11.25.13
Posted in News Roundup at 8:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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…earlier beta releases of the Linux version have been disappointing. The latest beta sees this cross-platform video editor finally starting to live up to its promises.
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Snappy is an open-source movie player that has become part of the GNOME project and is powered by GStreamer and features a user-interface written in Clutter. The project has been around for a while but releases are rare, except for a new update this week.
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Everyone knows that keeping regular backups of our data is the No. 1 best insurance against mishaps. The No. 2 best insurance is smart partitioning on your Linux PC that puts your data on a different partition from the root filesystem. Having a single separate data partition is especially useful for distro-hoppers, and for multi-booting multiple distros; all your files are in one place, and protected from mad installation frenzies. And why not distro-hop and multi-boot random distros? Unlike certain inexplicably popular expensive fragile, low self-esteem proprietary operating systems it’s easy and fun. No hoops to jump, no blurry eleventy-eight digit registration numbers, no mother-may-I, no phoning your activities home to the mother ship: just download and start playing.
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Posted in Action at 5:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Assassinations without trial, or “drone strikes” as the corporate press commonly calls them, are becoming more controversial
AS PROMISED yesterday, today we tackle the subject of predator drones (UAVs) again. It is no longer relegated to daily links; there is a lot of commentary worth making now that we know about the NSA’s role (cracking computers and using back doors) in assassinating people, based on lists it gathers. It has a lot to do with technology, and by technology we mean even software, not just aviation and physics/chemistry (producing explosives for Hellfire missiles). The NSA helps tracking targets by their devices that they carry and it also helps select targets, based on who they communicate with, what Web pages they visit, etc. The NSA has already participated in the assassination of thousands of people this way. Those who want us to naively believe that all those people deserved this punishment should read [1] and those who think that US citizens support it should read [2]. Most US citizens still have compassion [3], but not the corporate media which calls each person dead “militant” (meaning adult male) as if to blindly justify each assassination. Germany has just quit what might be perceived as complicity [4] and in Pakistan, where the NSA participated in thousands of murders, Imran Khan (a friend of Wikileaks) leads protests [5,6] which include, potentially, blocking of NATO [7]. Techrights will continue to cover such news because now we know the large degree to which software plays a role (mostly tracking), never mind the drones' embarrassing use of Linux. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Why do you trust that this secretive government is only killing “people who need to be killed”?
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Anti-drone activists will march from the White House to the headquarters of drone aircraft manufacturer General Atomics on Friday ahead of a rally to “discuss strategies to stop the proliferation of drones” used for military purposes around the world, organizers said.
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In our global fight for self preservation, we must remember, all the time, that we are all Afghans, we are all Filipinos, we are all Haitians, we are all Iraqis, and more, who struggle against the same forces and share the identical desire for self determination.
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Berlin has suspended the purchase of armed drones on the grounds that it “categorically rejects illegal killings.” This follows a report by Amnesty International that accused Merkel’s government of aiding the US with drone strikes in Pakistan.
A draft agreement between the Social Democrats and the Conservatives obtained by Der Spiegel condemns the use of drones for targeted attacks.
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Thousands rally in Peshawar, amid fears the CIA will aim unmanned anti-Taliban strikes deeper into Pakistani territory
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“We are holding the biggest ever anti-drone protest in Peshawar, where we could decide to block NATO supplies permanently,” Khan, who leads the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), told IPS ahead of massive protests planned by the party for Nov. 23.
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Posted in IBM, Microsoft, Patents at 4:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Useful analysis from Simon Phipps, who has turned more vocal in his opposition to software patents and those who promote them
Simon Phipps is a terrific leader. He is not self-censoring and over the years he has thrown some punches at companies which are hostile towards FOSS. He also built (or rebuilt) a relationship with the FSF, which helps reduce if not eliminate wasteful efforts such infighting and competitive advocacy; the OSI and FSF are now jointly submitting formal complaints against patent trolls. Phipps also spoke out repeatedly against patent trolls and patent aggressors — something which many in the FOSS groups don’t bother with. Here in Techrights, due to lack of time and resources, we have not focused so much on patents recently; so, here is something to make up for it.
Newegg is currently in the headlines because it gets sued a lot by trolls and it fights back. 30 infringement claims were made against Newegg in the past 8 years alone, based on Newegg’s claims. To quote: “Newegg was founded “in the ashes of the Internet trough” in 2001, said Cheng. The first 10 employees worked in a warehouse about 20 miles outside Los Angeles. Newegg still owns the facility, called Warehouse 1, though the company’s headquarters now resides in another warehouse in City of Industry.””
Newegg is not a massive giant like IBM, Apple, or Microsoft. It does not hoard patents and it is really suffering from patents, which are originally the game invented and played by the rich and the powerful. Also from Phipps (OSI President) there is this coverage of OIN, which was created by massive multi-nationals, including IBM. Phipps explains: “While many open source advocates remain rightly concerned about the chilling effect of software patents on both innovation and collaboration, open source software has additional defenses against patent aggression that aren’t available to proprietary software. The Open Invention Network (OIN), a novel patent pool fighting for rather than against open source, plays an important role in these defenses.”
But OIN is still not fighting to eliminate software patents. It’s more of an interest group. As Phipps put it, “make sure the software you use is under one of these modern licenses; older licenses like BSD and MIT don’t mention patents. Second, comply with the terms of the license — easy enough for almost all open source licenses, especially compared with the labyrinthine complexity of commercial licenses and EULAs. As long as you comply with the terms of the license, you benefit from the protection it offers. Third, work in the open rather than making last-minute contributions. This is good practice anyway, but it adds protection too.”
So in other words, OSI may be benign to Free/Open Source software players; for everyone else it’s not of much use. Newegg gets nothing out of it.
In another new post from Phipps it is claims that Microsoft and IBM are just “big trolls” — something he has said even back when he worked for Sun. “Rogue software patent trolls are the scourge of the tech industry. But the larger, better-dressed trolls don’t get a pass either.” Phipps writes.
To quote Phipps further: “The dirty secret IBM, Microsoft, and other self-proclaimed advocates of patent reform don’t want you to know is that they are trolls, too. They have large and highly profitable business units using exactly the same tactics as the patent trolls they hate. The reason they hate the trolls is not because of what they do — after all, IBM and Microsoft were the pioneers of treating patent portfolios as profit centers rather than cost centers. No, the reason they hate the trolls is because the trolls attack them with the weapons they themselves perfected.”
We already explained how IBM and Microsoft helped abolish patent reform attempts. This ought to make people who think of IBM as a friend of FOSS reassess their position; it is definitely not the first time IBM does this. IBM’s and Microsoft’s friends at SUSE have this new release (funded in part by Microsoft and IBM), but we should remember to regard it as nothing but an attempt to tax GNU/Linux with patents. We hardly cover anything SUSE-related anymore (we ignore rather than fight), but the fact remains that people should boycott SUSE. It’s about patents. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Security, Ubuntu, Virtualisation at 4:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
We need Freedo
Summary: Involvement in Linux development from the NSA and close corporate partners means that in order to restore real trust some code may need washing away (Linux-libre style)
THE news last week claimed that the US Defense Department was embracing FOSS [1,2]. We already know that it uses RHEL extensively and this may actually have strings attached to it. See, there is always aspiration to put control of the software at the hands of US corporations (and by extension bureaucrats who can compel those corporations to comply with surveillance desires); for others, there are back doors.
The other day we saw how a leading GNU/Linux vendor worked to promote and to spread UEFI ‘secure boot’, which is all about remote control (unless the signatures are maintained by the physical owner of the computer). UEFI ‘secure boot’ — like TPM — is about control by remote entities like Microsoft. Never forget that man from Microsoft (who still lives around there) manages Ubuntu now. Another man from Microsoft is now speaking on behalf of a Linux Foundation project (there are other people, but he is their manager). This really is a cause for concern because even “Linux” technologies are turning somewhat hostile towards users. When companies like Intel and IBM call the shots and when companies like Red Hat try to appease the Pentagon we just simply cannot assume that Linux will remain user-serving (as a matter of priority).
There are some news these days about Italy [3,4], Switzerland [5] and several other European nations moving to Free/Open Source software (this may include GNU/Linux) for control and autonomy, but they should keep a close eye on those who steer Linux development (and the government they lobby to oversee them amicably in particular). Yesterday when I had a discussion about this subject someone suggested embracing Hurd, but I on the other hand thought that perhaps Linux-libre should start removing NSA-sourced components (if they can be traced back to the NSA, as it is not just SELinux and some was submitted by @redhat.com addresses) and other suspicious or user-hostile code.
Even as Linux advocates we should recognise that there is a diversity of interests and the agenda of the NSA is to spy on everything and everyone, not to protect our privacy and security. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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As far as technology trends in the federal government go, the use of open source is on a multi-year hot streak. Alongside movements such as the cloud, open source is one of those agency options like an oasis – or perhaps a mirage — in a funding desert, promising savings and efficiencies.
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The Defense Department, looking for ways to cut costs and share information, is slowly but surely embracing open source software, sister publication FCW’s Amber Corrin reports.
“The problem with proprietary solutions is the limited set of folks who can use them, rather than opening the core components to the community to drive…and just be the experts and the integrators,” Andy Goodson, program manager for Lockheed Martin’s Distributed Data Framework, told FCW. DDF is a newly open source software search engine for intelligence.
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It’s no hidden fact that the European Union has a special love for free and open source software for all the merits these have to offer and for the huge cost savings EU’s various organizations get to make from these. In the past, several member countries have made the switch from Windows to Linux in a drive to make their systems more secure and save costs. Their governments and educational institutions have also moved on from using proprietary and expensive day-to-day software such as Microsoft Office to using OpenOffice and LibreOffice, software that get the same work done and are absolutely free. Now it is Italy’s turn to follow on the same path.
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We take a first reading of the recent modification to the fundamental law that governs the digital aspects of the Public Administration in Italy. These modifications require Public Administrations to prefer internally made solutions and FOSS solutions over proprietary ones, mandate an increased degree of interoperability and strengthen the push for open data.
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Lausanne, Switzerland’s fourth-largest city, is considering a switch to open source desktop PCs. “The time has come to evaluate a migration, by launching a pilot project on 5 workstations”, the city announced on 14 November. “Free and open source software is becoming more mature, user-friendly and compatible with other environments.”
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Posted in TechBytes Video at 12:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Direct download as Ogg (00:03:07, 10.3 MB)
Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation’s founder, speaks about laws that affect freedom of speech or, contrariwise, censorship
Made entirely using Free/libre software, heavily compressed for performance on the Web at quality’s expense
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11.24.13
Posted in Action at 7:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) helps unmask misconduct, for which people who hide behind the veil of secrecy are responsible
IN THE FOSS world there is belief in the value of sharing, which generally increases trust through collaboration and peer review. Open Data is said to be the recipe for advantage [1], not disadvantage, and more and more people now use FOIA to impose Open Data principles on their government [2]. The surge of FOIA requests has pushed the FBI into a corner [3,4]. It is struggling to deny or hide wrongdoing.
“The surge of FOIA requests has pushed the FBI into a corner.”A FOIA should be trivial; in fact, it oughtn’t be necessary in the first place. People who say they work in the public’s interest should work publicly and transparently. The CIA, NSA, DHS, FBI etc. give the illusion of transparency and the illusion of compliance with FOIA requests. To them, FOIA is like light to a vampire. When it’s done in larger volumes it becomes somewhat of a DDOS attack which the liars are unable to keep up with (some agency recently said it would take several years merely to prepare, i.e. redact, the document requested by a FOIA request).
Well, very recently, the assassination of John F. Kennedy reached a crucial anniversary and a lot of material got released to the public, not only bringing back memories [5] but also reinforcing people’s opinion that he was assassinated by secret agencies [6-9]. The father of Kennedy’s newphew thought the CIA was involved in this assassination [10] and most US citizens seem to think so too [11]. The secrecy only helps reinforce those opinions; but if the secrecy really does hide confirmatory evidence, then it’s clear that secrecy is the real enemy. Kennedy wanted to crush this secrecy and at one point he said he wanted to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
In the world of software, secrecy seems to be giving us noting but back doors and endless surveillance. Proprietary software (i.e. secret code) needs to become a thing of the past. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Yesterday, the Deputy CTO of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a press release highlighting the efforts (and success) of the Obama Administration in getting data compiled at public expense into the hands of the private sector for commercial repurposing. The release refers to a McKinsey & Company report that estimates that making such data publicly available “can generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value in seven key domains of the global economy, including education, transportation, and electricity.”
If you are American, the phrase “open data” may not have a familiar ring. If you’ve been following IT policy news in Europe, though, you’ll be aware that for the last year or so the EU in general, and some constituent countries in particular (notably, Great Britain), have been focusing not just on open standards and open source software, but on open data collected at any level of government as well. As in the U.S., such data can cover an almost infinite range of information, from demographics to geospatial to economic to integrations of all of the above – and more. Obviously, such data can have enormous value to the private sector, and especially so if it is made available in a form that can be efficiently utilized by private sector companies.
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Ryan Shapiro has just wrapped up a talk at Boston’s Suffolk University Law School, and as usual he’s surrounded by a gaggle of admirers. The crowd, consisting of law students, academics, and activist types, is here for a panel discussion on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a 2006 law targeting activists whose protest actions lead to a “loss of profits” for industry. Shapiro, a 37-year-old Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contributed a slideshow of newspaper headlines, posters, and government documents from as far back as the 1800s depicting animal advocates as a threat to national security. Now audience members want to know more about his dissertation and the archives he’s using. But many have a personal request: Would Shapiro help them discover what’s in their FBI files?
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Mother Jones has an interesting profile of Ryan Shapiro, a punk rocker turned animal rights activist turned MIT PhD student, who is officially the “most prolific” filer of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the FBI. At a high point, he was filing an average of two per day. In fact, he filed so many FOIA requests so successfully, that the FBI is now refusing to respond and is giving the courts a secret explanation which they won’t share.
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Later in the article, Shapiro admits that as he got more and more responses, it certainly allowed him to fill in many blanks (and also point him to where to file other requests). This, it seems, is exactly what the FBI fears the most: Shapiro has outsmarted them. While, normally, FOIA responses are done in a manner to limit what information is shared and to never, ever suggest a slightly different query that might be useful, it appears Shapiro has more or less figured out a way around that, in part via bulk requests which lead down other paths of inquiry. No wonder the FBI has stopped responding. Shapiro just plays the game better than they do, and they’re used to a world where the house always wins.
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The CIA has concealed its connections with Lee Harvey Oswald and hence has provoked speculations on the agency’s possible involvement in a conspiracy against President Kennedy, states Anthony Summers, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Irish journalist and writer. In his book “Not In Your Lifetime” Summers reveals the results of his own investigation of the assassination of JFK. The author shared his ideas and conclusions in an exclusive interview with “Voice of Russia”.
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Robert Kennedy Jnr has told ITV News that his father’s first instinct after JFK was shot was to wonder whether the CIA was involved.
Robert Kennedy Snr asked then CIA Director John McCone about it but was reassured that it wasn’t the case.
However Kennedy Snr – JFK’s brother – always felt Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone.
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Posted in Finance at 7:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
David Petraeus, former CIA head, is now Chairman of the newly-created New York-based KKR Global Institute, the investment firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
Summary: Surveillance and radical classification of “Occupy Wall Street” (by all means necessary, even through mercenaries like Stratfor — a privatised CIA extension) is beginning to make more sense while alternatives to the current economic system are sought
LAST week there were numerous reports (in the corporate press even) about how the CIA, which is supposed to serve national interests in secret/covert means, actually sort of colludes with the biggest domestic criminals (those causing the most damage). “Jamie Dimon And Lloyd Blankfein Love Being Romanced By The CIA’s Top Spies” is how one article put it [1].
The economy is not really in shambles. It is said, based on hard evidence, that there are around 30 trillion dollars in (mostly) illegal offshore havens and this money belongs to people who tell us that we have no choice but to vote for austerity now, i.e. punish the poor. The NSA (CIA) knows about all those tax evasion crimes and it has all the evidence needed for conviction. Instead, the NSA helps IRS et al. go after those who oppose the aforementioned corruption. There are black budgets that drain trillions of dollars per year and someone is pocketing that money (it is not the middle class). The solutions are really quite simple [2], but top executives won’t pursue these solutions. They contribute a great deal to growing disparity and they mock the poor [3], whom they themselves make poor.
It should be no surprise that given these injustices more and more people look for alternatives to the mainstream economy (e.g. Bitcoin [4]). It should be no surprise that secret agencies are eager to shut down Bitcoin and the likes of it (some have already been shut down). The state-protected system, which facilitates greedy banks (that take risks at taxpayers’ expense) and runs corporate-leaning spooks like the CIA, is losing credibility and it’s easy to see why. When the state and the banks are inseparable, then banks are the law. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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An alternative option would manage unemployment by reducing everyone’s work week by 7.5 per cent, or roughly 3 hours out of a week’s 40 hours. Every worker would then have 3 hours of extra leisure for which no pay would be received. Instead, the saved money would be used to hire the 7.5 percent of workers who no longer need to be fired. Their work would substitute for the 3 hours lost from every other worker’s week. In this way, unemployment would be shared by everyone and not imposed on a minority selected by capitalists.
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Fast food chain criticised for ‘offensive’ advice to US workers demanding living wage of $15 an hour
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Mystery still surrounds Bitcoin. Its creator -– or creators -– has remained anonymous and specific details surrounding the history of the virtual currency remain fuzzy. Still, buzz is growing. Here’s a rough timeline of the Bitcoin evolution.
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Posted in Action at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Think about the children”… and “terrorists”… and “terrorist children”…
Children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans.
Summary: Crushing of non-conformity or a diversity of views (or races) is no longer a cross-border issue but a domestic one
THE Bush and Obama reign symbolises an increase in state-sanctioned torture. People like Dick Cheney played a role in it, but that’s just part of history that’s not too relevant to this article. The matter of fact is, torture is typically outsourced to other countries or islands. It’s a legal loophole. The CIA has some ‘interrogation’/torture sites in Europe [1] (we wrote about this before, and even shared dozen of links about it since last year) and the same facilities and laws are set to become applicable to US citizens also [2,3] (we have shared hundreds of links about it since last year). Putting assassinations by drone aside (it’s a subject for another day), it becomes increasingly clear that the domestic population is increasingly seen as a threat, not a collective to defend. Just see who the NSA is profiling. The same algorithms they ran on the Soviet Union they now apply to US citizens. What seems like racist and aggressive policing [4], abandoning common principles [5], ought to remind us of the possibility of racial profiling used for internment (like Japanese Americans in the 1940s). This is probably scary and it may sound far-fetched, but the legal foundations for it are being put in place. Profiling is not just the business of advertising companies.
Here in the UK, where it is becoming common to crush students [6] because students have the power to engage in activism (they are only starting to become debt-saddled but are not yet profoundly encumbered/imprisoned by debt), we are already learning that secret courts exist because the government is trying to hide torture, which is illegal (so in essence they hide their illegalities/injustices). The torture targets particular races.
Torture has certainly made a comeback here in the Anglo-Saxon territories and in addition to it we have large-scale, wide-ranging assassination strategy, where we simply assume that because it’s done by flying robots in a so-called ‘rogue’ nation, then it’s somehow okay (even if this violates international law). We will deal with the subject next week. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Poland must wrap up a long-running probe into an alleged CIA jail on its territory where suspected Al-Qaeda members were purportedly tortured, and hold those involved accountable, UN monitors said Friday.
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On November 8, senior Democratic Whip Representative James P. McGovern (D-Mass.) sent a letter to leaders of the town of Oxford, Massachusetts, praising them for their passage of a resolution repealing sections of the NDAA that permit the president of the United States to order the indefinite detention of American citizens, denying them their constitutionally protected right of due process.
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The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee submitted on Thursday an already-approved cybersecurity bill to be considered as an amendment to next year’s National Defense Authorization Act.
If the amendment manages to stay intact as Congress prepares to approve the 2014 NDAA, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia)’s Cybersecurity Act of 2013 may finally be codified into law.
Rockefeller’s proposal, S.1353, was unanimously approved by the Commerce Committee in July but has stayed relatively dormant ever since. On Thursday he submitted that bill as an amendment to be considered as part of an annual Pentagon spending plan that could fast track his attempts to land his proposal on President Barack Obama’s desk after attempts in Congress to adopt cybersecurity legislation have largely proven to be futile.
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Jennifer Weber can’t read the Gettysburg Address to her students at the University of Kansas without taking a risk.
She chokes up a little, though she’s a Civil War author and historian. “A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” She starts losing it right about there.
“I’m not much of a crying person,” she said.
But whenever she steps inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and starts reading the words of the address carved in stone, the tears well up again.
She doesn’t choke up when she tells the president’s story, though.
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Why are some of the most powerful people in Britain so terrified of a bunch of students? If that sounds a ridiculous question, consider a few recent news stories. As reported in this paper last week, Cambridge police are looking for spies to inform on undergraduate protests against spending cuts and other “student-union type stuff”. Meanwhile, in London last Thursday, a student union leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested after a small and routine demo. Officers hauled him off to Holborn police station for not informing them of the precise route of the protest – even though it was on campus.
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