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08.09.15

Links 9/8/2015: GNOME Search for Executive Director, Many Distro Screenshots, Linux 4.2 RC 6

Posted in News Roundup at 7:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • A Look At Daala’s Git Repository, The Lead Developers & Code Count

    While the Daala video coding format backed primarily by Xiph.Org and Mozilla isn’t ready for mainstream use yet, looking at its Git repository does at least reveal some environmental data to discuss.

    While poking around the Daala Git repository this week in looking at the state of affairs, I decided to run GitStats on the code-base for seeing the pace of code entering the mainline code repository, etc. This was mainly done out of pure curiosity and figured the stats would be of interest to other Phoronix readers too. The Daala repository has 277 files made up of 124k lines of code that as of today was done via 1,432 commits and has seen contributions by 47 authors.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice, and the ODF legacy

      Common wisdom has it that sleeping dogs are better kept snoring and I tend to agree. I’m going to do what may seem to be understood as the contrary. I believe it is not the case, as prejudice is something that is hard to fight and tends to stick around dark corners and circles of people with little knowledge of the matter.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • LibreOffice 5, Creative Commons writes the White House, and more news

      In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the release of LibreOffice 5, a personal food computer, Creative Common’s open letter the President Obama, and more.

    • Open Data

      • Open data initiative to give true picture of election process

        The National Democratic Institute is has announced the launch of the Open Election Data Initiative. The goal of the initiative is to ensure that citizen groups have access to election data that can give a true picture of an election process, including how candidates are certified, how and which voters are registered, what happens on election day, whether results are accurate, and how complaints are resolved.

    • Open Access/Content

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Watch John Oliver Explain Why Washington, DC, Should Be the 51st State

    On Sunday, Last Week Tonight took on the issue of restricted voting rights for Washington D.C. residents, despite the fact they pay federal taxes and have a larger population than some entire states such as Vermont and Wyoming. Even the Dalai Lama once called the situation “quite strange.”

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Researchers Hack into a Linux-Powered Self-Aiming Sniper Rifle

      Two researchers, Michael Auger and Runa Sandvik, will present today, at the Black Hack conference in Las Vegas, their recent findings into the world of computerized weapons security.

    • OPM Wins Pwnie for Most Epic Fail at Black Hat Awards Show
    • DefCon ProxyHam Talk Disappears but Technology is No Secret

      Part of the drama at any Black Hat or DefCon security conference in any given year usually revolves around a talk that is cancelled for some mysterious reason, typically over fears that it could reveal something truly disruptive. Such is the case in 2015 at DefCon with a talk called ProxyHam, which was supposed to reveal technology that could enable an attacker to wireless proxy traffic over long distances, hiding their true location.

    • A chat with Black Hat’s unconventional keynote speaker

      In 2010, Black Hat had its first female keynote, Jane Holl Lute, who served at the time as the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Lute’s first comment about the nature of cyberspace set the tone for her keynote, which was, in characteristic DHS cybersecurity style, tone-deaf to attendee levels of expertise.

    • Uneasy detente between Def Con hackers and ‘feds’

      That led founder Jeff Moss to call for a “cooling off period” during which “feds” avoided coming near the annual conference in Las Vegas.

    • Design flaw in Intel processors opens door to rootkits, researcher says

      A design flaw in the x86 processor architecture dating back almost two decades could allow attackers to install a rootkit in the low-level firmware of computers, a security researcher said Thursday. Such malware could be undetectable by security products.

    • Why Your Mac Is More Vulnerable to Malware Than You Think

      The attack would enable a hacker to remotely target computers with malware that would both go undetected by security scanners and would afford the attacker a persistent hold on a system, even when it undergoes firmware and operating system updates. Because firmware updates require the assistance of the existing firmware to install, any malware in the firmware could block updates from being installed or write itself to a new update. Zetter reports that the only way to eliminate malware that’s embedded in a computer’s main firmware would be to re-flash the chip that contains the firmware.

    • ‘Zero-day’ stockpiling puts us all at risk

      The recent dump of emails from Hacking Team sheds new light on the extent of government involvement in the international market for zero-days. Rather than disclosing these vulnerabilities to software makers, so that they can be fixed, government agencies buy and then stockpile zero-days.

    • What’s wrong with the web? — authentication

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Outsourcing the Kill Chain: Eleven Drone Contractors Revealed

      Bureau reporters Crofton Black and Abigail Fielding-Smith name eleven companies that have won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to plug a shortage in personnel needed to analyze the thousands of hours of streaming video gathered daily from the remotely piloted aircraft that hover over war zones around the world: Advanced Concepts Enterprises, BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, Intrepid Solutions, L-3 Communications, MacAulay-Brown, SAIC, Transvoyant, Worldwide Language Resources and Zel Technologies. (see details below)

    • US Drone Strikes Kill Seven in North Waziristan

      According to officials familiar with the situation, US drones fired a pair of missiles against a house in Datta Khel today, destroying the building and killing at least seven people. Two others were wounded.

    • Brian Terrell: US Drone Campaign Needs To Be Acknowledged A Failure – Interview

      The assassination drone campaign on the tribal areas of Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan has been one of the controversial plans of the US government in the recent years.

      The White House, State Department and Pentagon officials maintain that the drone attacks are aimed at targeting the Al-Qaeda terrorists in these countries and crushing their strongholds; however, figures indicate that the majority of the victims of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles dispatched to the region are civilians. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recently revealed that between 2004 and 2015, there have been 418 drone strikes against Pakistan alone, resulting in the killing of 2,460 to 3,967 people, including at least 423 civilians. That’s while some sources put the number of civilian casualties in Pakistan during the 11-year period at 962.

    • US often does not know who drone attacks kill

      “Signature strikes” are drone attacks based solely on a target’s behaviour with the identity of the target not known. Sometimes such an attack may hit a high value target but at other times they may kill innocent civilians.

    • July Drone Report: Casualties Spike in Afghanistan, Strikes Increase in Somalia

      American drone strikes killed hundreds of people in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia in July, according to a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based nonprofit. The TBIJ produces monthly reports about highly secretive U.S. drone operations around the globe as part of its goal to provide the public “with the knowledge and facts about the way in which important institutions in our society operate, so that they can be fully informed citizens.”

    • US-Backed Corporations Make Huge Profits From Drones Killing Innocents

      Unmanned, remotely-operated drones supplied by private corporations are hugely profitable and attractive to those without conscience in the US government, activist Melinda Pillsbury-Foster told Sputnik.

    • One year on, drone attacks against ISIS increasing

      Drones appear to have an expanding role in the fight against Islamic State, although it’s unclear what impact they are having on the war itself.

      One year after President Barack Obama authorized airstrikes against ISIS targets, those airstrikes by the U.S. and its coalition partners, including Canada, have killed 15,000 ISIS supporters, the coalition claims.

    • UK hopes drones buzz will prompt lift-off

      Arpas says it has about 200 members, mostly small businesses and individuals, who form the country’s enthusiastic cottage industry. However, Britain’s two big aerospace groups, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce, are also developing drones for commercial purposes.

    • US military launches first Syria drone strike from base in Turkey
    • US drone bombs IS target after taking off from Turkey: Turkish official

      The U.S. military launched its first strike against Islamic State from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, the Pentagon said, reflecting a deepening security relationship between Washington and Ankara in the region.

    • U.S. drone strikes from Turkey
    • Hawke hones his craft as drone launcher in ‘Good Kill’

      Bold, honest and disturbing, “Good Kill,” in its own modest fashion, is one of the most memorable American films I’ve seen thus far in 2015.

    • Defence Minister Simon Coveney accused of involving Ireland in the international arms trade

      Mr Coveney has revealed plans to open the country up as a “testing zone” for “advanced military and weapons guidance systems, including drones, submarine drones and other such high-tech hardware”

    • ‘Iraq airstrikes won’t defeat ISIS, only kill civilians’ – anti-war group

      Peace activists have condemned the British government’s campaign of airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq, insisting continued bombing of the region will fail to defeat the terror group and lead to further civilian fatalities.

    • Air Force Moves Aggressively On Lasers

      All branches of the military really want laser weapons. But they don’t all want them for the same missions. What struck me after a recent conference here was how differently the US Air Force is approaching lasers.

    • Obama: Choice over Iran Nuclear Deal is Between Diplomacy and War
    • To press for Iran nuclear deal, Obama invokes Iraq war

      President Obama lashed out at critics of the Iran nuclear deal on Wednesday, saying many of those who backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq now want to reject the Iran accord and put the Middle East on the path toward another war.

      Obama also said that if Congress rejects the deal, it will undermine America’s standing in global diplomacy, leaving the United States isolated and putting Israel in even greater peril.

      While calling the nuclear accord with Iran “the strongest nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated,” Obama also seemed to turn the vote on the deal into a referendum on the U.S. invasion of Iraq a dozen years ago, a decision he portrayed as the product of a “mind-set characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy.”

    • Address legitimate injustice first, then see if the ideologues need to be bombed

      The unprecedented power of the internet is staggering. Asked by Nick Dry, prosecuting, why he needed so many rounds of ammunition, Lyburd replied glibly: “I was watching videos on YouTube and the Americans, they have thousands. You can shoot 100 rounds in a few seconds.” Lyburd is aged just nineteen, as young as some of the recruits attracted to Daesh.

      America legislators have for decades allowed so many high school shootings to occur that a teenager on the other side of the Atlantic felt inspired to play copy-cat. Has America just exported its first terrorist ideology?

      The use of social media in the case of Daesh and Lyburd is telling. America’s pervasive gun lobby is led by establishment organisations like the National Rifle Association and enhanced by grass-roots nationalist militia groups. Together, these quasi-political gun ownership clans have populated entire YouTube channels with educational videos; filled Twitter and Instagram feeds with gun pornography; exploited Reddit pages; and even launched online and printed magazines. The US government is involved in spreading gun culture, with the Pentagon gifting hundreds of millions of dollars each year to Hollywood, an asset that Obama has said he believes is part of American foreign policy.

    • Indian forces kill 2 Pakistanis, injure 5 in unprovoked firing
    • Do not kill terrorists, take them alive

      Who were the militants who attacked the Dinanagar police station in Gurdaspur district? What were their aims and ideology? How many of their comrades are waiting for another chance to attack? How much help are they getting from the Pakistani authorities, and what other sources of support and finance do they enjoy?

    • Kenya: Obama in Kenya

      Yet although he bears “our skin”, Obama represents the power of those who seek to dominate us by destroying our self-confidence. Therefore his speeches reinforce a pattern of contempt that his predecessors have purveyed for decades. Thus, although his speech in Nairobi (compared to Accra in 2009) was less of headmaster lecturing his pupils and recognised the transformative changes taking place on our continent due to our initiatives, he still castigated us. His comments on political violence and corruption in Kenya continued the tradition of lecturing to us. Why does America feel obliged to comment on how African nations govern themselves, something he does not do in Western Europe? Who gives Obama and the US the moral right to lecture to Kenyans about their governance?

    • Barack Obama’s hypocrisy in Africa

      On January 20, 2017, Barack Obama will leave the presidency. Black people capable of critical thought will have many reasons to breathe sighs of relief. They will no longer have to submit to condescending lectures directed exclusively at them.

      From the moment he ran for president, Obama has harangued Black people on a wide variety of issues. It doesn’t matter if his audience is made up of church congregants, graduating students, or Kenyan dignitaries. Every Black person unlucky enough to be in his vicinity risks being treated like a deadbeat dad, career criminal or Cousin Pookie, Obama’s own imaginary Willie Horton.

      During his trip to East Africa the president chastened Kenyans about gay rights, domestic violence, genital cutting, forced marriage and equal rights for women. He went on and on with no mention of how well his country lives up to any accepted standards of human rights

    • On the Passing of Abdullah Abdullatif Alkadi and a Postscript on Charlie Hebdo

      An intriguing aspect of Muslim culture is that murders are rarely committed over wealth. While there may be theft in Muslim countries, theft that involves murder is almost unheard of. The idea of killing someone over something as ephemeral as a car or money or a cell phone is a rarity (except perhaps in war-torn countries where all civil society has broken down). Murder in Muslim societies tends to be motivated by political issues but more often by a misguided sense of honor. This was the case earlier this month in France, where clearly deluded and uneducated men from the ghettos of Paris, after rediscovering their faith, felt compelled to take their misperception of Islamic law into their own hands in order to “uphold the honor” of their prophet who, they believed, was being denigrated by the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo. Without a doubt, such murders are criminal and wrong, but they can be rationally understood within the context of a society that holds the sanctity of prophets, those men of God, above all else.

    • Death of Taliban’s Mullah Omar could boost support for Islamic State
    • Taliban confirms Mullah Omar’s death, succession

      China has expressed its backing for Pakistan and other parties to “push for peace and reconciliation” in the war-torn Afghanistan, days after the second round of peace talks were put off following news of Taliban chief Mullah Omar’s death.

    • Yemen government-in-exile says base once used for U.S. drones retaken

      Clashes persisted around Yemen’s largest air base Tuesday, a day after its declared capture by forces loyal to the country’s exiled President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, military officials said.

    • In victory for activists, drone manufacturers linked to Gaza war cross-examined in Scottish courts

      After a gruelling fourteen day trial, a group of activists known as the Thales Ten,* received their verdict in Glasgow Sheriff Court last week. Five were convicted, and five acquitted, of the crime of breach of the peace.

      The group scaled onto the roof and blockaded entrances to the Thales UK factory on 23rd September, 2014 in response to the war in Gaza. They hung a fifty foot Palestine flag and several banners. One read: ‘Another Scotland is Possible: Stop Arming Israel’. Another made the connection between the French arms company Thales, Israel’s Elbit Systems, and the UK Ministry of Defence.

    • U.S.-led strikes kill 459 civilians in past year in Iraq, Syria, report finds

      U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria have likely killed at least 459 civilians over the past year, a report by an independent monitoring group said Monday.

      The report by Airwars, a project aimed at tracking international airstrikes targeting the terrorists, said it believed 57 specific strikes killed civilians and caused 48 suspected “friendly fire” deaths. It said the strikes have killed more than 15,000 Islamic State terrorists.

    • US led air strikes on Isis ‘likely to have killed hundreds of civilians’ says independent monitoring group

      An independent monitoring group says some bombings carried out by the US-led coalition targeting Isis are likely to have killed hundreds of civilians.

      The report by Airwars, a project aimed at tracking the international airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group, says it counted at least 459 suspected civilian fatalities from airstrikes it believes the coalition carried out in Iraq and Syria over the last year. It says the same strikes also caused at least 48 suspected “friendly fire” deaths.

    • MH370 probe: Wing fragment did come from missing jet, say French experts

      An aircraft wing fragment washed ashore on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion came from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared more than a year ago with 239 people aboard, experts say.

    • U.S. As Corrupt As Russia, Says Former NSA Exec

      Americans believe that Russia is a corrupt country where everyone from the president to regional governors to government officials are flourishing on bribes. Russia has developed corruption into a “fine art,” says a book titled “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?” written by the University of Miami professor Karen Dawisha.

    • NSA-Japan Spy Scandal, the Passport Revocation Act, ‘Russian Body Bags’

      Finally, we wrap it all up by commenting on the US ‘Institute for Peace’ chairman who said that the Pentagon should arm Kiev in order to create more – quote – “body bags of Russian soldiers”.

    • NSA Pays Utah $1M to Secure Roads to Enormous Super-Secret Data Center

      The National Security Agency paid the state of Utah more than $1 million over 14 months for state troopers to guard the entrance to the agency’s data center near Salt Lake City, according to Utah Highway Patrol records.

    • Records: NSA paid Utah over $1M to police data center roads
    • Officials blame Russia for Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff email hack

      US officials have laid the blame for an attack against the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff unclassified email system firmly on Russia’s doorstep.

      Explaining how the second attack against the Pentagon this year had led to severe restrictions being placed on the network, officials said the work of around 4,000 military and civilian personnel had been disrupted (interestingly, The Register reports that staff were told the service disruption was an expected side effect of a planned system upgrade).

      The latest attack, believed to have occurred on or around 25 July, had originally passed without any fingers being pointed, as evidenced by Pentagon spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Valerie Henderson’s statement to Reuters…

    • Army Entertainment Liaison Office: Watch More TV! The Freedom Of Our Nation Depends On Your Contribution!

      Generally speaking, the US Army Entertainment Liaison office believes most of what crosses its desk furthers the Army’s interests. There are lots and lots of supportive assessments contained in the document, with the most common being “Supports Building Resilience” — a phrase that covers everything from military-friendly documentaries to American Idol. Another popular assessment is “Supports Modernizing the Force,” something the Liaison Office has applied to blockbuster franchises like The Avengers.

    • Fight the hysteria about the hack of OPM’s files. It’s probably not a big threat.

      We’re told the OPM hack will have horrific consequences for America. Just as we have been told so many times since WWII, almost always falsely. I expect this too will prove to be a wet firecracker. Here are the reasons why, obvious things few journalists have told you. {1st of 2 posts today.}

    • Former top CIA official arrested at BWI for allegedly trying to bring gun through security
    • Ex-CIA official arrested for allegedly trying to bring gun through BWI security

      A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, a former top CIA official and longtime Baltimore business leader, was arrested at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport on Thursday for allegedly attempting to bring a loaded handgun onto an airplane.

    • Ex-CIA official arrested at airport for allegedly trying to bring gun through security
    • Buzzy Krongard Arrested, Attempted To Bring Loaded Gun Through BWI Security
    • 2 arrested at Maryland airports for gun possession
    • CIA Executive Director: CIA Committed Torture [same person as above]

      Former CIA Executive Director Buzzy Krongard told BBC on Monday that the CIA did engage in torture…

    • Ex-CIA boss admits to BBC Panorama that it tortured

      The CIA tortured terror suspects in its programme of “enhanced interrogation”, the agency’s former executive director, Buzzy Krongard, has admitted to the BBC’s Panorama programme.

    • Former senior CIA official says waterboarding was ‘torture’

      A former top CIA official has reportedly become the most senior agency figure to say he is “comfortable” with using the word “torture” to describe so-called enhanced interrogation techniques deployed against al-Qaeda suspects in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

    • Exclusive: “CIA death squads” – the one thing that could stop Jeremy Corbyn, according to Ken Livingstone

      Outside Camden Town Hall last night, a queue stretched round three sides of the building and along Euston Road. As people began to slowly file into the vast hall, it soon became clear that there was not enough space for the crowd to all fit inside. Teenagers actually began to scale the walls and huddle around windows to look inside.

      The spectacle? The 66-year-old Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn.

      As the crowd swelled at the door, former mayor of London and speaker at the rally, Ken Livingstone arrived.

      On his way into the venue, LondonLovesBusiness caught a few words with Livingstone about Corbyn’s campaign, and discovered that even with the tantalising prospect of a left-wing leader taking power, Livingstone’s sense of humour remains intact.

    • Edward Snowden: U.S. Government Snubs Pardon Plea for CIA Whistleblower Edward Snowden

      Lisa Monaco, the President’s Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, said that Snowden’s move to disclose confidential data has had a grave impact on the security of the state.

    • John Kiriakou: Read this First! Before You Blow the Whistle, Here’s What No One Ever Tells You

      At sentencing, my judge gave me 30 months in prison and three years of probation, and she took away my federal pension. I left for prison believing that was the totality of my punishment. I was wrong.

      One of the first things that happened upon my conviction was that the company with which I had my homeowner’s and auto insurance canceled my policies. They don’t do business with felons, they said. That same week, my credit card company canceled my card and demanded the immediate payment of the balance.

      Then, shortly before my departure for prison, the agency that my wife and I used to hire child care providers also jumped on the bandwagon. They dropped us as clients and left us without anybody to help her care for our three young children while I was away.

    • Obama’s Syria policy is a mess

      Last year, President Obama asked for $500 million to arm and train the Syrian rebels. This year alone, the effort is supposed to train 3,000 soldiers to fight ISIS.

    • Obama’s failed plan to train the Syrian rebels, in one brutal timeline

      President Obama’s big plan to train friendly Syrian rebels has had a really rough few days. The first 60 American-trained Syrian rebels, part of a group called Division 30, finally went onto the battlefield and almost immediately got attacked by al-Qaeda and suffered a humiliating defeat. According to the Guardian, al-Qaeda fighters killed five US-trained rebels, wounded 18, and kidnapped seven, including the unit’s commander. Half of the American-trained fighters were put out of commission within weeks of hitting the ground.

    • United States to Scale Confrontation with Syria

      The US government threatens to further escalation against the government of Syria, according to The Wall Street Journal.

      The newspaper says that, although military officials minimize the chances of direct confrontation with the forces of the Syrian Arab Army, the fact that President Barack Obama authorized the use of the Air Force to defend US-trained groups, leaves open that possibility.

    • Washington Stunned by Attack on US Mercenaries in Syria

      The attack came early Friday against a Syrian militia known as Division 30, which has been the central focus of a $500 million program initiated by the Obama administration and administered by the Pentagon to arm and train a US-controlled proxy force, ostensibly for fighting against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) inside Syria.

      Launching the attack was the Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda and the most powerful of the Islamist militias that have been fielded in the Western, Saudi, Turkish and Qatari-backed war for regime change to oust the government of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

    • SAS dress as ISIS fighters in undercover war on jihadis

      The unorthodox tactic, which is seeing SAS units dressed in black and flying ISIS flags, has been likened to the methods used by the Long Range Desert Group against Rommel’s forces during the Second World War.

      More than 120 members belonging to the elite regiment are currently in the war-torn country on operation Shader, tasked with destroying IS equipment and munitions which insurgents constantly move to avoid Coalition air strikes.

    • How US Allies Aid Al Qaeda in Syria

      The dirty secret about the Obama administration’s “regime change” strategy in Syria is that it amounts to a de facto alliance with Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front which is driving toward a possible victory with direct and indirect aid from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, as Daniel Lazare explains.

    • U.S. caution or incoherence in Syria?

      The U.S. military is training locals to fight IS but not Assad, while the CIA is training Syrian rebels to fight Assad.

    • Book review: Kill Chain by Andrew Cockburn

      AT a CIA awards dinner in Washington in 2011 Robert M Gates, a former director of the agency whose term as US Secretary of Defence straddled the Bush and Obama administrations, spoke on the future of the war on terror. Factories were working day and night, he told the audience, to turn out the newest, most vital front line weapons. “So from now on,” he said, “the watchword is: drones, baby, drones!”

    • We’re a year into the unofficial war against Isis with nothing to show for it

      This Saturday marks one full year since the US military began its still-undeclared war against Islamic State that the government officials openly acknowledge will last indefinitely. What do we have to show for it? So far, billions of dollars have been spent, thousands of bombs have been dropped, hundreds of civilians have been killed and Isis is no weaker than it was last August, when the airstrikes began.

    • Pentagon Doesn’t Know Who It Kills with ‘Signature’ Drone Strikes

      In June, when a CIA drone strike killed an al-Qaeda leader who the agency did not know was among a group of militants, the United States showed that it continues to fire drone missiles at targets whose identities are a mystery.

    • Exiled Chagossians could be allowed to return home under limited resettlement

      The Chagos Islands, one of the UK’s most remote overseas territories, could be opened up to tourism under plans allowing exiled islanders to return home, according to a Foreign Office report.

      The consultation process on resettlement of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), launched this week, proposes allowing 1,500 Chagossians to live on the archipelago.

      Britain forced the inhabitants off the islands in the early 1970s to make room for a US airbase that was built on the largest island, Diego Garcia. In exchange for the clearance, London received £5m off the cost of developing a joint US/UK missile programme.

    • Valerie Plame: The Spy Who Came in to the Code

      Since her cover was famously blown, former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame is more openly protecting the country’s digital assets. In May, the author and anti-nuclear activist joined the advisory board of Global Data Sentinel, developer of a cybersecurity platform designed to encrypt and protect across domains, networks, and devices.

    • Valerie Plame attacks Donald Trump on Iran nuke deal
    • Plame Wilson: Trump campaign sought support so she could get back at Rove
    • ‘You can’t make this stuff up’: Plame Wilson says Trump wanted her support

      Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson says the Donald Trump campaign reached out to her for support.

    • Missing In Action

      Over the past decade, a string of war movies emerged in the wake of 9/11: The Hurt Locker, Syriana, The Messenger, Green Zone, Lone Survivor, and American Sniper, to name just a few. Some have performed better than others at the box office, and many have received critical acclaim. Almost none has included portrayals of women in combat.

    • Are counterterrorism bills really working in the Western world?

      Last week we looked at the British counter-extremism bill, backed by Home Secretary Theresa May. The heated debate about this bill centers on whether it will curtail rights such as freedom of speech and whether it will target Muslims, creating an environment in which mistrust can only grow.

    • Letter: ‘Historic diplomatic achievement’

      The Iran deal reached in Vienna is truly a historic diplomatic achievement.

    • There’s good reason they should hate us

      Much adieu lately about how we can trust the Iranian nuclear agreement when they hate Americans.

      Do the Iranians hate us? If they don’t they should.

      Much of Iranian hatred is based on our CIA involvement in deposing their democratically elected prime minister in 1953 and supporting the brutal dictator (“the Shah”) who gave the U.S. and Britain unlimited access to oil.

      In the year 2000 the New York Times obtained a copy of the CIA’s secret history of the Iranian coup, revealing the inner workings of a plot that set the stage for the Islamic revolution in 1979, and for a generation of anti-American hatred in one of the Middle East’s most powerful countries.

    • US Special Forces Would Benefit From Recruiting More Arab Americans

      US Special Forces would gain an advantage and broaden its skill base by enlisting more Arab Americans, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Larry Johnson told Sputnik on Friday.

    • A forgotten conflict that is very much alive

      The murder of the Pakistani human rights activist Sabeen Mehmud in central Karachi earlier this year triggered a huge media echo. Mehmud was famous the world over for her work, primarily in the fields of women’s rights and Internet activism. Despite the intense media coverage, not much attention was paid to the fact that during the final months of her life, the activist had focused specifically on the conflict in the south-western Pakistani province of Balochistan. Just a few hours before her murder, Mahmud and her organisation “The Second Floor” had arranged a debate on the human rights situation in Balochistan.

      [...]

      Balochistan has been the scene of several major rebellions in recent decades, all of which were brutally put down by the government in Islamabad. Although the region has a wealth of natural resources, the people are among the poorest in Pakistan. They barely have access to stable infrastructure, power or clean drinking water. Some 88 per cent of Balochs live below the poverty line. Although natural resources are being exploited, the authorities are failing to make adequate investments in other sectors. Only the security sector is flourishing.

    • Report: Hundreds of Civilians Killed by U.S.-Led Bombing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria

      A new report from a group of journalists and researchers says that hundreds of civilians have died during airstrikes by the U.S. and other nations fighting the Islamic State, a marked contrast to the Pentagon’s official admission of just two civilian deaths.

    • Book review: The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong is gripping

      His account of the Tibetan struggle is a welcome contribution to the growing body of Tibetan resistance literature and on the CIA’s involvement.

      Some of the background to the events he recounts has never been told before. The only other Tibetan to tell the whole story is the late Lhamo Tsering in his exhaustive work, Resistance, and his son Tenzing Sonam in his compelling documentary, The Shadow Circus: the CIA in Tibet. Apart from these, this aspect of Tibet’s struggle for survival has been mainly hogged by CIA operatives or by American writers drawn to the subject. Gyalo Thondup’s perspective on the cloak-and-dagger game Tibet briefly played with the CIA will remain the authoritative Tibetan account of this episode of the Tibetan struggle.

    • Arguing Against Evil

      For liberal hawks and neoconservatives, the idea of the Congress for Cultural Freedom is an appealing fantasy. It evokes the time at the beginning of the Cold War when intellectuals played a serious role in politics because the world seemed not just caught up in a battle of armies but in a battle of ideas. Beginning in 1950, it brought together a diverse array of thinkers who, under the rubric of anti-totalitarianism, agreed that the freedom to think and write was inviolable. Its raison d’etre was anti-Communism; it sought to reduce the influence of Communist and fellow-traveling intellectuals, first concentrating on Western Europe but later expanding all around the world. In the words of one of its historians, “It was America’s principal attempt to win over the world’s intellectuals to the liberal democratic cause.” In seeking to influence left-wing intellectuals, it steered away from conservative thinkers. In Europe and elsewhere it featured social democrats, Christian Democrats, and even dissident Marxists. In the United States, its most active boosters were liberals, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Daniel Bell, and former Marxists moving in neoconservative directions, such as Sidney Hook. The CCF defended pluralism, democracy, and even socialism, so long as it was anti-Communist. (Even late in life, both Bell and Hook still thought of themselves as socialists, at least on economic questions.) It had a sophisticated publishing operation, amplifying voices critical of Communism. It arranged, for example, for the publication of the Yugoslavian ex-Communist Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, which argued that the Soviet Union was not in fact a classless society but one in which class privilege accrued based on proximity to the state bureaucracy. The CCF also operated a stable of high-quality literary and political magazines, among them Encounter in London, Der Monat in Germany, Jiyu in Japan, and Mundo Nuevo in Latin America.

    • Still Uninvestigated After 50 Years: Did the U.S. Help Incite the 1965 Indonesia Massacre?

      It is now fifty years since the so-called “G30S” or “Gestapu” (Gerakan September Tigahpuluh) event of September 30, 1965 in Indonesia, when six members of the Indonesian army general staff were brutally murdered.

    • Indonesian Genocide

      In light of these findings, it seems hypocritical for the US to constantly wag its finger at other nations for their human rights shortcomings when past US government have engaged in such horrific mass killings.

    • Iran’s Longstanding US-Inflicted Nightmare

      It began in August 1953 – replacing democratically elected Mohammad Mossadeq (Iran’s most popular politician at the time) with a generation of brutal US-installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi dictatorship.

      A 2013 declassified CIA document (marking the coup’s 60th anniversary) publicly acknowledged the agency’s involvement (Operation TPAJAX) – what’s been well-known for decades.

    • The crazy story of how Russia snuck a vast nuclear arsenal onto America’s doorstep

      Most stories about the Cuban Missile Crisis start with Oct. 16, 1962, when the president and his advisors were briefed on the missile sites on the island. A few start with Oct. 13, when the U-2 flight that photographed the sites took off. U-2 overflights would collect more information during the crisis along with other reconnaissance plans. After collecting all the information, U.S. intelligence agencies believed the Russians had smuggled nearly 10,000 troops onto the island.

    • Lessons from Tonkin and Libya: We Need a President Who Won’t Trick Us Into War

      Fifty-one years ago, an American president deceived the public about the true purpose of a U.S. military mission, ushering in a decade of foreign policy disasters. Unfortunately, this method of abusing democracy has continued, on a bipartisan basis, to the present day, when it is casting a shadow over U.S. policy in Syria.

      In August 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers deliberately misled Congress and the American people about the mission of two U.S. destroyers that were allegedly attacked off the coast of communist North Vietnam and their connection to U.S.-directed raids on nearby offshore islands. Their lie paved the way for U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and congressional passage of the administration’s Tonkin Gulf Resolution: a broadly worded measure that would soon facilitate Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. A policy that began with an act of deceit about a U.S. military mission had awful and ill-considered consequences for Americans, Vietnamese and other southeast Asians, U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and China, and America’s global reputation. Many historians are convinced that a diplomatic settlement could have avoided most of this damage.

    • August 4, 1964: The Gulf of Tonkin ‘Incident’ Sparks American Escalation in Vietnam

      Fifty-one years ago today, the United States Navy reported that its ships had been attacked some miles off the shore of North Vietnam. Provocatively, the US ships were patrolling in areas where South Vietnam was conducting active operations against the North, prompting the latter, quite understandably, to perceive the Americans as participants in the hostilities. Torpedo boats approached within a few nautical miles of the USS Maddox, which responded with warning shots. The subsequent firefight killed four North Vietnamese sailors, destroyed several of their boats, and lightly wounded an American ship and a plane. Two days later, American ships again reported that they were under attack and for hours fiercely maneuvered and fired at North Vietnamese boats, two of which they claimed to have sunk. As it turned out, the American ships had only been picking up radar signals from their own equipment, chasing phantoms as Don Quixote had combated windmills. Regardless, President Lyndon Johnson seized on the incident as a pretext for bombing North Vietnam and drastically escalating American involvement in the war. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing such action passed on August 7, 1964, with only two senators objecting: Wayne Morse of Oregon, a frequent Nation contributor, and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, managing editor of this publication in the early 1920s. In an editorial appearing in the first issue after the incident and the resolution, The Nation’s editors wrote, “The excessive retaliatory action the President saw fit to order brings us closer to the brink of World War III.” In the same issue, a former State Department official named John Gange wrote an essay titled “Misadventure in Vietnam: The Mix of Fact and Myth.”

    • Anti-Russian propaganda destroys Western journalism [says Kremlin propaganda]
    • Russia, Italy Can Restore Pre-Sanction Level of Relations – Farmers Union

      Dino Scanavino, the head of the Italian Confederation of Farmers (CIA), said that existing business relations between Italy and Russia are generally favorable, as Russian entrepreneurs are actively assisting their Italian colleagues in recovering losses.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Snowden 2.0: Japanese Journalist Has Been Living in Moscow Airport for Two Months

      Japanese journalist Tetsuya Abo is pulling a Snowden – he’s been living in the transit section of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for over two months now. The 36-year-old said in an interview that his stay is politically motivated – he does not want to go back home, and is requesting Russian citizenship instead.

    • Ling Jihua’s brother could become China’s Snowden: Duowei
    • China demands US repatriate businessman Ling Wangcheng
    • Former military contractor sentenced for stealing classified files [for doing what Petraeus did]

      A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida [official website] on Monday sentenced Christopher R. Glenn 120 months in jail and three years of supervised release for willful retention of classified national defense information [DOJ press release] under the Espionage Act [text].

    • FBI may pillory Hillary with email spillery grillery

      The FBI is investigating presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private email account while presiding over the State Department.

      The Washington Post has reported that the FBI is digging into Clinton’s operation of a personal email server as part of her work as the US Secretary of State between 2009 and 2012.

    • To intelligence community, Clinton’s private email scheme is inconceivable

      Sounds like free association triggered by some of the stories making the rounds on the 24/7 news networks.

      There was the announcement that Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard will be paroled after serving the 30 years mandated by his “life” sentence in 1985. This is the same Jonathan Pollard who caused George Tenet to threaten to resign as CIA director when the idea of a pardon or commutation was suggested during the Clinton administration.

    • Keeping top secrets

      Here’s why Hillary Clinton may have broken the law

    • What everyone with a Top Secret security clearance knows – or should know

      The key issue in play with Clinton is that it is a violation of national security to maintain classified information on an unclassified system.

      Classified, secure, computer systems use a variety of electronic (often generically called TEMPESTed) measures coupled with physical security (special locks, shielded conduits for cabling, armed guards) that differentiate them from an unclassified system. Some of the protections are themselves classified, and unavailable in the private sector. Such standards of protection are highly unlikely to be fulfilled outside a specially designed government facility.

    • DOJ Inaction Against Hillary Proves of Selective Prosecution in the United States

      In April of this year, former CIA Director David Petraeus, one of the most accomplished military generals in our nation’s history, was prosecuted and sentenced to two years of probation plus a $100,000 fine for giving his biographer classified material while they were working on the book. What was lost in the shuffle is that his biographer was a Reserve Army Intelligence Officer, who herself possessed a Top Secret clearance, and that no classified materials were ever published or provided to anyone who didn’t have clearance.

      Mr. Petraeus’ plea agreement carried a possible sentence of up to a year in prison, and in court papers, prosecutors recommended two years of probation and a $40,000 fine.

      U.S. District Judge David Kessler, however, increased the fine, in his words to, “reflect the seriousness of the offense.”

    • Army, CIA Satisfied Nazi Spy Information Request

      The Army and CIA satisfied their obligations under the FOIA by releasing thousands of pages about a Nazi general turned U.S. spy, the D.C. Circuit ruled.

    • Is the Intelligence Community Inspector General Trying To Give Contractors Whistleblower Protections?

      Last week, McClatchy’s Marisa Taylor reported on two cases showing the new appeals process for whistleblower retaliation claims ordered by President Obama is now operational; in the cases of Army whistleblower Michael Helms and CIA whistleblower John Reidy, the Intelligence Community Inspector General, Charles McCullough, has bounced the appeals back to the agencies in question for re-review.

      That McCullough has chosen to bounce these two appeals back to the agencies is notable enough, because his commitment to whistleblower issues has never been apparent. Instead, McCullough has spent his time as IG conducting leak investigations. And last year, a complaint email sent to Daniel Meyer, who oversees whistleblower issues for the intelligence community, somehow got shared with the subject of the complaint. So McCullough’s record on these issues is less than stellar.

      But McCullough’s move is particularly interesting when you consider the details of the appeal of the second complainant, John Reidy.

    • German government fires prosecutor over treason charge against Internet blog
    • German justice minister fires chief prosecutor in treason row
    • Top German prosecutor fired after treason probe involvement

      Harald Range, Germany’s top prosecutor, was dismissed from his duties on Tuesday by Justice Minister Heiko Maas [official website] after Range accused the German government of obstructing his investigation against two German journalists. Range was interested in an investigation against the two journalists from the website Netzpolitik.org, which had reported on the expansion of surveillance of online communication within Germany’s domestic spy agency. Range received information from an independent expert explaining that the information the journalists received from an unknown source was legitimate and also a “state secret.” In an effort to prevent anymore embarrassment to the German government, Range, who is 67, was dismissed [Deutsche Welle report], despite his intentions to retire next year and be succeeded by Munich federal prosecutor Peter Frank. The treason probe became public news last week following a criminal complaint filed by the spy agency which also targeted the unknown source who dispersed the leaked documents.

    • Germany scores against the surveillance state

      It all went very fast. On Tuesday morning August 4, Germany’s chief federal prosecutor, Harald Range, was ordered by Justice Minister Heiko Maas to withdraw an independent expert from the investigation of two journalists from Netzpolitik. The investigator had concluded that leaked documents quoted by the news website amounted to a disclosure of a state secret, one of the required criteria to pursue a treason case. The prosecutor protested: “To meddle with an internal review on the basis that the results might be inopportune is an intolerable interference with the independence of the judiciary .” A few hours later on Tuesday evening Maas asked for the prosecutor to be granted early retirement. In plain words, Harald Range was sacked.

    • Lawmakers and bloggers named in German treason case

      Germany’s domestic spy agency named not just bloggers but also lawmakers in a criminal complaint that sparked a controversial treason probe, news weekly Der Spiegel said Friday.

    • How a treason case in Germany set off a political firestorm

      German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s well-deserved holiday from the euro-zone crisis was disturbed this week by a domestic scandal involving a debate over freedom of the press vs. the protection of classified information, as German Justice Minister Heiko Maas requested the dismissal of federal prosecutor Harald Range for his investigation of two journalists for treason. Maas said Merkel agreed with his decision.

    • Pressure Mounts for German Intel Agency Chief to Resign Over Treason Probe

      There are growing calls for the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, to resign over the Netzpolitik affair, which has already claimed the scalp of the Federal Prosecutor Harald Range.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Idaho Huntress Defends Posting Photos with Giraffe (and Other Animals) She Killed on African Safari

      Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer went into hiding after he became the subject of international scorn for killing Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe. But another American is proudly advertising the game she has shot while on African safari – and thumbing her nose at her critics.

      “To me it’s not just killing an animal, it’s the hunt,” Sabrina Corgatelli, of Idaho, told the Today show on Monday.

      Corgatelli has been sharing photos on her Facebook page of her recent legal hunt in South Africa. On July 31 she reposted a picture of a massive giraffe she had killed.

    • In Zimbabwe, Cecil tells only part of the story

      When news of Cecil’s death first came out, many in Zimbabwe had never heard of the lion, said Fungai Machirori, a Zimbabwe-based journalist and social commentator.

    • Professional hunters in Zimbabwe court over killing of lions

      Two professional hunters have appeared in a Zimbabwean court, each accused in separate cases of helping Americans kill lions.

  • Finance

    • Contingent Faculty: Where Money Might Go in Higher Education

      Fifty years ago, more than 75% of college faculty members were full-time and had tenure or were on track to get it. Today, only a third are part of that elite group. Many of those doing the teaching at American universities are poorly paid, have no job security and limited benefits. Some have PhD’s but still qualify for government assistance to buy food.

    • Higher Education Debt Should Be Deductible, Rand Paul Says

      “You can’t just offer free education, but I think tying it to work and making it deductible is a good idea,” Sen. Rand Paul says at Republican presidential forum at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H.

    • Pornhub taught us to expect free porn — now, can it make us pay?

      Imagine, if you will, that there’s a restaurant that offers diners a free, unlimited buffet. For years they’ve encouraged their patrons to come in and gorge themselves at will, subtly implying that anyone who pays for food is an idiot. There’ve been rumors that this restaurant’s been able to keep the buffet going by stealing food from competing restaurants, but most patrons don’t care — and as the restaurant drives out its competition, or buys them out, eventually the objections die down.

    • George Osborne will miss £1tn export target warns British Chambers of Commerce

      The UK is the 11th largest exporter in the world, behind the likes of the US, China and Germany, according to the CIA World Factbook. And, according to the BBC, the country is also the second biggest exporter of services behind the US. But the business body has urged Cameron and Osborne to “open up markets” for firms and encouraged British businesses to up the skills of their workforce.

    • Donald Trump: “I pay as little as possible” in taxes
    • Explaining Donald Trump’s Rise With Economic Misinformation

      Everyone has heard about Donald Trump’s soaring poll numbers as the current leader in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Many have also heard the explanation that he appeals to those who feel left behind by the economy. Unfortunately, the way the media often tell this story has little to do with reality.

      [...]

      Both parts of this are seriously misleading. First, it is not just non-college grads who have struggled since the turn of the century. Most college grads have seen little or no wage gains since then. The second part is wrong also, since wages for non-college grads had also been stagnant since 1980, so for them the experience of the last 15 years has not been “a marked departure from prior decades.”

    • Funny Money: CIA Counterfeiting in Poland

      Communism was relegated to the dustbin of history for many reasons, foremost among them were its warped economic policies. In places like Poland during the 1960s, foreigners with access to hard currency could easily game the system and do pretty well. David Fischer recounts how Polish-American retirees lived like kings in Krakow, the way the embassy had to pay “bail” for one American with what turned out to be counterfeit zlotys made by the CIA, and how Western diplomats were able to travel abroad very cheaply.

    • Neocolonialism: How it is conquering our country today.

      It is important to note that forces of neo-colonialism are ably conquering our country today.

    • Nazi-Fighter Grynberg Girds for Swiss Last Stand Against Big Oil

      U.S. courts have been good to Jack Grynberg, netting him hundreds of millions of dollars in disputes with some of the world’s largest oil and gas producers since 1984.

      Despite that fortune, the 83-year-old oilman says he’s fed up with America’s legal system and has taken his biggest suit yet — a battle over profits from Kazakhstan’s most valuable oil fields — to Switzerland.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Video Games, Predictive Programming, and the 21st Century Skinner Box

      The game focuses upon two branching military campaigns: One by the Marine Corps in an unnamed Middle Eastern country (situated on the in-game map directly atop modern Syria) run by a cartoonish dictator generically referred to as none other than “Al-Asad,” the other by a British SAS team combating “ultranationalist Russians” who are supporting this thinly veiled tin-pot Arabic dictator. After a patriotic romp through Central Asia, “Al-Asad” predictably (predicatively?) uses “Weapons of Mass Destruction” on his own people, leading to a climactic final battle at a Russian nuclear site in a bid to avoid World War III.

    • AUDIO: ‘Left, Right & Center’: Republican Media Stunts, NSA Data Dump and Cecil the Lion
    • Chris Christie’s Revealing, Easy to Spot Lie About His 9/11 Credentials

      A majority of Americans in opinion surveys say they disapprove of the NSA’s collection programs. A Pew Research poll this May found a full 74 percent of respondents did not believe privacy should be sacrificed for safety. But Paul is one of only a few Republican candidates (Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is another) who has fought against the NSA program, and hawkish Republican candidates like Christie see attacking Paul on that as an effective way to build support among the Republican base, illustrating how out of touch that base can be on some of the important issues of the day.

    • Chris Christie So Obsessed With Increasing Surveillance He Pretends He Was A Fed On 9/11 Even Though He Wasn’t
    • Christie Lied about 9/11 to Try to Shut Down Paul’s Opposition to Dragnet Spying

      Never mind that most US Attorneys don’t, themselves, go before the FISC to present cases (usually it is people from the National Security Division, though it was OIPR when Christie was US Attorney), never mind that the name of the court is the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

      The real doozie here is Chris Christie’s claim that he “was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bush on September 10th, 2001.”

      [...]

      Update: In an absolutely hysterical attempt to rebut the clear fact that he was not nominated when he said he was, Christie’s people said he was informed he would be on September 10 at 4:30 (as I suggested was likely). But the rest of the explanation makes it clear they hadn’t even done a background check yet!

    • The GOP Debates Showed How Fox News Enforces Republican Orthodoxy

      At Thursday night’s GOP debates in Cleveland, moderators Bret Baier, Bill Hemmer, Megyn Kelly, Martha MacCallum and Chris Wallace peppered the party’s 17 presidential candidates with tough questions. But several of those questions had one key thing in common: They hit candidates for deviating from Republican orthodoxy.

    • Jeb Bush launches online store with hipster

      The “My Dad” tee, offered for $25, is emblazoned with the quote, “My dad is the greatest man I’ve ever known, and if you don’t think so, we can step outside,” obviously referring to Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush. Bush referenced the shirt in one of the more colorful moments coming from a New Hampshire forum earlier this week.

    • Sen. Graham moved up in Air Force Reserve ranks despite light duties

      Of all the candidates vying to become the nation’s next commander in chief, none has spent as much time in the military as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham. The South Carolina Republican retired from the Air Force this summer after a 33-year career, including two decades as a reservist while serving in Congress.

    • Politically Unapologetic: What about Bernie Sanders?

      Before his rally on May 26th, his overall poll rating average in the Democratic race was at 10.6%. It now hovers around 20-25%, which is causing concern for the Clinton camp since her unfavorable rating is rising. The coming weeks will really tell if Sanders can catch Clinton, given that Joe Biden doesn’t jump into the race last minute.

  • Censorship

    • Singapore teen blogger launches another attack

      A teenage Singaporean blogger recently jailed after publishing an online video that criticised the late Lee Kuan Yew and was deemed to have been obscene and insulting to religious feelings, has launched another tirade, condemning the lack of freedom of speech in the city-state.

    • Amos Yee, Singapore’s Teen Dissident, Is Back With a Crude, Hilarious Video

      The moptopped Singaporean blogger Amos Yee is out of prison after having served 53 days in jail for posting a video criticizing the late Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew. And if Singaporean authorities thought a prison term might quiet the precocious teen, they were sorely mistaken: Yee is out with a new, obscene, and often hilarious video answering his critics and attacking Singapore’s lack of civil liberties.

    • Are Americans falling in love with censorship?

      Classifying books according to their suitability for different age ranges would be “ill-advised”, “unworkable” and would “raise serious concerns about censorship”, American free-speech campaigners have said, in the wake of a poll claiming that more than seven in 10 US adults believe a rating system similar to that used for films should be applied to books.

    • The little-known history of secrecy and censorship in wake of atomic bombings

      The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago, is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant aspects of that bombing are still not well known.

    • The Fallout Over University Of Illinois Censorship Of War On Gaza Continues

      The chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), who was involved in firing Professor Steven Salaita over tweets he sent about Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, has announced her resignation yesterday. The announcement comes as a federal judge refused to dismiss Salaita’s lawsuit against the university for violating his free speech.

    • That’s Not Funny!

      Three comics sat around a café table in the chilly atrium of the Minneapolis Convention Center, talking about how to create the cleanest possible set. “Don’t do what’s in your gut,” Zoltan Kaszas said. “Better safe than sorry,” Chinedu Unaka offered. Feraz Ozel mused about the first time he’d ever done stand-up: three minutes on giving his girlfriend herpes and banging his grandma. That was out.

    • Truth hurts: censorship in the media

      In September 1945, less than a month after Japan’s surrender ending World War II and ushering in the U.S.-led Occupation, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander for the Allied powers, began cracking down on alleged Japanese war criminals. Over the next three months, hundreds of politicians, military men, bureaucrats and industrialists would be issued arrest warrants for their role in leading Japan to, and through, the war.

      Among those who found themselves under suspicion as Class-A, -B, or -C war criminals were senior members of the press. One of the most notorious was Matsutaro Shoriki, owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

      “He was one of the most important journalists who actively propagated the Axis cause before the war and energetically supported it through the war,” read a secret report on Shoriki compiled by Occupation officials when he was arrested on Dec. 12,, 1945.

    • Bangladesh must act against impunity

      Index on Censorship deplores the killing of blogger Niloy Chakrabarti in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and calls on the authorities to investigate the murder and ensure that those responsible are found and brought to justice.

      “We strongly condemn Niloy Chakrabarti’s brutal murder,” said Index’s senior advocacy officer Melody Patry. “We fear the death toll will increase if the authorities fail to take action to find and punish those responsible. Freedom of expression is in danger and Bangladesh must do more to protect writers online and offline.”

      Chakrabarti, who wrote under the pen name Niloy Neel, is the fourth secular blogger to be murdered since the start of the year. A member of Bangladesh’s Science and Rationalist Association, he was attacked in his home in Dhaka.

    • Memoir focuses on late librarian’s work on censorship in occupied Japan

      Subjected to censorship by the Allied Forces for four years starting in the fall of 1945, the materials bear censorship markings ranging from check-in and examination dates to deletions, suppression and other changes.

    • Govt blocks 857 porn websites, sparks debate on Internet censorship
    • India’s Porn Ban Reversal Is Essentially Bullshit
    • India orders clampdown on internet porn, sparks censorship debate
    • Isis play Homegrown sparks censorship debate after NYT cancels it for ‘quality reasons’
    • NYT radicalisation play axed amid cries of censorship
    • Man sentenced to 30 years of jail for insulting the Thai monarchy on Facebook
    • On your mind: Realpolitik defines US/Thai relationship

      Webster’s dictionary defines realpolitik as a system of politics based on a country’s situation and its needs, rather than on ideas about what is morally right and wrong. No doubt, US government officials would deny that realpolitik defines American policies, but it is hard to see any clear moral imperative with regard to that country’s relationship with Thailand.

      The moral face the US shines on Thailand, urging for example, that the Thais take steps to end human trafficking and restore democratic rule, is two-faced.

    • Google challenges France over ‘right to be forgotten’
    • Cameron’s censorship silences debate

      British Prime Minister David Cameron is a calculated hypocrite on the question of Muslim radicalisation. In July, in the wake of the attack on British and other tourists in Tunisia, he announced a counterstrategy to stop the spread of extremist movements such as the Islamic State.

      His four-pronged strategy includes delegitimising the ideology that underpinned these movements – especially those that argue for an Islamic caliphate – and emboldening the Muslim community to counter extremism from within. For Cameron: “The adherents of this ideology are overpowering other voices within Muslim debate, especially those who are trying to challenge it.”

      Yet, in a self-defeating move, his government has prevented one of the most prominent voices countering radicalisation of the Islamic State variety from entering Britain: Na’eem Jeenah, a South African.

    • Why the Rise of Decentralized Media is the End of Censorship

      In the buzzing world of altcoins, blockchains, and crypto-startups, if you aren’t decentralized these days, you’re probably still considered a bit of a dinosaur. But in the world of electronic publishing, legacy opinion remains, that media should be submitted to a central authority, subjected to editorial policies and stored on servers in ever larger data-centres.

    • How users of ‘Chinese Twitter’ Sina Weibo are beating state censorship

      If you were scrolling through Twitter and saw a post saying “someone is playing hide-and-seek again. These people can grass-mud horse,” you might be more than a little mystified.

      But if, say, you were Chinese, didn’t think much of your government, and knew something about fooling its stringent online censors, you may well understand the coded message.

    • Now playing in Israel: film censorship

      Right-wing politicians from the culture minister down are getting screenings canceled. The fear is that filmmakers will start censoring themselves.

    • A Quiz for the West’s Great Free Speech Advocates and Supporters of Anjem Choudary’s Arrest

      As we all know ever since the inspiring parade in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo attack, “free speech” is a cherished and sacred right in the West even for the most provocative and controversial views (of course, if “free speech” does not allow expression of the most provocative and controversial views, then, by definition, it does not exist). But yesterday in the U.K., the British-born Muslim extremist Anjem Choudary, who has a long history of spouting noxious views, was arrested on charges of “inviting support” for ISIS based on statements he made in “individual lectures which were subsequently published online.”

  • Privacy

    • Appeals court rules warrant required for cellphone tracking

      A federal appeals court in Virginia has ruled that police must obtain a search warrant to obtain records about cellphone locations in criminal investigations.

      The American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday’s decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals conflicts with two other federal appeals court rulings and increases the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the issue.

    • When Your Records Are Not Yours

      This dubious “third-party doctrine,” enunciated before the Internet existed and mobile phones became ubiquitous, was crucial to the outcome of a case decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in May. The court said an armed robber named Quartavius Davis had no constitutional grounds to object when the FBI linked him to crime scenes with cellphone location data that it obtained without a warrant.

    • Commentary: Christie wasn’t ‘Born to Run’

      Going back to Christie’s big moment during the debate, it’s completely predictable he’d be in favor of continuing the government’s bulk collection of phone data. After all, he’s a former prosecutor and professed 9/11 hugger (which garnered an amusing eye roll from Paul). I find myself more on Paul’s side of the argument, but the public surprisingly backs renewal of the government’s program of data mining. Plus, I wanted to draw a cartoon about Christie, not the NSA, which I’ve offered my opinion on many, many times.

    • Rand Paul And Chris Christie Spar Over NSA Surveillance

      Last night, Fox News hosted one of the most ridiculous, deeply entertaining GOP Presidential debates I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing a drinking game to. In the midst of the Moscow Mules, Lagunitas and amazing Trump-isms came a pretty heated (and unexpected) shouting match between former Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul regarding the spying capabilities of the NSA.

    • WATCH: Chris Christie vs. Rand Paul on NSA Surveillance

      New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor, and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a Libertarian who has fought against widespread government surveillance of American citizens, sparred over how to best protect the United States from terrorists.

    • This Group May Stop the NSA From Tapping the Internet’s Backbone

      It’s taken seven years of legal wrangling, but one group of pro-privacy activists are hoping an appeals court will finally declare a critical part of the National Security Agency’s spying apparatus unconstitutional.

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been challenging the NSA’s bulk data collection program in court since 2008, largely running on whisteblower testimony from Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician who alleges the NSA inserted technology into the internet company’s infrastructure that allowed it to collect and analyze the data.

    • EFF Finally Gets To Ask Appeals Court To Look At 4th Amendment Question Over NSA’s Backbone Sniffing

      It’s taken many years, but one of the EFF’s longstanding cases against the NSA has finally reached an important milestone: exploring the 4th Amendment question raised by the NSA tapping the internet backbone. This is part of the Jewel v. NSA case that has been going on for years. Back in February (after a lot of procedural back and forth on other issues), the district court rejected the 4th Amendment argument, basically toeing the government’s “but… but… national security!” line. Not surprisingly, the EFF disagreed with the court and appealed to the 9th Circuit appeals court.

    • A New Milestone: Appeals Court to Consider NSA’s Mass Seizures and Searches on the Internet Backbone

      One of the most outrageous ways that the government has violated our Fourth Amendment rights against general seizures and searches has been through its system of tapping into the fiber optic cables of America’s telecommunications companies. The result is a digital dragnet—a technological mass surveillance system that subjects millions of ordinary Americans to the seizure and searching of their online correspondence, conversations, web searches, reading and other activities as they travel across the Internet. This tapping isn’t just about metadata—it includes full content searches of Americans’ communications, at the very least any international communications involving a website or a person who is abroad.

    • How communication surveillance eats away fundamental human rights

      There are several intelligence agencies around the world, many of them headquartered in the US, which make use of the vastly developed technology of the digital age to spy on millions of people, who are not even considered terrorism suspects. The most (in)famous agency as such would be the NSA (National Security Agency), which uses a pretty smart foundation of ‘legal’ activities to justify its actions.

      The issue is that NSA activities are anything but legal. They manage to claim that they operate within the frame of law because of the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Security Court), which interprets the actual law into what would be considered legal for NSA’s actions. In other words, when the NSA goes searching for information about whomever it wants, there is usually no warrant, as the person is usually not even a suspect.

    • The NSA Playset: 5 Better Tools To Defend Systems

      The NSA ANT Catalog is a 50-page classified document listing technology available to the NSA Tailored Access Operations by the ANT division to aid in cyber surveillance. Most documents are described as already operational and available to U.S. nationals and members of the Five Eyes Alliance – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The document was first revealed in an article by security researchers in the German newspaper Der Spiegel, which released the catalog to the public on December 30, 2013.

    • NSA-grade encryption for mobile over untrusted networks

      The only term being thrown around government more than “2016 elections” these days is “cybersecurity,” particularly following a rash of damaging and high-profile data breaches. With that focus on protecting information top of mind in agencies, USMobile officials hope to find a ready market for their commercial app, which lets government workers use their personal smartphones for top-secret communications.

    • Security Sense: Encryption is a necessity that cannot feasibly be compromised

      It’s always fascinating to watch how security concepts are communicated to the general public and by “fascinating”, I mean it’s sometimes horrifying. There is no more poignant an example than that of encryption and I found the piece from CNN a few days ago on how encryption is a growing threat to security to be the absolute epitome of disinformation. It would be understandable if the general public walked away from reading and watching this piece with the distinct impression that encryption was the root of all evil. Why? Apparently “because terrorism”.

    • NSA’S EPIC Fail: Spy Agency Pays Lawyers That Sue It

      The NSA and FBI are major contributors to EPIC — the Electronic Privacy Information Center. But their “donations” aren’t exactly voluntary.

      A hefty chunk of EPIC’s legal budget is taken from the pockets of the very agencies it sues, each time a federal judge agrees that the government was wrong to keep the information secret.

    • Chris Christie actually wants to expand the NSA’s spying powers

      Sen. Rand Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie traded barbs Thursday night over the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. phone records. In the heat of the Republican presidential debate, Christie got the last word in — but who actually came out of the exchange on top?

    • NSA and GCHQ have been spying on you for 50 years

      Starting in 1966, the project leapt into life when the NSA fronted the money for the GCHQ to build a station in Bude, Cornwall, capable of intercepting satellite communications from Intelsat, the first commercial communications satellite network.

    • Snowden leaks confirm existence of ECHELON

      NSA documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden confirm the existence of ECHELON, a secret surveillance network spying on satellite communications. Set up by the US and the UK in the 1960s, ECHELON was the precursor of today’s global dragnet.

    • Uncovering ECHELON: The Top-Secret NSA/GCHQ Program That Has Been Watching You Your Entire Life

      If history is written by the victors, government surveillance agencies will have an awfully long list of sources to cite.

      Domestic digital surveillance has often seemed to be a threat endured mostly by the social media generation, but details have continued to emerge that remind us of decades of sophisticated, automated spying from the NSA and others.

      Before the government was peering through our webcams, tracking our steps through GPS, feeling every keystroke we typed and listening and watching as we built up complex datasets of our entire personhood online, there was still rudimentary data to be collected. Over the last fifty years, Project ECHELON has given the UK and United States (as well as other members of the Five Eyes) the capacity to track enemies and allies alike within and outside their states. The scope has evolved in that time period from keyword lifts in intercepted faxes to its current all-encompassing data harvesting.

    • Investigative journalism is vital for democracy as state surveillance increases

      For those inclined to think that the series of surveillance scandals and leaks over the past two years are unlikely to have much of an impact, it is worth recalling that, up until a little over 30 years ago, the British government denied the very existence of a spying organisation called GCHQ. As investigative journalist Duncan Campbell described in the Intercept yesterday, in a compelling account of a life spent chasing Britain’s spies out of the shadows, in the 70s and 80s even talking about GCHQ, let alone investigating and reporting on it, could get you followed, arrested and jailed.

    • How UK journalist revealed mass GCHQ snooping decades before Snowden

      It took more than 25 years for Duncan Campbell to finally publish confirmation of the Echelon project, completing a story he began breaking in 1988.

      The scoop, released on The Register and The Intercept this week, capped off some 40 years of investigative journalism on British and American spy agencies, Campbell having begun his career by revealing the existence of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

    • Global spy system ECHELON confirmed at last – by leaked Snowden files
    • USA Monitors 90 Percent of Global Communications

      The National Security Agency (NSA) espionage program Echelon remains active, which controls 90 percent of global communications, revealed today the intercept digital site.
      In an article in the Internet portal, the British journalist Duncan Campbell made the history of this monitoring system, also known as Project P415, and sets filtered by former contractor NSA Edward Snowden, now a refugee in Russia elements.

      The materials confirm that the mechanism was created in 1966, shortly after the first communication satellites began operating in earth orbit.

      Overall network received the codename Frosting and consisted of two subprograms: Transient directed against communications satellite of the Soviet Union, and Echelon, which focused on electronic signals Western powers.

    • Global Five Eyes Spy System ‘Bigger Than Ever’

      In an exclusive interview with Sputnik, the respected UK investigative reporter Duncan Campbell has said a western-led mass surveillance system developed in the 1960s is “bigger than ever, much more powerful and a critical component” of mass surveillance.

    • UK ECHELON journalist: “Snowden proved spies need accountability”

      Legendary investigative journalist Duncan Campbell describes his life of being kidnapped by the London Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, being surveiled and harassed by UK spies and ministers, and reveals the identity of the whistleblower who leaked the details of ECHELON to him.

      Campbell’s article is accompanied by never-released Snowden docs that demonstrate the full scope of ECHELON surveillance, and traces the lineage of journalists and whistleblowers who took huge personal risks to reveal corruption, criminal wrongdoing, and secrecy among spies and their masters in government.

    • Biden calls Abe to apologize after WikiLeaks details alleged NSA spying on Tokyo

      U.S. Vice President Joe Biden apologized to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday for “causing trouble,” after documents released last week detailed alleged spying by the U.S. National Security Agency on the government in Tokyo, a top Japanese official said.

      Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the phone conversation between Biden and Abe came about at Washington’s request.

      Suga declined to comment on whether Biden admitted the U.S. had spied on Japanese officials and companies over a period that started in 2006, as alleged in documents released last week by anti-secrecy group WiliLeaks.

    • NSA Spying on Japan: The Fallout

      Last Friday, the WikiLeaks website unveiled evidence that the U.S. National Security Agency is conducting espionage operations in Japan. On July 31, WikiLeaks published “Target Tokyo,” a list of 35 Top Secret NSA targets in Japan and five NSA reports on intercepts relating to U.S.-Japan relations, trade negotiations, and sensitive climate strategy.

    • Stealing valuables and saying sorry

      WikiLeaks also released a statement issued by Julian Assange, where he said that the documents showed clearly the vulnerability of the Japanese government as officials had been worrying in private about how much or how little inside information they would let Washington know.

    • Tokyo Expects US Explanations on NSA Spying on Japanese Government

      Tokyo is waiting for the United States to clarify situation with the revelations concerning the US National Security Agency (NSA) spying on the Japanese government and businesses, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told journalists.

    • Backgrounder: Japan’s deafening silence over NSA spying

      The Japanese government has remained relatively silent since the WikiLeaks website published documents Friday showing the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has spied on the Japanese government and Japanese companies.

      The documents, dated from 2007 to 2009, include five NSA reports — four of which are marked top-secret — that provide intelligence on Japanese positions on international trade and climate change.

      WikiLeaks also posted an NSA list of 35 Japanese targets for telephone intercepts including the Japanese Cabinet Office, the Bank of Japan, the country’s finance and trade ministries, and major Japanese trading companies.

    • Japan’s Prime Minister Demands US Vice President Investigate NSA Spying

      Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe asked US Vice President Joe Biden to investigate allegations that the United States spied on top Japanese government and corporate officials, a Japanese government spokesman said on Wednesday.

    • Japan NSA Backlash to Raise Asian Demands on Pacific Trade Pact

      The latest WikiLeaks revelations documenting close National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Japan will provoke countries the United States is courting for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement to increase their demands, experts told Sputnik.

    • NSA conducted commercial espionage against Japanese government and businesses

      New leaked documents published by Wikileaks show that the US spy agency conducted surveillance operations against Japan’s top government officials, prioritizing finance and trade ministers, as well as the Japanese central bank and two private-sector energy companies.

      There’s no conceivable connection between this long-term surveillance — which included wiretaps — and national security.

    • Japan PM calls for probe into WikiLeaks claims of US spying

      Japanese leader Shinzo Abe told US Vice President Joe Biden he would have “serious concerns” if WikiLeaks claims Washington spied on Japanese politicians were true, and called for an investigation, a top official said Wednesday.

      Tokyo’s Cabinet spokesperson Yoshihide Suga said Biden had apologised to the Japanese prime minister in a telephone call for “causing troubles”, without confirming the spying claims.

    • Japan’s Shinzo Abe warns Joe Biden over WikiLeaks spy claims

      Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has told US Vice-President Joe Biden he will have “serious concerns” if WikiLeaks claims that Washington spied on Japanese politicians are true, calling for an investigation.

    • US Spying Scandal Might Seriously Undermine Trust In Abe’s Government

      Commenting on the recent WikiLeaks revelations concerning US National Security Agency spying on the Japanese government, a Japanese politician told Sputnik that it might seriously undermine trust in the current government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and damage Japanese-American relations; however, another political analyst has a different opinion.

    • Japan PM wants probe into WikiLeaks claims

      Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has told US Vice President Joe Biden he will have ‘serious concerns’ if WikiLeaks claims Washington spied on Japanese politicians are true, calling for an investigation.

      Tokyo’s Cabinet spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Biden had apologised to the Japanese leader in a telephone call for ‘causing troubles’, without confirming the spying claims.

      WikiLeaks said on Friday it had intercepts revealing years-long spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on Japanese officials and major companies.

    • U.S. VP speaks with Japanese PM after website exposed spying

      The Wikileaks website on Friday posted U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) reports and a list of 35 Japanese targets for telephone intercepts, including the Japanese Cabinet Office, the Bank of Japan, the country’s finance and trade ministries, and major Japanese trading companies.

      According to the website, the eavesdropping dated back to 2007, a year after Abe’s first term began, and one report from telephone intercepts of senior Japanese officials could have been shared with Australia, Canada, Britain and New Zealand — the U.S. intelligence partners.

    • NSA spying allegations should not shake trust in Japan-U.S. alliance
    • Japan Premier Urges Biden To Probe Reported US Spying

      Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on US Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday to investigate allegations by WikiLeaks that Washington spied on the Japanese government and companies, Tokyo said.

    • Germany Could Create NSA-Like Mass Surveillance Program

      According to a legal fellow at Electronic Frontier Foundation, the German authorities seem to have plans for a mass surveillance program that parallels the NSA program.

    • NSA Announces New GC, Cites Big Law Experience

      On Monday, the National Security Agency tapped retired Milbank partner Glenn Gerstell as its new General Counsel.

    • Glenn Gerstell Named NSA General Counsel; Michael Rogers Comments
    • NSA lawyer with cyber cred, former FBI CIO moves and more

      Zalmai Azmi has taken the reins as president and chief operating officer of the IT consulting firm IMTAS, the firm announced Aug. 1.

      A native of Afghanistan who served as the FBI’s CIO from 2004 to 2008 and led the bureau through an IT transformation, Azmi said he is “pleased and excited” to be taking the new role at IMTAS. Azmi has previously served as CEO of Nexus Solutions, a senior vice president at CACI and CIO for the Executive Office for United States Attorneys.

    • NSA Ordered to Look Harder for Records

      A federal judge dismissed most, but not all, of the National Security Agency’s requests to dismiss a reporter’s FOIA request on federal surveillance of judges.

      Jason Leopold, formerly with Al-Jazeera America and now with Vice News, filed two FOIA requests for NSA and FBI “surveillance of federal and state judges.”

      The NSA and the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel responded that they had no such records.

      They sought summary judgment and dismissal. Leopold claims they failed to conduct adequate searches.

    • Watchdog Demands Rules on FBI Media Spying

      The Department of Justice refuses to reveal its unpublished rules for spying on journalists, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation demands a look at them, in Federal Court.

    • Web’s random numbers are too weak, researchers warn

      The process of generating a good random number begins with the server translating mouse movements, keyboard presses and other things a machine does into a data stream of ones and zeros. This data is gathered in a “pool” that is regularly called on for many security functions.

    • South Korea pushes policy for public sector to use local servers and storage

      South Korea is moving to implement a policy that will have the public sector give preferential treament to local storage and server vendors over foreign counterparts starting next year to boost the market.

    • A License to Kill Innovation: Why A.B. 1326—California’s Bitcoin License—is Bad for Business, Innovation, and Privacy

      A.B. 1326 (Dababneh) is a bill that would require “virtual currency businesses” to apply for and obtain a license in order to offer services in California, and it includes significant fees and administrative hurdles. Unfortunately, the bill’s language is so vague that it’s unclear what companies are, in fact, “virtual currency businesses.” So in spite of carve-outs for smaller companies and for software developers who don’t exercise control over the currency, the proposal threatens the future of virtual currency experimentation and innovation in the state.

    • Privacy Badger graduates to v1.0, protects users from spying ads

      Have you ever faced the following dilemma? Your favourite website is equipped to detect whether you’re using an ad blocker, obviously you have one installed, and then you get a pop up or toolbar appear asking “Would you please add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist? Ads help keep this site running.”, obviously at this point you feel a bit bad and go ahead to disable the ads on that site. The issue you have now is that you just let an ad provider plant a cookie on your computer that will track you around the internet reporting what you’re interests are.

    • EFF Releases Privacy Badger To Try To Stop Online Tracking
    • US Government OPM Cyber Breach Much Worse Than Reported

      When the OPM breach was first discovered, the number of people said to be affected was four million. This figure quickly rose to 22 million, though the Solutionary report states this is probably a very misleading figure. The issue is that the records accessed were not only those of government employees, but also included personal data about family members and even friends, and so the number of people affected is likely to be closer to 132 million, and even this could be conservative. However the authors of the report state it will probably never be known just how big the breach was, but it is likely to have been “the biggest loss of private information ever.”

    • Office of Personnel Management and CFPB violating American’s privacy
    • Fourth Circuit adopts mosaic theory, holds that obtaining “extended” cell-site records requires a warrant

      The new case creates multiple circuit splits, which may lead to Supreme Court review. Specifically, the decision creates a clear circuit split with the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits on whether acquiring cell-site records is a search. It also creates an additional clear circuit split with the Eleventh Circuit on whether, if cell-site records are protected, a warrant is required. Finally, it also appears to deepen an existing split between the Fifth and Third Circuits on whether the Stored Communications Act allows the government to choose whether to obtain an intermediate court order or a warrant for cell-site records.

    • Is the Google Balloon experiment to spy on Sri Lanka & violate our personal freedoms?

      It was recently announced that Sri Lanka had been chosen to launch the Google balloon-based internet services under a project titled ‘Google Loon Project’. Anything being rolled out for the first time and free should raise concern. Why ‘experiment’ on Sri Lanka moreover why Sri Lanka or does it align to Kerry’s success in regime change in Sri Lanka and pax Americana goal? It is not so much as the idea to provide internet coverage to the whole of Sri Lanka (though users will still have to pay to their local service provider) but the ability that the owners of the balloon have over a sovereign country and whether local laws or even international can cover the range of spying/surveillance that can be done! Associated with the project and representing the US intelligence community is Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham Executive Director of Cyber Security Research and Education Institute which is sponsored by George Soros’s Raytheon. The most important unanswered question is why was such a project kept secret from the Sri Lankan public, why were associated stakeholders not involved to report on the pros & cons and moreover why was the fundamental rights of privacy of the people violated. None of us wish to have the entire country under a blanket of US surveillance and it is wrong to have enforced such a project overlooking the national security concerns and the privacy of the people of Sri Lanka. Even the business community will undoubtedly have reservations. Will the world’s 1.8billion internet users like to have their privacy invaded too?

    • North Korea: I was ‘monitored’ while I studied there

      Alessandro Ford picked a gap year involving the world’s most secretive and repressed country.

    • Manuel Contreras, head of Chile’s spy agency under Pinochet, dies aged 86

      Contreras, who headed agency that kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands, died while serving 500 year sentence for crimes against humanity

    • Hated and feared former Pinochet-era Chilean spy chief dies at age 86
    • Gen. Manuel Contreras, leader of Chile’s feared spy agency, dies at 86
    • Manuel Contreras, Chilean Spy Chief, Dies at 86

      Gen. Manuel Contreras, Chile’s intelligence chief during the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, died on Friday in the military hospital in Santiago while serving 526 years of multiple prison terms for human rights violations. He was 86.

    • Augsto Pinochet dies at the age of 86
    • Manuel Contreras, Chile’s feared ex-spy chief, dies at 86
    • Chile’s feared secret police chief dies at age 86
    • Tor users: Do not expect anonymity and end-to-end security

      The Tor network is similar to a door lock: It works well, until a determined individual wants to get in. Get details on what Tor is and what it is not.

    • The judge committed fouls, too

      All espionages are a fact of life in today’s world, but none is morally acceptable, much less superior, to others.

    • Seeing a history of all your movements is now easier for you, but harder for the feds

      When you meet a new someone who makes your heart flutter and the feeling is mutual, and the two of you have spent significant parts of your life in the same city at the same time, there is usually a conversation within the first few weeks of the relationship trying to figure out why you didn’t meet sooner. You talk about the places you hung out and usually realize that you frequented the same coffee shop or bar or music venue, and you wonder if you were ever there at the same time. Were your phones to offer up their full history of where they’ve been, you could line up your personal tracking maps and find out the exact moment you might have encountered one another earlier in life.

    • Quoted: Carly Fiorina wants Apple, Google to ‘tear down cyberwalls’
    • Carly Fiorina calls on Apple, Google to provide greater access for FBI
    • Jonathan Pollard & Edward Snowden: How the US Hates Tattletales

      It seems clear that Edward Snowden and Julian Assange can look forward to extended vacations once their feet touch US soil. Like Pollard, Snowden’s charges fall under the US Espionage Act where defendants are not allowed to raise a defense. But unlike Mr. Pollard, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange has the internet and social media at their disposal to gain US and possibly worldwide sympathy. US Administration officials would probably not risk a drop in approval ratings and throw Snowden and Assange in Pollard’s vacated cell, or would they?

    • US Government Spies on EU Companies to Control European Industries

      Data collection is only a small part of the NSA’s intelligence tasks. The main goal of the US’ intelligence agencies is to control politicians and managers in Europe, former head of the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Gerd Polli, said in an interview with DWN.

    • Next-gen secure email using internet’s own DNS – your help needed

      A group of researchers from the US government and dot-com operator VeriSign are working on a new system for secure email: using domain names.

      Highlighting the problems and security holes associated with current mail systems, the team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a subset of the US Department of Commerce, argues that by using a new set of security protocols built around the domain name system, it is possible to provide a much higher level of security in electronic messages.

    • Chicago and Los Angeles have used ‘dirt box’ surveillance for a decade

      The Los Angeles and Chicago police departments have acquired “dirt boxes” – military surveillance technology that can intercept data, calls and text messages from hundreds of cellphones simultaneously, as well as jam transmissions from a device, according to documents obtained by Reveal.

    • BlackLivesMatter Activists: Targets of US Surveilence

      The Obama administration’s spy agencies have been keeping track of the movements, communications and activities of the new crop of Black activists. Although not surprising, the recent reports should give rise to “new strategies and tactics to exchange information among groups, and new modalities to circumvent infiltration and, ultimately, government sting operations.”

    • Edward Snowden: White House Rejects Pardon Plea
    • Views of the News: NSA seeks vast cyber deterrent

      U.S security officials recently stressed a need for a massive cyberweapon to provide a deterrent against ongoing and future cyber attacks by foreign powers.

      Admiral Michael Rogers—National Security Agency (NSA) director and head of U.S. Cyber Command—said it will require such a counterstrike capability to deter enemy hackers trying to penetrate our security data systems.

      Rogers cited the nuclear deterrence strategy of the Cold War missile race as relevant for defense against recent attacks on U.S. government and business databases.

    • China’s Cyberspying Is ‘on a Scale No One Imagined’–if You Pretend NSA Doesn’t Exist

      But how can that be? China is accused of obtaining personal information about 20 million Americans, federal employees and contractors, and that’s a big deal. But the US’s NSA, according to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, processes 20 billion phone calls and internet messages every day. The NSA’s unofficial motto for years has been “Collect It All.”

      The article notes that the US has its own “intelligence operations inside China”—but pretends these are purely defensive, referring to “the placement of thousands of implants in Chinese computer networks to warn of impending attacks.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Major psychological association bans cooperation with CIA following torture scandal

      The American Psychological Association made a nearly unanimous decision today to bar psychologists from participating in national security interrogations, The New York Times reports. The decision was a response to an independent report that came out last month, detailing how top APA officials and psychiatrists participated in the CIA’s torture program during the Bush administration.

    • Everyone Agrees the Senate’s Cyber Bill is Terrible. So Why Is It Moving?

      What do numerous privacy groups, civil liberties organizations, open government advocates, free market proponents, technologists, and the Department of Homeland Security have in common? Deep concern about the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or “CISA,” a bill expected to come to a vote this week in the Senate.

    • No Immunity For Cops Who Sent A SWAT Team To A 68-Year-Old Woman’s House For Threats Delivered Over Open WiFi Connection

      Earlier this year, we covered the story of Louise Milan, a 68-year-old grandmother whose house was raided by a SWAT team (accompanied by a news crew) searching for someone who had made alleged threats against police officers over the internet. Part of the probable cause submitted for the warrant was Milan’s IP address. But the police made no attempt to verify whether any resident of Milan’s house made the threats and ignored the fact that the IP address was linked to an open WiFi connection.

    • Despite Recent Court Rulings, Getting Behind The Wheel Is Pretty Much Kissing Your 4th Amendment Protections Goodbye

      There’s been more good news than bad concerning the Fourth Amendment recently. In addition to the Supreme Court’s ruling that searches of cellphones incident to arrest now require a warrant, various circuit court decisions on cell site location info and the surreptitious use of GPS tracking devices may see the nation’s top court addressing these contentious issues in the near future. (The latter still needs to be addressed more fully than the Supreme Court’s 2012 punt on the issue.)

    • Spy Software Gets a Second Life on Wall Street

      A wave of companies with ties to the intelligence community is winning over the world of finance, with banks and hedge funds putting the firms’ terrorist-tracking tools to work rooting out employee misconduct before it leads to fines or worse.

    • Here’s the CIA’s Letter to Congress Saying the Agency Was Quitting the Torture Business

      Three months after President Barack Obama was sworn into office, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta sent a letter to congressional oversight committees informing them that the agency was changing its torture policies.

      But the CIA would still play a significant role in the interrogation of terrorism suspects, according to a top-secret letter Panetta wrote [pdf below] that was recently declassified by the CIA and obtained exclusively by VICE News in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

      Panetta’s letter was sent to lawmakers just days after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to begin an investigation into the efficacy of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. It also followed an executive order Obama signed as one of his first acts as president outlawing the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” and shuttering the CIA’s network of black site prisons where detainees were held.

    • Eight top ex-CIA officials rebut ‘torture report’ with their own book

      In a bid to bring the “rest of the story” to the nation about the CIA’s detention and interrogation of al Qaeda terrorists, eight former top CIA officials, including three directors, are publishing a rebuttal to the sensational Senate Democratic “torture report.”

    • Eight top ex-CIA officials launch bid to rebut ‘torture report’
    • Former CIA Officials Launch Smear Campaign Against Senate Torture Report

      In an attempt to unveil what was really behind the scenes of the Al Qaeda terrorist interrogations conducted by the CIA, eight former high-ranking CIA officials, including three former directors, are ready to publish a response to last year’s incendiary US Senate “torture report”, according to the Washington Examiner.

    • CIA Torture Practices ‘Nothing New’ – Former Official

      Former US State Department official William Blum does not consider the recent statements about torture used by CIA under a program of “enhanced interrogation” as “sensational.”

    • New Effort to Rebut Torture Report Undermined as Former Official Admits the Obvious

      Former top CIA officials planning a major public-relations campaign to rebut the Senate torture report’s damning revelations have found themselves undermined by one of their own.

      Eight former top officials wrangled by Bill Harlow — the former CIA flak who brought us the CIASavedLives.com website after the Senate report was issued last December — are publishing a book in the coming weeks titled Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program.

    • Former CIA Official Admits Use of Torture during Bush Era

      A former top CIA official acknowledged that the US intelligence agency tortured terror suspects after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks under a program called “enhanced interrogation.”

    • Intelligence professionals continue rebutting torture allegations

      The book by the former CIA officers likely will be met with denunciations from Feinstein and others who accuse the U.S. of torturing Islamic terrorists. When former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell published, “The Great War of Our Time,” earlier in 2015, Feinstein responded to his defense of CIA treatment of terrorists by issuing both a press release and a 54-page “fact check” sheet through her official senatorial website. Feinstein condemned the book through both statements and reiterated her accusation that Americans were guilty of torture.

    • Gitmo is a “Rights-Free Zone”: Dissident Psychologists Speak Out on APA Role in CIA-Pentagon Torture

      We broadcast from Toronto, Canada, site of the annual convention of the largest group of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association. Ahead of a vote on a resolution to bar psychologists from participating in national security interrogations, the Psychologists for Social Responsibility hosted a town hall meeting. We feature highlights.

    • APA bans member psychologists from taking part in ‘national security interrogations’
    • US Psychologists’ Association Bans Members from Colluding in US Torture

      In what may seem like a no brainer, the American Psychological Association has voted to ban any member from participating in government torture programs. The decision follows a report which details the organization’s role in justifying “enhanced interrogation.”

    • Psychology Association Votes to Bar Members From Participating in Interrogations

      The American Psychological Association (APA) voted nearly unanimously on Friday in favor of a resolution prohibiting its members from participating in national security interrogations. Retired Col. Larry James, the former top Army intelligence psychologist at Guantanamo, had the only dissenting vote, Democracy Now reports.

    • Psychologists vote not to participate in US torture

      The American Psychological Association (APA) voted overwhelmingly on Friday to prohibit members from participating in interrogations conducted by United States intelligence agencies at locations deemed illegal under international law.

    • American Psychological Association Bans Members From Participating In Interrogations

      Following revelations earlier this year that American Psychological Association (APA) officials actively colluded with the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, the group voted nearly unanimously Friday to prohibit psychologists from participating in future national security interrogations.

    • Psychologists Approve Ban on Role in National Security Interrogations
    • Psychologists ban interrogation role [same piece]
    • James Risen: In Sharp Break from Past, APA Set to Vote on Barring Psychologists from Interrogations
    • Psychology group votes to ban members from taking part in interrogations
    • First Step for Reform: APA Votes to Bar Psychologists From Colluding in Torture
    • How the American Psychological Association lost its way
    • The Brutal Toll of Psychologists’ Role in Torture
    • When Psychology Is Used For Torture
    • Send in the psychologists to study the psychologists: Salutin

      The American Psychological Association is holding its annual convention this weekend in Toronto. It’s a huge organization, about 100,000 members — academics, researchers, practitioners. This is the seventh time in 37 years that they’re meeting here, a frequency or repetition compulsion that may be worthy of research and, possibly, therapy. Canadians belong to it, the way the Blue Jays belong to the American League. We’re in it but not always of it.

    • Breaking: APA Votes to Bar Psychologists from Nat’l Security Interrogations After Torture Scandal

      By a nearly unanimous vote, the American Psychological Association’s Council of Representatives voted today in Toronto to adopt a new policy barring psychologists from participating in national security interrogations. Retired Col. Larry James, the former top Army intelligence psychologist at Guantánamo, cast the sole dissenting vote.

    • The American Psychological Association Comes Out Belatedly Against ‘Enhanced Interrogation’

      Torture is just torture when you get rid of the pseudo-science.

    • American psychologists promise not to collude in torture

      In 2005 the top brass in the American Psychological Association changed its code of ethics.

    • CIA Torture Prisons Were Probably Worse Than You Can Imagine

      The Romanian prison was code named “Bright Light” and was part of a secret network of prisons operated by the U.S.

    • Tyler S. Drumheller | CIA officer, 63

      But he was best known publicly for his role in exposing the extent to which a key part of the administration’s case for war with Iraq had been built on the claims of an Iraqi defector and serial fabricator with the code name Curveball.

    • Tyler Drumheller, 63, CIA career of 26 years

      But he was best known publicly for his role in exposing the extent to which a key part of the administration’s case for war with Iraq had been built on the claims of an Iraqi defector and serial fabricator with the fitting code name “Curveball.”

      In contrast to Hollywood’s depiction of spies as impossibly elegant and acrobatic, Drumheller was a bulky, rumpled figure who often seemed oblivious to the tufts of dog hair on his clothes.

    • CIA Figure in Hillary Clinton Email Scandal Dies at 63
    • Author of Benghazi memos sent to Clinton dies after cancer battle

      Specifically, he vocally criticized the agency’s trust in an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, who gave faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein had developed laboratories for biological weapons. The assertions played a major role in the George W. Bush administration’s public case for invading Iraq in 2003.

      Drumheller also criticized the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger, which it used as evidence to support the claim that Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

    • CIA interrogation tactics can be used at home [not about torture]
    • Obama: The Courage to Say ‘We Were Wrong’

      Most of Obama’s letter contained information we already know. One of his first acts in office was to sign an Executive Order ending the CIA’s illegal detention and interrogation program. He is working to close Guantanamo, an unenviable task that raises as many questions as it solves but still must be done.

    • As the child of Latvian immigrants, I know that torture is un-American and should be banned: Ivars Balkits (Opinion)

      Nothing is more un-American than the support of torture by our government. That is the axiom I grew up with as a first-generation American born to Latvian emigres. In the final days of World War II, my parents, now deceased, fled the totalitarian Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic because they feared they would be tortured or murdered by the NKVD, as the Soviet internal police were known, if not summarily deported to Gulag labor camps.

    • CIA: OK, So Maybe We Work With Bad Guys

      The CIA is willing to overlook some of its shadier partners’ human rights records if they can still get the goods, according to agency Director John Brennan.

      In a letter sent to a trio of lawmakers and provided to The Huffington Post, Brennan expanded on the agency’s controversial relationships with less-than-desirable characters, offering an unusually candid glimpse into the spies’ liaison partnerships.

      The letter, a response to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), sought to clarify public remarks made by Brennan earlier this year. The unclassified response was dated Thursday.

    • White House criticized for not filling watchdog post at CIA

      More than six months after the CIA inspector general resigned, President Obama has yet to nominate a replacement, prompting mounting concerns on Capitol Hill that the delay may be affecting sensitive internal investigations — including a probe into an errant drone strike in Pakistan that killed American hostage Warren Weinstein, sources told Yahoo News.

    • Sept. 11 Defendants in Limbo Thwart Obama’s Guantanamo Ambitions
    • The true story of an ex-cop’s war on lie detectors

      Doug Williams used to give polygraph exams. Now he’s going to prison for teaching people how to beat them

      There was something odd, Doug Williams recalls, about the clean-cut young man who came to see him on Feb. 21, 2013. When Brian Luley had called two weeks earlier, he’d introduced himself as a deputy sheriff in Virginia applying for a job with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. To get the job, Luley needed to pass a polygraph test, and there were “a couple of reasons” he thought that might be a problem.

    • OPINION: What justice for the people of Chad?

      On 20 July 2015, the trial of former Chadian President Hissène Habré began in Senegal. The trial reflects many of the tensions afflicting international justice. Habré, who is charged with crimes against humanity, torture, and war crimes, relating to the death of an alleged 40,000 people between 1982 and 1990, denounced the court as a colonial project before being forcibly removed from the courtroom. The trial was subsequently postponed until 7 September, for Habré’s defence counsel to review court files.

    • Donald Trump: “Waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe”

      Donald Trump opened the door to torturing terrorism suspects if he’s elected president, telling ABC News Sunday that waterboarding “doesn’t sound very severe” given the barbarism of ISIS.

    • More than 80% of the thousands held at the Chicago police’s ‘black site’ were black

      About 8.5% of those held at the site were white. According to the 2010 census, Chicago’s population is 32% non-Hispanic white, 33% black, and 29% Hispanic (of which 13.5% identify as racially white) .

    • A Letter From Africa to #BlackLivesMatter

      When you say Black Lives Matter do you mean just Black American lives? What about the tens of thousands of black lives in Cuba that have been lost due to the covert war and the economic embargo still being waged against Cuba by the US government?

      Or what about the black lives that were lost when the UN over saw the starvation deaths of 250,000 “black” Somalis during the worst drought and famine in 60 years from 2010-2012, deaths that were predicted when UNICEF, headed by former senior foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama, Anthony Lake, budgeted less than 10 cents a day to feed the Somali refugees under their care?

      Do Black Lives Matter when the CIA and their capos in the human trafficking mafia in East Africa sends hundreds of Eritrean migrants to their deaths in rickety boats on the Mediterranean Sea (the Eritrean government continues to demand that the UN convene hearings so the reams of evidence they have on the CIA’s role in these crimes can be exposed to international scrutiny)?

      Do these Black lives matter just as much as Black American lives?

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Names

      • Anti-Piracy Group Hits Indie Creators For Using the Word ‘Pixels’

        An anti-piracy firm working for Columbia Pictures has hit Vimeo with a wave of bogus copyright takedowns just because people used the word ‘Pixels’ in their video titles. Several indie productions are affected, including an art-focused NGO, an award-winning short movie and a royalty free stock footage company.

      • No Air for Jordan: Michael Jordan Loses Fight over Marks in China

        The dispute began in 2012 when Michael Jordan took the sports brand Qiaodan Sports to court, alleging the misuse of his name and several other marks, such as the number 23 (used by him during his tenure in the NBA) and the Jumpman logo (derived from a photoshoot with Nike, incorporating Mr Jordan’s often unique and flamboyant dunk poses) that is associated with his own Air Jordan brand. At first instance his claim was denied, and Mr Jordan subsequently appealed that decision to the High People’s Court.

    • Copyrights

      • BitTorrent to RIAA: You’re ‘barking up the wrong tree’

        The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent a letter to BitTorrent last week asking the company to help stop copyrighted infringement of its members’ content. Brad Buckles, RIAA’s executive vice president of anti-piracy, asked BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker to “live up to” comments made by former chief content officer Matt Mason.

08.08.15

Links 8/8/2015: Linux Mint 17.2, CentOS Linux 6.7

Posted in News Roundup at 7:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • True Life: I’m An Open Source Rookie

    Some projects will continue to grow and become popular and successful while others may morph and change as they progress. Not all Black Duck Rookies are high-profile projects. CodeCombat, OpenBazaar, and Neovim are three projects representing different areas of technology not only in technical scope but in their path to Open Source Rookies of the Year.

  • Free Windows 10 Has Big Costs, Where’s GIMP.org?

    It was a slow news day today in Linuxland, which is probably why several Windows 10 headlines jumped out at me. First up, is a paranoid’s guide to securing Windows 10 that revealed listens to microphones and collects keystrokes of its users. Users brace for the first forced update and Christine Hall looks at some of gotchas to home and enterprise users. In other news, what’s happened to gimp.org?

  • Taking The Mystery Out Of SDKs With Open Source

    Mobile SDKs are, for most publishers, a necessary evil. Whether you’re trying to integrate analytics, cross-promotion, tracking, monetization or payments, your first step is most often to inject a third-party SDK into your codebase.

    This much-maligned piece of software drives developers, operations and marketers alike up the wall — creating well-defined operational specs that often change to soiling your product code with unspecified external components.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Firefox 39.0.3 Hotfix Out Now to Patch a Critical Issue in the Built-in PDF Viewer

        Today, August 6, Mozilla started seeding the first hotfix release of the stable branch of its popular, open-source web browser for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, Mozilla Firefox 39.0.

      • Important Firefox 39.0.3 Security Update Arrives in Ubuntu

        Canonical announced that the latest Firefox 39.0.3 has been uploaded to the repositories for the users of Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

      • 0-day attack on Firefox users stole password and key data: Patch now!
      • Firefox exploit found in the wild

        Yesterday morning, August 5, a Firefox user informed us that an advertisement on a news site in Russia was serving a Firefox exploit that searched for sensitive files and uploaded them to a server that appears to be in Ukraine. This morning Mozilla released security updates that fix the vulnerability. All Firefox users are urged to update to Firefox 39.0.3. The fix has also been shipped in Firefox ESR 38.1.1.

      • Virtual reality is the next open web frontier

        Each year, there’s a seemingly infinite amount of exciting things happening on the open web. It’s hard to keep track of all the new things rolling out, but I’d like to draw your attention to one of them that Mozilla has been quietly working on MozVR. It’s a new technology that combines the open web and virtual reality, enabling developers to create virtual worlds that we can step inside.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Who will be the Ubuntu of Hadoop?

      Today, he posits, variation between Hadoop distributions is actually less than we see in Linux land. (“There’s more variation among the Red Hat, Ubuntu, and CoreOS kernels than there is among the core components of the various Hadoop distributions.”) I found this a bit surprising given Hortonworks’ noise earlier this year that Hadoop standardization was imperative, as it launched the Open Data Platform initiative.

    • Announcing the draft Federated Cloud Sharing API
    • Federated Cloud Sharing in ownCloud 8.1https://owncloud.org/blog/federated-cloud-sharing-in-owncloud-8-1/

      Over the few last weeks, ownCloud founder and company co-founder Frank Karlitschek has published a short series of blogs on the topic of Federated Cloud Sharing, discussing what it is and why it is important. Today, he published a draft of a open API for sharing between different file share and sync clouds. In this post, we’ll quickly recap the concept, talk a little about the Open Cloud Mesh working group, and show how to configure and use it in ownCloud 8.1.

    • Hortonworks Reports Strong Results, a Growing Customer Base
    • OpenStack and Google – a match made in heaven

      OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

  • Databases

    • UK government reportedly working to end its reliance on Oracle

      The U.K. Cabinet Office has reportedly asked government departments and agencies to try to find ways to end their reliance on Oracle software, but it’s not clear that approach will really solve its problems.

      Motivating the request was the large but unspecified number of Oracle licenses currently supported within the U.K. government, The Register reported. Included in that count are apparently licenses covering individual leaders whose departments already pay for licenses of their own as well as separate software versions being supported.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.0 Is a Milestone Release for Ubuntu Touch

      LibreOffice 5.0 was made available by The Document Foundation a couple of days ago, and it’s a glorious release. It full of all sorts of new features, and many users have already upgraded to this latest version, but the application will also have an impact on another new platform, Ubuntu Touch.

  • CMS

    • Whats New for You This August in Open Source CMS

      In one corner, we have Hippo CTO Arjé Cahn, expouding the merits of open source CMS.

      In the other, we have Bryan Soltis, Technical Evangelist at Kentico Software, a Web Content and Customer Experience Management provider, espousing the virtues of proprietary systems.

  • Education

    • Open source is coming to campus

      I wanted to share an upcoming open source software event that we are hosting at my campus, at the University of Minnesota Morris. Working with OpenHatch, we are connecting mentors with students and members of the community for a one-day event. We’ll talk about what open source software is, and help people get started with their first contribution to open source software projects.

  • Healthcare

    • Open-source software boost for public health sector

      This has been possible because of an open-source software developed by US-based organization Dimagi. A social enterprise that specializes in using technology to empower rural communities across the world, they currently serve in more than 40 developing countries being engaged in over 300 projects. Two members of the Dimagi team were in the city to work on improving the interface that they share with Lata Medical Research Foundation (LMRF).

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Licence change derails development of hospital system

      The changing of the licence of openERP, an open source solution for enterprise resource planning, from GPL to AGPL in late 2009, thwarted development of Hospital, a hospital information system (HIS) written for a paediatric clinic in Thessaloniki (Greece). The clinic stopped a pilot of the software, and its developers moved to other open source-based projects.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • FDA To Develop Open-Source Precision Medicine Software Platform
    • FDA Unveils Open Source Platform for Genomic Sequencing Data

      On Wednesday, the FDA announced the launch of an open source platform for community sharing of genomic sequencing data called precisionFDA. DNAnexus, the provider of cloud-based genome informatics and data management was awarded a research and development contract by the FDA to build the platform. precisionFDA is the FDA’s answer to its role under the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative is to review the current regulatory landscape and develop a streamlined approach to evaluating next-generation sequencing NGS-based diagnostics.

    • The open source era dawns in Vietnam with fab labs arriving on scene

      A comprehensive look at Vietnam’s burgeoning open source movement and the players involved and why you should get in now

    • Open Access/Content

      • Save money with open-source textbooks

        It’s hardly a secret that the price of new college textbooks has risen 82% in the last decade, forcing students to find cheaper alternatives or forego course materials altogether.

    • Open Hardware

      • An open-source work bench

        Maker Bench is an open souce CNCed work bench design from 3D drawing company SketchUp, deigned by Eric Schimelpfenig.

        The SketchUp community has gone on to modify it for various uses.

  • Programming

    • Go 1.5 RC1 Released

      Go 1.5 is a huge update with the work to be rewritten in Go itself and many other features like a fully-concurrent garbage collector, new architecture ports, switching to Git, and many other changes. Go developers can find the verbose explanation of 1.5 changes via the tentative release notes.

Leftovers

  • Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems

    The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Friday
    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Black Hat Researchers Hack Rifle for Fun

      “The reason we started doing this in the first place is Runa [Sandvik] is from Norway and has a very romanticized vision of the U.S., so loving all things America, we needed to go to a gun show,” Augur said.

      At to the gun show, Sandvik became interested in the TrackingPoint weapon after learning that it is a Linux-powered device that could be connected to a phone via a mobile app.

    • And even Wintel is not safe

      At the annual Black Hat conference delegates have been shown a new exploit for Intel and AMD x86 central processor units that has hitherto existed since 1977!

      [...]

      Christopher Domas, a security researcher with the Battelle Memorial Institute discovered the flaw. “By leveraging the flaw, attackers could install a rootkit in the processors System Management Mode (SMM), a protected region of code that underpins all the firmware security features in modern computers. Once installed, the rootkit could be used for destructive attacks like wiping the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) the modern BIOS or even to re-infect the OS after a clean install. Protection features like Secure Boot wouldn’t help, because they too rely on the SMM to be secure. The attack essentially breaks the hardware roots of trust,” Domas said.

    • HTML5 privacy hole left users open to tracking for three years

      A feature of HTML5 that allows sites to detect battery life on a visitor’s device can also be used to track behaviour, a piece of research has revealed.

    • Sick of Flash security holes? HTML5 has its own

      HTML5 has been billed as the natural, standards-based successor to proprietary plug-ins such as Adobe’s Flash Player for providing rich multimedia services on the Web. But when it comes to security, one of Flash’s major weaknesses, HTML5 is no panacea.

      In fact, HTML5 has security issues of its own. Julien Bellanger, CEO of application security monitoring firm Prevoty, says HTML5 makes security more complex, not simpler. HTML5 security has been a question mark for years, and it has not improved over the stretch, he says.

    • Attackers can access Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive files without a user’s password

      The attack differs from traditional man-in-the-middle attacks, which rely on tapping data in transit between two servers or users, because it exploits a vulnerability in the design of many file synchronization offerings, including Google, Box, Microsoft, and Dropbox services.

    • SDN switches aren’t hard to compromise, researcher says

      Onie is a small, Linux based operating system that runs on a bare-metal switch. A network operating system is installed on top of Onie, which is designed to make it easy and fast for the OS to be swapped with a different one.

    • Open Network Switches Pose Security Risk, Researcher Says

      At the Black Hat show, a security expert demonstrates how vulnerable SDN switches that use the ONIE software are open to attacks by hackers.

    • OPM wins Pwnie, Google on Android security, DoJ on CFAA: Black Hat 2015 roundup

      Black Hat USA is finishing up in Las Vegas. News from its 18th year includes nuclear nightmares, Department of Justice on computer crime and research, Google on the state of Android security and much more.

    • on the detection of quantum insert

      The NSA has a secret project that can redirect web browsers to sites containing more sophisticated exploits called QUANTUM INSERT. (Do I still need to say allegedly?) It works by injecting packets into the TCP stream, though overwriting the stream may be a more accurate description. Refer to Deep dive into QUANTUM INSERT for more details. At the end of that post, there’s links to some code that can help one detect QI attacks in the wild. As noted by Wired and Bruce Schneier, among dozens of others, now we can defend ourselves against this attack (well, at least detect it).

    • Detailed Smart Card Cryptographic Token Security Guide

      After my first post about smartcards under Linux, I thought I would share some information I’ve been gathering.

      This post is already huge, so I am not going to dive into — much — specific commands, but I am linking to many sources with detailed instructions.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • To Defend Iran Deal, Obama Boasts that He’s Bombed Seven Countries

      President Obama yesterday spoke in defense of the Iran Deal at American University, launching an unusually blunt and aggressive attack on deal opponents. Obama’s blistering criticisms aimed at the Israeli government and its neocon supporters were accurate and unflinching, including the obvious fact that what they really crave is regime change and war. About opposition to the deal from the Israeli government, he said: “it would be an abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.”

      Judged as a speech, it was an impressive and effective rhetorical defense of the deal, which is why leading deal opponents have reacted so hysterically. The editors of Bloomberg News – which has spewed one Iraq-War-fearmongering-type article after the next about the deal masquerading as “reporting” – whined that Obama was “denigrating those who disagree with him” and that “it would be far better to win this fight fairly.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pronounced himself “especially insulted” and said Obama’s speech went “way over the line of civil discourse.” Our nation’s Churchillian warriors are such sensitive souls: sociopathically indifferent to the lives they continually extinguish around the world (provided it all takes place far away from their comfort and safety), but deeply, deeply hurt – “especially insulted” – by mean words directed at them and their motives.

    • ‘A genocide caused by European selfishness’: Sicilian mayor in plea after migrant shipwreck

      The mayor of Palermo urged EU leaders to respond to “a genocide caused by European selfishness” on Thursday, as an Irish navy ship carrying the bodies of migrants who died when their boat capsized off the coast of Libya docked in the Sicilian port.

      Leoluca Orlando spoke as the patrol vessel Niamh arrived with 370 survivors of Wednesday’s disaster and 25 corpses, including the bodies of children.

    • Hiroshima Atomic Bombing 70th Anniversary Marked With Solemn Ceremony, Calls For Nuclear Disarmament

      Residents of the Japanese metropolis of Hiroshima on Thursday solemnly marked the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bomb assault on the town throughout World Warfare II. Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used the event to name for worldwide nuclear disarmament.

      Bells tolled, hundreds bowed their heads in prayer and doves have been launched into the sky, at a ceremony attended by 40,000 individuals, together with representatives of greater than 100 nations.

      “Seventy years on I need to reemphasize the need of world peace,” Abe stated in his speech, based on a , including that the bomb had not solely killed hundreds of individuals in Hiroshima but in addition brought on unspeakable struggling to survivors.

    • 70 Years Later, The Bomb Still Casts Fear

      On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped a “super weapon” on Hiroshima, Japan, and launched a fundamental shift in the way we wage war.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • New Developments in Julian Assange’s Epic Struggle for Justice

      The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice and a grueling farce. For three years, a police cordon around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost £12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His “crime” is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.

      The persecution of Julian Assange is about to flare again as it enters a dangerous stage. From August 20, three quarters of the Swedish prosecutor’s case against Assange regarding sexual misconduct in 2010 will disappear as the statute of limitations expires. At the same time, Washington’s obsession with Assange and WikiLeaks has intensified. Indeed, it is vindictive American power that offers the greatest threat – as Chelsea Manning and those still held in Guantanamo can attest.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Reddit increases censorship by banning more communities

      Reddit announced more crackdowns on communities deemed to be offensive, and it also announced a quarantining policy for certain communities that will require users to opt-in to see those communities.

    • Reddit finally bans its white-supremacist subreddits

      Social news site Reddit has banned six forums, or “subreddits”, that form the core of its white-supremacist community.

      The banned subreddits included “CoonTown”, “WatchNiggersDie”, “bestofcoontown”, “koontown”, “CoonTownMods”, “CoonTownMeta”, although more have been banned since, as users attempt to recreate them and get shut down in turn.

    • Porn in India is actually still banned: internet companies fail to unblock adult sites

      Porn is still effectively banned in India, since a government directive to unblock it is too vague to implement.

      The government banned porn over the weekend, but after vast amounts of criticism quickly undid the block. But it came with a catch — that sites that allow child porn should not be let back online — which has become too difficult for internet providers to implement.

      “ISPs have no way or mechanism to filter out child pornography from URLs, and the further unlimited sub-links,” Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) said, reports the Times of India.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Reviving the Myth of the ‘Superpredator’

      By the early 1990s, as drug war hysteria fed an unprecedented build-up of the prison system, news organizations were declaring that youth born in the crack cocaine era would grow up to be “superpredators,” a “new breed” of offenders with “absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future.” Hillary Clinton warned of super predators in 1996 while campaigning for her husband.

    • Psychologist’s Work for GCHQ Deception Unit Inflames Debate Among Peers

      A British psychologist is receiving sharp criticism from some professional peers for providing expert advice to help the U.K. surveillance agency GCHQ manipulate people online.

      The debate brings into focus the question of how or whether psychologists should offer their expertise to spy agencies engaged in deception and propaganda.

    • Chicago police detained thousands of black Americans at interrogation facility

      Guardian lawsuit reveals overwhelming racial disparity at Homan Square, where detainees are still held for minor crimes with little access to the outside world, despite police denials that site is an anomaly

      At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility, newly uncovered records reveal.

      Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police.

      Despite repeated denials from the Chicago police department that the warehouse is a secretive, off-the-books anomaly, the Homan Square files begin to show how the city’s most vulnerable people get lost in its criminal justice system.

      People held at Homan Square have been subsequently charged with everything from “drinking alcohol on the public way” to murder. But the scale of the detentions – and the racial disparity therein – raises the prospect of major civil-rights violations.

    • Cops Caught Misbehaving During Pot Dispensary Raid Sue Police Dept. To Prevent Recording From Being Used Against Them

      The cops who were caught on camera insulting an amputee, disabling security cameras, playing darts and sampling THC-laced edibles during a raid on a pot dispensary are suing to prevent Santa Ana Police Department investigators from using the recording against them. (via Reason)

    • Suspended Cops Say Video of Them Eating Marijuana Edibles During a Raid Violated Their Privacy

      Remember the Santa Ana, California, cops who were caught on video munching on what seem to be cannabis-infused chocolate bars after raiding an unlicensed medical marijuana dispensary in May? The Orange County Register reports that three officers who were suspended after the incident are trying to stop the Santa Ana Police Department from using the footage in its internal investigation. Among other things, their lawsuit argues that the officers thought they had disabled all of the security cameras at Sky High Holistic and therefore had a reasonable expectation of privacy. The cops complain that the dispensary never got their permission to record them as they searched the premises.

    • Secular blogger killed in Bangladesh; fourth this year

      Assailants believed to be Islamist militants entered an apartment building posing as potential tenants and killed a secular blogger in Bangladesh’s capital on Friday, in the fourth such deadly attack this year, police said.

      Police official Mustafizur Rahman identified the victim as 40-year-old Niloy Chowdhury and said he was hacked to death in his apartment. The motive was not immediately clear.

    • Fourth blogger hacked to death with machetes this year in Bangladesh

      According to the monitoring group SITE, Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) branch Ansar al-Islam warned of more murders of bloggers to come in the Muslim-majority country: “In a communique issued in Bengali and English, and posted on its Facebook and Twitter accounts on August 7, 2015, Ansar al-Islam declared the attack to be ‘vengeance’ for the honor of the Prophet Muhammad, and vowed similar operations in the future against its enemies. The group threatened: ‘If your ‘Freedom of Speech’ maintains no limits, then widen your chests for ‘Freedom of our Machetes.’”

    • Police review video of Northern California officer pulling gun on man recording him

      A Northern California police department is reviewing a video showing one of its officers pulling a gun on a man who was recording him on his cellphone.

      The video, posted on YouTube, shows a Rohnert Park Public Safety officer driving toward Don McComas as he’s filming. As McComas moves in closer to record the license plate number on the officer’s police SUV, the officer stops, gets out and tells McComas to take his hand out of his pocket.

    • Trump’s Triumph: Billionaire Blowhard Exposes Fake Political System

      Last night’s FOX News GOP Presidential Debate Extravaganza featured the most riveting two minute political exchange ever heard on national television. During a brief colloquy between Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and Fox moderator Brett Baier, the pugnacious casino magnate revealed the appalling truth about the American political system, that the big money guys like Trump own the whole crooked contraption lock, stock, and barrel, and that, the nation’s fake political leaders do whatever they’re told to do. Without question, it was most illuminating commentary to ever cross the airwaves.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC urges carriers to turn off copper networks, upgrade to fiber

      The FCC today imposed new rules on carriers that intend to turn off copper networks and replace them with fiber, but said that carriers should feel free to make the switch as long as they keep providing the same services to customers.

      As before, carriers still need approval from the FCC before shutting off copper networks in cases where they intend to reduce or discontinue service. “However, carriers will retain the flexibility to retire their copper networks in favor of fiber without prior Commission approval—as long as no service is discontinued, reduced, or impaired,” the commission said in its announcement.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • EFF Told to “Shut the Hell Up” About SOPA

        Warnings from the EFF this week that Hollywood is making renewed efforts to obtain SOPA-like powers over Internet companies has touched a nerve, with filmmakers and anti-piracy activists attacking from all angles. The EFF should stop talking about the past, its critics say, and admit that the Internet won’t get broken by Hollywood.

      • Exclusive: Kim Dotcom says Mega 3.0 will succeed as a nonprofit

        Kim Dotcom is on a mission to save the internet. He plans to start by launching a free cloud-storage service — for the third time. Here, he talks exclusively to WIRED about why no one should trust his second file-hosting service Mega, his optimism for the future of an encrypted web, how a non-profit status will make Mega 3.0 a success, and why Hollywood is the ISIS of the internet…

        Last week German-born entrepreneur Kim Dotcom returned to the news in dramatic fashion, warning the world to steer well clear of the file-hosting service he once set up, Mega.

      • Millions of Songs Deleted in Piracy Crackdown

        After issuing a stern warning last month which ordered the country’s streaming music providers to stop offering unlicensed tracks, the Chinese government is reporting progress. Following the expiration of a July 31 deadline, the National Copyright Administration says that more than two million songs have already been deleted.

      • iTunes is Illegal Under UK Copyright Law

        The High Court recently overturned private copying exceptions introduced last year by the UK Government, once again outlawing the habits of millions of citizens. The Intellectual Property Office today explains that ripping a CD in iTunes is no longer permitted, and neither is backing up your computer if it contains copyrighted content.

      • 10 years for copyright infringement should be limited to criminals causing serious harm

        Open Rights Group (ORG) has responded to an Intellectual Property Office (IPO) consultation on proposals to increase the maximum prison sentence for criminal online copyright infringement to 10 years. The would bring sanctions for online copyright infringement in line with those for physical copyright infringement.

      • Should file sharers face ten years in gaol?

        New proposals to make online copyright infringement a criminal offence risks punishing users who share links and files online more harshly than ordinary, physical theft.

08.06.15

Links 6/8/2015: DebConf15, LibreOffice 5

Posted in News Roundup at 11:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Tuesday’s security advisories
    • Security updates for Wednesday
    • bad robot

      The best part of running your own server is definitely reviewing the logs.

    • MVEL as an attack vector

      Java-based expression languages provide significant flexibility when using middleware products such as Business Rules Management System (BRMS). This flexibility comes at a price as there are significant security concerns in their use. In this article MVEL is used in JBoss BRMS to demonstrate some of the problems. Other products might be exposed to the same risk.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Brookings Institute Plan to Liquidate Syria

      Here’s your US foreign policy puzzler for the day: When is regime change not regime change?

      When the regime stays in power but loses its ability to rule. This is the current objective of US policy in Syria, to undermine Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s ability to govern the country without physically removing him from office. The idea is simple: Deploy US-backed “jihadi” proxies to capture-and-hold vast sections of the country thereby making it impossible for the central government to control the state. This is how the Obama administration plans to deal with Assad, by making him irrelevant. The strategy is explained in great detail in a piece by Michael E. O’Hanlon at the Brookings Institute titled “Deconstructing Syria: A new strategy for America’s most hopeless war”.

    • Imperialist powers prepare another military intervention in Libya

      A joint US-European mission to Libya involving soldiers from six countries is being hatched under the pretext of combating Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and with the aim of establishing a pliant pro-Western government and “stabilising” the country.

    • Jeremy Corbyn: Tony Blair could face war crimes trial over ‘illegal Iraq invasion’

      Tony Blair could be made to stand trial for war crimes, according to the current Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn.

      The veteran left winger said the former prime minister was reaching the point when he was going to have to deal with the consequences of his actions with the coming Chilcot inquiry report.

      “I think it was an illegal war,” he said in an interview with BBC2′s Newsnight adding that former UN secretary general had confirmed that. “Therefore he (Blair) has to explain that,” Corbyn said.

    • MH370: Reunion debris is from missing plane

      Part of the aircraft wing found on Reunion Island is from the missing MH370 plane, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has confirmed.

      Mr Najib said international experts examining the debris in France had “conclusively confirmed” it was from the aircraft.

      The Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 239 people veered off course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Bombshell Study Reveals Methane Emissions Hugely Underestimated

      In a paper published at Energy & Science Engineering, expert and gas industry consultant Touché Howard argues that a much-heralded 2013 study by the University of Texas relied on a faulty measurement instrument, the Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler (BHFS), causing its findings to low-ball actual emission rates “by factors of three to five.”

  • Finance

    • How much will the London Tube strike cost the economy?

      The unions did not make themselves popular with business leaders in the capital when they announced 24-hour action starting on Wednesday from 6.30pm. The move follows a previous 24-hour stoppage in July.

    • 4 Reasons it’s Kicking Off on the London Underground

      The four unions organising on London Underground – RMT, TSSA, ASLEF, and Unite – have balloted their members for strikes. ASLEF’s ballot has been returned with a 98% majority in favour of strikes on an 81% turnout, and the union has scheduled a 24 hour strike over 8/9 July. The three other unions have their ballots due back on 30 June, and are almost certain to coordinate with ASLEF’s date if they receive majorities in favour of strike action. Coordinated action by all four Tube unions is almost unprecedented.

    • Tube strike: how to get underground whinging off Facebook, Twitter and rest of social media

      You can’t do anything about the strikes, but you can banish the complaints from your social networks.

      With some tweaks to your settings and a couple of browser extensions, you can easily get rid of the most annoying posts.

    • #TubeStrike: Why I’ll be striking over compulsory all-night shifts

      I’m a ticket officer and station assistant on London Underground, and I’ll be taking 24 hour strike action this evening alongside members of my union, TSSA, and unions representing other tube staff, ASLEF, RMT and Unite. We’re in dispute over the move to all-night running at weekends, starting in September.

      That’s not because we oppose all night trains at weekends. They’re a great idea, and will give London a real boost. What we oppose is the way this is being rushed in to meet political aims, without thought for tube workers’ family lives, and without the negotiation that could help find a fairer way.

      I currently work 35 to 40 hours a week, doing shifts of 7 1/2 hours. Currently they start as early as 5am, and finish as late as 1am. The changes London Underground Ltd wants won’t mean me working more hours, but they will alter my shift patterns, making me work more unsocial hours to cover the new all-night shifts, some of which would be 12 hours long.

    • Against the Tube strike? Then try spending 15 years as a train driver like I have

      Since 2001 my hours have become less social, my breaks shorter, and my weekends are about to become almost non-existent

    • Tube strike: Six misconceptions about the Underground workers’ action debunked

      As London gears up to weather another Tube strike, misconceptions about the strikers – and their industrial action – are gaining pace.

      A spokesperson for Unite, one of the four unions taking part in the strike across London, explained why their members were striking and what the action really meant.

    • How Closely Connected are the Most Powerful Corporations in America?

      Conspiracy theorists allege that the world’s most rich and powerful people have secret meetings at places like Bilderberg or Bohemian Grove, or that one can find rooms on Wall Street or in DC where world-changing deals go down amidst a cloud of cigar smoke.

      While there is still debate as to the true extent of the above claims, even the most skeptical of us can agree that the most powerful executives between Wall Street and the biggest corporations in America are intimately connected. Government officials are also in that web, but that’s a project for another day.

      The above visualization looks at the directors of 30 of America’s largest publicly traded corporations on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Of this group, there are a grand total of three companies that do not share board members with other companies in the index.

  • Privacy

    • Want To Know Why DHS Is Opposing CISA? Because It’s All A Surveillance Turf War

      This has led to some surprise among people who don’t follow this that closely, that “even Homeland Security” doesn’t like the bill. But that’s really ignoring history and what this fight has always been about. Going back many, many years we’ve been highlighting that the truth behind all of these “cybersecurity” bills is that it’s little more than a bureaucratic turf war over who gets to control the purse strings for the massive, multi-billion dollar budget that will be lavished on government contractors for “cybersecurity solutions.” That the bill might also boost surveillance capabilities is little more than a nice side benefit.

      The key players in this turf war? The NSA and Homeland Security (with the Justice Department occasionally waving its hand frantically in the corner shouting “don’t forget us!”). From the beginning, one of the key questions people have asked is “who gets the data?” Obviously, “none of the above” is probably the best answer, but of the remaining options, Homeland Security tends to be the least worst option out of a list of three really bad options. And, so far, the White House has repeatedly pushed to put DHS in charge, giving it more power over the budget. However, CISA does not put DHS in charge.

    • Coalition Announces New ‘Do Not Track’ Standard for Web Browsing

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), privacy company Disconnect and a coalition of Internet companies have announced a stronger “Do Not Track” (DNT) setting for Web browsing—a new policy standard that, coupled with privacy software, will better protect users from sites that try to secretly follow and record their Internet activity, and incentivize advertisers and data collection companies to respect a user’s choice not to be tracked online.

    • Spyware demo shows how spooks hack mobile phones

      Intelligence agencies’ secretive techniques for spying on mobile phones are seldom made public.

      But a UK security firm has shown the BBC how one tool, sold around the world to spooks, actually works.

      It allows spies to take secret pictures with a phone’s camera and record conversations with the microphone, without the phone owner knowing.

      Hacking Team’s software was recently stolen from the company by hackers and published on the web.

      Almost any data on a phone, tablet or PC can be accessed by the tool and it is fascinating how much it can do.

    • Comment: Genetic privacy, as explained by mystery poopers

      According to Nature, this was the first GINA case to go to trial since the law was enacted in 2008. Atlas tried to argue that the law didn’t apply in this case, because it wasn’t seeking medical information about its employees, just trying to find out who was pooping by the produce. Leaving aside that the mere fact someone is deliberately defecating outside a bathroom may signal some mental health issues, GINA says that it is “an unlawful employment practice for an employer to request, require, or purchase genetic information with respect to an employee.” (“Genetic information,” according to the statute, includes “genetic tests,” not necessarily limited just to ones that reveal medical information.)

    • Germany’s top prosecutor fired over treason probe

      A treason investigation against two German journalists claimed its first casualty Tuesday — the country’s top prosecutor who ordered the probe.

      Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced he was seeking the dismissal of Harald Range hours after the chief federal prosecutor accused the government of interfering in his investigation.

      Maas said he made the decision in consultation with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office, indicating that the sacking was approved at the highest level.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • “The Dream Of Internet Freedom Is Dying”

      So says Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, who gave the keynote address at the (somewhat infamous) Black Hat security conference today. Once, techno-utopians could say things like “The Internet treats censorship as damag e and routes around it” with a straight face. Today, though, the ongoing centralization of the Internet in the name of security and convenience “increasingly facilitates surveillance, censorship, and control,” to quote Granick again.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TPP Leaks Shows US Stands Firm That Companies Should Be Free To Abuse Patents & Copyrights

      Last week, as you might have heard, negotiators on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement gathered in Maui to try to finalize the agreement. Many believed that negotiators would more or less finish things up in that meeting. Earlier reports had suggested that everyone was “weeks away” from finishing, and many had said that the only thing holding back a final agreement was fast track authority (officially “trade promotion authority”) from the US government to make sure that the USTR could negotiate an agreement without further interference from Congress. And, as you’ll recall, Congress voted in favor of fast track after a long fight.

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Troll Asks Court to Ban the Term ‘Copyright Troll’

        Adult movie studio Malibu Media has asked the Indiana federal court to ban negative terms during an upcoming trial against an alleged BitTorrent pirate. According to the copyright troll, descriptions such as “copyright troll,” “pornographer” and “porn purveyor” could influence the jury.

      • RIAA Asks BitTorrent Inc. to Block Infringing Content

        The RIAA has asked uTorrent creator BitTorrent Inc. to come up with ways to stop infringement of its members’ copyrighted content. In a letter sent to BitTorrent Inc’s CEO, the RIAA’s Executive Vice President of Anti-Piracy points to BitTorrent’s DHT system and asks the San Francisco-based company to live up to its claim of not endorsing piracy.

08.05.15

Links 5/8/2015: Tanglu 3, Linux Foundation Courses Expand

Posted in News Roundup at 7:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Open Source Software Growth Is Rising

    GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath discusses open source software and GitHub’s plan to expand internationally. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on “Bloomberg West.”

  • Hayao Miyazaki CG Tribute Made with Open Source Tools

    Dono produced photorealistic worlds for the memorable stars of Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and many more of Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpieces using a suite of open source tools, including Blender for 3D, Gimp for image editing, and Natron for compositing. The only non-open source software was the rendering engine, Octane.

  • To Expedite Innovation, Give Away Your Code

    Open-source software has been a growing phenomenon for more than two decades, but in recent years it has risen in importance in a whole new way: as a key to rapid innovation for startups and corporate giants alike.

    One example of open-source software being used to increase the velocity of technical innovation can be seen with Airbnb. In early June, Airbnb did something that might sound crazy. It decided to give away a sophisticated software tool it developed called Aerosolve.

    Aerosolve uses machine learning to understand what consumers will pay for a certain kind of room in a certain place — and helps people figure out how to price their Airbnb rentals.

  • Adobe opens legal style guide and encourages clear writing

    Adobe has made its Legal Department Style Guide available to everyone under a Creative Commons license. This shows that open source principles are illuminating even the foggy world of legal writing. I’ve taken a pass through the guide, and can affirm that it’s generally sound and useful. It could help reduce obscurity in legal documents and foster more effective communication.

  • Ada Initiative Closes Up Shop
  • Ada Initiative organization to end, but its work will continue
  • The Ada Initiative Shuts Down, but Its Programs Will Be Open Source

    After four years of working tirelessly to improve diversity in tech, the Ada Initiative is shutting down. As a nonprofit organization, they led unconferences that brought women in tech together to help them find their feminist identities, they led impostor syndrome workshops, and they even had workshops for allies who want to help women in tech. Their programs and camps were one-of-a-kind, and the industry will be sorely missing their presence.

  • Guest View: How open source can help you break free of the storage Matrix

    The world inside the data center has been changing too, and it is changing fast. The large, status quo storage companies are just as nervous. This group of large legacy system companies has ruled the data center for the past 40 years. They’re the ones selling all that pricey systems hardware—especially in storage found in every organization. They are pushing their brand of reality, and when those companies came knocking, you paid, even as you felt something was not right.

  • University of Toronto Runs on Nexenta Open Source-Driven Software-Defined Storage Platform Supporting Key Cloud Services

  • Events

    • A Preview: Oracle Connects the Dots at LinuxCon/CloudOpen/ContainerCon

      I’m really pleased with the lineup of keynote speakers and sessions we have planned for LinuxCon, CloudOpen and ContainerCon taking place in Seattle in just two short weeks. Content is our first priority for these events, and I think developers, SysAdmins and executives will be happy with what they find in the keynote hall, session rooms and workshops.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • Teaching students the value of open source

      Open source is not just about making something publicly accessible. It is a set of values—a way of working that practices open collaboration between a community to build or maintain something. On the basis of these values, today we can observe a vibrant and thriving open source community responsible for many of the great successes in many industries.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • developing v8 with guix

      This machine runs Debian. It used to run the testing distribution, but somehow in the past I needed something that wasn’t in testing so it runs unstable. I’ve been using Debian for some 16 years now, though not continuously, so although running unstable can be risky, usually it isn’t, and I’ve unborked it enough times that I felt pretty comfortable.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Slavery “Necessary” Says Education Department Of Extremadura

      When some bureaucrat tells the world that there are no other options than non-free/slavery software for vocational schools, I know they’re lying. It’s just not true. If businesses want school graduates to use non-free software they should do their own training. It’s not up to government to do what they could do for themselves. It’s not government’s job to preserve the Wintel monopoly. That’s not good for the economy and it’s just wrong to indoctrinate citizens into slavery. Extremadura is cranking out graduates who know GNU/Linux and Free Software. Businesses should accept that and use Free Software too. There’s just no reason that businesses or government should throw money to the wind that could be better spent buying machinery or buildings or hiring people locally.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Design electronic circuits with MeowCAD

        MeowCAD is an online free and open source electronic design application tool. Its focus is on schematic and PCB design for electronic circuits. Since MeowCAD is a completely FOSS SaaS, it circumvents the problems with vendor dependence. For example, one can download and run local copies of MeowCAD, thus giving the designer complete control over their own tools.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Bernie Sanders is best for America

      Being a single mom has created a desire in me to find more resources for parents, especially those who are under served or low income.

    • Bernie Sanders, Open Borders and a Serious Route to Global Equality

      Some progressives expressed dismay last week to discover that Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, doesn’t favor a policy of open immigration. While such a policy would undoubtedly allow billions of people in the developing world to improve their lives, there are not many people in the United States who relish the idea of the country’s population tripling or quadrupling over the next three or four decades.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Security, Privacy and Standards Loom Large for Internet of Things

      As the Internet of Things (IoT) ramps up, there are more and more calls for proper legislation surrounding it, and proper standards for its advancements. As we recently reported, trade groups are urging the U.S. Congress to be wary of too much government intervetnion in IoT development. There are also some concerns about IoT security and the standards surrounding it.

    • EFF creates ‘stronger’ standard for Do Not Track

      Privacy advocates have long been working toward a coherent Do Not Track standard, and this week a new option is being put on the table. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with companies including Medium and DuckDuckGo, have introduced a new Do Not Track standard that they claim to be “stronger” than those currently going around. The standard sticks to Do Not Track’s existing tenets: it should be opt-in, and enabling it should tell websites and advertisers not to store and share information on the person visiting them. Supporting the standard is also voluntary, which is less of a choice and more of an acknowledgement that there’s no legal backing that requires websites not to track anyone.

  • Civil Rights

    • Controlling When the Cameras Record

      Around the U.S., the agents that control the public have been observed to beat up, shoot, kill, and arrest members of the public, with a special focus on protesters, members of minority groups, and people making recordings of the actions of those agents. This is often followed by fabricated accusations against the victim, meant to create false justification for the attack itself.

    • To LA Times, Meth in Skid Row Victim’s Blood More Important Than Gun in His Flesh

      Captured on cellphone video, the incident received attention because we are living in a moment when many people have decided that the state-sanctioned killing of black people by law enforcement is worth our attention—and that’s very uncomfortable for those who want to believe that every police killing must be in some way justified, if we could only see how. So Keunang’s autopsy—five months later—was likely to make some kind of news, but what kind?

    • Reverse this

      Being a cis white man who’s a native English speaker from a fairly well-off background, I’m pretty familiar with privilege. Spending my teenage years as an atheist of Irish Catholic upbringing in a Protestant school in a region of Northern Ireland that made parts of the bible belt look socially progressive, I’m also pretty familiar with the idea that that said privilege doesn’t shield me from everything bad in life. Having privilege isn’t a guarantee that my life will be better, in the same way that avoiding smoking doesn’t mean I won’t die of lung cancer. But there’s an association in both cases, one that’s strong enough to alter the statistical likelihood in meaningful ways.

08.04.15

Links 4/8/2015: KDE.org Redesign, Point Linux 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Cloud’s Open Source Seeds Are Growing Strong

    New features, functionality, rewrites and releases of open source software are being driven by customers, and it’s important to understand how the benefits of open source software can change. There have been many cases of organizations originally seeking open source primarily for cost savings, but then later realizing other benefits, including performance and reliability.

  • Announcing the shutdown of the Ada Initiative

    It is with mixed feelings that we announce that the Ada Initiative will be shutting down in approximately mid-October. We are proud of what we accomplished with the support of many thousands of volunteers, sponsors, and donors, and we expect all of our programs to continue on in some form without the Ada Initiative. Thank you for your incredible work and support!

  • Lockheed Open Sources Its Secret Weapon In Cyber Threat Detection

    The cybersecurity team at Lockheed Martin will share some defensive firepower with the security community at Black Hat this week with the open source release of an internal advance threat tool it has been using in house for three years now. Dubbed Laika BOSS, this malware detection platform is meant to help security analysts better hunt down malicious files and activity in an enterprise environment.

  • The Ada Initiative For Supporting Women In Open Tech Is Ending

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Open source Chromecast competitor, Matchstick, is dead

        Nearly a year ago, Matchstick hit Kickstarter with the goal of bringing a more open HDMI dongle to challenge the likes of the Chromecast and Fire TV Stick. Today, however, its creators made a painful revelation.

        They’re not going to be able to deliver a satisfactory product, and that means around 17,000 backers won’t be getting their hands on the Firefox OS-based Matchsticks they were hoping for when they pledged their support to the project last fall.

      • The Mozilla We’ve Got

        Nope, just non-Windows users being played so far [1]. I should have guessed with it being Adobe’s DRM that is being used that maybe Linux wouldn’t see the best support. It’s also depressing to me that Mozilla has given up on calling it what it is in some cases [2].

      • Pale Moon 25.6.0 (Firefox Based Browser) Brings New Features And Security Fixes

        As you may know, Pale Moon is an open-source, cross-platform browser based on Mozilla Firefox, being up to 25% faster then the original.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Ceilometer, Gnocchi & Aodh: Liberty progress

      It’s been a while since I talked about Ceilometer and its companions, so I thought I’d go ahead and write a bit about what’s going on this side of OpenStack. I’m not going to cover new features and fancy stuff today, but rather a shallow overview of the new project processes we initiated.

    • Mirantis and AppFormix partner to optimise enterprise cloud computing and improve infrastructure efficiency

      AppFormix, a leading provider of analytics and control services to cloud-based datacentres, has formed a partnership with Mirantis to become a Mirantis Unlocked partner. This will see AppFormix integrate with Mirantis OpenStack to bring analytics and control of resource utilisation to OpenStack based private cloud infrastructure.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5: The best office suite today won’t cost you a dime

      I’ve used LibreOffice as my main office suite since it forked from OpenOffice five years ago. Now its latest edition, LibreOffice 5.0, is better than ever. And, in my book, that means it’s the best standalone office suite available in 2015.

    • Working with Pivot Tables in LibreOffice Calc

      Pivot tables is a very powerful tools in spreadsheets that allow you to analyse big massive of data in flexible dimensions.

      LibreOffice Calc gives you an option to build your own Pivot tables using the built-in tools.

  • Education

    • Making the Case for Koha: Why Libraries Should Consider an Open Source ILS

      When Engard educates people on what open source is, what it means to use open source software, what types of software are available, which companies use it, and who trusts it, they see that their fears are unfounded, she says. To back up her discussions with facts, she maintains bibliographies on open source and open source security. She also has a set of bookmarks on Delicious, and she wrote a book, Practical Open Source Software for Libraries. “[W]hen people come to me and say open source is too risky … I have facts and figures, just what librarians want, to say no, all software has potential risk associated with it. You have to evaluate software side by side, and look at it, and really take the time to compare it. … I know you’re going to pick the open source solution over the proprietary because it is so quickly developed, so quickly fixed, so ahead of the curve as far as technology is concerned.”

  • BSD

    • Lumina Desktop 0.8.6 Released!

      Just in time for PC-BSD & FreeBSD 10.2 (coming soon), the Lumina desktop has been updated to version 0.8.6! This version contains a number of updates for non-English users (following up all the new translations which are now available), as well as a number of important bug-fixes, and support for an additional FreeDesktop specification. The PC-BSD “Edge” packages have already been updated to this version and the FreeBSD ports tree will be getting this update very soon as well.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Who Reads the Source Code Anyway?

      Today’s new feeds were just chock full ‘o interesting articles. The first up came from Ole Tange who set up a little experiment to see how long it took for someone to read his source code. Bryan Quigley commented on “The Mozilla We’ve Got” and OpenSource.com interviewed Linus Torvalds’ daughter, who is building a career in computer science and engineering. Elsewhere, Brook Kidane reviewed Point Linux 3.0 and Laurent Montel ran down KDEPIM 5.0.

    • The state of Federation

      It’s been a long time since there has been any news on the state of federation, so here’s an update on where Mediagoblin’s at and some technical aspects of federation. We’ve been working with the W3C Social Working Group to define the future of federation, and part of my work there has been to work on the ActivityPump standard. There’s more to say on that and why we’re investing time there, but this blogpost will mostly be about MediaGoblin and federation from a technical perspective.

    • Who actually reads the code?

      I am the maintainer of a piece of free software called GNU Parallel. Free software guarantees you access to the source code, but I have been wondering how many actually read the source code.

      To test this I put in a comment telling people to email me when they read this. The comment was put in a section of the code that no one would look to fix or improve the software — so, the source code equivalent to a dusty corner. To make sure the comment would not show up if some one just grepped through the source code I rot13′ed the source code.

  • Public Services/Government

    • New Extremadura Govt to support open source in schools

      The autonomous region of Extremadura (Spain) is committed to the use of open source in schools, the new Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) government says in a statement published on Monday. However, the administration will not cancel the EUR 38 million request for PC hardware and proprietary software licences, published by its predecessor.

    • Sielocal – Economic Transparency System in Spain

      “Our aim is to anticipate the information needs of the local public sector, information professionals and all citizens by providing a web space that makes it possible for them to view, compare and comment on town halls’ principal fiscal and accounting ratios, by allowing free access to multiple types of reports, segmenting the reports by autonomous regions or provinces. We intend to work with other exeprts and the principal National and Europan Transparency foundation.

    • Transparency in the EU: still a long way to go

      In terms of transparency, countries in the European Union (EU) still have a long way to go, a report entitled Future-proofing eGovernment for a Digital Single Market, and conducted by several IT service providers, revealed.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • The Personal Computer That Beat Apple (For a While)

    When the TRS-80 — a personal computer from Tandy that would be sold via their RadioShack stores, hence TRS — went on sale on Aug. 3 in 1977, computers weren’t exactly new. The Apple I had been introduced the previous year and personal computers were clearly a growing market, but Tandy is often credited with pioneering the idea of mass-market personal computer.

  • Twitter Jumps the Shark

  • Google+

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Hacktivists congratulate Daily Show’s Jon Stewart via Donald Trump’s website

      Canadian hacktivists Telecomix Canada have defaced Donald Trump’s website. The message, entitled “Your Moment of Zen, Mr Stewart” is a shoutout to Jon Stewart of the Daily Show for his steady criticism of Donald Trump.

      The announcement was made by Telecomix Canada on pastebin and says that the reveal of the server penetration is in honour of the last week of Stewart’s tenure helming the Daily Show on Comedy Central.

    • Macs can be remotely infected with firmware malware that remains after reformatting

      When companies claim their products are unhackable or invulnerable, it must be like waving a red flag in front of bulls as it practically dares security researchers to prove otherwise. Apple previously claimed that Macs were not vulnerable to the same firmware flaws that could backdoor PCs, so researchers proved they could remotely infect Macs with a firmware worm that is so tough to detect and to get rid of that they suggested it presents a toss your Mac in the trash situation.

    • More malware turns up on Macs

      As we head into the middle of the week more news will be coming out surrounding the Black Hat hacker conference which takes places on the 5th and 6th this week. A talk that will be given by Trammell Hudson, Xeno Kovah and Cory Kallenberg is set to show a flaw in the firmware of Mac computers which can be remotely targeted.

    • The World’s First Firmware Worm for Mac Is Here, and It Sounds Scary
    • 0-day bug in fully patched OS X comes under active exploit to hijack Macs

      Hackers are exploiting a serious zero-day vulnerability in the latest version of Apple’s OS X so they can perform drive-by attacks that install malware without requiring victims to enter system passwords, researchers said.

    • Hackers are exploiting an OS X flaw to install unwanted adware
    • Apple stock implosion shreds $113.4B

      Apple (AAPL) shares are down significantly for the second day Tuesday — bringing investors’ paper losses to staggering levels and putting the stock further into correction territory.

    • From Car-Jacking To Car-Hacking: How Vehicles Became Targets For Cybercriminals

      The morning after Laura Capehorn parked her Saab 9-3 estate, all she could find of it was a car-shaped hole in the snow.

      The interior designer had left the vehicle outside her mother-in-law’s house in Shepherd’s Bush, London, one evening in January 2014. By the morning it was gone, presumed stolen.

      Police immediately asked to see the car’s key, and weren’t surprised to find out it was an electronic fob. They had seen an increase in tech-savvy criminals using a key-cloning system to gain entry to high-value vehicles. Once in, the thieves drive away within seconds.

    • WordPress 4.2.4 Security and Maintenance Release

      WordPress 4.2.4 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

    • Six Vulnerabilities Patched With Release of WordPress 4.2.4

      The developers of the WordPress content management system (CMS) today announced the release of version 4.2.4. This security release addresses six vulnerabilities and four bugs.

      According to the release notes, WordPress 4.2.4 patches three cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws and a SQL injection vulnerability that can be exploited to compromise websites. The latest version also protects users against a potential timing side-channel attack, and prevents attackers from locking posts from being edited.

      Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Sucuri, Helen Hou-Sandí of the WordPress security team, Netanel Rubin of Check Point, Ivan Grigorov, Johannes Schmitt of Scrutinizer, and Mohamed A. Baset have been credited for reporting these vulnerabilities.

      WordPress has noted that these fixes are also included in WordPress 4.3 RC2.

      Check Point has published a brief advisory for the SQL injection vulnerability (CVE-2015-2213) patched in the latest version of WordPress. According to the security firm, this is a critical flaw affecting WordPress 4.2.3 and prior.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Britain’s secret ties to governments, firms behind ISIS oil sales

      Key allies in the US and UK led war on Islamic State (ISIS) are covertly financing the terrorist movement according to senior political sources in the region. US and British oil companies are heavily invested in the murky geopolitical triangle sustaining ISIS’ black market oil sales.

      The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and Turkish military intelligence have both supported secret ISIS oil smuggling operations and even supplied arms to the terror group, according to Kurdish, Iraqi and Turkish officials.

      One British oil company in particular, Genel Energy, is contracted by the KRG to supply oil for a major Kurdish firm accused of facilitating ISIS oil sales to Turkey. The Kurdish firm has close ties to the Iraqi Kurdish government.

    • CBS Evening News Reports On Historic Climate Policy Without Mentioning “Climate Change”

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • US Politicians’ Racist Anti-Iranian Remarks Don’t Make Headlines

      Imagine a US senator publicly calling the Chinese “evil people.” Imagine a governor saying African leaders are “animals.” Imagine a presidential candidate claiming Latinos are “liars.” In each of these cases, the media would rightfully explode, condemning the politicians for their overt racism.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Government Seizes Vehicles Worth $1 Million; Brings No Charges, Keeps The Cars

      It’s not so much the American public losing a few opportunities to buy a luxury vehicle as it is the other thing: tight control of sales. The American public can’t get many laws written in its favor, but large industries certainly can. This initial thrust led to lots and lots of partnerships with local law enforcement agencies conveniently located near shipping docks. And this led to lots and lots of luxury vehicles ending up in the hands of law enforcement.

      Then, the government stopped the crackdown. It claimed to be making an effort to more tightly focus its forfeiture efforts as a result of Eric Holder’s reform initiative. The appearance of being an errand boy for corporate interests certainly didn’t help. Cases were dropped and charges dismissed. But the vehicles remained in the government’s hands.

      One person in Saeki Co.’s position spent two years fighting for the return of a seized vehicle and $125,000 in cash. This followed about a dozen similar settlements, most occuring after a legal battle with the agency(ies) holding the vehicles. In other cases, the prevailing parties still have yet to be fully recompensed. And others are still being prosecuted for violating a law the federal government isn’t entirely clear on and has lost an interest in enforcing.

    • Police Body Cams Should Turn on Automatically, Says Richard Stallman

      Richard Stallman is famous for creating the GNU operating system, and founding the free software movement, which changed how we develop software. Now he’s published an essay in Technology Review about how police body cams should switch on automatically any time an officer pulls out a weapon.

      Stallman’s proposals are somewhat similar to what we’ve seen previously from groups like the ACLU, which crafted a model bill for regulating policy body cams. In that model bill, the ACLU suggests that police should turn body cams on whenever they respond to a call or interact with a member of the public — except when it would be dangerous for the officer to turn the camera on

  • Intellectual Monopolies

08.03.15

Links 3/8/2015: Linux 4.2 RC5, Korora 22

Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • A College Without Classes

    Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

    Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Aging Pipes Are Poisoning America’s Tap Water

      In Flint, Michigan, lead, copper, and bacteria are contaminating the drinking supply and making residents ill. If other cities fail to fix their old pipes, the problem could soon become a lot more common.

      [...]

      In the past 16 months, abnormally high levels of e. coli, trihamlomethanes, lead, and copper have been found in the city’s water, which comes from the local river (a dead body and an abandoned car were also found in the same river). Mays and other residents say that the city government endangered their health when it stopped buying water from Detroit last year and instead started selling residents treated water from the Flint River. “I’ve never seen a first-world city have such disregard for human safety,” she told me.

  • Security

    • DNS server attacks begin using BIND software flaw

      Attackers have started exploiting a flaw in the most widely used software for the DNS (Domain Name System), which translates domain names into IP addresses.

      Last week, a patch was issued for the denial-of-service flaw, which affects all versions of BIND 9, open-source software originally developed by the University of California at Berkeley in the 1980s.

    • Researchers Create First Firmware Worm That Attacks Macs

      The common wisdom when it comes to PCs and Apple computers is that the latter are much more secure. Particularly when it comes to firmware, people have assumed that Apple systems are locked down in ways that PCs aren’t.

      It turns out this isn’t true. Two researchers have found that several known vulnerabilities affecting the firmware of all the top PC makers can also hit the firmware of MACs. What’s more, the researchers have designed a proof-of-concept worm for the first time that would allow a firmware attack to spread automatically from MacBook to MacBook, without the need for them to be networked.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • A Haven From the Animal Holocaust

      There are mornings when Susie Coston, walking up to the gate of this bucolic farm in her rubber boots, finds crates of pigs, sheep, chickens, goats, geese or turkeys on the dirt road. Sometimes there are notes with the crates letting her know that the animals are sick or injured. The animals, often barely able to stand when taken from the crates, have been rescued from huge industrial or factory farms by activists.

      The crates are delivered anonymously under the cover of darkness. This is because those who liberate animals from factory farms are considered terrorists under U.S. law. If caught, they can get a 10-year prison term and a $250,000 fine under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. That is the punishment faced by two activists who were arrested in Oakland, Calif., last month and charged with freeing more than 5,700 minks in 2013, destroying breeding records and vandalizing other property of the fur industry.

  • Finance

    • Jimmy Carter: U.S. Is an ‘Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery’

      Former President Jimmy Carter had some harsh words to say about the current state of America’s electoral process, calling the country “an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery” resulting in “nominations for president or to elect the president.” When asked this week by The Thom Hartmann Program (via The Intercept) about the Supreme Court’s April 2014 decision to eliminate limits on campaign donations, Carter said the ruling “violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system.”

    • Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery”

      Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally syndicated radio show the Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”

    • Charles Koch calls for unity against ‘corporate welfare’

      As top GOP presidential candidates arrived at a hotel here to court the influential donors of the Koch network, Charles Koch called on retreat attendees to unite with him in a campaign against “corporate welfare” and “irresponsible spending” by both political parties.

      Speaking on the hotel’s grassy lawn with the Pacific Ocean shimmering behind him, Koch opened the gathering hosted by Freedom Partners by noting that the theme of the weekend would be “Unleashing Our Free Society.” Koch network donors and politicians alike must work toward “eliminating welfare for the wealthy,” he said.

    • Fox Analyst Compares Donald Trump To St. Augustine And Mr. Smith Goes To Washington

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • At NY Observer, Trump’s Too Close to Cover–but Promoting Publisher’s Real Estate Is No Problem

      The Huffington Post‘s Michael Calderone (7/28/15) had a piece on the ethical dilemma posed for the weekly New York Observer by the fact that its owner and publisher, Jared Kushner, is married to Ivanka Trump, daughter of real estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. One would expect the Observer to be all over the Trump story, given that its self-proclaimed mission is to cover “the city’s influencers in politics, culture, luxury and real estate who collectively make New York City unique,” but instead the paper has had next to nothing to say about Trump’s controversy-fueled presidential bid.

  • Censorship

    • Anti-Web Blocking Site More Popular in the UK than Spotify & Skype

      A service that helps users circumvent web-blocking injunctions handed down by the UK High Court has grown to become one of the country’s most popular websites. Unblocked.pw provides instant access to dozens of otherwise blocked domains and is currently ranked 192nd in the UK, ahead of both Spotify and Skype.

    • David Cameron Wants To Shut Down Porn Sites Because Kids Are Clever Enough To Defeat Age Restrictions

      UK Prime Minister David Cameron has been using “porn” moral panics as a wedge issue to ramp up censorship and control over the internet in the UK. He’s been pushing aspects of it for years, including demands for the impossible: filters that block “bad content” but allow “good content.” Yes, it does seem bizarre that someone in as powerful a position as David Cameron sees the world in such a black and white way, but remember, this is the same guy who bases his defense of more spying powers on what happens in fictional TV crime dramas.

      His latest plan? Well, he’s insisting that he’s going to shut down porn websites if they don’t guarantee to keep out everyone under the age of 18. Yes, many sites have some age controls, but kids aren’t stupid and can usually figure out a way around them. And that’s always going to be the case. And it’s been the case since pornography existed. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that it’s quite likely that David Cameron himself first came across pornographic material long before his 18th birthday.

    • The Pirate Bay Will Be Blocked in Austria

      Following a European trend, an Austrian Court has ordered a local ISP to block access to The Pirate Bay. The legal action, brought by copyright holders, resulted in an injunction which orders the ISPs to block access to several popular torrent sites and also affects Isohunt.to, 1337x.to and h33t.to.

  • Privacy

    • GCHQ and Me

      Events were about to take me on a different journey. Behind me, sharp footfalls broke the stillness. A squad was running, hard, toward the porch of the house we had left. Suited men surrounded us. A burly middle-aged cop held up his police ID. We had broken “Section 2″ of Britain’s secrecy law, he claimed. These were “Special Branch,” then the elite security division of the British police.

      For a split second, I thought this was a hustle. I knew that a parliamentary commission had released a report five years earlier that concluded that the secrecy law, first enacted a century ago, should be changed. I pulled out my journalist identification card, ready to ask them to respect the press.

    • I’m Quitting Social Media to Learn What I Actually Like

      Three years ago, I began taking August off social media. I wasn’t alone. That was the year everyone started writing about digital detoxes, smartphone-free summer camps, and Facebook cleanses. One writer at the Verge took a year’s vacation from the Internet.

      I don’t seem to see those stories as much anymore. To figure out why, I decided to ask my 1,868 Facebook friends. I pulled up the site, but before I could properly articulate the question, I noticed a guy I met briefly five years ago had posted hiking photos from the same place I went hiking last week. We had both been in Oregon!! What a coincidence! I clicked on the photo and saw he’d been there with a woman I knew from high school. Well, how do they know each other? I clicked on her photo and up came a profile pic of three tiny children, all adorable. The youngest had a Brown University shirt on. A little bit of digging revealed that, in fact, her husband had gotten a job at my alma mater and they’d all moved to Providence. I’d learned so much in just five minutes, but what was it I’d wanted to know from Facebook?

    • Supporter Newsletter: July 2015

      And now, after taking legal action, the High Court has ruled that DRIPA was indeed inconsistent with EU law.

  • Civil Rights

    • Police in Norway Haven’t Killed Anyone in Nearly 10 Years

      Police in Norway hardly ever use their guns, a new report released by the Scandinavian country’s government shows. In fact, it’s been almost 10 years since law enforcement shot and killed someone, in 2006.

      Perhaps the most telling instance was when terrorist Anders Breivik opened fire in 2011 and killed 77 people in Utoya and Oslo. Authorities fired back at him, all right, but only a single time. In 2014, officers drew their guns 42 times, but they fired just two shots while on duty. No one was hurt in either of those instances.

    • Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later

      Dr. Lewinski and his company have provided training for dozens of departments, including in Cincinnati, Las Vegas, Milwaukee and Seattle. His messages often conflict, in both substance and tone, with the training now recommended by the Justice Department and police organizations.

      The Police Executive Research Forum, a group that counts most major city police chiefs as members, has called for greater restraint from officers and slower, better decision making. Chuck Wexler, its director, said he is troubled by Dr. Lewinski’s teachings. He added that even as chiefs changed their use-of-force policies, many did not know what their officers were taught in academies and private sessions.

    • Spanish Cops Use New Law To Fine Facebook Commenter For Calling Them ‘Slackers’

      On July 1st, the Spanish government enacted a set of laws designed to keep disruption within its borders to a minimum. In addition to making dissent illegal (criminal acts now include “public disruption” and “unauthorized protests”), Spanish legislators decided the nation’s law enforcement officers should be above reproach. This doesn’t mean Spanish cops will be behaving better. It just means the public will no longer be able to criticize them.

    • German Netzpolitik journalists investigated for treason

      Press freedom is under threat in Germany — two journalists and their alleged source are under investigation for potential treason for disclosing and reporting what appears to be an illegal and secret plan to spy on German citizens.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Why ISPs still take forever to install business Internet service

      Dealing with telcos and carriers for enterprise circuit installation is still a royal pain. Haven’t we been doing this long enough to do it well?

    • The Web We Have to Save

      Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in. They were Tehran’s taxicabs writ large.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Killing Spotify’s Free Version Will Boost Piracy

        Spotify is generally hailed as a piracy killer, with music file-sharing traffic dropping in virtually every country where the service launches. However, much of this effect may be lost if recent calls to end Spotify’s free tier are honored.

      • Google Asked to Remove 18 ‘Pirate Links’ Every Second

        Copyright holders continue to increase the number of copyright takedown requests they send to Google. As a result the company is currently asked to remove a record breaking 18 links to “pirate” pages from its search results every second, a number that is still increasing at a rapid pace.

      • Kim Dotcom claims deal offered

        He says the offers included one which was conditional on him leaving New Zealand, where he has been a thorn in the side of the government since he and three colleagues were arrested at the request of the FBI in January 2012.

      • Copying And Sharing Was Always A Natural Right; Restricting Copying Never Was

        In the still-ongoing debate over sharing it’s paramount to realize that sharing and copying was always the natural state, and that restricting of copying is an arbitrary restriction of property rights.

08.02.15

Links 2/8/2015: KDE Applications 15.08 Beta, Zorin OS 10

Posted in News Roundup at 1:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • OS showdown: Windows 10 vs Linux

      Linux remains the undisputed champion of the server world, which is why it runs most of the internet. We have world class web servers and databases, industrial grade distributions (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the free CentOS) and the advantage of open source on our side. Linux virtual machines tend to be much cheaper than their Windows counterparts, and are certainly much more efficient thanks to its modular nature.

  • Server

    • Smaller Docker containers for Go apps

      Most of our services are in Go, and thanks to the fact that compiled Go binaries are mostly-statically linked by default, it’s possible to create containers with very few files within. It’s surely possible to use these techniques to create tighter containers for other languages that need more runtime support, but for this post I’m only focusing on Go apps.

  • Kernel Space

    • In Korean, Multipath TCP is pronounced GIGA Path

      Enabling Multipath TCP on the smartphone is the first step in deploying it. However, this is not sufficient since there are very few servers that support Multipath TCP today. To enable their users to benefit from Multipath TCP for all the applications that they use, KT has opted for a SOCKSv5 proxy. This proxy is running on x86 servers using release 0.89.5 of the open-source Multipath TCP implementation in the Linux kernel. During the presentation, SungHoon Seo mentioned that despite the recent rollout of the service, there were already 5,500 active users on the SOCKS proxy the last time he checked. Thanks to this proxy, the subscribes of the Giga Path service in Korea can benefit from Multipath TCP with all the TCP-based applications that they use.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Announces the Beta of KDE Applications 15.08, Based on KDE Frameworks 5

        After having a lot of fun at Akademy 2015, the annual world summit of KDE, which took place in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain between July 25-31, the KDE developers finally decided to post the announcement for the Beta release of KDE Applications 15.08.

      • Plasma 5: Keeping an Eye on the Disk Quota

        At this year’s KDE conference Akademy, I was working on a small plasmoid to continuously track the disk quota.

        The disk quota is usually used in enterprise installations where network shares are mounted locally. Typically, sysadmins want to avoid that users copy lots of data into their folders, and therefor set quotas (the quota limit has nothing to do with the physical size of a partition). Typically, once a user gets over the hard limit of the quota, the account is blocked and the user cannot login anymore. This happens from time to time, since the users are not really aware of the current quota limit and the already used disk space.

      • KDEPIM 5.0

        KDEPIM 5.0 is the port of kdepim to kf5/qt5.

      • rsibreak port to KF5 started!

        I just started the port of rsibreak to KF5.

      • Akademy 2015
      • Akademy 2015 and Akademy-es 2015 recap

        Finally thanks to the both Akademy and Akademy-es sponsors. Specially Qindel, that sponsored us for the first time, hope we can continue the relationship in the future.

      • Plasma 5 (KDE) In Testing

        A few days ago, fellow Qt/KDE team member Lisandro gave an update on the situation with migration to Plasma 5 in Debian Testing (AKA Stretch). It’s changed again. All of Plasma 5 is now in Testing. The upgrade probably won’t be entirely smooth, which we’ll work on that after the gcc5 transition is done, but it will be much better than the half KDE4 SC half Kf5/Plasma 5 situation we’ve had for the last several days.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Cleaning the house (GSoC #6) & GUADEC
      • gtkmm now uses C++11

        All the *mm projects now require C++11. Current versions of g++ require you to use the –std=c++11 option for this, but the next version will probably use C++11 by default. We might have done this sooner if it had been clearer that g++ (and libstdc++) really really supported C++11 fully.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Zorin OS 10 Core & Ultimate have arrived

        We are excited to finally announce the release of Zorin OS 10 with the availability of the Zorin OS 10 Core and Ultimate editions.

        Zorin OS 10 is our best, most beautiful release yet. We have made major strides with the visual styling in Zorin OS. In addition to the refined & perfected desktop theme and the new default FreeSans desktop font, we have introduced a stunning new icon theme, based on the elementary and elementary-add icon themes. This is its first major overhaul since Zorin OS 2.0.

      • Zorin OS 10 Is Out, the Best, Most Beautiful Release Yet, Based on Ubuntu 15.04 – Screenshot Tour

        On August 1, Artyom Zorin had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final release of his Zorin OS 10 GNU/Linux operating system, distributed as Core and Ultimate editions, based on Ubuntu 15.04.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat support evolves with new Access Insights services

        Open source users flock to Red Hat for enterprise support, but not all subscribers like the way the company handles IT issues.

        The company recently launched an updated support service. User experience is important to Red Hat Inc., and it dedicated its day-three keynote at the Red Hat Summit last month to its support.

      • Citrix, Red Hat Helping Startup Companies Launch in Raleigh, N.C.

        Raleigh has seen a 23% increase in IT jobs

      • Red Hat Receives Average Recommendation of “Buy” from Analysts (NYSE:RHT)

        Several research firms have weighed in on RHT. Northland Securities reissued a “buy” rating and set a $92.00 target price (up from $85.00) on shares of Red Hat in a report on Thursday, June 25th. Northland Capital Partners upped their price objective on Red Hat from $85.00 to $92.00 in a report on Thursday, June 25th. Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated a “buy” rating on shares of Red Hat in a research report on Friday, June 26th. Deutsche Bank restated a “hold” rating and set a $75.00 price objective (up from $70.00) on shares of Red Hat in a research report on Thursday, July 2nd. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. reaffirmed an “overweight” rating and issued a $85.00 target price (up previously from $82.00) on shares of Red Hat in a report on Thursday, July 2nd.

      • Fedora

        • Helps Improve Quality Kernel in Fedora
        • Flock Update

          So the schedule for Flock is finally fixed and I have to update some things according to my last post. First the practical part of the Wallpaper Hunt is scheduled now for Friday now instead of Satruday. Addionally I will help Máirín Duffy on Saturday morning with the Inkscape and GIMP Bootcamp, guess which part I will do.

        • Fedora 22 on Cubietruck

          In previous post (How-to set up network audio server based on PulseAudio and auto-discovered via Avahi) I’ve wrote details how I set up network audio-server. Actually I’m using cubietruck there.

        • Testing systemd-networkd based Fedora 22 AMI(s)

          Few days back I wrote about a locally built Fedora 22 image which has systemd-networkd handling the network configuration. You can test that image locally on your system, or on an Openstack Cloud. In case you want to test the same on AWS, we now have two AMI(s) for the same, one in the us-west-1, and the other in ap-southeast-1. Details about the AMI(s) are below:

    • Debian Family

      • He who forgets history…

        Hi all,

        I just looked back on the Halloween Documents, specifically
        http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html . Here are two quotes
        I find both interesting and timely:

        * Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.

        * OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server
        applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized,
        simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new
        protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.

        So next time one of the new breed calls you a neckbeard for helping
        build a distro with simple protocols and services, show him
        http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html . And try not to
        laugh when the whole thing goes right over his head.

      • My Free Software Activities in July 2015

        This month I have been paid to work 15 hours on Debian LTS.

      • Linaro VLANd v0.3

        VLANd is a python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The U.S. Has Unique Ability To Cut Health Care Costs

      The U.S. has a big healthcare cost problem, as is well known. Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist, has been a leader calling attention to this issue; she famously drew the chart below. I refreshed the data, and it looks the same. The U.S. spends about 50% more per capita on healthcare than other countries with comparable levels of income and development. The main drivers of higher spending are higher prices for medical procedures, hospital days, and drugs; higher utilization of many medical resources; and higher administrative costs (more). Recent U.S. healthcare reform initiatives have begun to push back on some of these factors via value-based provider payments and other mechanisms, but it will be quite a while before we know if this is working.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • These Researchers Just Hacked an Air-Gapped Computer Using a Simple Cellphone

      The most sensitive work environments, like nuclear power plants, demand the strictest security. Usually this is achieved by air-gapping computers from the Internet and preventing workers from inserting USB sticks into computers. When the work is classified or involves sensitive trade secrets, companies often also institute strict rules against bringing smartphones into the workspace, as these could easily be turned into unwitting listening devices.

    • Fake Address Round Trip Time: 13 days

      Regular readers will have noticed that I’ve been running a small scale experiment over the last few months, feeding one spammer byproduct back to them via a reasonably accessible web page. The hope was that I would learn a few things about spammer behavior in the process.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • CIA Meddling, Race Riots, and a Phantom Death Squad

      Why a tiny South American country can’t escape the ugly legacies of its idiosyncratic past.

      [...]

      This remains very much the case today. Forty-nine years free from British rule, Guyana — an overlooked chapter in the Cold War’s annals of U.S. interventions and the post-colonial dictatorships and racial tensions they fostered — is still haunted by its past. The most recent electoral contest might be seen as many things: a referendum on corruption, a test of coalition politics, or an effort to transcend ethnic voting. But beneath all those skins, it seemed, the unnerving campaign was about the chemical reaction between self and fact, identity and reality. It felt like history was on the ballot, with candidates on both sides putting it to political use or conveniently forgetting inconvenient parts of it.

    • How One Safari Nut, the CIA and Neoliberal Environmentalists Plotted to Destroy Mozambique

      With the white settlers no longer in control, and Rhodesia now known as Zimbabwe, the Renamo leaders turned increasingly to South Africa for local support beneath the overall patronage of Washington. The war was pitiless. At least 800,000 Mozambicans died. More than half the victims were children. Out of the population of 16 million, 6 million were displaced. Renamo gangs put to death as many as 100,000 civilians. In one infamous episode, Renamo attacked a hamlet inhabited mostly by women and children, all 425 of whom were slaughtered, their bodies hacked by machetes.

    • Intel agencies: U.S. strikes not weakening ISIS

      The Associated Press cited conclusions from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and others that the situation with the Islamic State is at a stalemate. “We’ve seen no meaningful degradation in their numbers,” an anonymous defense official told AP, adding that after spending billions of dollars and killing more than 10,000 extremist fighters, the group’s likely strength of 20,000 to 30,000 people hasn’t changed since last August when the U.S.-led airstrikes began.

    • Turkey’s Geopolitical Gyrations

      The Obama administration is joining with Turkey in airstrikes against Islamic State targets in northern Syria – a shift from President Erdogan’s past tolerance and even support for Islamic terrorists inside Syria – but a more complex geopolitical game is afoot, writes ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

    • US, Turkey prepare to escalate Syrian intervention

      Having reached a deal with the Turkish government to set up a buffer zone inside Syria, ostensibly to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), official Washington has begun debating the rules of engagement for US military forces to intervene against the Syrian military.

    • Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War

      Many parties are to blame, but certainly among them are interventionists in the United States and its allies who rationalized supporting the Islamist opposition – and refusing to embrace serious peace negotiations – on the grounds that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a uniquely evil dictator. That image of Assad grew directly out of his regime’s brutal response to civilian protests that began in early 2011, soon after the start of the Arab Spring.

    • Why Russia Shut Down NED Fronts

      The neocon-flagship Washington Post fired a propaganda broadside at President Putin for shutting down the Russian activities of the National Endowment for Democracy, but left out key facts like NED’s U.S. government funding, its quasi-CIA role, and its plans for regime change in Moscow, writes Robert Parry.

    • Russia Has Right to Expel CIA Successor NGO – Former US Analyst

      US hypocrisy was on full display when it condemned Russia for daring to ban the National Endowment of Democracy (NED), a descendant of the CIA with a history of undermining foreign countries under the guise of promoting democracy, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told Sputnik.

    • Left Progressives Collaborated As Investors in Genocide Owned

      Gaddafi overthrew a British installed King, brought Libya from Africa’s poorest nation to be its wealthiest with a UN Quality of Life Index higher than 9 European countries. A million Libyans out of a total population 6, desperately demonstrated for their Green Book Democracy and beloved Gaddafi outside Tripoli as Britain & France bombed. Left Progressives either collaborated with or were silent re lies used to destroy Libya

    • Intel expert: Obama admin framing arms dealer

      The Justice Department has charged Turi with lying on an export-license application, alleging he hid his intent to ship weapons and ammunition to Libya in direct violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 170. The Feb. 26, 2011, resolution imposed an arms embargo on all member states to prevent “the immediate prospect” of a Gadhafi-led attempt “to slaughter rebel forces in Benghazi that would likely result in massive civilian casualties.”

    • Syrian rebel group leaves their HQ after clash with al-Qaida
    • US-backed Syrian Rebels Abandon HQ After Clash With al Qaeda

      A group of rebels allegedly trained by the United States to fight the Nusra Front, which is al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, have deserted their headquarters, according to the Associated Press.

      Nusra Front said it attacked the headquarters of the group, known as Division 30, Friday night and abducted some of its members because they were trained by the CIA and vowed in a statement to cut off “the arms” of the American government in Syria. During the fighting, US-led coalition warplanes attacked the Nusra Front fighters, according to activists.

    • Morgan Freeman and Jack Black back Iran nuclear deal for fear of becoming ‘super dead’

      The actors Morgan Freeman, Jack Black and Natasha Lyonne have leant their support to Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran.

      The stars feature in a new video designed to help persuade legislators to get the agreement through Congress when it goes to the vote in September. Alongside them are an eclectic mix of camera-friendly experts including ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame, Queen Noor of Jordan and retired US Ambassador Thomas R Pickering, who urge Americans to support the agreement lest they wind up “super dead”.

    • Obama, Putin, Rouhani, Xi and Hollande to address UN on same day

      It will be the first joint appearance on a public stage of Obama and Rouhani since the Iran nuclear deal agreed this month in Vienna, and there is great anticipation that the two presidents could meet for the first time. Last year they spoke by phone as Rouhani was leaving town. On this occasion, by the time the presidents mount the famous green marble podium, the US Congress is expected to have voted to reject the Vienna agreement, and Obama could be in the position of counting votes in a scramble to ensure he can sustain a presidential veto of the congressional vote. The domestic politics around an Obama-Rouhani meeting could once more prove awkward.

    • Lincoln Chafee needles Clinton: Iraq war vote ‘created all the problems’

      Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee said Tuesday he’s seeking the Democratic nomination to keep the question of the Iraq War alive, one which implicitly haunts Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

      Democrats need to point out that the problems with ISIS and other instability in the Middle East started with the Iraq War and should not be afraid to tag Republicans on the issue, Chafee, who was a senator at that time of the vote in 2002, said during a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast in Washington.

    • Valerie Plame Calls Out Hypocrisy Over Response To Iran Nuclear Deal

      Former CIA covert operations officer Valerie Plame, who has been a vocal supporter of the Iran nuclear deal, sees some hypocrisy in the outcry against the proposition, she told HuffPost Live on Tuesday.

      While President Reagan was revered for his work with the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which was later signed by President George W. Bush, the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran have been much more controversial, Plame pointed out.

    • The US and Iran part III – the hostage crisis

      Political scientist Mark Gasiorowski says Iranians of a certain age all knew the CIA had conspired with the Shah 25 years earlier to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh, an elected and immensely popular prime minister.

    • Obama tells liberals: I can’t carry Iran deal on my own

      On Thursday evening, Obama spoke by phone with thousands of people affiliated with liberal activist groups Organizing for Action, the Center for American Progress and Credo Action.

    • Obama’s Version of Iran Nuke Deal: a Second False Narrative

      The Bush administration’s narrative, adopted after the invasion of Iraq, described a covert nuclear programme run by Iran for two decades, the main purpose of which was to serve as a cover for a secret nuclear weapons programme. Undersecretary of State John Bolton and Vice-President Dick Cheney, who were managing the policy, cleverly used leaks to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in 2005 to introduce into the domestic political discussion alleged evidence from a collection of documents of then unknown provenance that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons research programme from 2001 to 2003.

      The administration also passed the documents on to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2005, as part of a Bush strategy aimed to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council on the charge of violating its commitments to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Bolton and Cheney were working with Israel to create a justification for regime change in Iran based on the idea that Iran was working on nuclear weapons under the cover of its nuclear programme.

      The entire Bush-Israeli narrative was false, however.

    • Top Pentagon Intel Officer: Iraq ‘May Not Come Back as an Intact State’

      The U.S. intelligence community first learned that Yemen’s Houthi rebels had launched a Scud missile toward Saudi Arabia on June 30 not from spies on the ground or satellites in the skies, but instead from a more modern form of information gathering: Twitter.

      “The first warning of that event: ‘hashtag scudlaunch,’” Marine Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, the head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), said at a gathering of intelligence contractors just outside Washington on Thursday night. “Someone tweeted that a Scud had been launched, and that’s how we started to search for this activity.”

    • Photos: How the White House Reacted on 9/11
    • Benghazi Film by Michael Bay Could Be Next “American Sniper” But Let’s Hope Not

      Hollywood surprised itself earlier this year by producing an Iraq war movie that was a blockbuster—American Sniper has earned more than half a billion dollars so far, starring Bradley Cooper in the role of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. The film also produced intense cultural criticism about the way it narrowly represented the war, portraying Iraqis as little more than turbaned bullseyes for American valor.

    • Via Michael Bay movie, Fox News gets more bites at Benghazi ‘stand down’ dispute
    • Conservative Party crashers

      America’s defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s traumatized the ruling class in the US and its capitalist satellites, including Canada. Many of this class’ most prominent members regrouped to make sure the primary beneficiaries of the permanent war economy would never again face such a setback.

      The CIA was downgraded even as other agencies were created to install and prop up compliant governments within the USA itself and around the world. The plutocrats and their corporate managers thereby expanded and privatized many facets of so-called “national security.”

    • Marines Held Up in Vienna en Route to Ukraine

      Nine U.S. Marines en route to Ukraine for a training exercise were held up in Vienna for questioning last week because their weapons had not been properly declared, an Austrian newspaper reported.

    • Where the Streets Have No Name: Finding a Place to Land the U-2 Spy Plane

      So you have been entrusted with a very important mission — in this case, trying to convince several countries in the 1950′s to allow take-off and landing of a new, super-secret aircraft, the U2, which would allow the U.S. to conduct surveillance over the USSR at such a high altitude that Soviet MiG-17s would be unable to shoot them down.

    • Navy Could Face More Cases of Cancer, Illness Among Gitmo Personnel

      As the Navy investigates reports of seven military and civilian personnel diagnosed with cancer or other illnesses after serving at Guantanamo Bay, one of detention facility’s long-time defense attorneys says there could be almost three times as many claims.

    • Why Obama Is Going On His Africa Trip

      Last week’s U.S. drone strike in southern Somalia killed al Shabaab leaders Ismail Jabhad and Ismail Dhere. That’s according to both Somali intelligence and Kenyan officials, who offered incomplete and conflicting details on what appeared to be a larger strike against al Shabaab fighters near Bardere, along with a second US drone strike on al Shabaab in northern Kenya.

      The one thing they were sure about – despite the secretive nature of US military operations in Somalia – is that a US drone carried out the strike in Somalia for at least the third time this year, one of dozens of US drone strikes on Somalia conservatively dating back to 2011. As US intervention continues to evolve and expand in the Horn of Africa, many of these missions have been confirmed in recent years by US military and intelligence officials, and by their diplomatic counterparts who are increasingly willing to concede there are American boots on the ground. As a token of the importance the US ascribes to tackling terrorism in Africa, President Obama will visit Kenya and Ethiopia later in July.

    • Freedom Rider: Obama’s Africa Hypocrisy

      The president’s visit to East Africa has been the occasion for the same kind of hypocritical finger pointing Barack Obama usually reserves for his frequent hectoring of Black America, this time using “gay rights” as the standard, It’s a standard which he would never use to lecture America’s other vassals like the bloodstained beheading backward Saudi regime.

    • Dan Simpson: The U.S. isn’t helping Africa

      We cause our African allies more problems than we help them solve

    • Cuba Pre-1959: The Rise and Fall of a U.S. Backed Dictator with Links to the Mob

      Latin America’s relationship with the U.S. government has been difficult to say the least. The U.S. has been intervening in Latin America since President James Monroe established the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy that prevented European powers from colonizing any sovereign nation in “their backyard” (that was America’s job!). The Monroe Doctrine became an instrumental tool for Washington to advance American style Democracy and dominate governments in South and Central America and the Caribbean which brings us to Cuba.

      Cuba was one of the last colonial possessions under Spanish rule just 90 miles south of Florida. As Spain’s Imperial power was in decline, Washington had imperial ambitions to expand its influence on Cuba. Cuba had the potential to produce unlimited profits for U.S. business interests. Even organized crime got into the picture when they became a major player in Cuba since the early 1930’s. The mafia controlled the gaming industry, prostitution and the drug trade in the U.S. mainland also had their sights on Cuba. The mafia managed to expand their operations to Cuba to avoid harassment from the U.S. government. Cuba was to be their base of operations as they were looking to expand into other Caribbean nations. During that time, Cuba was under the leadership of President Fulgencio Batista who had close political ties to Washington and its multinational corporations. Batista was also a good friend to organized crime. Cuba became a cesspool of corruption, illegal drugs and prostitution which became a playground (metaphorically speaking) for the rich and famous while the majority of ordinary Cubans lived in extreme poverty. This is an historical account of Cuba before 1959, a time period that explains why Cuba’s Revolution was a long time in the making.

    • Only thing that we did right was the day we refused to fight

      Another tactic which provided us great inspiration was the destruction of draft board files to make the induction of soldiers impossible. This was followed by the destruction of corporate records for major war profiteers such as Dow Chemical, producers of napalm, and General Electric, producer of bomb components. Remember, if you can, this was decades before computerization; without those files, meat could not be fed into the maw of the war machine.

    • From Africa to Obama

      But it is also because we African elites have internalised the ideology of our conquerors that presents us as inferior, inadequate, and incapable of self-government. Bob Marley’s words that we must liberate ourselves from mental slavery are important here.

    • No Warlords Need Apply: A Call for Credible Peacemaking in Afghanistan

      U.S. military officials diminish the credibility of any proposed cease-fire when they suggest that the U.S. will, after all, consider maintaining bases and troops in Afghanistan far beyond the supposed 2016 evacuation of U.S. bases. Confidence in a cease-fire is further undermined when parties to negotiations know that the U.S. could assassinate them if they appear on a list of U.S. targets. Consider a recent statement by U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. He was answering a question about whether or not the U.S. would “take out” the purported leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, if the opportunity presented itself. Carter said, “we would certainly take it.” Note, he didn’t say, “if there are no children in the way, we would certainly take it.” Not “if he wasn’t in a dense urban area, we would certainly take it.” Essentially, Ashton Carter assured people that the U.S. will kill civilians if this is a condition of being able to kill leaders of groups the U.S. designates as enemies.

    • Pentagon Turns Its Anti-ISIS Rebels Into Cannon Fodder

      Is Washington really trying to train a rebel army in Syria? Or are they just marking fighters for death—and worse?

    • Remaking the Human Terrain: The US Military’s Continuing Quest to Commandeer Culture

      Several weeks ago, a CounterPunch special report revealed that the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS)—a $726 million embedded social science program—had quietly expired. As media outlets picked up the story, it became evident that HTS’s demise was a welcome development for many. Tax payers were fed up with what appeared to be a costly boondoggle, anthropologists bitterly opposed the program for its ethical shortcomings, and a small but vocal group of military officers complained about how it drained resources from other priorities.

    • US Drone Strikes Kill 20 ISIS Fighters in Nangarhar

      The Pentagon did not confirm the death toll, but did confirm the attacks as a “kinetic strike” in the area, targeting “individuals threatening the force.” The US has launched several strikes against ISIS forces in Nangarhar this month.

    • Obama’s drone campaign also an act of terror

      Any government serious about preventing global terrorism would abhor Obama’s drone campaign as much as it abhors the recent beach atrocity in Tunisia.

    • Another mass killing: Gun violence can be prevented, America

      Among developed nations, the gun problem we face is unique to the United States. Here, politicians are bought and sold to the highest bidder, and people are manipulated by a monolithic corporate media that is bought and sold just the same.

    • Are We At The Tipping Point

      I say it without equivocation, “Guns kill people.”People use guns to kill people. No one can deny that. I know people kill with other instruments of death. But guns are involved in so many deaths it must be stated. I know that criminals will always have ways to get guns.

      I wish every hand gun, assault rifle, automatic gun, and now sawed off shotguns, not used by law enforcement and military units could be delivered by train and methodically thrown into huge blast furnaces at the steel works in Gary, Indiana, melted and used for productive positive products. I wish for the magical power to extricate all guns from the hands of crooks, thugs, outlaws and melt them. I wish that no guns except those used by military and law enforcement agencies could be produced or imported or sold for the next 150 years. I wish all ammunition for all of those guns could be delivered to military arsenals and disposed of and no ammunition could be produced, imported or sold for the next 150 years. Anyone caught with a gun will be jailed forever. No questions asked. No due process.

    • Yemen’s Temporary Cease-Fire Falters
    • Yemen’s Hidden War

      Dawn is just breaking on June 5th at Djibouti’s international airport, but it’s already boiling hot on the tarmac. Mohammed Issa, a rotund and mustachioed border-police officer, gestures to a massive U.S. Air Force transport jet — a gray C-17 Globemaster — sitting a short distance away. “Since the start of the war in Yemen, it’s been crazy here,” he says. “Military flights, humanitarian aid — sometimes there’s no space to park on the tarmac.”

    • Guest Post: Reevaluating U.S. Targeting Assistance to the Saudi-led Coalition in Yemen

      As the United States provides targeting assistance to the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council in Yemen, it should consider that its allies’ standards for target selection may be less rigorous. However, the United States is still partially responsible for airstrikes enabled with its intelligence. Contrary to the official U.S. position that it remains in a “non-combat advisory and coordinating role to the Saudi-led campaign,” this enabling support makes the United States a combatant in the Yemen air campaign. Even if the United States is not pulling the trigger, the “live intelligence feeds from surveillance flights over Yemen” that “help Saudi Arabia decide what and where to bomb” are indispensable for the launch of airstrikes against Houthi rebels.

    • Paul: Protect Civil Liberties at Home
    • Do we really need to bring back internment camps?

      Last week, Retired General Wesley Clark, who was NATO commander during the U.S. bombing of Serbia, proposed that “disloyal Americans” be sent to internment camps for the “duration of the conflict.”

      Discussing the recent military base shootings in Chattanooga, TN, in which five U.S. service members were killed, Clark recalled the internment of American citizens during World War II who were merely suspected of having Nazi sympathies. He said: “Back then we didn’t say ‘that was freedom of speech,’ we put him in a camp.”

      He called for the government to identify people most likely to be radicalized so we can “cut this off at the beginning.” That sounds like “pre-crime”!

      Gen. Clark ran for president in 2004 and it’s probably a good thing he didn’t win considering what seems to be his disregard for the Constitution.

      Unfortunately, in the current presidential race, Donald Trump even one-upped Clark, stating recently that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is a traitor and should be treated like one, implying that the government should kill him.

    • Bid to ban autonomous killing machines

      It is a characteristic of technological development for humans to get machines to do things that they don’t want to, whether it is washing the dishes, mowing the lawn or walking long distances to get somewhere.

    • Open letter petitions UN to ban the development on weaponized AI
    • Autonomous weapons and the eventual robot uprising

      This past week, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and about a thousand other artificial intelligence researchers signed a letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons.

      The remote-operated drones that we use in modern warfare can already fly virtually undetected and use advanced targeting systems to drop bombs on buildings and people below — but the key phrase is “remote-operated.” A human is usually controlling the weapon from afar.

    • Jerusalem Gay Pride attack suspect lashes out in court

      An ultra-Orthodox Jew accused of stabbing six people at a Gay Pride march in Jerusalem weeks after his release from jail for a similar attack lashed out in court Friday, Israeli media reported.

      “I do not accept this court’s authority,” said a defiant Yishai Shlissel, representing himself at a hearing.

    • Amnesty accuses Israel of possible crimes against humanity
    • Israel accused of killing 75 children during day of ‘carnage’ and war crimes in Gaza war

      Israeli forces have been accused of carrying out war crimes during a day of “carnage” in the Gaza Strip that has been called Black Friday.

      A report by Amnesty International on alleged atrocities in Rafah during last year’s conflict with Hamas claims Israeli forces killed at least 135 Palestinian civilians, including 75 children, following the capture of a soldier.

    • Mythbusters Tests Killer Drones

      See what the team on Discovery Communications’ TV series Mythbusters learned when they tested the safety of drones. The results might make you lose your head.

    • A very human portrait of Drones

      My primary criticism of this album is that the storyline is vague. Unlike The Who’s “Tommy,” the listener gets more of an emotional storytelling through sounds and words rather than a literal connect-the-dots progression of clear events.

      The first half of the album is Heavy, with a capital H. Muse returns to their decidedly guitar-centered riff-laden focus of earlier days. While the opening track, “Dead Inside” is augmented by the slightest keyboard accents in the verses and singer Matthew Bellamy’s melodramatic vocals, it surges into the harsh threats of the drill instructor’s intro to the mind-numbing “Psycho.”

    • Groups protest use of drones

      They pointed out that drone strikes result in the killing of innocent people; one research study confirmed that in an effort to kill 41 identified “terrorists,” weaponized drones killed 1,147 unidentified individuals.

      “Drones prevent negotiations. Drones prevent peace,” said Jakob Fehr, chair of the German Mennonite Peace Commission. “You can’t talk to someone who’s shooting at you from an invisible location, nor can peace be obtained at a distance either.”

    • Syria Says Israeli Drone Attack Killed 3 in Country’s South
    • Reports: Israel strikes targets in Syria, Lebanon in two separate attacks
    • Syria says Israeli drone attack killed 3 in country’s south

      The Israeli military had no comment. The bombing reportedly happened in Khader, which is a town in the Syrian border along the countryside of Qunietra in the Syrian Golan Heights. The report says that the auto was hit in the boundary of the Israeli Golan Heights.

    • Reaping the rewards: How private sector is cashing in on Pentagon’s ‘insatiable demand’ for drone war intelligence

      Some months ago, an imagery analyst was sitting in his curtained cubicle at Hurlburt Field airbase in Florida watching footage transmitted from a drone above one of the battlefields in the War on Terror. If he thought the images showed someone doing anything suspicious, or holding a weapon, he had to type it in to a chat channel seen by the pilots controlling the drone’s missiles.

      Once an observation has been fed in to the chat, he later explained, it’s hard to revise it – it influences the whole mindset of the people with their hands on the triggers.

    • Revealed: The private firms tracking terror targets at heart of US drone wars

      The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private sector contractors in the heart of its drone operations to analyse top secret video feeds and help track high value terror targets, an investigation has found.

      Contracts unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal a secretive industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, placing a corporate workforce alongside uniformed personnel, analysing battlefield intelligence.

      While it has long been known that US defence firms supply billions of dollars’ worth of equipment for drone operations, the role of the private sector in providing analysts to comb through military surveillance video has remained almost entirely unknown until now.

    • Contractors Play Growing Role in US Drone Attacks – Investigation
    • Private Drone Operators to Cause More Civilian Deaths – Activist

      Upstate Drone Action activist Ed Kinane claims that private drone operators analyzing intelligence for the US military can lead to more civilian casualties with lesser accountability.

    • Revealed: Private firms at heart of US drone warfare

      The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private-sector contractors to the heart of its drone operations to analyse top-secret video feeds and help track suspected terrorist leaders, an investigation has found.

      Contracts unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal a secretive industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, placing a corporate workforce alongside uniformed personnel analysing intelligence from areas of interest.

    • Do not kill terrorists, take them alive

      Who were the militants who attacked the Dinanagar police station in Gurdaspur district? What were their aims and ideology? How many of their comrades are waiting for another chance to attack? How much help are they getting from the Pakistani authorities, and what other sources of support and finance do they enjoy?

      India needs the answers to such critical questions, but none are available because dead men tell no tales. India has now been at the receiving end of several terrorist attacks from across the border, and almost invariably all attackers perish in gun battles. That leaves us guessing about the attackers, and of ways to check them in future.

    • Mercenary Drone Operators Kill Outside US Chain of Command

      Experts say that the US armed forces are using a growing number of mercenaries or contractors to operate lethal drone attacks as regular troops are increasingly unwilling to do so.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • 5 US Intelligence Businesses Despatched Emails to Hillary

      A number of intelligence businesses despatched categorised emails to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal e mail handle, the primary account she used all through her tenure, sources say.

      In accordance with , investigators have found that info got here from the Nationwide Safety Company, the Protection Intelligence Company, the Nation-Geospatial Company, in addition to the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence (ODNI) and the CIA.

      The Workplace of the Intelligence Group inspector common has recognized 5 emails containing categorised info when it carried out a random sampling from the emails she launched to the State Division.

    • Kafka-like Persecution of Julian Assange

      In an era when powerful institutions demonize decent people – and the mainstream media joins in, piling on the abuse – legal proceedings have become another Kafka-esque weapon of coercion. Few cases are more troubling than the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as John Pilger describes.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • US govt never minded Americans killing rare lions before Cecil – WikiLeaks document

      WikiLeaks has unveiled a secret document on US hunters in Zimbabwe allegedly sent from a US official to the CIA, casting light upon the recent killing of Cecil the lion, a popular attraction to Zimbabwean Hwange National Park’s visitors.

    • 6 endangered animals poachers are hunting into extinction

      The bad news you probably already know: Cecil the lion, one of Zimbabwe’s best loved wild animals, was slain last week at the hands of unscrupulous safari guides and, it’s claimed, a crossbow-happy dentist from Minnesota.

      [...]

      Whatever poachers’ motivations, they’re threatening to wipe some of the most vulnerable species off the face of the earth. Here are six animals that, like Cecil, poaching might rob us of forever.

    • Protesters Rappel From Portland Bridge To Delay Shell Icebreaker

      A Shell icebreaking vessel being protested by Greenpeace and other activist groups will not leave a Portland dock Wednesday, according to the Columbia River Bar Pilot dispatch.

  • Finance

    • Russia’s rising startups: An open source guide (INFOGRAPHIC)

      For some time, the technology startup scene in Russia had suffered due to a lack of angel investors supporting the region, leaving the Russian ecosystem starved for funding. Many explanations have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, such as the lack of internet education amongst the Russian angels or just a strong desire to avoid public attention.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Russia’s propaganda machine revs up ahead of UN’s MH17 vote

      A well-coordinated campaign appeared to be underway ahead of the July 29 U.N. Security Council vote on whether to form a tribunal to investigate the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. Its goal seems to be aimed at discrediting the widely accepted version that Russian-separatists were to blame for the crash that killed all 298 people on board using a surface-to-air missile system supplied by Russia.

    • Money: for good or bad?

      Trump, on the other hand, is free to be as much of a maverick as he wants to be. Opinion polls show the tactic seems to be working, at least at this early stage, with American voters. During the press conference called to launch his campaign, he bragged: “I’m using my own money. I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.”

    • Japanese journalist lives 2 months in Moscow airport because of US propaganda

      Tetsuya Abo does not want to leave Moscow because of his convictions. He claims, that in his own country there is no freedom of speech any more, and the American propaganda rules political interests.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • President Obama Names Raymond Cook CIO of U.S. Intelligence Community

      President Barack Obama has named Raymond Cook CIO of the Intelligence Community, Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Mr. Cook most recently served concurrently as director of the Office of Space Reconnaissance for the Central Intelligence Agency since 2014, as well as director of Mission Operations for the National Reconnaissance Office, a position he held since 2013.

    • NIST app competition, Clapper’s hack warning, DIA protests and a new intel CIO
    • Former NSA, DHS Heads Think Requiring Crypto Backdoors a ‘Mistake’

      The former head of the National Security Agency is among a group of people who have unexpectedly spoken out against inserting government-only electronic backdoors into encrypted devices and services.

    • Hillview man arrested for shooting down drone; cites right to privacy

      A Hillview man has been arrested after he shot down a drone flying over his property — but he’s not making any apologies for it.

      It happened Sunday night at a home on Earlywood Way, just south of the intersection between Smith Lane and Mud Lane in Bullitt County, according to an arrest report.

      Hillview Police say they were called to the home of 47-year-old William H. Merideth after someone complained about a firearm.

    • Facebook Could Make Billions From Something It’s Not Doing Yet

      It’s not monetizing something that happens 1.5 billion times a day

      Facebook is slowly but surely taking over the Internet. In a post after its Q2 earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “1.49 billion people are now part of our community. In 1876, the year the first telephone call was made, around 1.49 billion people were alive.”

      Those 1.49 billion people use Facebook to plan events, talk to each other, share pictures, and keep up with the latest news. But there’s something else we’re using it for that we barely even notice: search. People now make 1.5 billion search queries on Facebook per day, according to opening remarks during Facebook’s earnings call.

  • Civil Rights

    • What the CIA thought of the most notorious US espionage case before Snowden

      Pollard was spying on behalf of a US ally and received a life sentence despite pleading guilty and fully cooperating with US investigators. He turned over thousands of classified documents and even allegedly sold documents to Pakistan and apartheid South Africa as well.

    • CIA ran up $40 million tab turning out Senate torture report, documents show

      The $40 million cost of producing the Senate torture report was incurred by the CIA, not lawmakers, newly obtained contracting documents reveal, as the agency insisted on outsourcing much of the work to the agency’s long-time contractor.

      Critics of the report, including former and current agency officials and some Republican lawmakers, often complained about the report’s price tag of over $40 million to denounce the Democrats leading the inquiry. Contract documentation obtained by VICE News through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, however, shows that the costs were incurred by the CIA.

    • SSA ‘still investigating’ CIA claims

      The State Security Agency (SSA) has said its probe into claims that Julius Malema, Thuli Madonsela, Joseph Mathunjwa and Lindiwe Mazibuko were spies is still ongoing four months after it was started.

      The agency began the investigation after an online blog post claimed that the four were working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

    • Joshua Wong dismisses Xinhua article on alleged CIA links

      Pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po, citing a report from the official Xinhua News Agency, reported Tuesday that Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong and his family met former US consul general in Hong Kong Stephen Young during a visit to Macau in 2011.

    • From James Bond to Edward Snowden: How the dangerous fantasies of spy fiction shaped our “Mission: Impossible” world

      The Indonesia debacle wasn’t the first time during the Cold War that American officials had lied about a covert operation against a foreign elected leader, played the subservient “free press” like a Stradivarius and then had the temerity to turn around and talk about the evils of Communist propaganda. It certainly wouldn’t be the last. But it was among the most egregious and unavoidable examples, and also one that suggested that all our sanctimonious homilies about democracy and freedom of expression could not quite conceal a darker reality.

    • When government whistleblowers become an “Enemy of the State”

      The National Security Agency (NSA) was only the beginning: Congress—along with the Executive Branch—is so paranoid that we are on the verge of a revolution, that they’re expanding the Surveillance State to watch us even more closely. Watch for the coming Cyber-Security Information Sharing Act (CISA). This Act is going further in watching us than even the NSA ever dreamed.

      If you believe Congress will ever rein in the NSA, think again. The NSA is never going to stop its illegal activities. In fact, what the NSA has done is in its infancy. The new Cyber-Security Information Sharing Act will take the NSA to the next level in watching and listening to us. Too much money and political muscle have been invested in the NSA to create levels of control and ability that monitor each of us 24/7. The NSA has proven itself over and over incompetent where terrorists are involved but very fluent where U.S. citizens are concerned.

    • Guantanamo detainee’s hearing delayed until September

      On hold again: The Pentagon’s latest attempt to move forward with a military commission for an Iraqi detainee was abruptly canceled when the judge found that the accused’s defense attorney, Marine Lt. Col. Sean Gleason, was also involved in another war crimes case.

    • Distraught people, Deadly results

      Officers often lack the training to approach the mentally unstable, experts say

    • How America’s psychologists ended up endorsing torture

      The investigation, led by David Hoffman of the law firm Sidley Austin, concluded this month with the publication of a 542-page report. Its findings diverge considerably from the APA’s expectations. Far from upholding their Hippocratic oath to “do no harm”, APA psychologists did indeed work with officials from the Defense Department and the CIA to facilitate the torture of detainees. This involved issuing loose ethical guidelines that endorsed existing DoD interrogation policies and permitted psychologists to participate at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere—unlike their colleagues in the field of psychiatry, who refused to back the government’s evolving interrogation tactics. Though the APA’s policies adhered to US law, they violated medical ethics.

    • Psychologists in crisis over findings on ‘torture’ allegations

      The American Psychological Association, or APA, under fire for its role in supporting the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques by US national security agencies, vows it will address the numerous ethical breaches detailed in the findings of an independent investigation leaked this month to The New York Times.

      But whether the association, the largest professional organisation for psychologists in the United States and arguably the most influential organisation for psychologists in the world, can salvage its reputation – or repair collateral damage – remains an open question.

      Some of its harshest critics predict mass resignations from the association. But APA’s reach extends far beyond its membership, which includes more than 122,500 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. It’s the publisher of major textbooks and journals. It’s also the accrediting body for university psychology programmes. And the episode has already been used as a case study in ethics courses.

    • Monterey Bay Psychological Association: APA must adopt higher standards

      It was recently revealed that key leadership in the American Psychological Association knowingly misled its membership of 125,000 psychologists as well as the American public in regard to their collusion with the Department of Defense and the CIA. This collusion appears to have been aimed at preserving unethical detention and interrogation practices that involved psychologists in human torture and abuse. These findings came to light on July 10 with the release of a report (www.APA.org/independent-review). Attorney David Hoffman had been commissioned by the APA board of directors to investigate allegations of APA collusion with the Bush administration to facilitate enhanced interrogation techniques. Such practices are abhorrent and violate the long-held principles and values of psychologists across the state and the nation to protect and preserve the mental and physical health and safety of our fellow human beings.

    • BARTON: Vote to end torture

      Rejecting this program is not only the right thing to do — it’s the smart thing to do. Past reports showed that the CIA kidnapped and tortured individuals in secret prisons, built in foreign countries paid for with bribes given to foreign officials. Government agencies ought to uphold our most cherished values, not dishonor them. By voting against torture, the Senate has clearly rejected the CIA’s past torture program.

    • Anti-torture reforms opposed within psychology group after damning report

      Before the American Psychological Association (APA) meets in Toronto next Thursday for what all expect will be a fraught convention that reckons with an independent review that last month found the APA complicit in torture, former military voices within the profession are urging the organization not to participate in what they describe as a witch hunt.

      Reformers consider the pushback to represent entrenched opposition to cleaving the APA from a decade’s worth of professional cooperation with controversial detentions and interrogations. The APA listserv has become a key debating forum, with tempers rising on both sides.

      A recent letter from the president of the APA’s military-focused wing warns that proposed ethics changes, likely to be discussed in Toronto, represent pandering to a “politically motivated, anti-government and anti-military stance”. A retired army colonel called David Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor whose scathing inquiry described APA “collusion” with US torture, an “executioner”.

    • When American psychologists use their skills for torture

      At 11am on July 2, my friend and colleague, Steven Reisner, and I met with the board of the American Psychological Association (APA). The board had just received a devastating report on an investigation of the APA’s years-long collusion with the CIA and US defense department in support of psychologist involvement in the George W. Bush-era torture program.

    • U.S. Psychologists Urged to Curb Questioning Terror Suspects

      The board of the American Psychological Association plans to recommend a tough ethics policy that would prohibit psychologists from involvement in all national security interrogations, potentially creating a new obstacle to the Obama administration’s efforts to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects outside of the traditional criminal justice system.

    • How the American Psychological Assn. lost its way

      Last December, a Senate Intelligence Committee report laid bare the extensive involvement of individual psychologists in the CIA’s black-site torture program. Then, in early July, a devastating independent report by a former federal prosecutor determined that more than a decade ago APA leaders — including the director of ethics — began working secretly with military representatives. Together they crafted deceptively permissive ethics policies for psychologists that effectively enabled abusive interrogation of war-on-terror prisoners to continue.

    • American Psychological Association Urged to Adopt Ban on Interrogations
    • American Psychological Association may bar members from terror cases
    • Following Damning Report, American Psychological Association May Prohibit Interrogation Involvement
    • American Psychological Association may bar members from terror cases
    • 2-part series examines ethics of ‘War on Terror’
    • Outrage of the Month: Leading Professional Psychologists’ Organization Colluded With Defense Department, Facilitated Participation in Torture

      These recent actions by the APA are appropriate first steps to address the egregious ethical lapses that occurred during the creation and implementation of the 2005 ethics guidelines. Despite these actions, the APA’s collusion with the DOD in issuing so-called ethics guidelines that allowed psychologists to participate in the torture of detainees held in DOD and CIA facilities has left an indelible stain on the organization’s reputation. The actions by the APA provided an aura of legitimacy to activities that are now widely recognized as having constituted torture. Such shameful conduct must never be repeated by the APA or any other professional organization representing health care providers.

    • Rowley – McGovern Iowa Speaking Tour

      FBI whistle blower Coleen Rowley and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern to speak at organized events in nine Iowa cities beginning Sept. 24

    • Yakub Memon’s hanging: Can we be neutral in a moving train?

      Some time in the future we will know if terrorism was dealt a deathly blow by Yakub’s execution, whether death penalty is a violation of human rights, whether Yakub was promised immunity and was eventually cheated out of it, whether he deserved the death warrant, whether the issue of the warrant while passing the test of the law, as the Supreme Court noted, also passed the test of justice.

    • Don’t confuse Yakub case with campaign against death penalty

      Did Yakub Memon come back to India because of a deal struck with the Indian authorities? Was he promised some sort of immunity? The honest answer has to be that we don’t know. Some of those involved in his arrest and prosecution say that India reneged on an agreement made with Yakub. Others say that there was never any deal.

  • DRM

    • Sen. Al Franken Wants Federal Probe of Apple Music, App Store Practices

      Critics of Apple’s surcharge for in-app purchases, as well as rules meant to keep that money flowing, have a powerful new friend in Washington. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) on Wednesday sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Edith Ramirez, asking them to review Apple’s policies for possible anti-competitive behavior.

    • Apple Music is a mess, and it’s alienating the company’s biggest fans

      Apple Music is shaping up to be Apple’s worst received product launch since Apple Maps in 2012.

      Apple Music, released in June, was supposed to be Apple’s big splash into the world of subscription on-demand music and online radio. But it seems to have a lot of bugs.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Google, Oracle’s endless Java copyright battle extended to … 2016

        The long-running copyright dispute between Oracle and Google over the latter’s use of the Java language APIs in its Android operating system will likely drag on for another year or more, based on the latest developments in the case in a US federal court.

        Reuters reports that US District Judge William Alsup, who has been presiding over the suit since it was filed in 2010, said in proceedings on Thursday that the case would likely not return to court for its next round until spring of 2016 at the earliest.

      • YouTube Games Copyright Law To Avoid License Fees, IFPI Says

        A decade-and-a-half of disruptive technology has certainly played its part, but without that turmoil the music industry might still be playing catch up today. At any rate, the rise of online piracy arguably provided a much needed wake-up call and prompted the rise of dozens of legitimate music services.

08.01.15

Links 1/8/2015: Steam Sale, blackPanther OS 14.1

Posted in News Roundup at 3:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • FFmpeg’s Leader Resigns, Hopes To Make Libav Developers Come Back

    Michael Niedermayer, the leader of the FFmpeg project for the past eleven years, has made a surprise announcement today: he’s resigning as its leader.

    Niedermayer is resigning as he no longer feels he’s the best leader for FFmpeg, given the current Libav fork still persisting even after Debian dropped Libav and is returning to FFmpeg.

  • Open source Copyright Hub unveiled with ’90+ projects’ in the pipeline

    The web has grown up without letting people own and control their own stuff, but a British-backed initiative might change all that, offering a glimpse of how the internet can work in the future. Their work will all be open sourced early next year.

    Britain’s much-anticipated Copyright Hub was given ministerial blessing when it finally opened its kimono today, boasting a pipeline of over 90 projects covering commercial and free uses.

  • Events

    • Banks’ Family Values; Texas Linux Fest & More…

      All in the Family: It seems that the Banks family of Los Angeles has taken upon itself to single-handedly invite the wider world to the see and try out the benefits of FOSS and programming. We reported on Keila Banks speaking at OSCON last week, but so has Business Insider and MTV News — and now MSNBC is getting in on the act by having her on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show at 8 a.m. Saturday. Check your local listings.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Redis open source DBMS overview

      Redis runs on Linux. Although the Redis project doesn’t directly support Windows, Microsoft Open Technologies develops and maintains a Windows port targeting Win64.

      The Redis open source DBMS is available as a BSD license. The Redis community offers support through the official mailing list as well as #redis on Freenode. Commercial support is available through Pivotal, the official sponsor of Redis. Pivotal offers two levels of professional support.

    • A shout-out to SQLAlchemy

      So here’s a shout-out to Mike B. at SQLAlchemy for his quick work. (And I’m glad the effort of making a good-as-I-can bugreport paid off.)

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The document Foundation Released LibreOffice 4.4.5 With Bug Fixes

      The document foundation released another update LibreOffice 4.4.5 which contains 80+ bug fixes over the previous release. LibreOffice is one of the most popular Office app that is also very active. Regular releases makes it more stable and feature-rich. According to the team LibreOffice 4.4.5 replaces LibreOffice 4.3.7 as “still” version for more conservative users and enterprise deployment. Install this update in Ubuntu/Linux Mint or other derivatives to get bug fixes.

    • Surprises, claws and various articles

      Dear readers, something nice but unexpected came up recently. As you can imagine, preparations for the release of LibreOffice 5 are keeping many people busy these days. Among the things that need to be found is the choice of collaterals and various elements for communication. It could very well be that readers of this blog will have a nice surprise the day LibreOffice 5 is released!

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 10.2-RC2 Released, Riding On Schedule Nicely

      Glen Barber announced the release of FreeBSD 10.2-RC2 today for those wanting to do some weekend BSD testing.

      FreeBSD 10.2-RC2 has changes to pkg, ntpd, nvme, a UEFI loader fix, and an assortment of other bug/regression fixes across the stack.

    • [FreeBSD-Announce] vBSDcon: September 11 – 13, 2015

      vBSDcon is a technical conference for the various BSD communities that is hosted by Verisign for users and developers of BSD-based systems. vBSDcon 2015 is being held in Reston, VA from September 11 – 13, 2015 at the Sheraton Reston hotel. vBSDcon is an ideal event for systems and network administrators, developers, and engineers with a focus on BSD-based technologies. The early bird registration rate of $75.00 is available through August 13, 2015 at vBSDcon.com.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Civil society pushing open source in Bulgaria

      The civil society organisation Obshtestvo.bg Foundation has been pressing as well as helping the Bulgarian government to incorporate open source in its legislation. Open source is now the preferred development form for eGovernment projects. The Bulgarian Council of Ministers has voted that the same requirements will be applicable to all government-funded software projects.

    • US House Opens Up to Open Source

      Providers of open source software recently found another market: the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. That market easily will grow to many thousands of potential open source users when the staffs of each representative, as well as the staffs of various House committees, are added to the total.

      Three advocacy organizations — the Sunlight Foundation, the Congressional Data Coalition, and the OpenGov Foundation — last month jointly announced that certain procurement restrictions that had constrained the use of open source technology in the House had been clarified.

      Read more

  • Openness/Sharing

    • KDE Plasma Mobile, NPR’s newsroom tool, and more news

    • Open Data

      • An open source mapping primer

        You now need a way to embed a map, manipulate the map tiles, and overlay other data onto the map. Leaflet is a popular choice for doing this. It’s an open source Javascript library that lets you easily create “slippy” maps with tiled base layers, panning and zooming, and various layered features such as markers at specific geographical coordinates (i.e. latitude and longitude). It handles interactions with the map, has a fairly rich and well-documented API, and also works with a wide collection of plugin that provide additional features.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Powering the Open Data Center

      Open source leadership is a big responsibility for Intel. When we take leadership positions in the open source ecosystem, it pushes us to advance the entire industry along with our company. In that mindset, Intel is investing a tremendous amount to continue expanding the boundaries of what technology can do for the data center and to ensure there is an ecosystem that facilitates the innovation required to meet enterprise demands and spur adoption.

  • Security

    • The cyber-mechanics who protect your car from hackers

      “Most manufacturers know there is a problem and they’re working on solutions, but no-one will go public with it,” explains Martin Hunt, who works in automotive penetration testing for UK telecommunications firm BT.

    • US to rethink hacker tool export rules after mass freakout in security land

      Proposed changes to the US government’s export controls on hacking tools will likely be scaled back following widespread criticism from the infosec community, a government spokesman has said.

      “A second iteration of this regulation will be promulgated,” a spokesman for the US Department of Commerce told Reuters, “and you can infer from that that the first one will be withdrawn.”

      The proposed restrictions are required by the Wassenaar Arrangement, a 41-nation pact that first came into effect in 1996 and which calls for limits on trade of “dual-use goods,” meaning items that have both civilian and military applications.

      In 2013, the list of goods governed under the Arrangement was amended to include technologies used for testing, penetrating, and exploiting vulnerabilities in computer systems and networks.

    • Remote denial of service vulnerability exposes BIND servers

      BIND operators released new versions of the DNS protocol software overnight to patch a critical vulnerability which can be exploited for use in denial-of-service cyberattacks.

      Lead investigator Michael McNally from the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) said in a security advisory the bug, CVE-2015-5477, is a critical issue which can allow hijackers to send malicious packets to knock out email systems, websites and other online services.

    • Botnet takedowns: are they worth it?

      The number of botnets has grown rapidly over the last decade. From Gameover Zeus leveraging encrypted peer-to-peer command and control servers, to Conflicker, infecting millions of computers across the world – botnets are continuing to infiltrate many internet-based services and causing mass disruption, and it’s getting worse.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Palestinian infant burned to death in West Bank arson; IDF blames ‘Jewish terror’

      A one-and-a-half year-old Palestinian infant was burned to death and three of his family members were seriously wounded late Thursday night after a house was set on fire in the village of Douma, near Nablus.

      According to reports, settlers were those who set the house on fire after targeting it with firebombs and graffiti. The Israeli military called the attack “Jewish terror,” while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials echoed the claim, vehemently condemning the attack.

    • CIA concludes US-led fight against IS a ‘strategic stalemate’: Report

      A year into US-led fight, Islamic State group’s membership levels remain consistent and group has spread geographically

    • USA: A clone of Israeli national security state

      Over the past decade, Israel lobby groups have founded exchange programmes with US police and homeland security agencies which have imported Israeli policing and national security practices to the US. Groups like the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee recruit delegations of high-level American security officials to liaise with Israeli counterparts in the police, military intelligence and internal security. Hundreds of officers have participated in these trips from departments in a score or more of US cities. New York even has its own police liaison office located inside an Israeli police station.

    • US to release Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard after 30 years

      The United Sates granted parole to Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and he will be freed in November. Pollard has been in U.S jail for almost 30 years. However, the U.S. government denied speculations that Pollard’s release is a gesture to placate Israel for softening its opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • California Using Recycled Fracking Water To Irrigate Crops

      California’s governor, a recipient of generous donations from the oil and gas industry, is now responsible for putting dangerous “frack water” into the American food supply.

      As California struggles with a historic drought, some farmers in California’s agriculturally fertile Central Valley turned to a water recycling program, allowing them to irrigate their crops at a fraction of the normal cost. According to Phys.org, the recycled water costs about $33 per square foot, while freshwater could cost as much as $1,500 for the same amount.

    • Cecil the lion’s brother Jericho shot dead on SAME day Zimbabwe bans hunting

      Zimbabwe has BANNED the hunting of lions, leopards and elephants in a part of the country frequently used by hunters.

      The nation’s wildlife authorities put the ban in place following the outrage overt he death of Cecil the lion.

      Tragically, despite the ban coming in place today, it was announced that Jericho, Cecil’s brother, was shot dead by poachers.

      Bow and arrow hunts, like the one undertaken by the killer dentist Walter Palmer, have also been suspended – unless hunters are approved by the National Parks and Wildlife Authority’s director.

      Zimbabwean authorities said the hunt was illegal and are seeking the extradition of Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer.

    • Cecil the lion’s brother Jericho shot dead in Zimbabwe by illegal hunters: officials

      Cecil the lion’s brother Jericho has been shot dead in Zimbabwe by illegal hunters, officials said Saturday.

      “It is with huge disgust and sadness that we have just been informed that Jericho, Cecil’s brother has been killed at 4pm today,” the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said in a statement. “We are absolutely heartbroken.”

  • Finance

    • “They bury the values of democracy”

      Yanis Varoufakis spent only five months in office as the Greek finance minister. But even that was enough to drive his colleagues to distraction – and his fans into a frenzy. An encounter in Athens.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Israel’s secret-keeper seeks censorship reform

      Soon-to-retire military censor envisions civil agency to provide ‘guidance’ rather than censorship to media

    • Interview: IDF’s secret-keeper seeks censorship reform

      As she prepares to retire next month, the chief military censor wants a steamlined, modern agency to provide advance ‘guidance’ rather than ‘censorship’.

    • Outgoing IDF chief censor: Israel’s preventive censorship is becoming irrelevant
    • Marc Shapiro and Jewish Censorship

      For years now Professor Marc Shapiro of the University of Scranton has revealed examples of mind control in Jewish sources. Opinions regarded as too lenient have been expurgated from books of responsa. Opinions once considered acceptable have now been proscribed in the current witchhunt against anything that might not completely condemn secular education. Records of great rabbis reading newspapers, Heaven forfend, have been removed from publications. Rabbis who held Zionist, tolerant, or modern views have had their names removed. Original approbations of great rabbis have been cut from their books so as not to misguide innocent modern readers.

      But thanks to easy access to original uncensored editions and the availability of texts online, this is now out in the open and clear for all to see (who are not blind). In his latest book, Changing the Immutable, Professor Shapiro has provided an invaluable service to the world of Torah scholarship by giving chapter and verse of so many examples of censorship and distortion.

    • Media practised self-censorship when I was PM, says Dr Mahathir

      “When I was the prime minister, there was press freedom but it is the media itself who did self-censorship, as if they didn’t want to hurt leaders’ feelings. This is the habit that we have in Malaysia,” he said at a book launch in Putrajaya today.

      He also said local mainstream media were too cautious.

      “They think what if leaders don’t like what they write,”he said.

      He added, however, that media like Harakah and The Rocket sometimes went overboard in criticising the government.

    • Censorship is killing student stand-up

      This attitude is toxic to comedy. Stand-up is nerve-racking enough; if young comics are constantly worried about being banned for speaking out of turn, how are they supposed to take the risks that allow you to grow as a performer? It’s bad enough when students’ unions ban professional comedians, for fear that their jokes will turn unthinking students into lads, Zionists or whatever the fear of the day is. But clamping down on 19-year-olds who can barely remember their lines? That’s laughable.

    • Politicians slam council chiefs for ‘censorship’ of controversial play about SNP activist

      POLITICIANS have accused West Dunbartonshire Council of censorship after it dropped a play about SNP activist Willie MacRae before telling the show’s producer he could come back if the Labour administration was given the boot in the next elections.

      After a successful run at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe , Andy Paterson from Theatre Magnetico said the authority called him asking about the possibility of putting his play 3,000 Trees: The Death of Willie Macrae on at Clydebank Town Hall.

    • Facebook Censors bianet’s News about Censorship

      Social networking service Facebook censored bianet news “Facebook Censors Kaos GL for ‘nudity’”.

      On July 29, bianet made news of Facebook censorship on Kaos GL, an LGBTI organization, which allegedly ‘violated the community rules’.

      We shared the news on Facebook and then Facebook censored our news stating the original photograph of the news as we used as headline violated the community rules.

    • When it comes to censorship, WordPress has your back

      Automattic, WordPress’s parent company, has a new transparency report that shows that they’ve bounced 43% of their 2015 copyright censorship demands for being frivolous or invalid.

    • Censorship is no substitute for enforcement

      Earlier this month, Justice Minister Owen Bonnici announced that his government would be amending archaic obscenity laws to remove the threat of imprisonment for ‘vilification of religion’, while regularising pornography within certain limitations.

    • Anti-Abbott poster erected by Australian students sparks row over censorship
    • Anti-Abbott poster erected by Castlemaine Secondary College students sparks row over censorship
    • Anti-Abbott poster erected by Castlemaine Secondary College students sparks row over censorship
    • An Artist Took Topless Photos of Women at the New York Supreme Court to Protest Censorship

      In August 2013, Allen Henson, a veteran-turned-photographer, visited the Empire State Building with his girlfriend. Henson took a topless photo of her on the observation deck and never imagined what would follow.

      In 2014, the Empire State Building filed a lawsuit against Henson for over $1 million, arguing he used the premises for commercial purposes (though Henson insists it was not a photoshoot and was exclusively for personal use) and ruined the building’s “reputation as a safe and secure family-friendly tourist attraction,” reports the Huffington Post.

    • Instagram bans #goddess from site

      Photo-sharing app Instagram has banned the hashtag #goddess because “inappropriate” images were allegedly shared, media reports said.

    • The Holes In Instagram’s Censorship Of Eating Disorders

      Recently, the social media site reversed its ban on searches for #curvy after users protested it by using the hashtag #curvee. Mashable reported Instagram now plans to filter out inappropriate content using the hashtag, stating #curvy was banned earlier this month due to content which violated its community guidelines, but insisting the ban had nothing to do with the term “curvy” itself.

    • Censors Cut Fan Bingbing’s Intimate Horse Scene in ‘Lady of the Dynasty’

      In the scene, Lai’s character Tang dynasty Emperor Xuanzong tore off the clothes of Fan’s character Yang Guifei and the couple engaged in an intimate encounter. Netizens feasted on the screenshots of the movie trailer and some suggested the possibility of censoring the part for its “bad influence” on the youth.

    • How Beijing’s censorship impairs U.S.China relations

      Over the past two years, the Chinese authorities have taken new steps to block Chinese citizens’ access to information from U.S. companies and media. These actions not only limit Chinese citizens’ access to news and entertainment, but they also harm U.S. businesses, media outlets, and innovators. In effect, the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive efforts to defend its political monopoly are costing the U.S. economy billions of dollars a year.

      These dynamics pose a challenge to smoother bilateral relations. They undermine trust, create obstacles to cooperation, and infuse business interactions with an underlying sense of unfairness. As such, they should be high on the agenda of any meeting between American and Chinese officials, be it the just concluded U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue or Xi Jinping’s upcoming U.S. visit in September.

    • How egalitarianism became a microaggression

      Now, to the ever-growing list of what’s racist we can add refusing to believe in the completely constructed and repulsive category of race in the first place. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), staff are being told that statements such as ‘I don’t believe in race’, ‘there is only one race, the human race’ and ‘America is a melting pot’ are no longer acceptable. In official UCLA guidelines uncovered by College Fix, all of these statements are branded ‘microaggressions’ – offhand comments or social slights which, the UCLA literature says, ‘communicate hostile, derogatory or negative messages’ to marginalised groups. That’s right: at this university, if you don’t believe in race, you’re probably a racist.

    • Non-religious groups criticise PM Lee’s remarks on “godless society”

      Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s remarks about how a “godless society” would bring “many other problems”, have raised the ire of some groups.

      “Overall, we think religion is a good thing,” Mr Lee said recently in an interview with TIME magazine. “I mean, if we were godless society, we would have many other problems, the communists found that out.”

      Mr Lee made those remarks when he spoke on the recent case of video-blogger Amos Yee whose online video on the late Lee Kuan Yew was also deemed to have “wounded the religious feelings of Christians.”

      “In our society, which is multiracial and multi-religious, giving offence to another religious or ethnic group, race, language or religion, is always a very serious matter. In this case, he’s a 16-year-old, so you have to deal with it appropriately because he’s (of a) young age,” Mr Lee said.

      The Prime Minister’s remarks about how a “godless society” would bring “many more problems”, however were criticised by at least two groups of non-religious groups.

      “Recent history shows that a state’s success or failure has more to do with its economic and political ideologies, governance, people and external factors beyond the state’s control than with religiosity,” said Leftwrite Center and the Humanist Society (Singapore) in a letter to TODAY.

    • PAP shows desperation by drawing electoral lines

      Our supreme leader has shown signs of weakness by targeting the likes of Roy Ngerng and Amos Yee.

    • Legal assistance for online media more critical today

      With the recent announcements of the electoral boundaries and the impending general elections looming, it is a forgone conclusion that blog activity and online discussions will spike. In tandem with growing public perception that state owned media outlets are the government’s mouthpieces, the Internet is fast becoming the forum du jour for political debates and information dissemination.

    • Asia’s ‘Unruly’ Children

      Ostensibly, 16-year-old Amos Yee was charged with “wounding the religious feelings of Christians” in a YouTube video that lambasted Lee Kuan Yew and compared him to Jesus, whom the young blogger described as ‘power hungry and malicious’. Amos was also found guilty of posting obscene material on the Internet, reference to a crude illustration of Lee and former British premier Margaret Thatcher in an acrobatic sex maneuver.

    • Canada is no friend of free speech, and as citizens get fined for criticizing police and lawyers get prosecuted

      O Canada! The land of Mounties and beavers and hockey and…hate speech tribunals? Yes, it’s no secret that Canada is no friend of free speech, and as citizens get fined for criticizing police and lawyers get prosecuted for criticizing a government agency, things are only getting worse. Join James in today’s Thought for the Day to find out more.

    • Rapid Pirate Site Blocking Mechanism Introduced By Portugal

      In concert with rightsholders and Internet service providers, Portugal has just introduced a mechanism which enables the streamlined blocking of ‘pirate’ sites. Set to go into effect during mid-August, the system will target sites with more than 500 allegedly infringing links and those whose indexes contain more than 66% infringing content.

  • Privacy

    • Groups urge Obama to oppose cyberthreat sharing bills

      The coalition of 39 digital rights and privacy groups and 29 security experts urged Obama to threaten to veto the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a bill that may come to the Senate floor for a vote by early August. CISA would protect from customer lawsuits those businesses that share cyberthreat information.

      “CISA fails to protect users’ personal information,” the coalition said in a letter to Obama, sent Monday. “It allows vast amounts of personal data to be shared with the government, even that which is not necessary to identify or respond to a cybersecurity threat.”

    • Legislative Cyber Threats: CISA’s Not The Only One

      If anyone in the United States Senate had any doubts that the proposed Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA) was universally hated by a range of civil society groups, a literal blizzard of faxes should’ve cleared up the issue by now.

    • New attack on Tor can deanonymize hidden services with surprising accuracy

      Deanonymization requires luck but nonetheless shows limits of Tor privacy.

    • Tor connection vulnerability uncloaks hidden web services

      MIT researchers have developed digital attacks which can unmask Tor services in the Deep Web with a high degree of accuracy.

    • How the way you type can shatter anonymity—even on Tor

      Security researchers have refined a long-theoretical profiling technique into a highly practical attack that poses a threat to Tor users and anyone else who wants to shield their identity online.

    • Internet of things: the greatest mass surveillance infrastructure ever?

      The word “thing”, in Old English, means a meeting or assembly. In the epic poem Beowulf, the eponymous hero declares he’ll “alone hold a thing” with the monster Grendel, who is terrorising the Danes in the great hall of Heorot. Beowulf uses “thing” euphemistically – it is a meeting that immediately descends into a fight.

      The Icelandic parliament is still called Althing (Alþingi). But over the ages, “things” have gradually evolved from meetings to matter. Today, we primarily use the term “thing” to refer to objects. Even in this sense, however, things are still core to our political and social lives.

      An appreciation that things have always been about community and politics, whether literally, or through the creation and respect of systems of private property, provides a useful backdrop to the recent book, Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up, by writer and professor of communication, Philip N Howard.

    • France approves ‘Big Brother’ surveillance powers despite UN concern

      France’s highest authority on constitutional matters has approved a controversial bill that gives the state sweeping new powers to spy on citizens.

      The constitutional council made only minor tweaks to the legislation, which human rights and privacy campaigners, as well as the United Nations, have described as paving the way for “very intrusive” surveillance and state-approved eavesdropping and computer-hacking.

    • Incongruities in the News — Paul Craig Roberts

      Jonathan Pollard, a paid spy for Israel described by Michael D. Shear as “one of the country’s most notorious spies,” has been pardoned from his life sentence. It strikes me as hypocritical for the US government to sentence anyone to prison for spying when the government itself spies on everyone everywhere. All Americans including members of the House and Senate, congressional staff, military officers, foreign governments including the leaders of Washington’s closest allies, and foreign businesses are spied upon. No one is exempt from Washington’s spying.

      Washington claims that its worldwide spying does no harm. So how did the very limited spying of one person—Pollard—a civilian employee of Naval intelligence do so much harm as to warrant a life sentence? What some of us would like to see is a life sentence for NSA.

      What disturbs me about the case is that it is Pollard, who spied for a foreign country, who is released. In contrast, Manning and Snowden who spied for the American people are locked away, Manning in a federal prison and Snowden in his Russian exile. Julian Assange, who merely did his job as a journalist and made available to newspapers documents leaked to him, is confined to the Ecuadoran embassy in London.

    • EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Explains Why Apple Should Continue To Fight the Government on Encryption

      As the Obama administration campaign to stop the commercialization of strong encryption heats up, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is firing back on behalf of the companies like Apple and Google that are finding themselves under attack.

      “Technologists and companies working to protect ordinary citizens should be applauded, not sued or prosecuted,” Snowden wrote in an email through his lawyer.

    • NSA Doesn’t Want Court That Found Phone Dragnet Illegal to Actually Do Anything About It

      The National Security Agency doesn’t think it’s relevant that its dragnet of American telephone data — information on who’s calling who, when, and for how long — was ruled illegal back in May.

      An American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit is asking the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which reached that conclusion, to immediately enjoin the program.

      But the U.S. government responded on Monday evening, saying that Congressional passage of the USA Freedom Act trumped the earlier ruling. The Freedom Act ordered an end to the program — but with a six-month wind-down period.

    • Stepping into an NSA agent’s shoes is just a download away
    • Seen: Self-censoring font redacts words monitored by the NSA
    • Former NSA Leaker Thomas Drake Now Working in Retail
    • NSA Whistleblower Describes Ongoing Anguish
    • The Original NSA Whistleblower Is Still Rebuilding His Life
    • US spies on Japan trade talks: WikiLeaks
    • WikiLeaks reveals US spied on Japan too
    • WikiLeaks files suggest US spied on Japan, Japanese companies
    • Wikileaks says US spied on Japanese government, companies
    • WikiLeaks alleges widespread U.S. spying on Japanese government, major companies
    • Wikileaks: US ‘spied on Japan government and companies’

      The US has been spying on Japanese cabinet officials, banks and companies, including the Mitsubishi conglomerate, whistleblowing website Wikileaks says.

      Documents released by Wikileaks list 35 telephone numbers targeted for interception by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

      [...]

      Wikileaks says the NSA shared the information it had gathered with Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand – the so-called “Five Eyes” group.

    • WikiLeaks Docs Purport To Show The U.S. Spied On Japan’s Government

      New classified documents released by WikiLeaks purport to show that the United States spied on Japan’s government, as well as on Japanese banks and companies, including Mitsubishi.

    • US has spied on Japan for years, reveals Wikileaks

      WIKILEAKS published evidence of the United States spying on its ally Japan yesterday, including a list of government and business targets.

      The whistle-blowing website published its “Target Tokyo” list of 35 of US National Security Agency (NSA) targets — the Cabinet Office, the Bank of Japan and corporate giants Mitsubishi and Mitsui among them — going back at least eight years.

    • US Will Escape Consequences After NSA Caught Spying on Japanese Officials

      The US National Security Agency spied on Japanese high-profile officials and businessmen, WikiLeaks revealed on Friday.

    • Japan’s PM Could Use NSA Spy Reports to Strengthen Secret State – Envoy

      US China Policy Foundation Co-Chair and former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman Jr. claims that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could use the WikiLeaks revelations of US spying on his government to make security affairs far more secret.

    • US spied on Japanese govt, companies, passed intelligence to Australia, New Zealand

      Washington spied on its key ally, Japan, and passed intelligence on to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, WikiLeaks has revealed. The NSA targeted 35 high-ranking Japanese officials and top companies, and also tracked trade negotiations.

    • WikiLeaks Discloses NSA Intercepted Japan’s Secret Climate Change Plans

      The US National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted Japanese climate change plans of the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that had been intended to be kept secret from the United States, WikiLeaks revealed on Friday.

    • Leak Shows US Spying on Japan Over Climate Change — and Cherries

      One document that summarizes intercepted communications from 2007 discusses plans by the Japanese government to announce plans to halve their carbon emissions by 2050.

    • Climate and Cherry Disputes in WikiLeaks Documents Show U.S.-Japan Relations Can Be the Pits

      New U.S. spying records offer a view of the mundane diplomacy between two allied, industrialized nations. But five excerpted cables, released Friday by WikiLeaks, show relations aren’t always sunny or sweet.

    • US spied on Japanese PM Abe, Mitsubishi, and so much more

      The targets of the cyber-spying included stealing secrets on US-Japan relations, trade negotiations and climate change policy. Fruits of the spying, exposed in leaked documents published by WikiLeaks on Friday, were shared with the US’s Five Eyes spying partners.

    • Tokyo to Protest US Spying on Gov’t, Companies if Allegations Confirmed

      Tokyo will lodge a formal protest with the US government if the WikiLeaks revelations of NSA spying on Japanese officials and businesses are proved.

    • WikiLeaks: NSA spied on Abe and Japanese companies

      Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, key figures of his former administration and several of Japan’s most powerful companies have been the targets of long-term US spying operations, according to documents published on the WikiLeaks website.

    • Target Tokyo: WikiLeaks reveals NSA spied on Japanese PM Shinzō Abe and companies like Mitsubishi

      The US National Security Agency (NSA) undertook systematic mass surveillance of Japanese politicians, ministries and corporations over a number of years, according to recently published documents. The revelations come from whistleblowing organisation WikiLeaks, which released a list of 35 top secret targets in Japan on Friday morning (31 July).

    • Exclusive: US bugs Japan on trade and climate

      Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and the top levels of the Japanese government are being spied on by America, and the information shared with allies including Australia, according to secret intelligence documents published by WikiLeaks.

    • NSA was spying on Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, WikiLeaks reveals

      WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing organisation recently revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was actively spying on some of Japan’s high-profile citizens, including the current Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe.

    • WikiLeaks: NSA also targeted Japan, spied on climate change policy

      Add Japan to the list of countries that the National Security Agency purportedly spied on. New documents published by WikiLeaks alleges that the NSA kept tabs on Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, his cabinet and companies like Mitsubishi since 2006. In particular, the US paid close attention to Japan’s policies around climate change. That includes details about Abe’s plan to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by half by 2050, which Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) was considering not telling the US about, as well as its confidential G8 summit proposals on climate change. Additionally, the US knew ahead of time that Japan intended to double down on a “sectoral approach” for managing carbon emissions, which focuses on specific carbon goals for sectors like “industry,” “residential” and “transportation.”

    • New leaks show NSA targeting Japanese ministers and energy companies

      The NSA has been keeping a close eye on Japan’s biggest businesses, according to a new publication from Wikileaks. Dubbed “Target Tokyo,” the new files show NSA selector IDs singling out a range of sensitive targets within Japan, including the country’s Minister of Economic Trade and Industry, numerous targets within the country’s finance ministry, and unspecified targets within Mistubishi’s Natural Gas division and Mitsui’s petroleum division.

      The latest release is similar to previous documents that revealed French government targets as well as the personal surveillance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The source of the documents is unknown, but they are not believed to have come from Edward Snowden, who has traditionally published documents through journalistic outlets like The Guardian, The Intercept, or The Washington Post.

    • Target Tokyo

      Today, Friday 31 July 2015, 9am CEST, WikiLeaks publishes “Target Tokyo”, 35 Top Secret NSA targets in Japan including the Japanese cabinet and Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi, together with intercepts relating to US-Japan relations, trade negotiations and sensitive climate change strategy.

      The list indicates that NSA spying on Japanese conglomerates, government officials, ministries and senior advisers extends back at least as far as the first administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which lasted from September 2006 until September 2007. The telephone interception target list includes the switchboard for the Japanese Cabinet Office; the executive secretary to the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga; a line described as “Government VIP Line”; numerous officials within the Japanese Central Bank, including Governor Haruhiko Kuroda; the home phone number of at least one Central Bank official; numerous numbers within the Japanese Finance Ministry; the Japanese Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry Yoichi Miyazawa; the Natural Gas Division of Mitsubishi; and the Petroleum Division of Mitsui.

    • EXCLUSIVE: Now it’s Edward Snowden the comic book – man who stole 1.7 MILLION classified documents and revealed NSA’s monitoring program is subject of ‘graphic novel’ [government propaganda, citing the agencies and/or anonymous sources, or unsourced, like the three links below]
    • NSA report shows China hacked 600+ US targets over 5 years

      NBC has released a 2014 slide from a secret NSA Threat Operations Center (NTOC) briefing—a map that shows the locations of “every single successful computer intrusion” by Chinese state-sponsored hackers over a five-year period. More than 600 US businesses and institutions were breached during that period.

    • Exclusive: Secret NSA Map Shows China Cyber Attacks on U.S. Targets
    • How NSA and GCHQ spied on the Cold War world

      American and British intelligence used a secret relationship with the founder of a Swiss encryption company to help them spy during the Cold War, newly released documents analysed by the BBC reveal.

    • NSA pays highway cops $1mn to patrol data centres
    • Local troopers maintain ‘perimeter presence’ at data center as part of contract with NSA
    • Report: Utah Cops Get $1M a Year to Park at NSA Data Center

      The massive controversial NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah, has police presence that’s costing the agency $1 million a year. State Highway Patrol troopers provide the facility that became a center of attention following Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the agency’s mass surveillance practices with a “perimeter presence” under contract with the feds, reported a local Fox News affiliate.

      In a statement, the NSA (National Security Agency) said the move was to ensure the security of its workforce and the larger community. Public outrage following the Snowden disclosures included protests at the site, putting the secretive facility in the national spotlight.

    • No pardon for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, says US government

      A petition calling for American intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden to be pardoned has been rejected by the US government – two years after it was started.

      More than 167,000 people signed the petition – calling for Mr Snowden to be “immediately issued with a full, free, and absolute pardon” – on the government’s official petitions website, We the People.

      But the US government said it would not be acting on it and instead urged Mr Snowden to return to America and be “judged by a jury of his peers”.

    • White House says Snowden should ‘come home, be judged’

      The White House rejected a call today to pardon Edward Snowden, saying the former intelligence contractor should “be judged by a jury of his peers” for leaking US government secrets. The US administration re-iterated its tough stance against the exiled fugitive, whom supporters regard as a whistleblower, in response to a petition on the White House website signed by more than 167,000 people.

      Lisa Monaco, an advisor on homeland security and counterterrorism, said Snowden’s “dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work day in and day out to protect it.” She said that Snowden, who has been granted asylum in Russia after he leaked documents on vast US surveillance programs to journalists, is “running away from the consequences of his actions.”

    • Quoted: White House says no pardon for Edward Snowden

      The administration response is in line with other government officials’ stated stance on Snowden, who a couple of years ago leaked documents he stole from the NSA. Although former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said earlier this month he thought that a deal was possible, a spokeswoman for current U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the administration’s position had not changed.

    • White House Says “Thanks but No Thanks” to Pardon for Snowden
    • Spies helped build Silicon Valley. Now the tables are turning

      David Cameron wants US tech sector companies to do more to fight terrorism. But they’ve grown too powerful to listen

    • Tor Project, Library Freedom Project to establish Tor exit nodes in libraries

      Tor Project and the Library Freedom Project have joined forces to establish Tor exit nodes in libraries in an effort to protect internet freedom, bolster the Tor network and show the public how Tor can be used to protect their digital free expression rights, according to a Tor Project blog post.

    • The NSA will soon stop examining millions of Americans’ calling records
    • NSA won’t get hands on bulk phone data after 29 November
    • NSA will stop looking at old phone records

      The agency says that would be “solely for data integrity purposes to verify the records produced under the new targeted production authorized by the USA FREEDOM Act”.

      The National Security Agency will purge all phone data collected during the operation of its expiring bulk surveillance program by the start of next year pending ongoing litigation, the government announced Monday. Instead, those metadata records – such as the time a call was made, to whom it was made, and the duration of the call – will held by the telephone companies, and the NSA will be required to submit specific search terms in order to request relevant data, after obtaining a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

    • NSA sets date for purge of surveillance phone records

      “Analytic access” to the five years worth of records will end on 29 November, and they’ll be destroyed three months later, it said in a statement released on Monday.

    • Why the NSA is destroying its historic telephone surveillance data

      Since Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, the National Security Agency, or NSA, has become a by-word for uncontrolled government surveillance, an Orwellian presence collecting information without remit or restriction.

    • NSA to destroy bulk phone records collected under Patriot Act
    • Chat about Safe Harbour all you like, the NSA’s still the stumbling block

      The EU’s Justice Commissioner met her US counterparts last week in an effort to break the stalemate over data protection rights.

      Věra Jourová and US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker met to discuss the revision of the so-called Safe Harbour agreement, a legally enforceable but voluntary code of conduct for US businesses that process European citizens’ data.

      The bilateral deal was reached in 2000 as a way to allow data flows across the North Atlantic, even though the US does not meet the EU’s adequacy standards on data protection.

    • CISA: The Dirty Deal Between Google and the NSA That No One Is Talking About

      One of the things that civil liberties activists like to lament about is that the general public seems to care more about Google and Facebook using their personal data to target advertising than the government using it to target drone strikes.

    • Pending bill could give NSA carte blanche on personal data

      Ever heard of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act? Not many people have, but the bill, which is progressing through the legislative process, could give government agencies access to huge amounts of personal data held by private companies like Google and Facebook.

    • What’s Inside the Justice Department’s Secret Cybersecurity Memo?

      Wyden, the Democratic privacy hawk from Oregon, claims that a classified Justice Department legal opinion written during the early years of the George W. Bush administration is pertinent to the upper chamber’s consideration of cyberlegislation—a warning that reminds close observers of his allusions to the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers years before they were exposed publicly by Edward Snowden.

    • Wyden, Internet privacy guru, pushes back on cyber, intel bills

      Ron Wyden, happy warrior, is at it again.

      The Oregon Democrat is throwing sand in the gears of legislation designed to fight hackers and terrorists over concerns that the bills will limit users’ privacy and free speech.

      With just days left before the August recess, Sen. Wyden is helping to lead a grassroots campaign against the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA). The bipartisan bill encourages private companies to share information with the government about cyber threats after a number of high-profile hacks of federal agencies and firms like Sony, Target and Anthem.

    • Magid: Concerns raised about cybersecurity bill

      The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act , or CISA, encourages private companies to share information with the federal government and local law enforcement. The bill, according to its co-author, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-San Francisco, would remove legal barriers for companies to share, receive and use cyberthreat information and cyber countermeasures “on a purely voluntary basis,” while also providing liability protection if user or customer data is shared.

    • Cyber-Surveillance Bill Set to Move to Senate Floor

      The Senate is expected to consider the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA, S. 754) on the Senate floor soon. The bill was marked up in secret, thereby denying the public an opportunity to better understand the risks the legislation poses. This document analyzes the bill as reported by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on a vote of 14-1.

    • Week of Action Opposing CISA: Over 400,000 Faxes Sent At Halfway Point

      We’re halfway through our Week of Action opposing the privacy-invasive “cybersecurity” bill CISA. This is the fifth time in as many years that Congress is trying to pass an information-sharing bill. The Week of Action aims to stop a rumored vote on the bill before Congress leaves for a 5-week vacation on August 7. We’re only three days in and over 400,000 faxes have been sent to the Senate opposing CISA. Join us now in the Week of Action.

    • Stop Cyber Surveillance
    • Privacy groups use faxes to fight cyber surveillance bill

      A coalition of privacy rights advocates and civil-liberties groups opposed to the proposed Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, is urging American citizens to wage a fax campaign against it – on the theory that if the government wants to impose Orwellian 1984-style surveillance laws on America, maybe circa-1984 technology is the best way to point out the problems with this.

    • Court: German spy agency need not give info on NSA list

      A German federal court has ruled that the country’s spy agency is under no obligation to divulge to the media a list of names compiled from search terms provided to it by the U.S. National Security Agency.

    • Bundestag Demands Access to Surveillance Lists Involved in NSA Scandal

      The G10 Commission of the Bundestag responsible for controlling German intelligence services is going to file a lawsuit against the current German government over a recent espionage scandal with the NSA. The Commission demanded access to BND documents containing lists of objects of surveillance, chairman of the Commission Andre Hahn told Sputnik.

    • German Intelligence Supervisor to Sue Merkel Amid NSA Scandal
    • German Courts Unlikely to Rule Against Gov’t in NSA Scandal
    • Even the former head of NSA thinks crypto backdoors are stupid

      Michael Chertoff, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security and a former federal prosecutor, made some surprising remarks last week, coming out strongly against cryptographic backdoors that could be provided to the government upon request.

    • Former Heads of Homeland Security, NSA Back Encryption

      Three prominent former national-security officials endorsed the use of encryption in communications, breaking with President Barack Obama and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey in their standoff with Silicon Valley over new uses of the controversial technology.

      Former National Security Agency Director Mike McConnell, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn backed encryption in an eyebrow-raising editorial published Wednesday in the Washington Post.

    • The Red Herring of Digital Backdoors and Key Escrow Encryption

      This subtle misdirection shifts the conversation away from a different sort of back door currently being leveraged on a global scale. That would be back doors that are built upon zero-day exploits. An entire industry has emerged to cater to the growing demand for zero-day bugs and the tech monoliths have quietly provided assistance. For example it’s well documented that companies like Microsoft gave the NSA early access to information on zero-day bugs in their products.

    • An Unexpected Voice Speaks Out Against Backdoored Encryption

      Chertoff said weakening encryption would increase the vulnerabilities for ordinary users, force “bad people” into using technology that would be even harder to decrypt, and could become a strategic vulnerability for the United States, especially if Russia and China demanded backdoor access.

    • Even former heads of NSA, DHS think crypto backdoors are stupid
    • Swiss cryptography firm helped NSA during Cold War

      According to an analysis of declassified documents by the BBC, Zug-based company Crypto AG helped the US National Security Agency (NSA) during the Cold War. The firm told swissinfo.ch that it was unaware of this secret collaboration until recently.

    • Law Enforcement Agencies NSA’s ‘New Customer’ for Data – Whistleblower

      NSA whistleblower William Binney claims that the most prominent users of data collected by NSA are federal and international law enforcement agencies.

    • Ex-Qwest CEO: Likely the NSA snatched emails, calls during Salt Lake Olympics

      Joseph Nacchio headed Denver-based Qwest from 1997 to 2002 and later served more than four years in prison on insider-trading convictions involving the telecom giant. He said Wednesday that he couldn’t say whether the company worked with the NSA or FBI to capture such information during the Olympics, but that the agencies could have worked with other executives to gain access without his knowledge.

    • NSA Phone Dragnet Will Be Emptied, Feds Say, If Foes Allow It

      The U.S. government says it wants to empty the National Security Agency’s databases of domestic call records that were collected in bulk, but that it can’t because surveillance foes seeking a courtroom win for privacy rights have forced their retention.

    • NSA won’t look at call metadata collected under the Patriot Act
    • Rogers: NSA, Cybercom Need Partners to Aid Cybersecurity
    • UK Police Want to Secretly Arrest Journalists Who Report on Snowden’s NSA Leaks

      Metropolitan Police claim an investigation into the possibility of prosecuting journalists for their role in publishing secrets leaked by Edward Snowden will be kept secret. The revelation that information won’t be disclosed due to a “possibility of increased threat of terrorist activity” follows the relentless demands for information from journalists at The Intercept

    • Why Some Americans hate Edward Snowden

      It is difficult to feel “exceptional” when we tolerate living in a “democracy” whose government spies on just about everything it can under the pretense of making us “safe” and “free”.

    • Exit Interview: I’m A Crypto-Specialist Working To Secure the Internet For A Billion People

      We spoke with Karsten Nohl, a Berlin-based crypto-specialist, to get a better handle on these issues. Karsten views himself as an ethical hacker who exposes the security flaws of large corporations, including GSM mobile phone carriers and credit card companies, in order to better protect the customers.

      And his research is fascinating. From developing USB “condoms,” to working to help over a billion people in India connect to the internet securely, Karsten is something of a renegade, trying to make the online world a bit safer for us all.

    • US Given Low Grades on Privacy, Surveillance from UN Committee

      Not surprisingly, the United Nations Human Rights Committee gave the United States low scores on privacy and national security surveillance. In particular, the committee concluded the US has failed to establish “meaningful judicial oversight of its surveillance operations, adequate limits on data retention and meaningful access to remedies for privacy violations.”

    • Dig out your old mobile phone and hack an air-gapped computer

      Researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel have discovered a new attack in which data, including passwords and encryption keys, could be stolen from a computer isolated from the web by using an old phone, malware, a GSM network and electromagnetic waves.

    • NSA Tries to Blame Privacy Advocates for Keeping Americans’ Telephone Records

      USA Freedom requires the NSA to stop collecting our telephone records. An open question when the law passed was what should happen to the mountain of records the NSA has already collected. Will the records be destroyed? Will the NSA keep them? Will it be able to keep using them?

      Earlier this week, the NSA announced that it was going to move the stored records out of active use in November, with a three month period when its employees check them for “data integrity” reasons. It noted, however, that it would not be destroying the records until resolution of the various court cases where the government is under a court order to preserve evidence. Three of those cases are EFF’s: Jewel v. NSA, First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA and Smith v. Obama. The implication is that the privacy advocates are the reason that these records aren’t being destroyed.

      Not so.

      We have offered to the NSA, in multiple court filings, to enter into a plan under which they can destroy many of the records (maybe not all, but certainly most of them). The NSA just needs to admit that our clients’ telephone records were included in the mass collection and for how long. Alternatively, they could state on the record that none of our clients’ records were ever included in the NSA’s telephone records collection, something that seems inconceivable (we do know what that word means) given that Jewel v. NSA is a class action on behalf of all telephone customers of AT&T.

    • Michael Moore Reveals Stealth NSA Project ‘Where to Invade Next’ on Periscope

      One of the big surprises among the world premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this September is Michael Moore’s first documentary in six years, “Where To Invade Next.” The usually expansive filmmaker and social media master has kept the project under wraps for a year, he declared on his first Periscope live video via Twitter. (As of Tuesday there was no IMDb listing.)

      “I’d like to say hello to my NSA friends who are watching right now,” Moore said. Clearly, he feels a certain paranoia about his subject, much as Laura Poitras did with “Citizenfour.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Why We Can’t Support Police Unions

      A labor movement that seeks to fight oppression has no room for police unions.

    • Openly gay CIA contractor faked family emergency to leave Afghanistan amid alleged LGBT discrimination by colleagues

      An openly gay CIA contractor feared that his own colleagues posed a graver threat to his safety than the enemy forces he encountered during a recent deployment in Afghanistan.

      Brett Jones ultimately faked a family emergency to escape the troubling pattern of escalating harassment he said he endured on the mission.

    • Former Navy Seal says CIA operatives turned on him because he is gay

      Brett Jones, a former Navy Seal and an openly gay member of the CIA’s paramilitary Global Response Staff (GRS), told ABC News that other staff members harassed him so much that he feared for his life.

    • WATCH: CIA Contractor Details Antigay Harassment by Colleagues in War Zone

      When former Navy SEAL and current CIA contractor Brett Jones came out as gay last year, he received widespread support from his colleagues. But his latest experience, while deployed in a war zone in Afghanistan, has been a different story.

    • Ex-US navy member alleges anti-gay bullying by CIA workers
    • High-speed police chases have killed thousands of innocent bystanders

      More than 5,000 bystanders and passengers have been killed in police car chases since 1979, and tens of thousands more were injured as officers repeatedly pursued drivers at high speeds and in hazardous conditions, often for minor infractions, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

      The bystanders and the passengers in chased cars account for nearly half of all people killed in police pursuits from 1979 through 2013, USA TODAY found. Most bystanders were killed in their own cars by a fleeing driver.

      Police across the USA chase tens of thousands of people each year — usually for traffic violations or misdemeanors — often causing drivers to speed away recklessly. Recent cases show the danger of the longstanding police practice of chasing minor offenders.

    • Feds Hand Out Funds To Be Used For ‘Traffic Safety;’ Local Agencies Buy License Plate Readers Instead

      The National Highway Transportation Safety Association (NHTSA) is supposed to be focused on one thing: safety. For crying out loud, it’s right in the middle of its cumbersome name. But the federal funding it hands out to state and local governments is being used for surveillance devices with no discernible “safety” purpose: automatic license plate readers.

    • Freedom Of The Press Foundation Sues DOJ Over Its Secret Rules For Spying On Journalists

      The wonderful Freedom of the Press Foundation is now suing the US Justice Department for refusing to reveal its rules and procedures for spying on journalists. You can read the complaint here. The key issue: what rules and oversight exist for the DOJ when it comes to spying on journalists. As you may recall, a few years ago, it came out that the DOJ had been using some fairly sneaky tricks to spy on journalists, including falsely telling a court that reporter James Rosen was a “co-conspirator” in order to get access to his emails and phone records. In response to a lot of criticism, the DOJ agreed to “revise” its rules for when it snoops on journalists.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • ISPs: Net neutrality rules are illegal because Internet access uses computers

      Internet service providers yesterday filed a 95-page brief outlining their case that the Federal Communications Commission’s new net neutrality rules should be overturned.

      One of the central arguments is that the FCC cannot impose common carrier rules on Internet access because it can’t be defined as a “telecommunications” service under Title II of the Communications Act. The ISPs argued that Internet access must be treated as a more lightly regulated “information service” because it involves “computer processing.”

      “No matter how many computer-mediated features the FCC may sweep under the rug, the inescapable core of Internet access is a service that uses computer processing to enable consumers to ‘retrieve files from the World Wide Web, and browse their contents’ and, thus, ‘offers the ‘capability for… acquiring,… retrieving [and] utilizing… information.’ Under the straightforward statutory definition, an ‘offering’ of that ‘capability’ is an information service,” the ISPs wrote.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Kim Dotcom & Mega Trade Barbs Over Hostile Takeover Claims

        In a Q&A session with users of Slashdot this week, Kim Dotcom advised surprised readers not use Mega amid claims of a hostile takeover. Intrigued, TorrentFreak caught up with both Dotcom and his former colleagues at the cloud storage site. Both had plenty to say and it’s now clear that previously warm relations have now iced over.

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