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06.03.14

Links 3/6/2014: Linux 3.15-rc8 , KDE Frameworks 5, Samsung Tizen, Dell Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 9:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Release notes: May 2014

    What’s the point of releasing open-source code when nobody knows about it? In “Release Notes” I give a round-up of recent open-source activities.

    angular-rt-popup (New, github)

  • A startup called Skymind launches, pushing open source deep learning

    Skymind is providing commercial support and services for an open source project called deeplearning.4j. It’s a collection of of approaches to deep learning that mimic those developed by leading researchers, but tuned for enterprise adoption.

  • Skymind launches with open-source, plug-and-play deep learning features for your app
  • Choosing a Linux web server: Nginx vs. Apache
  • Out in the Open: The Little-Known Open Source OS That Rules the Internet of Things

    Badgers spend a lot of time underground, which make it difficult for biologists and zoologists to track their whereabouts and activities. GPS, for example, doesn’t work well underground or in enclosed areas. But about five years ago, University of Oxford researchers Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni solved that problem by inventing a wireless tracking system that can work underground. Their system is clever, but they didn’t do it alone. Like many other scientists, they turned to open source to avoid having to rebuild fundamental components from scratch. One building block they used is an open source operating system called Contiki.

  • Telcos Pay Lip Service to Open Source

    Telecom service providers may acknowledge the value of open source technology, particularly as they adopt virtualization, but they are not entirely ready to embrace it warmly, a panel discussion here revealed.

    Five large service providers — AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA), Orange (NYSE: FTE), Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S), and Telecom Italia SpA (NYSE: TI) — were represented on a single panel as part of a pre-conference NFV workshop, and while they agreed on a lot, open source technology didn’t get a consensus vote.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Vice President: Trading Away Your Privacy

        Do you trust the National Security Agency or the Internal Revenue Service more than Google or Facebook? If so, you’re not alone. A recent Reason-Rupe poll found that most Americans do not trust big tech companies.

        Mozilla’s Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, says “data hygiene” should be something every new or established tech company should be thinking about. Dixon-Thayer sat down with Reason TV at the 2014 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas this year.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • What’s Next for OpenStack Is Ironic

      The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is now in the development phase for its next major release code-named Juno, set to debut in October. Among the major new features in development is a technology known as “Ironic,” which provides bare metal server provisioning capabilities.

    • Guavus Joins AMPLab for Open Source Big Data Collaboration

      Another Big Data analytics company has entered the open source realm. Guavus has become an official sponsor of the AMPLab, a research initiative hosted at the University of California at Berkeley to drive open source Big Data innovation.

    • Do you know your OpenStack history?

      In historical terms, NASA worked with Rackspace to develop OpenStack back in 2010.

    • ownCloud gets new CMO

      ownCloud announced in their blog that Claudine Bianchi has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). The move aims to secure a stronger position in File Sync and Share for the most popular open source software in this category.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.2.5 RC1 Is Now Available for Testing

      The developers from The Document Foundation have launched the first Release Candidate for 4.2.5 branch and it comes with numerous changes and improvements.

      According to the changelog, the text rotation has been fixed, the upper margin of multi-page floating table has been fixed, the set-all language menu has been added, output file extension is now adjusted when exporting, accepting and rejecting changes in a selection is now allowed, the strange brightness and contrast adjustment from Microsoft Office has been corrected, and the mapping between ATK and UNO roles has been improved.

  • CMS

    • What’s New in June for Open Source CMS

      Who has time to handle post-CMS deployment needs when there’s so much to do developing the platform? That’s the thinking of the creators of Tendenci, an open source content management system (CMS) project for associations and other nonprofits (NPOs).

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.3 Is In Beta, Adds Radeon KMS & Xen HVM

      Those interested in downloading FreeBSD 9.3 Beta or upgrading to it from an existing release can find all of the information via this mailing list announcement. FreeBSD 9.3 has many driver improvements, the hardware random number generators are disabled by default, the ZFS file-system support has been updated, and there’s support for Xen hardware-assisted virtualization (XENHVM). FreeBSD 9.3 also supports Apple’s MacBook trackpads and adds Radeon KMS, after the kernel mode-setting support was first found in FreeBSD 10.0.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • How to treat government like an open source project

      Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works—it’s arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information’s release.

    • Mark Johnson of OSS Watch opens up about the challenges of open source procurement

      The OSS Watch blog has been on our radar for a while now as a great resource for open source commentary. We’ve looked to their team, including development manager Mark Johnson, for thought leadership on how open source software is being used and to gauge the pulse of the open source movement. I wanted to find out more about what Mark does day-to-day to promote better understanding of open source. He’s got a knack for communication: concise with impact.

    • South Korean govt open source forum to hear EU cases

      IT strategists working for the French Gendarmerie and the Dutch municipality of Ede will participate in a conference organised by South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and the National IT Promotion Agency, to be held on 3 June in the capital Seoul.

    • Exposing the Flaws of the U.S. Media’s Dangerous Ukraine Propaganda

      The press has taken a near-sighted view of the crisis, spinning in ways that only create a partial picture.

      The New York Review of Books is a leading intellectual publication in the United States, and it (like all of the major U.S. “news” media) has “reported” on the Ukrainian civil war as having been incited by Russia’s Vladimir Putin — a simple-minded explanation, which also happens to be deeply false. The reality is that the residents of southern Ukraine, the part of Ukraine adjoining Russia, were overwhelmingly opposed to the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, though they are portrayed in NYRB (and other “news” media) as being mere stooges of Russian propaganda for their opposing the coup that overthrew the President for whom they had voted overwhelmingly. (The only thing that America’s “news” media had previously reported about Yanukovych is that he was corrupt; but so were all of his predecessors, and U.S. media ignored this crucial fact. Selective reporting is basic to propaganda, and the U.S. major media are trained masters at it. Without a person’s knowing that Ukraine is by far the most corrupt country in the former Soviet Union, and the one with the worst economic performance of them all, Ukraine’s politics just can’t be understood at all: it has long been an extreme kleptocracy, ruled by psychopathic politicians, for the benefit of psychopathic oligarchs, who have robbed the country blind. That’s the deeper truth — and it’s key to understanding the current situation there.)

    • What has open source got to do with open government?

      Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, highlighted at the conference that an open and transparent government is not enough if it lacks civic participation. “In my view, openness and transparency should stimulate their sense of ownership in open government.”

      Dr Alanna Simpson, Senior Disaster Risk Management Specialist, World Bank-Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, told me that the Indonesian Government is a leader in making open data and open source available.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • PHP 5.5.13 Updated for Two Security Vulnerabilities
    • To beat this new video game, reprogram it

      But playing the game—a sendup to traditional adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, which place players on quests that involve battling monsters, collecting artifacts, and solving puzzles—requires no programming knowledge whatsoever. Nor does it demand familiarity with coding tools. Instead, Hack ‘n’ Slash makes manipulating the game’s source code part of the game itself. To play it is to hack it.

Leftovers

  • Philadelphia Inquirer co-owner among seven dead in Boston plane crash

    Family members said one of the other victims was the wife of a New Jersey borough commissioner. James P Leeds Sr told the Associated Press that his 74-year-old wife, Anne, died Saturday night in the Massachusetts crash. Leeds said he got a text from his wife from the plane at 9.36 p.m, four minutes before the crash.

  • Why Middle Eastern lovers are marrying in Cyprus

    The island’s appeal is simple: couples of mixed religion can have a civil ceremony that, though not allowed back home, will still be recognised in law

    [...]

    In 1980, 61 Lebanese brides and 78 Lebanese grooms were married there, as well as 98 Israeli grooms and 99 Israeli brides. In 2013, there were 2,131 Israeli weddings, 581 Lebanese ones, and 35 Syrian unions. Some municipalities, such as tourist-friendly Livadia, report even more startling figures; last year, of the 1,000 or so weddings it recorded, 350 were Lebanese, 425 were Israeli, and 20 were Syrian.

  • Science

    • First Man to Walk in Space Celebrates His 80th Birthday

      Soviet cosmonaut and first spacewalker in the world, Aleksei Leonov, celebrated his 80th birthday on Friday. In March 1965 he was outside his spaceship for 12 minutes, connected to the craft by a 5.35 meter tether. Later, Leonov commanded the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the first joint space mission between the Soviet Union and the United States. Leonov is also an accomplished artist, whose works are displayed in many art galleries in Russia and abroad, and an author of several popular books about space. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev have congratulated the legendary cosmonaut, who was twice awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union title, on his anniversary and wished him good health, happiness and success. “Your professional biography, rich in significant and truly historical events, and all your life is a worthy example of unblinking devotion to the cause and of enormous personal courage,” Putin said in a telegramme, published on the Kremlin website on Friday.

    • “Why Did Life Begin During Early Earth’s Heavy Impact Period?” New Research Shows a Strong Link

      “It’s interesting that 4.2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, the early Earth experienced a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment where there were a lot of impacts, including large impacts, and this period also overlaps with the evidence of the earliest life on Earth,” said Haley Sapers, an astrobiologist at the Canadian Astrobiology Training Program at McGill University in Montreal. “One might ask why life arose during such an inhospitable part of Earth’s history. Maybe impact cratering had a role in the origin of life.”
      Impacts on a water-rich planet like Earth or even Mars can generate hydrothermal activity — that is, underwater areas boiling with heat. Seafloor hot springs known as hydrothermal vents more than a mile beneath the ocean’s surface can be home to thriving ecosystems on Earth, including giant tube worms 6 feet (2 meters) tall. The impact that created the Ries crater may have generated hydrothermal activity lasting as long as 10,000 years, given microbes time enough to colonize the area.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Deceitful Compromise Clears The Way For GMO Crops In Europe

      An unholy alliance of pro and anti- GMO countries have struck a deal that will sweep away the obstacles to genetically engineered crops in the EU. By allowing – under limited circumstance – individual member states to prohibit the growing of GMO crops on their territory, the European Commission expects to boost GMO cropping in the EU overall.

    • Is your lifestyle permanently damaging your hearing?

      Belinda worked as a model, lived in a nightclub and often went to noisy parties. There was loud music wherever she went. Then she went to art school, where she listened to music through headphones while she painted. Now, with a quieter job in finance, she lives with the legacy of irreversible damage to her inner ear.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The United Arab Emirates’ “Drones For Good” Website Is Terrible

      It’s not surprising then, that, picking up on one of the latest technology trends, the United Arab Emirates’ Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum would launch a “Drones for Good” competition, offering $1 million for the best positive drone design. The UAE will be taking international entries for drone ideas in categories like disaster relief, humanitarian aid, economic development until August.

    • After Using Promise Of Drone Memo Release To Push Its Appeals Court Nominee Through, Administration Returns To Dragging Its Feet

      The American government has killed four Americans with drone strikes since 2009, all of which were completely detached from any notion of due process. At best, the DOJ builds a case against the foreign-located citizen and, if the target resides in a nation where the US can get away with utilizing weaponized drones, the American citizen is sentenced to death via push-button operator.

    • US troops ‘kidnap’ 4-year-old drone strike victim from hospital, allege parents

      A four-year-old girl whose face was blown off during a US drone strike in Afghanistan was kidnapped by American troops and hidden by an international organization, her family says.

      The child, named Aisha Rashid, was travelling with her parents, a sibling and several other relatives from Kabul to their home in the village of Gamber in Kunar province on a hot September day, when the drone exploded, Expressen.se reported. An uncle, Meya Jan, is at home on his farm in that village when he receives a phone call about the strike from the neighboring village. He and others rush to the strike.

      Suddenly they hear a voice. “Water, water…”

      It is Aisha. She is missing a hand, her leg is bleeding, and there is nothing left of her eyes or nose.

    • Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: U.S. Drone Program Under Obama “Got Out of Hand”

      Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, “Sting of the Drone.” We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”

    • Michael Oren finds Israel vindicated by UN report that it slaughtered 101 civilians, including 33 children

      A few days ago, Phil reported on Yousef Munayyer’s take on the nauseating Wolf Blitzer interview with “CNN analyst” (and former Israeli Ambassador to the US) Michael Oren on the recent IDF sniping murders of two Palestinian teenage boys.

    • Imperialist threats and the limits of populism

      Every time the working class and poor of Latin America try to take a step forward and write their own history they confront the power of U.S. imperialism. It uses whatever is in fashion at the time — coups, blockades, manufactured protest movements, referendums or trade sanctions — to turn back the clock.

      When longstanding polarization in Venezuela erupted into street protests in February and March, the United States, true to form, played its usual role in the unrest. Using money, tough talk and lobbying among Latin American countries, the U.S. tried to shore up opposition to the elected government of Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s successor.

    • Yup, Obama’s Still Arming And Training Al Qaeda

      Not wavering from his foreign policy mission of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood to restore an Islamic Caliphate under their control, Mr. Obama has ordered the training and arming of Syrian jihadists to overthrow Assad. Current reports indicate that the forces loyal to Assad are gaining ground against the Muslim Brotherhood–supported rebels.

    • Swap to Free Alan Gross Depends on Obama, “Cuban Five” Spy Says

      The release of U.S. government contractor Alan Gross from a Cuban prison depends solely on the “political will” of President Barack Obama, a Havana spy who spent more than 15 years behind bars in the United States said on Monday.

      To support that assertion, Fernando Gonzalez cited Obama’s decision to trade five senior Taliban members being held at Guantanamo for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American POW in Afghanistan.

    • Activists Demand US Govt Reveal Files on Terrorism Against Cuba
    • “False Flag Terrorism” to Sustain America’s “Humanitarian” Agenda

      Through constant use of false flags deceptively blaming the designated enemy of the United States, starting with the dual threat of the Soviet Union and China’s spreading Communism in the early 1950’s, then in this century fabricating the al Qaeda enemy’s spreading terrorism and now back to a revitalized cold war stopping the expansionist spread of Russia and China again, the US has been busily justifying its aggressive interventionist policy throughout the world.

    • 6,000 Journalists Refrain from Naming CIA Station Chief

      Last weekend, a White House press report distributed to 6,000 journalists, included the name of the CIA’s station chief in Afghanistan, alongside said title.

    • Not Forgotten: Street Art to Remember the Victims of the School of the Americas
    • Cleveland car chase ends with two dead, 137 shots fired and six police charged

      A night-time car chase in Cleveland that ended on a schoolyard where more than 100 shots were fired at the suspect’s vehicle appeared to be over when an officer opened fire again, a prosecutor said in announcing charges against the patrolman and five police supervisors.

    • Afghanistan 2016 withdrawal keeps secret Bagram detainees in limbo

      President Barack Obama’s decision to keep American troops in Afghanistan until 2016 is likely to mean two more years behind bars for America’s most secret detainee population, according to Pentagon officials.

      On the outskirts of the massive Bagram airfield, about an hour’s drive from the capital of Kabul and in what the military calls the Detention Facility in Parwan, the US holds about 50 prisoners. The government has publicly disclosed nearly nothing about them, not even their names, save for acknowledging that they are not Afghans.

    • Syria’s ‘western-backed’ rebels? Not in weapons

      Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, believes that captured weaponry appears to be the most important fuel of the armed rebellion, followed by self-made arms and materiel, and then foreign-supplied items.

    • US moves towards sanctions as Venezuela charges coup plot

      The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation mandating sanctions against Venezuela as officials there presented evidence of US involvement in a plot to bring down the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

      The bill, passed in a voice vote by the House with only 14 members in opposition, demands that the Obama administration draw up a list of Venezuelan officials allegedly responsible for repression during violent protests that have been organized across the South American country since last February. They would be sanctioned with the freezing of any assets in the US and the denial or revocation of visas.

      Washington’s step closer toward another blatant imperialist intervention against Venezuela came on the same day that government officials in Caracas publicly presented what they described as evidence of US involvement in a plot by the far-right in Venezuela to overthrow the government and assassinate President Maduro.

    • Harper Attacks ‘Evil’ Communism In Lengthy Keynote Speech

      Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched into a full-throated attack on the evils of communism at a fundraiser on Friday for a monument to its victims.

    • Walk to protest drones

      A group of people, including religious leaders in Berrien County, are taking to the road from Chicago to Battle Creek to protest what they see as a menace from the sky.

      The participants will walk from Chicago to Battle Creek on June 3-14 to protest the use of armed drones in the “War on Terror,” that they say kill innocent civilians, create more enemies and undermine America’s standing in the world.

      “The use of armed drones pose many legal, strategic, tactical, and ethical problems,” said the Rev. Dan Scheid of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Benton Harbor, who will walk and host discussions on the issue. “As a citizen of the United States and of the world, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is bad public policy. As a follower of Jesus, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is immoral, and my baptismal and ordination vows compel me to witness against them.”

    • Afghanistan drone attack kills more civilians

      According to local officials in the eastern province of Kunar, the US-launched drone was on a targeted attack which killed and injured unknown people, some of them civilians.

    • New president of El Salvador is former rebel leader

      San Salvador – Sanchez Sanchez Ceren, 69, a former leader of the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front(FMLN) was sworn in as the president of El Salvador. He had won the presidency in a close March runoff vote against his conservative opponent.

    • FBI agent who killed bombing suspect’s friend probed

      Bay Area officials in Oakland are reviewing seven years of police disability retirements after learning last month that one of their former officers was collecting a disability pension even while he was working for the FBI.

      Former Oakland police officer Aaron McFarlane received more than $52,000 in disability benefits each year while he was working as an FBI special agent in Boston.

    • Setback for former Portland man suing FBI, alleging torture and challenging no-fly list
    • ‘Cross-border crime means we need FBI for Europe’

      His parting shot was a call for a European FBI to tackle cross-border crime gangs and the call for UKIP to follow in the footsteps of Sinn Fein ex-MPs Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who did not take up the seats they won in the Commons.

    • Obama at West Point

      In the words of Charles Krauthammer, a strong critic of Obama and supporter of the George W. Bush administration who has neoconservative tendencies: “And you didn’t hear much of anything in the West Point speech. It was a somber parade of straw men, as the president applauded himself for steering the nation on a nervy middle course between extreme isolationism and madcap interventionism. It was the rhetorical equivalent of that classic national security joke in which the presidential aide, devoted to policy option X, submits the following decision memo…

      [...]

      The difference between Bush and Obama is that the latter is much more selective in his interventions. Such a correction was what the American people wanted when they elected Obama in 2008 — and inevitable after the two unsuccessful wars of Afghanistan and Iraq.

    • Obama at West Point

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Neil deGrasse Tyson: When the rich start losing money, they’ll take climate change seriously

      Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson characterized the naysaying surrounding climate change as par for the course in footage aired on Monday from his interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes,

    • George Osborne accused of making climate change worse with tax breaks

      Friends of the Earth claims chancellor handed out £2.7bn of incentives to North Sea oil and gas firms

    • Dirty U.S. Coal Finds a Home in Europe

      Even as it faces increased regulatory scrutiny at home, America’s dirty and unwanted coal is being embraced in one of the world’s cleanest energy markets: the European Union.

      At the biggest power plant in the U.K., operated by Drax Group PLC, a small black mountain of a million tons of coal sits at the base of a dozen 374-foot cooling towers.

    • Why Superfreakonomics’ authors are wrong on geo-engineering

      A fierce debate has been raging between climatologists and Superfreakonomics authors Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt, culminating in an impassioned New York Times blogpost yesterday by Dubner. From RealClimate, part of the Guardian Environment Network

    • Why Green Capitalism Will Fail

      Green capitalism is destined to fail: You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We can’t shop our way out of global warming nor are there technological magic wands that will save us. There is no alternative to a dramatic change in the organization of the global economy and consumption patterns.

    • Our egalitarian Eden

      Many anthropologists think this egalitarian lifestyle was an essential feature of hunting and gathering societies. In contrast with both today’s titans of Wall Street and the alpha males of the great apes, people in these societies “had an ethic of sharing that was central to their way of life,” Lee says. “No one takes precedence over anyone else.”

    • Brazil laundering illegal timber on a ‘massive and growing scale’

      Illegally logged timber in Brazil is being laundered on a massive and growing scale and then sold on to unwitting buyers in the UK, US, Europe and China, Greenpeace claimed on Thursday.

      After a two-year investigation, the environmental campaign group says it has uncovered evidence of systematic abuse and a flawed monitoring system that contradicts the Brazilian government’s claims to be coping with the problem of deforestation in the Amazon.

      In a report released on Thursday, Greenpeace cited five case studies of the fraudulent techniques used by the log launderers, including over-reporting the number and size of rare trees, logging trees protected by law, and over-extraction. It notes how forest management officials are implicated in the wrongdoing and several have previously been fined or detained for similar crimes in the past.

    • The age of climate warfare is here. The military-industrial complex is ready. Are you?

      During his speech at West Point Military Academy earlier this week, President Barack Obama described climate change as a “creeping national security crisis” that will require the armed forces to “respond to refugee flows, natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food.”

      The speech emphasised that US foreign policy in the 21st century is increasingly being honed in recognition of heightened risks of social, political and economic upheaval around the world due the impacts of global warming.

      A more detailed insight into US military planning could be seen in the report published a couple of weeks earlier by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board, written and endorsed by a dozen or so senior retired US generals. Describing climate change as a not just a “threat multiplier,” but now – even worse – a “catalyst for conflict”, the study concluded that environmental impacts from climate change in coming decades…

  • Finance

    • 50 million in poverty get a fraction of the coverage of 482 billionaires

      With poverty at 15 percent, inequality rising and Republican politicians talking about addressing the problem by cutting federal programs that help the poor, one might expect poverty to occupy a solid spot on media agendas.

    • New federal database will track Americans’ credit ratings, other financial information

      As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives — including their Social Security numbers — in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies.

    • “How Immigration Became Illegal”: Aviva Chomsky on U.S. Exploitation of Migrant Workers

      We are joined by Aviva Chomsky, whose new book, “Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal” details how systemic prejudice against Mexicans and many other migrant workers has been woven into U.S. immigration policies that deny them the same path to citizenship that have long been granted to European immigrants. She also draws parallels between the immigration laws now in place that criminalize migrants, and the caste system that has oppressed African Americans, as described by Prof. Michelle Alexander in her book, “The New Jim Crow.” Chomsky’s previous book on this topic is “They Take Our Jobs! and 20 Other Myths about Immigration.” She is a professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.

    • Seattle votes for $15 minimum wage

      Seattle has voted unanimously to raise the city’s minimum wage to the highest level of any major US city – $15 (£9) per hour, twice the national minimum.

      Wages would begin to rise next year, ultimately reaching $15 from Washington state’s minimum of $9.32 over three to seven years, depending on the business.

      A councillor who supported the push said the vote “sends a message heard around the world”.

    • Pope Francis Calls for ‘Legitimate Redistribution’ of Wealth
    • Ex-Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney blasts “radical,” “fundamentalist” capitalism

      Well, this ought to cause a stir at this summer’s garden parties among Canada’s elites.

      Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada Governor (now the Governor of the Bank of England) has come forward to condemn what he calls “unchecked market fundamentalism.”

      He delivered the remarks last week at the Conference for Inclusive Capitalism, an annual gathering of global political and financial elites that featured keynotes by Carney along with Prince Charles and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

    • China home prices clock first decline in 23 months

      Residential and commercial buildings are seen in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Home prices in major Chinese cities registered their first monthly decline in 23 months in May.

    • How Wealthy Elites Are Hijacking Democracy All Over the World

      Amid the upheavals in Thailand, Ukraine and Egypt, wealthy elites have used popular movements and elections to ratify decisions in their favor.

    • Britain is still feasting on credit – and the next crunch will hit in 2016

      Except for one big difference. By early 2016, the era of record-low interest rates is over. Borrowing is getting steadily more expensive. And the result is starting to destabilise our entire economic model.

    • The cowardly tax pursuit of Britain’s poorest

      A few weeks ago, an official from the Cabinet Office gushed on his blog about a jolly exciting trip, a kind of pilgrimage, to Amazon and Google in Seattle and San Francisco. Francis Maude, the unofficial government minister for paperclips and parsimony, led the expedition. It was mindblowing, the official reported afterwards.

      They looked at the IT, were given a sneak preview of the cutting edge innovations. It seemed they had unlimited time to talk about all manner of things. But there was no indication that anyone raised the fact with these multinational behemoths, that on any right-thinking estimation, they owe us billions of pounds in tax. Amazon’s UK subsidiary paid £2.4m in corporate taxes in 2012, despite sales of £4.3bn. Google paid £11.6m in the same period despite sales of £506m.

    • Qatar accused of paying $5mn in bribes to win World Cup bid

      Senior football officials in Africa received over $5 million in bribes to make sure Qatar won the bid for the 2022 World Cup, the Sunday Times reports citing leaked documents.

      According to the paper, the money came from former FIFA vice-president and infamous Qatari businessman, Mohamed Bin Hammam.

      Bin Hammam reportedly used 10 slush funds controlled by his private company – as well as cash handouts – to make dozens of payments of up to $200,000 to the heads of the 30 African football associations.

    • Federal Workers Good at Paying Taxes, USA Today Expose Conceals

      The front page of USA Today (5/23/14) blew the whistle on federal workers: They are tax deadbeats who owe billions in back taxes.

      The story also revealed that they owe less than most people.

      Confused?

    • Stiglitz: Tax-Dodging, Corporate Welfare Destroying US Economy

      A new progressive tax code would end the assault on shared prosperity, create jobs, and help save the planet, says Nobel Joseph Stiglitz

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Serbian PM demands OSCE apology over allegations of censorship

      Serbia’s prime minister accused Europe’s chief security and rights watchdog of lying on Monday after it alleged his government tried to smother online criticism of its handling of devastating floods last month.

    • China escalates attack on Google
    • China tightens enforced Tiananmen silence on anniversary eve
    • Google: One takedown request every 7 secs

      Google has had one demand every seven seconds to suppress information about people’s pasts, it was revealed on Sunday.

      The rush of censorship requests follows the internet giant’s move to provide forms allowing people to ask that certain information about them be hidden when their name is searched online.

      The figures indicate that large amounts of material could disappear from public reach as a direct result of an EU court decision that search engines must enforce a “right to be forgotten”.

    • Egypt satirist goes off air

      Egypt’s internationally renowned satirist, Bassem Youssef, has announced the end of his popular television show, citing pressure from the authorities.

    • The real tragedy of Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef’s censorship is he played a role in it
    • Google & take-down requests – Pointless, worrying & censorship?

      I’ve avoided talking about this story until it progressed further. Historically Google has had many take-down requests, many to do with “piracy” and there’s also court order’s for ISP blocks on domains – we already have an increasing trend towards censorship. But is some censorship good? Whilst the copyright take-down’s and ISP blocks are mostly useless, with the recent ruling involving Google removing search results for you and me, requires further examination.

    • India’s Newest Media Baron Embraces Censorship

      Bold initiatives characterize India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, who famously lives in a 27-story building in Mumbai, a city where most people languish in slums. Last month, his company, Reliance Industries Ltd., sought to prevent circulation of a new book which claims that Reliance successfully pressured the previous Indian government to double the price of natural gas. Amazon received a cease and desist notice, as did even an individual who had merely forwarded an e-mail invitation to the book’s launch. And Thursday, Ambani moved to buy a whole swath of the Indian media: Bloomberg News reports that Reliance, which has already invested $11 billion in a high-speed cellular network, will now spend $678 million for majority stakes in two major media companies, Network18 Media & Investments Ltd. and TV18 Broadcast Ltd.

    • Saudi censorship blurs lines between journalism, activism

      Since the surprise Arab uprisings of 2011, the Saudi government has worked assiduously to ensure it has all the tools of censorship it needs to control dissent. These tools–a combination of special courts, laws, and regulatory authorities–are starting to fire on all cylinders. The result has been a string of arrests and prosecutions in recent months of independent and dissident voices.

      The first step came in January 2011 with new regulations for online media that could be used to restrict coverage, including applying the kingdom’s already highly repressive press law to online media. Shortly after, the Ministry of Culture and Information began blocking local news websites that failed to register, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    • Jordan’s free press record dims with website restrictions
    • Encouragement (Sort of) About Press Freedom

      At a meeting with journalists last week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. was questioned about the prolonged quest to compel James Risen, a reporter for The Times, to testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency official. Prosecutors say Mr. Sterling was a source for restricted information in Mr. Risen’s 2006 book on the C.I.A. “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” Mr. Holder said.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Self-Determination as Anti-Extractivism: How Indigenous Resistance Challenges World Politics

      Indigeneity is an unusual way to think about International Relations (IR). Most studies of world politics ignore Indigenous perspectives, which are rarely treated as relevant to thinking about the international (Shaw 2008; Beier 2009). Yet Indigenous peoples are engaging in world politics with a dynamism and creativity that defies the silences of our discipline (Morgan 2011). In Latin America, Indigenous politics has gained international legitimacy, influencing policy for over two decades (Cott 2008; Madrid 2012). Now, Indigenous political movements are focused on resisting extractive projects on autonomous territory from the Arctic to the Amazon (Banerjee 2012; Sawyer and Gómez 2012). Resistance has led to large mobilized protests, invoked international law, and enabled alternative mechanisms of authority. In response, governments have been busy criminalizing Indigenous claims to consultation that challenge extractive models of development. Indigenous opposition to extractivism ultimately promotes self-determination rights, questioning the states’ authority over land by placing its sovereignty into historical context. In that sense, Indigeneity is a valuable approach to understanding world politics as much as it is a critical concept to move beyond state-centrism in the study of IR.

    • We All Must Become Zapatistas

      Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), has announced that his rebel persona no longer exists. He had gone from being a “spokesman to a distraction,” he said last week. His persona, he said, fed an easy and cheap media narrative. It turned a social revolution into a cartoon for the mass media. It allowed the commercial press and the outside world to ignore traditional community leaders and indigenous commanders and wrap a movement around a fictitious personality. His persona, he said, trivialized a movement. And so this persona is no more.

      “The entire system, but above all its media, plays the game of creating celebrities who it later destroys if they don’t yield to its designs,” Marcos declared.

    • I am a British citizen – not a second-class citizen

      Coming through passport control is an ordeal, I am followed on the street and hassled by security services. Not all citizens enjoy the same rights

    • Nothing We Do at Firedoglake Involves Letting the Government Decide

      What is Firedoglake? How does it work? How does the site make money? Are there any other websites you could write for? What do you think you plan to do next?

      Sometimes describing what I do at Firedoglake to family, friends and people I encounter after speaking at events is a bit perplexing to people. This is not a more prominent news media organization like New York Times, Rolling Stone or Huffington Post. But I have found not being more prominent uniquely positions Firedoglake to pursue specific projects.

    • The CIA Can’t Control the Truth at Guantánamo Forever
    • Will Eric Holder Back Off?
    • James Risen’s Fate Now Unclear
    • NY Times reporter faces jail time after Supreme Court refuses to hear appeal
    • Does the Taliban Treat Its Prisoners Better Than the U.S. Treats Prisoners?
    • US government should withdraw Risen subpoena
    • US court declines to intervene in NYT case
    • Supreme Court rejects attempt by reporter to shield source
    • Editorial: Weakening press freedoms by omission
    • Supreme Court rejects reporter’s bid to protect source

      A reporter who has been ordered to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of disclosing classified information lost his bid Monday to get the Supreme Court to clarify whether journalists have a right to protect their confidential sources.

    • Supreme Court rejects New York Times reporter’s First Amendment plea

      The case had been closely watched as possibly setting an important precedent about the First Amendment, news reporters and confidential sources. Instead, Risen will now face a decision about officially naming his source for a book he wrote about Iran or refusing to answer questions under a Justice Department subpoena. (The source’s name has been widely reported as part of an official legal action.)

      Last Thursday, the Justices met behind closed doors to consider accepting Risen’s case for the Court’s next term, which starts in October 2014.

    • How the UK taught Brazil’s dictators interrogation techniques

      As the world focuses on the World Cup, which opens in Brazil in less than a fortnight, many Brazilians are wrestling with painful discoveries about the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. The BBC has found evidence that the UK actively collaborated with the generals – and trained them in sophisticated interrogation techniques.

    • Brazil’s World Cup 2014: Private Security “Made in the USA”

      As the World Cup nears, the Brazilian press has reported that the American company Academi, formerly Blackwater, carried out training of Brazilian military personnel and federal police in April.

      The training is a facet of the military cooperation agreement between Brazil and the United States signed in 2010 during the second term of the Lula de Silva administration in preparation for containing terrorist acts during this year’s World Cup. Academi is a private security company based in the United States, and has used mercenary soldiers in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    • War Is Peace, Citizens Are The Enemy

      Bill Gertz reported this week on a memo outlining Obama’s plan to use the military against citizens – a memo from 2010. Remember how the blogs and many of us out here were ringing the alarm bells on Obama’s stance that he could use the military and drones against American citizens? Remember how we were marginalized and called crazy for it? Turns out, ‘crazy’ is relative.

    • Second Informant Surfaces in ICE’s Mayan Jaguar Cocaine-Plane Op

      The ICE undercover operation played out in the first decade of the 2000s (roughly 2004 until sometime in 2008) and involved the use of US government front companies to sell aircraft to suspected Latin American drug-trafficking organizations.

    • Robert Fisk: Alaa al-Aswany, Egypt’s greatest living novelist, knows Sisi is not a true democrat – but is still hopeful that he can ‘do good’
    • Saudi Deportation of Migrant Workers

      In an effort to increase job opportunities for Saudi Arabian citizens, the Saudi government is detaining and deporting thousands of undocumented foreign migrant workers. Part of the deportation process includes detaining large populations in what has been described as “appalling” conditions. These detention centers have had reports of guard brutality, overcrowding, lack of food, and poor hygiene. Furthermore, most of these migrant workers are Somali, and are deported back to one of the most unstable, dangerous areas in the world.

    • Tales of Army Discord Show Tiananmen Square in a New Light

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • YouTube’s monopolistic behaviour is hurting indie music labels

        So there’s every reason to believe that YouTube is, indeed, bullying the independents into accepting a deal that dramatically undervalues the investment indies make in new emerging artists. Unlike the lack of support songwriters had when PRS experienced the same tactic, the indies can surely count on songwriters to support them in standing up to the bully. But when will the competition commissions around the world do something about it? It’s not only artists that will be worse off if the indies give in – so will music fans all over the world.

      • The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Peter Sunde Taken into Custody in Southern Sweden

        Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay co-founder was arrested in Southern Sweden. TPB co-founder was wanted by Interpol and apprehended in a police raid. Peter did not serve prison time for his role in Pirate Bay operations. TorrentFreak noted that he was arrested exactly eight years after police conducted the raid.

        Peter was wanted by Interpol for more than two years and he was arrested in a place near Malmö, Sweden. Interpol had been looking after his role in The Pirate Bay case.

      • Pirate Bay Co-Founder Peter Sunde Arrested in Sweden

        Peter Sunde was arrested today in a police raid in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay co-founder was wanted by Interpol as he had yet to serve prison time for his involvement with the site. Sunde’s arrest comes exactly eight years after the police raided the Pirate Bay servers, which marked the start of the criminal prosecution against the site’s founders.

06.01.14

Links 1/6/2014: Two Linux Mint Releases, New NSA Leaks From Risen

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kano review – doing it for the kids

    The Kano computer system revolves around two core things: a Raspberry Pi and the Kano OS designed for it. More than just another Raspberry Pi kit, it proved itself with a successful Kickstarter, promising a system that would help get kids into real computing and allow them to start down a path of programming and coding.

  • Sphere 1.4 Is an Icon Pack for People Who Don’t Like Flat Operating Systems

    The Sphere icon pack is made by Achim Karsch and features over 24.000 icons for the operating system, covering pretty much all the known applications out there.

  • Australian Linux conference 2014 records big loss

    The Australian national Linux conference of 2014, held in Perth in January, looks set to make a loss of nearly $40,000, according to the president of Linux Australia, Joshua Hesketh.

  • Linux.conf.au $40,000 Budget Shortfall: A Lesson In The Importance Of Planning

  • Server

    • Linux Video of the Week: 40-Node Raspberry Pi Supercomputer

      Guill, a recent graduate of the masters in computer science and electrical engineering program at the University of Texas in Dallas, built the 40-node Raspberry Pi cluster for distributed software testing. In addition to a list of technical requirements, Guill wrote that he also wanted it to be “visually pleasing.”

    • 32-bit Enterprise Linux Still Matters

      I’ve done a lot of support of government servers and they run for about forever, as in until they serve no further use. Even retired, old servers are often repurposed and put back into service due to budget restrictions and/or long lead times to order new equipment under the required procedures for government procurement. In the United States this is especially true at the state level. When a server is repurposed it is usually reloaded with the current enterprise standard Linux distrubution release and applications, not legacy releases. That’s one common use case.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Foundation webpage design
      • First ideas for a better GNOME browser

        I have tried to describe a situation where Web browsing is more tightly integrated with the desktop. There is still a lot of work to do: detailed functionality needs to be refined, assumptions need to be verified, mockups and prototypes need to be created and evaluated…

        A browser is a very complex application to design, but luckily there is a lot of knowledge already available that should help us generate ideas and make informed decisions.

      • AppData progress and the email deluge

        I’ve deliberately not included GNOME in this sweep, as a lot of the core GNOME applications already have AppData and most of the gnomies already know what to do. I also didn’t include XFCE appications, as XFCE has agreed to adopt AppData on the mailing list and are in the process of doing this already. KDE is just working out how to merge the various files created by Matthias, and I’ve not heard anything from LXDE or MATE. So, I only looked at projects not affiliated with any particular desktop.

      • GNOME Shell 3.13.2 Brings Improvements for Airplane Mode

        This is the first update for GNOME Shell in the current 3.13.x development cycle, and its makers have made quite a few modifications to it.

        According to the changelog, the airplane mode menu is now insensitive in the lock screen, the struts are no longer extended to the screen edge, keynav has been fixed for alternatives in AltSwitcher, and the window menus have been implemented in the shell.

      • Tartan: Plugging Clang Into The GNOME Stack

        Tartan is a new research and development project by Collabora to yield a Clang analysis plug-in for GLib and GNOME.

        The Tartan plug-in loads GObject-Introspection meta-data for all encountered functions to better inform LLVM’s Clang and the plug-in also takes care of detecting common coding practices for GLib. Tartan is licensed under the GPLv3+ by Collabora.

      • GTK+ 3.13.2 Arrives with Interactive Debugging and Gestures Suppor

        This latest update for GTK arrives with a multitude of changes and new features, but this is understandable because this is a development release.

        According to the changelog, interactive debugging support has been implemented, gesture support has finally landed, the GTK+ widgets can now draw outside their allocation zone, by setting a clip with gtk_widget_set_clip(), GtkStack has added a few more transition types, and the GtkProgressBar is now narrower.

  • Distributions

    • Kali Linux 1.0.7 review

      The latest update to Kali Linux was released a few days ago. Kali Linux 1.0.7 review is a summary review of the main features of this latest upgrade to the security distribution from Offensive Security, a security and penetration training outfit based somewhere on this third rock from the Sun.

      The main feature introduced in Kali Linux 1.0.7 is the ability to transfer the system to a USB stick with encrypted persistence.

    • The five most popular end-user Linux distributions

      Sure, on the desktop, Windows still rules. According to Stat Counter’s’ April 2014 data, Windows has about a 90 percent market share. Out of an approximate base of 1.5 billion PCs, that’s about 1.36 billion Windows PCs. So, guess what’s the number two end-user operating system in the world?

    • Netbook, Desktop and X Editions of Simplicity Linux 14.7 Alpha 1 Now Available

      “Simplicity Linux 14.7 Alpha is now available for download in Netbook, Desktop and X Editions. It is based on Precise Puppy and uses the excellent LXPup by SFS to provide LXDE as a desktop environment for Netbook and Desktop Editions. As usual, Netbook is our cut down version which focuses on web based applications rather than locally installed applications,” said the developer in the official announcement.

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • June 2014 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine released

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the June 2014 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Tails 1.1 Beta 1 Secure Distro Now Has Windows 8 Comouflage Mode

        Tails is a distribution based on Debian and Tor technologies that aims to keep its users as anonymous as possible. It gained a lot more visibility after Edward Snowden said that he used exactly this Linux distribution to hide his tracks. The developers are now implementing more changes and fixes that should ensure it becomes even more secure.

      • Siduction ‘Paintitblack’ LXQt Dev Release: Screenshots

        Earlier this month the Siduction team, which regularly updates snapshots based on Debian Unstable/Sid, released a development build showcasing the new LXQt desktop, the future of both the LXDE and the Razor-qt environments. Siduction have a bit of history here as they featured Razor-qt as a desktop early on and were probably the only distribution to ship a dedicated iso as part of their line-up throughout 2012 and 2013. Besides using KDE 4 for the main image Siduction have shown a great commitment to medium light and lower resource desktops.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • First Look Unreal Tournament, Tangiers Trailer, and Ubuntu Surface
          • Is Cinnamon a worthy replacement for Ubuntu Unity?

            If there’s one area of Linux that gets more scrutiny than any other, it’s the desktop. From every corner, the haters and detractors abound. Nearly every publication that offers any focus on the Linux desktop at some point posts a piece about getting rid of the default Ubuntu desktop. Cinnamon is one of the primary replacement contenders.

          • Unity Control Center for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Review

            Ubuntu developers are trying to shake some of its GNOME dependencies and they have been working towards this goal for quite some time. Ubuntu distributions have been using GNOME packages since the beginning, even before the adoption of Unity as the default desktop environment.

            Back when Ubuntu was still using GNOME 2.x to power its desktop, people were complaining about various problems, which in fact were not the fault of the Ubuntu developers. Some of the patches submitted by Ubuntu upstream, to the GNOME project were accepted either with delay or not at all. So, Canonical has decided to make Unity, a project it can control from one end to another.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Deepin’s Functionality Is a Bit Too Shallow

              The Deepin desktop design is snazzy yet simple to use. It is one of the first Linux distros to take advantage of HTML 5 technology.

              Add its home-grown applications such as the Deepin Software Center, Deepin Music Player and Deepin Media Player, and you get an operating system that is tailored to the average user.

              The Deepin Linux development team is based in China. The distro so far is available only in English and traditional or simplified Chinese. It is a very young distro that debuted a few years ago and cycled through just one or two full releases per year as it crawled through its alpha and beta stages.

              Deepin 2014 Beta is the latest version, released earlier this month to replace a version released last fall. This current release, based on screen shots displayed on the website for the previous version, substitutes the more traditional bottom panel bar with a docking bar that resembles the Mac OS X look.

              Read more

            • Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Is Now Available for Download

              The new Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the first flavors released are Cinnamon and MATE, which is the norm for this kind of launches.

              It’s important to note right from the start that the ISOs for the two versions of Linux Mint 17 usually arrive before the official announcement, which is not too far off. Rest assured, these are the official images from the Linux Mint Team.

            • Download Linux Mint 17 final release ISO images
            • Linux Mint 17 Qiana release ISOs available for download

              The ISOs approved for Linux Mint 17 aka Qiana stable release are already uploaded and available for download. The release hasn’t been announced yet but here’s your chance to install and enjoy the latest version of the popular Ubuntu derivative! 32 and 64-bit versions of both the Cinnamon and MATE variants are available.

            • Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Is Now Available
            • Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Cinnamon Officially Released
            • Linux Mint 17 MATE & Cinnamon Versions Officially Out

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Synology DS414j review – the future of NAS?

      When you buy a Synology product, you know what you’re getting yourself in to. The company’s designs rarely change between generations, beyond a few small tweaks and improvements to the internals, and its Linux-based DiskStation Manager operating system only ever improves with time. Its pricing, however, can leave it out of the reach of the budget-conscious buyer, especially when more than two drive bays are required.

    • Why Cisco joined the Linaro Digital Home Group
    • Linaro forms digital media group

      The Linaro Digital Home Group, or LHG, follows other working groups from Linaro, a not-for-profit company owned by ARM and many of its top licensees. Linaro develops standardized open source Linux and Android toolchain software for ARM-based devices. Previous groups have included the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG), the Linaro Networking Group (LNG), and most recently, the Security Working Group (SWG).

      As usual, the goal is provide standardized software and requirements for relevant upstream open source projects. In this case, Linaro defines digital home applications as media-centric devices including set-top boxes, televisions, media players, gaming, and home gateway devices. Home automation does not appear to be a central focus.

    • Phones

      • Ubuntu Phone OS vs. Mozilla Firefox OS

        Though it’s difficult to compare two operating systems that are targeted at different users, Mozilla’s Firefox OS still feels half-baked compared to what Ubuntu offers. While Canonical is focused on making a full-fledged mobile OS that goes head-to-head against Android and iOS, Firefox’s approach is towards making smartphones more affordable. Initial reviews of Firefox OS have been really underwhelming so it will take about a year for us to see both operating systems in the hands of its end users. Finally, it would be a great idea to wait till both operating systems get enough exposure and that would be somewhere around April 2015 where both Ubuntu and Firefox would have (hopefully) reached enough stability to be used on a broader scale.

      • Tizen Dev Conf 2014 open to student developers for free

        Good news for budding developers interested in mobile platforms and devices. The Tizen Developer Conference 2014 (hashtag #TDCSF14) due next week is offering free registration to student developers.

      • Pride and Prejudice: Smartphones

        Android/Linux smartphones are taking 80% of the market shipments while having an average selling price ~$70 less than those other operating systems, you know, on Blackberries and iPhones.

      • WebRTC voice and video now available on Firefox Nightly, but…

        WebRTC voice and video is now available on Firefox Nightly. That’s the latest news from the Mozilla Foundation and TokBox, the Web communications company that Mozilla Foundation is working with to bring us WebRTC voice and video in my favorite Web browser. To see how this actually works, I decided to download Firefox Nightly and install or run it on my systems.

      • Ballnux

        • Samsung’s original Galaxy Gear smartwatch drops Android for Tizen

          Samsung’s first generation of smartwatches is officially ditching Android. SamMobile reports that the original Galaxy Gear is being upgraded to Tizen, the operating system used on the newer Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo (but not the Gear Fit, yet another model released this spring.) Samsung has made a point of differentiating its software from stock Android — its various Android smartphones are loaded with design tweaks — but in this case, the main difference will be in added features; we and other reviewers found that the Tizen interface looked and operated very much like the Android one.

        • Samsung Continues to Convert Mobile Players to Tizen

          Samsung continues to welcome new players into the Tizen family. Its June 2 dev conference may coincide with Tizen smartphone news.

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Teenager Killed His Parents Because They Took His iPod Away

    A Virginia tenth grader says he attacked and killed his parents because they were acting too parental, “taking away [his] iPod and stuff.”

    Vincent Parker, a 16-year-old honor roll student, was arrested after he randomly attacked and killed his parents last December.

  • Brother and sister kill their Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother during an EXORCISM by beating her to ‘force out demons’
  • Everyone Agrees They Don’t Know Why Teenager Committed Suicide, So Helpful Coroner Shouts Video Games

    They say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. When it comes to adults attempting to explain away inexplicable tragedy by scapegoating the younger generation’s entertainment du jour, that certainly seems to be the case. For our generation, of course, that means video games. We’ve seen it over and over again, from journalists jumping to blame violent games before they have any facts to back it up, to television personalities pretending there’s a proven link when there isn’t, to grandstanding politicians proposing constitution-violating sin-taxes on games just because.

  • Science

    • New Video: Neil deGrasse Tyson Destroys Climate Deniers

      For 11 episodes now, the groundbreaking Fox and National Geographic Channel series Cosmos has been exploring the universe, outraging creationists, and giving science teachers across the nation something to show in class every Monday. In the process, the show has been drawing more than 3 million viewers every Sunday night, a respectable number for a science-focused show that is, after all, a major departure from what prime-time audiences are used to.

      Cosmos certainly hasn’t shied from controversy; it has taken on evolution and industry-funded science denial, and it has been devoting an increasing amount of attention to the subject of climate change. And apparently that was just the beginning. This coming Sunday, Cosmos will devote an entire episode to the topic.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Why Are Food Prices so High? Because We’re Eating Oil

      Anyone who buys their own groceries (as opposed to having a full-time cook handle such mundane chores) knows that the cost of basic foods keeps rising, despite the official claims that inflation is essentially near-zero.

    • Diets Make You Fatter—The Three Little Words that Really Help You Lose Weight

      “British girls have become the fattest in Europe” was this week’s brutal headline.

    • Synthetic biology products found in “green” laundry detergent

      Consumer products containing ingredients made using an advanced form of engineering known as synthetic biology are beginning to show up more often on grocery and department store shelves.

      A liquid laundry detergent made by Ecover, a Belgian company that makes “green” household products including the Method line, contains an oil produced by algae whose genetic code was altered using synthetic biology. The algae’s DNA sequence was changed in a lab, according to Tom Domen, the company’s manager for long-term innovation.

  • Security

    • Anonymous hacktivists plan massive attack on Brazilian World Cup sponsors – report

      Amid mass demos and violence over extravagant World Cup spending showing little promise of return for an impoverished Brazil, Anonymous hackers plan a mass hack attack on the Cup’s sponsors, a source told Reuters.

      High inflation and low business investment have hampered the government’s recent attempts to boost the economy ahead of the tournament. All this is happening as some of the country’s most pressing social and other problems have been neglected, with rampant poverty and destitution rife in large parts of the capital.

      People are up in arms, staging protest events for a number of reasons, the latest of which are centered on skepticism that the lavish spending on the World Cup will benefit them in any substantial way. This Friday, several simultaneous events blocked Rio de Janeiro’s main roads, paralyzing traffic.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Don’t sanitize the reality of war

      The only winners in war are those who produce the guns, bullets, drones, IEDs, and all the other gadgets to maim and kill.

    • White House press secretary Jay Carney leaving

      Jay Carney is stepping down as White House press secretary, President Barack Obama announced on Friday.

    • 6 Of Jay Carney’s Most Epic Clashes With Reporters

      When Jay Carney steps down as White House press secretary later this year, he will leave behind a trail of memorable clashes with reporters. Here are a few of them:

    • How Many Terrorists Are There: Not As Many As You Might Think

      Terrorism is a deadly, ever-present menace from which Americans should spare no expense or effort in protecting themselves. Or so our rulers claim.

    • The University & the Security State: DHS Joins Pentagon and CIA on Campus

      Most countries have special-purpose institutions of higher education to train military officers. The United States has 18 such colleges and universities, including federally funded ones such as West Point, state-funded ones such as The Citadel, and private ones such as Norwich University. What distinguishes the United States from all but a few other countries is the presence of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at civilian colleges and universities.

      Created in 1916, ROTC is probably the most visible sign of U.S. military involvement on non-military colleges and universities, with its uniformed cadets and midshipmen and university credit for courses taught by military officers on “military science” and “leadership.” Army, Navy), or Air Force ROTC programs are present today on almost 500 campuses.

    • Obama accepts veterans affairs chief resignation with ‘regret’

      Obama said Sloan Gibson, deputy secretary of the VA, would take the helm on an acting basis while he looked “diligently” for a new permanent VA secretary. Gibson, an Army veteran and former banker, had joined the VA just three months ago after running the USO military service organization.

    • How Long Will Europe Pay Tribute to USA?

      France and the United States have exchanged statements on the Mistral ships contract with Moscow. Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf has said the United States is concerned about the deal and it believes that the time is wrong for selling the amphibious assault ships to the Russian Federation. The statements were made after French President Hollande confirmed that the deal signed in 2011 is in force to be completed in October. The $1, 2 billion Vladivostok is to join the Russian Navy in 2014 with Sevastopol, the second ship of the class, to be delivered in 2015.

    • Fmr Bush Counter-Terror Czar: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld All Committed War Crimes

      According to the nation’s former top counterterrorism official, former President George W. Bush, his Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had all committed war crimes during their tenure.

      Richard Clarke was Bush’s counterterrorism czar in 2001 and later became the president’s special advisor on cyberterror until he resigned in 2003 and became a vocal critic of the administration. In an interview with Democracy Now! this week, Clarke was asked by host Amy Goodman whether Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld could ever seriously face “war crimes” charges for the Iraq operation.

    • Exclusive: New document details America’s war machine — and secret mass of contractors in Afghanistan

      What is a huge army of private contractors secretly doing in Afghanistan? A leaked PowerPoint presentation explains

    • “Force Protection Alpha in Effect” –Coming To A Town Near You

      My arrest at Creech along with eight others on April 16 was a “return to the scene of the crime” (the Air Force’s crime, not mine) for me, as I was among the “Creech 14” in April 2009, the first nonviolent direct action against drones in the U.S. Creech was then one of only a few sites from which drones were controlled by the U.S. and by the United Kingdom, which has a wing of the Royal Air Force stationed there to fly their own drones. Since then the use of armed drones has been proliferating around the world and so has the number of drone operation bases in communities around the U.S. My work with Voices for Creative Nonviolence has brought me to the scenes of the crime in Afghanistan, the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia and at the gates of drone bases in New York, Iowa, Missouri and in England as well.

    • US Drones hitting Civilian Homes, Killing non-Combatants

      Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.

    • New Data: American Drones Killed Hundreds of Pakistani Civilians
    • Civilian Casualty Rates in CIA vs. DOD Drone Programs: Apples and Oranges
    • What the Drones Strike: Targets Attacked by CIA Drones in Pakistan – Most are Houses

      The Bureau is publishing, for the first time, data showing the types of targets that have been reportedly attacked by CIA drones in Pakistan.

      The research is a joint project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research unit based at Goldsmiths University, London, and Situ Research in New York. The data feeds this interactive website mapping the strikes, the types of target attacked, and their relative scale.

    • If Bush Is a War Criminal, Then So Are Truman, LBJ, Nixon and Obama

      Finally, although President Obama ended the use of torture, he continued the drone attacks started under Bush. A Stanford Law School reports states that “there is significant evidence that U.S. drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.” Many say they violate international law, especially since civilians are killed in countries that haven’t declared war upon the U.S. As for the decisions of presidents before Obama, the use of the atomic bombs, massive bombing campaigns in Vietnam, and chemical weapons like Agent Orange can easily be viewed as war crimes. If President Bush is deemed a war criminal, then the decisions of presidents before and after Bush should be evaluated in the same manner.

    • Aussies dead in drone strikes — and Brandis does not care
    • US Will Still Use Drone Strikes: Barack Obama

      President Barack Obama said on Wednesday he will continue to “take direct action” by ordering drone strikes and capture operations against suspected terrorists “when necessary to protect ourselves.”

      In a speech outlining a foreign policy framework that stresses cooperation with allies, Obama said there still would be times when the U.S. must go it alone. He restated a policy he disclosed last May, however, that no drone strike should occur unless there is “a near certainty” that no civilians will be harmed.

    • A(nother) Procedural Roadblock for Drone Casualty Reporting Requirements

      By way of brief background for the unfamiliar, at the most basic level (but with varying degrees of specificity), each proposal would require the President to release a public report on the number of civilian and combatant casualties killed in U.S. drone strikes (for earlier discussions on the substance of the proposals, see e.g., here and here). Back in November, the House and Senate intelligence committees debated including a similar reporting requirement in the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2014. The SSCI-approved version of the bill included the provisions; whereas, HPSCI rejected a Schiff-sponsored amendment to include the reporting requirements in the House version. Ultimately, however, the proposal was never enacted.

    • US Global Hawk Drones Given Access To British Airspace
    • Despite promise, US govt moves to classify justification for drone killing of American
    • U.S. Seeks to Censor More of Memo That Approved Drone Strike on American
    • Feds Want to Censor More of the Drone Memo
    • US gov’t wants to withhold crucial information on Yemen drone strike
    • US appeals court rebuffs govt try for secrecy

      A New York federal appeals court has rejected the government’s request to reargue in secret its order that it reveal a classified memo describing legal justifications for using drones to kill U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism overseas.

    • Inside the Ring: Memo outlines Obama’s plan to use the military against citizens
    • Obama Unveils His “Don’t Do Stupid Sh*t” Doctrine At West Point
    • ‘Boss’ bumper sticker for a true Chicagoan
    • Is ‘Obama: Like a Boss’ bumper sticker completely wrong?
    • Obama Administration Desperate to Censor Assassination Memo

      After announcing it would comply with a federal court order, the Obama administration has decided that it wants to conceal more portions of a controversial memo authorizing the assassination of Americans overseas.

      Last week, officials with the U.S. Department of Justice said they would make public parts of the internal document written in July 2010 by then-federal lawyer David Barron that justified the use of drones or other means to kill U.S. citizens accused of terrorist involvement.

      The declaration came as the U.S. Senate was considering Barron’s confirmation as a judicial appointee to the First Circuit Court of Appeals—a move that helped convince at least one Democratic senator, Mark Udall of Colorado, to support the nomination.

    • Drone memo author should be in jail

      Conservatives say, and this is one of their more successful memes, that poor people are immoral. The proles have sex and kids out of wedlock and expect us (i.e., upstanding middle- and upper-class patriots) to pay for them. They steal Medicare and cheat on welfare. They don’t follow The Rules (rules written by, let’s just say, not them). Which makes them Bad.

    • Obama’s Vacuous West Point Foreign Policy Speech

      In his May 28 West Point speech on foreign policy President Obama took a swipe at “so-called realists.” But the acolytes of this particular school of thought will by and large be satisfied with his manifesto. The most scathing attacks on Obama’s foreign policy have come from neo-conservatives such as Robert Kagan. They are the ones who will pounce on the Mr. Obama’s latest address, and indeed have already done so.

      The West Point lecture was classic Obama: the president was calm and reasonable. And he took an in-between Goldilocks stance designed to differentiate him from the extremes. The latter he characterized simplistically to supplement the rhetorical force, if not the persuasiveness, of his case.

    • As Obama sets agenda at West Point, anti-drone protesters rally

      About two dozen anti-drone protesters greeted those entering the United States Military Academy Wednesday, piggybacking their message onto the fanfare of graduating cadets and a visit by President Barack Obama.

    • New data shows drones killed hundreds of Pakistani civilians

      Some light has been shed on how the drone program works; in October 2013, the Washington Post revealed how the NSA is also involved in the targeted killing program. And early in 2014, The Intercept published more details about how “controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies” used by the NSA for its surveillance programs are also used to identify drone targets.

    • The Blair-Bush notes

      It isn’t just John Major who is unhappy that transcripts and full notes of conversations between Tony Blair and George W Bush about the lead-up to the Iraq war will remain secret. The entire world needs details of conversations between Blair and Bush about the 2003 war, but instead the Chilcot inquiry will only get the gist of the talks. For a war which killed 655,000 Iraqis and over one million in total, and for a reason never proven, it cannot be just the former British prime minister who is troubled by the lack of information and transparency.

    • Liverpool journalist channels Iraq War anger into debut novel

      IT’S ABOUT as eye-catching a blurb as you could hope for on an Iraq war thriller – an endorsement from embattled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange himself.

    • Full-steam ahead for a whitewash of Tony Blair’s Iraq lies as Chilcot surrenders

      Chilcot has surrendered in a “bad, bad day for democracy and justice. The establishment of this country, and the security and intelligence services have won again. Truth has lost out.”

    • Welcome to the warped but wonderful world of ex-PM Tony Blair

      Many believe Blair should be put on trial for his role in taking us to what looks like an increasingly illegal war in Iraq. I would try him for allowing the country to be swamped with millions of new arrivals as, and this fact is absolutely vital to remember, it was not fair to anyone; not those who were already here, those who arrived or those who came along subsequently.

      Communities felt they lost their identities, schools were filled to the point that giant cabins were quickly rushed into playgrounds to fit in all the children, many of whom could speak no English, and resentment quickly grew.

    • Crediting Obama for Bringing Troops Home–Without Noting He Sent Them Abroad

      In reality, current US troop levels–about 32,000–are actually about what they were when Obama took office (Think Progress, 6/22/11). A graph that accompanied an NPR story (6/29/11) shows this pretty clearly.

      Late last year the New York Times offered similarly misleading spin (FAIR Blog, 11/25/13), reporting that Obama “has reduced the forces in Afghanistan from about 100,000 in 2010 to about 47,000 today.” That’s technically true, but ignores the fact that the troop levels had only gotten that high as a result of Obama’s policy of massive escalation.

    • Is Iran’s Missing General, Ali Reza Asgari, Living in the United States?

      He was said to be a key player in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983 and in the founding of Hezbollah—until he disappeared in 2007. Now a new book claims he’s under CIA protection.

    • Benghazi ‘‍cover-up’ being ignored, reader contends

      Reader Peter Smith is none too happy with this newspaper.

      As he wrote to me: “I could see The Blade shirking and hiding initially from its duty of reporting to the citizenry about the tragedy when the news first broke, due to the lack of ‘factual evidence…’

      “But now the facts are out! I know it and you know it too … time to step up and report first-hand all the facts about this tragedy and all the ramifications coming out of it, including the cover-up.”

    • US sends assault ship with 1,000 Marines to Libyan coast
    • Op-Ed: Hifter again attacks Islamists as Libyan protesters show support
    • The man at the center of the chaos in Libya: Khalifa Haftar
    • Syrian rebels say they are already being trained by the CIA

      The issue of giving aid to the Syrian rebels has been widely debated with some concerned that weapons and training will end up in the hands of Islamists who have embedded themselves among the opposition.

    • Syrian rebels say they are being trained by the CIA
    • Guatemala: The coup that radicalised Che Guevara

      Sixty years ago, in June 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup ousted the reformist Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. The coup installed a brutal right-wing regime and decades of bloody repression.

    • Obama’s ProtoWar Against Russia and China

      Russia and China are both under attack by a multi-pronged U.S.-led ‘proto-war’ which could erupt into ‘hot war’ or even nuclear war. ‘Protowar’ or ‘proto-warfare’ is the term I have coined to describe the use of multiple methods intended to weaken, destabilize, and in the limit-case destroy a targeted government without the need to engage in direct military warfare.

    • What Are Polish Death Squads Fighting For in Ukraine?

      On May 11 a plane arrived at Kiev’s airport in strict secrecy; it was met by the airport’s military personnel rather than the civilian staff. NATO military uniforms, 500 packages of amphetamines, and containers marked as poisonous substances were unloaded from the plane. By order of the Kiev directorate of the SBU, the fighters, the cargo and the containers of poison were not inspected and left the airport in cars with tinted windows. The cargo was accompanied by CIA agent Richard Michael. Aboard the plane were also fighters from the Right Sector and the Polish private military company ASBS (Analizy Systemowe Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz) Othago, created several years ago by Poland’s current Minister of the Interior, B. Sienkiewicz.

    • Premature US Victory-Dancing on Ukraine

      Washington’s role in the coup d’etat in Kiev on Feb. 22 has brought the U.S. a Pyrrhic victory…

    • Squat demolition called off after four nights of rioting in Barcelona

      City attempt to reach peaceful agreement over fate of squatters’ civic centre after fourth night of violent clashes in Catalan capital

    • Meet Directive 3025.18 Granting Obama Authority To Use Military Force Against Civilians

      While the “use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized,” The Washington Times uncovering of a 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans. As one defense official proclaimed, “this appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens.” Meet Directive 3025.18 and all its “quelling civil disturbances” totalitarianism…

    • Sleeping toddler burned during SWAT raid
    • SWAT team throws concussion grenade into baby playpen during no-knock raid

      A SWAT crashed through a family’s door in the middle of the night and threw a concussion grenade into a baby’s playpen. A 19-month-old baby was horribly disfigured when it exploded in his face. [Graphic]

      Alecia Phonesavanh and her family were staying at a friend’s house after their home had been lost in a fire. The makeshift living arrangements left their 19-month-old baby boy sleeping in a playpen in a shared room. Things were going OK until the local government decided to send paramilitary home invaders to unleash indiscriminate violence upon the home and anyone inside.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • ‘The disgraced oligarch’: WikiLeaks cables reveal changing US views on Poroshenko

      The US was among the first states to congratulate Ukraine’s president-elect Petro Poroshenko. Yet real US opinions of the new president are more complicated, as revealed by WikiLeaks cables which refer to the billionaire as a “disgraced oligarch.”

      For years, the US was keeping an eye on the Ukrainian billionaire and former foreign minister. Between 2006 and 2011, Poroshenko’s name was a direct or indirect subject of hundreds of cables released by WikiLeaks.

      A simple search for ”Poroshenko” on WikiLeaks’ website gives at least 350 documents mentioning his name. But some of the descriptions provided by US diplomats are far from complimentary.

    • Thousands of journalists withhold a mistakenly released CIA agent name

      Last Saturday, the White House accidentally revealed the identity of the CIA’s most senior operative in Kabul by accidentally including his name on a list of officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit to US troops in Afghanistan. Though it was disbursed to more than 6,000 journalists, all indications suggest that every outlet has complied with the government’s request to refrain from publishing the name.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Action Alert: Ann Coulter as CNN’s Climate Change Expert

      FAIR’s latest Action Alert (5/28/14) urges media activists to call out CNN for basing a climate change report around one guest: right-wing climate change denier Ann Coulter. If you write to CNN, please share a copy of your message in the comments below.

    • CNN’s Climate Expert: Ann Coulter?!
    • US Plans to Speed Poultry Slaughtering, Cut Inspections

      The U.S. government is in the final stages of weighing approval for an overhaul of regulations governing the country’s poultry industry that would see processing speeds increase substantially even while responsibility for oversight would be largely given over to plant employees.

    • The “Pugilistic” Way The Koch Brothers Handle The Media

      The author of Sons of Wichita, the new biography of the Koch brothers, never got the interviews he wanted with the archconservative billionaires. But he says the family nonetheless kept a close eye on his research, deploying the “very aggressive P.R. operation” they have used for years to silence media criticism.

    • ‘A Government Of Thugs’: How Canada Treats Environmental Journalists

      I attempted to enter Canada on a Tuesday, flying into the small airport at Fort McMurray, Alberta, waiting for my turn to pass through customs.

      “What brings you to Fort Mac?” a Canada Border Services Agency official asked. “I’m a journalist,” I said. “I’m here to see the tar sands.” He pointed me to border security. Another official, a tall, clean-shaven man, asked the same question. “I’m here to see the tar sands.” he frowned. “You mean oil sands. We don’t have tar here.”

  • Finance

    • Bilderberg 2014: In the Court of Good King Henry

      The bankers, intelligence chiefs and private military strategists are the dukes, energy and arms firms the barons.

    • Seven Finns participate in Bilderberg meeting

      The list of participants for the 62nd Bilderberg meeting that began in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday includes seven Finns. The annual meeting is an exclusive forum for the political and financial elite of the world to engage in informal, off-the-record discussions on a variety of global issues.

    • ​Bilderberg actually talks nukes, euro nationalism and… Barack Obama – leak

      The officially released agenda of the prestigious Bilderberg club meeting is not true, claims RT show host Daniel Estulin, a longtime watcher of the ‘secret world govt’ group. He says he obtained the real agenda for this year’s gathering in Copenhagen.

    • Thomas Piketty accuses Financial Times of dishonest criticism

      Thomas Piketty has accused the Financial Times of ridiculous and dishonest criticism of his economics book on inequality, which has become a publishing sensation.

      The French economist, whose 577-page tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century has become an unlikely must-read for business leaders and politicians alike, said it was ridiculous to suggest that his central thesis on rising inequality was incorrect.

      The controversy blew up when the FT accused Piketty of errors in transcribing numbers, as well as cherry-picking data or not using original sources.

    • Threat of tenant evictions at highest level in more than 10 years

      Bedroom tax and housing list squeeze blamed for landlord repossession orders topping 47,000 in three months

    • Moyers: 10 Disgustingly Rich Companies That Will Do Anything To Avoid Paying Taxes

      This week, Bill speaks to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who argues that we must reform the tax code and stop subsidizing tax dodgers. A recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness suggests that corporate taxes are near a 60-year low — and that’s partially because corporations have become adept at not paying their share.

      Here’s a list of 10 tax-dodging corporations excerpted from the Americans for Tax Fairness report.

    • Argentinian Central Bank is Afraid of Bitcoin

      Yet another of the world’s central banks has publicly “warned” citizens of Bitcoin. The Argentinian Central Bank has posted a statement about Bitcoin on their official website, warning of the lack of legal tender status, volatility, and Bitcoin’s use in fraudulent activities and money laundering.

    • Savage capitalism is back – and it will not tame itself

      Back in the 90s, I used to get into arguments with Russian friends about capitalism. This was a time when most young eastern European intellectuals were avidly embracing everything associated with that particular economic system, even as the proletarian masses of their countries remained deeply suspicious. Whenever I’d remark on some criminal excess of the oligarchs and crooked politicians who were privatising their countries into their own pockets, they would simply shrug.

    • Proof that Corporate Tax Cuts Have Done More Harm Than Good

      The percentage of taxes that corporations pay today are near the record lows of the United States’ total tax bill, even though these corporations are bringing in huge profits. Although this is happening, the unemployment rate still remains high. A study completed by the Center for Effective Government and National People’s Action shows the damage done by having corporations pay low taxes and the effect on state budgets. The study shows that a small increase in the amount of taxes large corporations pay will have positive effects such as restoring cuts in education and public services, and could possibly restore over three million jobs. As federal aid was declined to state budgets more and more, many states have cut back on taxes claiming that doing so would benefit their economy and create jobs. One example of this was a tax exemption on corporate profits passed directly to individual owners in the state of Kansas. This kept Kansas in a recession. Hard working employees were stuck with paying the taxes that corporations got out of paying. Corporations get out of paying taxes in loopholes such as offshore tax havens, the “executive pay loophole” that allows corporations to deduct performance bonuses from their tax receipts, and the “stock-based pay loophole” that allows companies to deduct billions from their tax bill. People can see that cutting the taxes of corporations is not helping the economy in any state. It is not helping form jobs, and Americans agree it needs to be stopped.

    • More Proof Corporate Tax Cuts Have Done More Harm Than Good

      The taxes paid by corporations today are near record lows as a percentage of the United States’ total tax bill, even as they are recording massive profits. Yet the unemployment rate is still high. However, if we turned back the clock on corporate tax rates and returned to Nixon-era levels and closed loopholes, millions of American jobs would be created, according to The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base, a new report released today.

    • Could 932,367 Secessionists Be Right About Dying America?
    • More disabled workers paid just pennies an hour

      A national charity whose executives earn six-figure salaries used a legal loophole to pay disabled workers as little as three and four cents an hour, according to documents obtained exclusively by NBC News.

      An NBC News investigation recently revealed that Goodwill Industries, which is among the non-profit groups permitted to pay disabled workers far less than minimum wage because of a federal law known as Section 14 (c), had paid workers as little as 22 cents an hour.

    • Digging up the Dirt on Canadian Mining in Latin America

  • Censorship

    • MPAA: The Last Bastion of Censorship in America

      The MPAA was formed initially in 1922 under the moniker Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. It was created in order to give films at the time a set of standards by which filmmakers would use as a list to make sure that movies wouldn’t depict excessive violence, sexuality or other practices deemed immoral. It was later changed to the Motion Picture Association of America and placed under the direction of Jack Valenti in the mid ‘60s.

    • In Cuba, technology may beat censorship
    • The New York Times and freedom of the press

      An extraordinary commentary published in the New York Times Book Review — posted online May 22, scheduled for print publication June 8 — asserts that the US government must be the final decision-maker on whether leaked information about government wrongdoing should be published by the press.

      This anti-democratic screed, worthy of any police state, is written by Michael Kinsley, a longtime fixture of the punditry establishment and the former co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” program. His commentary takes the form of a review of Glenn Greenwald’s new book No Place to Hide on the Edward Snowden revelations about illegal mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.

      Kinsley ridicules Greenwald’s claim that blanket NSA surveillance of electronic communications is a threat to the democratic rights of the American people, and that Snowden was justified in exposing government criminality by leaking documents to Greenwald and other journalists for eventual publication in the Guardian (US) and the Washington Post.

    • Wikipedia founder: Google EU ruling ‘won’t work’
    • Google faces up to image problem in Europe
    • Germany Mulls Arbitration for Web ‘Right to Be Forgotten’

      The German government is considering setting up arbitration courts to weigh in on what information people can force Google Inc. (GOOG) and other search-engine providers to remove from results.

    • Twitter Has Quietly Learned To Censor And Ban Its Users When Governments Ask

      Twitter has a reputation as an open platform for expressing one’s opinions. It’s become a place for dissent and debate. It played a key role in the “Arab Spring” revolutions of the last couple of years.

      But last week, it agreed to censor a pro-Ukrainian Twitter feed in Russia. It also blocked a “blasphemous” account in Pakistan. It’s not the first time Twitter has censored politically sensitive accounts. Now, it seems, Twitter’s reputation as a platform for free speech is at risk.

    • Michael Bloomberg Compares Ivy League ‘Censorship’ to Soviet Russia in Harvard Speech
    • Michael Bloomberg Blasts Ivy League For Liberal ‘Censorship’
    • Cambodia’s Draft Law Turns Free Speech into Cybercrime

      Historically, Cambodia has been fairly lax in enacting legislation that stifles freedom of expression online—unlike its neighbors of Vietnam and Thailand— but with more Cambodian citizens gaining access to the Internet, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) has attempted to control dissenting views and “immoral actions” online through the drafting of a cybercrime law. A leaked copy of the legislation, which was initially drafted in 2012, revealed some serious threats to fundamental freedoms by making certain speech and other actions online punishable by fine and prison time.

    • “I Can Feel Total Censorship in the Air”: Internet Freedom Evaporates in Thailand
    • Google accepting censorship requests

      Google is accepting requests from Europeans who want to erase unflattering information from the results produced by the world’s dominant search engine.

      The demands can be submitted on a Web page Google opened late Thursday in response to a landmark ruling issued two weeks ago by Europe’s highest court.

    • Google accepting ‘right to be forgotten’ requests in Europe

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • MakerBot Files For Patent On A Design Derived From Work By Its Community

      MakerBot is one of the key companies in the low-cost 3D printing market. It was founded in 2009 and based its first model on the completely open RepRap design. However, in 2012, MakerBot moved away from its open source roots, claiming that it needed to make this shift in order to build a long-term business:

      We are going to be as open as we possibly can while building a sustainable business. We are going to continue to respect licenses and continue to contribute to the open technology of 3D printing, some of which we initiated. We don’t want to abuse the goodwill and support of our community. We love what we do, we love sharing, and we love what our community creates.

    • Makerbot blatantly steals and patents a community design.

      In a stunning display of madness, makerbot industries files a patent application on a mechanism clearly derived from content created by their users. What’s almost worse is the article they wrote praising the invention, presumably while they were filing the paperwork.

    • Success Of Fringe Parties In European Parliament Raises New Obstacle To TAFTA/TTIP’s Progress

      As Techdirt has been charting, the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations have already encountered far more resistance than was expected when they began last year. This has mostly centered around the controversial corporate sovereignty provisions, but there are also more general concerns about things like deregulation — for example, through a new regulatory council. As well as pushback from expected quarters — civil organizations and NGOs (pdf) — even some European governments are expressing their doubts. And following last week’s elections for the European Parliament, a new obstacle to concluding the agreement has been added: an increased number of European politicians (MEPs) that are skeptical about pan-European projects in general, and TAFTA/TTIP.

    • Copyrights

      • Labels Decide Not To Appeal Spanish Court Ruling That Found P2P File Sharing Software Perfectly Legal

        In April, we wrote about an important court ruling in Spain that found that Pablo Soto’s P2P file sharing software, Blubster, was “perfectly legal”, because the software was “neutral” and a part of “free enterprise within the framework of a market economy.” In that post, we went through the entire history of earlier court rulings that had similarly suggested that file sharing software shouldn’t be blamed for how people used it, and the US’s aggressive pressure that forced Spain to pass multiple new copyright laws to try to reverse such rulings. All of that appeared to be for nothing, as the courts still recognized the silliness of blaming software for how people use it.

      • RESPECT Act Should Be HYPOCRISY Act After How Often Labels Screwed Over Artists

        Yesterday, the music labels, under the guise of RIAA spinoff SoundExchange, along with Congressional Reps. George Holding and John Conyers, announced some new legislation and a coordinated PR campaign for what they’re calling “Project72.” The official name of the bill is the “Respecting Senior Performers as Essential Cultural Treasures Act” or the RESPECT Act. There is so much hypocrisy and ridiculousness here that it’s difficult to know where to start. However, in short, the labels fought hard to keep the situation the way it is today, and a very large number of the musicians the RIAA rolled out in “support” of this new law — claiming they just want to get paid by music streaming services — are musicians who got totally screwed over by RIAA labels in the past. How about a little “respect”?

05.30.14

Links 30/5/2014: GOG GNU/Linux Expansion, LGP Down, Valve Delays

Posted in News Roundup at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Oregon’s GMO Sellout

      Even though the state of Oregon enacted a law to override the ability of localities to regulate their own food systems, local ballot measures to ban GMO crops passed overwhelmingly in Jackson and Josephine Counties on May 20, according to news reports. “We fought the most powerful and influential chemical companies in the world and we won,” Elise Higley, a local farmer with the anti-GMO group Our Family Farms Coalition, told The Oregonian. The Progressive magazine tells the backstory below and reveals that the preemption measure shares language with an ALEC model bill.

    • Cynical? – It’s bad for your health……apparently.

      That’s right. If you don’t buy into everything told you, it’s bad for your health. This is the stuff of dreams for anyone who wants you to buy into everything they say. I’m currently writing about the City of London Police so I’ll pass this link onto them, I’m sure they can use it. The researchers, who amongst the many things they fail to grasp (from the report I read) go on to say:

    • Britain does so much cocaine it’s now in the drinking water

  • Security

    • WordPress Gets Flagged for Insecure Cookie Risk
    • Exim 4.82.1 security release
    • Wednesday’s security advisories
    • Write secure code using Open Web Application Security Project guidelines

      The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a not-for-profit charitable organization focused on improving software security. OWASP works on the principles of open source software, particularly the idea that the community is the force of creation and contribution. The unique aspect here is that OWASP is not software, rather a set of guidelines created by the community to help developers plug security holes in their code.

      Security has become a very important aspect of software development lately, but not everyone is aware of ways to write secure code. You may think, “my team of developers is very experienced/skilled/efficient, they can write 100% secure code,” but if you follow the news you are aware that even bigshot websites are regularly brought down or have their user data compromised. Your website should be well-prepared to avoid such attacks by following these guidelines by OWASP.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • After Safety Concerns Over Its Southern Leg, Keystone XL Is Getting New Regulations

      TransCanada will have to meet two extra safety conditions if it gets the go-ahead to build the northern portion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, due to concerns from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) that defects could occur during construction.

      PHMSA slipped in the two conditions towards the end of the appendices of the State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement, released this January. They dictate that TransCanada hires a third-party contractor chosen by PHMSA to monitor Keystone XL’s construction and report any faulty construction techniques back to the agency. In addition, TransCanada will be required to adopt a quality management program to make sure that Keystone XL is “built to the highest standards by both Keystone personnel and its many contractors.”

  • Finance

    • Exceptionalism – The Mind Killer

      It is so deeply embedded, so seamlessly rooted and integrated into what we think of as ‘our self’, that when expressed oftentimes it is (intentionally) mistaken for something else entirely. Our indoctrination begins at birth in tiny little ways, mostly personal in nature, with our parents and care givers the initial delivery system. From day one out of the womb we are conditioned via adoring smiles and Coochie Coochie Coo’s that we are exceptional, one of a kind and King of the house. A few minutes of screaming has everyone running to stem the tears and change the pee pants. And it is all downhill from here.

    • Death of money’: Author Rickards predicts collapse of global monetary system

      The collapse of the monetary system awaits the world in the near future, says financial expert James Rickards. Russia and China’s desire to rid the US dollar of its global reserve currency status is an early sign of the “increasingly inevitable” crisis.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Do you know what information your smart device collects?

      Are you aware that smart devices can collect information about your personal activities? If not, you are one of the 53% of British internet users that were unaware that smart devices such as smart TVs, fitness devices and in car-navigation systems can collect data.

    • Actual Former Government Official Makes Totally Ridiculous Argument That Snowden’s ‘Harms’ Are That Other Countries Are Angry

      Sometimes you have to wonder about people who hold government positions and the absolutely ludicrous statements they make. Following Ed Snowden’s big NBC interview, NBC apparently asked former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, to respond to Snowden’s pretty convincing claims that all the hand-wringing about “harms” he caused have no basis in fact. In the interview, Snowden points out, accurately, that no one has yet been able to show a single individual harmed by the revelations. McFaul then makes what may be the single dumbest statement we’ve heard to date on this whole debate, arguing that the “harm” is that other countries now trust us less — and that this is somehow Snowden’s fault, rather than, you know, the fault of the NSA which is doing the surveillance…

    • Kerry Tells Snowden to “Man Up” and Come Home

      A near-complete failure as Secretary of State (if you are not sure, read this), Kerry is apparently relegated within the Obama administration to the role of mumbling bully-boy statements, faux-machismo rantings whose intended audience and purpose are very, very unclear. Did Kerry think he might persuade Snowden to take up the challenge and fly back to the U.S.? Maybe meet Kerry in the Octagon mano-a-mano? No, Kerry sounded much more like Grandpa Simpson than America’s Senior Diplomat. – See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2014/05/29/kerry-tells-snowden-to-man-up-and-come-home/#sthash.PUdzNxZj.dpuf

    • How will government share your data?

      The Cabinet Office has started an early pre-consultation process looking at removing barriers to sharing or linking different databases across government departments. The rationale is that this can help Government “design and implement evidence based policy, for example to tackle social mobility, assist economic growth and prevent crime”.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • City of London Police – Getting results or using weasel words?

        iracy is wrong, piracy is theft. That’s that we are told. I personally refuse to watch the trash from Hollywood or your mainstream music et al, mainly because I think its manufactured nonsense aimed at markets either too lazy or too slow witted to find entertainment in more engaging mediums (such as reading, listening to the radio…you heard of those?)

        Now despite Piracy NOT being theft (if applied to Sec 1 of the Theft Act in the UK, which for me clearly defines what theft is), today we are looking at some claims made by the City of London police and finding out exactly what they are doing to combat the threat they claim of “piracy”.

        This is not an article on if you agree with infringement of copyright or not. I support CC and FOSS – I have no care or interest in the industries which make these multi-million pound movies, nor the movies themselves.

        [...]

        City of London Police – Why won’t you name the sites you claim to have closed down? – I believe I know the answer and its because they are not closed at all and just some word play by people who either don’t understand the concepts they are talking about or are intentionally looking to mislead. – Is there any other reason? Are my opinions incorrect? Please by all means give your reasons.

05.28.14

Links 28/5/2014: TogetherJS, PHP Next Generation

Posted in News Roundup at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Is ‘Open’ the ‘Organic’ of the IT Industry?

    First let’s talk about what ‘open’ is not. Open is not merely publishing an API, it’s not submitting your proprietary way of doing things to a standards body, nor is it throwing some code on GitHub. These things aren’t enough.

    Open isn’t about fundamentally changing the equation for the end user. What end users of technology are looking for is the ability to select technology from multiple vendors and have it work together. The ability to not be dependent on a single vendor and to switch non-disruptively if a vendor chooses to go in a different direction.

    So what is ‘open’? First of all it’s something everyone can see, everyone can access, the community can change and anyone can build on. It’s not easy, it’s hard. Good open source is open. How do you know good open source? Look at the community. If there is diversity, meritocracy and a high level of activity it’s probably ‘open’. Hadoop, MySQL, Linux, and OpenStack all make the grade. Cloud Foundry is getting there; Open vSwitch has really come a long way.

  • Nginx passes Apache as Web server of choice among top sites

    According to W3Techs’ figures, Nginx runs 38.8 percent of the top 1,000 sites, with Apache Httpd running 33.7 percent and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) running 9.2 percent. The overall rankings still put Apache at the top, though, with 60.5 percent of all known sites running Apache and only 20.7 percent running Nginx. But the closer one gets to the top of Alexa’s rankings, the greater the odds the site in question is running Nginx.

  • Top 4 open source alternatives to LDAP

    When you want to set up an application, most likely you will need to create an administrative account and add users with different privileges. This scenario happens frequently with content management, wiki, file sharing, and mailing lists as well as code versioning and continuous integration tools. When thinking about user and group centralization, you will need to select an application that fits your needs.

  • Blender 2.71 Test Release Issued With New Features

    Blender 2.71 with its Cycles rendering now supports fire and smoke rendering, deformation motion blur, various optimizations, and support for NVIDIA Maxwell cards when it comes to CUDA support. Blender 2.71 also adds OpenGL render options to its UI, animation improvements, multi-threaded animations within the Blender Game Engine, and many improvements within the Freestyle NPR Rendering.

  • Open Source in high integrity systems

    For example, the Linux operating system is pervasive and open source tools such as the GCC compiler collection are widely used. I even have a copy of Linux running the refrigerator in my kitchen.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Can you name all ten OpenStack releases?

      Can you name all of the OpenStack releases? It’s harder than you think, even for some of the core members of the development team.

      During OpenStack Summit, a sampling of attendees were surveyed to see if they could. The results were, well, mixed.

  • Databases

    • Oracle Expands Open-Source High-Availability with MySQL Database Fabric

      Oracle is aiming to make it easier for open-source users of its MySQL database to scale.

      Today Oracle announced the new MySQL Fabric technology as an open-source tool that is available in the MySQL Utilities 1.4 release.

      “If you want to build a high-availability MySQL database, you typically have to setup replication, manage the failover and write some scripts to manage the failover,” Tomas Ulin, vice president, MySQL Engineering explained toDatabaseJournal. “MySQL Fabric hides most of that and will manage the high-availability for you.”

    • Oracle launches database scalability service MySQL Fabric
    • Met Office selects 2ndQuadrant to help with data migration to open source

      The Met Office has selected PostgreSQL specialists 2ndQuadrant to provide training, support and consultancy as the weather service bids to shift from proprietary database solutions that require a licence fee to other alternatives.

      The selection of 2ndQuadrant comes after two pilot projects went into production in April when the Met Office’s locations management database (Strabo) and LIDAR (light detector) data capture system were implemented again into object-relational database management system PostgreSQL and open source software program PostGIS.

  • CMS

    • Open source CMS Tendenci launches service provider program

      The creators of open source CMS project Tendenci want to free up time to focus on developing the platform, so they’ve launched the Web Alliance Marketing Program to partner with service providers to help organizations with their post-deployment needs.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • TogetherJS

      Want to add real-time collaboration to your Web application? Mozilla’s TogetherJS is worth a look.

    • PHP Next Generation

      Over the last year, some research into the possibility of introducing JIT compilation capabilities to PHP has been conducted.

      During this research, the realization was made that in order to achieve optimal performance from PHP, some internal API’s should be changed.

      This necessitated the birth of the phpng branch, initially authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov. This branch does not include JIT capabilities, but rather seeks to solve those problems that prohibit the current, and any future implementation of a JIT capable executor achieving optimal performance by improving memory usage and cleaning up some core API’s.

    • PHP Working On A “Next Generation” Branch

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Counties sue narcotics makers, alleging ‘campaign of deception’

      Two California counties sued five of the world’s largest narcotics manufacturers on Wednesday, accusing the companies of causing the nation’s prescription drug epidemic by waging a “campaign of deception” aimed at boosting sales of potent painkillers such as OxyContin.

  • Security

    • The Half-Baked Security Of Our ‘Internet of Things’

      It is a strange series of events that link two Armenian software engineers; a Shenzen, China-based webcam company; two sets of new parents in the U.S.; and an unknown creep who likes to hack baby monitors to yell obscenities at children. “Wake up, you little slut,” the hacker screamed at the top of his digital lungs last summer when a two-year-old in Houston wouldn’t stir; she happened to be deaf. A year later, a baby monitor hacker struck again yelling obscenities at a 10-month-old in Ohio.

    • Apps on your Android phone can take photos without you knowing

      A researcher has demonstrated that it’s possible for malicious attackers to create an Android app that will surreptitiously take pictures and upload them to a remote server without the user being aware of or noticing it.

    • Avast Takes Down User Forum After Breach

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • No UK troops for Nato’s Ukraine war games

      We note with great concern that UK and US troops will participate alongside Ukrainian troops in joint military exercises on Ukrainian territory in July as part of NATO’s Rapid Trident manoeuvres. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. Its participation in military exercises by a nuclear-armed alliance with a first-strike policy can only further destabilise the situation in the Ukraine, making it more difficult to achieve a political resolution to the crisis.

    • One Year After Obama’s Big Drone Speech, Many Promises Left Unkept

      One year ago last Friday, President Barack Obama gave a major address on drones, targeted killing and terrorism. The president and administration officials promised that the drone program would operate within limits protecting civilians, control would be transferred from the CIA to the Pentagon, and a new era of transparency would begin.

      The number of drone strikes has fallen since then, but it is far from clear that the drop was a result of a shift in administration policy. Frustrated in part by Congress and the facts on the ground in Pakistan and Yemen, when it comes to drones, Obama has fulfilled few of his promises.

    • Drones will be focus of protests at Obama’s speech
    • NYPD Renews Push For Drones To Help Police The City

      While unmanned aircraft could offer outstanding benefits to both the NYPD and the city’s fire department, these benefits may not outweigh the concerns of citizens and civil liberties groups.

    • Robot Warfare: What Happens When Humans Cede Combat Duty to Automated Forces?

      With the increasing use of drones in military operations, it is perhaps only a matter of time before robots replace soldiers. Whether fully automated war is on the immediate horizon, one researcher says it’s not too early to start examining the ethical issues that robot armies raise. In her recent thesis on the ethics of automation in war, Linda Johansson, a researcher in robot ethics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, suggests that it is necessary to reconsider the international laws of war, and to begin examining whether advanced robots should be held accountable for their actions.

    • Is US Domestic Case Law Providing a Moral Hazard for Covert Killings of Americans Overseas?

      One of the most controversial decisions of the Obama presidency has been his authorization to target and kill Americans overseas who decide to take up arms against the United States. In 2011, a drone strike killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who moved to Yemen and became a high level cleric within al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, which has been deemed by the United States to be al-Qaeda’s most dangerous branch. According to US officials, Awlaki was too dangerous to be left alive as his work and teachings were radicalizing others to join in jihad.

    • White House Can’t Regain a Deterrence It Never Had

      The stories previewing President Obama’s upcoming foreign-policy address at West Point leaves the impression that the president might somehow just verbalize a word cloud of catchphrases instead of an actual speech. The New York Times story over the weekend, for example, explains that the president will seek to “chart a middle course between isolationism and military intervention.” It quotes national-security aide Ben Rhodes as saying the speech, at tomorrow’s commencement ceremony, is “a case for interventionism but not overreach.”

    • The Uncomfortable Truth Is That Targeted Killings Are Legal Until Congress Says Otherwise

      At the most superficial level, Judge David Barron, who the Senate confirmed last week to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, is easy to compare to the infamous Bush Administration attorney John Yoo. Yoo authored several infamous memos while he was a senior attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which argued that it was perfectly legal to torture so-called “enemy combatants” captured during the Bush Administration’s efforts to fight terrorism. Barron, also as a senior attorney in the same Justice Department office, authored several memos concerning the use of drones to target suspected terrorists during the Obama Administration — including at least two concerning whether the president may order a senior enemy combatant who is also an American citizen killed without trial.

    • Feds seek extra redactions in drone memo

      The Justice Department plans to ask a federal appeals court to delete additional material from a drone-related legal opinion before it’s made public—redactions that would go beyond those the court approved last month, a government lawyer said in a legal filing Tuesday night.

      Last week, officials speaking on condititon of anonymity said the Obama Administration had decided not to appeal the pro-disclosure ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Word of the decision to acquiesce in the the appeals court ruling and release the Office of Legal Counsel memo in redacted form came on the eve of a Senate vote on the confirmation of former DOJ official David Barron to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. Indeed, word of the decision to make some of the legal opinion public may have helped clear the way for Barron’s confirmation by the Senate, 53-45.

    • UK government faces legal action over failure to investigate BT drones link

      The legal charity Reprieve has threatened legal action against the British government over its failure to investigate the role of UK telecoms giant BT in facilitating covert US drone strikes in Yemen.

      BT has earned an estimated $23 million from a US government contract to supply key communications infrastructure between RAF Croughton – a US military base in Northamptonshire – and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the secret base from which armed drones reportedly carry out lethal strikes in Yemen. According to the US military, American forces stationed at RAF Croughton provide “global strike operations.”

      Legal investigations have begun on behalf of Mohammed al-Qawli, a Yemeni civil servant who lost his brother, a primary school teacher, and cousin, a 20-year-old student, in a drone strike in January 2013. They follow a July 2013 complaint by Reprieve to the UK government watchdog, the National Contact Point (NCP) for the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) Guidelines. That complaint was rejected after the NCP said it had no duty to “conduct research or interrogate” BT.

    • An Advocate For One-Branch Tyranny

      President Barack Obama has employed the limitless executive power defended by Mr. McCarthy…

    • Yemen’s Military Really Doesn’t Want Anyone to Know About Civilian Casualties

      It’s clear that when journalists and activists have been prevented by the governments of Yemen and the US from covering conflicts in Yemen — or persecuted for challenging official versions of events — the goal of authorities has repeatedly been to conceal atrocities against civilians. As the Yemeni military, backed by the US, continues both its fight against al Qaeda and its persecution of journalists, we must continue to ask: What are they trying to hide this time?

    • Conor Friedersdorf: Killing of American a dangerous precedent

      Consider the most extremist act President Barack Obama has taken: he put an American on a secret kill list, sent a drone to find the man, and blew him up. No judge. No jury. Just a summary execution. The target might have deserved to die. But he had a right to a trial, even in absentia. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no one will be deprived of life without due process.

    • Posterity Will Hate Us: Building a Lasting Legacy of Death

      What do we aim at? Houses! Who do we kill? Everyone inside the houses!

    • 10K troops to ‘finish’ Afghan job

      President Obama revealed his long-awaited plan for Afghanistan on Tuesday, announcing that a residual force of 9,800 U.S. troops will remain there for one year after the end of combat operations in December. That number will be cut in half at the end of 2015 and reduced at the end of 2016 to a small military presence at the U.S. Embassy.

    • Monster Capitalism and the Complicit State

      The phrase “close-embrace” to describe the incestuous relationship between business and government in advanced capitalism is by Masao Maryuma, a Japanese political scientist to describe corporate concentration under the blessing and encouragement of government. This is, along with the centrality of war and market expansion, among the most salient integral features of capitalist development in its progression to monopolism, hierarchical class structure, and establishing a full-blown partnership with government: the Corporate and National-Security States merging, with national security concerned as much with protecting the market share and freedom from adverse regulation of the dominant firms in the industrial and financial sectors, as with putatively repelling a foreign foe and protecting the “homeland”. The upshot, fascism without, necessarily, the concentration camp—fascism predicated on the internalized repression of the populace, conditioned to look to the business system as the genius of the nation, its arbiter of taste, its salvation. The trickle-down paradigm follows, as does the moral superiority of those at the top AND the enterprises they lead—conversely, justified class-stratification where the lazy and/or subversive (i.e., those maladapted to the incentives offered by capitalism) fall deservedly into an underclass.

    • 50 Years Later, CIA Still Refuses to Release One Volume of Report on Invasion of Cuba

      The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been granted the legal authority to refuse to release an historical report on the failed Bay of Pigs invasion more than 50 years ago.

      The matter arose after the National Security Archive, a nonprofit historical organization at George Washington University, sued the CIA to obtain the last portion of an internal history about the April 1961 mission to overthrow Fidel Castro of Cuba.

      The first four volumes of the report, written by CIA staff historian Jack Pfeiffer, have been released over the years. But the CIA refused to release the Volume V draft, claiming it was authorized under an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act to withhold the information. A final version of the report has not been produced.

  • Finance

    • Can capitalism ever be ethical?

      Bank of England governor Mark Carney says capitalism is doomed if ethics vanish

    • Thomas Paine, Our Contemporary

      Cornel West, Richard D. Wolff and I, along with moderator Laura Flanders, next Sunday will inaugurate “The Anatomy of Revolution,” a series of panel discussions focusing on modern revolutionary theorists. This first event will be part of a two-day conference in New York City sponsored by the Left Forum, and nine other discussions by West, Wolff and me will follow in other venues later this year.

      Sunday’s event will be about Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason”—the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, works that established the standards by which rebellion is morally and legally permissible. We will ask whether the conditions for revolt set by Paine have been met with the rise of the corporate state. Should Paine’s call for the overthrow of British tyranny inspire our own call for revolution? And if it should, to echo Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?

      Thomas Paine is America’s one great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists—Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day and Noam Chomsky—and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups—Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West and bell hooks—but we don’t have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.

    • Is David Koch Getting a Tax Writeoff for Dropping $900K on the Walker Race?

      The “charitable” wing of David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity has dropped nearly $900,000 on ads to boost Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s reelection campaign, just days after polls showed Walker tied with his Democratic challenger, Mary Burke.

  • Censorship

    • Europe On The Verge Of Destroying Online Comments And Free Speech

      We’ve written many times about the importance of protection against secondary liability for websites, such that they’re not held liable for what their users do. In the US, thankfully, we have Section 230 of the CDA, which clearly states that websites cannot be held liable for speech made by their users. Frankly, we shouldn’t need such a law, because it should be obvious: you don’t blame the site for the comments made by others. That’s just a basic question of properly placing liability on those responsible. But, in a world of Steve Dallas lawsuits, in which people will always sue companies with deep pockets, it makes sense to have explicit safe harbors to stop bogus litigation.

    • BBC Accused Of Censorship After Editing Out ‘Girl’ For Fear Of Offending
    • OSCE against Internet censorship in Serbia

      OSCE representative in charge of media freedom, Dunja Mijatovic, criticized today Serbian authorities over a disturbing trend of efforts to censor media content on the Internet.

    • Censorship in an online age
    • Film Censorship Board set to revise outdated fees

      Filmmakers and importers will soon have to dip deeper into their pockets to have their film certified by the Film Censorship Board.

    • Saudi Arabia Steps Up Censorship, Snaring Activists

      Since the surprise Arab uprisings of 2011, the Saudi government has worked assiduously to ensure it has all the tools of censorship it needs to control dissent. These tools — a combination of special courts, laws, and regulatory authorities — are starting to fire on all cylinders. The result has been a string of arrests and prosecutions in recent months of independent and dissident voices.

    • In Kansas, Professors Must Now Watch What They Tweet

      The Kansas Board of Regents gave final approval Wednesday to a strict new policy on what employees may say on social media. Critics say the policy violates both the First Amendment and academic freedom, but school officials say providing faculty with more specific guidelines will actually bolster academic freedom on campus.

  • Privacy

    • FBI Says Free App Could Help In Child Abduction Cases
    • Saving Time & Lives: FBI Unveils New Child ID App
    • FBI Joins The 20th Century, Will Begin Using Recording Equipment During Custodial Interviews

      No, that’s not a typo. The FBI has finally reached the 20th century when it comes to advancements in recording technology. No longer will records of custodial questionings be limited to agents’ handwritten notes — the sort of thing that’s impossible to independently verify and prone to “spin” by the transcriptionist. (via emptywheel)

    • DOJ reverses no-recording policy for interrogations

      Since the FBI began under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, agents have not only shunned the use of tape recorders, they’ve been prohibited by policy from making audio records of statements by criminal suspects without special approval.

    • NSA aims for absolute surveillance

      He said the NSA aims to have utter surveillance of everything it wants, and there is no boundary or limit to what it wants to do.

    • Deputy Pm: ‘Fnm Govt Knew Of N.S.A. Spying’

      DEPUTY Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis suggested yesterday that the former government “was aware of” an arrangement to accommodate alleged cell phone spying conducted by the United State’s National Security Agency (NSA) on the Bahamas.

    • Where was the NSA before the Isla Vista Mass Shooting?

      He stabbed three men to death in his apartment and shot the others as he opened fire on bystanders on the crowded streets of Isla Vista, California. Rodger then killed himself. Three semi automatic handguns, along with 41 loaded ten-round magazines— all bought at local gun stores— were found in his car. There could have been many more dead.

    • Do Personal Computers Come With NSA Surveillance Devices Built-In As Standard?

      Just over a year ago, only the most paranoid would have worried about the fact that the GCHQ sent two people to destroy these seemingly trivial components. But in the wake of Snowden’s revelations about the astonishing range of technologies that the NSA has developed in order to infiltrate hardware systems — things like radio transmitters built into USB leads — the GCHQ’s actions immediately raise a troubling thought: that most or all mainstream computers routinely contain various components that can be used to spy on us.

    • Importing network gear from the US is “a big f***ing mistake”

      Ever since the revelations from Edward Snowden regarding the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) mass interception of online communications, many individuals have taken measures to secure their data connections. Use of services designed to improve personal privacy has spiked, and many companies – like Google and Facebook – have begun fully encrypting traffic on their networks to try and avoid the prying eyes of spooks.

    • What’s Wrong With Cisco and IBM Today? Blame the NSA
    • China Said to Study IBM Servers for Bank Security Risks

      The Chinese government is reviewing whether domestic banks’ reliance on high-end servers from International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) compromises the nation’s financial security, people familiar with the matter said, in an escalation of the dispute with the U.S. over spying claims.

      Government agencies, including the People’s Bank of China and the Ministry of Finance, are asking banks to remove the IBM servers and replace them with a local brand as part of a trial program, said the four people, who asked not to be identified because the review hasn’t been made public.

    • Google’s Brin says NSA surveillance revelations were a ‘huge disappointment’
    • Google’s Brin Says NSA Surveillance Revelations Were a “Huge Disappointment”

      Onstage at Code Conference, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that recent revelations of National Security Agency surveillance were “a huge disappointment, certainly to me and obviously to the world as a whole.”

      He suggested that some level of surveillance for national security may be appropriate, but that limited spying on a few foreign generals to prevent “total nuclear annihilation” during the Cold War is not the same as mass surveillance of Internet traffic in the modern age.

    • Privacy under attack: the NSA files revealed new threats to democracy

      Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain privacy is far from hopeless

    • Edward Snowden Says He Assisted NSA and CIA as Undercover Agent Overseas

      Edward Snowden, former contractor at the US National Security Agency who leaked top secret documents about massive surveillance programmes conducted by the US government, said he “was trained as a spy” and rejected claims that he was a low-level analyst.

    • Snowden: I Was a Spy, Given a Fake Name

      Edward Snowden wants the world to know he was more than the “low-level systems administrator” US authorities have described him as—he was a trained spy and technical expert. In an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, the National Security Agency leaker says he was a spy “in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas—pretending to work in a job that I’m not—and even being assigned a name that was not mine.” He says he has worked for the CIA as well as the NSA, and as a lecturer at a counterintelligence academy for the Defense Intelligence Agency and for the CIA as well as the NSA..

    • Edward Snowden: ‘I Worked As A Spy Overseas’
    • Edward Snowden: I was a spy ‘at all levels’

      Fugitive leaker disputes US government claims he was a low-level administrator

    • Why it’s impossible to make an NSA-proof computer

      The past year has not been a great one for computer security. Last summer, Edward Snowden revealed how the NSA has been exploiting vulnerabilities to spy on people, Target suffered a massive security breach that exposed the credit card information for as much as a third of the American population, the Heartbleed bug was a major vulnerability found in the Internet’s most common encryption standard, and eBay just asked all 145 million of its customers to change their passwords after a security breach. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

      [...]

      She argues that every computer and every piece of software we use is vulnerable to hackers because of terrible security flaws. The reason for all these flaws, Norton says, it that these programs are being written by developers who face immense pressure to ship software quickly. Security is simply not a top priority in this context. Even the people who focus on computer security struggle to keep track of every vulnerability.

    • Spectacular NSA-saga finale coming: Greenwald

      Glenn Greenwald, one of the main journalists behind the exposé of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)’s global mass surveillance of Internet and telephone communications, said that the “biggest yet” revelations were yet to come in days ahead — the names of numerous U.S. persons and organisations who were the targets of the automated mega-snooping.

    • Names of American citizens spied on by NSA to be published
    • ‘Biggest yet’: Greenwald to publish names of Americans whom NSA is spying on
    • House Moves to Sever Crypto-ties Between NSA and NIST
    • House Committee Initiates NIST-NSA Separation on Crypto Standards

      Eight months after an explosive revelation that encryption standards developed and evaluated by the National Security Agency were allegedly subverted by the intelligence outfit, a House committee has moved to sever the NSA’s involvement in the standards process.

      An amendment to the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act, or FIRST Act, was passed by the House Science and Technology Committee late last week that strikes a requirement that the NSA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) work hand-in-hand on encryption standards.

    • Secrets and Lies: Should we know how far surveillance goes?

  • Civil Rights

    • Karl Rove Whitewashes His Role In Outing CIA Agent

      Fox News contributor Karl Rove exploited the Obama administration’s accidental exposure of a CIA operative’s identity to absolve his own culpability in deliberately leaking former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity during the Bush administration.

    • Oops … the CIA does it again!

      The resultant chaos in the wake of Arab Spring, however, tops the chart. In other words, it is very rare to read anything positive about the CIA in any US paper. So, from where does these sleuths receive positive reports about their achievements to satisfy the US Senate Intelligence Committee or the White House?

    • The CIA and the Misuse of Public Health

      After the deception was revealed by the British newspaper, however, the ruse had an unexpected outcome. Angry villagers in several tribal areas on the Afghan border chased away legitimate health workers. They accused those workers of being spies who wanted to gather information on the people living in that region.

    • US asks judge to reconsider his CIA prison order

      Pohl ordered prosecutors last month to turn over never-revealed details about al-Nashiri’s treatment. A CIA inspector general’s report says he was waterboarded and threatened with a gun and power drill.

    • Right-Wing Media Draw False Equivalence To Downplay Bush Administration’s Deliberate Leak Of CIA Covert Agent’s Identity
    • Expensive TSA Nudie Scanners Find A New Home: Prisons

      It’s been quite a while since we’ve had much news about the TSA’s nudie scanners, other than the admission by one TSA employee that they, you know, don’t work to do anything other than show people being naked. Yes, the federal government’s oddly belated overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which they don’t think will be attempted again, required a massive influx of taxpayer cash to pay for all this uselessness. That would be your money, my money, all of our money going into a program that didn’t work, wasn’t needed, and violated our rights. But a story of this kind of futility and waste needs a nice little bow put on it for an ending. The federal government never seems to fail us in this kind of request.

  • DRM

    • Accepting Amazon’s DRM Makes It Impossible To Challenge Its Monopoly

      Amazon was the target of some well-deserved criticism this past week for making the anti-customer move of suspending sales of books published by Hachette, reportedly as a hardball tactic in its ongoing negotiations over ebook revenue splits. In an excellent article, Mathew Ingram connects this with other recent bad behavior by Internet giants leveraging their monopolies. Others have made the connection between this move and a similar one in 2010, when Amazon pulled Macmillan books off its digital shelves.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

05.27.14

Links 27/5/2014: Greenwald on GNU/Linux, Drupal Nets Massive VC

Posted in News Roundup at 2:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux for Lettuce

    During that time, Michaels’s computer-savvy son was messing around with alternative operating systems for his PC. Through him, Michaels learned about Linux and other software that was free to be used, altered, and shared by anyone. Linux came with a license that turned the concept of licensing on its head: Instead of restricting people from copying the product, it restricted people from restricting it or any of its offshoots. It marked the code indelibly as part of the commons.

  • China working on new Windows-like Linux OS after Windows 8 ban
  • Linux app lets you control fruit fly brains – with frikkin’ LASERS
  • Meet the Man Hired to Make Sure the Snowden Docs Aren’t Hacked

    When he got to Rio, Lee spent one entire day strengthening Greenwald’s computer, which at that point used Windows 8. Lee was worried spy agencies could break in, so he replaced the operating system with Linux, installed a firewall, disk encryption and miscellaneous software to make it more secure.

  • Techtalk: learning more about Linux

    Techtalk discussed the open source operating system Linux and where you can go to learn more about it.

    “The short answer is that as far as courses are concerned they are a little bit thin on the ground. There used to be a group called Ballarat Linux Users Group… there is also a group called Viclan which runs local area administration”.

    “Linux is a free open source operating system that is probably described as an alternative to Windows. It’s free, you can download it and it runs on most PC’s. Apple is excluded at this point in time but most PC’s that run Windows will run Linux”.

  • Desktop

    • Why Chromebooks Make More Sense Than Ever

      If you’ve been following the market share reports, you know that Chromebooks–portable computers running Google’s cloud-centric Chrome OS platform–are starting to succeed, especially in several niche markets such as the education market. Additionally, PCMag.com has a big story out on why Microsoft should be worried about Chromebooks, and Business Insider has argued that Chromebooks are the best hardware choices for many users. The fact is, some new incentives from Google as well as some newfound forms of compatibility with popular applications make Chromebooks more viable than they ever have been.

  • Server

    • The Companies That Support Linux: CoreOS

      As companies grow their data centers to accommodate more cloud services and applications, their resource management practices also grow increasingly complex. CoreOS is a new Linux distribution that uses containers to help manage these massive server deployments.

      On May 19, CoreOS joined the Linux Foundation as a corporate member, along with Rackspace Hosting and Cumulus Networks. All three companies are playing a crucial role in the data center transformation and see open source as the lynchpin for optimal scalability, efficiencies, security and data center savings.

    • Define your network in software with OpenDaylight

      For years, the traditional model in networking was for much of the work to be done in hardware. But with the rise of cloud computing and virtualization, and the need for networks to become more agile and flexible than ever, a trend is beginning to take hold to take networking in the same direction that computing has gone. We are seeing more and more that the networking functions traditionally done in the datacenter by dedicated, almost exclusively proprietary hardware and software combinations, are now being defined through software.

  • Kernel Space

    • Apple Thunderbolt Driver Might Be Added To Linux

      An open-source Thunderbolt driver for supporting Apple MacBooks might be added to the Linux 3.16 kernel.

      Going on for months has been a Linux driver to support Thunderbolt on Apple MacBook systems. A special driver is needed for supporting Thunderbolt on Apple hardware since Apple implemented Thunderbolt holt-plug support within their OS X driver rather than at the firmware level, which is where it’s implemented by other Thunderbolt devices.

    • WRITE YOUR FIRST LINUX KERNEL MODULE

      Probably the easiest way to start kernel programming is to write a module – a piece of code that can be dynamically loaded into the kernel and removed from it. There are limits to what modules can do – for example, they can’t add or remove fields to common data structures like process descriptors. But in all other ways they are full-fledged kernel-level code, and they can always be compiled into the kernel (thus removing all the restrictions) if needed. It is fully possible to develop and compile a module outside the Linux source tree (this is unsurprisingly called an out-of-tree build), which is very convenient if you just want to play a bit and do not wish to submit your changes for inclusion into the mainline kernel.

    • BFQ Scheduler Still Trying For The Mainline Linux Kernel

      BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler that shares a lot of code with the CFQ scheduler. The Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ) scheduler has long been part of the mainline tree but BFQ hasn’t been pulled yet even after many revisions and comments. The next opportunity for BFQ to land would be with the Linux 3.16 kernel whose merge window will be opening in June. New features of BFQ with the latest work includes low latency for interactive applications, low latency for soft real-time applications, high throughput, strong fairness guarantees, etc.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Tablet Support Gets Figured Out For Libinput
      • Mesa Is At 1.4 Million Lines Of Code

        Mesa is up to 1.4 million lines of code and has already seen almost 2,500 Git commits so far this year.

        With Mesa 10.2 planned for release this week, this morning I ran GitStats on the Mesa Git code to look at the latest development trends for this open-source OpenGL library with the various mainline hardware drivers from Intel’s classic DRI driver to the Gallium3D architecture and its many drivers like Radeon, Nouveau, and Freedreno.

      • Mesa 10.2 Features Are Quite Exciting
      • Features You Will Not Find In Mesa 10.2

        Mesa 10.2 will be released very soon and while it does offer a lot of new features within its 1.4 million line code-base, it isn’t perfect and lacks some features still being sought after by open-source Linux fans.

      • NVIDIA vs. AMD 2D Performance Benchmarks

        Yesterday on Phoronix we had benchmarks of high-end NVIDIA and AMD GPUs when looking at the Linux OpenGL performance on the proprietary drivers. For those more concerned about the 2D performance of the modern GeForce and Radeon graphics cards, here’s some benchmarks for you.

      • AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta Driver Coming Soon To Linux

        The first beta release of the Catalyst 14.6 proprietary Linux graphics driver will soon be available.

        The Catalyst 14.6 Linux driver will introduce official Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support, install improvements by having better defaults and prompting to auto-install the packages generated by the driver, and various bug-fixes are landing.

      • Catalyst 14.6 Beta Now Available For AMD Linux Gamers

        Since writing about the features of the Catalyst 14.6 Beta earlier today, the x86/x86_64 proprietary Linux driver has surfaced on a third-party web-site for those wishing to try out this latest AMD Linux graphics driver.

        As explained this morning, Catalyst 14.6 Beta for Linux comes with official Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support, driver installer improvements, and various bug-fixes as the primary changes.

    • Benchmarks

      • High-End NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Comparison

        After last week carrying out separate NVIDIA Windows vs. Linux OpenGL benchmarks and similar AMD Radeon Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 14.04 tests, today we are pitting the GeForce and Radeon graphics cards against each other on Ubuntu Linux with the very latest drivers to see how their performance compares now head-on. With this testing we have some Steam games plus are also monitoring the power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and GPU thermal metrics.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Enlightenment: EFL and Elementary 1.10 release plan

      We aim for a 12 weeks release cycle which is a little under three months. The schedule is divided into 4 distinct parts: a 4 weeks development period which allows for features and fixes to get commit followed by a 1 week stabilization period which allows only fixes to be committed into the master branch. We then repeat the 4 weeks development period followed by a 3 weeks stabilization period to complete our schedule.

    • Enlightenment EFL 1.10 Released

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Want AppStream metadata for your KDE project? Act now!

        Originally, my plan was to directly push metadata to most KDE projects. The problem is that there is no way to reach all maintainers and have them opt-out for getting metadata pushed to their repositories. There is also no technical policy for a KDE project, since “KDE” is really only about the community right now, and there are no technical criteria a project under the KDE umbrella has to fulfill (at least to my knowledge, in theory, even GTK+ projects are perfectly fine within KDE).

      • Monday Report: Wallpaper Edition

        So what are we looking for? Photo wallpapers, illustration wallpapers or graphical and abstract wallpapers are all accepted for submission, personally I would suggest to avoid text elements or logo’s entirely – the theme we’re going for is a hopeful futurism but this should be considered something to focus around, not a prerequisite.

      • Randa: Moving KDE Forward

        The Randa Meetings really bring KDE and its software forward. But as most of the participants are young people, students (and we try to bring new people to every KDE sprint), parents or just can’t afford the travel costs, we need some help.

      • Qt3D 2.0 Is A Rewrite Of Qt’s 3D Support

        Two years ago the Qt3D module was showing lost of promise for 3D support within the popular, cross-platform toolkit. However, just before the Qt 5.0 release, Nokia shutdown their Qt Brisbane office that among other Qt modules was responsible for the work on Qt3D. Nokia’s late actions with Qt prior to selling it off to Digia was a a big blow and led to Qt3D being demoted. Fortunately, Qt3D 2.0 is coming along as a maintained, rewritten version of the 3D support for Qt.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Review: KaOS 2014.04

      This distribution caught my eye from a DistroWatch review. That review concludes that it isn’t clear exactly what the goal of this distribution is. Looking at the website more, I can’t say that it’s any clearer to me either. All I can glean is that this distribution aims to please more experienced users with a rolling-release model, maintain a small base of packages so that those will be polished before use, and target newer computers by using KDE and only 64-bit releases. I’ll have to try this distribution out to see if there is any more information regarding the target audience of this distribution. I tried KaOS on a live USB made with MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.

    • How Handy HandyLinux Is?

      HandyLinux 1.5 is a nice looking system. It reacts quickly to your actions, snappy and fast. It is more or less easy on resources: only about 250 Mb of memory when idle, though you might expect even less from the Debian+Xfce combination.

      However, there are still some things for developers to look at. French roots are visible, menu can be extended for easier use, packages are missing or broken. That’s not something you would expect from a distribution that claims to be “Powered by Debian”.

    • Antergos 2014.05.26 Distro Powered by Numix Looks Stunning

      Antergos 2014.05.26, a distribution based on Arch Linux that used to go by the name of Cinnarch, has been released and is now available for download.

      The only RC for Antergos was launched only a few days ago and now the final version of this very interesting OS has arrived. Besides the normal updates and improvements that are to be expected from a new build, the developers have also integrated a unique theme developed by the Numix project, which really sets this OS apart.

    • BackTrack Successor Kali Linux 1.0.7 Arrives with Linux Kernel 3.14

      As usually, Kali Linux 1.0.7 features various new tools, updated applications, as well as numerous fixes in order to make Kali Linux a more stable and reliable Linux operating system. This includes a new version of the Linux kernel, among other things.

      There are numerous Linux distributions in the open source ecosystem, but there are very few built specifically for penetration testing and digital forensics. The former iteration of this distro, BackTrack, is one of the most downloaded OSes and it’s the go-to operating system when you need a professional solution.

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Xfce 0.8.10 RC1 Is Ready for Testing, Now Based on Xfce 4.11

        Manjaro has slowly become one of the best Arch-based distributions, and the Xfce flavor is powering on with the first Release Candidate in the new 0.8.10 series. This is not the first flavor that gets a release in this new branch, but it’s one of the most popular.

        Despite what users might think, most of the Manjaro flavors are actually developed by the community and not by a central team. In fact, the Manjaro ecosystem is so large that it would be very difficult for just one team to take care of all the versions. Xfce, on the other hand, is an official one, so it might seem a little bit more polished than the others.

    • Slackware Family

      • Porteus Kiosk Edition Is an Operating System Based on Slackware and Firefox

        Porteus 3.1 (Kiosk Edition) is based on Slackware 14.0 and relies on Linux kernel 3.12.20 and Firefox 24.0. It’s a 32-bit system, which is entirely locked down to prevent tampering with any of the components (including the browser).

        “This distribution release includes bug fixes, software updates and new features. At a mere 50 megabytes, the Porteus Kiosk Edition ISO includes just the libraries and utilities required to run Firefox in a secure environment, making this a perfect fit for kiosks and other web terminals.”

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • After Debian Jessie Gets Stable, Kwheezy Will Change Its Name To Kebian

        Kwheezy is a Debian 7 Wheezy fork that uses KDE as the default desktop environment. While the name is very intuitive, making reference to both KDE and Wheezy, there will be a problem when Debian Jessie will become the stable Debian version, because the name will not match any more.

      • wattOS R8 review – Debian greenie

        Lightweight Linux distributions are inherently energy saving. By definition you’re using a fewer resources to run your system, which in turn requires less power and electrical draw. Throw in some power-efficient hardware and idle power draw will be minimal. These lightweight systems – while naturally energy-conserving – don’t normally include any specific optimisations for power saving. This is where wattOS comes in.

        While also lightweight, wattOS strives to strike a balance between conservative code and usability. The net result is a little less wattage while idle and a longer-lasting laptop battery when disconnected. It’s the usability part that is very important to wattOS: something like Puppy Linux or Tiny Core may likely be less resource-intensive while idle, however you need to make some level of sacrifice regarding the desktop and available software to use these distros.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • LightDM 1.11.2 Released for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn)

            LightDM is a display manager that’s mainly used in Ubuntu distributions, but users will find it in other Ubuntu-based distros as well. It’s not a visible part of the operating system and it’s not something that users interact with at any level.

            The LightDM development has been going at a steady pace and its devs have just released a new version that is designed for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn). It doesn’t have too many changes, but there are a couple of interesting ones.

          • Cinnamon PPA will no longer be maintained for Ubuntu users

            Gwendal Le Bihan, maintainer of the Cinnamon PPA, has confirmed he will be discontinuing the popular desktop environment. At least the stable releases the community has become accustomed to that is. The development of the Cinnamon desktop environment will continue through development builds in a separate nightly PPA.

          • Ubuntu Users Will No Longer Have a Cinnamon PPA
          • Leadwerks partners with Ubuntu for Linux games development

            The firms said they will make the Leadwerks Game Engine software development framework available in the Ubuntu Software Center to provide users of the operating system with a powerful tool for rapid game development under Ubuntu Linux.

          • Leadwerks Game Engine Pushed Into The Ubuntu Store
          • Linux users rejoice, here’s Ubuntu on the Surface Pro 3

            The good news is that it seems like there are only a few small things in between a Linux user and a decent Surface Pro 3 experience, and with any luck by the time these devices hit shelves there will be people eager to help implement fixes for most, if not all of these issues.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • RhinoLINUX Lite Xfce Edition 7.0 Is Based on Xubuntu 13.10 and Linux Mint 16

              RhinoLINUX 7.0 has been dubbed “Saucy SUZIE” and the code name betrays the roots of the distribution. The developers have used more than just one base for their operating system, namely Xubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) and Linux Mint 16 (Petra). This is rather unusual, especially if we take into consideration the fact that Ubuntu 13.10 is about to reach end of life in a couple of months.

            • Mint 17 the Best, Foe to Friend, and KaOS Review

              Topping our coverage tonight, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols declares Linux “Mint 17 the best Linux desktop to date.” Terrence O’Brien describes his journey with Linux as from foe to friend, sort of. And finally tonight, KDE tablet Vivaldi appears to be defunct and KaOS gets the once-over.

            • Ubuntu Studio 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr : Video Review and Screenshot Tour

              Ubuntu Studio 14.04 LTS trusty tahr is the latest version official ubuntu-derived that based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Ubuntu Studio is free and open source operating system based on ubuntu that dedicated for users and professionals who want an operating system that already includes several open source software for managing and editing multimedia files.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Imagination, partners form Prpl open source group for MIPS
  • When Apache Projects Die. Click.

    Open-source projects come and go all the time. In the Apache world though there is a prescribed process by which the ‘going’ happens that is somewhat unique in the world of open-source software development.

  • The true value of open source is people

    Open source is valuable. Very few people would argue that point. There is most definitely a sense of intrinsic worth. But where does this value exist? Is it in the code produced or in something else?

  • Coexisting in software-defined storage : Open source & best-of-breed can survive

    EMC is known for its storage appliances that relied on its hardware, but the company is quickly adapting to a software-defined industry. Paving the way for the future, EMC’s Advanced Software Division, led by Salvatore DeSimone is attempting to change the way people use and deploy IT. TheCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante talked with DeSimone at EMC World 2014 about EMC’s vision for the future of software-led enterprise.

  • Events

    • Professors headed to open source summer camp

      Ellis, Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at Western New England University in Springfield, MA, and Hislop, Associate Dean in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, are co-organizers of the Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), an annual conference that invites educators from across the country to learn how they can incorporate open source tools—and open source values—into their classrooms. It begins May 28 at Drexel University.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • TRY FIRA SANS, A FREE FONT FAMILY COMMISSIONED BY MOZILLA

        In 2013, the Mozilla Foundation commissioned Erik Spiekermann, a famous typographer, to work on a free, open source font family called Fira Sans (initially called Feura Sans).

        Recently, the typeface was updated to version 3.1, getting 12 different weights (bringing the weights number to 16), all accompanied by italic styles, a huge character map and extensive language supports. There’s also a monospaced variant: Fira Mono which includes 2 weights (regular and bold).

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • CMS

    • CMS Award Reflections: Hippo CMS Wins Best Open Source Solution of 2013
    • When digital marketing meets open source

      It’s a product that actually costs nothing, is up against entrenched competitors, and exists in a category that enterprises have in the past been wary of. All in all, marketing open source to marketers was probably never going to be an easy job.

      So you might forgive Tom Wentworth if he was a little wary of taking up the role of chief marketing officer at Acquia. But the CMO says that when he received a message from a recruiter asking if he was interested in the position, he jumped at the chance. “I couldn’t have dialled back the number faster when I saw him asking about Acquia,” Wentworth says.

    • Acquia, Focused on Drupal, Closes $50 Million Financing Round

      Here at OStatic, we’ve repeatedly covered Acquia, the small company that focuses on the popular Drupal content management system (CMS). OStatic runs on Drupal, which is known for its modularity and flexibility, and countless sites around the web depend on it. Now, Acquia has closed a $50 million financing round, bringing total investment in the company to $118.6 million. Led by new investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the round includes new investor Split Rock Partners as well as existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and Tenaya Capital. Ravi Viswanathan, general partner at NEA, will also join Acquia’s Board of Directors.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Swiss open source resource site now bilingual

      Switzerland’s ‘OSS directory’, an open source directory service offered and maintained by /ch/open, the Swiss Open Systems User Group, is now available in German and French. The register now lists 276 open source service providers, 374 open source solutions and 283 reference documents. The bilingual site was officially unveiled last Saturday in Geneva, during the Fetons Linux conference and trade fair.

    • Adullact to award open source development project

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Public access to works supported by new alliance

        The founders of Authors Alliance are U.C. Berkeley Professors: Carla Hesse (Department of History and Dean of Social Sciences), Thomas Leonard (School of Journalism and University Librarian), Pamela Samuelson (Berkeley Law School and School of Information), and myself. I’m a professor at Berkeley Law who focuses on the law of both tangible property (land, cars, etc.) and intellectual property (copyrights, patents, etc.).

      • Is Elsevier going to take control of us and our data? The Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge thinks so and I’m terrified

        I am gutted that I missed the Q+A session with Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz the Vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. It doesn’t seem to have been advertised widely – only 17 people went – and it deserves to be repeated.

        [...]

        Elsevier has bought Mendeley – a social network for managing academic bibliography. Scientists put their current reading into Mendeley and use it to look up others. Mendeley is a social network which knows who you are, and who you are working with.

        Do you trust Mendeley? Do you trust Elsevier? Do you trust and large organisations without independent control (GCHQ, NSA, Google, Facebook)? If you do, stop reading and don’t worry.

        In Mendeley, Elsevier has a window onto nearly everything that a scientist is interested in. Every time your read a new paper Mendeley knows what you are interested in. Mendeley knows your working habits – what time are you spending on your research?

    • Open Hardware

      • Open source VR headset takes on Oculus

        The designs for the ANTVR headset itself and its nifty convertible game controller are proprietary technology. But the designs and firmware for the wireless receiver — which sits between the headset, the controller, and the gaming console — are open source. That opens up a range of possibilities, such as creating custom controllers or using the ANTVR controller to control other devices.

        For example, ANTVR co-founder Qin Zheng says you could write software for using ANTVR to control a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot, perhaps using the headset to watch the feed from the bot’s on-board camera. You could also make your own version of the receiver specifically designed to work with a game console or device not officially supported by ANTVR. “You can use the signal straight from the USB port,” Zheng says. “We will give the developer all the documentation and libraries.”

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Developer Calls For HTTP 2.0 To Be Thrown Out

      Open-source developer Poul-Henning Kamp is pushing for the HTTP Working Group to toss out their current work on the HTTP 2.0 standard and to start over.

    • PHK: HTTP 2.0 Should Be Scrapped

      Via the HTTP working group list comes a post from Poul-Henning Kamp proposing that HTTP 2.0 (as it exists now) never be released after the plan of adopting Google’s SPDY protocol with minor changes revealed flaws that SPDY/HTTP 2.0 will not address.

Leftovers

  • Pope Francis makes unofficial stop at Israeli terrorism memorial

    Detour, at request of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, seen as attempt to appease hosts after stop at separation wall

  • Science

    • Space Hackers Prepare to Reboot 35-Year-Old Spacecraft

      Early next week, a team of volunteers will use the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to see if they can make contact with a spacecraft that hasn’t fired its thrusters since 1987. If all goes well, the effort could bring the 35-year-old spacecraft, the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3), back into position near the Earth, where it could once again study the effect of solar weather on Earth’s magnetosphere.

    • [Old] The Republican Street Fight Over Transparency in Government

      Several in the GOP want to stop a request for scientists to disclose financial conflicts in their research. What good reason could they possibly have?

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The fruit of Nato’s war in Libya are the coups and terror spreading across Africa
    • Freedom Cheaper than Iraq War

      A particularly mendacious lie by Danny Alexander puts the institutional start-up costs of Scottish Independence at £1.5 billion. That is a cool half billion pounds cheaper than Scotland’s share of the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars, even on the Westminster government’s blatant under-estimate of the war costs.

    • Veteran tells how killing a young German soldier haunted him for life

      He said it was the saddest moment of his life—which haunted him every night of his life, even while he knew this young kid would have killed him just the same. But that doesn’t matter. If you’re a normal human being, killing another human being will leave a mark on you.

      Obviously, Robertson was affected by PTSD. Today we know a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder and veterans of modern wars get treated for these and other mental illnesses derived from their time in combat. But, back then, little was known. Most people assume that PTSD is a relatively modern sickness, but the truth is that every soldier since the beginning of time has been exposed to the same extremely stressing moments, accidents, death, and atrocities that would leave any healthy person scarred for life. All of them—unless they were psychopaths—have suffered PTSD in various degrees.

    • Ukraine and the US fiasco driving Russia into the arms of China

      Besides ripping Ukraine apart – and getting scores of Ukrainians killed – the US-supported coup in February has injected more uncertainty into Europe’s economy and pushed Russia and China back together.

    • President Karzai Refuses US Offer for a Meeting with President Obama at Bagram Military Airbase
    • The World’s Most Humble President Just Opened His House to 100 Syrian Refugee Children

      One hundred children orphaned by the Syrian civil war could find a home in Uruguayan President José “Pepe” Mujica’s summer retreat, “a mansion and riverfront estate surrounded by rolling pastures,” according to Yahoo News. That would be a welcome sight for any of the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by Syria’s political turmoil.

    • Secret laws are a threat to American democracy

      Last week, the Obama administration signaled that it would finally declassify a secret memo detailing its justification for using drones to kill U.S. citizens living abroad. The announcement came just hours before the Senate voted to confirmDavid Barron, the memo’s author, as President Barack Obama’s newest judicial appointee.

    • Robot warriors pose ethical dilemna

      According to a UN survey, civilians have been killed in 33 separate drone attacks around the world. In Pakistan, an estimated 2,200 to 3,300 people have been killed by drone attacks since 2004, 400 of whom were civilians. According to the latest figures from the Pakistani Ministry of Defense, 67 civilians have been killed in drone attacks in the country since 2008.

    • Why Risk Prison To Protest Drone Murders? An Activist Explains.

      Judging from my email box in recent years — which often differs on this question with such sources of knowledge as my television or the New York Times — the conscience of our country lies somewhere near Syracuse, New York.

    • Government blasé on Australian drone deaths

      While the last couple of weeks have been taken up with thinking about the Budget and its disproportionate impact on poorer Australians, another, more spectacular, area of government disregard for the lives and rights of its citizens has gone relatively unremarked.

    • Complicity of Australia and New Zealand in US Drone Assassinations
    • Obama’s Reprehensible Foreign Policy

      I was reading an editorial criticizing President Obama for not doing more in the international realm. Specifically, it suggested that he was too weak. He was supposedly not responding sufficiently to the alleged Russian threat to Ukraine, for instance. Another example is that some critics believe that the administration should have done more in response to the Arab Spring, in particular, offering more assistance. The editorial dribbled on.

    • America’s “War on Terror”: No U.S. Citizen Is Safe “Throughout the World”

      After the attack on Iraq a frequently heard comment from those with no interest in foreign affairs or much, from activists, journalists and political observers of all hues, was: “Soon no American or British citizen will be safe anywhere on earth, for decades to come. ”

    • Doubting Obama’s Resolve to Do Right

      As President Obama prepares to make another speech explaining his foreign policy, the question is whether he can climb out of the rut of his previous whiny apologies for continuing many of George W. Bush’s abuses, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote last year.

    • Barack Obama to make new bid to define foreign policy
    • Fear and anti Muslim bigotry are big business in America

      There has long been a concerted effort to demonize Muslims in the American Homeland as a part of the never-ending big money maker that is the phony war on terror. Big media of course plays a critical role in the dark propaganda campaigns that ensure that millions of Americans will continue to see the menace of al Qaeda and worse lurking in the darkest corner of their closets and under their beds. The connection is never made that the military and security industrial complex need the ongoing Muslim bogeyman to keep those god blessed dollars rolling in and to keep the war machine running on high. The business of America anymore – particularly since September 11, 2001 – is death, as in selling arms, financing repression and peddling surveillance technology against dissidents to friendly tyrants. The wars that drive what is left of the economy must go on as they always will in our own version of Oceania.

    • UNICEF’s polio advisor says CIA revelations led to deaths of vaccine workers

      He’s now the principal polio advisor for the United Nations children’s organisation. He is in Australia this week and he joined me in The World Today studio, shortly after stepping off the plane.

    • The C.I.A.’s Deadly Ruse in Pakistan

      The use of a sham vaccination program in the government’s hunt for Osama bin Laden has produced a lethal backlash in Pakistan where dozens of public health workers have been murdered and fearful parents are shunning polio vaccine for their children.

    • Were the media right to not disclose CIA operative’s name?

      Politico is reporting Monday that the White House inadvertently identified the Central Intelligence Agency’s top official in Afghanistan on Sunday, sending his name among the list of officials briefing President Barack Obama on security conditions in Afghanistan during his surprise trip there.

      Obama stopped at the Bagram Air Base outside Kabul on his trip to show support for the troops during the US Memorial Day weekend.

    • Chris Hedges “The American Public Is Utterly Misinformed On What’s Happening In Ukraine”

      It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war

    • U.S. Training Elite Antiterror Troops in Four African Nations

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • CNN’s Climate Change Coverage: Starring Ann Coulter

      For those not up to speed: Game show host Pat Sajak tweeted this: “I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night.” It was all in jest, you see–though Sajak seems to be dismissive of climate change nonetheless.

      And CNN’s Pat-Sajak’s-opinion-of-climate-change guest? Well, far-right bombthrower Ann Coulter, of course.

    • Government sets logging sights on ‘precious jewel’ of B.C. forests

      Gambier Island sits in the heart of Howe Sound, a thickly forested, dark green hump of land surrounded by a blue ocean, just around the corner from the urban sprawl of Metro Vancouver.

    • Wanted: a breed of chicken that can survive crippling heatwaves

      US scientists fear climate change could have devastating effects on poultry farmers as temperatures reach scorching levels

    • China tries to make artificial lake, fails and creates desert instead

      Officials in Zhengzhou, China, wanted to build an artificial lake on the outskirts of the city but everything went wrong. The source of water they intended to use dried up and the hundreds of thousands of tons of sand destined for the artificial beach began to spread, covering an area the size of four football fields.

    • The Crazy Genius Behind Solar Roadways

      Here’s an idea crazy enough that it just might work: Pave the streets with solar-powered panels that have their own built-in heat and LED lights. That’s what Scott and Julie Brusaw hope to accomplish with their ongoing Solar Roadways project, which they just funded through a hugely popular crowdfunding campaign.

      The husband-and-wife team has spent the better part of the last decade developing solar-powered modular panels that could be installed in roadways and parking lots, and would be able to collect power from the sun. Those panels could also keep streets clear of snow and ice, while illuminating them with LEDs.

  • Finance

  • Politics/PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Nick Griffin concedes European parliament seat as BNP votes fall away

      Arriving at Manchester town hall on Sunday night, Griffin came under attack from protesters shouting “Nazi scum off our streets”. Some were rugby tackled by police after throwing placards at him reading “Nick Griffin Must Go”, with one attempting to land a punch on the BNP man.

      Speaking after his defeat, Griffin blamed Ukip for taking the BNP’s vote. Asked whether the people of the north-west had rejected his party’s racist and fascist policies, he said: “They’ve voted for Ukip’s racist policies instead.”

      He added: “Ukip want to keep out white Poles but let in huge numbers of Pakistanis and Africans.”

    • Euro Values

      Brian Taylor of BBC Scotland said last night he picked up at Holyrood that the other unionist parties were pleased that UKIP had won the former Lib Dem seat in Scotland and stopped the SNP getting a third. That was the most revealing moment of last night for me – it showed the vicious irresponsibility of the Better Together campaign, and exposed the lie that UKIP are outsiders.

      [...]

      The BBC’s promotion of UKIP again explodes the myth of UKIP as outsiders.

    • Elections In Middle Earth

      My take from the European election results is the UK has voted to remove many of its experienced politicians from Brussels and to leave the EPP and S&D to run the show. By promoting UKIP, we now have eleven fewer elected representatives working on our behalf to improve the UK’s position as new policy evolves, and even if they did suddenly decide to represent us — instead of voting in favour of things like the ivory trade and against flood prevention “to make a point” — they have no parliamentary colleagues they are willing to work with among the other nationalist parties to produce change.

      The same story in other countries means the intact set of experienced political operators is from Germany, and the dominant influence from the UK will come from Labour acting within the S&D party who came second in the election. The UK’s ability to influence has been dangerously harmed and the euro-sceptic influence has moved even further from the levers of control (the UK’s Conservatives had already quit EPP by forming a new minority party) leaving pro-europeans from EPP, ALDE, Greens and S&D in control.

    • European Elections: 9 Scariest Far-Right Parties Now In The European Parliament
    • European elections: six countries that went left, not right

      The People’s party was one of the few governing parties to win the largest portion of the vote. But it’s the large gains by leftwing parties that are exciting political commentators. Between them, the two dominant political parties (People’s party and Socialist party) lost five million votes compared with their 2009 performance. Meanwhile, the protest party Podemos (“We can”) took nearly 8% of the vote and five seats. Podemos was formed only four months ago, having grown out of the Spanish indignados who camped out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square in 2011. Coalition group United Left also gained around 12 seats, further increasing the voice of the left in parliament. “It’s the hour of the people. This is only the beginning,” Podemos’s leader Pablo Iglesias, tweeted. “Clearly, we can.”

    • Federal Judge Who Halted Walker Dark Money Criminal Probe Attended Koch-Backed Judicial Junkets

      The federal judge who ordered a halt to Wisconsin’s “John Doe” criminal investigation into spending during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections has regularly attended all-expenses paid “judicial junkets” funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and other ideological and corporate interests.

      On May 6, federal District Court Judge Rudolph Randa blocked an ongoing John Doe criminal probe into allegedly illegal coordination between nonprofit groups like Wisconsin Club for Growth, which spent $9.1 million on electoral ads during Wisconsin’s recall elections, and the recall campaigns of Governor Scott Walker and state senators. John Doe investigations are similar to grand jury investigations, and Wisconsin Club for Growth — and its director, Eric O’Keefe, a longtime compatriot of the Koch brothers — asked the federal court to stop the probe, alleging it violated their “free speech” rights.

  • Censorship

    • Editor navigated Fiji’s media censorship

      Laisa Taga, a leading Fijian journalist and editor, has died in Suva, Fiji, aged 56.

      For more than 30 years, Laisa worked in a range of media and served as mentor for other female journalists. She was the first woman to edit a daily newspaper in Fiji, and most recently served as editor-in-chief of Islands Business International, publisher of the leading regional news and business magazine for the Pacific Islands.

      Originally from Votua village on the island of Vanua Levu, Laisa studied at Adi Cakobau School (ACS), the elite school for young Fijian women.

  • Privacy

    • Discussion with Richard Stallman about Surveillance, the Future of Internet, Life, the Universe and Everything

      Richard Stallman, inventor of the principles of Free/libre software and founder of the Free Software Foundation gave us the immense pleasure and honour of sitting down with us for an open discussion.

      Interviewed by Jérémie Zimmermann when he was still a full-time employee of La Quadrature du Net, Richard speaks in great length about surveillance and how to take back control of our communications, as well as about the future of the Internet and computing. Through the philosophy of Free/libre software he delivers his vision for better democratic processes and for a better society. He also brushes topics related to life, the Universe, and Everything ;)

    • US may block visas for Chinese hackers attending DefCon, Black Hat
    • Facebook Launches NSA-Style Auto-Eavesdropping Feature

      “I hope there are people who love the feature and post more,” says Facebook’s product manager excitedly about the new feature they just added. We suspect people will not… As The WSJ reports, starting Wednesday, the app has the ability to recognize music and television shows playing in the vicinity of users. Read that again… ‘in the vicinity of users’. In other words, Facebook is unveiling its own NSA-style eavesdropping feature (on you and all your friends). Don’t worry though… even if users decide not to share what they’re hearing or watching, Facebook will hold onto the data in anonymous form, keeping tabs on how many users watched particular shows. Sound familiar?

    • Hidden Cameras in Care Homes

      On Monday our acting director, Emma Carr, took part in a workshop organised by the Care Quality Commission on the topic of covert surveillance in care homes. The session was organised by Andrea Sutcliffe, Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care at the CQC, and she has shared her thoughts on the session which you can read here.

    • Austria Constant Partner of NSA: Journalist

      American journalist Glenn Greenwald has said in an interview with newspaper Der Standard on Monday that Austria “constantly” works together with the American National Security Agency (NSA).

      This came despite recent claims from Austrian Minister for Defence Gerald Klug that the two work together only “occasionally.”

    • Glenn Greenwald to publish list of U.S. citizens that NSA spied on

      Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA.

      “One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer,” Mr. Greenwald told The Sunday Times of London.

    • Greenwald’s Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance

      The man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.

      Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.

    • Light Version of Oversight

      The USA Freedom Act passed by the House – advertised as ending bulk collection of Americans’ phone records under the Patriot Act – barely scratches the surface. Its main achievement: requiring the foreign intelligence court to vet N.S.A. selection terms used to sift through Americans’ phone, Internet and financial records. Sounds good, right? That’s because the N.S.A. talks about selection terms as being things like phone numbers or email addresses, suggesting that they are targeted at specific bad guys. But in negotiations, the administration insisted on leaving open the definition of selectors. As Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, explained, it is now “so vague that it could be used to collect all of the phone records in a particular area code, or all of the credit card records from a particular state.”

    • FreedomWorks working to stop the NSA

      A grassroots organization hopes its lawsuit related to the National Security Agency’s surveillance program will soon make its way to the Supreme Court.

      As a private citizen, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) in February joined with FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group, in filing a U.S. District Court lawsuit in the District of Columbia against President Obama and top intelligence officials over NSA surveillance.

    • NSA whistle blower says he is considering a move back home
    • Security Industry Fights Surveillance State with Words

      As posted originally on securitycurrent. Full disclosure per Forbes policy: All of the vendors mentioned in this post have been my clients for strategic advisory services during the last ten years.

      Cisco’s General Counsel Mark Chandler on May 13 reacted strongly to further news of NSA exploiting Cisco gear, sparked in part by the publication of Glenn Greenwald’s book on Snowden and the leaked documents.

    • The United States’ Global Surveillance Record

      In October 2012, President Obama signed Presidential Policy Directive 20, ordering America’s national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for U.S. cyber-attacks. The directive also stated that what it called Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) offered unique, unconventional capabilities to advance U.S. national objectives around the world, giving little or no warning to potential adversaries or targets.

    • Investigation confirms U.S. snooping activities against China: report

      A Chinese Internet information body on Monday said an investigation spanning several months has confirmed “the existence of snooping activities directed against China” as exposed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

    • MEDIA WINDOW: Data pirates in the Caribbean

      THE U.S.NATIONAL Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas says a TRANSCEND Media Service report.

    • NDP Wants Privacy, Security Experts To Probe Warrantless Data Gathering

      The federal New Democrats are calling for a group of independent experts to investigate warrantless data collection by the federal government.

      The Official Opposition says it also wants the group to recommend ways to ensure the privacy of Canadians is protected in the digital era.

    • U.S. conducts unscrupulous secret surveillance programs across world: report

      On March 29 this year, the German news magazine Der Spiegel, citing a secret document from Snowden, revealed that 122 world leaders were under NSA surveillance in 2009, and the agency maintained a secret database on world leaders which included 300 files on Merkel.

    • China report slams U.S. for ‘unscrupulous’ surveillance

      eijing accused the United States on Monday of “unscrupulous” cyber surveillance that included large-scale computer attacks against the Chinese government and Chinese companies.

      “America’s spying operations have gone far beyond the legal rationale of “anti-terrorism” and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity,” concluded a report prepared by the China Academy of Cyber Space.

    • Can I see what information the feds have on my travel?

      Lately I’ve been on something of a public records binge. I asked for records about my license plate reader data from local law enforcement agencies. I asked for complaint records from the Federal Trade Commission about a sketchy Bitcoin mining hardware maker. A few more requests are still pending.

    • Facebook Wants To Listen In On What You’re Doing

      Facebook is rolling out a new feature for its smartphone app that can turn on users’ microphones and listen to what’s happening around them to identify songs playing or television being watched. The pay-off for users in allowing Facebook to eavesdrop is that the social giant will be able to add a little tag to their status update that says they’re watching an episode of Games of Thrones as they sound off on their happiness (or despair) about the rise in background sex on TV these days.

    • John Faulkner voices spying fears after parliament CCTV captures meeting

      Senator seen in parliamentary footage being used to discipline government department employee

    • China Said to Push Banks to Remove IBM Servers for Security

      The Chinese government is pushing domestic banks to remove high-end servers made by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and replace them with a local brand, according to people familiar with the matter, in an escalation of the dispute with the U.S. over spying claims.

  • Civil Rights

    • ‘Big money’ is backing Modi to end resistance, says Arundhati Roy
    • Fixing U.S. intervention capabilities in Cuba

      What people think seemingly has little effect on ending what Cubans say is the longest and cruelest economic blockade in human history. Polls show overall U.S. disapproval, Cuban-Americans included. The UN General Assembly has repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected the blockade. The prestigious Atlantic Council NGO recently disapproved. Former high-profile blockade defenders in Florida, notably gubernatorial candidate Charley Crist and Cuban-American sugar baron Alfonso Fajul, changed their thinking. U.S. food producers, Illinois corn producers most recently, have called for new regulatory arrangements allowing exports to expand.

    • Nazis Attack City Hall in Dortmund, Germany
    • FBI chief says anti-marijuana policy hinders the hiring of cyber experts

      FBI cyber recruits “want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Comey says.

    • Journalist Calls for Accountability in Police Killings

      When one thinks about law enforcement, it’s safe to assume that its purpose is to ensure the compliance of the law; its purpose is to serve the greater good of its people. If the law and government fail to give justice to its citizens, then what good is it? The government is meant to provide a set of rules for people to adhere to and when not obliged, there are consequences for that action. Under the government there are police who are there to oversee that the law is being followed. So why is it that when the police are killing innocent people, they are not being punished as equally as regular civilians? Is it that the badge or title plays a role in how severe the punishment is, or that the police even get punished at all? Is the badge a “get out of jail free card”?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Europe’s Pirate Parties are sinking, but they’ve already won

        The 2014 European elections haven’t been kind to the various Pirate Parties, which campaign for digital rights, free speech and decriminalisation of filesharing. In their native Sweden, the Pirates lost both their MEPs, dropping from a 7.1 percent vote share to just 2.2 percent. In Finland where high-profile activist Peter Sunde was campaigning, the party balloted just 0.7 percent. In Britain, the three Pirate Party candidates secured just 8,597 votes combined — just 0.5 percent

        [...]

        Despite the movement’s founder and loudest voice, Rick Falkvinge, claiming on his blog that the results are a “strong improvement”, it’s clear that this is a bit of a washout for the European Pirates. Their gains in Sweden in 2009 came in the wake of the the high-profile trial of the founders of the Pirate Bay, but it’s impossible to argue that 2013′s Snowden revelations and recent renewed interest in net neutrality wouldn’t push traditional Pirate issues towards the forefront of voters’ minds in this election.

        [...]

        Once the dust has settled, the only cornerstone Pirate policy remaining will be a decriminalisation of filesharing. That’s unlikely to happen for the time being — the rapid growth of legal streaming services is increasingly rendering filesharing irrelevant, and the entertainment industry’s arguments that it could kill their fledgling attempts to manage the digital transition seem to hold water with most politicians.

        [...]

        Pirate Parties may have had a terrible election but, in Europe at least, Pirate politics is here to stay.

      • Pirate Party Keeps a Seat At The European Parliament

        A few hours after all polling booths across Europe closed, it now becomes clear that the Pirate Party has kept a seat at the European Parliament. The results show that the Pirates won one seat in Germany. That’s also the only one, although the Czech Republic Pirates came awfully close.

05.26.14

Links 26/5/2014: Chromebook Prospects, China and GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 60 Open Source Apps You Can Use in the Cloud

    The open source community is participating in this race to the cloud in two key ways. First, much open source software, particularly software for enterprises and small businesses, is now available on a SaaS basis. This provides customers with quality, low-cost applications and eliminates the hassles of deploying software on their own servers. At the same time, it gives open source companies a viable business model that allows them to make money from their technology.

  • Open source cloud hosting environment built in Swiss data centre

    A research lab at Zurich’s University of Applied Science has helped a data centre provider to create a new open source cloud hosting environment for its European research and development program.

  • Source Serif: Adobe’s New Open Source Typeface

    Adobe has released its 100th Typeface family, Source Serif, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Adobe Originals font library. Source Serif is an open-source font available via Adobe Typekit or via SourceForge.

  • GroundWork Unveils OpenStack Open Source Cloud Monitoring Tool

    OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, offers some metering tools as parts of the core OpenStack code. But it lacks a robust performance monitoring framework, which is why GroundWork has rolled out a new solution for tracking the performance of various parts of the OpenStack public and private cloud infrastructure.

  • Hadoop security: Hortonworks buys XA Secure – and plans to turn it open source

    Hortonworks says the deal struck this week to acquire XA Secure will help provide a comprehensive approach to Hadoop security for the first time.

  • Trendnet Embraces Open Source DD-WRT Firmware for Select Wireless AC Routers
  • TRENDnet(R) Announces Open Source DD-WRT Compatibility for Wireless AC Routers
  • Out in the Open: Take Back Your Privacy With This Open Source WhatsApp

    SnapChat settled with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month over a complaint that its privacy claims were misleading, as reported by USA Today, and last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a report listing the company as the least privacy-friendly tech outfit it reviewed, including Comcast, Facebook, and Google. Last year, WhatsApp faced privacy complaints from the Canadian and Dutch governments, and like Snapchat, its security has been an issue as well.

  • Open source light sabre with Virtual Reality IMAX headset
  • Salesagility release 3 new open source versions of SuiteCRM to target Salesforce
  • To help Hadoop adoption, Hortonworks to make security tools open-source
  • Clinovo to launch new Clincapture open source EDC system on May 23, 2014

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Text missing in chrome on Linux

        I’m in the process of trying Fedora 20 on my retina MacBook and I ran into a peculiar issue with Chrome. Some sites would load up normally and I could read everything on the page. Other sites would load up and only some of the text would be displayed. Images were totally unaffected.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla, a tale of gentrification

        The problem I see, however, is something I’ve witnessed for some time now, and while I’m aware that I will probably look like I’m howling with the pack (something I do not like at all) I believe I should come clean about it. This problem is about Mozilla itself, what it does, how it operates, its own standing within the Free and Open Source Software community and its revenue model. In fact, I believe all these points are tightly connected and discretely conspired to bring Mozilla where it is today. This is not to say that I don’t like what Mozilla does and has done. This is not to say that there isn’t a whole bunch of great people inside Mozilla: there are, I know several of them. This is not to say that Mozilla is not an exciting set of projects and ventures: I think it will continue to be exciting in the years to come. And many of us know what technology does to any project or company in just a few years: kill it or make it blossom.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.3 In Beta, Bringing Good Improvements

      The beta release of LibreOffice 4.3 is available this week with many new features being under development for this popular open-source office suite.

      Among the features being worked on for LibreOffice 4.3 is going from a 16-bit character limitation of Writer paragraphs to now 32-bit, changes to navigation buttons and other UI elements, DrawingML import/export support, proportional image scaling support, support for printing comments in margins, improved formula engine support within the Calc spreadsheet, auto detection of fax4CUPS printers, improved PDF importing, improved OOXML support, and many other changes.

  • CMS

    • White House contributes APIs, stages hackathons & runs on Drupal

      Director of new media technologies at the Executive Office of the President of the United State of America Leigh Heyman was recently reported to be the man behind all the modern interactive media delivered during Barack Obama’s last ‘state of the union’ address.

    • Orion Launches Open-Source Client Portal

      Orion announced in early May that it has launched a redesigned client portal that uses open-source code so other providers can build their own pages to integrate into the site.

  • Education

    • Damian Conway on Teaching, Programming Languages, Open Source and Our Future

      Damian Conway is well known in the Perl community and has worked on Perl 6 for many years; he’s a speaker and teacher, author of several technical books and Perl software modules, and runs an international IT training company, Thoughtstream, which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level in Europe, North America, and Australasia. His website is: http://damian.conway.org

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.8.3 Compiler Released

      For those that haven’t already moved over to the recently released GCC 4.9, the third point release to the GNU Compiler Collection 4.8 series has finally surfaced.

  • Public Services/Government

    • City of Vienna increasingly turns to open source

      The administration in the Austrian capital, Vienna, is expanding its use of open source solutions, including on its workstations, because of new requirements, open data, budget constraints and the major shift towards smartphones and tablets.

      “Open source helps to solve IT vendor lock-in situations”, Norbert Weidinger, ICT-Strategist for the city, said in a presentation on the city’s use of free and open source solutions.

      Open source is now well-established in the city’s main IT operations, according to the presentation which Weidinger delivered at a Major Cities of Europe conference in Dublin on 17 January. The city has 454 Linux servers (from a total of 2,000 servers), 270 Apache instances, uses Postgres to manage 380 databases and MySQL to manage another 90. Open source is used for file and printing services, for e-government services and for external and internal websites.

      “We’re promoting the use of open source products where possible”, Weidinger said.

      The IT department’s responsibilities include the IT in the city’s public healthcare, public schools and the administration of city-owned housing.

    • Opportunity

      In the UK, The National ICT Category Management Programme (NICTMP) is intended to guide local governments towards better IT, including using FLOSS. It’s about time. Many small businesses and governments are scarcely more skilled at IT than consumers and a little help can go a long way towards huge savings greater diversity and better IT. With FLOSS it’s easy to put up a web-server sharing information with the public and using open standards to ensure interoperability with minimal cost. I think savings of 20% are at the lower end of estimates. In my experience, software licences can save 20% of IT costs but ease of maintenance could do that again and getting full performance out of hardware purchases that much again. Local governments in UK spend hundreds of millions of dollars on hardware and software for IT each year. Break-even can be immediate if hardware is re-used by using FLOSS. Governments should be looking at savings of ~50% by using FLOSS. There’s a reason M$ and “partners” do what they do. It doubles the cost of IT making slaves of us all providing free labour. FLOSS works for us the users and not some monopolists.

    • New UK IT procurement model urges open standards

      A new model for IT procurement for local governments in the United Kingdom is urging public administrations to use open standards, to create room for agile and innovative software solutions including open source. One of the aims of the National ICT Commercial Category Strategy for Local Government is to reduce IT expenses by 10 to 20 percent over the next five years.

    • How governments are more collaborative with open source

      Technology is the easy part in government. The biggest challenges are cultural barriers – it’s a question of thinking in a more collaborative and open way, believes Ben Balter, Government Evangelist for GitHub, a social network for open source communities.

    • American elections are stuck in the 20th century. Here’s how to change that.

      Aneesh Chopra, President Obama’s choice to be the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer from 2009 to 2012, wants to do something about the problem. He is teaming up with a group called the Open Source Elections Technology Foundation to address the problem. Their plan: develop the software necessary to run an election and release it as an open-source project. Chopra and his colleagues believe that could lead to better election systems while simultaneously saving cash-strapped states money.

    • Open Source Lessons For Feds

      White House and agency IT leaders discuss how open source can empower government IT project teams, at FOSE conference in Washington, D.C.

  • Licensing

    • Scratch 2.0 editor and player now open source

      The latest version of a tool used to teach kids how to program video games, animations and interactive art is now open source. The Scratch 2.0 editor and player can now be found in GitHub under the GPL version 2 license.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • The LLVM 64-bit ARM64/AArch64 Back-Ends Have Merged

      Back in March Apple open-sourced their ARM 64-bit LLVM back-end (dubbed ARM64) many months after other ARM vendors had already developed a competing 64-bit ARM back-end (dubbed “AArch64″ as ARM’s official name for architecture). Since Apple opened up their back-end, Apple and outside LLVM developers have been working to converge the competing 64-bit ARM back-ends into a single 64-bit ARM target. That work is now complete.

    • Create a game with Scratch on Raspberry Pi

      While Scratch may seem like a very simplistic programming language that’s just for kids, you’d be wrong to overlook it as an excellent first step into coding for all age levels. One aspect of learning to code is understanding the underlying logic that makes up all programs; comparing two systems, learning to work with loops and general decision-making within the code.

    • Raspberry Pi Motion Camera: Part 2, using gphoto2
    • A Raspberry Pi motion-detecting wildlife camera

      I’ve been working on an automated wildlife camera, to catch birds at the feeder, and the coyotes, deer, rabbits and perhaps roadrunners (we haven’t seen one yet, but they ought to be out there) that roam the juniper woodland.

    • Clive: A New Operating System Written In The Go Language

      Clive is the new operating system announced on Friday and is written in Google’s Go programming language, features a “new weird file protocol” called ZX, and uses parts of the Plan 9 operating system. Clive is also going to run on a modified Nix kernel.

    • Open source Hoodie is tailored for quick app dev

      A quick option for building Web and iOS apps is on the horizon from a group of developers in Europe. Hoodie is an open source tool for building Web applications in days via an open source library described as being easier to use than JQuery.

Leftovers

  • Pope Francis to Call for Sovereign, Independent Palestinian State

    Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin is signaling that Pope Francis in his visit to Bethlehem on Sunday will strongly support the right of Palestinians to a sovereign state.

    Implicitly, Pope Francis will condemn the Apartheid system of military rule used by Israel in the West Bank, though he likely won’t use the word.

  • Haiku OS Adds Support For Latest Radeon HD Graphics Cards
  • Afghanistan strongly condemns recording of phone calls by U.S. NSA

    Amirzai Sangin, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Afghanistan said Sunday that the phone calls are recorded by devices which have been set up in the country to fight drugs smuggling.

    [...]

    Assange said that Afghanistan was the second country where NSA “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic and international phone calls.”

    Bahamas was revealed as one of the country where the phone calls were being recorded by National Security Agency in earlier reports; however the second country was called “country x.”

  • US Collecting All Cell Phone Calls in Afghanistan
  • White House mistakenly reveals name of top CIA officer in Afghanistan

    The White House inadvertently included the name of the top CIA official in Afghanistan on a list of participants in a military briefing with President Barack Obama that was distributed to reporters on Sunday, the Washington Post reported.

  • Oops! White House said to have blown cover of CIA chief in Afghanistan
  • CSG implements first napping station in UGLi

  • Science

    • Nobody Cares How Awesome You Are at Your Job

      In an article published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, University of California at San Diego behavioral scientist Ayelet Gneezy and University of Chicago business professor Nicholas Epley tracked people’s responses to three types of promises: broken ones, kept ones, and then ones that were fulfilled beyond expectations. And while it’s true that everyone gets upset when a promise is broken (I’m looking at you, housing-contractors-who-claim-bathroom-renovations-will-be-done-in-a-week), it turns out that overdelivering on something won’t make anyone significantly more impressed by your awesomeness.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Hacker Turned FBI Informant Sabu Will Be Sentenced Next Week

      Wired reports that Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka “Sabu”, the LulzSec hacker who became an FBI informant and helped take down numerous other hackers, will be sentenced on Tuesday, May 27. The government will seek a sentence of just seven months, citing time served and his immense cooperation with the government.

    • Feds Seek 7-Month Sentence for LulzSec Hacker and Lower East Sider ‘Sabu’

      Anarchism and the Lower East Side go hand in hand, so should we be super surprised that one of the most notorious hackers of our day operated from within the Jacob Riis Houses on Avenue D?

      You’ll recall that in June 2011, hacker Hector Xavier Monsegur, an unemployed father of two, was caught by the FBI and quickly turned snitch. The high-ranking capture immediately paid dividends, as “Sabu” was the man who once led the outlaw LulzSec, an offshoot of the notorious Anonymous organization. With the new traitor status, he helped deliver a number of top hackers on a platter and still helps the bureau with his connections.

    • US seeks leniency for ‘Sabu,’ Lulzsec leader-turned-snitch

      U.S. prosecutors say a hacking group’s mastermind should be spared a long prison sentence due to his quick and fruitful cooperation with law enforcement.

      The man, Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York, is accused of leading a gang of international miscreants calling themselves “Lulzsec,” short for Lulz Security, on a noisy hacking spree in 2011, striking companies such as HBGary, Fox Entertainment and Sony Pictures.

      Lulzsec, an offshoot of Anonymous, led a high-profile campaign that taunted law enforcement, released stolen data publicly and bragged of their exploits on Twitter. Their campaign touched off a worldwide law enforcement action that resulted in more than a dozen arrests.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Private Group Sought to Arm Syrian Rebels

      For one group of Americans, that wasn’t enough. On their own, the Americans offered to provide 70,000 Russian-made assault rifles and 21 million rounds of ammunition to the Free Syrian Army, a major infusion they said could be a game changer. With a tentative nod from the rebels, the group set about arranging a weapons shipment from Eastern Europe, to be paid for by a Saudi prince.

    • Canada Is Selling Arms to Everyone It Can

      While Canada exports oil, maple syrup, and hockey players, it also deals a lot of arms. And Canadian military exports are growing: the latest available figures say sales jumped more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2011, with later years reportedly expected to spike.

    • Were These 3 Guantanamo Deaths Really Suicides?

      On June 9th, 2006, it is said that three prisoners in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp committed suicide in a coordinated effort. They all died using the exact same methods, in their cells, on that evening.

      However, when NCOs (non-commissioned officers) contradicted this account, cracks began to show in the official NCIS investigation. The NCOs revealed that these three prisoners were actually not in their cellblocks the night they died. Rather, they were taken to a secret CIA black spot nearby, dubbed ‘Penny Lane’ or ‘Camp No’. While they were returned to their cell at the time of death, more than 12 papers that contradicted the official report of that night were suppressed during an internal investigation.

    • Police Investigating Use of Scottish Airports by CIA “Rendition” Torture Flights

      Legal charity Reprieve has called on the Scottish Government to ensure that police investigating the use of Scottish airports by CIA ‘torture flights’ have access to a major US Senate report on the spy agency’s secret ‘rendition’ programme.

    • Onerous, irrational and unconstitutional

      Political. America is freeloading. Events belie the local panel’s assertion that the Philippines invited the United States as our guest, to use our former bases and facilities—rent-free—as counterweight to China. The Chinese became aggressive in the West Philippine Sea in 2012; the United States decreed its “pivot” to Asia much earlier. Clearly, America decided, unilaterally, to make the Philippines home to thousands of its soldiers, aircraft carriers, battleships and warplanes. And the Philippines followed America in a zombie-like stupor.

    • Once a U.S. asset, Gen. Hafter recruited Libya’s entire military command with Egypt’s backing

      Egypt has been deemed a leading supporter of this week’s mutiny within the Libyan military.

      Diplomatic sources said renegade Gen. Khalifa Hafter was receiving guidance and military support from Egypt.

    • WPost Seeks US-Patrolled ‘Safe Zone’ in Syria

      Neocons never blush at their own hypocrisies, demanding Russia respect international law and do nothing to protect eastern Ukrainians, while demanding President Obama ignore international law and create a rebel “safe zone” in Syria, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

    • The Real Financiers of Boko Haram–Exposed

      In other words, the incitement of North against South, Christians against Muslims, was recognised as the most potent strategy that could push Nigeria into sectarianism. In fact, that Boko Haram has extremist religious connotation is believed to be enough to keep Nigeria busy to think beyond its survival.

      So carefully managed, it is impossible to trace Boko Haram’s funding and arms supply sources; unless one has a privileged access to the CIA-led trillion dollar terror economy, which Loretta Napoleoni, in her book, ‘’Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Network,’’ argued is impossible for CIA’s unofficial funding sources include money laundering, terrorism, extrajudicial killings, drug trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping, human trafficking, gambling and illegal arms and oil sales.

      Known not to leave anything to chance, the CIA ensured that it was in full control of both the mainstream and grassroots media in Nigeria. This was a smart move since it is a given that the one who controls what the people read, hear and watch invariably controls what the people think about and how they think.

      Thus, fully aware that press freedom actually belongs only to those who own the press, the CIA is secret marriage with some media owners and as a result has been successful at controlling and manipulating what gets to most Nigerians.

      Little wonder no one seems to wonder how the US Embassy (and by that the CIA) gets its intelligence, including the recent announcement it made that “As of late April, groups associated with terrorism allegedly planned to mount an unspecified attack against the Sheraton Hotel, in Nigeria.”

      The problem is that our government is not bold enough to demand their source of intelligence, and why rather than sharing such important intelligence with Nigeria, the US chose to make them public in the form of announcements.

    • ‘Over 60% drone targets homes in Pakistan’
    • The Drone Promise
    • PM unimpressed by protest outside his house

      Prime Minister John Key thought the candlelight vigil outside his house last night was “not really cricket”.

      About 30 protesters gathered outside his Auckland home last night in a candlelight vigil commemorating “the numerous deaths of civilians and the illegal killing of ‘supposed’ terrorists, including New Zealander Daryl Jones — killed by the US drone strike programme”.

    • PM: Don’t protest outside my home

      Prime Minister John Key has hit out at protesters who gathered at his home last night, to protest his position on deadly drone strikes.

      Last week Key said drone strikes were justified, but acknowledged innocent civilians were caught in the crossfire.

    • Australian drone deaths expose government indifference

      While the last couple of weeks have been taken up with thinking about the Budget and its disproportionate impact on poorer Australians, another, more spectacular, area of government disregard for the lives and rights of its citizens has gone relatively unremarked.

    • Most US Drone Strikes in Pakistan Attack Houses

      Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.

      By way of contrast, since 2008, in neighbouring Afghanistan drone strikes on buildings have been banned in all but the most urgent situations, as part of measures to protect civilian lives. But a new investigative project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research unit based at London’s Goldsmiths University, and New York-based Situ Research, reveals that in Pakistan, domestic buildings continue to be the most frequent target of drone attacks.

    • Secret Cable Reveals Russia Warned US in 2008 Meddling in Ukraine Could Split Country

      A secret cable released by Wikileaks on Tuesday revealed that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Washington as far back as 2008 that US-EU-NATO meddling in Ukraine could split the country in two.

      “Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit (ref A), Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat,” said the 2008 cable classified by William Burns, than US Ambassador to Moscow and currently the US Deputy Secretary of State.

    • This Leaked Diplomatic Cable From 2008 Foreshadowed Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

      A secret U.S. diplomatic cable written six years ago (and tweeted by Wikileaks on Tuesday) foreshadowed much of the tension between Russia and the U.S. over Ukraine.

    • Donetsk crowds protest Ukrainian elections, besiege richest oligarch’s mansion
    • Wikileaks Released Cable Reveals Russia Warned US of Potential Split in Ukraine

      A secret cable released by Wikileaks on Tuesday revealed that Washington had been warned by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as early as 2008 that US-EU-NATO interfering in Ukraine would result in the country splitting in two.

    • China fumes over cyber theft charges, accuses US of hypocrisy

      Miffed with the US over indictment of five People’s Liberation Army officers over commercial cyber espionage charges, China accused the US of hypocrisy and double standards.

      Chinese Defence Ministry posted a statement on its website, saying, “From ‘WikiLeaks’ to the ‘Snowden’ case, US hypocrisy and double standards regarding the issue of cyber-security have long been abundantly clear”.

      “The so-called ‘commercial espionage network’ is a pure fabrication by the US, a move to mislead the public based on ulterior motives,” the AFP quoted the statement.

    • Which 39 Democrats Want a War That Never Ends–and Voted Against Sunsetting the AUMF?

      During the defense appropriations amendment process, Adam Schiff (CA-28) proposed an amendment that would sunset the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) with the end of our combat role in Afghanistan, i.e. December 31, 2014.

    • Vladimir Putin hits back at Prince Charles

      The Russian president accuses the Prince of Wales of ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unroyal behaviour’

    • Drone Killing Memo Author Confirmed as Federal Judge

      Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Paul said, “I rise today in opposition to killing American citizens without trials. I rise today to oppose the nomination of anyone who would argue that the President has the power to kill American citizens not involved in combat.”

      “I rise today to say that there is no legal precedent for killing American citizens not directly involved in combat and that any nominee who rubber stamps and grants such power to a President is not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court,” the Kentucky senator said.

      On Wednesday, the Obama administration agreed to release to senators a redacted version of the document co-authored by Barron that provided the legal justification for the targeted drone killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

    • AP’s Fram Neglects to Mention ‘Filibuster’ or ‘Waterboarding’ in Covering Judicial Confirmation of Obama’s ‘Drone Memo’ Author

      Given that he was confirmed on a 53-45 vote, it is highly unlikely that Barron’s nomination would have survived had Senate majority leader Harry Reid not imposed the “nuclear option” last year to prevent senators from stopping a contentious nomination by requiring 60 senators to approve the idea of even having a confirmation vote. As for waterboarding, Barron’s nomination became controversial because he is, as Fram noted, the “architect of the Obama administration’s legal foundation for killing American terror suspects overseas with drones.” 53 Democratic senators are apparently okay with that, even though many if not most of them have gone apoplectic over the idea of waterboarding known terrorists of any nationality who may have knowledge of their fellow travelers’ plans.

    • The Three Laws of Pentagon Robotics

      1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
      2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
      3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

    • A Yemeni Man Is Suing British Telecom over America’s Deadly Drone Strikes

      A deep boom rocked through Sanaa, Yemen, the sound coming from outside of the city, perhaps from near the village of al-Masna’a.

    • Despite Obama’s new rules, no end in sight for drone war
    • Drone strike protest outside PM’s home
    • Candlelight Vigil to Be Held Outside John Keys House
    • Vigil planned outside Key’s home

      There will be a candlelight vigil outside Prime Minister John Key’s home in Auckland to highlight the issue of US drone strikes.

    • “Masters of Manipulation”: Psychopaths Rule The World

      Psychopaths are in love with power and risk taking, masters of manipulation, self-serving opportunism and self-aggrandizement, and hold doctorates in deceit and deception. Psychopaths are super intelligent charmers who are highly skilled at playing others in order to get what they want. They are keenly perceptive at reading people, understanding their motives and values, brilliant at learning their weaknesses and blind spots, and highly effective at inducing both sympathy and guilt in others.

    • The War on America’s Military Veterans, Waged with SWAT Teams, Surveillance and Neglect

      Just in time for Memorial Day, we’re once again being treated to a generous serving of praise and grandstanding by politicians and corporations eager to go on record as being supportive of our veterans.

      Patriotic platitudes aside, however, America has done a deplorable job of caring for her veterans. We erect monuments for those who die while serving in the military, yet for those who return home, there’s little honor to be found.

      The plight of veterans today is deplorable, with large numbers of them impoverished, unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with depression, thoughts of suicide, and marital stress, homeless (a third of all homeless Americans are veterans), subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and hospitals, and left to molder while their paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration (VA) offices.

    • CIA ‘gave Beirut bomber refuge in return for secrets’

      AN IRANIAN terrorist responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans in the 1983 Beirut bombings was resettled in the United States by the CIA in return for divulging secrets about Tehran’s nuclear programme, a new book claims.

      Ali Reza Asgari is believed to have masterminded the attacks in April 1983 on the US embassy in the Lebanese capital, which killed 63 people, and another attack six months later on the marine barracks and the French barracks, in which 241 US servicemen and 58 French citizens died.

    • Ex-CIA analyst: U.S. regularly use death as criminal punishment

      An inconvenient truth about America’s use of capital punishment is that it puts the U.S. in company with unappealing authoritarian states, like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while creating a divide from modern democratic societies in Europe and the Americas, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar, consortiumnews.com reported.

    • America’s Death-Penalty Fellow Travelers

      An inconvenient truth about America’s use of capital punishment is that it puts the U.S. in company with unappealing authoritarian states, like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while creating a divide from modern democratic societies in Europe and the Americas, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Former Texas A&M President, CIA Director, Takes Over Boy Scouts of America

      Robert Gates, the new president of the Boy Scouts of America, says he has no problems with allowing openly gay adults in the organization, but won’t address changing their policy right now.

    • US report on Scots role in terror suspect transfer

      SCOTLAND’s role in the interrogation and alleged torture of terror suspects by the CIA could be laid bare by a recently declassified US intelligence report, it has been revealed.

      Police are currently investigating claims Scottish airports were used as a stop-off for “rendition” flights, which transferred prisoners to secret jails overseas.

    • Qatar Sentences Alleged Filipino Spy to Death

      The unknowing also includes Qatar that has sentenced a Filipino national to death for allegedly selling top secret Qatari military information to “Filipino state security forces” that the Qataris left unnamed.

    • The information wars

      The US government continues its efforts to clamp down on leaks of classified information.

    • Disability Pay of Ex-Cop, Now FBI Agent Probed

      A former police officer in Northern California is being investigated for collecting a disability pension while he is currently working for the FBI.

      Oakland city officials are looking into how former police officer Aaron McFarlane receives more than $52,000 in disability benefits from the city while he has been working as an FBI special agent in Boston.

    • Tsarnaev pal’s lawyer seeks to grill FBI agents

      Federal prosecutors have acknowledged that the two FBI agents and a Homeland Security Investigations agent questioning the youth at the state police barracks in North Darmouth knew a lawyer had called, but neither they nor the trooper who spoke with Griffin passed that information along to the students.

    • To Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley: We Need Accountability and Transparency for Local Law Enforcement!
    • The FBI Prospers by Feeding Fears

      James Comey became FBI director last year, at a time when Osama bin Laden was dead, terrorism at home was on the decline and the United States was shrinking its inflammatory presence in the Muslim world. So naturally, he says the danger is way worse than you think.

    • The FBI prospers by feeding public safety fears

      James Comey became FBI director last year, at a time when Osama bin Laden was dead, terrorism at home was on the decline and the United States was shrinking its inflammatory presence in the Muslim world. So naturally, he says the danger is way worse than you think.

      Referring to al Qaeda groups in Africa and the Middle East, he recently told the New York Times, “I didn’t have anywhere near the appreciation I got after I came into this job just how virulent those affiliates had become. There are both many more than I appreciated, and they are stronger than I appreciated.”

    • The FBI hypes terrorism

      Terrorism has fed the FBI’s growth. Between 2001 and 2013, its budget nearly doubled after adjusting for inflation. But Comey was not pleased on arriving to learn that he would be inconvenienced by last year’s federal budget sequester.

    • God won’t save us: Memorial Day, honest history and our new military-industrial complex

      You had to take Johnson’s point. The question was, Why did Obama choose this man? As defense secretary, Gates oversaw an increase in troop strength in Afghanistan from 32,000 (when Obama took office and named him) to roughly 100,000 (before withdrawals began). Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting does the counting here. Why did Obama do that?

  • Transparency Reporting

    • ‘They think of WikiLeaks like Al-Qaeda’

      “They think of WikiLeaks like Al-Qaeda,” he said of the U.S. government. “I needed to move away from it all. I [still] talked to a few people on the computer but I generally completely disassociated myself with anything to do with Anonymous.”

    • Media Direct: towards better security for whistleblowers

      In essence, Media Direct seeks to enable encrypted interactions between anonymous whistleblowers, who access it via the Tor relay network, and specified journalists, with the submission server itself not logging anything, thus meaning it has no information to provide should it be targeted by the government of its host country (which remains secret, even from the administrators to the Media Direct site here in Australia). The site automatically deletes material that isn’t used within two weeks, and the keys whistleblowers use to access the server also have a limited lifespan. It’s close to plug-and-play for whistleblowers, as long as they can install Tor.

    • Chagossians: Wikileaked cable admissible after all
    • CIA won’t fake vaccinations, FBI still pursuing WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, latest on Benghazi: Spy Games Update

      The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice are still actively pursuing a criminal investigation against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

    • Assange targeted by FBI probe, US court documents reveal

      WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange remains the subject of an active criminal investigation by the United States Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation, newly published court documents reveal.

      Papers released in US legal proceedings have revealed that a “criminal/national security investigation” by the US Department of Justice and FBI probe of WikiLeaks is “a multi-subject investigation” that is still “active and ongoing” more than four years after the anti-secrecy website began publishing secret US diplomatic and military documents.

      Confirmation that US prosecutors have not closed the book on WikiLeaks and Mr Assange comes as a consequence of litigation by the US Electronic Privacy Information Centre to enforce a freedom of information request for documents relating to the FBI’s WikiLeaks investigation.

    • Julian Assange’s father in Newcastle to receive award

      JOHN Shipton says he is not, by nature, the most outgoing of people.

      “I’m a private person; I’d prefer to be at home reading a book,” Mr Shipton said yesterday.

      But having WikiLeaks whistle-blower Julian Assange for a son means Mr Shipton’s life is no longer solely his own.

    • TOPICS: Truckers missing trick without cartoon mascot

      Assange will receive an International Award for Outstanding Service in the Defence of Human Rights and Global Justice. You know, one of those.

    • Afghan anger at mass US phone monitoring
    • Julian Assange Goes Where Glenn Greenwald Wouldn’t

      Though they’re often lumped together as crusaders against state secrets, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and journalist Glenn Greenwald don’t always see eye to eye.

    • Julian Assange’s spy report knocks Glenn Greenwald down a peg

      A rift is forming in the world of leaked top-secret government documents. On one side is Glenn Greenwald, the founding editor of The Intercept online news site, who earlier this week reported that the U.S. government was recording practically every single cell phone call made to or from the Bahamas and another, unnamed country.

    • Will Julian Assange Be Moving to a Squatters’ Settlement In Brazil?

      On May 14, João Paulo Rodrigues, a leader of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The two men discussed ways in which Latin American social movements might help Wikileaks. Following their two-hour discussion, the leader told Assange, “If you need asylum in Brazil, we offer our land settlements.” Assange responded with a hug.

    • Wikileaks Founder Assange Endorses Bitcoin at South African Tech Conference

      Notorious whistleblower Julian Assange spoke glowingly about Bitcoin during a technology conference in South Africa on Wednesday, calling the currency “the most intellectually interesting development in the last two years.”

    • WikiLeaks: US eavesdrops on Kenyans’ calls

      A US intelligence agency is allegedly tapping all phone calls made in Kenya, possibly informing the recent travel advisories and the heightened alert at its Embassy in Nairobi.

    • Hacker who Targeted WikiLeaks is Going after Edward Snowden
    • Film About 1971 FBI Break-in Traces Path To Snowden And Wikileaks

      The film 1971, which just had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, documents the activities of “eight ordinary citizens,” but their story is far beyond the ordinary. On March 8, 1971, the group orchestrated a robbery at an FBI office in the Philadelphia suburb aptly called Media, making off with every file. Those hundreds of documents, mailed to the press leading to 50,000 more pages, laid bare the details and degree of government surveillance of the American people. Congressional hearings in subsequent years revealed that the FBI, under the autocratic leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, infiltrated institutions from universities to community groups and even threatened the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The mere fact of the existence of residential FBI offices, in low-slung brick buildings along tree-lined, mostly residential streets, reflected the acceptance — and even deification of the agency in earlier decades. No member of the Media, Pa., group was ever caught or prosecuted for the break-in. They broke their long silence in the film and a new book by Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Swansea traffic warden caught on camera refusing to give ticket to vehicle on double yellow lines ‘because that’s the boss’s car’

      As a man who has himself experienced wardens deciding, with their “discretion”, to give him a ticket in that very spot before, Steve McMillan perhaps understandably felt he could not just let it slide.

      Filming the whole incident on his mobile phone, he can be seen confronting a warden who initially says that it hasn’t yet “been five minutes”.

      But when Mr McMillan explains that it clearly has – and that he has this recorded on his phone – the unnamed warden quickly goes on the defensive.

    • Obama Administration Sued for Refusing to Disclose Data on Student Loan Debt Collectors

      President Barack Obama has taken several steps over the past few years to address the $1 trillion problem of student loan debt. He’s pushed loan forgiveness programs and efforts to help borrowers reduce payments. One thing that apparently isn’t factoring into his plans, though, is reining in abusive debt collectors that the Department of Education hires to collect student loans debt when people can’t pay.

      More than $94 billion of the nation’s student loan debt was in default as of September 2013, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office. And the percentage of people defaulting on school loans has increased steadily for six years in a row. In 2011, the Department of Education paid private debt collectors $1 billion to try to collect on that debt—a number that is expected to double by 2016. The tactics used by those debt collectors range from harassing to downright abusive. In March 2012, Bloomberg reported that three of the companies working for the Department of Education had settled federal or state charges that they’d engaged in abusive debt collection.

    • Fighting Poverty Wages

      We’re at a critical moment in our economic recovery that requires real leadership and people power to ensure true economic democracy in our country. There is incredible work being done to build a strong antipoverty movement, and spaces like these are fundamental to encourage an open dialogue about our strategies and tactics as well as our successes and failures.

      As corporate profits keep soaring, workers’ wages continue to stagnate, creating the widest income inequality gap our nation has seen in modern times. At Jobs With Justice we still believe that in America, people who work hard should be paid enough to live with dignity and raise a family. Today, millions of people go to work every day and still don’t earn enough money to feed their families. If people can work full-time and still can’t afford groceries, rent and medication, then the entire model is flawed and unfair. We can’t continue down this path of creating bottom-of-the-barrel, low-wage jobs that condemn our friends and neighbors to poverty.

    • Big Credit Suisse’s Sweetheart Deal

      Attorney General Eric Holder’s sweetheart settlement with Switzerland’s second largest bank, corporate criminal Credit Suisse, sent the wrong message to other corporate barons. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) says it well:

      “Nor does the plea deal hold any officers, directors or key executives individually accountable for wrongdoing, raising the question of whether it will sufficiently deter similar misconduct in the future.”

      Mr. Holder, of course, touted the deal as tough. Credit Suisse was fined a non-deductible $2.6 billion for their long, elaborate plan to provide tax evasion services for many thousands of wealthy Americans. The bank agreed to plead guilty of criminal wrongdoing – a rare demand on the usually coddled large financial institutions. In addition, Credit Suisse, in Mr. Holder’s words, failed “to retain key documents, allowed evidence to be lost or destroyed, and conducted a shamefully inadequate internal inquiry”… through a “conspiracy” that “spanned decades.”

    • What do Brazilians really think of their maids?

      An anonymous Twitter account is highlighting the poor treatment of maids in Brazil.

    • Even Iran Knows How To Fix The Corrupt Banker Problem

      Having watched Tim Geithner’s disgusting defense of the tax-payer-backed re-inflation of a corrupt and knowingly devastating banking system on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and watching the US fine (no jail time for anyone) a Swiss bank which admits its guilt over billions of fraud yet allow them to remain a prime dealer of US Treasuries; we thought the following story from a ’3rd world banking system’ would open a few eyes in the US this weekend as ‘we remember’. As AP reports, a billionaire businessman at the heart of a $2.6 billion state bank scam in Iran, the largest fraud case since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, was executed Saturday, state television reported.

    • We (and This Includes You, Democrats) Have Blown a Huge Hole in the Safety Net
    • Law Enforcement vs. the Hippies

      Maybe this is because lefties don’t complain enough. You may remember the hissy fit thrown by Fox News when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report suggesting that the election of a black president might spur recruitment among right-wing extremist groups and “even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.” As it turns out, that was a good call. But the specter of jack-booted Obama thugs smashing down the doors of earnest, heartland Republicans dominated the news cycle long enough for DHS to repudiate the report under pressure and eventually dissolve the team that had produced it.

      And the similar report about left-wing extremism that DHS had produced a few months earlier? You don’t remember that? I don’t suppose you would. That’s because it was barely noticed, let alone an object of complaint. And even if lefties had complained, I doubt that anyone would have taken it seriously. There’s just no equivalent of Fox News on the left when it comes to turning partisan grievances into mainstream news.

    • Housing crisis? No, just a very British sickness

      Housing booms are today’s medieval plagues. Boils suppurate on the political backside. People rush to find culprits to lynch. Quacks appear on street corners with fake remedies. Reason takes a holiday.

      Thus it was yesterday, as the Today programme’s John Humphrys chided David Cameron for the “housing crisis” and for not building more houses in the Tory shires. It was like curing famine by sending caviar to Africa.

      Meanwhile, everyone from Ed Miliband to the governor of the Bank of England screams crisis. There is a crisis when prices fall and a crisis when prices rise. Almost everywhere house prices are still bouncing along the bottom, but at London dinner parties they are a “bubble”.

    • How the IMF Destroyed Greece: The Reality of the Greek “Success story”: On Its Way to Become a Third World Country
    • As the Global Economy Continues to Crumble, Old Fascism Finds a New Voice

      Europe has a special worry about a broken, uncaring economy.

      Things rip apart. More and more people fall into desperation. Some of them decide it’s the fault of immigrants. Or homosexuals.

    • Unification of Europe’s Far Right: Rise of the Fourth Reich?

      The situation is not entirely comparable to that of Europe and Germany of the 1930s and 40s. Nevertheless, the rise of these far-right parties, their ties to the economic hardships and austerity measures imposed by the European Union, and the spread of nationalistic and xenophobic tendencies are alarming.

    • Jean-Marie Le Pen suggests Ebola as solution to global population explosion

      Virus ‘could sort out demographic explosion’ and by extension Europe’s ‘immigration problem’, says founder of Front National

  • Politics

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Report blasts “unscrupulous” U.S. surveillance in China

      In particular, it described China as a main target of the U.S. clandestine secret surveillance.

    • Afghanistan Hits Out at U.S. Spying Allegations

      Afghanistan on Sunday expressed anger at the United States for allegedly monitoring almost all the country’s telephone conversations after revelations by the Wikileaks website.

      Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said on Friday that Afghanistan was one of at least two countries where the U.S. National Security Agency “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic [and international] phone calls.” Earlier last week journalist Glenn Greenwald had revealed that the NSA had been monitoring all the domestic and international phone calls of the Bahamas, but had refused to identify the second country, claiming he believed it could lead to the death of innocent people.

    • The world’s biggest internet spy is playing cop

      Since the US Department of Justice announced indictments against 5 Chinese military officers, some US media have reported that the US is conducting spying operations not confined to national security. The claims are based on secret documents leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

    • ‘USA Freedom Act’ and bipartisan tyranny
    • NSA reform falls short

      While a welcome first step toward reining in a government with “Big Brother” powers, the House bill falls short of the objective of its original sponsors. Transparency measures intended to guard against secret intrusions on personal privacy were weakened. And there are concerns about an undefined “specific selection term” to theoretically limit the reach of government intrusion into personal records and personal communications.

    • Jesse Kline: A bigger surveillance state won’t stop ‘cyberbullying’

      …making it easier for government officials to gather information about Canadians’ online activities.

    • Snowden In Russia Of His Own Free Will, Says Glenn Greenwald

      If not, other countries are ready to offer him shelter, including Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and possibly even Germany or perhaps also Switzerland as there have been reports of the NSA spying on Swiss banks, he added.If not, other countries are ready to offer him shelter, including Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and possibly even Germany or perhaps also Switzerland as there have been reports of the NSA spying on Swiss banks, he added.

    • Why US is in no position to accuse the Chinese of hacking
    • As Snowden gets his own comic book, the writer ‘leaks’ her inspiration and motivations

      FOUR years ago, Valerie D’Orazio was writing a story about a character who knows too much. Whom people want silenced. And who ultimately delivers all her files to the media, via email, so the whole world shall know these dark secrets. Little could D’Orazio have known then that this Marvel Comics story, titled Punisher MAX: Butterfly, was professional prologue to another big assignment: Writing about the life and exploits of NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

    • Lawyer: Edward Snowden ‘Considering’ Return to US

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is “considering’ returning to the United States if certain conditions are met, his lawyer told Germany’s Der Spiegel.

      “There are negotiations,” Snowden’s German lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck said, according to a translation on RT.com, a news agency based in Russia. “Those who know the case are aware that an amicable agreement with the U.S. authorities will be most reasonable,” Kaleck said.

      Snowden is not involved in the negotations, Kaleck told Der Spiegel.

    • Snowden ‘considers’ returning to US – report
    • Congress divorces NIST and NSA

      The US Congress has passed a bill that removes the NSA’s direct input into encryption standards.

      According to a report at ProPublica, an amendment to the National Institute of Standards and Technology act removes the requirement that NIST consult with the NSA in setting new encryption standards.

    • Chinese Troops Must Take Up ‘Legal Arms’ Against ‘Pretentious’ U.S. (Huanqiu, China)

      The U.S. Department of Justice last week announced the criminal indictments of five Chinese army officers, claiming that they helped Chinese companies steal American corporate business information, and that all five are from “Unit 61398″ of the People’s Liberation Army. Since February last year, the U.S. government has accused the unit “headquartered in Shanghai” of being part of a “hacker army” involved in the long-term theft of U.S. trade secrets.

    • Scottish Nationalist Proposes Asylum For NSA Whistle-Blower Edward Snowden

      Scottish supporters of Edward Snowden say an independent Scotland should offer political asylum to the man whose disclosure of classified NSA documents revealed pervasive U.S. surveillance around the world.

      Members of the Scottish parliament (MSPs) have considered a call for the former NSA contractor, who is currently being sheltered in Russia, to be given political asylum in Scotland if voters opt for independence in September’s referendum.

    • China’s state-owned sector told to cut ties with US consulting firms

      China has told its state-owned enterprises to sever links with American consulting firms just days after the US charged five Chinese military officers with hacking US companies, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

      China’s action, which targets companies like McKinsey & Company and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), stems from fears the firms are providing trade secrets to the US government, the FT reported, citing unnamed sources close to senior Chinese leaders.

    • US-China cyber-battles intensify

      The United States has accused some Chinese of hacking into American companies’ computers but the US itself has been engaging in massive spying of foreign companies and trade officials.

      [...]

      But in fact the US does spy on companies and trade policy makers and negotiators of other countries, presumably in order to obtain a commercial advantage.

    • ‘USA Freedom Act’ and bipartisan tyranny
    • US tries to bar Chinese nationals from two hacker conferences in the US
    • Licence to spy

      In January, after the disclosures by Edward Snowden about the scale of the US intelligence apparatus’s cyber snooping capabilities, President Barack Obama acknowledged the need to curtail the National Security Agency’s damaging practices and to begin a conversation on how a balance between national security and civil liberties could be struck. If it was clear then that downsizing the surveillance state would be a difficult task, the version of the USA Freedom Act that passed the House of Representatives last week underscored that fact.

    • German Lawmakers May Call Apple CEO Tim Cook Over NSA Spying

      An investigation committee set up by German parliamentarians to look into the NSA’s bulk collection of Europe’s telecommunications data may call several prominent U.S. tech company executives to testify, including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, reports The Wall Street Journal. Other witnesses that the committee may call include Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) CEO Dick Costolo, and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) executive vice

    • The Washington Post’s ‘Fear-Driven Approach’ to NSA Files Infuriated Snowden

      When National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden was working to convince journalists to cover NSA documents he taken with him to expose evidence of dragnet warrantless surveillance, he was especially frustrated with one media organization, which has actually received recognition for its work on the NSA files: The Washington Post.

      The story of how the Post became involved and, in many ways, let a whistleblower down is a testament to why future whistleblowers should be cautious when approaching such establishment media outlets. What happened is detailed in journalist Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA & the US Surveillance State.

    • The Bahamas Wants To Know The Reasons Of NSA Recording Its Phone Calls

      The Bahamas government officials want their US counterparts to explain why the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting and recording every cell phone call taking place on the island nation.

    • NBC’s Brian Williams Gets Exclusive with Edward Snowden

      NBC anchor Brian Williams has landed an exclusive interview with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. It will be Snowden’s first American television interview. Williams traveled to Moscow this week to speak with both Snowden and Glenn Greenwald for an hour-long special that will air during primetime on May 28th.

    • US-China tech exchange strained over hacking accusations

      The U.S.’ escalating feud with China over hacking charges could end up hurting IT suppliers in both countries, as suspicions and eroding trust threaten to dampen the tech exchange between the two nations.

    • New York Times Admits Reason For Delay In Delivering NSA Wiretapping Story

      On the 2004 campaign trail, President Bush denied the existence of an American warrantless surveillance program. But inside the Department of Justice, an attorney leaked information to The New York Times explaining the National Security Agency did indeed eavesdrop on phones around the country.

    • New York Times: Spy bill falls short

      Unfortunately, the bill passed by the House on Thursday falls far short of those promises, and does not live up to its title, the USA Freedom Act. Because of last-minute pressure from a recalcitrant Obama administration, the bill contains loopholes that dilute the strong restrictions in an earlier version, potentially allowing the spy agencies to continue much of their phone-data collection.

    • NSA reform to be ‘fight of the summer’

      Civil libertarians who say the House didn’t go far enough to reform the National Security Agency are mounting a renewed effort in the Senate to shift momentum in their direction.

    • FBI introduces app to help protect children
    • The FBI’s Massive Facial Recognition Database: Privacy Implications
    • House Committee Puts NSA on Notice Over Encryption Standards

      An amendment adopted by a House committee would, if enacted, take a step toward removing the National Security Agency from the business of meddling with encryption standards that protect security on the Internet.

    • Will The House’s Gutted USA Freedom Act Really Stop The NSA?

      “While it represents a slight improvement from the status quo, it isn’t the reform bill that Americans deserve,” says a staff attorney with the ACLU.

    • Unhackable NSA-proof instant messaging program

      In the digital world, you never know who is spying on you. There’s hackers, nosy neighbors, a vengeful ex, the NSA, and that’s just a handful of the possibilities.

      Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to keep your messages safe from prying eyes? Now there is.

      Take a look at PQChat, an unhackable – yes, I said unhackable – secure instant messaging app.

    • CERN Scientists Launch Encrypted Email Service

      As it turns out, people really don’t want the government reading their email. Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have launched a new email service featuring end-to-end encryption to ensure complete privacy for users.

      Dubbed ProtonMail, the service claims to be fully anonymous. “Because of our end-to-end encryption, your data is already encrypted by the time it reaches our servers,” the site says. “We have no access to your messages, and since we cannot decrypt them, we cannot share them with third parties.”

      According to Jason Stockman, a co-developer of ProtonMail, the service was inspired by the revelations of the massive citizen surveillance programs by the US National Security Agency (NSA) made public by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year.

    • NSA row sparks rush for encrypted email

      A new push to encrypt email, keeping messages free from government snooping, is gaining momentum. One new email service promising “end-to-end” encryption launched last Friday, and others are being developed while major services such as Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail have stepped up security measures.

      A major catalyst for email encryption were revelations about widespread online surveillance in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor. “A lot of people were upset with those revelations, and that coalesced into this effort,” said Jason Stockman, a co-developer of ProtonMail, a new encrypted email service which launched last Friday with collaboration of scientists from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European research lab CERN.

    • US considers denying visas to Chinese hackers to attend conferences
    • US accuses Chinese officials of cyber espionage

      Meanwhile, US is engaged in massive electronic surveillance

    • Read it, you’ll doubt no more

      In the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden found a perfect match. I don’t mean to slight the contributions of Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman, the other two journalists who first dug into Snowden’s amazing and unprecedented trove of National Security Agency (NSA) documents.

    • America: spying mostly on its own

      One characteristic of a totalitarian state is that it is as determined to subjugate its own citizens as it is to conquer foreigners. That’s why Edward Snowden could tell the National Press Club by live video link from his Russian exile that when he was a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) he was appalled to see NSA “collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia.”

    • Independent Scotland could give asylum to ‘traitor’ Edward Snowden

      HOLYROOD has triggered a major diplomatic row with the US over a proposal to grant asylum to the “traitor” Edward Snowden in the event of independence.

    • The Pressure’s On Harper to End Online Spying — Let’s Keep it Up

      Leading Conservative elder statesman Stockwell Day has joined the growing chorus of Canadians speaking out about how Bill C-13 would expose law-abiding Canadians to warrantless government spying. If passed, the controversial bill would grant immunity to telecom companies who hand our private information to the government without a warrant.

    • Commentary: U.S. cyber-scoundrelism doomed to backfire

      “Play by the rules” seems to be Washington’s sacrosanct motto on international interaction. But time and again rules are just a lump of clay in Uncle Sam’s hands.

      In a recent farce about cyber-security, the United States slapped some fabricated charges against five Chinese military officers, accusing them of hacking into the systems of U.S. companies to steal trade secrets.

    • Chinese indicted for acting like America’s NSA
    • What does GCHQ know about our devices that we don’t?
    • Police use cellphone spying device
    • The Pentagon report on Snowden’s ‘grave’ threat is gravely overblown

      NSA defenders still won’t tell the whole truth, but a newly revealed damage assessment offers a window into government damage control – not any actual damage done by Snowden

    • Edward Snowden Threw Crypto Parties Before He Blew the Whistle on NSAEdward Snowden Threw Crypto Parties Before He Blew the Whistle on NSA
    • A warning, not a blueprint – living in a post-Snowden world

      It is twenty five years since Tim Berners-Lee had the germ of an idea that became the World Wide Web. Smartphones for everyone have been with us less than a decade. Technology is transformative and world changing. 150 years ago we didn’t have the electric light or the phonograph. Photography was a new and rare technology, and everything we take for granted in our lives today – central heating, hot and cold running water, flushing toilets, fridges, cars, radio, and TV – had yet to be invented, or was at the very least out of the reach of the average citizen.

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

    • Tell Mozilla: Keep DRM out of Firefox

      Only a week after the International Day Against DRM, Mozilla has announced that it will support Digital Restrictions Management in its Firefox Browser. The browser will have a built-in utility that automatically fetches and installs DRM from Adobe.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Majority of Japanese public oppose compromising over TPP: Mainichi poll

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Supreme Court Admits Copyright Infringement May Actually Help The Copyright Holder
      • Pirates Are Staying In European Parliament

        As of 18:00 on Election Day, it is clear that the Pirate Party remains in the European Parliament for another term. The German exit polls predict that at least Julia Reda from Germany has just been elected as Member of European Parliament, securing a pirate seat for the coming term. More results as they come in (developing story).

      • THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE COPYRIGHT INDUSTRY AND THE NSA

        Most notably, the copyright industry is known for using child porn as an argument for introducing mass surveillance, so that the mass surveillance can be expanded in the next step to targeting people who share knowledge and culture in violation of that industry’s distribution monopolies. This is a case study in taking corporate cynicism to the next level.

        This mass surveillance is also what feeds the NSA, the GCHQ, and its other European counterparts (like the Swedish FRA). It is continuously argued, along the precise same lines, that so-called “metadata” – whom you’re calling, from where, for how long – is not sensitive and therefore not protected by privacy safeguards. This was the argument that the European Court of Justice struck down with the force of a sledgehammer, followed by about two metric tons of bricks: it’s more than a little private if you’re talking to a sex service for 19 minutes at 2am, or if you’re making a call to the suicide hotline from the top of a bridge. This is the kind of data that the spy services wanted to have logged, eagerly cheered on by the copyright industry.

      • Amazon Won’t Sell You The Paperback Version Of The Anti-Amazon Book

        The latest evidence: Amazon has escalated its battle against book publisher Hachette. Now Amazon won’t allow you to pre-order any Hachette books, the publisher confirmed to The Huffington Post on Friday. That means you cannot buy the paperback version of Brad Stone’s Amazon exposé “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.”

      • Amazon Is Cracking Down on Book Publisher, Say Critics

        Amazon appears to be trying to pressure a book publisher into agreeing to more favorable terms for the online retail giant by refusing to offer pre-orders of some of the publisher’s titles. Books for which Amazon is no longer taking orders include a new novel by J.K. Rowling and the paperback version of “The Everything Store,” an inside look at the operations of Amazon.

      • Kim Dotcom Fails in Bid to Suppress FBI Evidence

        Kim Dotcom has lost his bid to have evidence held by the FBI against him kept a secret. The information , a 200-page document which includes a sampling of 22 million emails relevant to his extradition case, may now be made public. Efforts by Dotcom to gain access to government held documentation against him were also rejected.

      • Public BitTorrent Trackers Ban Piracy Monitoring Outfits

        The three largest BitTorrent trackers have banned the IP-ranges of several major hosting companies. The move aims to make it harder for anti-piracy outfits and other information gathering outfits to snoop on file-sharers. Unfortunately, the changes also mean that users of some VPNs, proxies and seedboxes can no longer connect.

      • Open WiFi Is Not a CopyCrime: EFF’s Primer on Open WiFi and Copyright

        Every day cafes, airports, libraries, laundromats, schools and individuals operate “open” Wi-Fi routers, sharing their connection with neighbors and passers-by at no charge. The City of San Francisco recently deployed a free, public Wi-Fi network along a three-mile stretch of Market Street. Sometimes people use those connections for unauthorized activities. Most of the time they don’t, and the world gets a valuable public service of simple, ubiquitous Internet access.

05.24.14

Links 24/5/2014: Many Games on GNU/Linux, Thai Coup

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • YouTube to acquire Twitch for more than $1 billion

    In March 2014 alone, Twitch was single handedly responsible for 1.35% of all downstream traffic in North America.

  • 9 Things That Didn’t Happen to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

    The evidence is mounting that a deliberate action by someone on board caused the diversion and disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. But over the past week and a half since the plane vanished, as contradictory information came in from various sources, people floated plenty of crazier ideas about the plane’s fate.

  • Security

    • EBAY… You keep using that word ‘ENCRYPTION’ – it does not mean what you think it means

      A day has passed since the online tat bazaar admitted its customer database was hacked back in February, and the method of encryption is still not known. We do what wasn’t encrypted: millions of people’s names, home addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses, which were stored in the ransacked database alongside the passwords.

    • Researcher finds vulnerability in eBay and claims he uploaded a shell

      Jordan said in his tweet that he notified about the vulnerability to eBay. A screenshot published in his twitter account shows that he is able to upload a ‘shell.php’ file in the following location…

    • eBay Security Breach Delivers 10 Lessons for Enterprise IT Executives

      Another day, another company that has disclosed that one of its main databases has been hacked and user information has been compromised. So far eBay hasn’t divulged full details of the breach. Reportedly the attackers accessed about 145 million records. Now, the online auction company is urging its 128 million active users to change their passwords. The attackers were able to access everything from users’ full names and addresses to email addresses. But eBay asserts that the compromised database didn’t contain financial information, which the company encrypts anyway. The company also said PayPal users weren’t impacted. The breach, which is just the latest in a long list of security issues that have affected large enterprises with large customer bases, should teach us a lot about security, or the general lack of it, across the Web. The massive Target breach in December showed what can happen when huge databases containing customer information are breached and the data stolen. Reports about eBay demonstrate, once again, how even a huge Internet business, which should know how to defend itself against sophisticated cyber-attacks, can be compromised. This eWEEK slide show highlights what we can learn from this latest attack.

    • eBay Breach Isn’t Just About Passwords
    • EPFL researchers crack unassailable encryption algorithm in two hours

      A protocol based on “discrete logarithms”, deemed as one of the candidates for the Internet’s future security systems, was decrypted by EPFL researchers. Allegedly tamper-proof, it could only stand up to the school machines’ decryption attempts for two hours.

    • Duo Security Review

      Traditional password authentication has long been recognised as the weak link in the security chain, even before the Heartbleed vulnerability exposed the private keys of millions of servers worldwide. A password the user can easily remember is rarely a good password, while a good password is rarely easy to remember.

    • DARPA IS WEAPONIZING VIRTUAL REALITY FOR CYBER WAR

      Andy Greenberg has an online article in this morning’s (May 23, 2014) Wired.com, with the title above. Mr. Greenberg writes that, “for the past two years, DARPA has been working to make waging cyber war — as easy as playing a video game.” “On Wednesday,” he notes, “DARPA showed off its latest demos for Plan X, a long-standing software platform designed to unify digital attack and defense tools into a single, easy-to-use interface for American military hackers. And for the last few months: that program has had a new toy. The agency is experimenting with using Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset — to give cyber warriors a new way to visualize three-dimensional network simulations — in some cases with the goal of better targeting for them to attack.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Anna Politkovskaya killing: five men convicted of murder

      The defendants were three Chechen brothers, one of whom was accused of shooting Politkovskaya in the lobby of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006, as well as their uncle and a former police officer.

    • New Zealand, Australian governments complicit in US drone attacks

      In a New Zealand television interview last week, American investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill said in that the National Party government is “extremely aware” of US drone attacks, including one which killed NZ citizen Daryl Jones (also known as Muslim bin John) in Yemen last year. Scahill, author of Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, who was in Auckland at a writers’ festival, also implicated the Australian government.

    • A Year On, What’s Changed (And What Hasn’t) On Drone Oversight
    • Most US drone strikes in Pakistan attack houses
    • Why Have US Drones Targeted So Many Houses in Pakistan?
    • Why Have US Drones Targeted So Many Houses in Pakistan?
    • E-cigarette ban among bills governor signs

      Gov. Terry Branstad signed 11 bills into law Friday, including a ban the sale of electronic cigarettes and alternative nicotine products to minors in Iowa and a separate measure designed to create parameters for the use of drones, otherwise known as unmanned aerial vehicles.

    • Experts debate ‘killer robots’
    • Despite Obama’s new rules, no end in sight for drone war
    • Obama has put Pakistan drone war on hold

      A year ago, President Obama delivered a speech at the National Defense University in Washington in which he made the case that it was time to wind down the “boundless global war on terror ” and “perpetual wartime footing” that has been a feature of American life since 9/11.

      Indeed, the CIA drone program in Pakistan has stopped completely since the beginning of this year. This is a noteworthy development given the fact that there have been 370 drone strikes in Pakistan over the past decade that have killed somewhere between 2,080 to 3,428 people; most of whom were suspected militants, but also a smaller number of civilians.

    • Judge Napolitano: Obama’s Drones Killed More Girls than Boko Haram Kidnapped

      During a discussion on President Obama sending troops into Chad to help the search for the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano told Shepard Smith that American drone strikes have done more damage than the terrorist organization.

    • The year of living more dangerously: Obama’s drone speech was a sham

      Twelve months ago today, Barack Obama gave a landmark national security speech in which he frankly acknowledged that the United States had at least in some cases compromised its values in the years since 9/11 – and offered his vision of a US national security policy more directly in line with “the freedoms and ideals that we defend.” It was widely praised as “a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America”.

      Addressing an audience at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, the president pledged greater transparency about targeted killings, rededicated himself to closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and urged Congress to refine and ultimately repeal the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which has been invoked to justify everything from military detention to drones strikes.

    • UK’s new Reaper drones remain grounded, months before Afghan withdrawal

      Five new Reaper drones announced by David Cameron in December 2010 to support British troops in Afghanistan are still not yet in operation, the Bureau can reveal.

      The new drones were bought as an urgent purchase and were part of a £135m package intended to effectively double the size of the UK’s fleet of armed drones in Afghanistan, and its surveillance capacity. But more than three years after the purchase was announced, and with just months to go before the UK’s troops are due to leave the conflict, the additional Reapers are yet to take to the skies.

    • Protests Against US Drone War Planned at West Point

      Anti-war protesters displaying model drones and photos of known victims of the US military and secret CIA targeted assignation program will greet family and friends of the graduates as they enter West Point gates at 7 am. The protest will extend to 9:30 am; graduation ceremonies begin at 10:00 am.

      The protest has special meaning for those in the US Army because the MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone, a more deadly version of the infamous Predator drone, is being integrated into use in every Army division.

    • Drone strikes on U.S. citizens defy justification

      That President Obama, formerly a professor of constitutional law, and David J. Barron, “one of the memo’s authors” and an Obama nominee to a federal appeals court judgeship, could conceive of even a shred of justification for such crimes boggles the mind.

    • Tell Congress And President Obama: No Money For More War

      President Obama gave an eloquent speech on May 23, 2013 on the issues of endless war, US drone strikes, Guantanamo, and the 12-year old AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force). Compare his words then with the reality one year later.

      “For over the last decade, our nation has spent well over a trillion dollars on war, helping to explode our debts and constraining our ability to nation-build here at home.”Reality? The “direct” cost of our Iraq & Afghan wars is over $1.5 trillion, and the Administration wants a $79 billion blank check for fighting undefined wars in FY 2015. (That’s on top of a “basic” Pentagon budget of $495 billion).

      “…there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility (Guantanamo) that should never have been opened.” Reality? There were 166 prisoners at Guantanamo a year ago, 154 now. Most of them have been formally cleared for release, and most of the rest have not been formally charged. Hunger strikes there are on-going. Efforts to secure the release of US Army POW Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for Afghan Guantanamo prisoners have not succeeded.

    • US drone promises – One year on

      A year after President Obama laid out new conditions for drone attacks around the world, US forces are failing to comply fully with the rules he set for them.

    • Commentary: The Government Isn’t Very Good at Deciding What to Keep Secret
    • Old CIA links return to haunt Libya’s Haftar

      Libya’s renegade General Khalifa Haftar is leading a military campaign against the country’s Islamist-led government and militants; however, his past life in America and old ties to the CIA are likely to be a stumbling block on his road to power.

      Following his botched February coup attempt –when he appeared on television announcing the dissolution of the government only to be scoffed at by the-then Prime Minister Ali Zeidan as “ridiculous” – launched this week “Operation Dignity” to rid Libya of “terrorists” and “corrupt” officials.

    • Khalifa Haftar: renegade general causing upheaval in Libya

      Commander has managed to rally influential bodies in offensive against post-Gaddafi government but is dogged by old CIA link

    • The CIA’s Bay of Pigs Documents Can Be Kept Secret Indefinitely, Court Rules

      The American public might never get to know the entire history of the events that occurred during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, not at least until the Central Intelligence Agency is finished revising the draft copy of its history, which seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

    • U.S. Court of Appeals Joins the CIA’s Cover-Up of its Bay of Pigs Disaster

      The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday joined the CIA’s cover-up of its Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 by ruling that a 30-year-old volume of the CIA’s draft “official history” could be withheld from the public under the “deliberative process” privilege, even though four of the five volumes have previously been released with no harm either to national security or any government deliberation.

    • Why is Glenn Greenwald Protecting the CIA?

      Every day across the planet the CIA instigates the arrest, torture and murder of people whose only wrongdoing is opposing the crimes being committed by those in league with Pax Americana. Arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, all of the most evil activities on this planet are being instigated and directed by the CIA. So why is Glenn Greenwald protecting these bastards?

    • The CIA Coordinates Nazis and Jihadists

      The confrontation between the Kiev putschists, backed by NATO and Ukrainian federalists, supported by Russia, has reached a point of no return.

    • Senators Feinstein and Levin on 9/11 Case Delay, RDI Declassification

      Made available today: a letter from Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, which was sent to President Obama in January of this year and urged him to speed things up in the 9/11 case—chiefly by declassifying additional information regarding the CIA’s long-since-discontinued program of rendition, detention and interrogation.

    • CIA secrecy over detention program threatens 9/11 prosecutions, senators warned Obama
    • U.S. Covert Intervention in Chile: Planning to Block Allende Began Long before September 1970 Election

      Covert U.S. planning to block the democratic election of Salvador Allende in Chile began weeks before his September 4, 1970, victory, according to just declassified minutes of an August 19, 1970, meeting of the high-level interagency committee known as the Special Review Group, chaired by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. “Kissinger asked that the plan be as precise as possible and include what orders would be given September 5, to whom, and in what way,” as the summary recorded Kissinger’s instructions to CIA Director Richard Helms. “Kissinger said we should present to the President an action plan to prevent [the Chilean Congress from ratifying] an Allende victory…and noted that the President may decide to move even if we do not recommend it.” – See more at: http://hnn.us/article/155768#sthash.svf3Lrin.dpuf

    • What Really Happened in Chile

      The CIA, the Coup Against Allende, and the Rise of Pinochet

    • Thailand army chief confirms military coup and suspends constitution
    • A Military Coup in Thailand

      In fact, that’s why America’s Founding Fathers opposed a standing army for the United States. It’s also why President Eisenhower warned the American people about the dangers that the military-industrial complex pose to America’s democratic processes. It’s also why President Truman, thirty days after the Kennedy assassination, authored an op-ed in the Washington Post that talked about the sinister nature of the CIA.

    • A Former Congressman Is Making Explosive Allegations After Allegedly Being Told the ‘Ground Truth’ About Benghazi by Source

      West also said he was told the attackers were with Ansar al-Sharia and government officials are being threatened with their pensions being cut if they speak out about Benghazi.

      As far as why U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi at the time, West claims he was informed that there was a “covert weapons scheme going on in Libya, Benghazi.”

      “We had been supplying radical Islamists with weapons against Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi, effectively supplying the enemy and destabilizing that country,” he added.

      “And it seems that there was a CIA weapons buy-back program, the aim of which was to ship the retrieved weapons out of Libya through Turkey, and to the Islamist forces in Syria.”

      West apparently believes in his source enough to allege Benghazi will “make Iran-Contra look like Romper Room.” However, due to the unanswered questions about the source, it’s impossible to verify the claims at this time.

    • Elias Groll: How much economic espionage is too much?

      Those were the words not of an aggressive Chinese spy, but none other than Stansfield Turner, the Carter-era CIA director, who in 1992 argued that the United States should more aggressively carry out intelligence operations aimed at securing America’s leading economic position in the world.

      If it weren’t for matters of patriotism, the former CIA director probably wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at allegations of Chinese spying unveiled by a Pennsylvania grand jury and the Department of Justice this week.

      Indeed, the tactics the Obama administration has accused China of using have also been debated at the highest levels of the U.S. government as possible instruments of American power. Other countries  have carried out operations similar to those the Pennsylvania grand jury have accused Chinese spies of carrying out.

    • Robert Gates: Most Countries Conduct Economic Espionage

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Whistleblowers deserve full coverage

      Of course, thanks to Wikileaks this even­ing, we now know the coun­try that Glenn Gre­en­wald redac­ted from his ori­ginal report was Afghanistan.

      Why on earth should the Afgh­anis not be allowed to know the sheer scale of sur­veil­lance they live under? In fact, would many be sur­prised? This is an excel­lent related art­icle, do read.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • At least 21 dead in Vietnam anti-China protests over oil rig

      At least 21 people were killed and nearly 100 injured in Vietnam on Thursday during violent protests against China in one of the deadliest confrontations between the two neighbours since 1979.

      Crowds set fire to industrial parks and factories, hunted down Chinese workers and attacked police during the riots, which have spread from the south to the central part of the country following the start of the protests on Tuesday.

      The violence has been sparked by the dispute concerning China stationing an oil rig in an area of the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam. The two nations have been fighting out a maritime battle over sovereignty and that battle has now seemingly come ashore.

    • Green party support is surging – but the media prefer to talk about Ukip
    • This Ice Sheet Will Unleash a Global Superstorm Sandy That Never Ends

      Glaciologist Richard Alley explains that losing West Antarctica would produce 10 feet of sea level rise in coming centuries. That’s comparable to the flooding from Sandy—but permanent.

    • Why Do So Many Books About Africa Have the Same Cover Design?
    • Meet Jess Spear, the Socialist Climate Scientist Running for the State House

      Sawant and Spear are buddies because she left her scientific research to help run Sawant’s victorious Socialist Alternative campaign for City Council last year. She also spent much of that time as Organizing Director of the $15 Now campaign, which is somehow magically about to pass just a year after it began, to the collective bewilderment of the rest of the United States.

    • Climate Change As a Weapon of Mass Destruction

      Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who—other than a few suckers—could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on. For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.

    • Landmark sites in the US at risk from climate change – in pictures

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Labour Party has tanked in the English council elections

      Labour played the game of negative expectations in a massive way, claiming a net gain of 150 seats would be a victory for them. So far they have a net gain of just 82. But the extraordinary thing is that the BBC have, throughout the Breakfast News period – the largest TV news watch of the day – been unable to add up all the council seats yet. Sky has totaled every single one of the council seats declared overnight, while the BBC has been able to total under half – and the BBC has come up with a Labour net gain of 102. This has enabled the BBC to show a three figure Labour gain on its strapline all morning, and lead every news bulletin: “Major gains for UKIP in English local elections. Labour has also made gains. A poor night for the Conservatives and Lib Dems”.

    • BBC New Labour Orgasm

      The BBC are way behind in their totalizing, and cherry picking the Labour gains. The BBC have consistently been showing about 7% of all seats contested as Labour gains. Sky consistently shows under 3% of all seats contested as Labor gains.

    • First Amendment for Whom? Press Fights for Access to Scott Walker John Doe Docs

      The public may be on the cusp of learning more about the two “John Doe” investigations into Scott Walker, his associates, and groups that spent millions to get him elected.

      On May 21, the Wisconsin judge in the now-closed 2010-2013 “John Doe I” investigation into Walker’s County Executive during his 2010 run for governor ordered the release of all records gathered in the probe that pertain to county business. That probe resulted in six convictions for Walker aides and associates, including for political fundraising on the taxpayer’s dime. Now, the decision about what records to release rests with Walker’s successor as County Executive, Chris Abele.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • LG Will Take The ‘Smart’ Out Of Your Smart TV If You Don’t Agree To Share Your Viewing And Search Data With Third Parties

      LG certainly feels it has the right to do this. In fact, it makes no secret of this in its long Privacy Policy — a document that spends more time discussing the lack thereof, rather than privacy itself. The opening paragraph makes this perfectly clear.

      [...]

      LG seems very concerned that Smart TV owners won’t allow it to provide them with “relevant ads.” This focus on advertising might give one the impression that a Smart TV is subsidized by ad sales, rather than paid for completely by the end user.

      When LG was caught sending plaintext data on files stored on customers’ USB devices, it amended its policies and data collection tactics to exclude this data. This happened not on the strength of a customer complaint (in fact, LG told the customer to take it up with the store that sold him the TV) but because the UK government announced its intention to dig into LG’s practices and see if they conformed with the Data Protection Act.

    • DNI James Clapper Says US Intel Community About to Experience Technological Revolution With New Satellites and Advanced Sensors

      COLORADO SPRINGS: The intelligence community is on the verge of “revolutionary” technical advances. Spy satellites and other systems will be able to watch a place or a person for long periods of time and warn intelligence analysts and operatives when target changes its behavior. Satellites and their sensors could be redirected automatically to ensure nothing is missed.

    • NSA surveillance reform bill passes House by 303 votes to 121

      The first legislation aimed specifically at curbing US surveillance abuses revealed by Edward Snowden passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats.

      But last-minute efforts by intelligence community loyalists to weaken key language in the USA Freedom Act led to a larger-than-expected rebellion by members of Congress, with the measure passing by 303 votes to 121.

    • No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald – review
    • A Response to Michael Kinsley

      Do I need to continue to participate in the debate over whether many U.S. journalists are pitifully obeisant to the U.S. government? Did they not just resolve that debate for me? What better evidence can that argument find than multiple influential American journalists standing up and cheering while a fellow journalist is given space in The New York Times to argue that those who publish information against the government’s wishes are not only acting immorally but criminally?

    • Assange names country targeted by NSA’s MYSTIC mass phone tapping program

      The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been recording and storing nearly all domestic and international phone calls from Afghanistan, according to Wikileaks’ front man Julian Assange.

      Wikileaks revealed the name of the country after The Intercept reported Monday that the NSA was actively recording and archiving “virtually every” cellphone call in the Bahamas and one other country under a program called SOMALGET. The Intercept said it did not name the second country because of concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.

    • WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA

      The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the Washington Post and The Intercept (based in the US and published by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar) have censored the name of one of the victim states, which the latter publication refers to as country “X”.

    • With or Without WikiLeaks’ NSA Revelation, Violence Reigns in Afghanistan
    • WikiLeaks names ‘entire’ nation under NSA gaze
    • WikiLeaks Claims NSA Is Recording ‘Nearly All’ of Afghanistan’s Phone Calls
    • New NYT editor spiked NSA spying story

      Mostly lost in the past week’s media gossip around NYT executive editor Jill Abramson’s ouster, and Dean Baquet’s promotion to her role: Baquet is the former LA Times editor who killed the biggest NSA leak pre-Edward Snowden.

    • How the NSA may have tapped Merkel’s phone

      The seven-page secret report by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), seen by Bild newspaper, discusses five possible ways the NSA could have gained access to Merkel’s phone. The story caused outrage in Germany when it came to light in October last year.

    • ​NSA spies on OSCE HQ in Vienna – report
    • NSA Spying In Austria Beyond Unacceptable: Analyst

      The National Security Agency [NSA] has reportedly gained direct access to the fiber optic network linking Vienna, Austria to the Internet, and has been spying on the roughly 17,000 diplomats stationed in the Austrian capital city, where several important international organizations are headquartered, including the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the International Atomic Energy Agency and Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
      Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/us/news/2014_05_24/NSA-Spying-In-Austria-Beyond-Unacceptable-Analyst-9767/

    • Another Former NSA Lawyer Says He Wouldn’t Have Listened To Concerns About The Agency’s Surveillance Programs

      Frontline’s expansive report on the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks (United States of Secrets) has uncovered some rather amazing stuff about the agency’s mindset. The post-9/11 decision to deflect every question or concern with conjecture about how “thousands of lives” will be lost if its programs are rolled back or altered in any way continues to this day — rehashed in every government hearing and set of talking points since the leaks began.

      “Live in fear” is the motto. Every question about domestic surveillance is greeted with nods to its legality and assertions that even acknowledging known facts about the NSA’s programs gives our nation’s enemies the upper hand.

    • Pentagon report: scope of intelligence compromised by Snowden ‘staggering’
    • China responds to NSA tampering with network gear vetting process

      The US government used security concerns to essentially drive Chinese companies out of the American networking marketplace. Now China is doing the same thing, as the Chinese government is planning to require all products sold in the country to pass a “cyber security vetting process,” the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency reported.

    • The NSA wins again. You lose
    • Who Leaked NSA Documents to WikiLeaks?

      Julian Assange’s whistle-blowing group announced plans to publish an NSA report that allegedly could get people killed. The question is: How did they get the documents?

    • NSA panel invites US tech chiefs as witnesses
    • Germany wants Zuckerberg to testify in NSA case – report

      Members of the German parliamentary commission, which is investigating the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) questionable activity, want the heads of US high-tech companies, including Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google, to testify to the Bundestag, writes Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

      In March, the German parliament’s lower house voted to investigate the NSA’s operations in Germany. According to the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA monitored the telephone conversations of Chancellor Angela Merkel and other members of the German political and economic elite.

    • How the NSA Can Get Onto Your Computer

      But as The New York Times and others reported earlier this year, there is a suite of programs, codenamed QUANTUM, which allows the NSA access to a much wider variety of computers.

    • Letter: Americans should be furious over the extent of NSA spying

      Over the past two weeks, I watched the two-part PBS “Frontline” investigation broadcast locally on WNED titled, “The United States of Secrets.” This was an engrossing yet chilling report on the secret NSA spy program that encompasses the intrusions into the privacy of all U.S. citizens as well as foreign entities. This is the program that began after 9/11 under President George W. Bush and has been expanded upon under President Obama.

      I found myself becoming very angry while watching this program, perhaps more for the fact that both presidents continue to mislead and even lie to the American public about the scope of the spying rather than the actual privacy intrusion itself. Yes, many people will say: “Oh, it doesn’t affect me. I have nothing to hide.” But this country was built upon the Constitution and our rights are being trampled under the guise of security from terrorism. Major U.S. Internet and communications providers are cooperating with the NSA in granting access to our emails, phone calls, messages, Skype calls and even our financial transactions.

      I think the thing that may disturb me the most is the silence over this issue from the American public. In my opinion, Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower and should be applauded for his disclosures rather than ostracized and condemned as a criminal. Wake up, America, before it’s too late.

    • Irony alert: Google labels NSA data centre a ‘backup service’

      Irony alert! Google Maps has labelled the now infamous NSA data centre in Utah a “hard drive backup service.”

      While not technically inaccurate, it’s also hardly descriptive.

      The NSA’s data centre in Utah is the focal point of many of the surveillance operations brought to light by the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013. It was popularized after an article in Wired Magazine last year profiled its construction and purpose. It includes four 25,000-square-foot buildings just to hold servers. It has its own power plant and substation. Security is intense and nobody gets close to it without proper clearance.

    • With the NSA Reform Bill, Privacy Is Not on the Menu
    • House of Representatives passes ‘gutted’ NSA surveillance reform
    • House Members Join Hands to Pass ‘Weak’ NSA Reform
    • Feinstein: ‘Open’ to Considering House NSA Reform Bill

      Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said she is willing to consider the surveillance reform bill passed by the House on Thursday, which would end the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection of phone records.

    • Glenn Greenwald: U.S. Corporate Media is “Neutered, Impotent and Obsolete”

      In the final part of our extended interview, Glenn Greenwald reflects on the Pulitzer Prize, adversarial journalism and the corporate media’s response to his reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaked National Security Agency documents. “We knew that once we started publishing not one or two stories, but dozens of stories … that not just the government, but even fellow journalists were going to start to look at what we were doing with increasing levels of hostility and to start to say, ‘This doesn’t actually seem like journalism anymore,’ because it’s not the kind of journalism that they do,” Greenwald says. “It doesn’t abide by these unspoken rules that are designed to protect the government.”

    • We need to know why DHS is an NSA intelligence “customer”, and what that means

      One of the results of the endless propagation of this myth was the creation of so-called “intelligence fusion centers” throughout the United States, initially funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Now sustained by state and local governments, with occasional aid from DHS, fusion centers are staffed by representatives from federal, local, and state agencies, as well as members of private industry. They have cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars over the last ten years, but even though they were set up as anti-terrorism intelligence offices, none has thus far produced any useful information about terrorism.

    • Peter Watts on the Harms of Surveillance

      This is interesting. People accept government surveillance out of fear: fear of the terrorists, fear of the criminals. If Watts is right, then there’s a conflict of fears. Because terrorists and criminals — kidnappers, child pornographers, drug dealers, whatever — is more evocative than the nebulous fear of being stalked, it wins.

    • Edward Snowden is giving his first American TV interview on May 28th

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Open Source Chief at Redhat Hit With Bogus Copyright Claims

        Bogus copyright claims on YouTube are getting more and more prevalent, but they only get exposure when they do damage to high-profile targets. Michael Tiemann is the Chief of Open Source Affairs at Redhat Inc. and apparently he can’t use Creative Commons music in his uploads without being bombarded with copyright claims.

      • Red Square, Moscow
        “Why I’m Voting Pirate” – A Testimony From An Ex-Soviet

        This testimony – “Why I’m Voting Pirate” – was published by Leila Borg, a person who grew up in the Soviet Union but moved to Sweden after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It has been translated to English and reposted here for a wider audience.

05.22.14

Links 23/5/2014: Linux 3.15 RC6, KDE Previews

Posted in News Roundup at 8:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Why are there so few high quality science communicators?

      Well scientists have to take their share of the blame for this, in that if anyone can promote science, it’s them. However speaking as a research scientist I KNOW why communicating science/ debunking pseudoscience (in science circles) is generally seen as a gamma rate objective, typically only pursued by betas.

  • Security

    • eBay Hacked – Will Ask Users to Change Passwords

      eBay announced this morning that they’ve been hacked and that “encrypted passwords and other non-financial data” have been compromised. They’re expected to begin notifying their customer base later today, which will include a suggestion for users to change their passwords. The company says that PayPal, an eBay subsidiary, uses its own servers and was not affected by the attack.

    • Another password scare, billion-dollar duds and Obama’s empty NSA talk

      PayPal did not say why the passwords needed to be changed, and then later the message was removed altogether.

    • eBay hacked, requests all users change passwords

      eBay’s morning just went from bad to worse. The e-commerce site confirmed Wednesday that its corporate network was hacked and a database with users’ passwords was compromised. While eBay says there is no evidence that users’ financial information was accessed in the hack, the company is telling all users to change their passwords.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • CIA Triumph

      It is quite extraordinary to me how very little publicity is being given to the CIA sponsored military coup in Libya, following the same event in Egypt. The Arab Spring was front page headlines. The CIA and Saudi sponsored cooperation to turn it back to the deepest of freezes virtually gets no mention. This is even true of Libya, where we bombed tens of thousands of civilians to a pulp to ensure the changeover of regime, under the guise of installing democracy. The real aim was never democracy, but a neo-con friendly government, which is so much better secured under the auspices of the CIA.

    • Top Iran Terrorist Under CIA Protection in U.S., Book Says

      The senior former Iranian intelligence officer who quarterbacked the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and killed scores of Americans was recently living under CIA protection in the United States, a book being published Tuesday says.

    • Coup leader? CIA asset? Mystery surrounds Libya’s rogue General Haftar

      From alleged connections to the CIA to possible plans to overthrow the government, there is a sense of mystery surrounding Khalifa Haftar, the rogue general whose forces led an attack on the Libyan parliament in Tripoli Sunday.

    • An Ex-CIA Recruit Adds to Libyan Chaos

      This could be the real Benghazi scandal: As Libya’s major cities see some of the worst fighting since 2011, a Libyan general who once defected to the U.S. is leading the charge.

    • Report: CIA blocked U.S. group’s effort to arm Syrian rebels

      The CIA is said to have blocked a plan to supply Western-backed Syrian rebels with up to 70,000 assault rifles for the war against President Bashar Assad.

      The Wall Street Journal said a plan by a private U.S. group to provide Russian-made light weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition to the Free Syrian Army was foiled by the CIA.

    • CIA Can Keep Bay Of Pigs History Secret, DC Circ. Says
    • Appeals Court: CIA Can Keep Bay of Pigs History Secret

      In a 2-1 split ruling, the US Court of Appeals has decided that the CIA can keep its Bay of Pigs invasion history report secret on the grounds that the history only exists in a “draft” form, and was never marked as a final document.

    • CIA denies its agents were killed in eastern Ukraine
    • CIA, FBI Agents Dying for Illegal Junta in Ukraine
    • White House will release memo that justifies using drones to kill U.S. citizens

      After receiving a court order in April to reveal a secret memo that justifies drone strikes to kill U.S. citizens who live overseas, the Obama administration has announced that it will not appeal the order and will comply with the request. The announcement came as the Senate votes on President Obama’s nomination of David Barron—the author of the memo—to the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

    • Guest Post: David Barron and the OTHER missing memos

      When the Administration first released the Awlaki memo to all members of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, Dianne Feinstein revealed that the Committee had never seen at least 5 other OLC memos pertaining to targeted killing. In her statement, she cited 9 total memos, while reporting at the time suggested there might be 11 (and therefore 7 memos even the Intelligence Committees had not seen).

      Just after that disclosure, the National Journal provided some description of what might be in the memos withheld even from the Intelligence Committees: “secret protocols with foreign governments, including Pakistan and Yemen,” the two countries where the US is known to have used signature strikes. Members of the House Judiciary Committee have twice asked for memos pertaining to signature strikes; and John McCain has posed questions about them as well.

    • Drone Memo Author Nears Senate OK as Federal Judge

      Bolstered by the promised public release of a secret legal memo, Senate Democrats are ready to approve a top federal judgeship for a former Obama administration official who helped formulate the justification for the drone killings of suspected American terrorists overseas.

      The Senate was expected Thursday to approve David Barron to join the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Boston.

    • AP sources: Justice Dept. to reveal drone memo
    • Senate Backs Judge Pick Who Wrote Drone Memos
    • Activists Walk Across Georgia in Critique of Drones

      The 120-mile walk had begun eight days earlier at the gates of Ft. Benning. Drones researched and developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) Research Institute are then tested at the Fort Benning Maneuver Battle Lab through a project federally funded by the U.S. Army Threat Systems Management Office.

    • Why I Don’t Want to See the Drone Memo

      And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us a secret memo that gets us out of the bit about Thou-shalt-not-kill.

      And, lo, as I was driving home from the committee hearing I was pulled over for speeding, and I said unto the officer, “I’ve got a memo that lets me speed. Would you like to see it?” and he said, “No thank you, and not your grocery list or your diary either.”

      Transparency in drone murders has been a demand pushed by U.N. lawyers and pre-vetted Congressional witnesses, and not by the victims’ families. Nobody asks for transparency in child abuse or rape. “Oh, have you got a memo that explains how aliens commanded you to kill and eat those people? Oh, well that’s all right then.”

      Seriously, what the filibuster?

      I don’t want to see the memo that David Barron wrote “legalizing” the killing of U.S. citizens with drone strikes, after which (or is it beforehand?) I’ll decide whether he should be a federal judge.

    • Rand Paul to Filibuster Pro-Drone Lawyer’s Judgeship

      The Los Angeles Times is reporting: “President Obama’s Justice Department will release a long-sought secret document laying out the legal basis for using drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorist activities abroad, administration officials confirmed Tuesday.

    • After 21 requests, Obama administration coming clean about drone policy

      Faced with the threat the U.S. Senate would block judicial nominees, the Obama administration announced this week it would release the so-called “drone memos” outlining the supposed legal rationale for using drones to attack and kill American citizens.

      The “most transparent administration in history” just needed to be asked 22 different ways.

    • Gordon Campbell on New Zealand’s role in the US drone programme

      So, thanks to our membership of the Five Eyes network, the GCSB spy agency has been supplying information on “persons of interest” in Afghanistan (at least) that may be used for targeting them in US drone strikes. At his post-Cabinet press conference yesterday, Prime Minister John Key said that he did not know how, or for what purposes, the information that New Zealand supplies to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan is being used. He did however confirm that GCSB-supplied information had not been used to target the New Zealand citizen Daryl Jones, killed by a drone strike in Yemen last November. (How Key could be so sure when he claimed not to know the purposes for which ISAF uses the data that we supply, was left unclear.) Key would not confirm whether any other New Zealanders had been killed by drone operations.

    • Key ‘comfortable’ with occasional drone mistake

      Prime Minister John Key admits drones occasionally hit the wrong targets and kill innocent civilians, but he’s comfortable with New Zealand’s indirect involvement in the programme.

      The Government Communications Security Bureau doesn’t give the United States information for the express purpose of carrying out strikes, Mr Key said on Firstline this morning – but it does pass on intelligence that could be useful.

      “There are environments like Afghanistan where our people have gathered information, and that’s information on people of interest to our ISAF partners, and we’ve passed that information onto ISAF partners – and one of those is the United States – and ISAF have passed that information on,” says Mr Key.

    • Key admits role in illegal drone wars

      John Key today admitted that the GCSB is supporting the US state sanctioned assassination programme. He said that the GCSB provided information to the United States that was used to conduct drone strikes in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere.

    • Yemen’s Chaos

      If women’s rights in Yemen were of real international concern, say locals, health funding would not remain a meager 4 percent of the government’s budget, leaving little money to provide primary health care and nutrition, and nothing for reproductive health. The development community would be working to combat female illiteracy (which hovers at a staggering 70 percent) and helping women set up small businesses and monitor the use of money — which we know women are better at than men — to cut down on rampant corruption. Since social capital remains strong among women, and they are providing much of the remaining glue in this unstable society, this is where the West should invest.

    • Blood on the hands of our spy agency

      Greg Dawes condemns New Zealand’s involvement with drone strike ”murders”.

      Almost a year ago, I drew readers’ attention to the fact our security services may be spying on New Zealanders.

      Sadly, it now seems they may be doing much worse.

      They may be complicit in extra-judicial killings, acts that violate principles of natural justice and, almost certainly, international law.

      If they are supporting such actions – and the prime minister has all but admitted it – our security services have blood on their hands.

      What I am talking about is the involvement of the GSCB, the Government’s electronic spy agency, in the drone killing programme that for some years has been undertaken by the United States.

    • Rand Paul: ‘Drone judge’ betrayed Bill of Rights, promotes ‘vigilantism’

      Declaring that a Harvard University law professor nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals violated the Bill of Rights by penning a memo justifying the administration’s drone killing of Americans overseas, Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday vowed to fight David Barron’s appointment.

      “I cannot and will not support a lifetime appointment of someone who believes it is okay to kill an American citizen not involved in combat without a trial,” Paul said in a Senate floor speech in opposing Barron’s nomination to the Boston court, considered a sure bet.

    • Obama’s revamp of anti-terror policies stalls

      In a Senate hearing Wednesday, irate lawmakers criticized senior administration officials over the lack of follow-up with one of the strategy’s principal goals: Obama had said he was looking forward to “engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine and ultimately repeal” the nearly 13-year-old congressional authorization to use force against those individuals, groups and nations responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

    • Obama Administration Doesn’t Think It Needs Authorization from Congress to Wage War Anywhere in World

      Does the President have to have a statute authorizing the use of military force in order to legally wage war against terrorist groups that may or may not pose an imminent threat to the United States? Or can the President simply target, capture and kill whomever in whatever terrorist group wherever, even if Congress has not authorized action?

    • Paul, Wyden Clash Over Barron Nomination, Use of Drones Abroad

      “It’s unfortunate that it took Mr. Barron’s nomination for the Justice Department to make these memos public,” Wyden said. “I believe that every American has the right to know when their government believes it is allowed to kill them.”

    • Death to the Death Penalty
    • Key won’t say if more Kiwis killed in drone strikes

      He has also rubbished claims by a US journalist the country’s spies likely provided information which led to a drone strike which killed a New Zealander.

    • Drone strikes justified – Key

      Drone strikes are justified – even if innocent civilians are mistakenly killed, Prime Minister John Key says.

      Key confirmed yesterday that intelligence collected by the Government Communications Security Bureau might be passed to the controversial US programme.

    • Drone strike leaves 4 Taliban militants dead in Kunar province

      At least four Taliban militants were killed following a drone strike in eastern Kunar province of Afghanistan, local officials said Wednesday.

    • The entire basis for Obama’s drone strategy may be wrong

      The basic premise of the Obama Administration’s drone program is that decapitation, the killing of a terrorist organization’s top leadership, works. Killing al-Qaeda’s leadership should, in theory, limit the organization’s ability to plot attacks on the US and its allies.

      But what if that’s not true? That’s the core finding of a just-published study in the prestigious journal International Security. In it, Georgia Tech professor Jenna Jordan takes a look at the history of targeting terrorist leaders and draws lessons for the fight against al-Qaeda. According to Jordan, believing that targeted killing can actually weaken al-Qaeda means assuming al-Qaeda depends on a group of charismatic leaders. But that’s wrong, and that mistaken assumption has led the Obama Administration to pursue a strategy centered on targeting al-Qaeda’s leadership with drones when it’d really be better to cut down on targeted killings altogether.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Wikileaks and The Intercept clash over censorship – spot the real media hero

      When whistleblowers clash over whether information should be censored from the public then alarm bells should be ringing in the heads of all free thinkers. In this particular instance we are talking about an organisation headed by a political prisoner and another spearheaded by an acclaimed prize winning journalist.

      Of course we are talking about two giants in the whistleblowing community – Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald – both of whom work for very different organisations.

      Assange, who heads up Wikileaks, has been a political prisoner, held without charge, for more than three years, including almost two years in the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Wikileaks has also been treated as a pariah organisation cut off from the usual avenues of international funding from would be donors.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Nasty surprise for some student loan borrowers

      Students who take out private loans to pay for college could face a nasty surprise if their co-signer dies or files for bankruptcy: The lender may suddenly demand the loan be paid in full—or even worse, put that loan in default—even though all payments are being made on time.

  • Censorship

    • Facebook‘s censorship strategy under fire over removal of lesbian kiss snap

      Facebook’s censorship rules have been thrust into the spotlight after a seemingly innocuous photo of two women kissing was removed on the grounds that it ‘violated the community’s standards on nudity and pornography’.

    • Science fiction and the law: free speech, censorship, privacy and surveillance
    • Bromley: Lessons in school censorship

      Students learn so much in fighting for their First Amendment rights. They learn the extent of their resolve. They learn that the ideals of the Bill of Rights extolled in the classroom aren’t so revered by school administrators intent on protecting their fiefdoms. And they learn that there’s nothing like a swimsuit issue to boost circulation.

      [...]

      Fond du Lac High School’s student newspaper, the Cardinal Columns, won multiple awards this year, including a prize for a recent article about rape victims at the school. After publication of the piece, titled “The Rape Joke,” administrators enacted oversight guidelines. Let it be known that award-winning journalism will not go unchecked at Fond du Lac High.

    • Twitter’s selective censorship of tweets may be the best option, but it’s still censorship

      Twitter’s ability to block certain tweets or users from being seen in specific countries, a somewhat Orwellian feature it calls the “country-withheld content” tool, seems to be getting more popular, according to the Chilling Effects clearinghouse, which tracks such things: tweets and/or users are now being blocked in Pakistan as well as Turkey, and a pro-Ukrainian account is apparently unavailable to users who try to view it from inside Russia, at the request of the government.

    • Twitter Steps Down From the Free Speech Party

      In 2012, when Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis—as opposed to taking it down across the entire Twitter network—EFF defended that decision as the least terrible option. After all, when a company refuses to comply with an official government request, the government’s response is often to block an entire platform.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Senate review of secret CIA detention and interrogation program “shocking”, said Senator Feinstein

      “The purpose of this review was to uncover the facts behind this secret program, and the results were shocking. The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never again be allowed to happen.

    • Feinstein takes on the CIA

      Future American historians will marvel at how long the CIA engaged in such utter unconstitutional lawlessness as the torture of its captives and drone-plane executions of alleged terrorists — including U.S. citizens — without trials, using “kill lists” provided by President Barack Obama.

    • Federal Judge: Pennsylvania’s Law Banning Same-Sex Marriage Is Unconstitutional

      A federal judge has ruled that Pennsylvania’s state law banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, bringing the total number of state marriage amendments to be overturned in the federal courts over the past year to over a dozen. Pennsylvania is one of the five states that does not have marriage equality but only has a state law banning it — not a state constitutional amendment. The decision did not include a stay, which means couples could possibly begin applying for marriages immediately immediately. Pennsylvania law, however requires a 3-day waiting period between when an application is filed and when a license can be issued, which could prevent any marriages from being finalized should the 3rd Circuit issue an emergency stay.

    • AT&T hacker invoices Justice Dept. for time spent in federal prison

      A computer hacker who was released early from prison last month due to a federal appeals court decision is demanding that the Justice Department pay him for what he calls acts of fraud and violence committed by the United States government.

      On Tuesday, 28-year-old Andrew Auernheimer of Fayetteville, Arkansas published an open letter addressed to the members of the New Jersey Direct Court and US Department of Justice who oversaw his 2012 conviction for computer hacking and identity fraud vacated last month by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

    • AT&T hacker wants government to pay him $13M

      Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer, whose struggles with federal prosecutors have fueled calls for reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), wants the government to pay him $13 million for taking away his freedom for the past three years.

    • Some Kids Get Charged Twice for One Crime

      A little-known aspect of the juvenile justice system requires young offenders to pay for their own prosecution and incarceration.

    • Fmr CIA spy criticises US policy to ban use of vaccination programs as cover for spy operations
    • White House: CIA has ended use of vaccine programmes

      The CIA has ended the use of vaccine programmes in its spying operations amid concerns for the safety of health workers, the White House has said.

      In a letter to US public health schools, a White House aide said the CIA stopped such practices in August.

      The CIA used a fake vaccine programme to try to find Osama Bin Laden before US special forces killed him in 2011.

    • CIA will not use vaccination schemes for spying, says White House official
    • CIA To Stop Using Vaccination Schemes As Cover
    • Missing MH370: Ex-Malaysian PM hints at CIA conspiracy and claims ‘someone is hiding something’

      The former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, has accused the CIA of possibly knowing the whereabouts of missing flight MH370.

      Dr Mahathir says that someone is hiding something because if the plane’s GPS system failed then Boeing or the US government agency would know why.

    • Missing MH370: CIA ‘Withholding Information About Flight Disappearance’ says Ex-Malysia PM Mahathir Mohamad
    • Missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: ‘CIA hiding something’ claims former leader Dr Mahathir Mohamad

      The former Prime Minister of Malaysia has accused a US intelligence agency and the Boeing aircraft firm of concealing the whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which has been missing since 8 March.

    • Historian: Espionage Not Just for CIA, KGB Anymore

      Get ready to live in a world without privacy or secrecy, warns historian Richard Aldrich, who specializes in intelligence gathering and espionage.

      Speaking at the PINC 15 conference in Amsterdam, Aldrich said it’s not just government agencies that are spying on us now.

      According to Wired, Aldrich believes the big intelligence gatherers are now airlines, banks, Internet providers, and others.

    • The Guantánamo “Suicides” Revisited: Did CIA Hide Deaths of Tortured Prisoners at Secret Site?

      In one of the great mysteries of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, three prisoners, two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen, died the night of June 9, 2006. Authorities at Guantánamo said the three men — Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, Salah Ahmed al-Salami and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi — had killed themselves. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, described their deaths as an “act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

    • Report Explores Possible CIA Cover-Up At Guantanamo

      “If we look at the original report that was released some years ago, about four years ago now, it gave a narrative of how these three prisoners committed suicide in their cells simultaneously and in a rather strange way,” Horton explained. “When we reviewed that account with well-known medical examiners, they all had the same conclusion, which was: impossible. No one has ever committed suicide that way and it’s pretty much impossible to do.”

    • Torture Report for Public Isn’t Ready, CIA Says

      On the hook to release a redacted version of the so-called torture report, the CIA has asked a federal judge for more time to review the study by the Senate Intelligence Committee that harshly criticizes its interrogation techniques.

    • Stop revolving door between Human Rights Watch and the C.I.A.

      Why did Human Rights Watch select a former CIA official to sit on its advisory committee for eight years?

      That’s a question two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, a former UN assistant secretary general, a UN special rapporteur, and over 100 scholars are asking HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth in an open letter. They note that Miguel Díaz, a CIA analyst in the 1990s, served as an advisor on human rights to HRW Americas from 2003-11 before moving back into government, as a State Department “interlocutor between the intelligence community and non-government experts.”

    • Wyoming drafts bill to reintroduce firing squads for executions

      Wyoming has become the latest death penalty state to consider a return to the firing squad, as concern rises over the scarcity and secrecy surrounding medical drugs used in lethal injections.

      State legislators have begun to draft a bill that they plan to introduce in Wyoming’s next legislative session that would reintroduce executions at the point of a gun. The move was prompted, elected members said, by the drought in lethal injection drugs caused by a pharmaceutical boycott of US death chambers.

      The Wyoming move adds to a mounting sense of crisis across the US in the practice of the death penalty, which is arguably more profound that at any time since a federal moratorium was imposed by the supreme court in Furman V Georgia in 1972. Utah is also considering reviving the firing squad, which it abolished for all death sentences handed down since 2004, and states including Missouri have also debated the return of the gas chamber.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Lawmakers to FCC: stop mulling net neutrality reclassification

      Republican legislators don’t even want the Federal Communications Commission to think about reclassifying broadband as a utility—a route the regulator could take in order to reinstate net neutrality rules.

    • The Net Neutrality Hysteria

      Mania is peaking over the “open Internet,” but the last thing you should want is the FCC getting involved.

      [...]

      The public can find a lot of ways to punish a corporation that abuses its privileges. This situation should not be escalated to the point that the FCC has anything to do with it.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Son of ACTA pours fuel on IP trade fire

      Activists are mobilising against another international trade treaty, with the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) negotiations between America and the EU starting to cause angst.

    • European Milk Board rejects TTIP agreement

      European milk producers are calling for the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement negotiations between the USA and the EU to cease.

      It says: “The negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – the TTIP – are causing the European Milk Board (EMB) great concern.

    • Copyrights

      • These five MEP candidates care about your digital right

        The European Elections are upon us and several groups are keen to see as many pro-digital rights MEPs elected as possible. A campaign called WePromise.eu is encouraging MEP candidates to support a charter of 10 digital rights principles, and in returning is encouraging citizens to pledge their votes to those candidates.

        Wired.co.uk has picked out five MEPs and wannabes who have shown real dedication to supporting digital rights with input from the Open Rights Group, which is supporting the WePromise campaign, and the Pirate Party, which has many of its candidates signed up to the charter.

      • Supreme Court Rejects Application of Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde

        The Swedish Supreme Court has rejected an application by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde to have his case reopened. Based on new EU rulings, Sunde’s legal team argued that he cannot be held responsible for copyright infringements carried out by users of The Pirate Bay, but the Court didn’t see any reason to reopen the case.

      • Shameful: American Society Of Civil Engineers Issues DMCA Notices Against Academics For Posting Their Own Research

        As we’ve pointed out many times in the past, the originally stated purpose of copyright law was to encourage the sharing of scientific knowledge for the purpose of learning. The first copyright act in the US was actually entitled “for the encouragement of learning.” Yet, as copyright law has evolved, it’s frequently been used to make learning much more difficult. Just a few months ago, we covered how publishing giant Elsevier had started to demand that academics who had published their own research on Academia.edu take down those works. As we noted then, while big journal publishers often demand that academics hand over their copyright in order to get published, they usually would either grant an exception for an academic to post their own work, or at least look the other way when the academics would do so. And many, many academics obviously decided to post their own papers to the web.

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