In the U.S., July 4th is a time for barbecue, fireworks and . . . open-source software? In honor of a time when American patriots declared their independence from imperial rule, I decided to declare Windepence from the Microsoft monarchy. In lieu of Windows 10, I've been using Linux as my primary OS for home and work for the better part of a week. My experience has been frustrating at times, but mostly rewarding.
My Experience
When it comes to Linux, I'm not an expert, but not exactly a newbie either. The open-source OS is like an old college friend I see once every few years then forget about until they post something outrageous on Facebook. Over the past two decades, I've tried several different flavors, from Red Hat in the late 1990s to Ubuntu just a few years ago. I've also used Raspbian on my Raspberry Pi. However, I've never employed Linux as my primary OS for several days in a row, until now.
Tomorrow is July 4th -- a very special day for the United States of America. This is the day we celebrate our independence from the then-tyrannical British government. Thankfully, the Brits are now our allies -- we can enjoy some of their finest exports, such as Ed Sheeran, without guilt.
While you are celebrating America's freedom, why not also celebrate your computing freedom by switching from Windows to Linux? Rather than install a distro on your aging PC, you could totally buy a new computer that comes with Linux pre-installed! System76 sells such computers with either Ubuntu or its own Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS, and today, it announces a very rare sale.
After reaching the amount of 12600€, the electrical schematics will be delivered to us in a month by ACube Systems. The final design resulting from this phase will be made public as soon as possible.
These new thinner, lighter, premium-built Precision mobile workstations come preloaded with Ubuntu and have been RHEL certified. The 7530 and 7730 feature the latest Intel Core and Xeon processors, blazing-fast memory and professional graphics.
Of particular note is the increased core count and memory. In fact the maximum memory has doubled to 128GB which helps with cloud developer local workloads. In the case of the 7730, it supports up to 8TB of PCIe NVME storage, the most PCIe storage on the market today. The 7730 is also the first AI/ML ready mobile workstation available.
The Dell Precision 7530 and 7730 Mobile Workstation Developer Editions are now available to order from Dell's online store with the Ubuntu Linux operating system pre-installed.
At the end of May 2018, Dell's Project Sputnik leader George Barton announced the availability of four new Dell Precision Mobile Workstations running the open-source and free Ubuntu Linux operating system.
While at the moment of the announcement only the Dell Precision 3530 was available to order, those interested in purchasing a powerful laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed can now order two other models, namely the Dell Precision 7530 and Dell Precision 7730.
Dell Precision 7530 and 7730 Mobile Workstation Developer Editions are now open for order worldwide via the company’s online store. Both machines get powered by the open-source and free Ubuntu Linux operating system.
Interested users who want a powerful machine with Ubuntu pre-installed, can now order the Dell Precision 7530 and Dell Precision 7730. Under the hood, both machines run the latest Intel Core or Xeon processors. The processor is further coupled with high-speed RAM, top-end NVidia or AMD graphics cards, and come pre-installed with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 operating system.
Dell also plans to release professional drivers in the near future that’ll include features not offered by standard Inbox drivers of NVidia and AMD GPUs.
The migration to Microsoft's platform took a while, with an impossibly young Andrew Orlowski writing in The Register at the end of 2001 that Hotmail still ran on Unix. Windows Server 2000 dealt with front edge duties.
While Microsoft fiddled with Hotmail, competition arrived in the form of Yahoo! Mail in 1997 and the all-conquering GMail from Google in 2004. Hotmail, however, had other problems with which to contend.
Some people might think that there are similarities between the macOS and the Linux kernel because they can handle similar commands and similar software. Some people even think that Apple’s macOS is based on Linux. The truth is that both kernels have very different histories and features. Today, we will take a look at the difference between macOS and Linux kernels.
While there has been quite a bit of work on various aspects of networking performance, including bufferbloat reduction, queue management, and more, much of that work has been oriented toward the needs of high-end users. But there is more to the Internet than data centers and high-speed links. A large number of Internet-connected devices can be found behind consumer-level routers on relatively slow broadband links. For some time, a group of developers has been working on the "Common Applications Kept Enhanced" (CAKE) queuing discipline, which is aimed directly at the needs of those users.
Home networks face a number of challenges not found in many commercial settings. Bufferbloat can cause significant latencies, but can often be difficult to address by end users. The links themselves are relatively slow, and they are often highly asymmetric — download speeds can be an order of magnitude higher than upload speeds. The result of all this can be significant domestic tension when, for example, one household member is pushing a large Git tree while the other is engaged in a high-stakes raid. Given the special features of home networks, it would seem to make sense to tune the behavior of the network stack to match. That is where CAKE is meant to come in.
One of the new features merged for the 4.18 kernel is a new polling interface using the asynchronous I/O mechanism. As part of this work, the internal implementation of how the various polling-related system calls (poll(), select(), and epoll_wait()) work was significantly changed. The reporting of a significant performance regression has now put all of that work into doubt, though. While it could be reverted, the more likely outcome would appear to be another set of changes to how polling works in the kernel.
As attackers have lost the easy ability to execute code stored in writable memory, they have increasingly turned to return-oriented programming (ROP) and related techniques to compromise vulnerable systems. ROP attacks use the code that is present in the program under attack and are hard to defend against in software. In response, hardware vendors are developing ways to defeat ROP-like techniques at a lower level. One of the results is Intel's Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) [PDF], which adds two mechanisms (shadow stacks and indirect-branch tracking) that are intended to resist these attacks. Yu-cheng Yu recently posted a set of patches showing how this technology is to be used to defend Linux systems.
The patches adding CET support were broken up into four separate groups: CPUID support and documentation, some memory-management work, shadow stacks, and indirect-branch tracking (IBT). The current patches support 64-bit systems only, and they only support CET for user-space code. Future versions are supposed to lift both of those restrictions.
The Automotive Grade Linux project has unveiled plans for a virtualization framework for its Linux-based automotive distribution that provides a flexible, mixed criticality bus architecture to plug in multiple existing hypervisors and partitioners.
Last August when The Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project released version 4.0 of its Linux-based Unified Code Base (UCB) reference distribution for automotive in-vehicle infotainment, it also launched a Virtualization Expert Group (EG-VIRT). The workgroup has now released a white paper outlining a “virtualized software defined vehicle architecture” for AGL’s UCB codebase. The framework includes a bus architecture that can encompass both critical and non-critical systems and can support a variety of open source and proprietary virtualization solutions running simultaneously.
I started using open source before I even knew what it was. Perl was my first programming language, and so installing libraries from CPAN became a routine task (as well as a routine challenge on SunOS). I posted my first open source code on SourceForge soon after, still thinking of it as a way for hobbyists to share their hobby, but not as something serious developers or companies would do. I still remember the feeling I had when Netscape announced that the next version of their browser, Netscape Navigator 5, would be released as open source. As a web developer in the late 90's, Netscape was the killer app, the king of the hill, the virtual monopoly that was leaps and bounds ahead of IE4. For them to release their source code in a way that let other people see it, copy it, even improve on it, was revolutionary. And it changed forever the way I thought about open source.
Of course, anybody else who lived through those turbulent times knows how that Netscape 5 story actually turned out, not because it was open source but because of business decisions and buyouts (thanks AOL!) that kept pulling the development one way and then the other. But my own journey into open source was much more straight forward. I dove in completely, releasing everything I could under an open license, using as much openly licensed software as possible. I bought (yes bought) my first copy of Linux from Best Buy in 1999, and switched my desktop permanently in 2006 when Canonical mailed me a free CD of Dapper Drake. Five years later I would join Canonical myself, and eventually land on the Community Team where I was building new communities and growing existing ones around Ubuntu and all it's upstreams and downstreams. Last year I was doing the same at Endless Computers, bringing the benefits of open technology to users in some of the most remote and disconnected parts of the world.
What does Valve's Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri do now that he took the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver up to OpenGL 4.4 in its compatibility profile mode? Work on OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile support, of course.
While the recent effort from taking the OpenGL compatibility profile mode in RadeonSI from OpenGL 3.1 to OpenGL 4.4 means a great deal of more games/applications are now working with this open-source Radeon GCN OpenGL driver, Arceri is working on OpenGL 4.5 support for this context that allows deprecated OpenGL features to still be mixed in with newer versions of OpenGL.
Any experienced technology educator knows engagement and motivation are key to a student's learning. Of the many techniques for stimulating engagement and motivation among learners, storytelling and game creation have good track records of success, and writing interactive fiction is a great way to combine both of those techniques.
Interactive fiction has a respectable history in computing, stretching back to the text-only adventure games of the early 1980s, and it's enjoyed a new popularity recently. There are many technology tools that can be used for writing interactive fiction, but the two that will be considered here, Twine and Ren'Py, are ideal for the task. Each has different strengths that make it more attractive for particular types of projects.
Youtube-DL is a command line tool, developed in Python to download videos from various popular websites including Youtube, Dailymotion, Facebook, Photobucket and many others. A list of supported video sites is available here. Youtube-dl downloads videos right from the terminal with simply understandable commands. If you like to work with terminal then I am sure you'll like youtube-dl.
Not going to lie: there’s a great satisfaction in deploying a well-timed GIF as a mic-drop moment or snark-tastic comeback.
But while these pithy animated clips make sense on service like WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter and Reddit, is the humble terminal sorely in need of them?
Debatable, but a Google dev has gone and done it anyway, releasing GIF for CLI to celebrate the 31st anniversary of the Gif.
How does the tool work? How is it possible to get colorful rich animations display in the terminal?
At many workplaces, if you’re at work, you’re also expected to be available on Slack. For some people, that means the thing that “replaced” email is something much more demanding.
Author Oswald Campesato has written it as a practical introduction to using flexible, powerful (and free) Unix / Linux shell commands to perform common data cleaning tasks. He provides realistic examples and numerous commands that illustrate both the syntax and how the commands work together.
One of the most basic things that any user does in Linux is rename files. You can rename files in Linux using a file manager, but it isn’t very interesting. In this article, you will learn renaming a file or rename multiple files in Linux through the terminal.
Though it may not have managed to bring Linux to the desktop in any meaningful sense, 4 July marks 25 years since the first stable release of not-a-Windows-emulator, Wine.
Created in 1993 as a way of inflicting Windows 3.1 applications on the then positively pristine Linux world (mastermind Linus Torvalds had only just emitted the first version of the open-source operating system in 1991), Wine was originally envisaged as a way users could leave Windows behind without abandoning their favourite apps.
Unlike a traditional emulator, Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) translates Windows API calls to POSIX calls on the fly, meaning that applications could run on the Linux desktop without requiring the usual technical paraphernalia associated with emulation. Unlike a virtual machine solution, users also do not require a licence to access Windows-based application goodness.
Turn-based village builder 'Seeds of Resilience' has you build a village on a small island, as you battle against the weather and natural disasters.
It was already available on itch.io and now it's also available on Steam in Early Access. I've played a little of it now and it's not bad, a little confusing at the start perhaps since the tutorial is so very basic. It has a nice idea, so I'm keen to see what they do with it.
If you're after a cheap thrill, Visceral Cubes is a game of survival as you attempt to make it past infected with stealth and a little luck.
It released with Linux support back in May and just recently got updated with new weapons to help you survive a little longer, more animations for enemies and more little features.
Xonotic [Official Site], the free and open source fast-paced shooter Xonotic is now available as a Snap package for super easy installation on Linux.
Coregrounds [Official Site] is a free to play competitive RTS that mixes in elements of a Tower Defense and a MOBA, it's out now with Linux support.
The highly addictive Rocket League is almost three years old! To celebrate, they're holding an anniversary event on July 9th. This special event will run until July 23rd and they're mixing up the gameplay for it.
Backer build 2 of Phoenix Point [Official Site] is now out with new units, new maps and I took another early look for you.
For those not familiar and didn't read anything previous on it, it's a game being developed by Snapshot Games, which includes Julian Gollop, the designer of the original X-COM series.
This build includes the Technician class, which comes with a brutal melee attack using mechanical arms, which can also be used to heal other characters and repair damaged limbs. They also have a deployable turret making them incredibly versatile, in addition to having their own assault rifle and grenades.
Another classic game may be coming to Linux, with hints of Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive recently popping up.
Rakuen, a great looking non-combat story-rich adventure was previously only available on Steam and now it's also DRM free on the Humble Store.
It arrived with day-1 Linux support last year, we wrote about it coming but completely missed it actually getting released. So now is a great reminder, since those of you who prefer DRM free builds can get in on the fun.
A lot has happened in the last two years. A busy real life unfortunately made me miss the yearly “Not-Thanksgiving” progress report last year…so this here will be a kind of combination release post and progress report. Buckle up, this will be a long one. If you’re only interested in the short release notes, move on to the GitHub release pages linked above and again at the bottom of the post. Cool? Cool.
So, continuing from the last progress report in 2016, what exactly has happened?
Back then, I said I was working on unit tests for xoreos, planning to make them public in December. I did that, and then merged them in February 2017. Since then, several more have been added and bugs were found (and prevented) with them. I consider them a huge success and a boon to the codebase. However, the coverage is nowhere near 100%. Pull requests adding new unit tests to existing code are always welcome ;).
For those playing or interested in getting into the MMO Albion Online, you might want to know more about the new Factional Warfare system coming soon.
Here's one from a recent successful Kickstarter we missed! Iratus: Lord of the Dead [Official Site] is a dark and challenging turn-based RPG and it's coming to Linux.
It was funded on Kickstarter last month, with nearly 600 backers pledging over $20K to help make it happen. Linux support wasn't actually mentioned directly on the Kickstarter, however, they said in their comments section "we will release Linux version in the future for sure"—great! Linux is also listed as a platform in their FAQ discussion post on Steam.
Urban Goose Games have announced that their strategy game Radiis is set to release this month with Linux support.
What makes it interesting, is that there's no moving units. You place down buildings to increase territory and grow your population, creating a tug of war type of strategy game as you fight to claim the most territory.
Hey guys. It's been a while since my last post, however we haven't lazed since then. We solved the problems presented in the previous post, and also implemented the "next steps". To get in the picture you may want to read the previous post.
So let's just go through the new things step by step. I'll try to explain the respective feature, and also give examples using videos or screenshots.
The biggest problem was that these topics are completely INDIVIDUAL, so they may send totally different amount of data (this amount of data may differ from message to message as well, given one topic) and this hasn't made possible putting the data of these messages in the same container (spreadsheet). The idea used for the solution came from my mentor Kristóf and his former mentor Alexander Semke.
Imagine that you are a happy developer living a happy life sending patches for some random terminal emulator that you know and love. Imagine also that you see a strange pattern in code and you know that you can write in a better way, and you do. Code looks fine, code looks correct, code looks pretty and it also does a massive cleanup on the number of lines of code. Now also imagine that you are pretty confident that you are actually doing something good for mankind.
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.7 RC!
After 2 weeks and 70 changes since the Beta2, we think that we are almost ready for the final release of Qt Creator 4.7. So this is a good time to give us some last feedback, best done through our bug tracker.
A brand new beta of the ‘next-generation’ Kdenlive video editor is now available to download.
Developers working hard on the Kdenlive open-source video editor are preparing to unveil their significantly refactored code-base in the upcoming KDE Applications 18.08 release. But for helping weed out the bugs, you can now test an AppImage for this big release that is nearly two years in the making.
The new Kdenlive video editor now automatically separates clips having both video and audio tracks, reliable slow motion video support, timeline improvements, insert/life/overwrite should now be working reliably, KDE Purpose library support, support for generating lower-resolution video in the timeline preview for faster rendering, better keyboard layout changing support, and various other enhancements.
After more than 1.5 years of work, we are planning to release the refactoring version of Kdenlive in august, part of the KDE 18.08 Applications release. But taking such a decision is not easy. Most of the code was rewritten, which also means many possible regressions. So while we are very excited to have the opportunity to finally release our work to the public, it’s also a bit stressful. So what now ?
Apart from re-writing a lot of the internals to clean up the code and make Kdenlive more efficient and easier to stabilize, this beta adds a bunch of new and interesting features. For example, the video and audio from clips are now automatically separated when dropped in the timeline, the slow motion effect now works and insert/lift/overwrite should also work reliably. Another thing you can do is install new keyboard layouts with one click. This means that, if you are coming from another video-editing software and relied on its shortcuts, you can still be equally productive with Kdenlive. For a full list of the new features in Kdenlive 18.08 Beta 17, take a look at the article on the projects site.
The four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week are trending quite stable as new major version packages have been updated this week.
Among the packages updates this week were FFmpeg, KDE Plasma, GNOME Builder and Krita along with a kernel update.
The most recent snapshot, 20180702, put out the first update ffmpeg 4.0 with a refresh of patches and an enablement for ffnvcodec when building with NVIDIA support. The snapshot brought about another 4.0 version with checkmedia upgrading from 3.8 to the new 4.0 version. The tools and libraries package to work with Extensible Firmware Interface variables, efivar, had a major update as well and adjusted its libefiboot-export-disk_get_partition_info.patch to work with the new 36 version. That wasn’t the last major version update either. The package for userspace components for the Linux Kernel‘s drivers/infiniband subsystem, rdma-core, updated to version 18.1; the new major version fixed compilations with recent glibc. Among the other packages in the snapshot there were updated were spec-cleaner 1.1.0, brotli 1.0.5 and System Security Services Daemon (sssd) 1.16.2.
When you fire up your machine and see GDM’s friendly face smiling back at you, how did it get there? Clearly it was executed, but by what? The short answer is that GDM asked gnome-session to start its UI up for you.
I’m currently writing this at Minneapolis airport. Having ramen and sushi, before boarding my flight to CDG and ultimately to Malaga and Almeria. GUADEC is always the most special time being able to meet absent friends, and of course the scheming, the plotting and rabble rousing and that’s just the things I’m doing! :-)
I’m writing these lines while I’m in the flight to Almeria where this year’s GNOME Users And Developers European Conference will take place, typing with my Thinkpad Bluetooth keyboard on my mobile phone (I’ve to admit that the Android physical keyboard usage is getting awesome, allowing proper WM actions) :), as the battery of my T460p was already over after the flight from Florence to Madrid during which I fixed some more shell JS errors.
There are countless Linux distributions these days, but one in particular seems to really get people excited -- elementary OS. Why is this? Well, the developers of the operating system focus heavily on the user interface and experience -- it is kind of like a mix between GNOME and macOS. For those that still believe the fabled "year of the Linux desktop" is coming, elementary OS' beauty and polish serves as a beacon of hope. Unfortunately, the distribution has not made a significant impact -- yet.
If you are a fan of the operating system, you will be happy to know elementary OS 5.0 "Juno" Beta 1 is available right now! Before you get too excited, however, you probably shouldn't install it. The developers are making it very clear that Juno Beta 1 is not yet ready for prime time, and it is not intended for end users. While you can install it if you want, you will not have a good experience -- it is really just intended for third-party app developers at this point.
CentOS Linux 6.10 is derived from source code released by Red Hat, Inc. for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10. All upstream variants have been placed into one combined repository to make it easier for end users. Workstation, server, and minimal installs can all be done from our combined repository. All of our testing is only done against this combined distribution.
After much wait and anticipation, the elementary OS developers have shipped the first beta of their forthcoming “Juno” release. Being called a Developer Preview, it is aimed at the 3rd party developer and other users who are interested in testing the new features.
This release cycle will primarily strive to deliver a better experience by incorporating different design and UX improvements. The designers have worked hard on the icons and modified about 1000 icon files. There has also been a jump from Gtk+ 3.18 to Gtk+ 3.22, resulting in a full rewrite of stylesheet.
AryaLinux 1.0 is the latest in our ever evolving line of built-from scratch system. This is the first time we are releasing a Gnome version of AryaLinux and we plan on making Gnome the default desktop environment for Arya. Of course other desktop environments would be supported but AryaLinux would be a Gnome3 based distribution. Here is a glimpse of the changes that have happened in this release.
Final Call for RMLL volunteers RMLL/LSM
Mageia will be present with a stand in at RMLL in Strasbourg, but we have very few volunteers who have put their names down for the stand: https://framadate.org/dbLxWJPnci6o6aqb If you’re going to be there, please go to that signup page and let us know – RMLL starts this coming Saturday, so we need you urgently!
Linux distribution Gentoo's maintainers say attempts by attackers last week to sabotage code stored on Github is unlikely to have worked.
Gentoo's Github account was compromised in late June.
The attacker was able to gain administrative privileges for Gentoo's Github account, after guessing the password for it.
Gentoo's maintainers were alerted to the attack early thanks to the attacker removing all developers from the Github account, causing them to be emailed.
Gentoo has laid out the cause and impact of an attack that saw the Linux distribution locked out of its GitHub organisation.
The attack took place on June 28, and saw Gentoo unable to use GitHub for approximately five days.
Due a lack of two-factor authentication, once the attacker guessed an admin's password, the organisation was in trouble.
UK-based Micro Focus acquired Suse from The Attachmate Group back in 2014, but now the ownership of Suse is being transferred from Micro Focus International to Sweden’s investment firm EQT VIII. The deal, which is yet to be completed, has been finalized for $2.535 billion.
[...]
The acquisition is expected to complete by early 2019 with Nils Brauckmann continuing his job of the CEO. In the announcements, the SUSE team has assured that latest development will not let them deviate from their commitment for building open source software. They are viewing the buyout as a positive thing for the development of their open source products.
The SUSE division – which at its core is a business-to-business operating system service company – is being snapped up by Swedish private equity firm EQT just four years after being acquired by Micro Focus as part of its €£1.8billion takeover of the Attachmate Group which accounted for a fifth of Attachment's revenues at the time of purchase.
SUSE, the company behind the popular Linux distribution, OpenSUSE is going to be acquired for by EQT from Micro Focus for $2.535 billion.
Before anyone writes in with stern words, KVM is inherently in all major Linux distributions and not exclusively code that comes with a Red Hat distro.
However, Red Hat has enhanced KVM with some very useful features that those already running Red Hat Enterprise Linux need to be aware.
Red Hat has two versions; a basic model included in Enterprise Linux that can have four distinct VMs on a single host and a more sophisticated Red Hat Virtualisation edition.
Red Hat Virtualisation doesn’t require a host OS, can be deployed on bare-metal installations and spawn as many isolated VMs as is needed.
With the potential for hundreds of virtual machines, it also has sophisticated management tools to enable a supervisor to virtualise resources, processes, and applications easily.
Red Hat, Inc. has launched a program that aims to help system integrators (SIs) build and monetize a modern cloud-native application development and delivery practice using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat JBossMiddleware.
The Red Hat OpenShift Practice Builder Program is designed to help SIs build expertise on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss Middleware developer tools and enable them to build and modernize applications for the cloud, to help deliver new services at lower cost and accelerate development for faster return on investment.
Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10, CentOS Linux 6.10 incorporates a new GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) update that supports retpolines to better protect users against the second variant of the well-known Spectre security vulnerability affecting billions of computers powered by modern processors.
The CentOS Linux 6.10 release also rebases the gcc-libraries, clufter, and pacemaker packages on newer upstream releases, updates the iptables-services package to read configuration files from the /etc/sysctl.d folder, and updates BIND with a new root KSK for the forthcoming DNSSEC Root Zone Key-Signing-Key rollover.
In the old world, the operating system was the center of the computing universe. In today’s modern application age, container platforms fill the space once occupied by the OS. That fact helps to explain why so much cash and code is pouring into Kubernetes.
What it doesn’t explain, however, is why comparatively few companies are investing heavily enough in Kubernetes. Given the central role Kubernetes seems destined to play in shaping enterprise infrastructure, we should see more competition to contribute, given that more code tends to equal more influence in open source. Oddly, only Google and Red Hat seem to be playing to win in Kubernetes, based on contribution counts.
When it comes to the growing number of changes slated for Fedora 29, while most of the feature plans benefit all supported CPU architectures, there are also some ARM-specific improvements planned.
There are two main ARM feature proposals so far for Fedora 29: enabling ZRAM for ARMv7/AArch64 and using UEFI for ARMv7 device booting.
I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.
Now that Linux Mint 19 "Tara" has been officially released and it's available to download as Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions, the development team announced today that the upgrade path from the Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" operating system is now open for all three editions, except the KDE one which is no longer supported.
However, upgrading is recommended only for users who want to explore the new features of Linux Mint 19 "Tara" or they need a fix for an issue with Linux Mint 18.3 "Sylvia" as Linux Mint project leader warns everyone not to upgrade if their installations aren't broken. He reminds users that the Linux Mint 17 series is supported until 2019 and the Linux Mint 18 series until 2021.
This week the Linux Mint 19 Tara Cinnamon operating system has been released providing long-term support until 2023 allowing users the satisfaction of knowing support will be available for at least five years. New features in the latest version of Linux Mint include Timeshift which was first unveiled within Linux Mint 18.3 and backported to all Linux Mint releases. The new feature is now the centre of Linux Mint’s update strategy and communication.
Clem Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, has announced that it is now possible to upgrade from Linux Mint 18.3 to version 19, which was released on June 29. If you’re planning to update, bear in mind that upgrade can go a bit wonky or leave residue from your last install (such as packages remaining that wouldn't be there in a clean install of Linux Mint 19).
So to help promote the latest release (and the distro in general) the folks at Deepin HQ have put together a sleek new promo video.
And it’s really good.
The 4:39 clip, posted to the official Deepin Linux YouTube channel and embedded below convenience, breezes through the many unique features that make the distro what it is.
There are demos of new features and changes (like the new app launcher), a gander at improvements to core system apps like Deepin Files, and a showcase of why the distribution is often considered to have the best Linux app store around!
Linux Ultimate Gamers Edition has launched their 5.8 ISO, and you can currently download it from SourceForge and Softpedia if you’re interested in trying out a huge cross section of heavy-hitting applications that GNU/Linux has to offer. Users who have been involved with Linux for some time might remember Ubuntu Ultimate, which is the distro that Linux Ultimate Gamers Edition is based on.
Boutique distros have a reputation for coming with only a small number of applications and having repositories that aren’t as well stocked as those like Arch or Linux Mint. Ultimate Gamers seriously challenges that assumption. Since it’s based on Debian and Ubuntu, users can install a large number of applications if they’d like to.
NXElec has launched an 80 x 42mm “Innostick 6” SBC that runs Linux on a low-power, 900MHz i.MX6 ULL SoC, and offers up to 32GB eMMC, WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB host and OTG ports.
Nine-year old embedded firm Shanghai Naxing Electronics (NXElec), which makes the BeagleBone Companion Board and BeadaFrame LCD Display Kit for BeagleBoard, has now moved to the NXP world with a miniscule Innostick 6 SBC. The 80 x 42mm board features the low-power, i.MX6 ULL, a variation on the i.MX6 UltraLite (UL) that similarly offers a single Cortex-A7 core, in this case clocked to 900MHz. Other i.MX6 ULL SBCs include MYIR’s 70 x 55mm MYS-6ULX and PolyVection’s open source VoltaStream Zero, an audio streaming SBC that features a similarly petite footprint.
Winmate’s rugged “FM10A VMC” touch-panel computer is designed for forklifts and runs Android 6.0 or Ubuntu 16.04 on an i.MX6 Dual. It offers a 10.4-inch HD screen, a camera, and multiple wireless options.
We have never covered Winmate on LinuxGizmos because as the name suggests, most of its products are designed exclusively for Windows. Yet, like many traditionally Windows-oriented embedded vendors, Winmate — 16 percent of which is owned by Advantech — appears to be giving Linux a tryout. An Ubuntu- and Android ready FM10A VMC system has been mixed into its June 29 announcement of a half dozen touch-panel vehicle mounted computers designed for forklifts used in warehouse data collection and logistics applications.
Although the UDOO Bolt looks like any other tiny single board computer, it can act as a full-fledged computer as well. You can just plug in a monitor, mouse, and keyboard and turn it into a mini workstation. It supports Windows 10 and any 64-bit Linux distribution.
Today, we have the list of the Top 20 most downloaded apps from the Tizen Store during June 2018. These apps are compatible with the current range of Tizen mobiles, such as the Samsung Z1, Z2, Z3, and Z4 mobiles
WhatsApp still remains top of the leaderboard even though there was a serious issue at the end of June. The problem was however addressed via an update, version 2.16.9, that brought with it WhatsApp video calling, which also happens to be the first video calling app on the Tizen mobile platform.
Whether you believe that blockchain technology is poised to change the world or that it is a flash in the pan, one thing is sure: Technical and legal questions about blockchain are on everyone's mind today. People often wonder: Is Bitcoin "open source"? But this question arises from confusion about three separate concepts: blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and open source software.
I remember talking to other technology reporters in 2000, asking if they thought Linux had a commercial future. Some saw the uptake in server rooms and were certain of it. Others believed Linux advocates to be nothing more than anti-vendor zealots and hobbyists who would rather write software themselves than pay for it, and that’s where open-source would remain.
The open source movement has facilitated the development of low cost and easy-to-use technologies for scientific settings. A study published in PLOS ONE describes the creation of a novel multi-fluorescence imaging system from readily available, low cost components.
The study has just been awarded the 2018 PLOS Open Source Toolkit Channel Prize, and I was lucky to interview via email study authors Isaac Nuñez and Tamara Matute, of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, who both contributed to the answers below.
[...]
The GOSH (Global Open Science Hardware) movement and OpenPlant work to promote open source technology. We believe that openly shared technologies, such as open scientific hardware and open genetic tools, are crucial for technology development and knowledge production, particularly in low income countries.
Joel Hernández is frank about why he’s trying to launch Openbook, an open source, hyper-secure social network as an alternative to Facebook.
The 22-year-old programmer and entrepreneur, who by day works as a security software engineer for Dutch telecoms giant KPN, told Computer Business Review: “We are sleepwalking into a zero privacy world. This may not be abused now, but it will be in future. I’m someone with the capability to fix a small part of that.”
Two years ago he had tried to talk a group of friends into the project, amid concerns about Facebook and other social media platform’s data sharing practices and a perceived lack of privacy. They told him they didn’t think anyone cared enough to make the leap to an alternative that prioritised security and transparency.
Open source has been a tech mainstay for decades in large part, as Tilde co-founder and JavaScript veteran Yehuda Katz has argued, because it "gives engineers the power to collaborate across ...companies without involving [business development]."
"The benefits of this workaround are extraordinary and underappreciated," Katz continued. But open source offers something just as extraordinary and even more underappreciated, something that edX community lead John Mark Walker recently pointed out on Twitter.
Namely, what open source does to collaboration among engineers inside the same company.
The Open Source Initiative is the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD) and the community-recognized body for reviewing and approving licenses as OSD-conformant. The organization's members play an important role across the world in community building, education and public advocacy to promote the importance of non-proprietary software. In doing so they further international awareness of how open source technologies, licenses and models of development can provide economic and strategic advantage.
Rust was the primary reason we dropped source parity for TenFourFox also (though there were plenty of other reasons such as changes to the graphics stack, the hard requirement for Skia, Electrolysis and changes to ICU; all of this could have been worked around, but with substantial difficulty, and likely with severe compromises). Now that Firefox 52ESR, the last ESR to not require Rust support, is on its last legs, this marks the final end of "Warpzilla" and Firefox on OS/2. SPARC (and apparently Solaris in general) doesn't have rustc or cargo support either, so this is likely the end of Firefox on any version of Solaris as well. Yes, I use Firefox on my Sun Ultra-3 laptop with Solaris 10. There are probably other minor platforms just hanging on that will wink out and disappear which I haven't yet discovered.
Event Telemetry is the means by which we can send ordered interaction data from Firefox users back to Mozilla where we can use it to make product decisions.
For example, we know from a histogram that the most popular way of opening the Developer Tools in Firefox Beta 62 is by the shortcut key (Ctrl+Shift+I). And it’s nice to see that the number of times the Javascript Debugger was opened was roughly 1/10th of the number of times the shortcut key was used.
Last time we had a closer look at a metrics-based report analysis from the Analysen & Tal agency that took a deep dive into support.mozilla.org’s historical data.
Today, we are going to continue sharing external insights into our community and support model with a summary of the comparative study conducted for us by a team of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design from Denmark. While we were not exactly looking for the essence of hygge, we found quite a few interesting nuggets of wisdom and inspiration that we’d like to share with you below. You can find the presentation here.
As you can see, the C++ step that was originally required to call wasm from JS has been completely eliminated!
This resulted in massive speedups over a variety of different situations: when a wasm function is directly / indirectly / polymorphically called, or used as a getter/setter, or called by Function.prototype.call/apply, when the call is missing required arguments, etc. Here's a brief summary of the results, but there might be a full-blown blog post about these optimizations coming on Mozilla Hacks at some point in the future.
LibreOffice styles management sure can benefit from improvements. All office suites can. Not only that, there are dozens of other areas where this free office suite could better itself. But to focus on the original question, styles in LibreOffice are different from Microsoft Office, but they work reasonably well.
There are some annoyances - selected text, the style and tab jumps on selection, and the lack of global export. On the other hand, you have the preview option, and the modify sub-menu is powerful and rather intuitive. Usable and reasonable. Now, that does not mean you should toss away your payware suite and go free. Not at all. The specific, individual needs are very delicate. Moreover, while LibreOffice has improved a lot, it's still not quite as powerful as Microsoft Office, and this is more evident in Calc and Impress, less so in Writer, which often gets most attention and care. But it is marching in the right direction, and if you're keen on doing documents right, you need to use styles. And when it comes to styles, LibreOffice 6.0 works fairly well. But the quest for perfection continues. So long and thanks for all the fonts.
Tomorrow, July 6, The Document Foundation plans to host the third and final bug hunting session for the LibreOffice 6.1 office suite, due for release in mid-August 2018. This bug hunting session is aimed at fixing last remaining issue against the Release Candidate milestone.
Those interested in joining the final bug hunting session to find, report and triage bugs can now download the first Release Candidate version of LibreOffice 6.1 for GNU/Linux as DEB and RPM packages, as well as for macOS and Microsoft Windows platforms.
The reason for this is a phenomenom called "bufferbloat". I'm not going to explain it in detail, there are plenty of good resources to read about it, including the eponymous Bufferbloat.net. Bufferbloat is the result of complex interactions between the software and hardware systems routing traffic around on the Internet. It causes higher latency in networks, even ones with plenty of bandwidth. In a nutshell, software queues in our routers are not letting certain packets through fast enough to ensure that things feel interactive and responsive. Pings, TCP ACKs, SSH connections, are all being held up behind a long line of packets that may not need to be delivered with the same urgency. There's enough bandwidth to process the queue, the trick is to do it more quickly and more fairly.
- The first half of 2018 was certainly eventful for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) with the stable release of GCC8, feature development on GCC9 kicking off, and all the associated fun.
The stable GCC 8.1 debut brought with it initial C++2A support, initial Intel Cannonlake and Icelake CPU enablement, Profile Guided Optimization improvements and other optimization passes work, Intel CET, Qualcomm Saphira CPU support and other ARM CPU improvements, C17 language support, updates for the Go and Fortran languages, AMD HSA IL / BRING improvements, and a whole lot of other work that built up over the past year. GCC 8.1 was officially released in early May while all feature work is now focused on GCC 9 that should debut as stable around the end of Q1'2019.
Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community.
Python 3 adoption has clearly picked up over the last few years, though there is still a long way to go. Big Python-using companies tend to have a whole lot of Python 2.7 code running on their infrastructure and Facebook is no exception. But Jason Fried came to PyCon 2018 to describe what has happened at the company over the last four years or so—it has gone from using almost no Python 3 to it becoming the dominant version of Python in the company. He was instrumental in helping to make that happen and his talk [YouTube video] may provide other organizations with some ideas on how to tackle their migration.
Fried started working at Facebook in 2011 and he quickly found that he needed to teach himself Python because it was much easier to get code reviewed if it was in Python. At some point later, he found that he was the driving force behind Python 3 adoption at Facebook. He never had a plan to do that, it just came about as he worked with Python more and more.
The combination of an "unsuspecting library employee" and a bunch of bored children has created a popular program using the Raspberry Pi and other tools to teach coding to kids. Qumisha Goss is a librarian at the Parkman branch of the Detroit Public Library; she started the "Parkman Coders" program and came to PyCon 2018 in Cleveland, Ohio to tell the assembled Pythonistas all about it. She also had some thoughts on ways to make the Python community a more diverse place, along with some concerns for her students that are much bigger than the diversity topic.
We thought it might be fun as retaliation to send multipart emails, with the text/html part saying “This email has no HTML version, please refer to the plain text”. An hour and a few curses at mutt’s documentation later, I’d come up with this solution...
Get in the car, kids. It's time to see the Fourth of July drone show.
Towns in California, Colorado and Arizona – facing another season of drought and wildfire – are turning to drone shows as a less dangerous alternative to organized fireworks, encouraged by the development of jaw-dropping, choreographed shows such as the one Intel prepared for the Winter Olympics broadcast.
In the ‘60s, the US federal government saw a need for a unified standard for digitally encoding information. Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 executive order on computer standards directed federal agencies to convert all of their databases to the new character encoding standard: the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII.
Although more powerful and flexible standards have since appeared - most notably Unicode, created to enable people to use computers in any language - ASCII became ubiquitous, and remains foundational to computing. It was the most popular encoding on the web until 2007.
In June 2016, Ernest “Chris” Keys received a heart transplant at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston, giving him and his family hope he would finally return home after months in the hospital battling chronic heart failure.
Things went downhill “almost immediately after surgery,” according to a lawsuit filed last month against St. Luke’s and its affiliated Baylor College of Medicine, as well as three Baylor doctors who treated Keys.
After several follow-up surgeries, Keys, then 44, left St. Luke’s in August 2016 with a new heart — but also a severe brain injury that left him unable to speak or walk.
“It’s horrible what he’s been through,” said Michelle Wan, a Houston lawyer who filed the lawsuit in Harris County District Court.
A hospital spokeswoman said she could not discuss pending litigation and declined to respond to questions about the care Keys received.
But it makes sense that the WHO would respond to lobbying by its affiliates. If the overuse of games or smartphones are a matter of behavior, then of course that behavior is bound to vary by region, nation, culture, and other social conditions. To some extent, all diseases require a social construction—they have to be acknowledged by a body like the WHO in a bureaucratic artifact like the ICD in order to be diagnosed, treated, managed, and paid for. But unlike a viral infection or an autoimmune condition, a behavioral disorder is particularly susceptible to the varied social contexts in which the behavior takes place.
The discrepancy between digital dependencies considered pathological and those considered perfectly normal may simply come down to pleasing lobbyists--or avoiding their displeasure.
Competition law is a critical tool in seeking to maintain some semblance of reasonable pricing in the pharmaceutical market. It is particularly important as legislators around the world appear extremely hesitant to address pharmaceutical pricing in meaningful ways, regrettably influenced by well-funded lobbying.
Two recent competition law decisions discussed below illustrate the importance of and challenges to regulating the pharmaceutical sector. In the first, the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) partially upheld and partially reversed and remanded (pending briefing) a decision by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) fining Pfizer and Flynn close to €£90 million for abuse of dominant position in the excessive pricing of an anti-epilepsy drug. The CAT decision is problematic because it creates unnecessary and unwarranted hurdles to findings of excessive pricing in the UK. In the second decision, the US Federal Trade Commission succeeds in proving that AbbVie engaged in abuse of monopoly power by engaging in sham patent litigation against two generic producers in order to delay market entry of competitive products. The Federal District Court found that AbbVie’s patent lawyers by “clear and convincing” evidence had knowingly pursued patent infringement claims without chance of success for no other purpose than to delay market entry.
A new analysis of the thriving synthetic biology patent landscape has revealed the top patent owners and dealmakers in this space, as well as those appearing most often in the courtroom. Among its key findings are that Hewlett Packard (HP) has expanded into the life sciences arena and that the microfluidics market is booming. What’s more, a look at patenting activity by jurisdiction shows a stark contrast between the behaviours of US and Chinese players – and plenty of opportunities for collaboration between the two.
Scholars and professionals in IP, trade and public health are likely to be digesting the 900-odd page WTO Panel Reports in Australia – Tobacco Plain Packaging, circulated on 28 June 2018, for some time. An appeal by one or more of the complainants (Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Indonesia) is expected, to be launched between 20 and 60 days after circulation, in accordance with the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU, Art 16). Although Australia won the dispute in its entirety, the country could also choose to appeal certain intermediate findings of the Panel, such as its interpretation or application of particular WTO provisions.
With pressure from the United States, Colombia will reinstate its practice of spraying glyphosate to eradicate coca crops.
Colombia’s Minister of Defense says the country will reinstate the policy of eradicating its coca production with glyphosate, this time with the help of drones.
Uber-popular battle royale game Fortnite is being used as a vehicle for malware and adware, with YouTube and other streaming services being exploited to spread malicious code.
Earlier this year, a bug in Google Chrome was a rejoice for tech support scammers who could freeze people’s browser using the infamous download bomb trick.
The general awareness of microarchitectural attacks is greatly increased since meltdown and spectre earlier this year. A lot of time and energy has been spent in defending against such attacks, with a threat model that assumes attacks originate from the CPU. Frigo et al. open up an entirely new can of worms – modern SoCs contain a variety of special purpose accelerator units, chief among which is the GPU. GPUs are everywhere these days.
LWN reported on June 29 that Gentoo's GitHub mirror had been compromised. Gentoo now considers the incident resolved and the full report is available.
Over the years, threats have evolved from simple attacks to very advanced threats that can cripple an organization and hide their tracks. As the attacks have evolved, so have our protection needs. We have gone from the single point of protection on mainframes and Unix servers to a large number of endpoints across many networks. We went from Layer 3 security appliances to protect the entire network from the outside to place more of an importance on the endpoints. We've seen this grow from antivirus solutions to tools that use machine learning and provide in-depth threat hunting tools.
In the past cyber gangsters mainly targeted their tools at Windows users, since this was the most widely-spread operating system. Recently, modifications for Linux have been discovered as well.
Cybercriminals have grown to love decentralized digital currencies. Ransomware now seems to be the trend of the past. These days it is cryptojacking that is the hot one.
PROPagate was originally discovered in October 2017, so it represents a fairly new way to target Windows installations. However, Smoke Loader has been around since at least 2011. The current version has evolved considerably, and some of the recent outbreaks have been as a result of fake patches that claimed to correct the Meltdown and Spectre exploits.
[...]
PROPagate was originally discovered in October 2017, so it represents a fairly new way to target Windows installations. However, Smoke Loader has been around since at least 2011. The current version has evolved considerably, and some of the recent outbreaks have been as a result of fake patches that claimed to correct the Meltdown and Spectre exploits.
An infosec researcher who uses the online pseudonym of Capt. Meelo has modified an NSA hacking tool known as DoublePulsar to work on the Windows IoT operating system (formerly known as Windows Embedded).
The original DoublePulsar is a hacking tool that was developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA), and was stolen and then leaked online by a hacking group known as The Shadow Brokers.
At its core, DoublePulsar is a Ring-0 kernel mode payload that acts like a backdoor into compromised systems. DoublePulsar is not meant to be used on its own, but together with other NSA tools.
Larsen and other military officers involved said Russian personnel behaved professionally and kept their distance, but the NATO forces were taking new steps to insulate themselves electronically: All members of the crew on Larsen’s four ships were required to keep their phones on airplane mode to ward off hacking [sic] attempts.
[...]
Troops at Estonia’s Tapa military base switched to a “no smartphones” policy last year, after they noticed their contacts were disappearing and music they had not downloaded would start playing.
In this post I describe how my cheap magstripe reader wouldn’t read all magstripes, only credit/debit cards. This did nothing to help me understand what data was on my hotel key card – which is what I really wanted to know. Rather than take the obvious next step or buying a better reader, I opted to open up the cheap magstripe reader, probed around a bit and found a way to read the raw data off the hotel magstripes. What that data means remains a mystery so there may be a part 2 at some stage.
Someone impersonating administrators of cryptocurrency-related discussion channels on Slack, Discord, and other social messaging platforms has been attempting to lure others into installing macOS malware. The social-engineering campaign consists of posting a script in discussions and encouraging people to copy and paste that script into a Terminal window on their Macs. The command downloads a huge (34 megabyte) file and executes it, establishing a remote connection that acts as a backdoor for the attacker.
The contract will see services such as automation and blockchain provided to federal departments including defense and home affairs, IBM’s Asia Pacific head, Harriet Green, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday. The “youth of the technology” and the employment of Australians to support and help the implementation would be hallmarks of the new partnership, she said.
We’ve argued for many years that governments should implement transparent processes to review and disclose the vulnerabilities that they learn about. Such processeses are essential for the cybersecurity of citizens, businesses, and indeed governments themselves. To advance policy discourse on this issue in Europe, we recently participated in the Centre of European Policy Studies (CEPS) Taskforce on Software Vulnerability Disclosure. The Taskforce’s final report was published this week and makes a strong case for the need for government vulnerability disclosure policies, and comes at a critical juncture as European policymakers debate the EU Cybersecurity Act.
"Public security in the United States is not good. Cases of shootings, robberies, and theft are frequent"
The optimism generated by President Trump’s meeting last month with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is giving way to the reality of just how difficult it will be to persuade North Korea to surrender its nuclear weapons. In fact, it’s difficult even to understand what Kim and Trump actually agreed to.
Recent reports said U.S. intelligence agencies suspect that North Korea has, according to NBC News, “increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites;” has also, 38 North adds, made “improvements to the infrastructure at … Yongbyon,” the plutonium-production reactor; and, The Washington Post reports, is “considering ways to conceal the number of weapons it has and secret production facilities.” Separately, The Wall Street Journal reported that North Korea was expanding a facility to build solid-fuel ballistic missiles, even as Kim was meeting with his South Korean counterpart in April and preparing for his meeting with Trump in June.
A complex air war over Libya has killed hundreds of innocent civilians, and possibly many more, since the U.S.-led NATO intervention in the North African state began in 2011. And almost no one outside of the war-torn country has even noticed. The U.S. government, for its part, increasingly seems to prefer it that way.
Manned warplanes and drones from four foreign countries and various Libyan factions conducted at least 2,158 air strikes between September 2012 and mid-June 2018, according to a new report from the Washington D.C. based New America Foundation and Airwars.org, an air-strike-tracking project affiliated with the University of London.
The CIA will not be able to block a Freedom of Information Act request regarding records about the justification, approval process, and assessment of casualties ahead of the January 2017 raid by U.S. forces in al Ghayil, Yemen, that left 10 children among the dead, according to reports.
The request for the records, made by the American Civil Liberties Union, was issued to the U.S. Departments of Defense, Justice and State, along with the CIA. According to U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York, all litigation over the request has proceeded with the exception of the CIA.
The CIA issued its customary Glomar response, refusing to confirm or deny the existence of responsive records on the grounds that doing so would reveal highly sensitive information protected from FOIA disclosure.
The ACLU argued the Glomar response is inappropriate, because public statements made over a series of days by former White House spokesman Sean Spicer, as well as earlier statements by CIA officials regarding the agency’s interest in Yemen, functioned as official acknowledgement.
White House statements about a deadly 2017 raid in Yemen prevent the CIA from refusing to say whether it has documents responsive to American Civil Liberties Union information requests, a New York federal judge held Wednesday, saying the comments made it clear that the agency had an interest in the mission.
American officials claim their drones carry out high-precision attacks on specific targets; but the reality is that most of these drone attacks result in death of innocent civilians.
Before the U.S. military began building its $100 million drone base in Agadez, Niger, U.S. Africa Command and the State Department took the temperature of locals through public-opinion surveys. The results indicated mixed feelings about the United States and its motives in the region — and take on added resonance in the wake of an ambush last October in Niger that killed four American soldiers.
“The devout of Agadez are divided on variables associated with violent religious extremism,” reads a military report that contains data from surveys conducted in 2012 by the polling firm ORB International. The 2013 report by U.S. Army Africa, which is the Army component of AFRICOM, is titled “Special Assessment: Agadez, Niger – Strategic Crossroads in the Sahara,” and was obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act.
A July 2012 survey found that 83 percent of Agadez respondents believed that American and European cultures pose a threat to traditional Muslim values. Nearly 50 percent were convinced that the United States is fighting Islam, rather than terrorism, across the Muslim world. And 40 percent believed that using violence in the name of their religion was always or sometimes justified.
On March 29, 2018, a Toyota Land Cruiser carrying five members of the Al Manthari family was travelling through the Yemeni province of Al Bayda, inland from the Gulf of Aden. The family were heading to the city of al-Sawma’ah to pick up a local elder to witness the sale of a plot of land. At two in the afternoon, a rocket from a US Predator drone hit the vehicle, killing three of its passengers. A fourth later died. One of the four men killed, Mohamed Saleh al Manthari, had three children aged between one and six. His father, Saleh al Manthari, says Mohamed was the family’s only breadwinner.
The US took responsibility for the strike, claiming the victims were terrorists. Yet Yemenis who knew the family claim otherwise. “This is not a case where we’re just taking the community’s word for it – you’ve had verification at every level,” says Jen Gibson, an attorney with legal organisation Reprieve, which represents the Al Manthari family. “You've got everyone up to the governor willing to vouch for the fact that these guys were civilians.” The US Central Command (CENTCOM) has in the past few weeks opened an investigation – a “credibility assessment” – into the circumstances of the strike, which lawyers describe as unusual.
Last month a freelance journalist named Joshua Cohen published an article in The Washington Post about the Ukraine’s growing neo-Nazi threat. Despite a gratuitous swipe at Russia for allegedly exaggerating the problem (which it hasn’t), the piece was fairly accurate.
Entitled “Ukraine’s ultra-right militias are challenging the government to a showdown,” it said that fascists have gone on a rampage while the ruling clique in Kiev closes its eyes for the most part and prays that the problem somehow goes away on its own.
Thus, a group calling itself C14 (for the fourteen-word ultra-right motto, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) not only beat up a socialist politician and celebrated Hitler’s birthday by stabbing an antiwar activist, but bragged about it on its website. Other ultra-nationalists, Cohen says, have stormed the Lvov and Kiev city councils and “assaulted or disrupted” art exhibits, anti-fascist demos, peace and gay-rights events, and a Victory Day parade commemorating the victory over Hitler in 1945.
Yet nothing has happened to stop this. President Petro Poroshenko could order a crackdown, but hasn’t for reasons that should be obvious. The U.S.-backed “Euromaidan” uprising not only drove out former president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, who had won an OSCE-certified election, but tore the country in two, precisely because ultra-rightists like C14 were in the lead.
In early 2006, Assange started to work on a website which is intended to share secret information and news leaks on an international scale. This lead to the foundation of WikiLeaks and in 2007 WikiLeaks was officially launched.
The persecution of Julian Assange must end. Or it will end in tragedy.
The Australian government and prime minister Malcolm Turnbull have an historic opportunity to decide which it will be.
They can remain silent, for which history will be unforgiving. Or they can act in the interests of justice and humanity and bring this remarkable Australian citizen home.
Assange does not ask for special treatment. The government has clear diplomatic and moral obligations to protect Australian citizens abroad from gross injustice: in Julian's case, from a gross miscarriage of justice and the extreme danger that await him should he walk out of the Ecuadorean embassy in London unprotected.
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange was willing to discuss guidelines on the release of CIA documents — which were published under the name Vault 7 beginning in March 2017 — in exchange for a limited immunity deal that might have freed him for a while, but the deal was squashed by former FBI director James Comey, a report claims.
The Hill reported that Democrat Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee; Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr; and American lawyer Adam Waldman — who is known for his US Government connections — were involved in the negotiations to try and bring about the deal during the early days of the Trump administration.
According to the report, in January 2017 Assange's lawyers contacted Waldman to see if the new administration would negotiate with the WikiLeaks publisher. Washington was aware that Assange had a trove of CIA documents that he was planning to publish.
Ex-FBI Director James Comey and some former Obama administration officials would have had much to lose if Julian Assange had shared his vision on what happened during the 2016 US presidential race, Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel opined speaking to Sputnik, explaining why the ex-FBI chief was so "incurious" about the DNC server hacking.
By this point, the belief that James Comey still deserved to be FBI director and that his firing at the hands of President Donald Trump was uncalled for takes an almost Herculean act of intellectual dishonesty.
The inspector general’s report on the FBI investigation into Hillary Cinton’s emails might have officially found no bias on the part of the bureau as an organization (questionable), but it indisputably showed an organization full of Clintonista shills complete with Comey at the helm, bumbling from one disaster to another.
This was in addition to what we already knew about Comey and his self-serving tendency to place himself at the center of every major event of the 2016 presidential election.
[...]
“Assange had a bargaining chip: The U.S. government knew he had a massive trove of documents from classified CIA computers, identifying sensitive assets and chronicling the agency’s offensive cyber warfare weapons,” Solomon noted.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Tuesday said it's too early to tell whether House Republicans would want to talk to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) about his contacts with former FBI Director James Comey during the Russia probe.
In an interview with Hill.TV's "Rising," Jordan was asked about a contributor's piece published by The Hill on Monday about how former FBI Director James Comey allegedly intervened, through Warner, to kill a WikiLeaks' immunity deal with whistleblower Julian Assange.
Following Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's exposure of former FBI Director James Comey's mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email case, investigative journalist John Solomon has shed light on Comey's meddling in the DOJ's negotiations with Julian Assange ahead of a massive disclosure of CIA cyber malpractice.
A limited immunity deal the Department of Justice was considering for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was killed when then-FBI Director James Comey intervened, a report said.
The deal, which could have temporarily freed Assange from a London embassy where he has been in exile for years, was derailed by Comey with help from Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, The Hill’s John Solomon reported on June 25.
The modern detainee in a political sense has to be understood in the abstract. Those who take to feats of hacking, publishing and articulating positions on the issue of institutional secrets have become something of a species, not as rare as they once more, but no less remarkable for that fact. And what a hounded species at that.
Across the globe prisons are now peopled by traditional, and in some instances unconventional journalists, who have found themselves in the possession of classified material. In one specific instance, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks stands tall, albeit in limited space, within the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
Unlawful imprisonment and arbitrary detention are treated by black letter lawyers with a crystal clarity that would disturb novelists and lay people; lawyers, in turn, are sometimes disturbed by the inventive ways a novelist, or litterateur type, might interpret detention. The case of Assange, shacked and hemmed in a small space at the mercy of his hosts who did grant him asylum, then citizenship, has never been an easy one to explain to either. Ever murky, and ever nebulous, his background and circumstances inspires polarity rather than accord.
A British Foreign Office minster called Tuesday for an end to the impasse surrounding WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, a resident of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012.
“It is now over six years since the Ecuadorian Embassy has been abused in its purpose as an embassy” Sir Patrick McLoughlin, a Conservative member of the House of Commons, said during a Parliament hearing. “How long does the government care to put up with this?”
Mr. Assange “is in the embassy of his own choice,” responded Sir Alan Duncan, a fellow Conservative and the U.K. minister of state for Europe and the Americas.
A UK Foreign Office minister has offered cupboard-dwelling WikiLeaker Julian Assange access to medical attention if he leaves Ecuador's London embassy.
Sir Alan Duncan told Parliament this afternoon that the British government is "increasingly concerned" about Assange's health.
"It is our wish that this can be brought to an end and we'd like to make the assurance that if [Assange] were to step out of the embassy, he would be treated humanely and properly and that the first priority would be to look after his health, which we think is deteriorating," Sir Alan told the House of Commons earlier today.
Democrats in the US Senate have urged Vice President Mike Pence to press Ecuador's government over asylum it grants to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Senator Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and nine other Democratic senators said in a letter to Pence that they were extremely concerned over Ecuador's protection of Assange at its embassy in London.
Pence was beginning his stop in Ecuador on Wednesday as part of a three-nation tour of Latin America, where he will meet with President Lenin Moreno to discuss trade and the crisis in Venezuela.
During their private meeting, Pence raised the issue of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who Ecuador has granted asylum, U.S. officials said.
Assange, whose leak of classified U.S. documents infuriated U.S. government officials, has been a sticking point between the two nations. He has been living under asylum inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012.
Pence and Moreno did not mention Assange in their public comments.
Lawmakers pressed Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday to raise concerns while in Ecuador this week about the country’s decision to continue shielding WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, a resident of its London embassy for the past six years.
A group of 10 senators, all Democrats, wrote Mr. Pence urging him to discuss Mr. Assange’s asylum status during his meeting with Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno.
Led by Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the letter said that lawmakers “remain extremely concerned about Ecuador providing asylum to WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange since June 2012.”
Vice President Mike Pence discussed the asylum status of Julian Assange during a meeting with Ecuador's leader on Thursday, following pressure from Senate Democrats who have voiced concerns over the country's protection of the WikiLeaks founder.
"The vice president raised the issue of Mr. Assange. It was a constructive conversation. They agreed to remain in close coordination on potential next steps going forward," a White House official said in a statement.
Several Democratic senators penned a letter to Pence earlier this week asking him to raise the issue when he met with Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno during his multi-country swing through Latin America.
Such a historical twist, but one that deserves its iniquitous slot in the history books. No secret has been made about US policy towards Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, which continues its trajectory to seek his apprehension and shutter the organisation. Despite its cables being used for political effect by interested parties; despite the exposures of corruption within the ranks of US politics, Assange is to be thanked with punishment.
This is the sentiment expressed by Senator Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with nine other Democratic senators, in a letter to US Vice President Mike Pence. The senators had been losing sleep after getting wind of what was said, or rather not said, in a June 4 phone call between Pence and Ecuadorean President Lenín Moreno. One glaring omission troubled them: the absence of any discussion about Assange’s asylum status and stay in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
Last week, US Vice President Mike Pence visited South and Central America to pressure Latin American governments to back Washington’s efforts to tighten its control over the region.
Announcing an escalated offensive against democratic and social rights, Pence negotiated with Ecuador over the expulsion of Julian Assange from Quito’s embassy in London. He also coordinated with Brazil and Ecuador to intensify the US intervention in Venezuela’s crisis and pressed Central American governments to build up their armed forces to prevent immigrants from trying to escape the desperate social conditions in their countries of origin.
On Thursday, Pence stopped in Quito, Ecuador, the highest ranking US official to visit the country in three decades. Given that President Lenín Moreno’s government seeks a rapprochement with Washington, a group of ten US Democratic senators sent an open letter to Pence ahead of the trip pushing for him to force the expulsion of Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks.
Democrats in the U.S. Senate also urged the vice president to press Ecuador's government over its continued asylum for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Ten Democratic senators said in a letter to Pence that they were extremely concerned over Ecuador's protection of Assange, who has lived in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012.
"It is imperative that you raise U.S. concerns with President (Lenin) Moreno," the letter said. "WikiLeaks continues its efforts to undermine democratic processes globally."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, on Tuesday, 3 July, will be celebrating his 47th birthday in the same Ecuadorian embassy in London that has been his abode for 6 years now. His motives, his interventions, his leaks, and not to forget the status of his asylum at the embassy have been subjects of intense debates.
Two days after the United States Vice President, Mike Pence, in a meeting with Ecuador President Lenin Moreno, discussed Assange, an Ecuadorian diplomat on Monday, 2 July, said Washington can't decide the fate of Australian programmer.
Having travelled across Australia, gone to 37 different schools, Julian Assange who sought refuge at Ecuador’s Embassy in London on 19 June 2012, is now offered citizenship by Equador. This move is being seen as an effort to ease out mounting pressure from the international community on Assange, who was confined to the embassy for six long years.
The environmental organization published a video on its Twitter page showing a Superman-shaped drone flying over the Bugey nuclear plant, located about 20 miles from the city of Lyon. The drone then slams into a building inside the nuclear plant.
Airspace surrounding and above nuclear plants are no-fly zones in France.
Greenpeace crashed a Superman-shaped drone into a French nuclear plant on Tuesday to demonstrate its vulnerability to outside attacks, the environmental group said. Greenpeace said it had flown the drone — piloted by one of its activists — into the no-fly zone around utility EDF’s Bugey nuclear plant, near Lyon, and then crashed it against the wall of the plant’s spent-fuel pool building. “This action again highlights the extreme vulnerability of this type of buildings, which contain the highest amount of radioactivity in nuclear plants,” Greenpeace said.
He’d almost certainly have to work with Harley’s foreign foes to fill the void, and none has stepped forward to announce any such negotiations.
The taxi queue arrangement at Helsinki Airport has changed quite a bit over the weekend. Instead of a single, long line of taxis waiting for customers, there are now four lanes reserved for specific companies, each offering slightly different pricing schemes.
The airport set up the new arrangement before Finland's taxi law reforms went into effect on Sunday and started using it on Monday. The first row of taxis, the one closest to Terminal 2's arrivals doors, belongs to Lähitaksi, while the second row is reserved for Vantaan Taksi.
The third row is devoted to Taksi Helsinki vehicles, while a fourth row was still empty on Monday, one day after the reforms went into effect.
Amtrak has made drastic changes in the dark, without input from the public, stakeholders or lawmakers.
With smart contracts gaining more and more popularity, there have been many platforms that have tried to attract users by offering blockchains with certain revisions that would allow better deals. One of them is called Burst Dymaxion, and this one offers a truly distinct experience thanks to various unique mechanisms and features.
Before we get to the actual topic of this post, a quick follow-up to the previous one: the Deseret News reports that President Trump has interviewed Senator Mike Lee, so the possibility of a FRAND-friendly Supreme Court Justice is real (though other candidates have been interviewed as well).
Last week, an interesting class action complaint was brought against Qualcomm in the Northern District of California by a group of consumers, with the class being defined broadly enough to include any U.S. smartphone buyer. I've run a couple of online searches and found that there's a whole bunch of other class lawsuits pending against Qualcomm, and they're all about Broadcom's acquisition of Qualcomm, which couldn't materialize after a presidential veto.
Fox, in his demonstration of the role that the United Kingdom has played and continues to play as one of the “foremost champions” of the multilateral trading system, highlighted the efforts of the UK in making sure that the multilateral trading system is beneficial to all.
[...]
In the medium term, the system needs reforming for adaptation to a more multi-polar technological world and in the long term, leadership is needed for more inclusiveness of women and young people in international trade and entrepreneurship, she added.
I only came to be convinced slowly about Russia’s role in the attack and I have been skeptical of the Steele dossier from the day it was published. That said, I obviously do not like Donald Trump — though I’m no Hillary fan, either. But my decision to share information with the FBI had nothing to do with my dislike for Donald Trump. It had to do with the serious damage that someone else I believed to be involved in the Russian attack — someone I had been friendly with — was doing to innocent people, almost all of those people totally uninvolved in American politics.
But in a small courtroom in California’s Redwood City on Monday, attorneys for the social media company presented a different message from the one executives have made to Congress, in interviews and in speeches: Facebook, they repeatedly argued, is a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the first amendment.
In Facebook's lawyers claim that it is a “publisher” which gives it the right to decide “what not publish.”
Today America celebrates its liberation from the shackles of the British Crown and the beginning of its transition into corporatist oligarchy, which is a lot like celebrating your lateral promotion from housekeeping to laundry staff. Fireworks will be set off, hot dogs will be consumed, and a strange yellow concoction known as Mountain Dew will be imbibed by patriotic high-fiving Yankees eager to celebrate their hard-fought freedom to funnel their taxes into corporate welfare instead of to the King.
Spark up a bottle rocket for me, America! In trouncing King George’s red-coated goon squad, you made it possible for the donor class to slowly buy up more and more control of your shiny new government, allowing for a system of rule determined not by royal bloodlines, but by wealth bloodlines. Now instead of your national affairs being determined by some gilded schmuck across the pond, they are determined by the billionaire owners of multinational corporations and banks. These oligarchs have shored up their rule to such an extent that congressional candidates who outspend their opponents are almost certain to win, and a 2014 Princeton study found that ordinary Americans have no influence whatsoever over the behavior of their government while the will of the wealthy has a direct influence on US policy and legislation.
Just as the World Cup had forced the British media to grudgingly acknowledge the obvious truth that Russia is an extremely interesting country inhabited, like everywhere else, by mostly pleasant and attractive people, we have a screaming reprise of the “Salisbury incident” dominating the British media. Two people have been taken ill in Amesbury from an unknown substance, which might yet be a contaminated recreational drug, but could conceivably be from contact with the substance allegedly used on the Skripals, presumably some of which was somewhere indoors all this time as we were told it could be washed away and neutralised by water.
Amesbury is not Salisbury – it is 10 miles away. Interestingly enough Porton Down is between Amesbury and Salisbury. Just three miles away from Muggleton Road, Amesbury. The news reports are not mentioning that much.
We are continually presented with experts by the mainstream media who will validate whatever miraculous property of “novichok” is needed to fit in with the government’s latest wild anti-Russian story. Tonight Newsnight wheeled out a chemical weapons expert to tell us that “novichok” is “extremely persistent” and therefore that used to attack the Skripals could still be lurking potent on a bush in a park.
Yet only three months ago we had this example of scores from the MSM giving the same message which was the government line at that time: “Professor Robert Stockman, of the University of Nottingham, said traces of nerve agents did not linger. He added: ‘These agents react with water to degrade, including moisture in the air, and so in the UK they would have a very limited lifetime. This is presumably why the street in Salisbury was being hosed down as a precaution – it would effectively destroy the agent.'”
Donald Trump would have been an active target of Russian intelligence since the moment they laid eyes on him for two reasons that come straight from the classical espionage textbook: He has influence; and he is potentially vulnerable to various forms of compromise. Playing by the book, the Russians would have attempted to initiate multi-layered operations to develop varied means of access to him in an effort to establish and ultimately exploit mechanisms of control over Trump and his associates. This is not calling out our president, but rather is a reflection of the reality of how Russian intelligence operates. Indeed, it could even benefit the president to know how this stratagem works. To be fair, I have no information that suggests that our president has been compromised by the Russians. Rather, my intent is to offer to the reader an explanation of the classical vulnerabilities that intelligence officers seek to identify and exploit including sexual indiscretions, greed, corruption, revenge, and most of all, ego. In essence, the pursuit of selfish interests over the common good.
A recent BBC video saw the state-funded broadcaster chat to the deputy director of the UK's intelligence agency, giving the espionage network some soft and cuddly PR at the taxpayers expense.
Nikesh Mehta, who has been the number two at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) since 2015, was interviewed for BBC Ideas for their Habits of the Highly Successful segment, which seeks tips from people at the top of their game.
Other videos to feature on BBC Ideas, which bills itself as a “curated video platform for people who want to think as well as surf,” include programs on why you should wear trainers to work and investigations into why people chant at football matches.
It is getting harder to stay on the right side of customers and employees
Russia’s foreign minister on Friday cast doubt on the possibility of extraditing Edward Snowden, the fugitive former National Security Agency contractor who received political asylum from Moscow after leaking classified documents to the media in 2013.
Sergey Lavrov briefly discussed the situation surrounding Mr. Snowden during an interview conducted in advance of the recently announced meeting scheduled for July 17 in Finland between President Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
“What are you prepared to give in this Summit? For example, if Donald Trump says he wants the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden back in the U.S., is that something that you would consider? Is this something that you can put on the table?” asked a reporter for the U.K.’s Channel 4.
The Right2Know Campaign (R2K) and the South African Screen Federation (Sasfed) is rejoicing the overruling of the censorship of Inxeba.
The Film and Publications Board (FPB) reclassified the film as X18. R2K and Sasfed entered the case as friends of the court with representation by the Legal Resources Centre.
Malaysia has seen bans on yoga and a ballet performance in the name of religion, but Hong Kong has always been a secular society – or has it?
A quick search of the hashtag “snowflakes” on Twitter will reveal that the word has become a go-to for conservative commentators describing left-wing young people who dismiss arguments on the basis of personal offence. According to the narrative, snowflakes congregate on university campuses, where they seek to silence speakers they disagree with.
The government takes the risk of a blizzard seriously: in May, universities minister Sam Gyimah suggested that the Department for Education brought in a clearer set of free speech guidelines for higher education institutions. In explaining his reasons for the proposals, Gyimah referenced an incident in which students at Cardiff University signed a petition demanding Germaine Greer be disinvited from a guest lecture on the basis of “misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether” (Greer was in fact not disinvited by the university).
It is now de-facto Emergency and an undeclared press censorship in large sections of the print and TV networks, and many websites in the country.
[...]
Indeed, the promulgation of Emergency on June 25, 1975 followed by press censorship, did constitute a dark chapter in history of press in free India. The period had its immediate and long-term repercussions for the press. The moot question today is how far have the lessons been learnt by succeeding governments and the press? In fact, while in the earlier years, dark shades of press censorship were indeed hovering over the country, there were also some periods of resistance too, when the press even imagined an adversarial role for itself. Darker shades were visible during what was a BJP interregnum in its previous government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, but now more dangerously, new forms of suppression have been invented. The press today is caught in new forms of press monopoly with major industrial houses directly entering the all spectrum media fray.
"A condition for triggering known mechanisms of self-censorship in the program content", is the opinion of the Association of European Journalists - Bulgaria, concerning the case of the temporary withdrawal of the "Healthcare" sphere of the journalist Maria Cherneva from the Bulgarian National Television.
High schools across the country have pushed back this year against student journalists who have reported on sensitive subjects, such as the reaction to school shootings and adolescent sexuality.
[...]
Since 1988, when the Supreme Court ruled that a Missouri school district had acted lawfully in removing a two-page spread on divorce and teenage pregnancy from a student newspaper, administrators have been able to censor work in school publications that they consider poorly written or “inconsistent with the shared values of a civilized social order.” Fourteen states have laws in place meant to safeguard school publications from interference.
The killing of the opinion piece on the National School Walkout protest was the third instance of conflict between John Burdett, the principal of Prosper High School in Prosper, Texas, and the school’s news publication, Eagle Nation Online. The first skirmish concerned an article about the cancellation of “movie day,” a school tradition allowing the class that had raised the most money for a cancer charity to see a movie during school hours. Burdett disputed the article’s take on the cancellation and ordered the faculty adviser, Lori Oglesbee-Petter, to scrub it from the site.
The Chinese comedian Yu Zhenzhong knows how to make 50 people laugh at a stand-up night. But tackling a potential TV audience of 1.4 billion people is another challenge — especially when there’s a smaller but less friendly audience of censors to face first. That’s why Yu headed from Shanghai to London last year to learn the secrets of the laugh track and the family sitcom.
Chinese love comedy as much as anyone else, but the two forms most popular in the country — traditional “cross-talk” and the scathing online humor of the young — don’t always translate to regular commercial programming. Cross-talk, reminiscent of the old Western music hall routines down to the somewhat naughty jokes and the comedy accents, turns around individual performers in a way that’s hard to replicate every week. Online sarcasm, meanwhile, is increasingly scoured from the internet and impossible to put on TV. Audiences and authorities want something regular, safe, and universal — like the multicamera sitcom.
Yu’s company, Houghton Street Media, has partnered with the U.K.-based China Media Centre to sponsor a seminar series teaching Chinese comedy writers how to write Western-style comedies. The workshop is one of several run each year by the China Media Centre, designed to “help Chinese creative talent produce their own ideas in a systematic and commercializable way,” said Hugo de Burgh, the director of the center. For years, these workshops focused on helping Chinese producers localize British programming, but de Burgh noted a recent shift toward equipping Chinese talent to develop their own shows.
If the laws are passed, law enforcement will be able to monitor and block websites in the name of crime prevention and protection of national security. The laws on online media would also increase the regulation of the media to potentially block disfavored sites. Amnesty reports that “Over the past year, the Egyptian authorities have blocked 500 websites including independent news platforms and pages belonging to rights groups.”
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and its partner in Pakistan, Freedom Network (FN), have expressed concern over reports of media censorship in the country, observing that “censorship and intimidation of media are incompatible with democracy”.
In a joint letter written to caretaker Prime Minister Nasirul Mulk, the RSF and FN called upon the authorities to allow journalists to cover the election campaigns freely.
The June 25 letter said: “What with threats, abductions, beatings, illegal suspensions and disrupted distribution, media and journalists are being harassed by the military and intelligence services, as well by political actors, in a clear attempt to intimidate them and prevent independent reporting ahead of the elections.”
The letter highlighted a number of cases related to intimidation of journalists, including those of Gul Bukhari and Marvi Sirmed.
University officials said the move came because of budget cuts and was not meant as censorship.
Students, administrators and journalism organizations are reacting to Lindenwood University’s decision to cease the physical publication of the student-run magazine, The Legacy.
Student-staff was notified by the university that printing of The Legacy would shut down on Friday, sparking accusations of censorship from student-media staff. Lindenwood University alumni have voiced their concerns over the announcement, said The Legacy News Editor, Madeline Raineri. She said students and alumni are considering what to do next.
The cultural diplomacy arm of the Foreign Office has become embroiled in controversy in the Bahamas where it has been accused of censorship and causing further damage to relations already strained by the Windrush scandal.
The British Council was served with an unprecedented rebuke by the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (NAGB), its partner in a major exhibition this year, which said the council had caused “distress and disappointment” after distancing itself from an accompanying catalogue over unstated concerns about its “political” content.
Artists and collaborators in the project have gone further, voicing allegations of censorship and saying they were left feeling “stunned and angry” while the gallery described it as a lost opportunity to foster goodwill in the wake of the Windrush revelations.
Ironically, the project in the Bahamas was the final phase of a British Council series called Difficult Conversations – reflecting on the UK’s involvement in the slave trade in the Caribbean.
The controversy centres on a catalogue for a Bahamian show in which the work of local artists has been displayed this year alongside Scottish artist Graham Fagen’s video installation re-working the Robert Burns song the Slave’s Lament. It was commissioned by the British Council for the 2015 Venice Biennale.
The project would've served as the final phase of a series called 'Difficult Conversations' which were to be reflections of the UK’s involvement in the slave trade in the Caribbean, the Guardian has reported.
United Kingdom's cultural body, the British Council has come under scrutiny for censorship by the Bahamas government, further straining the relations amid the recent Windrush scandal.
Craigslist said it is dropping its personals section, citing the passage of a sex trafficking bill potentially leaving websites liable for penalties.
The U.S. Senate voted 97-2 on Wednesday to pass the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which adds tougher penalties on web services that help facilitate prostitution or sex trafficking.
Lawsuit claims “anti-trafficking” bill SESTA-FOSTA has already harmed sex workers, calls it “legislative censorship of Internet speech”
[...]
The EFF, a nonprofit founded in 1990, specializes in defending civil liberties online and in the realm of digital technology. They have been one of many organizations to mobilize against SESTA-FOSTA since it was first introduced to Congress in 2017, under the name H.R.1865. SESTA-FOSTA makes it a crime to operate or manage a website that “promotes or facilitates prostitution,” vastly expanding liability for sites that host any content on which sexuality may be discussed.
Because the law vaguely defines what speech can be interpreted as “supporting” prostitution, websites like Craigslist have already chosen to remove their personals section rather than face liability. Others such as Instagram have increased scrutiny of hashtags such as #yesastripper, while Reddit has outright banned subreddits including r/Sexworkers. Just this week, fundraising host Patreon suspended the accounts of numerous adult-themed creators. Any discussion of sex work, or even sex in general, could potentially make a third-party host – from Twitter to Google – liable for their users’ posts.
The road has become a difficult one to navigate for future journalists. With our work been criticized openly by President Trump and the recent death of five Maryland journalists at the hands of a disgruntled reader, it has become even more important that we seek the truth and defend it always, as written in the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics.
Unjustified and unreasonable restriction of such human rights as the right to freedom of speech and the right to access to information is a violation of Ukraine’s Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Convention on the Protection of Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
Such interference is illegal irrespective of how it is carried out: through the prohibition of a printed publication, the prohibition of the release of a political talk show, or by blocking Internet resources.
In addition, it is very easy to cross the line in the developing democracies: from the defense of national interests to the "massacre of those who are not wanted" and the narrowing of freedom of speech.
In the conditions of Ukrainian politics, these risks are no less dangerous, but now they are still relevant.
Recently, the legislative initiative No. 6688 "On Amending Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine Regarding Information Security of Ukraine" was introduced into the agenda of the Verkhovna Rada. The essence of it is to block Internet resources under certain conditions.
Considering that the authors of the bill are coalitionists from Poroshenko’s Bloc and National Front, there is a high probability that by the end of this session the parliament would vote for it.
On Tuesday June 26, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IAJLJ) filed an amicus brief with the Polish Constitutional Court in an effort to have the Polish government cancel an amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, also known as the “Polish Denial Memory Law” or “Polish Holocaust Law.”
The IAJLJ argued that the Polish Law was overly broad and had contradicted the Polish Constitution and its value of freedom of expression. Moreover, the IAJLJ felt this law severely hampered Holocaust study across the world.
On Wednesday June 27, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed an amendment to the law, downgrading the offense from criminal to civil. While no one can say for sure why law was changed because many countries including Israel and the United States and many organizations across the world lobbied for its cancellation, the “IAJLJ feels confident that the filing of their amicus brief aided in the pressure being put on the Polish government to cancel this law” said, iAJLJ Deputy President attorney Calev Michael Myers.
The New York Times recently published a report that revealed a disturbing trend of harassment and domestic abuse via internet-connected devices. In addition to using them to stalk and monitor their victims, abusers are also doing things like changing door-lock codes, turning lights on and off and boosting the thermostat to unbearable heat. In short, making their victims miserable.
On the surface, this seems like a relatively straightforward problem to solve: Just change your password or unplug the devices, right? Except the issue here is two-fold. Not only are the devices sometimes solely controlled by the abuser, but oftentimes making these changes will result in even worse abuse, especially if the couple is still living together. Asking these victims to stop using the devices is like telling them to just leave their abuser; these situations are usually much more complex, and the victims could be putting their lives in danger by doing either.
In March 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a type of National Security Agency bulk monitoring known as "upstream" surveillance. More than three years after the ACLU originally filed the suit, the case is still mired in procedural and bureaucratic limbo. But on Friday, a hearing over one such roadblock in Maryland district court could bring long-awaited progress.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which the ACLU is representing along with cocounsel from the Knight First Amendment Institute and Cooley LLP, engages in more than a trillion communications per year with people around the world, and has hundreds of millions of visitors each month to Wikipedia. The organization is suing to stop upstream surveillance, the process by which the NSA passively monitors and collects a huge amount of data and text-based communications by combing international internet traffic as it moves across service providers' backbone infrastructure.
The suit alleges that this tactic violates the First and Fourth Amendment, along with other laws. But it took two years for Wikimedia to simply prove its standing to bring the suit. Now, the government is using a concept known as the “state secrets privilege,” which protects classified information from the discovery process in a lawsuit, to resist cooperating with Wikimedia's requests. As a result of these evasive tactics, the core constitutional issues of upstream surveillance remain unexamined.
Earlier this month, our friends at The Government Attic caused quite a stir in the FOIA community with a release of over 100 vintage security posters from the National Security Agency. As it turns out, MuckRock founder Michael Morisy had a similar request with a slightly larger timeframe, and the two appear to have been consolidated.
The terrifying extent of online government surveillance is laid bare in the Orwell game series. How complicit will you be when put in control?
Facebook has canned its plans to bring high-speed internet via a solar-powered drone beaming lasers to the ground, according to an announcement on Tuesday.
The social media behemoth hellbent on ‘global connectivity’ wanted to launch a “high altitude platform station (HAPS) system," nicknamed Aquila, into the stratosphere. Facebook envisaged hundreds of these electric-engines powered drones floating in the skies drawing energy from solar panels and firing laser-guided internet access to remote corners of the world so locals could get a daily diet of memes and messages.
But, after four years of trying to make the concept work, Facebook announced on Tuesday that the Aquila project had been killed off.
Facebook is killing Aquila, its solar-powered, jet plane–sized drone that it built to beam down internet to more than 4 billion people around the world who are still offline.
Among the hundreds of properties owned by leading telecommunications giant AT&T across the United States, at least eight are being used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to suck up billions of records from internet and cell phone users that don’t even have a contract with the company.
On Monday, The Intercept published a report detailing AT&T’s collaborative relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA) via a program codenamed FAIRVIEW. According to the report, AT&T facilities in eight U.S. cities play a central role in helping the NSA conduct surveillance on both Americans and foreign citizens — even those who are not AT&T customers. The report provides details on each facility, as well as supporting evidence drawn from public records, interviews, and classified NSA documents.
In an investigative report released on Monday, The Intercept has further exposed the long-term and highly organized collusion between the communications behemoth AT&T and the National Security Agency (NSA). The story reveals the use of eight AT&T facilities in major cities across the US (New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington D.C., and Dallas) by the NSA to serve as “critical parts of one of the world’s most powerful electronic eavesdropping systems, hidden in plain sight.”
In large part due to the efforts of brave whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, the public has been made aware of the massive and illegal surveillance on all forms of electronic communications carried out by the NSA. In addition, there has been sufficient evidence of the “special relationship” between AT&T and the NSA. However, the new revelations are striking in that they not only provide us a much better look at the physical infrastructure of the spying, but also make clear that the sheer scale of the collusion and the surveillance is far greater than has been assumed.
"Like all companies, we are required by law to provide information to government and law enforcement entities by complying with court orders, subpoenas, lawful discovery requests and other legal requirements," said Jim Greer, the director of corporate communication at AT&T, in an emailed statement. "And, we provide voluntary assistance to law enforcement when a person's life is in danger and in other immediate, emergency situations. In all cases, we ensure that requests for assistance are valid and that we act in compliance with the law.
In a new article published Monday, The Intercept has now revealed what it describes as secret AT&T facilities across several American cities that are "central to an NSA spying initiative."
The piece builds on earlier reporting that the website did in November 2016 which focused on one such site in New York City.
The eight locations, which are in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC, are "peering" facilities that normally route other telecom companies' data traffic onto their network as part of their regular Internet service.
NSA scandal of surveillanceNSA scandal details exposed by Edward Snowden via his Twitter account. “The most important surveillance story you will see for years just went online, revealing how @ATT became the internet’s biggest enemy, secretly collaborating against its customers and partners to destroy your privacy.”
A mass surveillance operation has been unveiled as AT&T has been colluding with the NSA in actively tracking citizens. A detailed post by The Intercept on June 25th outlined the details of the operation, and the significance of the findings cannot be understated. The AT&T/NSA scandal could go down in history as one of the most extensive recorded incidences of mass surveillance. While previously reported, it has not been examined in detail or brought to the public attention on a widespread basis.
Surveillance cameras seem to be popping up everywhere these days. People use them to protect their homes. Police departments across the U.S. use them to spot crimes 24/7.
Even the U.S. military has used surveillance cameras to keep an eye on certain bases and embassies. This can be a good way to keep us safe, but it also could lead to a loss of privacy. In fact, we told you last year that the Chinese government may have found a way to use surveillance cameras against you. (PssT! Scroll to the end of this article to listen to Kim's free podcast dealing with the Chinese government spying on you.)
You would probably expect that type of shady activity from the Chinese government, but not from our own. Well, it turns out that the U.S. government is spying on American and foreign citizens and AT&T is helping them do it.
Since the inception of target advertising, a way of positioning ads based on demographics and activity on smartphones, people have believed that their phones secretly record conversations and monitor their every move.
Researchers were quick to mention the limitations of the study and never made a definitive claim that your apps are never secretly listening to you. Since an automated system was used to test the apps, the results may be different from what a human would encounter. The automated system was also unable to sign into these apps and could have missed audio that was processed locally on the device.
But, the researchers did notice something else funky, according to Gizmodo. Several apps had taken video recordings and screenshots of what people were doing. These screenshots were then sent off to third-party domains.
Like good scientists, they refuse to say that their study definitively proves that your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but they didn’t find a single instance of it happening. Instead, they discovered a different disturbing practice: apps recording a phone’s screen and sending that information out to third parties.
It’s the smartphone conspiracy theory that just won’t go away: Many, many people are convinced that their phones are listening to their conversations to target them with ads. Vice recently fueled the paranoia with an article that declared “Your phone is listening and it’s not paranoia,” a conclusion the author reached based on a 5-day experiment where he talked about “going back to uni” and “needing cheap shirts” in front of his phone and then saw ads for shirts and university classes on Facebook.
Facebook isn’t spying on everything you say. Your data plan would be higher, and your battery life worse, if that were the case.
And yet the conspiracy theory that apps are listening to your in-person conversations and using them to show ads persists. So researchers at Northeastern University decided to look into it, testing 17,000 Android apps and monitoring what kind of information they sent home.
If there’s one thing the Internet has taught us over the last 40 years, it is that information is power.
The Internet has made and ruined careers, toppled corrupt regimes, made and broken millions of relationships, disrupted entire sectors of economies and created new markets for everything from t-shirts to music to real-estate.
It has the potential for enormous good. Free information keeps governments honest, gives people reliable news from all perspectives on issues, and brings together communities of people from every walk of life to enjoy the latest Psy video on YouTube.
But with this tremendous potential for good, also comes the likelihood to shift power away from the status quo. Powerful institutions like governments, banks, large corporate copyright holders, patent authorities, news outlets, and even research institutions seek to reign-in the Internet. They want to protect themselves from the disruptive forces that the internet brings.
The most obvious of these efforts are nations that tightly control what their citizens see and learn in order to manipulate their populations into complacency.
The key, Saffel says, is getting developers to agree to hand over the source code of their apps for in-depth analysis and review. Whether an app is a simple time/speed/distance calculator for a pilot or a hyper-specialized classified tool, sharing source code is a big risk for developers, because it means trusting third parties with the core intellectual property [sic] they have built their businesses on. But NGA soon realized that full access was the only way its project could work.
If Congress doesn't update existing digital privacy laws, it's also possible that states may step in and craft their own. Some already have: California passed a law in 2015 that requires state law enforcement to obtain a warrant to get user data stored online, including things like text messages and location information. Last week, the state also unanimously passed another sweeping privacy law, designed to give citizens more control over the data collected about them by private companies like Facebook and Google. For now, we'll have to wait and see if Congress and the Supreme Court follow California's lead.
While financial terms were not disclosed, we reported that Facebook is paying between $23 and $30 million. Bloomsbury AI is an alumnus of Entrepreneur First, and it was also backed by Fly.VC, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund and the U.K. taxpayer-funded London Co-investment Fund.
Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.
But surveillance captialism is still dangerous: all those dossiers on the personal lives of whole populations can be used for blackmail, identity theft and political manipulation. As I explain in my new Locus column, Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags, Facebook's secret is that they've found a way to turn a profit on an incredibly low-yield resource -- like figuring out how to make low-grade crude out of the oil left over from oily rags.
A judge in Washington state has excoriated the Tacoma Police Department for withholding public records pertaining to its use of cell-site simulators, also known as stingrays.
Back in 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state sued the TPD on behalf of four community leaders, arguing that the department has not adequately responded to their public records requests concerning the use of stingrays, which included asking for a blank form authorizing its use.
Last year, Google was criticised for accessing users’ inbox to show them relevant ads. In the time that followed, the search giant stopped its practices, but the ability for third-party apps to look into people’s Gmail inbox remained intact.
People who have connected third-party apps to their accounts may have unwittingly given human staff permission to read their messages.
The WSJ reported on Monday that employees of Gmail app developer Edison Software personally read the emails of hundreds of users to build a new feature; employees of another developer, Return Path Inc, reportedly read about 8,000 unredacted user emails to help train algorithmic software.
Gmail users' private messages are sometimes read by employees at software companies, it has emerged, when the user installs certain apps and grants permission to their Google account.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Rod Sims says how Australia approaches the proliferation of digital platforms, and how they collect and manage data, is one of the defining questions of our age.
On July 1st , 1852, the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society took out an advertisement in Frederick Douglass’ Paper for a “Celebration of the National Anniversary.” The event, scheduled for July 5 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, boasted speeches from prominent abolitionists as well as a headlining address from the namesake of the paper himself. If the irony of inviting a former slave to speak at an occasion billed as a "celebration" of a nation still practicing slavery was lost on the Ladies Society, it was not lost on Douglass. His polemic would be one for the ages.
On June 20th, police raided five locations in Germany, nicely coordinated at 6:00 in the morning: The private homes of all three board members, Jens, Juris and Moritz, our registered headquarters in Dresden (a lawyer’s office), and the home of a previous board member.
Please check the bottom of this page for links to various press reports about these raids detailing what happened. We will update that section regularly.
The brief summary is that a German left-wing blog “Krawalltouristen” (ruckus tourists) called for protest actions around the right-wing AfD party convening in Augsburg, Germany. Law enforcement argues that this includes calls for violence.
When I returned from Guantanamo Bay in August 2005, I described that prison as “a cancer on our democracy” because I understood that the political, legal, and moral framework that allowed that institution to exist posed an existential threat to our nation. I did not understand then that the cancerous corruption of our American values had already metastasized to North Carolina.
We were a frightened, angry people in 2005, because our nation had been attacked. Three members of my congregation in New Jersey were in the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, and only two escaped with their lives. So I was invested in seeing the perpetrators of that despicable crime brought to justice. Having previously served in U.S. Army Intelligence, I grasped the challenge of that mission and gasped at the appalling miscalculations made by our leaders.
Reality Winner, the first person to be prosecuted by the Trump administration for leaking sensitive government information, pleaded guilty Tuesday to sending to the news media a top-secret National Security Agency report about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Her plea agreement calls for her to serve five years and three months behind bars, though she will be sentenced at a later date.
“All of these actions I did willfully, meaning I did them of my own free will,” she told the court.
NSA whistleblower Reality Winner is expected to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act at a hearing on June 26. We’re sending Kevin Gosztola to Augusta, Georgia, to cover it.
You’ve helped Kevin travel there to cover this important story before, and we believe it’s in the public interest to have him present for this last phase of this significant prosecution. But we need $1,200 to cover his travel costs.
The plea agreement is still tentative: a sentencing investigation begins now, with a court hearing to come during which Reality may choose to make a statement and bring forth character witnesses to mitigate her sentence.
Reality was initially charged under the Espionage Act, which carries a ten year prison sentence and $250,000 fine. The Espionage Act bars defendants from explaining themselves in court, so had Reality taken her case to trial, she would not have been allowed to argue that she wanted to inform the American people, that she knew the leak wouldn’t cause any harm, and that the government shouldn’t needlessly hide this information from its citizens.
And accused NSA whistleblower Reality Winner has pleaded guilty to retaining and transmitting a document to a news organization after reaching a deal with the U.S. government to serve a 5-year prison sentence. Winner had faced up to 10 years in prison on charges she violated the Espionage Act by leaking a top-secret document to The Intercept about Russian interference in the 2016 election. She’s been imprisoned for the last year at the Lincoln County Jail in Georgia, where The Intercept reports Winner has been struggling with depression and an eating disorder. Click here to see all our coverage of Reality Winner’s case.
It’s been kind of an uphill and/or a rocky thing preparing for this. I knew that, today’s hearing, I knew that she was going to change her plea. I knew that she was going to plead guilty to this. I knew that she was going to plead guilty to the violation under the Espionage Act. That’s something that I didn’t want to see happen. So it was very hard for me.
Today, right now, I feel a sense of relief because it’s over with. But still it’s not the ending that I was hoping for. It’s not the outcome that I had wished for. I never wanted for people to think that Reality was totally innocent, as far as—you know, today she was able to come out to the judge and say that she did this. She did release this document. She knew that it was top secret. She knew what that meant. She had the training. She had everything. So she knew that this was something she wasn’t permitted to do. So she did break a rule. She did violate a law.
What I didn’t want to see happen was that she was going to be charged and convicted under the Espionage Act. I didn’t want her to be labeled as a traitor. I didn’t want it to be this severe punishment, for her to be seen as somebody who acted against her country. Because to me when you read the Espionage Act that’s pretty much what it says. You have committed a crime against the United States. So that to me is something I really didn’t want to see happen and I’m not happy about.
There likely isn’t such a thing as a “typical” violent white extremist in America in 2018. Still, Michael Miselis — a University of California, Los Angeles doctoral student with a U.S. government security clearance to work on sensitive research for a prominent defense contractor — makes for a pretty unusual case.
For months, ProPublica and Frontline have been working to identify the white supremacists at the center of violent demonstrations across the country, including the infamous Unite the Right rally last August in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Rise Above Movement, a Southern California group that expresses contempt for Muslims, Jews, and immigrants, became a focus of that effort. ProPublica and Frontline were able to quickly identify a number of the group’s leaders, and find evidence that put them in the middle of violence in Charlottesville and Berkeley, California, among other places.
Courage welcomes a strong set of proposals and recommends changes regarding national security cases, protecting anonymity and letting whistleblowers choose who they talk to
In April this year, the European Commission published the text of its draft whistleblower directive. This was something that campaigners had been working towards for years, partly due to the galvanising impact of the LuxLeaks revelations and the opposition to the European Trade Secrets Directive, both of which we have followed closely at Courage.
On the whole, the proposals are stronger than had been expected and there’s a lot in them that we can be wholly positive about. We are particularly happy to see that the draft Directive treats disclosures about privacy, potential data breaches and network security as whistleblowing, a clarification that is long overdue.
At the same time, we think there are some aspects of the draft Directive that could be improved and we’ve just submitted our explanation to the European Commission.
The first case I litigated before Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27 after more than 30 years on the Supreme Court, was Texas v. Johnson, the 1989 case that established that the First Amendment protects flag-burning. Kennedy, a mild-mannered Reagan appointee, was no flag-burner. But he provided the crucial fifth vote to strike down Texas’s law.
A few years later, I invited him to guest-teach my constitutional-law class at Georgetown. I said he could talk about anything; he chose the flag-burning case. But his real subject was judging. In his hour with the students, he not only stressed the importance of having an open mind, but exemplified it in his openness to the students themselves. Not all judges are like this; Justice Antonin Scalia was always absolutely certain about his views when speaking to students (or to anyone else, for that matter).
The paramedics are fully complicit in this horror show. They're overriding their own knowledge and medical training with catastrophic results. This atrocious behavior was exposed by a report from the Office for Police Conduct Review. The report showed ketamine injections increased from three in 2012 to 62 in 2017. It wasn't until this report was delivered to police that anyone decided to do anything about it. The Minneapolis Police Commander has now forbidden officers from instructing EMS crews to sedate a subject.
Ketamine is a dangerous drug. The police know this. They classify it as a "date rape" drug, capable of putting people into deep sedation and altering their memories. Healthcare providers know this, too, which is why they're often hesitant to use it as a sedative if the subject has preexisting breathing problems. Ketamine can kill under these circumstances. When used as a first response in the sedation of detainees, medical histories aren't available and the outcome can be death.
Allowing police to "prescribe" sedatives is a horrible idea. The report shows Minneapolis cops nuked arrestees with a powerful sedative just because. In many of the cases examined, there appeared to be no reason to escalate to a dangerous sedative.
The UK tolerated "inexcusable" treatment of US detainees after the 9/11 attacks, MPs have found.
The Intelligence and Security Committee said British agencies continued to supply intelligence to allies despite knowing or suspecting abuse in more than 200 cases.
Committee chairman Dominic Grieve said agencies knew of incidents that were "plainly unlawful".
London, Jun 28 Britain's intelligence officers and ministers have been blamed for allowing "inexcusable" torture by the US in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York.
A damning UK parliamentary report released today concluded that British authorities turned a blind eye to the routine mistreatment of detainees by US authorities. The cross-party House of Commons' Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) said UK intelligence agencies, like MI6 and GCHQ, knew what was going on from an early point but failed to act.
And it was also inexcusable that British intelligence and security agencies supplied questions for the interrogation of prisoners who they knew or suspected were being subjected to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment (CIDT) and paid for the rendition of others to states where they were at risk of such abuse.
A three-year investigation by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee found no “smoking gun” proving that the agencies turned a blind eye to torture, and no evidence that UK officials themselves mistreated detainees.
British intelligence officers put questions to a man despite knowing he had been subjected to appalling abuse, including being waterboarded 83 times, according to damning evidence contained in a UK parliamentary report published this week.
In the years after 9/11, Abu Zubaydah was the only CIA prisoner who went through all 12 of the agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques”, including being beaten, deprived of sleep and locked in a small box.
After a four-year inquiry, the all-party intelligence and security committee (ISC) said in its report published on Thursday that MI6 had “direct awareness of extreme mistreatment and possibly torture” of Zubaydah.
Scattered throughout the reports is overriding concern not for human rights but fear of offending the US, and of being excluded from the intelligence gained through methods that breach international law. The UK inquiry began in 2010 under a judge, Sir Peter Gibson, but he ended up publishing only an interim report, stymied by a lack of cooperation. The ISC took up the investigation but, like Gibson, also gave up. Given the restrictions it worked under, the committee did a commendable job. But it acknowledged there were still too many gaps, too many unwilling to testify and too many obstructions – such as Theresa May, who refused to allow four key officers in the intelligence agencies and the military to give evidence.
Some police are prone to using force at a moment’s notice, even when their orders are being followed.
When two patrons at a Starbucks cafe in Philadelphia were arrested while waiting for a colleague earlier this year, people in Pennsylvania and around the country saw on video what Black people have known for a long time — the mere act of going about our daily lives can lead to harassment, arrest, or worse.
The stakes are ratcheted upward dramatically when we cross paths with law enforcement officers. Even when we comply with an officer’s every request, we can be at risk of violence.
That’s what happened to Sean Williams, a 27-year-old Black man in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on June 28. While trying to comply with police officers’ conflicting commands, Williams was shot in the back with an electronic control device, popularly known as a Taser, after the brand that manufactures the weapon. A video recording of the incident has gone viral across the country.
Williams was a suspect in a dispute with three other people. While a statement from the Lancaster City Bureau of Police claims that the video does not show the full context of the incident and that Williams earlier failed to comply with their commands, the video clearly shows that the situation had deescalated to the point that Williams was seated and prepared to do what the police told him to do. Officer Philip Bernot stunned him with the Taser anyway, sending an electric shock through his body.
Robert Rundo, a leader of the violent white supremacist group known as the Rise Above Movement, pounded the man, hitting him with a series of thudding punches — left, right, left — that sent his foe staggering backwards.
But this wasn’t a street brawl captured on video: It was a boxing match — complete with 12-ounce gloves, a referee, and scantily attired ring girls — and it was promoted by a white supremacist fight club in Ukraine. The event was held inside a bunker-like building in Kiev, with fighters competing inside a cage of the sort familiar to mixed martial arts fans in America.
With the skinhead subculture fading, neo-Nazi organizers in Europe have turned to promoting boxing and mixed martial arts bouts with the aim of pulling in new recruits.
In other words, by "unlimited" Comcast really means 20 GB on a connection incapable of delivering HD video unless you pay more money. As an added, new restriction, Comcast is also now throttling all tethered hotspots on these "unlimited" connections to 600 kbps--unless you sign up for the company's pay per gigabyte option at a whopping $12 per gigabyte. This is, apparently, Comcast's version of what it looks like when you try and disrupt and compete with the broader wireless industry.
On its face this isn't the end of the world. On a small mobile phone screen, the difference between 480p and 720p will likely be unnoticable to many users. It's the precedent that's being set that's more troubling. For one, this continues to be a bastardization of the term "unlimited," a word the telecom sector has abused for the better part of the last decade without learning any real lessons.
The images auto-fill across the first row, filling all available space. If there’s no image2 or image3, image1 fills 100% of the available width.
I really like the way The Economist occasionally allows its writers to address a topic at length. Siegele provides a good overview of what has gone wrong and the competing views of how to fix it. Below the fold, my overall critique, and commentary on some of the articles.
AT&T confirmed the price increase to Ars and said it began informing customers of the increase this past weekend. "The $5 increase will go into effect July 26 for new customers and varies for existing customers based on their billing date," an AT&T spokesperson said.
Instead, Netflix has become an industry in and of itself. Mr Sarandos, the company’s chief content officer, and his colleagues will spend $12bn-13bn this year—more than any studio spends on films, or any television company lays out on stuff that isn’t sport.
VLSI Technology, an entity with apparent ties to Fortress’s IP Group, has launched a second infringement lawsuit against Intel, accusing the chipmaker of infringing five patents. Filed late last week in district court in Delaware, it follows another court action brought by VLSI against the tech giant in the Northern District of California last October. All the patents in suit in Delaware herald from NXP Semiconductors, currently subject to a Qualcomm takeover bid. VLSI picked up a large portfolio of NXP patents in a series of assignments in 2016 and 2017; although not all originated with the Dutch company.
Historically, the Spanish Patents and Trademarks Office (“SPTO”) has rejected the correction of the registered term of supplementary protection certificates (“SPCs”), even in cases where such term has had to be recalculated due to the new case law emanating from the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”). As reported in our posts of January 2018, following the judgment of 20 December 2017 of the CJEU in case C-492/16 (“Incyte“), the SPTO modified its historical position. In particular, it published a “Notice to Applicants” informing that it would now allow the modification of entries registered in the SPTO so that the published term of protection may be recalculated, pursuant to the case law of the CJEU. So far, so good.
The European Parliament has today heard the voice of European citizens and voted against proposals that would have dealt a hammer blow to the open internet in Europe.
By a clear majority, MEPs have rejected rubber stamping proposals that would have forced internet companies to filter the web, and would have introduced an unprecedented tax on linking online.
This is great news for Europe’s citizens, its SMEs and startups, especially those in the creative sectors as, while the proposed rules were supposed to protect and support them, they would have been the ones to suffer most under the new regime.
The last few days (and weeks) we've had plenty of articles about the EU's attempt to undermine the fundamental aspects of the internet with its Copyright Directive, including a snippet tax and the requirement of upload filters. Supporters of the Directive have resorted to ever-increasing levels of FUD in trying to get the EU Parliament to move the directive forward without changes -- and they did this despite quietly making the directive much, much worse and only revealing those changes at the last minute. It became quite obvious that the intent of this legislative effort was to fundamentally change the internet, to make it much more like TV -- with a set of gatekeepers only allowing carefully selected and licensed content online.
As the drumbeat got louder from (quite reasonably) concerned people around the world, supporters of the effort kept trying different strategies in support of this nonsense -- including a letter claiming to be written by Sir Paul McCartney.
The odds were steep, but thanks to everyone who contacted their representatives, MEPs got the message that Article 13 and it’s automated “upload filters” would be a catastrophe for free expression online.
In the final days, support for Article 13 collapsed, as pressure from real people like you convinced MEPs that they needed a rethink.
Today’s victory is a rude awakening to industry lobbyists who expected Article 13 to pass quietly under the radar. We can expect a fierce battle in the coming months as the Copyright Directive returns to the EU Parliament for further debate.
Today’s vote preserves our ability to speak, create, and express ourselves freely on the Internet platforms we use everyday. Instead of rolling over and putting computers in charge of policing what we say and do, we’ve bought ourselves some time to foster public debate about the wisdom, or lack thereof, behind automated censorship.
The European Parliament votes tomorrow on whether to allow negotiations with the Council to begin on controversial copyright reform legislation. The proposed updated rules have sparked intense lobbying by supporters and foes alike, including, one lawmaker said at a press briefing today, death threats.
Under parliament’s rules of procedure, at least 76 MEPs are needed to object to the opening of talks with the Council without seeking plenary approval, the European Parliament said. As of midnight Tuesday, “enough MEPs had in fact lodged their objection.”
If tomorrow’s vote confirms the negotiating mandate adopted by the Legal Affairs Committee, negotiations can begin at any time, Parliament said. If the vote rejects the mandate, the substance of the proposed measure will have to be debated and voted on in September’s plenary session, it said.
Meanwhile, concern continues in the music industry over those whom we’ll call the music 99 percent being able to earn a fair amount from streaming dollars. On YouTube, for example, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimated in a 2017 report that the annual revenue for the music industry per user is less than $1. “User upload services, such as YouTube, are heavily used by music consumers and yet do not return fair value to those who are investing in and creating the music,” IFPI chief executive Frances Moore said in a statement.
Last year The Pirate Bay caused controversy by embedding a cryptocurrency miner to generate revenue. The site has experimented off and on since and has recently established another miner. While users might prefer for it not be there, a TPB moderator says it's easily blocked and anyone spending more than a couple of minutes on the site "is doing it wrong."
Last year, when The Pirate Bay was first caught mining cryptocurrency without notifying the users, it created lost of havoc in the pirate community. While some supported the decision by calling it a way to assist the website operations, others expressed concern.
The Monero cryptocurrency miner has been found to make an appearance once again, according to TorrentFreak. As per a user who was trying to upload torrents to The Pirate Bay, his CPU got “really hot” during the process.
Some 145 organisations have signed an open letter urging European Parliament to vote against the Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee mandate to negotiate on copyright reform. The European Parliament will meet on 5 July for a plenary vote on whether or not to endorse the mandate.
In their open letter, the 145 organisations representing “citizens, startups, human rights organisations, publishers, creators, educators, cultural heritage professionals, librarians, and researchers,” call on Parliament to vote against the negotiating mandate, and “to vote for a public debate on the Directive,” according to the letter.
Tomorrow the European Parliament will vote on whether to send its version of the Copyright Directive text to "trilogues" for final negotiations. As I've written here before, this would be disastrous for the Internet in the EU. However, efforts to prevent that happening are having an impact. The MEPs on the JURI committee that drew up the current flawed text have just sent a short document to all MEPs to try to convince them to vote to move on to the trilogues (you can read it on Techdirt). It is full of misinformation, which I would like to debunk here so that people can explain to their MEPs – either in an email, or by phone – why the claims made in the JURI note are false.
I'll concentrate here on what it says about Article 13, which will bring in upload filters, since the threat it represents to the Internet is greater, and the misinformation in the JURI paper most egregious.
Tomorrow, the whole European Parliament will vote on the new Copyright Directive. Two weeks ago, Parliament's "Legal Affairs" Committee has adopted a first text, forcing commercial platforms to actively block copyright-protected contents uploaded by their users. Tomorrow, Parliament must reject this text.
On 20 June, the "Legal Affairs" Committee, gathering 25 Members of the European Parliament, was in charge of adopting a first draft on the Copyright Directive. The majority of its members adopted an Article 13 which would impose automatic filtering measures on commercial platforms that publish and "optimize" the displaying of user-provided contents. YouTube or Facebook have already implemented such measures for a very long time: they would be legitimized by this Article 13.
Our public communications should never be regulated through automatic means, be it for "protecting copyrights" or fighting hatespeech or 'fake news'. Only humans should be able to regulate humans' conducts, especially when it relates to fundamental rights like freedom of expression.
In two days time, a pivotal vote will take place in the European Parliament, one that could change the direction of copyright enforcement in the EU. Framed around the so-called "Value Gap", Article 13 aims to force Internet platforms to "play fair" on licensing rates with record labels. Ahead of the vote, hundreds of groups and organizations are facing off in a final clash of the causes.
Sony Pictures Entertainment's movie 'Khali the Killer' is on release in the United States and, as is customary, a trailer has been uploaded to YouTube. However, on closer inspection, it appears that Sony uploaded the entire movie in error. Oops.
When people at Sony Pictures are bored to hell and feel the need to make headlines, they just pitch in human-error backed up by their PR.
The EU’s new Copyright Directive is anti-competition, anti-innovation, and anti-free speech. It requires online platforms to develop complex and expensive filtering systems to monitor and delete copyrighted content. If they fail to do so, they will be hit with massive fines.
In Spain, Italy and Poland, an explanatory, protest statement about the upcoming vote came up when the online encyclopedia of the usual web page on whatever celebrity, legal case or historical event users had searched for.
This is an important moment in this fight. MEPs need to hear from their constituents on this: with EU elections coming up, they're more likely to be responsive than at any other time. The daily activities and cultural lives of hundreds of millions of Europeans are on the line here.
However, acting Prime Minister Winston Peters said the possibility of appealing wasn't clear cut.
Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has lost the latest round in his long-running battle to avoid extradition to the U.S. and will now take his case to New Zealand’s highest court.