I wrote an interesting editorial a while ago related to the Mr. Robot TV show that runs on the USA Network channel every Wednesday, starring Rami Malek as a computer hacker that goes by the name of Elliot.
Dual-booting Windows and Linux really sucks. It’s not because I hate Windows, either. It’s because I feel it should be unnecessary. It’s a half-measure that allows a lot of Linux users to play games or get things done.
Chromebooks have become incredibly popular among some users, as you can see from Amazon's list of bestselling Chromebooks. One user decided to use a Chromebook as his primary computing device for three months, and found that it worked extremely well for him.
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Debian Linux is known as a distribution that supports lots of different hardware, but now the Debian developers have announced the removal of support for the SPARC hardware architecture.
I really wish that things were calming down, but it hasn't happened quite yet. It's not like this is particularly big or scary, but it's also not at the stage where it's really starting to get quiet and the bugs are really small and esoteric.
So we still had some bugs due to the low-level x86 asm cleanup work, and the 32-bit compat 'syscall' instruction (only used on AMD) was subtly broken. That should be all fixed now, so if you run a 64-bit kernel and have 32-bit user space (including things like wine etc) and saw problems earlier, go ahead and update.
The rate of development for the Linux kernel is unprecedented, with a new major release approximately every two to three months. Each release offers several new features and improvements that a lot of people could take advantage of to make their computing experience faster, more efficient, or better in other ways.
AMD has released new Linux drivers for the upcoming Linux 4.2 kernel.
The drivers include the new "AMDGPU" kernel driver which succeeds the "Radeon" DRM kernel driver.
For those who came in late this is part of AMD's long talked about new Linux driver architecture for supporting the latest GPUs and all future GPUs.
The Mesa developers, through Emil Velikov, have announced earlier today, July 26, the immediate availability for download of the third maintenance release of the stable Mesa 10.6 3D graphics library.
The HarfBuzz 1.0 milestone marks the point that it supports the Universal Shaping Engine, a project out of Microsoft's Operating Systems Group as a new effort for converting Unicode texts to glyphs. Information on the Universal Shaping Engine is available via this blog post and here.
One of the latest Direct Rendering Manager drivers in development for the mainline Linux kernel is the Freescale DCU driver.
In the current DIY environment, many musicians can expect to wear a number of different hats. Of course, musicians and singers play instruments or sing for live audiences and in recording studios. Practising and rehearsing are also daily activities. They have always worn these hats. But there are many other duties that musicians and singers do themselves that have nothing to do with music; travelling to venues, finding locations for performances, and promoting their careers on websites and social media. They may also want to process and generate sound, and this is where audio programming languages step in.
The FFmpeg project and its forked Libav have added support for new video decoders based on libmfx, technology from the Intel Media SDK.
This week I posted the results of a 15-way graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux with AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while running the very latest proprietary drivers. Those tests were focused on 4K resolution testing in order to stress the latest-generation AMD/NVIDIA GPUs. However, if you want to see 1080p numbers, here are some benchmark-friendly results.
Victor Vran, an isometric action RPG developed by Haemimont Games and published by EuroVideo Medien on Steam, has been released on Linux as well.
The genre of isometric action RPGs is a very well defined one and it incorporates titles like Diablo. Victor Vran has been very well received by the community and the Linux platform has been supported right from the start.
WHAT’S NEW IN VERSION 150726? 1. ExLight is now based on Ubuntu 15.04 (alias Vivid Vervet) and Debian 8.1 Jessie. 2. I have upgraded the Desktop environment Enlightenment (Beauty at your fingertips) to version 0.19.7. 3. I have replaced kernel 3.18.0-10-exton with kernel 4.0.0-4-exton.
Immediately after having announced the major Enlightenment 0.19.6 release, the developers of the modern and lightweight desktop environment used in numerous GNU/Linux distributions offered Enlightenment 0.19.7 for download.
I've just pushed a patch to KWallet5 allowing you to have your wallet unlocked automagically during login. This patch was originally done by Alex Fiestas for KWallet4, so all credits and free beers go to him; I've merely just forward-ported it.
Now that cauldron is open, the kde team has updated KF5 to 5.12.0, Plasma to 5.3.2 and Kde Applications to 15.04.3.
When approaching this issue I had been thinking about the issue for a while. I had mainly 2 problems: I was rather frustrated with previous Linux-based systems so far and the one I liked didn’t really scale for us.
A common problem for many applications contained in the KDE Applications releases are non-incremented version numbers. Often the maintainer forgets to update the version number of the application, like I did it for Kate since the first KF5 based release.
Akademy, the yearly KDE conference is alive and kicking. During the last days we were discussing again about potential KDE licensing issues (for instance code that is licensed under GPLv2, but not GPLv3). That’s why KDE is maintaining a relicense checker script, that every KDE contributor should enter herself/himself.
The second day at Akademy started off with 10 or so hours of sleep!, which was much needed for basic functions (really happy I don’t have to drive here). The hotel (Rialta) had great breakfast with coffee, OJ, bread with meat and cheeses, yogurt, cereal all the basics that makeup a great day!
KDE developers have announced that they are working on a new project called Plasma Mobile. From what the developers are saying, it's running on Wayland, and it's capable on running Ubuntu apps. One of the problems is that at least one of the Ubuntu developers has noticed that even if the project is based on Ubuntu for phones, credit is not given.
Jonathan Riddell said the hacking was frustrating at first, but Martin Gräßlin was able to get the system going with Wayland and KWin. Gräßlin said Plasma Mobile is the first product to use Wayland by default and the only reason Wayland is mature enough to be included as a technical preview in upcoming Plasma 5.4. They're confident Android apps will run on it at some point as well.
As you may know, the KDE developers have created Plasma Phone UI, a Linux based operating based on Ubuntu Touch and Kubuntu Linux.
The OS is open-source, has an user-friendly interface and provides a customizable platform for mobile devices. For now, KDE’s mobile OS is just a prototype and can be tested on the LG Nexus 5.
With loads of help from people on #kde-devel, we finally managed to complete the KDE Network Filesharing port to KF5. Wasn’t easy, given that this was my first time porting frameworks, but it was real fun. Apart from apol’s blogpost shared in my last post, here’s another post that was immensely helpful to me while porting: Porting a KControl Module to KF5.
During the release cycle of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, the GNOME developers updated the GNOME Initial Setup components, which is displayed only once when you first install the GNOME desktop on your GNU/Linux distribution.
As you may know, Gnome Pie is a circular application launcher, enabling the users to easily access their favorite apps, which they have added to the pie. For usage information, see this link.
BackBox is a Linux distribution that’s based on Ubuntu and designed for conducting “penetration tests and security assessments”.
If you’re not familiar with the distribution, this brief review will give you an idea what else it can be used for other than being an OS for pentesters.
On July 27, Arne Exton, the creator of several Linux kernel-based operating systems, had the pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of a new build of his Exton|OS Light distribution.
On July 27, ARNU Box (formerly Armada) had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability for purchase of two new Pure Linux set-top box devices powered by the recently released Kodi 15.0 "Isengard" media center software (formerly XMBC Media Center).
On July 26, Arne Exton, the creator of numerous distributions of GNU/Linux as well as various Android-x86 Live DVDs, was more than proud to announce the immediate availability for download of a new build for his ExLight Linux distribution.
The Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, has posted an interesting article on the project's website informing the entire Linux community that they need your help to contribute to the Arch Linux-based distribution.
Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 has received a fresh update pack and the developers have upgraded some of the supported Linux kernels, a number of important packages have been updated, and some important fixes have been implemented.
Kesha Shah, a student at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, and Sarah Sharp, embedded software architect at Intel, were named winners of Red Hat’s first Women in Open Source Awards. The winners were announced at Red Hat Summit, the industry’s premier open source technology conference, in Boston.
Red Hat released the latest milestone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.x last week with the RHEL 6.7 update. With the update comes some new features as well as some that were backported from the more recent RHEL 7.x branch.
As previously disclosed, Charles E. Peters, Jr. will retire as an employee and Executive Vice President of Red Hat, Inc. (the “Company”) effective July 31, 2015.
The number of Fedora packages within their repository has seemed to plateau, but it's not necessarily a bad sign.
Fedora contributor Jiri Eischmann published some interesting statistics today indicating that the number of Fedora packages have leveled off since Fedora 20. Fedora 22 currently is comprised of 17,021 packages, which is largely flat since the Fedora 20 days.
I’ve recently set up a Fedora 22 firewall/router at home (more on that later) and I noticed that remote ssh logins were extremely slow. In addition, sudo commands seemed to stall out for the same amount of time (about 25-30 seconds).
On July 27, the Debian Project, through Joerg Jaspert, announced the effective removal of support for the SPARC hardware architecture from the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
The Debian project is best known for its stable GNU/Linux operating system, a platform which is used as a base by over one hundred distributions. However, the Debian project is home to other operating systems, including a port of GNU's Hurd. The GNU/Hurd port combines Debian packages and package management with GNU userland software running on GNU's microkernel. The project offers this description: "The Hurd is a set of servers running on top of the GNU Mach microkernel. Together they build the base for the GNU operating system. Currently, Debian is only available for Linux and kFreeBSD, but with Debian GNU/Hurd we have started to offer GNU/Hurd as a development, server and desktop platform, too. We hope to be able to release Debian GNU/Hurd for Wheezy."
While Debian supports many CPU architectures, it's working to remove support for the Sun/Oracle SPARC architecture. As of this weekend, Debian has dropped SPARC from their unstable, experimental, and jessie-updates archives.
Ubuntu has changed its mind on an end-of-life announcement, giving Version 14.10 one last kernel patch to cover off some big vulns.
Usually, end-of-life means what it says: a version isn't going to get any more updates, and that was the status of Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic Unicorn” (guys, it's time to rethink your naming conventions) after July 23.
Lately, I've found myself being asked by readers about how I like the Ubuntu phone I own for some time now, if I’ve already got used to it, and if they should be buying one right now, or if they should wait a little more time. If yes, which one should they buy?
The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition is the latest phone to ship with the operating system built by Canonical, and it's also the most powerful available right now. We'll take a closer look at it, and we'll try to determine whether it's good enough to stand on its own.
On July 27, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report informing us all about the work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in the last couple of days, as well as to apologize for a regression introduced by the Ubuntu Touch OTA-5 update.
The Ubuntu MATE distro will no longer ship with the Ubuntu Software Center, starting with the next 15.10 Alpha 2 released, announced one of the project developers.
Aaeon’s Yocto Linux ready, 3.5-inch “GENE-BSW5ââ¬Â³ SBC offers Intel Braswell CPUs, dual GbE ports, six serial ports, and mini-PCIe, SATA, and mSATA expansion.
The Lava Pixel V1 offers a solid value for the price, combining mid-range hardware with the latest Android software updates from Google.
The Lava Pixel V1 offers a solid value for the price, combining mid-range hardware with the latest Android software updates from Google.
If you've invested in one of a few "NVIDIA Tegra Note 7" tablets, sold by other companies of course, and have been green with envy over all the attention showered on NVIDIA's SHIELD devices, then maybe its time for a change of color. Somewhat out of the blue, NVIDIA rather quietly started to roll out a massive OTA update to the stylus-enabled tablet, pulling the Tegra Note 7 from Android Jelly Bean and right into Android 5.1 Lollipop territory, extending the device's lifetime by just a bit.
Apple will always be limited in some way by its walled-garden. Even with its hugely impressive sales figures, in terms of overall market share, Apple made up just 18.3 percent of smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2015, while Android dominated with 78 percent. Growing iPhone sales in China will help bridge the gap somewhat, but even then they face fierce competition from budget Android handsets.
Android continues to account for the lion’s share of smartphone users in France, based on a recent report from the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), “Le Baromètre Trimestriel du Marketing Mobile en France - Juin 2015 - 10ème edition.”
Craig Muzilla, Red Hat’s Application Platform Business’ Senior Vice President, says that 80% of businesses want their closed-circuit enterprise apps developed and deployed for the mobile, first. Samsung, on the other hand, has been preaching about the need for secure enterprise applications for several years now. Robin Bienfait, Samsung Electronics America’ Chief Enterprise Innovation Officer and Executive Vice President, envisions enterprise apps that will be deployed internally, but also double in functionality and let the business reach their customers and partners. These are the goals that the Samsung and Red Hat “strategic alliance” aims to reach.
The new model looks to be an improvement over its predecessor in nearly every way. “We started this company because we didn’t think any Android phones on the market were good enough,” OnePlus director and co-founder Carl Pei said. “We still think that’s the case, and we learned a lot from the OnePlus 1. The OnePlus 2 not only flagship worthy, but something that will remain cutting edge next year as well.”
To do this with Android Kitkat, the most popular Android version, you open the Messenger app and tap on the menu at the top right corner of the screen (the three vertical dots) and then tap on Settings. Once there, select Block Unknown Senders, and you're done.
(There are a couple of workarounds: one is to root your Android mobile and disable Stagefright. Another is to remove or disable Google Hangouts, the default messaging app on Android, which processes video messages automatically. Even without Hangouts, if you receive a booby-trapped MMS and accidentally view it, you'll still be infected. Finally, you could tweak your carrier settings to not receive MMS texts.)
Interestingly, the Stagefright vulnerability also affects Firefox on all platforms except Linux, and that includes the Firefox OS. Firefox developers have patched the vulnerability in versions 38 and up.
There are no guaranteed solutions, of course, but there are smart things we can do. One of the biggest is "eating our own dog food." If you're putting on an open source conference, there's no reason you can't use open source software to create the flyers, video promos, banners, T-shirt graphics, and the myriad of other pieces of content to run and promote the show. If you're working for a company that ostensibly has a commitment to open source, ask if your marketing material is being produced with open source software. If it isn't, then ask why not. And if you happen to be a creative at one of these companies, why aren't you?
Open source software has become a critical driver for innovation at leading companies and public-sector organizations around the world, according to a new research report produced by Oxford Economics in partnership with Wipro Limited.
The report, The Open Source Era, also shows that open source software is essential to the use of other cutting-edge technologies and that open source methodologies have spread far beyond software development.
Typefaces designed for programmers aren’t a new idea, but I’m particularly taken with Iosevka, a monospace coding typeface that’s completely generated using Node.js.
The project – which is inspired by existing coding typefaces Pragmata Pro, M+ and PF DIN Mono – aims to produce characters that “have a narrow shape to be space efficient and compatible to Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters.”
The bank launched its Hygieia DevOps dashboard at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) last week in Portland, Ore. The Capital One Agile development teams all use the technology.
IBM has just launched developerWorksOpen to enable developers to collaborate using its open sourced technologies. It is poised to provide new tools, in particular with regards to mobile.
IFTTT (If This Then That) has this month introduced a new collection of new open source projects as well as updating existing ones.
Allen Gunn is a facilitator, open source technologist and Executive Director of Aspiration, where he helps NGOs, activists, and software developers make smarter use of tech for social change. Later this month, Aspiration is partnering with Greenpeace's Mobilisation Lab to host the first-ever Open Campaigns Camp in Berlin. We recently got together to chat about working open and the leadership required to make it work.
Kravets showed us a report she found. It reviewed 23,493 GitHub projects and found that 75.3% had no gender diversity at all. This brought Kravets to the following quote from Malcolm Gladwell: "The world that we could have is much richer than the world we've settled for."
In the open source industry, we often hear that we should fail quickly and often, but that doesn't make failure any less scary. Failure seems like a personal problem, but it's really a corporate problem. We use the phrase "failure is not an option," and people are so proud to live by it. The fact of the matter, said Scavarda and Hawthorn, is that this statement should say "failure is not an option; it is a requirement." The truth is that it's not a matter of whether we will fail, but when we will fail and what will be our timeline for our recovery.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles' (UAV) applications and capabilities are advancing at a phenomenal rate, and the cost of these systems is decreasing at an equally impressive rate largely because of the open source. In many cases, open source projects are outpacing the development of their equivalent closed source systems.
phpMyAdmin, the popular free and open source web based tool for administering MySQL databases, has left the SourceForge building.
In a blog post on Saturday, the project’s infrastructure coordinator, Michal ÃÅihaà â¢, announced that a migration from Sourceforge is all but complete. The few remaining items left on the SourceForge server will be “hopefully handled in upcoming days as well.”
Boundless’ global customer base uses the OpenGeo Suite, a complete open source geospatial web services stack, to deploy solutions for web mapping, transportation, telecommunications, open government, and a diverse range of other solutions. The OpenGeo Suite provides a continually updated geo web services platform along with maintenance agreements that include support and training to support the growing functionality of continually enhanced open source geospatial software.
Firefox Nightly for Linux has been compiled with GTK+3 and the stable version of Firefox 42 may be the first one to be released with GTK+3.
Can your ideas make one of the most popular Internet browsers better? Mozilla is considering the possibility. The company is launching a testing initiative next month that will let Firefox users try out possible changes to the browser. The project is called "Idea Town" and basically seeks to crowdsource ideas for browser- and web-centric new concepts.
firefox-os-phone-firefox-os-phone-While choosing a new mobile phone to buy, you must consider all different available options. Earlier I’ve written about the differences between Ubuntu Touch, Android OS, and Windows Phone. Today I’m going to add another contender in the list – the Firefox OS – and I’ll discuss how is Firefox OS different from others.
On July 19, 2010, Chris Kemp, at the time NASA's CTO for IT, went on stage at the OSCON open-source conference to announce OpenStack, a new open-source effort along with Rackspace. Five years later, OpenStack has emerged as one of the leading cloud platforms governments and big-name companies around the world use. Best Buy and Walmart are among the major retailers that use OpenStack while major carriers, such as Comcast and AT&T, are also users and contributors. One of the biggest drivers of OpenStack's growth in the last five years was the formation of the OpenStack Foundation, a vendor-neutral, multi-stakeholder effort to help build and promote the OpenStack platform. While OpenStack in 2010 was made up of two companies, the OpenStack Foundation in 2015 numbers well over 100 members. Another key driver of OpenStack's growth is continued technical innovation. In 2010, the OpenStack Platform started with just two projects: the Nova Compute Project and the Swift Storage Project. Over the years, multiple additional projects were added, including Glance image, Horizon dashboard, Neutron network and Keystone identity. Here's a look at key milestones in OpenStack's five-year history.
In the data analytics and Hadoop arena, the folks at Pepperdata have an interesting story to tell. Pepperdata's cofounders ran the web search engineering team at Yahoo during the development of the first production use of Hadoop and created Pepperdata with the mission of providing a simple way of prioritizing Hadoop jobs to give resources to the ones that need them most, while ensuring that a company adheres to its SLAs.
MariaDB Corporation is a provider of open source database solutions for SaaS, cloud and on-premise applications that require high availability, scalability, and performance. Built by the founder and core engineering team behind MySQL, MariaDB has more than 2 million users globally and over 500 customers in more than 45 countries -- most of whom are running Linux.
Caolán McNamara, a renowned Red Hat engineer, has recently published some interesting details, claiming that he managed to get the well-known LibreOffice open-source office suite to run on the next-generation Wayland display server.
It has occurred to me that not learning Unix is a grave mistake. My relatively early exposure to Unix was important. I may not have appreciated Linux as much or even at all if I hadn't had that ability to experiment at home with Xenix. Learning about Unix develops new mental muscles like playing a musical instrument or learning a new language. But learning these new processes becomes more difficult with age. To me the exact technical details are less important. It does not really matter if you are a Linux user or if you use one of the BSDs or even something more exotic like Plan 9. The important thing is you can learn new concepts from what I will broadly refer to as the Unix/Internet Community.
In the olden days, Guile had no compiler, just an interpreter written in C. Around 8 years ago now, we ported Guile to compile to bytecode. That bytecode is what is currently deployed as Guile 2.0. For many reasons we wanted to upgrade our compiler and virtual machine for Guile 2.2, and the result of that was a new continuation-passing-style compiler for Guile. Check that link for all the backstory.
The developers of the lightweight and user-friendly Claws Mail GTK-based email client used in many GNU/Linux distributions have announced the release of the major 3.12.0 version.
The developers of the famous open-source Docker Linux container engine have recently announced that the first RC (Release Candidate) version of the anticipated Docker 1.8 app is now available for download and testing.
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is nurturing a growing number of communities of software developers working on open source solutions. NHS’ Code4Health team is now supporting 17 communities that bring together health care providers, developers and supporters.
Google is no longer forcing Google+ on the world: people will be able to log into YouTube, and other Googley services, without having to create mandatory Google+ profiles.
From now on, only those who deliberately sign up for Google+ will create profiles on the ghost town of a social network. Previously, Google harassed users of YouTube, Gmail and so on, to convert their accounts into Google+ accounts, a move obviously designed to boost G+'s sad numbers. It didn't go down very well at all – a lot of folks hated it.
Google has decided the autocomplete API it informally offers will no longer be available for “unauthorised” users as of August 10th.
Sepp Blatter deserves a Nobel Prize for his leadership of Fifa, according to Vladimir Putin.
If successfully planted, the malware tries to register itself in the system as a daemon (system service). Thereafter it uses LZO compression and the Blowfish encryption algorithm to chat to command and control servers. Every packet contains a checksum, so that the recipient could verify data integrity.
Cybersecurity experts aren’t like you or I, and now we have the evidence to prove it. Researchers at Google interviewed more than 200 experts to find out what security practices they actually carry out online, and then spoke to almost 300 non-experts to find out how they differ.
More than a million Chrysler vehicles, including Jeeps, Ram pickups, and Dodge vehicles, are vulnerable to a major vulnerability that could drive them -- literally -- off the road.
Last week, the company recalled 1.4 million vehicles at risk of a remote hijack vulnerability, which, as detailed by Wired, can result in a hacker remotely operating the brakes, interfering with the driver's visibility by switching on the windshield wipers, and even shutting off the engine.
Jane answered the phone and a pleasant young man identified himself as an internet technician with Microsoft. He told her they’d received a report that something was extremely wrong with their computers and he was calling to help.
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From here it gets crazy. There was a $200 payment made to this “tech expert” and then he calls back and says that payment wasn’t necessary. In fact, an error was made and a draft of $2,000 had been made and not $200. He needed to take his $1,800 back. Of course, the “bank statement” Jane looked at did indeed show $2,000 instead of $200, so Jane was being asked to refund the $1,800.
In a joint operation that included law enforcement agencies from 20 countries, the infamous Darkode hacking forum has been taken down.
At last sensible Labour politicians are injecting some maturity into the leadership debate. To start with, Tony Blair’s aide John McTernan called anyone who nominated Jeremy Corbyn a “moron”, which is such a refreshing change from the divisive and childish approach of the Left.
Ian Cobain, a reporter with The Guardian, is one of very few people who know why a student arrested by armed British police officers in 2013 was finally acquitted this year of terrorism charges.
Problem is, he cannot report what he knows. He was allowed to observe much of the trial, but only under strict conditions intended to keep classified material secret. His notebooks are being held by Britain’s domestic intelligence agency. And if he writes — or even talks — about the reason that the student, Erol Incedal, 27, was acquitted, Mr. Cobain faces prosecution and possibly jail.
According to a document recently published on WikiLeaks, authorities in Saudi Arabia are looking for a new access point on the Arabian Sea. This implies either a port in the Sultanate of Oman or in Yemen.
Lord Hall, the director general of the BBC, is to be questioned by MPs over his refusal to refer to Islamic State using the term 'Daesh' (an Arabic abbreviation that means 'one who crushes something underfoot' and 'one who sows discord') because it is pejorative and therefore biased. Controversial British prime minister David Cameron had sent a request to the BBC supported in a letter signed by 120 MPs from across the spectrum – Labour, Tory and SNP.
No explanation was given of what these goals are, nor was any evidence given that “barely any Israeli” agrees with these goals.
While New York Times editors didn’t make Shmuel Rosner specify what the alleged goals of the avowedly pro-Israel peace group J Street are that “barely any Israeli” agrees with, context suggests the most obvious explanation: J Street has backed the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran and is backing the Iran nuclear deal, and that’s why opponents of the Iran nuclear deal are attacking J Street and saying that J Street’s claim to be “pro-Israel” is dubious.
Can Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis?
Along with credit default swaps and other exotic instruments, the total notional derivatives value is about $1.5 quadrillion – about 20% more than in 2008, beyond what anyone can conceive, let alone control if unexpected turmoil strikes.
The late Bob Chapman predicted it. So does Paul Craig Roberts. It could “destroy Western civilization,” he believes. Financial deregulation turned Wall Street into a casino with no rules except unrestrained making money. Catastrophic failure awaits. It’s just a matter of time.
Ellen Brown calls the “derivatives casino…a last-ditch attempt to prop up a private pyramid scheme” – slowly crumbling under its own weight.
For years, Warren Buffett called derivatives “financial time bombs” – for economies and ordinary people.
I pointed out that Nicola Sturgeon’s appearance in the TV leadership debates was the first major airing of an anti-Trident argument on broadcast media in England for a decade. Actually hearing anti-austerity arguments led to a huge surge in support for the SNP in England as well as Scotland.
Prostitution and drug dealing provide a €£10billion boost to the economy, new research revealed today.
Bizarre new European rules mean that for the first time illegal activities must be included in the official estimates of the size of the economy.
It means a booming sex trade or an expansion in cannabis factories will provide a boost to George Osborne’s economic outlook.
Journalistic objectivity is a sham, a horribly misleading and self-flattering conceit.
But something else struck me about the twitter record. Aaronovitch’ twitter account claims to have 78,000 followers. Yet of the 78,000 people who allegedly received his tweet about my insanity, only 1 retweeted and 2 favourited. That is an astonishingly low proportion – 1 in 26,000 reacted. To give context, Mark Doran has only 582 followers and yet had more retweets and favourites for his riposte. 1 in 146 to be precise, a 200 times greater response rate.
Please keep reading, I promise you this gets a great deal less boring.
Eighteen months ago I wrote an article about Aaronovitch’s confession that he solicits fake reviews of his books to boost their score on Amazon. In response a reader emailed me with an analysis of Aaronovitch’s twitter followers. He argued with the aid of graphs that the way they accrued indicated that they were not arising naturally, but being purchased in blocks. He claimed this was common practice in the Murdoch organisation to promote their hacks through false apparent popularity.
Walker was accused of coordinating with outside groups, namely Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce. And these are groups that, after the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, can accept unlimited secret donations, and Walker’s campaign is still bound by campaign finance limits that the US Supreme Court has consistently upheld.
From the start of 2014 through March of this year, the NSA has paid the state $1,033,850 to patrol the perimeter of the data center, according to records provided by UHP.
Britain's equivalent of the FBI has been condemned by judges after a sophisticated bugging operation against alleged money-launderers descended into farce and a series of ‘grave failures’.
The National Crime Agency deployed 100 officers in 30 cars to seize the bosses of a company in West London under investigation.
While the suspects were being interviewed at a police station, NCA chiefs hid listening devices in their offices.
The Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement since anti-police protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, according to hundreds of documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Tor, the world's largest and most well-known "onion router" network, offers a degree of anonymity that has made it a popular tool of journalists, dissidents, and everyday Internet users who are trying to avoid government or corporate censorship (as well as Internet drug lords and child pornographers). But one thing that it doesn't offer is speed—its complex encrypted "circuits" bring Web browsing and other tasks to a crawl. That means that users seeking to move larger amounts of data have had to rely on virtual private networks—which while they are anonymous, are much less protected than Tor (since VPN providers—and anyone who has access to their logs—can see who users are).
Alex Ciccolo was arrested after weeks of talking to an FBI agent he thought would sell him weapons for a terror attack—and who likely knew he was mentally ill.
The ever-vigilant Federal Bureau of Investigation has once again reminded us of the constant threat of domestic terrorism plots — by inventing one. But the most recent story has a more tragic twist than many other FBI “national security” capers, since it involves as well a betrayal of family values.
...the threat of white terrorism, which the US government largely ignores; a recent elaborate FBI sting against a poor black felon that shows where the agency is putting its resources; and how the FBI monitored live streams of Ferguson protests.
Retired general and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Friday called for World War II-style internment camps to be revived for “disloyal Americans.” In an interview with MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts in the wake of the mass shooting in Chatanooga, Tennessee, Clark said that during World War II, “if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.”
Former MSNBC employee Pat Buchanan used an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press to frame immigration as a "massive invasion" and "conquest of the West" by "third-world ... border jumpers." During the appearance, host Chuck Todd did not mention Buchanan's past history of racist comments, or that NBC's cable channel MSNBC parted ways with Buchanan in 2012.
But VICE News has exclusively obtained more than 100 pages of contracting documents [pdf below] that show it was CIA officials who insisted on outsourcing work related to the Senate's review — and that it was the CIA that paid more than $40 million to one of its longtime contractors for administrative support and other tasks related to the report. Those tasks included compiling, reviewing, redacting, and posting to a server the more than 6 million pages of highly classified CIA cables and other documents Senate Intelligence Committee staffers pored through during the course of their probe.
The Hoffman report (so named because the principal investigator is a lawyer named David Hoffman) was commissioned by the American Psychological Association to examine a 2005 APA publication called the Psychology Ethics in National Security document (PENS). This document, voted into policy by APA leadership at the time, outlined the conditions in which a psychologist could ethically work alongside military and intelligence interrogators. Critics from within and without the APA had—since the document’s inception—suspected foul play. The Hoffman report lays those accusations bare, by showing that the APA’s head of ethics had been directly working with the military to create a back-scratching policy.
This decision of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court is not the most recent, but may be interesting in connection with the discussion on private copying exception in the UK.
Can collecting societies authorise the reproduction and communication to the public of out-of-print works without an express prior mandate from relevant rightholders?