06.15.15
Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another important article from an important media outlet, talking about the European Patent Office’s privacy violations
THIS newly-added PDF has the original in German and an English translation. We remarked on this article a few days ago, right after it had been published. Here it is in English:
10th June 2015
European Patent Office
Call for external oversight of data protection
Thomas Petri, 45, supervised the processing of sensitive data in Schleswig-Holstein and in Berlin before taking up his position as Data Protection Commissioner in Bavaria. (Foto: picture alliance / dpa)
- Thomas Petri, the Bavarian Data Protection Commissioner wants to have an external data protection supervisor deployed at the European Patent Office.
- It has become a matter of public knowledge that publicly accessible computers at the EPO were placed under observation using surveillance technology after the receipt of letters containing [allegedly] defamatory remarks against the Management.
The Bavarian Data Protection Commissioner Thomas Petri has called for an external data protection supervisor for the European Patent Office (EPO). On Tuesday the SZ reported that surveillance technology capable of intercepting keystrokes and generating screen-shots had been installed on publicly accessible computers over a period of several weeks. The internal investigation unit at EPO headquarters in Erhardtstrasse was using these techniques in an attempt to track down the writer(s) of [allegedly] defamatory letters.
Data Protection Commissioner Petri previously investigated the data protection arrangements at the EPO in the Spring of 2014 following a complaint and he came to the conclusion that they were deficient. “It emerged that nobody was really in charge”, Petri told the SZ. The internal supervisors were not sufficiently independent. As a result, Petri contacted the Federal Data Protection Commissioner last year and the latter wants to take corrective action via the Council of the European Union.
However, the data protection authorities are confronted with a problem: the European Patent Office is a supra-national organisation which is “a law unto itself”. The foundation of its legal order is the European Patent Convention. “The contracting states must take measures to supplement the European Patent Convention as a matter of urgency”, says Petri who believes that his previous reservations have now been confirmed by the latest revelations. He does not consider that external oversight [in relation to data protection] would impair the EPO’s ability to perform its normal functional tasks. “In the absence of such oversight, as experience shows, matters are liable get out of hand.”
URL: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/europaeisches-patentamt-forderung-nach-externem-
datenschuetzer-1.2513289
Copyright: Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH
We expect a lot more media coverage to come. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The desktop is full of eye candy. It enhances the visual experience and, in some cases, can also increase functionality of software. But it also makes software fun. Working on the command-line does not have to be always serious. If you want some fun on the command-line, there are lots of commands to raise a smile.
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Desktop
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When the A10 notebook was released, there was a statement going around saying it was impossible to install Linux on it. For [Steffen] that was a challenge. He cracked open this netbook and took a look around the Flash chips. There were two tiny pads that could be shorted to put the device in recovery mode, and the entire thing can be booted from a USB stick.
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Server
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The open-source Docker application container virtualization technology is becoming increasingly popular, spawning a need for distributed monitoring capabilities. To help organizations understand what tools are available for container monitoring, Docker last week announced a new Ecosystem Technology Partner (ETP) program that is starting off with six vendors that have integrated with Docker for monitoring. Those vendors include AppDynamics, Datadog, New Relic, Scout, SignalFx and Sysdig.
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Kernel Space
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Sebastian Andrzej Siewior has had the great pleasure of announcing earlier today, June 14, the immediate availability for download of the Linux kernel 4.0.5-rt3 patch set, for the real-time Linux community.
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After having released a buggy Linux kernel 3.18.15 LTS version, Sasha Levin announced on June 15 the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.18.16 LTS (Long Term Support).
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So I’m on vacation, but time doesn’t stop for that, and it’s Sunday,
so time for a hopefully final rc.
It turns out it’s just as well that I wanted to drag the release out
by a week so that I don’t have the merge window while on vacation – we
still have some fixes in md. As Neil Brown put it “Hasn’t been a good
cycle for md has it :-(“.
The fixes are pretty small, and hopefully we’re all good now. But
another week of testing certainly won’t hurt, so rc8 is perfectly
appropriate.
There’s also various other things going on, including continuing MIPS
fixes as well, along with small ARM, s390 and x86 updates.
But the bulk is (as usual) drivers, and no, that’s not from the md
camp (those fixes are very small). Mostly ethernet, slave-dma, and
spund. But some drm fixes and random other noise too.
There’s some generic networking fixes as well, and random small stuff.
The shortlog is appended as usual, for people who want to get an
overview of the details.
Anyway, it’s not like there is a *ton* of fixes, and most of them are
very small, so I don’t think this is particularly worrisome. It’s just
that rc8 works out not just because of my timing, but due to
continuing small details cropping up.
Let’s make next week really calm, shall we? Because I will very
actively try to avoid having to read email.
Linus
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Graphics Stack
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David Airlie is looking at adding a few more PRIME (the open-source alternative to NVIDIA Optimus) features for X.Org Server 1.18.
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Last year upstream developers decided to rename the R600 AMD GPU LLVM back-end to “AMDGPU” and that move finally happened… But not to be confused with the new AMDGPU Linux kernel DRM driver.
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Applications
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Kodi, a media player and entertainment hub that used to go by the name XBMC up until a few months ago, has been updated once more and is now available for download. This is the second Beta in the new branch, and it comes with some pretty important new features.
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Here it is, the second beta build for Kodi 15.0; freshly baked and ready to be served! A little later than originally planned though, which we’ll explain later. Although we said that Kodi 15.0 a “clean-up” edition, we still managed to squeeze in a couple of really nice features. In total we had ~180 code change requests which were included since last beta release. All this sums up in a pretty big list of improvements and clean-up. As such we will only highlight some of the bigger changes.
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More than one month after the Kodi 15.0 Beta 1 release, the second beta is out for Kodi 15.0 “Isengard” as the successor to XBMC. Kodi 15.0 Beta 2 brings with it new features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I have previously written about the gitlab CI runners that use docker. Yesterday I made some changes to procps and pushed them to gitlab which would then start the CI. This morning I checked and it said build failed – ok, so that’s not terribly unusual. The output from the runner was:
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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Skullgirls, the 2D fighting game with quite a saga built upon its Linux port, has released a video of the port in action.
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I wanted to try World of Goo and This War of Mine. Luckily, The Humble Bundle offered The World of Goo and other interesting titles (ZenBound, Limbo, and Braid again), so I bought the bundle and decided to play them on Steam.
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The Steam Monster Summer Sale continues, and today we have yet another batch of great Linux titles that are just waiting to get a buyer. The sale will continue until June 18, and each day will bring us new discounts.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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As reported earlier this week, the hard-working team of developers behind the acclaimed GNOME desktop environment are still releasing maintenance versions for some of the core components of the stable GNOME 3.16 branch.
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Pinentry is an application to handle prompts for GnuPG, it should be able to ask for passwords and make questions.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro 0.8.13 is the latest version of the famous operating system based on Arch Linux. The developers have managed to release yet another stable version and to improve further the overall experience.
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Manjaro 0.8.13 has been released as the newest version of this easy-to-use derivative of Arch Linux. Manjaro 0.8.13 was developed over the past four months and ships with a tweaked Xfce 4.12 desktop and as an alternative is KDE Plasma 5.3.1 with KDE Frameworks 5.10 and KDE Applications 15.0.4.1
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Results have started appearing on OpenBenchmarking.org of the new Intel NUC5i7RYB that’s powered by an Intel Core i7 “Broadwell” CPU.
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Red Hat Family
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Barclays has also modified their ratings on a number of other information technology stocks in the few days. The firm raised its price target on shares of Citrix Systems, Inc. from $68.00 to $74.00. They have an overweight rating on that stock. Also, Barclays raised its price target on shares of Ellie Mae Inc from $70.00 to $75.00. They have an overweight rating on that stock. Finally, Barclays reiterated its equal weight rating on shares of TiVo Inc.. They have a $13.00 price target on that stock.
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Fedora
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The development team behind DNF, Fedora Linux’s default package manager, used in Fedora 22 and later, has recently been updated to version 1.0.1, introducing various new features and patching nasty issues.
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All KDE applications are well integrated, with a similar look and feel and an easy to use interface, accompanied by an outstanding graphical appearance.
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Debian Family
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I have written a guide showing how to dual boot Windows 8 and Debian. The one thing I commend the Debian developers on is making the dual boot easy. I didn’t have to choose the location of the EFI partition as the installer worked it out for itself.
Therefore having worked out that the best option is to use the network install link on the Debian homepage the rest was quite simple.
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Derivatives
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Voyager X8 is a new Linux distribution based on Debian 8.1 “Jessie”, and it uses the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment. The developers have integrated a large number of apps, and they’ve also made sure that it runs on systems with UEFI.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical, through Łukasz Zemczak, informed its users about the fact that the upcoming OTA-5 software update for its Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system will get new icons for all the core apps.
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Sergey Sorokin, Director of Business Development at Zabbix, wrote an interesting article on Canonical’s Ubuntu Insights website about the collaboration of Zabbix with the Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system for IoT (Internet of Things).
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The work being done on Mir by Canonical developers include buffer semantic changes to help nested bypass support, dynamic double buffering (switching to/from triple buffering), continued work on detecting hung client applications, working out input changes, Mir-on-X is still being worked on, and there’s improved testing and security work items also being tackled.
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Flavours and Variants
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Cinnamon 2.6, the latest version of cinnamon desktop environment has been released and announced few week ago by linux Mint Developer (Clement Lefebvre) via Linux Mint Segfault blog and it will become as main desktop for upcomming Linux mint 17.2 rafaela will be released end of June, 2015.
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It’s taken fifteen months of development but the wait has paid off, MATE 1.10 has been released and Linux Mint users will be able to grab the new update after updating to Linux Mint 17.2 due to be released at the end of June. Of course Arch users can grab it right now.
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If you’re into coding, DIY, or just trying to save some money, then you might be interested in the SamplerBox Player – a project born out of the frustrations of modern-day sampling.
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Phones
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Android
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When Xiaomi Corp. launched a new smartphone here in April, there was an air of chaos. Employees were still stuffing gift bags that morning, and a few staffers from Beijing headquarters, pressed for time, arrived on tourist rather than business visas.
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Google’s Hangouts messaging service has been at the epicenter of the company’s efforts in a lot of areas: it’s taken on video chat, Google Voice calling, and even SMS over the years. That’s a lot of features (or cruft, depending on your feelings), and it’s made Hangouts on Android feel really messy. Now, Android Police has apparently acquired Hangouts 4, the next version of the app, and it seems to have a much cleaner interface.
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Four months ago, BlackBerry announced it was porting key features of its BlackBerry OS software to Android and iOS – stuff like its onscreen keyboard, Universal Search, and the notification Hub.
It was only a matter of time before word emerged of somebody actually grabbing this idea and running with it. The only surprise is that it’s BlackBerry itself.
Virtually nobody outside China, except for Apple, makes money from making smartphones. HTC has wiped out a year’s profits in just one quarter. Samsung’s smartie market share is falling. And that’s when your operating system comes “for free.”
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With both iOS 9 and Android M having been announced recently by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) respectively, how do the two mobile operating systems compare to one another? Here ValueWalk assesses the new features in the proprietary Apple software and compares them to the Android M system.
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Teclast X80H is a cheap tablet that managed to get the attention of users because it’s relatively powerful, well-built, and can run both Android and Windows 8.1. And, from the looks of it, it can also run Ubuntu.
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The time has come to update your AndEx installation to a new version build on top of the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop mobile operating system and Linux kernel 4.0.3, as Arne Exton has informed us recently.
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When your business uses open source code, but you aren’t a coder yourself the process of creating original, modifying or contributing to code might seem complicated. But, whether you’re the CEO or CFO, you understand that your organizations’ IT workers adopted open source software for sound reasons such as cost efficiency, security and quality.
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http://fossforce.com/2015/06/self-saturday-linux-under-a-carolina-blue-sky/
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Google has just released most of the source code for the Chrome for Android web browser, so now developers will be able to create browsers based on it, just like they do with the desktop version.
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DreamFactory Software says its open source REST API services platform is now available as a Docker container.
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Lots of organizations are aware of the potential value of their IT logs; it’s just that they’re not in a financial position to do much about. To help internal IT teams overcome that issue, Graylog developed an open source log analytics application that has been upgraded to provide access to both Linux and Windows machine data via a new user interface.
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Deque’s award-winning accessibility rules engine, aXe, is now open source and available for download. aXe (The Accessibility Engine) is a JavaScript library that includes more than 15 years of industry-leading accessibility research and best practices to yield superior automated test results.
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LinkedIn today is making its Pinot real-time analytics software available under an open-source license. It’s the latest major release of open-source software from LinkedIn, a company known for using large quantities of data to enrich its own applications.
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As we are on the cusp of the Industrial Internet of Things and its extensive connectivity potential, one organization believes that industrial machinery and components can communicate data rapidly and reliably among themselves, system controllers, and ultimately to their human overseers via an open-source, software-based Ethernet communication standard.
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IBM HAS announced SuperVessel, a development platform designed to allow developers, students and teachers to create big data applications free of charge using the IBM OpenPower ecosystem.
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IBM has lifted the lid on SuperVessel, an open access cloud service intended to let students and developers experiment with building applications for the OpenPower ecosystem based on IBM’s Power architecture processors, all for no charge.
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IBM announced the launch of SuperVessel, an open access cloud service developed by the company’s China-based research outfit and designed for developing and testing cloud services based on the OpenPower architecture.
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The company has appointed 20 people in the last month, with IBM executive Rob Thomas saying to Bloomberg, “We’re going to be scaling this up to hundreds of people that are just focused on Spark open source and how we evolve that for the enterprise.”
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An open-source developer, Shapiro works at the intersection of development and business. We sat down with him to ask some questions about Velocity.js, one of his open source contributions, and other things.
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Facebook has released the source code to Infer, its static analysis tool, under the open source BSD license.
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SourceForge has been in the news a lot lately, and not for any positive reasons. The site seems to stumble from one bad situation to the next, and some think that SourceForge is making a long, slow and ugly exit.
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Support for Auron has been added in Coreboot Git. Auron is the Google Broadwell Reference Motherboard, which in turn is based on Google’s Peppy.
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SDN
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Web Browsers
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SaaS/Big Data
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Databases
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Dan Wagner, the chief executive officer of U.K.-based mobile payments company Powa Technologies Ltd., poses a challenge for database giant Oracle Corp.
Wagner’s company last year began shifting away from pricey products from Oracle and International Business Machines Corp., replacing them with open-source software, which is freely available and can be modified. Now, Wagner said the closely held company is converting virtually all of its operations to free database software.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Project Releases
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As with all the previous versions, I have prepared a mega update for the Kobo firmware 3.16.0, including all my favorite patches and features. Please see details for 3.15.0, 3.13.1 and 3.12.1. As before, the following addons are included: Kobo Start Menu, koreader, coolreader, pbchess, ssh access, custom dictionaries, plus as a new treat, some side-loaded fonts. What I dropped this time is most of the kobohack part, as the libraries seem to get outdated. But I included the dropbear ssh server from the kobohack package.
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Openness/Sharing
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Now available on Github, the cloud client already supports the majority of desktop machines and is being shared under the GNU Affero General Public License. The latest release is meant for 3D printer manufacturers, developers and tinkerers to assess the standard toolset available in 3DPrinterOS and expand existing features and functionality.
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In one of the first opportunities to get an inside look at a business built on technology and data, I recently had an enjoyable conversation with Russell Foltz-Smith, VP data platform at TrueCar. He explained to me how the US car market works from the buyer’s perspective. It turns out that in many situations, the prospective buyer experiences a lot of frustration figuring out the final buy price of a new vehicle. This is for a variety of reasons but principally, buyers are not always aware of add-ons the dealer will likely handle rather than the factory.
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Renewable energy has just become a closer option for everyone. And it is not about the price but rather about the access to the very technology of using solar energy. In this case, it is about solar concentrators — devices allowing you to obtain high-temperature heat (and with some tinkering, electricity). Now one can produce such devices right in their home workshop using open-source blueprints and documentation from the EnergyTorrent project. All of the documentation, with detailed step-by-step manufacturing instructions, can now be downloaded at the EnergyTorrent Wiki.
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Open Data
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It’s called Wheelmap, and it tells you the accessibility status of public places all over the world. It’s free and grades locations in a traffic light-style, red-yellow-green scale of wheelchair accessibility. Developed by German nonprofit SOZIALHELDEN e.V., it’s now celebrating five years since launch. Since 2010, users have added nearly half a million entries across the globe.
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Programming
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Mortenson, who is the ex-Microsoft director of development for the .NET Framework, admitted the switch from HTML5 to React Native had been a challenge, but said: “It was a really big shift we had to make. We decided the phones were not yet powerful enough to have a really awesome, first-class experience for iOS and Android, so we bit the bullet.”
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Today, I’m launching a news service in an entirely new format, designed to outcompete oldmedia. The new service publishes all news as shareable images, thereby bypassing a large number of restrictions and limitations, not needing clickbait, and being immune to adblock – but also paying people well, using bitcoin. Meanwhile, oldmedia continues to call people greedy and selfish for not buying their printouts of yesterday’s internet.
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Health/Nutrition
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When we were on our way to shoot the bat-filled tree in the center of town on our last Sunday in Sierra Leone, we happened upon a large group of young men running in cadence near the beach; chanting “Ebola 4 Go … Ebola 4 Go.” That’s essentially Creole for “Ebola be gone.” I could not help but smile. It filled my heart with joy, despite all I had seen and learned in the hard days before.
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In 2011, polio vaccination went from being a health issue to a security issue after U.S. intelligence officials used a vaccination program to help in their search for Osama bin Laden. This caused particular consternation among health officials who reported their efforts to vaccinate children were being frustrated by the CIA’s use of the fake vaccination program and elevating mistrust amongst the community and health officials.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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It is easy to forget that until he started criticising the Americans for bombing too many Afghan civilians and comparing them to “occupiers”, Hamid Karzai was Washington’s grateful servant. After all, US officials picked him to be Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban president, armed and financed him to launch an uprising against the mullahs after 9/11, helicoptered him away from imminent capture after one clumsy foray inside Afghanistan in mid-October, reinserted him a few weeks later to march on Kandahar successfully, and finally foisted him on the rest of the Afghan political class at the United Nations-sponsored conference in Bonn in December 2001 as the leader they could not afford to reject.
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Political, military and international figures are among the nearly three dozen people who filed letters of support for former CIA director David Petraeus, whose career was ruined for sharing classified materials with a mistress who was writing his biography.
A federal judge in Charlotte unsealed the documents Monday, two months after the retired four-star general was sentenced to two years of probation and fined $100,000 for unauthorized removal and retention of classified information.
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Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote to a US judge begging him not to send David Petraeus to prison after it emerged the former CIA director had leaked classified information to his mistress.
Blair, along with more than 30 other high profile international figures, succeeded in persuading Judge David Keesler to grant Petraeus leniency given the amount of work he had done for the intelligence agency.
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Michael Fullilove hates leaks. Except, you know, when it comes to former CIA head David Petraeus.
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Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding, Mr Obama commands the most active military in the world, which makes sure that what America wants, America damn well gets. A ‘working visit’ from the US president is like a friendly visit from your boss — only one of you gets to relax. And like an Arnett Gardens helper hosting her Cherry Gardens employer, it happens infrequently (once every 30 years) and requires new curtains (hence the repaved streets and displaced street vendors).
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According to a report in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, Brennan met his counterpart Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and other intelligence officials, as well as Netanyahu.
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Recent Israeli dirty bomb tests involved 19 open-air detonations and one at a closed facility.
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IT WAS the perfect juxtaposition. Leaving Bethlehem through Checkpoint 300 in the morning and arriving two hours and four buses later at the ISDEF 2015 weapons expo in Tel Aviv.
At the West Bank checkpoint, I had to wait for nearly an hour, jammed into a mosh pit of more than 80 people, mostly Palestinian men, waiting for Israeli soldiers in cubicles behind tinted glass to decide to unlock the revolving metal door for a few seconds, so that maybe 10 people could rotate their way into the metal detector room. Then the soldiers would lock the gate again, forcing us all to wait, helplessly, needlessly, in nothing more than a theater of power and powerlessness. Again, again, ad nauseam.
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A comparison of the Economist’s Democracy Index with the Global Militarization Index reveals that, on average, democracies are just as militaristic as authoritarianism/democratic “hybrids.”
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Each of the remaining 950 lashes the Saudi Arabian authorities plan to inflict upon dissident blogger Raif Badawi will bludgeon freedom of expression and make a mockery of the country’s international human rights obligations, Amnesty International warned amid fears his public flogging could resume as soon as tomorrow.
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Seventy-one years ago today the U.S. Army established a temporary cemetery in Europe. It was needed to bury thousands of soldiers who were killed in the D-Day invasion that had started two days earlier on the beaches of France. The assault was a daring effort to help defeat the Nazis that would ultimately lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.
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There’s much to like about Bernie Sanders, but can he really help us kick the war habit?
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The aid charity caught up in the CIA operation to capture Osama bin Laden was ordered out of Pakistan on Thursday after officials accused it of “anti-Pakistan” activities.
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Save the Children has previously been accused by Pakistani intelligence agencies of using a Pakistani doctor’s vaccinations programme in the city of Abbottabad as cover for the CIA to obtain DNA samples at a compound where Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was later killed by US commandos.
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Pakistani authorities expelled the U.S.-based aid agency Save the Children from the country on Thursday, sealing its office in the capital and giving staff members 15 days to leave because of “anti-Pakistan activities,” according to the Interior Ministry.
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Pakistan has suspended moves to close the national branch of the charity Save the Children.
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Amid US pressure, Pakistan today suspended its order and allowed international aid agency ‘Save the Children’ to resume operations, days after it sealed the NGO’s office here for alleged “anti-nation activities”.
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Fareed Zakaria is a very wise man but he makes a mistake asserting that Saudi Arabia can’t go nuclear.
[...]
When I was in Saudi Arabia, I could feel the hatred of Iran. It was palpable. They hated the Iranians more than Israel. The only thing that has prevented them going nuclear years ago was promised support from USA.
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Gathering in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh were Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly crowned Saudi King Salman, and the organizer of the get-together, the emir of Qatar. The meeting was an opportunity for Turkey and Saudi Arabia to bury a hatchet over Ankara’s support — which Riyadh’s opposes — to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to agree to cooperate in overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
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There are growing indications that the war in Syria has now entered a new and dangerous phase that threatens to engulf the entire Middle East in a broad regional war. The news that Iran has sent significant numbers of Iranian, Iraqi, and Afghan troops to take active part in defense of Syria has the potential to transform the conflict into one with global implications as Iran’s key regional rivals – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel – continue to support jihadi factions in their war against the government of Bashar al-Assad.
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The U.S. media portray Middle East warlords as savage psychopaths, but their terrorist tactics are a means to an end. They want to redraw the map created by the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France.
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This morning’s Missoulian reveals a fascinating layer of smokejumping history: Its involvement in highly classified covert operations. Recently declassified documents chronicle how smokejumpers were recruited to assist the CIA in Tibetan resistance movements against the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s and ’60s.
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Tim Martin covers the activities of Reprieve and other actors noted on this site and adds that Members of Veterans for Peace (VFP), Code Pink and other anti-war groups recently went to Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada, home to the Predator and Reaper drones, to protest against America’s use of drones. They temporarily closed the base and 38 protestors were arrested, including retired Humboldt State University biology professor Richard Gilchrist. “I never thought I’d spend my later days in demonstrations and getting arrested . . . but I can’t ignore what we are doing around the world.”
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In Yemen 17 men were targeted and 273 people (seven of them children) were killed in the process.
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If Barack Obama can publicly apologize for the accidental killings of two al-Qaida hostages – one American and one Italian – by a US drone strike, the White House should extend the same courtesy to a pair of Yemeni civilians killed by US Hellfire missiles.
That is the hope of the wrongful death lawsuit filed late on Sunday by the families of Salem bin Ali Jaber and Waleed bin Ali Jaber, two men killed by a US drone strike in August 2012 in the eastern Yemeni village of Khashamir. And although it’s unclear if the case will even be heard, human rights groups who have long criticized the use of armed and unmanned aircrafts for counterterrorism operations believe the families of the two victims were left with no other option but to sue.
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The “willful blindness” of the U.S. military drone program killed a Yemeni imam who preached against al-Qaida, and his police officer brother, the men’s family claims in Federal Court.
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The family of two Yemeni men killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012 filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the United States, saying the attack “violated the laws of war.”
Salem bin Ali Jaber and Waleed bin Ali Jaber were killed Aug. 29, 2012, in the village of Khashamir in Yemen’s eastern Hadhramaut governorate. They were innocent bystanders when a U.S. drone strike targeted three men suspected of being terrorists.
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Precisely what happened next is unclear. What is known is that, out of the darkness, a United States armed drone appeared in the vicinity. It had most likely taken off hours earlier from the US Expeditionary Naval Base at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, across the Gulf of Aden, and had located its target. The drone fired on the vehicle with between one and three Hellfire missiles, scoring a direct hit. Shabwani and as many as three others were killed.
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U.S. drones have now fired on Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and Syria, and are a feature of war that is here to stay. Their global use by the United States has set precedents “pushing hard at the boundaries of international law,” and the challenge, Woods writes, will be in “convincing others not to follow Washington’s own recent rulebook.”
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Development of robots capable not only of killing humans, but also of deciding for themselves whom to kill, is progressing apace, but policy makers aren’t paying enough attention to how — or whether — they should be used, a UC Berkeley professor recently warned. Killer robots could be deployed in the millions, and their agility and lethality would leave humans defenseless, warned Stuart Russell.
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I will never forget the moment I saw what was left of Salem and Waleed. The drone left them almost unrecognizable. We identified them from their clothes and scraps of matted hair. Khashamir was not a war zone. It was a quiet town until Obama sent in his drones. The strike hit near the wedding celebration of my eldest son. After we buried the dead, we started to ask questions. How did this happen? Why?
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A classified annex to the National Defense Authorization Act seeks to further enable the White House’s long-promised transition to end its secret CIA drone program and shift control of the targeted killing operation to the Pentagon.
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An airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Syria has reportedly killed a couple and their five children in the northern province of Aleppo. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strike wiped out the entire family. Meanwhile the Observatory also reported airstrikes by the Syrian regime killed at least 49 people in Idlib province, including six children.
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Yesterday, the Obama Administration announced its plans to send 450 additional U.S. troops to Iraq, bringing the total number of U.S. troops there to 3,550. The British military will also be deploying an additional 150 trainers for a total of 1,000 troops in Iraq. The new contingent of troops are being sent at the request of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and will be assisting with training Sunni tribal fighters at Al Taqqadum military base, near Habbaniya in Anbar province. The Obama administration also said that it would speed up the delivery of weapons and equipment, which fighters in Iraq say have been slow to arrive.
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So began Army Lt. Col. Jason Amerine’s testimony before a Senate hearing Thursday on retaliation against whistleblowers. He was the first witness in what was a sometimes-emotional hearing into the reprisals military personnel and civilians can face from the government they serve.
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A U.S. special forces officer says his attempts to put a rescue plan together for two Canadian hostages being held in Pakistan – one of them a man from Ottawa – were scuttled by U.S. government infighting and a lack of policy on how to deal with hostage situations.
Green Beret Lt.-Col. Jason Amerine had originally been assigned by the U.S. Army in 2013 to look into ways to obtain the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was captured by insurgents in Afghanistan in 2009.
Amerine told a U.S. Senate hearing Thursday that during his efforts, he obtained details about Canadian Colin Rutherford; U.S. citizen Caitlan Coleman and her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle of Ottawa; and U.S. citizen Warren Weinstein.
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Even though peace talks are slated to begin on June 14 in Geneva between the major parties involved in the conflict over control of Yemen, the fighting rages on inside this underdeveloped Middle Eastern state.
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At least 43 people were killed in heavy fighting in Yemen on Wednesday between supporters of exiled president Abdrabu Mansur Hadi and the Houthi rebels, residents said.
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According to the arrangements, the Pentagon was given notice of Saudi strikes, they said. The Saudis pick targets and provide that information for review to Pentagon war planners. US analysts study the would-be targets, offering advice on the most effective way of launching some strikes, and steering them away from others. The aim, officials said, was to prevent critical infrastructure being damaged, and to reduce the potential for collateral damage.
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Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems’ UK factory will become the target of a protest to mark the anniversary of the Gaza conflict in July.
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Investigation into deadly drone strike on Gaza’s beach front ends without criminal charges or disciplinary action, army says
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Israel on Sunday defended its conduct in the 2014 Gaza war as both “lawful” and “legitimate” in an inter-ministerial report into the deadly 50-day conflict.
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The father of one of four Palestinian children killed on a Gaza beach during last summer’s Hamas-Israel war said Friday he was outraged by the announcement from the Israeli military that it was closing its internal inquiry into the incident without any indictments.
The father also said he hopes the killings would be part of a Palestinian war crimes case against Israel, which is expected to be presented to the International Criminal Court.
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Everybody loves a good killer. American pop culture is saturated with the love of killers. The more sexy and elite the killer, the more reverence he or she receives and the more the obvious moral questions are parried away. As the Orwell quote, above, suggests, all societies revere “rough men” with the capacity to ruthlessly kill members of threatening nations or outlaw bands.
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On 5 February, Jordanian officials confirmed that the intellectual godfather of al-Qaida, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, had been released from prison. Though he is little known in the west, Maqdisi’s importance in the canon of radical Islamic thought is unrivalled by anyone alive. The 56-year-old Palestinian rose to prominence in the 1980s, when he became the first significant radical Islamic scholar to declare the Saudi royal family were apostates, and therefore legitimate targets of jihad. At the time, Maqdisi’s writings were so radical that even Osama bin Laden thought they were too extreme.
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John Cusack thinks that, in terms of civil liberties, President Obama is “as bad as or worse than Bush.”
“Well, Obama has certainly extended and hardened the cement on a lot of Bush’s post-9/11 Terror Inc. policies, so he’s very similar to Bush in every way that way. His domestic policy is a bit different, but when you talk about drones, the American Empire, the NSA, civil liberties, attacks on journalism and whistleblowers, he’s as bad or worse than Bush,” Cusack, 48, told the Daily Beast.
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The families of a police officer and an anti-Qaeda cleric killed by an U.S. drone strike in Yemen are asking an American court to compel U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration to admit their deaths were a mistake. Legal experts say their quest is likely to fail, and if the past is any indication, their best chance to get anything from Washington was if a special operator had given them a farm animal.
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It’s time to disband the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and all other secretive, unaccountable units of the U.S. imperial military. As is said about lawyers, if we didn’t have these units, we wouldn’t need them.
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The unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been converted into a global manhunting machine with limited outside oversight.
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What the Times account makes clear—whatever the newspaper’s intentions and its undoubted vetting of its material with the Pentagon and the White House—is that in the pursuit of its global interests, the United States government has become ever more dependent upon the murderous operations of secret death squads.
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Transparency Reporting
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The CIA does not plan on releasing the “stash of pornography” Seal Team Six found shortly after killing Osama bin Laden, no matter how nicely you ask.
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Did Osama bin Laden have a foot fetish? Or was he into cake farts? Maybe the mass-murderer was so used to his many wives that his fantasy was to escape to a world of plain, vanilla monogamous sex.
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Waging jihad from a concrete compound with only three of your wives gets lonely. Thank God for “fairly extensive” video collections of porn, which Osama bin Laden allegedly had, and which may or may not now be in U.S. intelligence hands. But you’ll never know, because Uncle Sam’s sticky fingers aren’t sharing.
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A newly declassified CIA watchdog report that probed the agency’s intelligence failures leading up to the 9/11 attacks reveals that investigators on the CIA’s 9/11 review team “encountered no evidence” that the government of Saudi Arabia “knowingly and willingly supported” al Qaeda terrorists.
Moreover, the June 2005 CIA Inspector General report’s, released Friday, said the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 “‘had made no final determinations as to the reliability or sufficiency’ regarding Saudi issues raised by its inquiry.” (A separate report released in 2004 by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 Commission, found no evidence that the government of Saudi Arabia or Saudi officials individually provided funding to al-Qaeda.)
CIA inspector general John Helgerson launched the internal review in response to a request from the Joint Inquiry and “focused exclusively on the issues identified” by panel. The CIA’s 9/11 review team reached the “same overall conclusions on most of the important issues” identified by the Joint Inquiry, the watchdog’s report says.
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One section of interest touched on the role of Saudi Arabia and its links, if any, with al Qaeda.
While there was some speculation among U.S. intelligence agents that a “few” Saudi government officials may have supported bin Laden, there was not enough information to confirm, the report states.
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A federal judge denied most of an attorney’s bid for CIA records on the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy…
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The memorandum, released June 3, illustrates the department’s concern regarding ties between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and extremist Cuban émigré groups in South Florida.
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His left eye, to be precise, which he lost while being held in one of the C.I.A.’s secret prisons.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Gelderland province has dropped plans to use a top secret neck-breaking machine to kill 1,600 geese because there are not enough geese at the planned locations.
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Finance
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In a desperate bid to try and get Alexis Tsipras to accept the Troika’s terms for another bailout, German Chancellor Merkel is now using fear mongering tactics to try and scare Athens into signing away the country’s future.
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America’s largest private employer cares a lot about preventing its workers from organizing, a leaked training video reveals.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Pacifist writer David Swanson, author of “War No More: The Case for Abolition,” found no fewer than “45 lies” in Obama’s September 24, 2013, speech to the United Nations. Just one example: Obama said, “we have …worked to end a decade of war.”
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Not many people, especially among the younger generation, would have heard of the intrepid US reporter Seymour M Hersh, who has been breaking stories over the years that have deeply embarrassed US governments of the time. Probably his most important exposé was the massacre at My Lai village, Vietnam in March 1968 of dozens of women, children and old people, “all gunned down”, as Hersh puts it in an article in The New Yorker updating the tragic events, “by young American solders”, a contingent of about 100 soldiers known as Charlie Company. They “raped women, burned houses and turned their M-16s on the unarmed civilians of My Lai”. This exposure, however much played down by the US government, created quite a stir and helped mobilise people against the US war in Vietnam.
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Rupert Murdoch described as “almost fascist” Hillary Clinton’s remarks in support of anti-discrimination protections for LGBT Americans during her campaign launch speech.
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Censorship
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The new EU trade secrets directive, which is currently working its way through European Parliament, could make it much harder and riskier for whistleblowers and investigative journalists to operate within Europe. In a formal resolution (PDF) published yesterday, members of the French National Assembly called for the the European Union to uphold its commitments to freedom of expression and freedom of information by exempting journalists from the new rules on protecting commercial secrets. The resolution comes ahead of a key vote on the proposed directive by the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) next Tuesday.
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Privacy
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The Sunday Times has a front page story out today claiming that the Chinese and Russian governments have somehow managed to obtain National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s trove of documents. The story is sourced from anonymous UK government officials who make a series of significant allegations, unfortunately backed up with little evidence.
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3) MI6 officers work under diplomatic cover 99% of the time. Their alias is as members of the British Embassy, or other diplomatic status mission. A portion are declared to the host country. The truth is that Embassies of different powers very quickly identify who are the spies in other missions. MI6 have huge dossiers on the members of the Russian security services – I have seen and handled them. The Russians have the same. In past mass expulsions, the British government has expelled 20 or 30 spies from the Russian Embassy in London. The Russians retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats from Moscow, all of whom were not spies! As a third of our “diplomats” in Russia are spies, this was not coincidence. This was deliberate to send the message that they knew precisely who the spies were, and they did not fear them.
4) This anti Snowden non-story – even the Sunday Times admits there is no evidence anybody has been harmed – is timed precisely to coincide with the government’s new Snooper’s Charter act, enabling the security services to access all our internet activity. Remember that GCHQ already has an archive of 800,000 perfectly innocent British people engaged in sex chats online.
5) The paper publishing the story is owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is sourced to the people who brought you the dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, every single “fact” in which proved to be a fabrication. Why would you believe the liars now?
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The site is under a strong denial of service attack from a bot trying to crash it by overloading with millions of pings from multiple locations. I presume the objective is to take down the revelation of the fake MI6 Snowden story, which had been read by tens of thousands already and is now really taking off.
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Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it’s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, then uncritically accept those anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But they’ve learned no such lesson. That tactic continues to be the staple of how major US and British media outlets “report,” especially in the national security area. And journalists who read such reports continue to treat self-serving decrees by unnamed, unseen officials – laundered through their media – as gospel, no matter how dubious are the claims or factually false is the reporting.
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The House Intelligence Committee is supposed to be providing “oversight” of the intelligence community and preventing it from violating our civil rights. That’s why it was formed in the first place, out of the Pike Committee, when Congress actually investigated abuses by the NSA, CIA and FBI. But, over the decades, the House Intelligence Committee has, instead, turned into a cheerleader for the intelligence community and seems to work to better hide its activities from the public, rather than oversee them. That’s part of the reason why we now have a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) who is actually supposed to be investigating these programs and protecting our civil liberties.
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Omer Mohammed Ali, chairman of the board of directors for the Islamic Center of Temecula Valley, said he is afraid the Obama administration’s Countering Violent Extremism initiative will lead to domestic spying on Muslims.
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Why doesn’t cybersecurity icon Dan Geer carry a cell phone? If he doesn’t understand how something works in detail, he says, he won’t use it. Yet he’s no Luddite: as chief information security officer at In-Q-Tel, the nonprofit venture arm of the CIA, Geer has one of the clearest views of the future of security technology. His personal vision? To put those technologies (as well as new laws and policies) to work in ways that governments and corporations around the world today are too feeble, dysfunctional, or corrupt to implement themselves.
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Civil Rights
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Usaama Rahim’s family said in a statement that the blurry video shows that the 26-year-old security guard was not the initial aggressor and that he did not appear to be breaking any laws as he walked toward a bus stop on his way to work on June 2.
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“Once again, the nation is fixated on frightening video of a police officer’s over-reaction,” the Dallas Morning News editorialized on Monday. “This time it happened in North Texas. This time no one was hurt.
“This time we got lucky.”
The Morning News was leading the pack Sunday and Monday with thorough coverage of an incident that went viral on social media, thanks to a video taken by a 15-year-old bystander. The BBC News called it “the police video that shocked America.”
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American Sniper, this winter’s controversial biopic about a Navy SEAL serving in the Iraq War, depicted four Muslim children, total. As AlterNet Senior Writer Max Blumenthal noted on Twitter, three out of four of these characters were either terrorists or the children of terrorists; the fourth was tortured to death. Journalist Rania Khalek made similar observations, saying that the film showed Iraqi “children as soulless monsters who Chris Kyle is forced to kill to protect invading US soldiers.”
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For years, Guantanamo Bay prisoners’ memories of their time in CIA custody have been considered classified state secrets. Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers can’t talk publicly about how he lost his left eye. Lawyers for Mustafa al Hawsawi, who can now only sit on a pillow, can’t tell the press or the public about anal feedings that left him with a rectal prolapse. And until recently, Majid Khan’s lawyers couldn’t bring up the time he was hung from a pole for two days, naked and hooded, while interrogators threw ice water on him.
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One of the government’s most secretive agencies is celebrating its one year anniversary of its Twitter account with a little comedy.
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The US is hampering Poland’s investigation into a secret CIA prison by snubbing repeated requests for vital documents, including a Senate report detailing CIA prison locations and practices, a Polish prosecutor said on Saturday.
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The United States is ignoring a request from Poland to hand over the full version of a Senate report that could shed light on allegations the CIA abused al Qaeda suspects at a secret prison in the north of the country, according to Polish prosecutors.
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The U.S. is hampering Poland’s investigation into the secret CIA prison by snubbing repeated requests for vital documents, including the Senate report detailing CIA prison locations and practices, a Polish prosecutor said Saturday.
Published in December, the summary of the report by the U.S. Senate’s Intelligence Committee was redacted and did not mention Poland by name, but other facts in it pointed to the country and a secret CIA prison there from 2002-2003, where terror suspects were submitted to harsh treatment.
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The United States is ignoring a request from Poland to hand over the full version of a Senate report that could shed light on allegations the CIA abused al Qaeda suspects at a secret prison in the north of the country, according to Polish prosecutors.
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In light of the Senate Torture Report’s findings that CIA officials interrogated prisoners within its borders, Poland has been conducting its own investigation into Washington’s misdeeds. But according to Polish prosecutors, the US is refusing to cooperate, withholding key information on what, exactly, the CIA did in its “black sites.”
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Polish prosecutors today accused the Obama Administration of “stonewalling” a Polish government investigation of CIA torture at a secretly run black site in northern Poland, and that they don’t seem to be able to get any response from the US at all on their requests.
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Polish prosecutors formally asked the U.S. Justice Department for a full, unredacted copy of the report to help their criminal investigation into allegations the CIA ran one of the facilities in a Polish forest.
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The United States is ignoring a request from Poland to hand over the full version of a Senate report that could shed light on allegations the CIA abused Al Qaeda suspects at a secret prison in the north of the country, according to Polish prosecutors.
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Earlier this month, Reuters reported on Majid Khan’s account of torture at the CIA black site where he was held. Khan confessed to working with al Qaeda and faces up to 19 years in prison — if he serves as a government witness. Khan alleged that he was videotaped naked and that interrogators touched his “private parts,” among other horrifying things.
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In 2003 the CIA captured a Pakistani named Majid Khan, took him to an overseas black site, and began to torture him. According to Khan, interrogators beat him, waterboarded him, and hung him from a beam naked for days. He spent most of one year in the dark. They threw ice water on him, deprived him of sleep, and subjected him to “violent enemas.” Even his memories of the abuse were not his own; the CIA has considered recollections of interrogation to be classified information, thus forbidding detainees from speaking or writing publicly about their experiences. Notes taken by Khan’s lawyers were finally cleared for release in May, and were reported by Reuters last week.
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A bipartisan group of lawmakers did Tuesday what rights groups and a broad chorus of government officials have urged for years: In this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers proposed Congress formally outlaw torture.
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Proposed legislation to reinforce the US prohibition on torture could help prevent the United States from again engaging in torture, Human Rights Watch said today. However, until the US criminally investigates and prosecutes past torture and those responsible for planning and authorizing it, there is a danger US officials will ignore the law, as they have in the past.
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A group of senators led by California’s Dianne Feinstein have introduced new legislation that hopes to make U.S. sanctioned torture even more illegal (torture is already illegal in the United States) by closing the existing loopholes that allowed the U.S. to circumvent such prohibitions in the past and codifying into law President Obama’s 2009 executive order prohibiting the practice of torture by any government body, including the CIA.
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Less attention has been paid to the risks posed by fabricated information obtained via torture. The Senate’s report detailed two cases in which suspects tortured by the CIA sent agents down false trails.
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Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has joined a bipartisan team pushing to limit brutal interrogation techniques — such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and electric shock — the CIA can use on detainees.
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In a bizarre mixture of the sincere and the insincere, an amendment proposed by a bipartisan group of senators to the upcoming National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is being touted as all but ending torture by the U.S. — if it passes.
According to an article in The Intercept, “Human rights and transparency organizations are applauding the effort.” But is there really anything here to celebrate?
If you read The Intercept article all the way to the end, there’s mention that a group of medical experts found the Army Field Manual “permits techniques that are ‘recognized under international law as forms of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.’” So why is there applause?
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I remember when the photos of Abu Ghraib were published in 2004. I was deployed with my Marine Corps unit, my fifth of eight deployments in what would be nearly five years overseas during my 20-year career.
I was appalled and ashamed. This violated the very values our country was founded upon and contradicted the ideals we believed we were upholding as members of the military. As a veteran and one who cares deeply about what America stands for, the issue of torture is personal. Quite simply, I love my country too much to remain silent.
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Although the information came from a rendition case in which the United States transferred a detainee to a foreign country (reportedly Egypt), the episode is a cautionary tale for why U.S. policymakers should never allow torture nor rely on information acquired from it.
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In December 2014, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee issued a strong report on the CIA’s use of torture on detainees between 2001 and 2006. On Tuesday, we learned that the CIA used a much wider array of sexual abuse and other forms of torture than the Senate report described.
Because the CIA torture videotapes were destroyed, it is not surprising that revelations like this were not covered in the report. Nevertheless, the report’s findings and recommendations are still valid.
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Majid Khan is a Guantanamo prisoner, who though he is a citizen of Pakistan, has long had political asylum status in the United States. He grew up outside Baltimore and lived and worked in the area. In March 2003, he was captured while in Pakistan by the CIA. He was abducted, imprisoned and tortured by U.S. officials at secret overseas “black sites” operated by the CIA before being transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006. His detention and interrogation violated U.S. and international law.
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THE stories of what really happened to prisoners under CIA custody are slowly beginning to leak out. That’s not good news for America’s Central Intelligence Agency.
Waterboarding. Beatings. Men stripped naked and hung from poles for days. It is brutal stuff and until very recently it was information classified as “state secrets”.
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June is Torture Awareness Month as acknowledged by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT).
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Human Rights Watch Senior National Security Counsel Laura Pitter said: “Requiring the CIA and other U.S. agencies to abide by one uniform set of interrogation rules will help prevent torture.”
She added, however, that these reforms wouldn’t be as effective in the future “if those responsible for torture in the past aren’t brought to justice.”
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Under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, all U.S. personnel were ordered in general terms to refrain from engaging in “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in custody. But only interrogators employed by the Department of Defense were required to abide by the Army Field Manual, which made specific practices off-limits. Exempt from the requirement was the Central Intelligence Agency, which took the lead in unsavory interrogations. An attempt by Congress to force the CIA to follow the manual was vetoed by Bush in 2008.
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Senator McCain and friends have a new push on to once again ban torture (except for exceptions in the Army Field Manual) that is being presented as an effort to preempt future Republican presidents’ torturing. This reinforces two false beliefs. One is that torture is not ongoing today under President Peace Prize. The other is that torture wasn’t banned before George W. Bush was ever selected by the Supreme Court.
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When a president violates a law, that president — at least once out of office — should be prosecuted for violating the law. The law can’t be declared void because it was violated. Loopholes can’t be created for the CIA. Reliance on the Army Field Manual can’t sneak into law the loopholes built into that document. Presidents can’t order and un-order things illegal.
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Do we mean what we say when we ban torture? That has been a question for more than a decade, ever since President George W. Bush, on United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture in September 2003, declared that “torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere” — even as his CIA agents were subjecting detainees to extended sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, slamming into walls, and waterboarding.
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Some Republicans—including 2016 hopefuls Rick Perry and Rick Santorum—are still willing to use “enhanced interrogation techniques.” But if John McCain’s bill passes, they won’t get a chance.
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Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the US to fully support newly introduced legislation that bans the country from re-engaging in torture during an interrogation.
Introduced by US Senators John McCain and Dianne Feinstein, the proposed legislation would require all US government agencies to accept the rules outlined in the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.
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The case, Jose Luis Munoz Santos vs. Linda R. Thomas, relies on the testimony of witnesses who say they were tortured by Mexican authorities. The allegations are plausible. Torture by Mexican police is a significant problem, as I documented in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council earlier this year. According to the State Department’s report on Mexico, torture was frequent when the interrogation of these witnesses took place. If extradited, Munoz might face torture himself in violation of yet another human rights standard: the prohibition against returning a person to a country where he would face torture.
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Six months after the Senate released a report detailing some of the gruesome interrogation tactics employed by the CIA after 9/11, a bipartisan pair of senators is seeking to permanently outlaw torture.
Senator John McCain, a Republican of Arizona, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, introduced a measure on Tuesday that would limit the US government to the use of interrogation techniques specified in the Army Field Manual – a public document that prohibits enhanced interrogation methods such as waterboarding and prolonged sleep deprivation.
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There are already laws on the books in the US that prohibit the use of torture. But the McCain-Feinstein amendment would specifically prohibit the use of violence and coercive techniques to extract information from individuals detained in an armed conflict. It would make permanent an executive order President Barack Obama signed after he was sworn in as president in 2009 that banned waterboarding and other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the CIA’s longterm detention of detainees.
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Chum Mey had never heard of the CIA before, but after 10 days of torture he was ready to confess to being a secret agent for the US.
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Doctors, psychologists and lawyers played a key role in rationalising torture methods practised in clandestine CIA detention centres, according to an article published in the US-based New England Journal of Medicine.
The publication based its article on data from a report last year by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that revealed CIA tortures during the presidency of George W. Bush.
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But it is the last decade of his career there, when Rizzo oversaw the building of a legal framework for “enhanced interrogation” techniques, that has come to define his legacy.
“I know what the first paragraph of my obituary is going to read,” he said recently, speaking in the conference room of the Steptoe and Johnson law firm, where he has spent time since 2010: “ ‘John Rizzo, lead counsel, legally approved the torture programs’ — because the euphemism now is torture.”
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Washington, Jun 12 (EFE).- Doctors, psychologists and lawyers played a key role in rationalizing torture methods practiced in clandestine CIA detention centers, according to an article published in the U.S.-based New England Journal of Medicine.
The publication based its article on data from a report last year by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that revealed CIA tortures during the Presidency of George W. Bush.
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Doctors, psychologists and lawyers played a key role in rationalising torture methods practised in clandestine CIA detention centres, according to an article published in the US-based New England Journal of Medicine.
The publication based its article on data from a report last year by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that revealed CIA tortures during the presidency of George W. Bush.
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“I think the president has tried to make sure that we’re able to push the envelope when we can to protect this country. But we have to recognize that sometimes our engagement and direct involvement will stimulate and spur additional threats to our national security interests,” Brennan said Face the Nation.
Left unmentioned by Brennan is the fact the CIA creates terrorism.
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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan recently made a startling but little-noticed admission: A belligerent foreign policy can actually make the United States less safe.
Appearing on the May 31 edition of the CBS show Face the Nation, Brennan was asked by host Bob Schieffer if President Barack Obama is “just trying to buy time” in the war on terrorism or if he’s “ready to make a full commitment” to winning it.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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After the seized Megaupload and Megavideo domains ran malicious ads last month, there is more Mega domain strangeness to report. Various domain names which previously belonged to Kim Dotcom and his companies have expired and are now listed for sale, or were sold already.
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Although it’s rather dropped off the radar, an extremely important revision of the EU Copyright Directive has been underway for years. The biggest development recently has been the excellent work by the German Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda, who put together a draft report on the existing Copyright Directive and some bold but sensible proposals for what the next iteration should contain. Naturally, that report has come under fierce attack from the copyright maximalists, who believe that copyright should only ever get stronger and longer for their benefit, and that it should never be changed for the benefit of the public, who are regarded simply as consumers that must pay for every use of everything.
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