Emily Fox is a talented musician and Linux-loving youth in the United Kingdom. Her musical talent is enormous and she produces all her music videos using open source software.
PS4 jailbreaks have been the stuff of rumors since 2013, but the first one has finally been released for 1.76 firmware consoles. The current hack allows Linux to run, and more avenues could be opened up in the future.
The news comes to Design & Trend via the expert console hackers at Wololo. They provide a summary of the situation at hand.
Microsoft has been getting a lot of positive press lately for supposedly embracing Linux (albeit years later than it should have). But can the company really be trusted? Or is it simply hiding its real feelings about Linux?
This issue came up on the Linux subreddit yesterday, and the thread quickly got more than 1,500 up votes and more than 900 responses. Redditors pulled no punches in expressing their continued distrust of Microsoft and its intentions toward Linux.
I've been following Dell's Project Sputnik for some time now. The developer project began in 2012 and, almost immediately, Dell rolled out the Ubuntu version of the XPS ultrabooks. These were, without a doubt, top of the line machines and Dell did an outstanding job of marrying the hardware with the Ubuntu platform.
At the time, Dell knew Linux was a niche audience. they also knew just how important that audience was. They were right. Now that Linux is the backbone behind nearly every enterprise company on the planet, Linux development is one of the hottest commodities in IT. That was some seriously forward thinking on Dell's part to bring to life Sputnik.
Linux won without going to war, even though it had lots of opposition from the start.
In addition to the X.Org Server still seeing DRI3 and Present extension fixes, the xf86-video-intel and xf86-video-ati DDX drivers for X.Org have also been seeing more DRI3/Present fixes recently.
In particular, much of the work recently on the still unreleased xf86-video-intel 3.0 driver has been about Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 and the Present extension. It's going on three years that the Intel 3.0 X.Org driver has been in development without being formally released and there's still no signs of it coming soon. The most recent development release, xf86-video-intel 2.99.917, is now 15 months old itself!
CG Internals has released version 2.0 of glbinding, the cross-platform, open-source C++ binding to the OpenGL API.
GLbinding 2.0.0 has been updated against the latest OpenGL API, includes per-feature header directories, now supports NMake and CYGWIN, compilation time has been decreased, there are a number of documentation updates, and a variety of fixes.
I don’t know if you remember, but I announced in November a small project, called gCSVedit. It’s a small text editor for viewing and editing CSV, TSV, etc files.
I’ve released the 0.2 stable version recently. It is at least now consumable outside Jhbuild.
And, gCSVedit is now hosted on SourceForge instead of GitHub. Because SourceForge is cool again. The forge of SourceForge is free software, unlike GitHub. The users (will) download the tarballs/bundles/installers that *I* have generated, not what GitHub thinks is good to ship. And if the need arises, I can open a mailing list.
The final release of the Vivaldi 1.0 web browser was launched today, as we reported earlier, and it comes as an alternative to the Opera and Google Chrome browsers for GNU/Linux, as well as Mac OS X and Windows users.
After entering its beta development stage back in November 2015 and as a public preview in early 2015, Vivaldi founder and co-founder of Opera Software Jon von Tetzchner has today announced the launch of the new Vivaldi web browser version 1.0.
After leaving Opera a few years ago Tetzchner has been busy developing a new web browser in the form of Vivaldi which is now available to download for Windows, Linux and Mac systems.
The development team behind the open-source, free, and cross-platform Warzone 2100 RTS (Real-time strategy) game was happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the 3.1.4 update.
Hand of Fate 2 will release on Windows, Mac, and Linux in Q1 2017.
Like the first Hand of Fate, players will compete against an ominous dealer through a mix of card-based combat and third-person real-time fisticuffs. Storywise, you'll play as a new heroine 100 years after the events of the original game, and that title's protagonist will now serve as the antagonist for this one.
I often see people complain about the lack of MMO games on Linux, so maybe RuneScape will be a bit more appetising when they release "NXT" their new OpenGL powered game engine on April 18th.
I have been excited about Enter the Gungeon for a long time, and now that it has been released with day-1 Linux support I took a look at it.
Ethan Lee, otherwise known as flibitijibibo spoke at MAGFest 2016, and the youtube video is now available for your viewing pleasure.
I love seeing developers talk about Linux/SteamOS at events. It's also great to put a face to the name with Ethan who is responsible for a growing number of great Linux ports.
KDE is a highly diverse community and every one of our contributors has his or her own motives, such as having fun, developing new skills and meeting nice people. However, a common desire unites all of KDE: to change the world for the better. This shared motivation, although the major driving force behind KDE, has never really been made explicit.
Today KDE has announced the general availability of KDE Plasma 5.6.2, the second maintenance release in the stable KDE Plasma 5.6 series of the acclaimed desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.
Now that everyone is enjoying the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment on their GNU/Linux distributions of choice, it is time for KDE devs to concentrate all of their efforts on the new features for the next major version.
Today KDE has published a story like no other. Not an announcement of a new project or the release of an updated version of one of their existing pieces of software, but a story about their vision for the future.
NetworkManager 1.2 should be released soon and the first release candidate is now available.
In the NetworkManager 1.2 Git branch there were many updates today followed by the tagging of NetworkManager 1.2 Release Candidate 1. In Git master, NetworkManager 1.3-dev is the new version is now in development.
It wasn’t without time but I am finally proud to say that we have a new version of gedit for Windows. This was a long road getting GTK+ 3 and all the dependencies properly working and there are a lot of people behind this, so thanks to all of them for the hard work.
On April 5, 2016, Univention GmbH was pleased to announce the general availability of the fifth maintenance build in the stable, long-term supported Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.0 series.
Berthold Gunreben of SUSE Linux informed the openSUSE community about the upcoming availability of the openSUSE Linux operating system for the IBM z Systems architecture.
IT Leaders Enabling Linux-Based Software-Defined Infrastructure Through Joint Testing, Reference Architectures, and Cloud Solution Center
Red Hat officially announced the OpenShift Blockchain Initiative today, a new development effort aimed at assisting financial firms as they embark on proofs-of-concept and other trials related to the emerging technology.
Under the OpenShift Blockchain Initiative, Red Hat customers can build hosted blockchain applications using tools provided by independent solutions vendors (ISVs) focused on the industry, while taking advantage of the company's managed support services.
As Red Hat welcomes its North American partners to New Orleans this week to discuss the open-source renaissance transforming enterprise IT, its CEO has his eye on growing the company to $5 billion in annual sales.
During the Red Hat Partner Conference's opening keynote, Paul Cormier, EVP and president of products and technologies at Red Hat, discussed the vendor's approach to tackling new opportunities, such as the telco space.
Red Hat has been hard at work. The company that was and is still known more for its open source Linux offerings has been quietly working on becoming an alternative for hybrid cloud offerings.
While the company once focused on eliminating closed software stacks to allow for new configurations, today, the software vendor is very much looking to offer these alternatives itself.
Red Hat is offering upstart financial types the opportunity to play with blockchain tech on its OpenShift platform.
Today Red Hat Inc. and Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT) announced that they are working together to deliver combined Red Hat offerings (including Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with QCT servers, storage, and networking. These joint solutions will increase private and hybrid cloud deployments, and enable customer success on the combined offerings through joint testing, validations, reference architectures, and more.
The Debian project announced updates to "jessie" and "wheezy" last weekend bringing security and bug fixes only. In other news, SUSE announced a new executive position and the gentlemen who filled it. Elsewhere, Christine Hall discussed five distributions that "break the mold" and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reported on Linus Torvalds' talk at the 2016 Embedded Linux Conference.
Bad Thing #1 – It's not open source
That's right. The software for running Ubuntu Linux's userland applications on Windows is, at least as of this writing, closed source.
That just plain stinks. Hopefully this gets remedied quickly. It's early enough that I'm willing to give the team behind this the benefit of the doubt that, by the time there is an official public release, there will be source code available under a reasonable license.
We've already told you yesterday that the Ubuntu Touch development team decided on the official release date of April 6, 2016, for the OTA-10 software update for Ubuntu Phones devices, as well as the new Ubuntu Tablet, BQ Aquaris M10.
Looking for a small, cheap Linux-powered computer to put at the heart of your project? Take a look at the VoCore. This is a small, low-cost, totally open-source (both the hardware and software) computer that's ideal for projects such as IoT or building your own custom router.
Don't think that for $20 you're getting a poor-quality bit of kit. You're not. The VoCore features a 360MHz MIPS CPU, 32MB of RAM, 8MB of flash memory, and comes ready equipped with header pins for sound, USB 2.0, Ethernet, and even Wi-Fi.
Ubuntu MATE project leader Martin Wimpress has announced today, April 5, 2016, the release of the second Beta build of the Ubuntu MATE 16.04 port to Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computers.
Adlink announced the “AmITX-BW-I” SBC, featuring Intel’s Braswell SoCs, a slim, embeddable “thin Mini-ITX” profile, dual GbE, and 4K triple-display video.
Today, a new version of the Tizen Software Development Kit (SDK) 2.4 Rev5 has been released. This is a comprehensive set of tools for developing Tizen Web and Native applications. As part of the SDK software developers get an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Emulator, toolchain, sample code, and documentation. You can run the software on Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X.
Its a huge news for Samsung Z1 and Z3 users out there who have been dying to play some graphic intensive games on their Tizen smartphone. One of Gameloft’s most popular racing game, Asphalt 8: Airborne that has hit some record number of downloads on Android, iOS and Windows phone platforms is now available on the Tizen Store absolutely FREE! The Game brings in a high flying action filled racing experience where you get to drive a car to win races and accomplish special tasks in each race to win coins and and stars in return.
AT A TIME when we're spending so much of our energy moaning about a certain operating system, it's nice to be able to say something positive rather than just tell you what not to buy.
Enter Remix OS, the answer to a problem that even Google has repeatedly failed to solve: how to bring the overwhelming popularity of Android to the desktop.
Android tweeted on Monday that their car service is pushing into 18 more countries. Android Auto, an Android-based operating system and app for compatible cars, allows users to access some of their apps from a car’s dashboard screen.
According to some new studies from Gogo, the in-flight Wi-Fi provider, Android is the operating system of choice for global travelers. More than two times as many Android phones and tablets are being carried onto airplanes than iPhones. The company also says that 90% of travelers bring a connected device along with them on their flights, and connectivity options are important to travelers.
The European Union’s Commissioner for Competition on Monday said regulators are moving forward with a probe into Google’s practices surrounding its Android operating system and AdSense advertising platform.
In recent years, cloud computing has transformed the ways that people purchase software, but it hasn't necessarily made it more affordable.
Today, many applications are available on a software as a service (SaaS) basis and require a monthly fee. Over time, these fees add up, and in many cases, software companies earn more from these subscriptions than they did from boxed or downloadable software. In fact, IDC estimates that by 2018, just the enterprise portion of the SaaS market will generate $22.6 billion in annual revenue.
What does open source software mean? When you are explaining it to someone else, how do you convey the value and essense of open source without reinventing it? There have been many hard won lessons in open source since the phrase was first coined in 1997, and we should not forget those lessons.
To help with that, I've collected 12 memes that are meaningful to me to help share the history, set the stage, and provide context for what open source software is and what it means to the software industry at large.
Unlike other solutions to the problem of a slow mobile web, AMP is an open source project. The code for the project resides on GitHub. It's an active community with lots of open issues and thus far includes contributions from well over 100 people. The project provides clear information about governance, as well as a code of conduct (based on the Hoodie Community Code) that describes the project as a "positive, growing project and community" that aims to provide a "safe environment for everyone."
Lennart Poettering, the creator of the systemd project, an advanced init system and service manager for GNU/Linux operating systems, has had the great pleasure of announcing the second systemd conference event.
Big news for a number of reasons. VW is, after all, a Red Hat shop (or historically has been, anyway). Big news because this is a fantastic proof point for OpenStack, in particular, heading into the OpenStack summit next month in Austin. And big news because, according to sources, Red Hat once again used the "we don't support RHEL on Mirantis" line with VW who reportedly ignored that thinly-veiled threat and went for Mirantis anyway. And finally, big news because VW's intention is to connect all of its cars to the internet within a couple of years. What that means is that the cloud, OpenStack and, ultimately, Mirantis, will power VW's connected and self-driving cars.
The open-source effort, which is backed by Cloudera, Intel, eBay and others, is seeing early adoption, as organizations aim to gain the upper hand on attackers.
Leader in open source databases MariaDB is announcing the release of its new big data analytics engine, MariaDB ColumnStore.
It unifies transactional and massively parallelized analytic workloads on the same platform. This is made possible because of MariaDB's extensible architecture that allows the simultaneous use of purpose built storage engines for maximum performance, simplification, and cost savings. This approach sets it apart from competitors like Oracle, and removes the need to buy and deploy traditional columnar database appliances.
It's a team effort, with contribution across many internal departments as well as our ecosystem of 1,000+ partners. The community has grown over the years. The software has been downloaded over 10 million times, and we have more than 40,000 MongoDB User Group members and more than 600 advocates on our Advocacy Hub. These users demand nurturing—whether through educational content or networking opportunities—and we are proud that our integrated team across engineering, support, and marketing can help scale to meet the community needs.
The report, which was released Tuesday, compares how companies of different sizes are using traditional databases -- think Oracle MySQL -- and "next-generation" alternatives. The latter category consists of databases that discard the rigid SQL-style storage and retriveal process in favor of more flexible ways to store data. Next-generation databases, notably ones called NoSQL because they are the opposite of SQL-based platforms, are designed to perform well in an age when data tends to be stored on massive scales in the cloud.
With all these conversations happening amongst many disparate groups of stakeholders, the Open Source Initiative and the Apereo Foundation both saw an opportunity to break down silos and bring everyone together to collaborate, share lessons learned, and form stronger bonds to advance open in education. The first step is the upcoming Open Summit in New York City, a one-day event taking place May 23 at New York University.
For those curious about the state of C++11 / C++14 / C++1z features in LLVM's Clang compiler, engineers from Google and Qualcomm have a brief yet nice overview of the recent additions to the C++ programming language and the current support state within Clang.
autoconf-archive-2016.03.20 complexity-1.10 ddrescue-1.21 denemo-2.0.4 global-6.5.3 glpk-4.59 gneuralnetwork-0.5.0 gnutls-3.4.10 grep-2.24 linux-libre-4.5-gnu mcsim-5.6.5 mpfr-3.1.4 nano-2.5.3 octave-4.0.1 parallel-20160322
Joint agreement between Grab, The World Bank, and Philippines Department of Transportation and Communications aims to analyse real-time traffic data including speeds and intersection delays.
This month the German City of Potsdam will present its open data concept to the City Council for approval. The strategy serves two main goals: to provide information to citizens, and to allow third parties to reuse and link administrative data in their applications. The city will start implementing an open data portal on its municipal website, which will then be gradually developed into a fully-fledged repository.
For anyone developing with PHP for any length of time you've likely encountered Composer as a dependency management solution for PHP.
Jess Portnoy is a prolific PHP developer and open source geek with lots of helpful data and web data utilities on SourceForge and GitHub.
I was vaguely familiar with Jess's work from various tech talks that she's given, which usually attracted my attention because of her affiliation with the web multimedia platform Kaltura.
Her upcoming talk at LinuxFest Northwest is all about PHP monitoring, and given the kind of traffic Kaltura deals with, there are likely few people as familiar with the subject as Jess.
The first largescale study of ancient DNA from early American people has confirmed the devastating impact of European colonisation on the Indigenous American populations of the time.
At an annual conference for the British Transplantation Society, the National Health Service (NHS) announced that it wants to encourage women who have babies that would be born with life threatening birth defects, to carry them to term so that their organs can be used to help another infant who needs a transplant. Transplant surgeon Niaz Ahmad from St James’s University Hospital said, “we are looking at rolling it out as a viable source of organ transplantation nationally. A number of staff in the NHS are not aware that these organs can be used. They need to be aware. These can be transplanted, they work, and they work long term.” The ideal candidates are anencephalic babies who are born without a brain or little brain tissue and will not survive. Currently, this is legal in the United States, but in the UK, it is not legal to pronounce an infant as brain dead and harvest their organs. If babies in the UK need a transplant, they would have to get donor organs from Europe.
Abuse of the JavaScript library has led to over 4.5 million recent exposures to infection.
A developer long involved in Coreboot/Libreboot development is trying to call attention to "uncorrectable freedom and security issues" on x86 platforms with nearly all post-2009 Intel systems and post-2013 AMD systems.
The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard.
The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for more than a year infiltrated the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM. In the process, they stole highly sensitive data about several millions of government workers and even spies.
Banking industry sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that the Trump Hotel Collection — a string of luxury properties tied to business magnate and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — appears to be dealing with another breach of its credit card systems. If confirmed, this would be the second such breach at the Trump properties in less than a year.
After spending last night working on a Reverse DNS Function for Google Sheets I couldnt leave well enough alone and wrote Shodan2Sheets tonight using the shodan.io api.
If this sounds familiar, you are probably running a web application of some kind. Maybe your whole business depends on it. Maybe you didn't hear about the latest world-on-fire vulnerability. Panic.
How do you keep up with security issues when everything is happening so fast? Which parts of your technical stack are the most at risk? Is the customer data safe? Do you really need to care?
Attackers can easily bypass the patch to exploit a vulnerability that allows them to escape from the Java security sandbox
Let’s face it: in times of war, the Constitution tends to take a beating. With the safety or survival of the nation said to be at risk, the basic law of the land — otherwise considered sacrosanct — becomes nonbinding, subject to being waived at the whim of government authorities who are impatient, scared, panicky, or just plain pissed off.
The examples are legion. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln arbitrarily suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ignored court orders that took issue with his authority to do so. After U.S. entry into World War I, the administration of Woodrow Wilson mounted a comprehensive effort to crush dissent, shutting down anti-war publications in complete disregard of the First Amendment. Amid the hysteria triggered by Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order consigning to concentration camps more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, many of them native-born citizens. Asked in 1944 to review this gross violation of due process, the Supreme Court endorsed the government’s action by a 6-3 vote.
Through its dysfunctional politics and over-reliance on military force, the United States is destroying both its Republic and its imperial reach, a problem made in the USA, said former Ambassador Chas W. Freeman Jr. in a recent speech.
Last week Defense Secretary Ashton Carter laid a wreath at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in commemoration of the "50th anniversary" of that war. The date is confusing, as the war started earlier and ended far later than 1966.
The bit is really funny and perceptive. But in actuality, the average American would respond with, “We’re bombing Yemen? What’s Yemen?” While the average American foreign policy official wouldn’t cite 9/11, but would feign innocence. “We’re not! That war belongs to Saudi Arabia. Whaaatt? I didn’t do anything!”
I am always amazed how gridlock is pushed aside to implement intellectual property laws. In a unanimous vote yesterday, the Senate passed the Defend Trade Secret Act (DTSA, S. 1890) that would create a federal cause of action for trade secret misappropriation and provides for damages and injunctive relief (including a seizure order to prevent dissemination). Neither Senators Ted Cruz nor Bernie Sanders voted. The identical bill H.R. 3326 is pending in the House of Representatives and includes 127 co-sponsors (mostly Republican). President Obama has announced his support as well.
“Global food system faces threats from climate change,” is a report from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and was issued at the United Nations Climate Conference (COP21). The report warns that exceedingly warmer temperatures and altered patterns of precipitation can threaten food production, distribution efforts, degrade food safety, as well as have other impacts. As a result, international progress in the past few decades toward improving food security will be difficult to maintain. The report was led by the US Department of Agriculture. It included contributors from nineteen federal, academic, nongovernmental, intergovernmental, and private organizations in the United States, Argentina, Britain, and Thailand. This is a critically important news story of 2015 that will impact all populations around the world. However, some will be affected in worse ways than others, particularly tropical and subtropical regions.
More deaths from extreme heat. Longer allergy seasons. Increasingly polluted air and water. Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and ticks spreading farther and faster. Those are among the health risks that could be exacerbated by global warming coming decades, the Obama administration warned in a new report Monday.
Over the weekend, a bunch of media outlets let loose shock and awe in bulk leak documents, PanamaPapers, with project leaders ICIJ and Sueddeutsche Zeitung — as well as enthusiastic partner, Guardian — rolling out bring spreads on a massive trove of data from the shell company law firm Mossack Fonseca.
If all goes well, the leak showing what MF has been doing for the last four decades will lead us to have a better understanding of how money gets stripped from average people and then hidden in places where it will be safe from prying eyes.
THE PUNDITS said it would never happen. But both California and New York on Monday implemented legislation that moves them toward a tiered minimum wage of $15 an hour, covering 60 million Americans.
The hikes come as a direct result of organizing by thousands of people in the union-backed “Fight for 15” movement that kicked off in 2012 — organizing that was quickly decried by pundits and opponents as unrealistic and unlikely to ever succeed.
China on Tuesday denounced accusations arising from a massive leak from a Panamanian law firm as "groundless" and moved to limit coverage of documents that may have exposed financial wrongdoing by some of the world's rich and powerful.
The "Panama Papers" revealed financial arrangements of politicians and public figures including friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin, relatives of the prime ministers of Britain, Iceland and Pakistan, and the president of Ukraine.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which has published some of the information from the documents, said the files also revealed offshore companies linked to the families of Chinese President Xi Jinping and other powerful current and former Chinese leaders.
The prime minister, who was elected to parliament as a reformer in 2009, promising transparency following the ruinous collapse of three Icelandic banks the year before, failed to disclose that his family secretly held bonds worth millions of dollars in the same banks, through a shell company in the British Virgin Islands.
Jeremy Corbyn is calling for an independent investigation into the tax controversies revealed in the Panama Papers leak — that includes David Cameron’s family, of which his late father Ian was implicated.
The UK’s PM David Cameron was pressed in 2013 to do something about BVI’s tax laws. He said he would work with the G8 to tackle tax evasion. Of course, we now know why he sat on his hands; he had highly-rewarding and substantial familial interest in doing nothing but continue his family’s tax avoidance scheme. And yet he still managed to get reelected last year, the corrupt pig fucker.
Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson is facing calls for early general elections after it was revealed he is among many politicians linked to companies named in the Panama Papers. Dramatically the Pirate Party is leading in the latest Gallup poll, raising the astonishing prospect that a Pirate-led coalition government could rule Iceland.
The biggest-ever leak of secret information involves 11m documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Here’s how the story is being covered around the world.
Head of Iceland’s Pirate Party Birgitta Jónsdóttir has publicly advised the country’s Prime Minister to resign today, in the wake of last night’s ‘Panama Papers’ revelations.
Opposition MPs met this morning and unanimously agreed upon a motion of no confidence against the government. The text, which will be distributed today, demands the dissolution of the current parliament and early general elections.
The revelation of vast wealth hidden by politicians and powerful figures across the globe set off criminal investigations on at least two continents on Tuesday, forced leaders from Europe to Asia to beat back calls for their removal and claimed its first political casualty — pressuring the prime minister of Iceland to step down.
Public outrage over millions of documents leaked from a boutique Panamanian law firm — now known as the Panama Papers — wrenched attention away from wars and humanitarian crises, as harsh new light was shed on the elaborate ways wealthy people hide money in secretive shell companies and offshore tax shelters.
[...]
In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron faced calls for a government inquiry and accusations of bald hypocrisy by championing financial transparency — when the leaks showed that his family held undisclosed wealth in tax havens offshore.
Edward Snowden has drawn attention to David Cameron’s apparently new interest in privacy, in the wake of questions about his family’s tax affairs.
The Prime Minister has looked to avoid questions about his tax situation, following mentions of his father Ian Cameron in the “Panama papers”. Mr Cameron has looked to argue that his tax affairs are not public and so shouldn’t be discussed.
David Cameron was left dangerously exposed on Tuesday after repeatedly failing to provide a clear and full account about links to an offshore fund set up by his late father, as the storm over the Panama Papers gathered strength in both the UK and elsewhere around the world.
The prime minister and his office have now offered three partial answers about the fund set up by his father Ian, which avoided ever paying tax in Britain. The key unanswered question is whether the prime minister’s family stands to gain in the future from his father’s company, Blairmore, an investment fund run from the Bahamas.
The Daily Mail report that since moving into 10 Downing Street in May 2010, Cameron has been letting out his home in the luxury London district of Notting Hill, and in doing so has made in excess of €£500,000 from rental payments.
So what is the truth? Are we supposed to believe the claims of a man who today argued that he ‘does not gain from offshore funds’ – despite having received a public school education and a €£300,000 bequest from his father who used Mossack Fonseca’s services to run an offshore fund which paid not a penny in UK tax? Is his education, and subsequent status not a ‘benefit’ of this money?
Today’s claims from Cameron are at least disingenuous. His failure to be open and honest just adds to the secrecy surrounding the Panama Papers scandal.
While I haven't seen any proof that the free trade deal exacerbated the problems with Panama—the recent leaks cover 40 years of history, after all—Sanders was broadly on point. The U.S. could have forced Panama to significantly reform its secretive banking sector before rewarding it with a trade deal that was probably a tad more important to them than to us. Instead, it inked a relatively weak side deal on tax transparency, making it somewhat easier, theoretically, to uncover instances of evasion. But years later, Panama is still marketing its services as a well-hidden safety deposit box for the world's rich. You don't have to think the whole effort was a conspiracy on behalf of American billionaires—which Sanders sort of lightly implies here—to agree that, at the very least, this was a botched opportunity that demonstrated the U.S.'s lack of commitment to dealing with these issues. If you’re going to sign a trade pact with a tiny, economically marginal tax haven and don’t use it as an opportunity to clamp down on hard on its worst behavior, what, exactly, is the point?
The Panama Papers leak, that reveals how the rich and powerful rely on a secretive law firm to hide their wealth in tax havens, has drawn attention to a 2011 speech by Senator Bernie Sanders against the Panama-United States Trade Promotion Agreement, which became law in 2012. He noted that Panama’s entire economic output at the time was so low that the pact seemed unlikely to benefit American workers. The real reason for the agreement, Sanders argued, is that "Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade taxes." Sanders said the trade agreement "will make this bad situation much worse." We get reaction from Michael Hudson, senior editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which published the Panama Papers, and Frederik Obermaier, investigative reporter at Germany’s leading newspaper, the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung. He is co-author of the book "Panama Papers: The Story of a Worldwide Revelation."
A more convincing explanation is that the journalists who are researching the leaks are still pursuing American clients of Mossack Fonseca. In fact, we now know this to be the case. On Monday, a piece published by Fusion, one of the U.S. media organizations that has access to the leaked material, said, “So far, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has only been able to identify 211 people with U.S. addresses who own companies in the data (not all of whom we’ve been able to investigate yet). We don’t know if those 211 people are necessarily U.S. citizens. And that figure covers only data from recent years available on a Mossack Fonseca internal database—not all 11.5 million files from the leak.”
[...]
So much for individuals. What about U.S. banks, financial advisers, law firms, and other intermediaries? Data compiled by the I.C.I.J. consortium indicates that, of the roughly fourteen thousand intermediaries—banks, law firms, company-incorporation firms, and other middlemen—with which Mossack Fonseca worked over the years in order to set up companies, foundations, and trusts for its customers, six hundred and seventeen were based in the United States. That’s a lot.
[...]
There are several reasons why the United States might not have been a major source of clients for the Panamanian law firm, relatively speaking. Perhaps it deliberately avoided having a large presence in the United States, so as not to attract the attention of U.S. authorities. Or perhaps there was too much competition. An article published in The Economist in 2012 pointed out that the business of setting up shell companies in tax havens is competitive and includes a number of well-established firms, such as the Hong Kong-based Offshore Incorporations Ltd., the Isle of Man-based OCRA Worldwide, and Morgan & Morgan, of Panama. In other words, wealthy Americans have many options for structuring their offshore holdings.
The president of the United Arab Emirates has secretly built one of the single biggest offshore property empires in Britain, the Panama Papers reveal.
Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan owns dozens of central London properties worth more than €£1.2bn through offshore companies supplied by Mossack Fonseca.
His property portfolio runs from the BHS building on Oxford Street to the designer outlets of Bruton Street and Mayfair’s Berkeley Square estate, where his tenants include Hermès, Stella McCartney and Annabel’s nightclub.
World leaders, business people and celebrities are among those whose anonymous ownership of London property has been exposed by the massive leak of the Panama law firm’s data on offshore companies.
The prime minister of Pakistan, Iraq’s former interim prime minister and the president of the Nigerian senate are among those whose links to London property are detailed by the files.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation shamed the BBC by putting out a Four Corners documentary on the Panama leak that had real balls.
In stark contrast to the BBC, the Australians named and shamed Australia’s biggest company and Australia’s biggest foreign investor. BBC Panorama by contrast found a guy who sold one house in Islington. The Australians also, unlike the BBC who deliberately and knowing hid it, pointed out that the corruption centred on the British Virgin Islands, and even went there. All in all an excellent job.
Four Corners of course has a history of this. Their absolutely excellent documentary Sex, Lies and Julian Assange told vital truths about the concoction of the allegations against Julian Assange, which to this day have been hidden by the BBC and entire British corporate media. I implore anybody who has not yet seen it, to watch it now.
In this dreadful situation where the corporate media have monopoly access to the Mossack Fonseca database, there is going to be a little chink of light here and there, where old fashioned notions of journalistic integrity still cling to life in isolated pockets. But those chinks of light only serve to highlight the abject servitude of outlets like the BBC and Guardian to the official neo-con narrative.
In a BBC Panorama documentary entitled Tax Havens of the Rich and Powerful Exposed, they actually did precisely the opposite. The BBC related at length the stories of the money laundering companies of the Icelandic PM and Putin’s alleged cellist. The impression was definitely given and reinforced that these companies were in Panama.
Richard Bilton deliberately suppressed the information that all the companies involved were in fact not Panamanian but in the corrupt British colony of the British Virgin Islands. At no stage did Bilton even mention the British Virgin Islands.
Company documents were flashed momentarily on screen, in some cases for a split second, and against deliberately unclear backgrounds. There is no chance that 99.9% of viewers would notice they referred to British Virgin Islands companies. But instantly reading a glimpsed document is an essential skill for a career diplomat, and of course I happen to know immediately what BVI or Tortola mean on a document. So I have been back and got screenshots of those brief flashes.
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In deliberately obscuring the key role of the British money-laundering base of British Virgin Islands in these transactions, the BBC have demonstrated precisely why the entire database has to be released to the scrutiny of the people, rather than being filtered by the dubious honesty of state and corporate journalists. The BBC targeting of two very low level British minions at the end of their programme does not alter this.
But if one is asking whether or not international trade agreements are good, or bad, for America, one needs to think bigger. On a whole-of-society level, economics is about people. We all want American companies to make money. It’s also great that Walmart is full of low-cost consumer electronics from Asia, or Carrier air conditioners fresh from Mexico, but you need money — a job — to buy them.
CMD was provided with a copy of the poll which was shared with business lobbyists, who were instructed on how to manipulate the public debate over those policies rather than implement the views of the business executives who were polled. Below are some of the surprising highlights of the full poll, which you can access here. New materials about this are available here.
The Club Med hotel chain, which still owns properties on both sides of the Mediterranean is now, tellingly, a Chinese company, although led by the son of France’s former president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing: a committed EU supporter who served in a number of positions in Brussels after being ousted from the presidency in 1981.
Breaking--New materials provided to the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch reveal that a top GOP polling firm instructed state Chamber of Commerce lobbyists how to try to defeat popular measures like increasing the minimum wage, despite polling data from business leaders that shows overwhelming support for such progressive workplace policies.
California just passed a statewide measure to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next few years, as other cities have also embraced this and other key workplace reform measures, such as paid sick days.
Madison, WI--Video footage of a closed-door webinar provided to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reveals top GOP pollsters instructing Chamber of Commerce lobbyists to ignore internal survey data showing that Chamber members across the country overwhelmingly support progressive workplace policies including raising the minimum wage, providing paid sick days, and increasing paid family leave. (These and other materials are available here.)
During Tuesday’s Republican town hall in Milwaukee, it was not a candidate, but the host, Anderson Cooper, who had the best line of the night, when he told Donald Trump — in the politest way possible — that he was acting like a fatuous little boy. “Sir, with all due respect, that’s the argument of a 5-year-old,” said the CNN anchor, after Trump defended his attack on Ted Cruz’s wife by saying that he “didn’t start it,” in just the same manner a child who is unable to admit any wrongdoing (or someone with narcissistic personality disorder) might.
When it’s all said and done, there’s no doubt that the hundreds of stories exposing the intricate web of tax avoidance and laundering, also known as the Panama Papers, will be an important blockbuster feat of journalism. The sheer size of the leak (11.5 million documents) and scope of the project led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (which brought together over 100 news outlets) is as staggering as it is impressive. The implications—the prime minister of Iceland has resigned, and dozens of investigations are allegedly underway around the world—will be felt for years.
Why then, in this moment of well-earned glory, would the primary party responsible for this act of journalism go out of its way to take a swipe at WikiLeaks, and, by extension, a prisoner of conscience?
On the face of it, Trump is Reagan on steroids. His towering size, his nativist US supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show confidence make him ideal for the role of bullying and big lies from the oval office. He is America come to meet itself in larger-than-life image to rejuvenate it as its pride slips away in third-world conditions and a multi-polar world.
As of this writing, with approximately 88% of precincts reporting, CNN reported Sanders winning with 56.2 percent of the vote compared to rival Hillary Clinton's 43.5 percent – a double-digit margin.
The designer of China's "Great Firewall" has been mocked online after he reportedly had to bypass the censorship system that he helped create during a public event.
Talking about independence is of no benefit to Hong Kong, former lawmaker and Our Hong Kong Foundation consultant Kaizer Lau Ping-cheung said during an RTHK radio debate on Wednesday. Student leader Joshua Wong, also present, said that Hongkongers should be allowed to decide for themselves what would happen after 2047, when the One Country Two Systems agreement is expected to end.
The technology used to crack the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters is coming to a local police department near you. The FBI told local law enforcement agencies that it would teach them to unlock iPhones and other mobile devices, according to an advisory letter issued late last week in response to inquiries about the new technique.
According to Buzzfeed, which first reported the news, the FBI did not expressly state the unnamed third-party used to unlock the iPhone would be available to local law enforcement agencies, but would “consider any tool that might be helpful to our partners,” FBI assistant director Kerry Sleeper wrote in the advisory letter.
In the picture, you can clearly see NSA employees opening the shipping box for a Cisco router and installing beacon firmware with a “load station” designed specifically for the task.
Hackers in China haven’t retired their assaults on American targets, but U.S. intelligence officials aren’t certain if Beijing has fully breached the terms of a cyber pact reached last year between President Obama and his Chinese counterpart, NSA Director Navy Admiral Mike Rogers testified on Tuesday.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday considered how easily investigators should be able to track criminal suspects through their cellphones, becoming the latest front in the debate over how to balance public-safety interests with digital privacy.
The issue before a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Maryland and Virginia, was whether law enforcement officials need search warrants to pull cellphone records to trace the long-term movements of suspects.
The case, argued in Richmond, arose after investigators in Maryland obtained seven months of phone records to map the movements of two men later convicted in armed robberies around Baltimore.
The judge clearly recognized the issues, noting that there's no contract between users and a site that requires them to view ads, no matter how much publishers may want to pretend that what they refer to as a "social contract" is somehow a legal contract. The court also, rightly, noted that the law is not designed to pump up a business model that is failing, and that it's up to the publishers themselves to create better business models.
Even though we're a publisher who relies on ads for some of our revenue, we've never been shy about recognizing that ad blockers are an essential form of freedom for users, to control what goes into their computers, and an important security tool as well. Would our own lives be easier if ad blockers didn't exist? Perhaps. But, as always, the onus needs to be on us to build business models that work, and not rely on forcing people into doing things they're not comfortable doing.
The sooner more publications realize this, the sooner we can get past the broken system we have of online advertising today.
More good news on the secure communications front: WhatsApp has finally implemented full end-to-end encryption -- for everyone. Late in 2014, WhatsApp began rolling out its end-to-end encryption, but it was limited to one-to-one communications and did not cover messages containing media. Now, it's everything, including group messages.
In the Seventh Circuit -- where there's currently no Appeals Court precedent on cell site location info (CSLI) -- federal judge Pamela Pepper has decided only about half of what other courts have said about this info's expectation of privacy applies. That would be the half that finds the Third Party Doctrine covers cell phones' constant connections to cell towers. (via FourthAmendment.com)
Last year, AT&T launched the latest sexy trend in broadband -- charging users significantly more money if they want to opt out of their ISP's snoopvertising. It basically works like this: users ordering AT&T's U-Verse broadband service can get the service for, say, $70 a month. But if you want to opt out of AT&T's Internet Preferences snoopvertising program (which uses deep packet inspection to study your movement around the Internet down to the second) you'll pay at least $30 more, per month. With its decision, AT&T effectively made user privacy a premium service.
As the FCC has started pushing for new privacy rules (precisely because of ISP moves like this), AT&T's luxury-privacy option has been under heightened scrutiny.
"Naked" is synonymous with "vulnerable." And yet, plenty of naked people continue to be shot and killed by police officers, despite having nowhere to hide weapons and nothing standing between them and the bullets headed their way.
Of course, naked people are far more prone to find themselves in confrontations with police. In almost every case, substance use/abuse or mental illness will be the reason for the person's nudity. Despite being handicapped by both limited mental faculties and lack of any protection, naked people are often considered inherently "threatening," and thus, worthy recipients of any level of force that allows responding officers to feel "safe" again.
17-year-old David Joseph was shot to death by Austin police officer Geoffrey Freeman, who was responding to reports of a naked man acting erratically. Freeman said he feared for his life, even though Joseph had no clothing and no weapons.
Of course, the first response from the police union was to assume Joseph was under the influence of a "drug like PCP." PCP is the go-to guess for officers trying to explain how they felt overwhelmed by a person smaller than them... or carrying no weapons... or wearing no clothes. It supposedly gives even unarmed, naked people superhuman strength and increased resistance to less-lethal force. How many people officers feel are using PCP is miles away from how many people are actually using PCP.
The following is a Q&A with David Cole, civil liberties litigator, law professor, recipient of the ACLU’s inaugural Norman Dorsen Presidential Prize, and author of the just-published book, “Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law” (Basic Books). The book tracks three campaigns — one relating to marriage equality, another relating to gun rights, and another relating to human rights in the context of the “war on terror” — to examine, as the title suggests, how constitutional law gets made.
Trial dates have been set for a 35-year-old Bay City woman accused of posting vulgar status updates on Facebook and committing a felony in the process.
Jury selection in the trial of Rene K. Kolka is to begin the morning of Tuesday, May 10, before Bay County Circuit Judge Joseph K. Sheeran. In the event proceedings are delayed, the trial is instead slated to commence the morning of Tuesday, June 14.
A school district in canton Basel Country stands behind its decision to allow some Muslim students to not participate in a ritual of shaking their female teacher’s hand before and after class, despite the controversy the move has unleashed across Switzerland.
SCOTLAND's leading human rights lawyer has received death threats from Islamic extremists over his calls for unity within the country's Muslim community.
Though unable to give details due to an ongoing police investigation, Aamer Anwar said the threats came from individuals who have taken issue with his call for Muslims of all backgrounds and denominations to stand up together against Islamic extremism.
Former death row prisoner Moreese Bickham has died at the age of 98. In 1958, Bickham, an African American, was sentenced to death for shooting and killing two police officers in Mandeville, Louisiana, even though Bickham said the officers were Klansmen who had come to kill him and shot him on the front porch of his own home. Multiple other people in the community also said the officers worked with the Ku Klux Klan, which was a common practice in small Southern towns. Bickham served 37 years at Angola State Penitentiary, in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
PRISON INMATES around the country have called for a series of strikes against forced labor, demanding reforms of parole systems and prison policies, as well as more humane living conditions, a reduced use of solitary confinement, and better health care.
Inmates at up to five Texas prisons pledged to refuse to leave their cells today. The strike’s organizers remain anonymous but have circulated fliers listing a series of grievances and demands, and a letter articulating the reasons for the strike. The Texas strikers’ demands range from the specific, such as a “good-time” credit toward sentence reduction and an end to $100 medical co-pays, to the systemic, namely a drastic downsizing of the state’s incarcerated population.
“Texas’s prisoners are the slaves of today, and that slavery affects our society economically, morally and politically,” reads the five-page letter announcing the strike. “Beginning on April 4, 2016, all inmates around Texas will stop all labor in order to get the attention from politicians and Texas’s community alike.”
Google isn't making any friends on the news that the company is effectively bricking working smart home hardware for a large number of users. About seventeen months ago Google acquired Revolv, rolling the smart-home vendor's products in with its also-acquired Nest product line. Revolv hardware effectively lets users control any number of smart-home technologies around the home, ranging from home thermostats and garage door openers, to outdoor lights and security and motion detection systems. But according to an updated Revolv FAQ, all of these systems will no longer work as of May 15, 2016.
Nest is dropping support for one of its products on May 15. More than just dropping support, the product will cease to work entirely.
Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices—customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of updates would enable the hardware they paid for to actually work, only to discover the manufacturer can turn their device into a useless brick when it so chooses.
Xiaopeng Zhao argues that recent court decisions in China provide a boost for overseas companies whose names have been registered by counterfeiters
Everyone should know by now that language is ever evolving. New, cultural, or colloquial words get added to the dictionary. In addition, existing words attain new definitions, typically contextual definitions. Like the word "diamond", for instance, which has a different definition when spoken in the context of baseball. In baseball lingo, the diamond is in the filed, or infield, and the term is as common as "bat", or "ball", or "single." And, yet, two makers of baseball equipment are now in a trademark legal spat over the word "diamond."
Sending legal notices to users for downloading illegal torrents is nothing new. But, taking things to a whole new level, Rightscorp, a struggling anti-piracy group, is working on a new method to lock down the web browsers of the copyright infringers.
As the DMCA heads towards possible reform, critics on both sides have been airing their complaints with the current system. For far too many people, though, the problem is apparently Google, rather than the law or the DMCA process itself. Rights holder groups have been especially vocal about Google's supposed participation in copyright infringement, despite the fact it processes tens of millions of DMCA takedown notices every day.
This is a lot of work and it's being done by Google to handle DMCA complaints about content it's not even hosting. To make rights holders happy (except that many of them are not), Google delists millions of URLs every day. It also vets each DMCA notice to make sure the URLs should actually be delisted. The rise of bot-generated DMCA takedown notices has increased the workload as well as the likelihood of error. It's an ugly process all around and the law itself is in need of some serious repairs.
The political season lingers upon us, for all the world appearing to be less democracy in action and more likely some kind of test initiated by aliens to see exactly how much mind-numbing stupidity a populace can handle. In any case, for some reason presidential politics brings out the touchiest behavior amongst us. For instance, take a quick look at this brilliantly, if unintentionally, hilarious "trailer" a Donald Trump Supporter put together.