Last Thursday, Russian antitrust authority said it had opened an investigation into Microsoft for allegedly abusing its dominance in the antivirus software market.
The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) is investigating whether the tech giant is in violation of Part 1 Article 10 of the Federal Law 'On Protection of Competition' [PDF], which prohibits companies occupying dominant positions in the market from engaging in activities that result or can result in "preventing, restricting, eliminating competition" and/or "infringing the interests of other persons (economic entities) in business activities or consumers at large".
This past weekend, the developers of the popular Docker open-source application container engine have published the first Release Candidate (RC) snapshot of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 release.
With the SuperComputing '16 event taking place in Salt Lake City, the latest TOP500 list of super-computers has been published.
The 48th edition of the TOP500 list saw China and United States pacing each other for supercomputing supremacy. Both nations now claim 171 systems apiece in the latest rankings, accounting for two-thirds of the list. However, China has maintained its dominance at the top of the list with the same number 1 and 2 systems from six months ago: Sunway TaihuLight, at 93 petaflops, and Tianhe-2, at 34 petaflops. This latest edition of the TOP500 was announced Monday, November 14, at the SC16 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Initially, NSX will be employed to provide basic switching and routing services. Jared Rosoff, chief technologist for the Cloud-Native Applications Business Unit at VMware, says that over time the Photon Platform will feature a complete set of logical networking elements and services using the same core network virtualization technologies that IT organizations are already embracing across the rest of the enterprise.
So far, containers have been used mostly to develop or deploy apps to servers—specifically, x86 servers. But containers have a future beyond the data center, too. From internet of things (IoT) devices, to ARM servers, to desktop computers, containers also hold promise.
Among the many areas that IBM is pushing forward with its Power architecture is in deep learning. Today IBM announced a new tool called PowerAI that aids in helping organizations learn things faster in a bid to generate advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
Back to my Sunday schedule, things look fairly normal. Calm first part of the week, with most fixes coming in towards the end.. I'm used to it by now.
Things have definitely gotten smaller, so a normal release schedule (with rc7 being the last one) is still looking possibel despite the large size of 4.9. But let's see how things work out over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, there's a lot of normal fixes in here, and we just need more testing.
The stats for rc5 look extremely boring (which is a good thing). Two thirds driver updates, 10% arch updates, 10% filesystems, the rest "misc". Nothing really stands out, with the possible exception of the re-enablement of "-Wmaybe-uninitialized" again after Arnd fixed it all up.
Linux kernel maintainer Jiri Slaby announced the release and general availability of the sixty-seventh maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series.
Today, November 13, 2016, Linus Torvalds announced the release and general availability of the fifth RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming and highly anticipated Linux 4.9 kernel series.
Linux kernel 4.9 could be the next LTS (Long Term Support) branch, and it promises to be the greatest kernel release ever, bringing support for some older AMD Radeon GPUs in the AMDGPU driver, and lots of other improvements. Right now, earlier adopters can get their hands on Linux kernel 4.9 RC5, which looks like it's a much smaller than RC4.
Now, Twenty-five years later, both Linux and the concept of Open Source grown far beyond what Torvalds originally imagined.
On Sunday, Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 4.9 RC5, a step closer to the final release of the next kernel version, which brings new support for various devices and other improvements. Softpedia has the full details, or check out the announcement directly from Torvalds. The 4.9 kernel is currently on track for a December release.
The VC4 open-source graphics driver stack for notably supporting the Raspberry Pi Broadcom SoCs is nearing support for threading as another potential performance win.
On Saturday, VC4 lead developer Eric Anholt posted drm/vc4 threading support with work originally done by Jonas Pfeil. This less than 100 lines of code provides support for threaded fragment shaders within the kernel DRM driver.
Mesa 13.0.1 is now available as the first point release to the massive Mesa 13.0 that brought OpenGL 4.5 to Intel, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver, and much more.
After informing us last week about the availability of the Release Candidate (RC) version of the first point release of Mesa 13.0.0, as well as about Mesa 13.0.1's upcoming launch on November 13, 2016, Collabora's Emil Velikov released the final version today.
The recent slowdowns seen with AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 on my test systems may be attributed to the Linux 4.8 kernel being not properly supported by this hybrid kernel driver.
While we have seen a number of ARM vendors in recent years open-source and mainline DRM/KMS drivers in the Linux kernel for supporting their display blocks on modern SoCs, there has been little activity in the open-source 3D space still for ARM SoCs.
For those of you that have been keeping up with AMD’s Boltzmann Initiative, the company has been moving at a rapid clip to overhaul its HPC software stack for use with its GPUs. AMD's solution not only compares favorably with NVIDIA's CUDA, but developers can also reuse much of its code base (up to 90 percent according to AMD).
German conglomerate Siemens has announced they are acquiring Mentor Graphics, a company that's involved with Linux in several areas.
Siemens is spending $4.5 billion dollars to acquire Mentor Graphics. Mentor designs automation software for IC/SoC development and much more. But through their embedded software work and other areas there are ramifications on Linux/open-source.
On Friday last week I released version 1.1.1 of Yokadi, the console-based TODO list system.
Back in 2012 I wrote about Project Darling as an effort to run Mac OS X software on Linux -- to Wine is for Windows software on Linux, Darling is for Mac software on Linux. Work on Darling seems to have picked up recently after a brief hiatus.
Microsoft has rolled out a new update for the Linux flavor of its Skype client, bringing it to version 1.12, but still keeping it in the alpha development stage for the time being.
I was seriously looking forward to getting some space combat action with 'EVERSPACE' [Steam, Official Site], but it's sounding like the developers are having major issues.
Killing Room [Steam Official Site] is an FPS from Alda Games was supposed to be on Linux day-1. It was delayed due to issues with the Linux version and getting the Windows version ready, but now it's even less certain.
PC Gamer had a chat with Alienware manager Frank Azor about the changing situation of Steam Machines. They feel Windows 10 is part of the reason Steam Machines and SteamOS didn't do so well.
Well now, this is not a game I ever thought I would play. Beholder [Steam, Official Site] has truly captured my interest with the amusing and creepy setting.
Disclosure: Key provided by the developer.
It's disturbing really, nothing would freak me out more than the thoughts of someone spying on me in my own home. The idea of someone peeping through a keyhole at me gives me the shivers.
When finding out a few days back about the ETLegacy 2.75 open-source update with the improvements made around its OpenGL 3.2 renderer, I couldn't help but try it out to relive the original Enemy Territory on Linux with this modernized engine work.
One of my favorite Linux-native games of all time would definitely be Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Wonderful memories of that excellent id Tech 3 game and back when I had time to game on Linux, when not being challenged by early Linux GPU driver issues. This game continues to live on via the community ETLegacy open-source project and recently did issue a major update.
A Phoronix reader pointed out this week that back in September was the ETLegacy 2.75 release. We have covered ETLegacy previously as an open-source project working on a fully-compatible client and server for Enemy Territory based off the open-sourced id Tech 3 engine code. The past few years ETLegacy has been making the game more modern and supported via SDL work, Ogg Vorbis support, optimizations, engine improvements, Lua scripting, and other features not dreamed of back when this game was released in 2003.
Guild Software developers are proud to announce this past weekend the release of a new maintenance update for their popular, cross-platform, and VR-ready Vendetta Online 1.8 massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
Vendetta Online 1.8.396 is here exactly two weeks after the 1.8.395 release to finally implement monitoring functionality to all empty sectors in the Capitol systems, but only those that contain Training Sectors. Also, it adds various tweaks to the management of powercell energy in capital ships during jump-out, and addresses an issue with the menu, which wasn't visible during automatic generation of account conversion on mobile devices.
Valve is planning to introduce beta versions of its SteamVR platform for Mac OSX and Linux users within a few months.
As we reported earlier this month, the Budgie 11 desktop environment is in the works, and it promises to bring lots of goodies to fans of the Solus Linux-based operating system later in December, hopefully.
In this story, we'd like to inform fans of the Budgie desktop environment about some of the upcoming features heading their way. Developer Ikey Doherty tells Softpedia that Budgie 11 is a major update, with a modular architecture, featuring a reacher UI (User Interface), actionable notifications, and multi-monitor support for the panel.
Before I started using tmux, I’d hear it mentioned frequently. It always sounded cool, and while there’s no shortage of great information on the web about what tmux is, it was never entirely clear to me how it would dramatically improve my development workflow. After using tmux for a few years, I’ve come to rely on its ability to streamline several aspects of my development process. Thanks to tmux, my workflow is now more organized, more automated, and easier to customize. My hope is that by sharing a few concrete examples of how tmux has helped me, it may help others better understand what might be gained by taking tmux for a spin.
This post assumes that you’re familiar with the basic vocabulary of tmux, concepts like sessions, panes, and windows. A tmux window functions much like a terminal tab; a session is a collection of related windows (think tabs); and each window can be split into horizontal or vertical sections called panes. Each pane behaves as if it were its own terminal, sourcing your dotfiles, managing distinct environment variables, and so on. For a more comprehensive intro, here’s a great resource to get you up to speed.
A few moments ago, KDE Neon project leader and long-time KDE developer Jonathan Riddell published a security advisory to inform users of the KDE Neon GNU/Linux distribution about an insecure package archive.
According to the security advisory, it would appear that the package archive of the KDE Neon operating system was misconfigured in such a way that it could allow anyone to upload any package to it. Most probably, no one uploaded any package there, but, just in case, the maintainers have emptied the archives and remove all the ISO images.
I will make a presentation on Kdenlive next saturday, 19th of november 2016 in Toulouse at the “Capitole du Libre” event. The Kdenlive event will be at 16h30, and lots of other interesting conferences / workshops / boots will be presenting various aspects of open source so hope to meet some of you there! Full schedule is here.
Besides announcing its next version of Ceph-powered SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE has bought openATTIC, the open-source Ceph and storage management framework.
82 percent of healthcare organizations surveyed have a fully implemented mobile strategy, indicating a greater level of maturity compared to commercial enterprises, according to a recent RedHat mobile app survey. The online survey of 200 IT decision makers from private, public, life sciences and pharmaceutical healthcare organization in the U.S., France, Germany, U.K. reveals nearly 8 in 10 (78 percent) healthcare organizations are achieving positive ROI from mobile app investments.
This positive ROI reflects the respondents expectation that the average number of healthcare apps developed by U.S. respondents over the next 12 months will grow 56 percent from nine to 14. European respondents developed an average of 13 apps and expect that number will grow by 31 percent to 17 apps in the next 12 months. Despite this increase, only 15.5 percent plan to increase their budgets to support mobile app development growth needed to to maintain and update existing apps. This disparity between investment growth and desired app volumes may not be achieved by developing mobile apps as one-off projects.
It was great to be a part of FUDCon Phnom Penh and that too as a speaker. Only lucky ones do get such a wonderful opportunity. Furthermore, it was an extravagant and rich conclave of developers and users of Fedora. And it was a rare opportunity for me to meet extraordinary people, prolific contributors and great friends in the making. It was a rare opportunity to sit by them, listen to them and learn from them. Their contributions so wonderful, their talks and workshops so productive and useful. Since there were three parallel tracks running, I could not hear many of the discussions (as one can't participate in more than one place at a time). So I can only admire the talks of Parag Nemade on 'How to Globalize your software', of Alex Eng on 'Zanata: Translation Platform', of Harish Pillay on 'The final balance of Projects and Products', of Robert Mayr on 'News from the council', of Gerard Braad on 'Project Atomic', of Ryan Lerch on 'Portable Dev Environments with Vagrant', of Kushal Das on 'Testting Fedora Atomic Hosts in an automated way' and of Siddesh Poyarekar on 'Hello World: Revisiting the first C program we write'. These were highly interactive sessions with participants asking many interesting questions. The talks were very helpful and opened up many possible ways of contributing to the Fedora Project. Besides the above talks there were others which I did not get the opportunity of attending as there were parallel sessions working. This was my second FUDCon. The first one was at Pune where I could attend only for a single day. I missed many interesting talks there but this time I could make up for it and learn a lot.
Debian developer Cyril Brulebois was pleased to announce this past weekend the release and immediate availability of the eighth Alpha development snapshot of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" installer.
Not sure what happened here. Debian’s release-critical bug count has been high for months with many failures to build from source after changes to GCC and several libraries.
Total number of release-critical bugs: 2647 Number that have a patch: 442 Number that have a fix prepared and waiting to upload: 84 Number that are being ignored: 47 Number concerning the current stable release: 664 Number concerning the next release: 771
Out this weekend is the eighth alpha release of the Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 9.0 "Stretch" release due out in 2017.
This latest alpha installer release adds GNU/screen support to the debian-installer, supports a merged /usr via the --merged-usr option, support for XZ-compressed package indices, ARMHF EFI systems support with the GRUB installer, and a wide range of other changes.
After informing us earlier this month about the new task manager that will be implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 update for Ubuntu Phone and Tablet devices, reader Tomas Vicik is back with more interesting tips.
It appears that Tomas Vicik is using the rc-proposed channel on this Ubuntu Phone to get an early taste of the new features coming to the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system developed by Canonical for various smartphone and tablet models.
He wrote in his last email that the appearance of the default Scopes was refreshed and it looks great, and that the new task manager now features a fuzzy background, which should enchant fans of the Ubuntu Touch OS.
Many of you may recall that this switch wasn’t without controversy. Many users were not happy with the change, which they felt was too ‘mac-esque’ and a break with conventional window button placement.
The good news was that any one who didn’t like the default placement could change the position of window control buttons back to right-hand side. An entire crop of 3rd-party tools, hacks and apps grew up with this option present among them Unity Tweak Tool.
As the years have passed, so too has the memory of this drama. Most of us have long since gotten used to left-aligned window controls, and would find a sudden change back to the right almost as jarring!
One of our Twitter followers got in touch with us this weekend to ask how to move the window buttons to the right in Ubuntu...
Recent Files Indicator sits in your panel and gives you access to recently used files, saving you the need to navigate or search using Nautilus.
Earlier today, November 13, 2016, Linux Mint leader Clement Lefebvre published the project's monthly newsletter for the month of November 2016 to emphasize some aspects regarding the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" operating system.
Nintendo look as though they may have something of a hit on their hands with their latest console offering. It’s not the next in the line of high-end consoles with immersive VR or silicon that wouldn’t have looked out of place in last year’s supercomputer, instead it’s an homage to one of their past greats. The NES Classic Edition is a reboot of the 1980s console with the familiar styling albeit a bit smaller, and 30 of the best NES games included.
Geniatech’s “Development Board IV” is a 96Boards-like SBC that runs Android or Debian on a Snapdragon 410, and features 40- and 60-pin expansion connectors.
Linaro’s 96Boards spec has taken off to the point that we’re beginning to see clones and near-clones that are not yet sanctioned by 96Boards.org with an official mark of compliance, as in the case of Fujitsu’s 96Boards CE compatible F-Cue SBC. In the case Geniatech’s Development Board IV, there is not even a mention of 96Boards. The SBC, which is also referred to as Developer Board 4 and DB4, has 96Boards-like 40- and 60-pin connectors, and a feature set that is very similar to that of Qualcomm/Arrow’s DragonBoard 410c.
Samsung is planning to introduce new Tizen OS-running smartphones next year. As part of its preparations, it has launched an incentive program for app developers to create more applications for the Linux-based operating system.
According to VentureBeat, Samsung has decided to create the Tizen Mobile App Incentive Program as part of its efforts to increase the number of apps available for Tizen devices. Through this incentive program, app developers can earn $10,000 for an app that manages to emerge as part of the top 100 most-downloaded apps list on the Tizen Store.
As many of you know, Huawei had introduced two flagship devices quite recently, the Huawei Mate 9 and Porsche Design Mate 9. Now, the company had introduced these two devices in Munich, Germany, and they’ve scheduled a press event in China for today. Well, the company has just announced the Huawei Mate 9 and Porsche Design Mate 9 in China, and in addition to those two devices, Huawei has also introduced a third smartphone, a device that surfaced earlier today, read on.
I eventually found out that my friends was fed up, the company wouldn't allow him to contribute to open source. Wow. Even in Silicon Valley.
ARK Platform, the innovative blockchain based products and solutions initiative has taken a major step by making the codes completely open source. The platform released the codes on its official GitHub account on November 12, 2016, with the intention of allowing developers from across the world to take advantage of the latest advancements in blockchain technology.
GCHQ’s aim is to contribute and create its own open source software as a government department and technology organisation.
Richard Marshall of IAC Publishing Labs describes Ask.com's adventures in navigating two decades of legacy infrastructure on the way to living the container native dream, in his presentation from LinuxCon North America.
The Cascadia Community Builder Award recognizes a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the free software movement in the Cascadia region, and this year's winner is Bill Wright. The award was presented in person on Saturday, November 12 at the Seattle GNU/Linux conference (SeaGL). Wright was chosen because his tireless work as a founding organizer for Linuxfest Northwest has been instrumental to growing the free software community in Cascadia.
The goal of social science research is to discover fundamental features of human behavior. There are many different approaches to discover this, but one of the best approaches is through games. How do researches implement these types of games and what technologies are most appropriate to help them gather the research that they need to discover why humans behave like we do?
Mozilla last week named its next-generation browser engine project and said it would introduce the new technology to Firefox next year.
Dubbed Quantum, the new engine will include several components from Servo, the browser rendering engine that Mozilla has sponsored, and been working on, since 2013. Written with Rust, Servo was envisioned as a replacement for Firefox's long-standing Gecko engine. Both Servo and Rust originated at Mozilla's research group.
Back in August, Mozilla delivered a number of updates for its Firefox browser that created a bit of fanfare, but the browser has steadily lost market share to Google Chrome. Still, if you've been a fan of open source for any length of time, you are familiar with Firefox's status as a pioneering browser.
Now, Mozilla has announced plans to kickstart Firefox innovation with a next-generation browse project called Quantum. Here are details.
After investigating our open source options and due diligence, we picked MariaDB as Teleplan’s new replacement e-TRAC database partner. With MariaDB, we realized significant performance improvements.
For example, whereas running one particular daily report would take up to 15 seconds to run on Oracle Enterprise, with MariaDB it was running in under a second. We did not have the in-house expertise to work on improving the Oracle performance and found this aspect much easier with MariaDB. We also received excellent support both in terms of value and responsiveness and that, coupled with a highly competitive cost, makes MariaDB a great overall package for our e-TRAC needs.
For those wanting a concise look at how FreeBSD's development has evolved recently, their third quarter 2016 status report was published this weekend to offer a glimpse at the latest development projects.
If you live in a city with poor air quality you may be aware that particulates are one of the chief contributors to the problem. Tiny particles of soot from combustion, less than 10üm across, hence commonly referred to as PM10. These are hazardous because they can accumulate deep in the lungs, wherein all kinds of nasties can be caused.
The maker movement intersects deeply with open source. When I think of open source I normally think of the most hardcore bleeding-edge software or hardware development. But the maker movement has a long-established sharing culture, which really is nothing less than pure open source.
The source code is a little different, however. For example, consider Nicole Curtis, the maker celebrity and TV star of Rehab Addict. Nicole routinely shows her fans how to remodel their homes and save a fortune. For example, she redid a bathroom by upcycling what others discarded for $1000, easily a tenth of the cost of putting in a new bathroom. Her videos provide the howtos for anyone with similar problems, so in a sense they represent the "source code" to rehab a house.
Now anyone can do the work to take ownership of their neighborhood. All it takes is effort and this kit from the Better Block Project.
Correctly installing and configuring an integrated development environment, workspace, and build tools in order to contribute to a project can be a daunting or time consuming task, even for experienced developers. Tyler Jewell, CEO of Codenvy, faced this problem when he was attempting to set up a simple Java project when he was working on getting his coding skills back after dealing with some health issues and having spent time in managerial positions. After multiple days of struggling, Jewell could not get the project to work, but inspiration struck him.
A few thoughts on what it means for software to be production ready. Or rather, what if any information is conveyed to me when I’m told that something is used in production. Millions of users can’t be wrong!
Some time ago, I worked with a framework. It doesn’t matter which, the bugs have all been fixed, and I don’t think it was remarkable. But our team picked it because it was production ready, and then I discovered it wasn’t quite so ready.
This week marked five years since the release of the Open64 5.0 compiler in what is the latest and likely last-ever release of this once-promising code compiler.
Open64 5.0 was released back in 2011 and unfortunately there hasn't been a release since. Last year we wrote how the Open64 project vanished. A few days after that article, it was said back on 27 March 2015, "The websites and SVN servers are down for maintenance and will be back soon."
There is a multi-billion-dollar cult, propagated by the Hollywood elite, which preys like an engorged leech on the minds and pocketbooks of people seeking a purpose. Oh, I'm sorry, did you think I'm talking about Scientology? Well, think different. I'm talking about a little gadget company you may know as Apple Inc. Of course, I expect the Apple Sheep (or as I like to call them, Shapples) to angrily yet gingerly close their brand-new "rose gold" (Shapple word for "pink") MacBook Air, take an even angrier sip of their matcha latte, and send off a furious Kimoji.
NHS chiefs tried to keep plans to cut hospital services in England secret, an investigation has found.
Forty-four reviews of local services have been set up across the country and all have now drawn up proposals.
Some involve closing A&Es or, in one case, a whole hospital, but the details of most have yet to emerge.
That is because NHS England told local managers to keep the plans "out of the public domain" and avoid requests for information, the King's Fund suggested.
One piece of guidance even went as far as to advise managers how to reject freedom of information requests.
The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) is renewing its financial support for a project that ensures binaries produced from open source software projects are free of tampering.
The Reproducible Builds Project provides tools and best practices to software projects to ensure that the binaries generated by a compilation process are identical each time and can be matched to the source code used to build them.
Encryption is an interesting thing. The first time I saw encryption in action was on a friend’s Gentoo Linux laptop that could only boot if the USB key with the boot partition and decryption key was inserted. Cool stuff, from a geek point-of-view.
Fast forward, and revelations from Edward Snowden and ongoing concerns about government snooping are slowly bringing encryption and privacy tools into the mainstream. Even if you’re not worried about a Big Brother or some shady spy-versus-spy scenario, encryption can still protect your identity and privacy if your laptop is stolen. Think of all the things we keep on laptops: contact information, financial information, and client and company information. All of that data is worthy of protection. Luckily, Linux users have access to several tools for the affordable price of free.
There are three main methods for protecting the data on your laptop, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
The networked electronics found under the hood of modern automobiles enable a great many useful and cool things, such as fuel-saving engine optimizations, parking assist mechanisms, collision avoidance systems, and myriad further applications most often involving sensing and the passing of data among vehicular systems and human drivers. As is pretty much always the case when electronics become networked, this connectivity also offers hackers new potential exploits.
According to research presented last month at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Vienna, courtesy of computer scientists at the University of Michigan (and Adrian Colyer's excellent The Morning Paper), the controller area network (CAN) protocol implemented by in-vehicle networks has a new and potentially quite dangerous vulnerability. The attack, known as a bus-off attack, exploits the CAN's built-in error handling facilities to potentially nuke both contemporary insecure CANs and future secured versions.
Rootkits are much in the news lately. They were recently sighted in the Street Fighter V video game, critical infrastructure controls and even Yahoo email servers.
In the case of Yahoo, the spying tool that the U.S. government ordered the company to install on its servers was a "buggy" rootkit that concealed itself on Yahoo's systems and provided the government with a backdoor into Yahoo emails, according to an article in Motherboard.
President-elect Donald J. Trump said Friday that he was likely to abandon the American effort to support “moderate” opposition groups in Syria who are battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying “we have no idea who these people are.”
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal that dealt largely with economic issues, including his willingness to retain parts of the Affordable Care Act, he repeated a position he took often during his campaign: that the United States should focus on defeating the Islamic State, and find common ground with the Syrians and their Russian backers.
“I’ve had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria,” Mr. Trump told The Journal. “My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria.”
His comments suggest that once Mr. Trump begins overseeing both the public support for the opposition groups, and a far larger covert effort run by the Central Intelligence Agency, he may wind down or abandon the effort. But there are in fact two wars going on simultaneously in Syria.
The folly involved in the United Kingdom continuing to cling on to tiny relics of Empire is underlined by considering two airports. Firstly we have St Helena, where DFID have famously wasted €£250 million of taxpayers’ money on an airport which cannot be used because of wind shear.
[...]
British attitudes to St Helena were for generations of malign neglect, and the recent laudable attempt to improve things has been destroyed by gross incompetence – for which nobody has resigned or been sacked.
By comparison, the equally isolated Chagos Islands have an excellent airport, owned by the British Government, on Diego Garcia. The problem here of course is that the British government brutally uprooted and deported the entire local population, and leased the base to the United States, keeping the previous inhabitants away by force.
[...]
Personally, I should like to see the US air force removed and the islands demilitarised. But even without that, dual military and civilian use of runways exists in a great many locations all round the world and there is no reason whatsoever why civilian flights could not land. Indeed, passing billionaires are permitted to land their Lear jets already to refuel. But of course, making the islands viable for tourism and a population is not the goal here. The goal is to make them unviable.
So there we have it, a tale of two airports on extremely remote islands. One built at vast expense which cannot be used, and one perfectly viable which the government will not permit to be used. It is a story which sums up the shame, immorality and international criminality of the UK’s continuing Imperial pretensions.
Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein accepted the 2016 Sydney Peace Prize in Australia on Friday, delivering a searing speech that reflected on Donald Trump's presidential victory in the United States and the factors that allowed it to happen.
"If there is a single overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate, of direct appeals to power over the 'other'...especially during times of economic hardship," said Klein, whose books include The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
Calling Trump the "demagogue of the moment," Klein went on to identify other lessons to "take from our barely three-day-old reality."
A Swedish prosecuting official has arrived at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to be present while Julian Assange is interviewed about a sex allegation.
Ingrid Isgren faced photographers as she stepped out of a car and walked up the steps to the front door of the building in Knightsbridge on Monday morning.
A Swedish prosecutor has arrived in Ecuador’s London embassy to interview Julian Assange more than six years after he was accused of rape in Sweden.
The long-delayed interview marks a milestone in a case that has been locked in stalemate since the WikiLeaks founder sought asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden over the allegation, which he denies. Sweden is likely to come under renewed pressure to issue formal rape charges or to drop the case altogether after he has been interviewed.
Sweden's chief prosecutor is questioning WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about a rape allegation at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
He denies the allegation that he raped a Swedish woman in 2010.
Swedish prosecutor Ingrid Isgren is listening as an Ecuadorean prosecutor puts the questions to Mr Assange.
Over four years after he was granted asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Julian Assange is set to be interviewed over allegations of sexual assault.
Here is all you need to know about the allegations and why it has taken six years for him to be interviewed.
Swedish assistant prosecutor Ingrid Isgren has arrived at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to interview Julian Assange over rape allegations and request a DNA sample.
Ms. Hanson, meanwhile, issued a statement Friday saying she’ll work with the Trump administration towards securing immediate release of Mr. Assange, an “Australian citizen and political prisoner.”
“I hope that in light of his great service towards freedom and truth President Elect Donald Trump will consider granting a full presidential pardon,” she wrote.
Mr. Assange, 45, has not been formally charged in the United States. Since at least 2010, however, he and his website have been the subject of several U.S. federal investigations resulting from their publication of classified U.S. government documents.
Despite having only been elected in the early hours of this morning, the Republican candidate is already facing his first major decision over calls for Mr Assange to be cleared over sex assault allegations.
WikiLeaks has long sought to expand privacy rights and has strongly opposed secret wiretaps, drone strikes, and the Guantánamo Bay prison facility.
When President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House next year he will bring with him potential conflicts of interest across all areas of government that are unprecedented in American history.
Trump, who manages a sprawling, international network of businesses, has thus far refused to put his businesses into a blind trust the way his predecessors in the nation’s highest office have traditionally done. Instead he has said his businesses will be run by his own adult children.
Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s eldest child, has insisted that Trump’s holdings would go into a trust managed by him and his siblings Eric and Ivanka Trump.
“We’re not going to be involved in government,” Trump Jr told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in September on Good Morning America. “He wants nothing to do with [the company]. He wants to fix this country.”
2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century.
The scorching temperatures around the world, and the extreme weather they drive, mean the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, published on Monday at the global climate summit in Morocco, found the global temperature in 2016 is running 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. This is perilously close to to the 1.5C target included as an aim of the Paris climate agreement last December.
Eighteen Indiana state parks will close temporarily on November 14-15 and again on November 28-29 to allow for controlled hunts to reduce the deer population.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed and controversial 12-nation trade pact dealing with everything from intellectual property to human rights, effectively died Friday. Congressional leaders from both parties told the White House they would no longer consider it with a lame duck president, even one who staunchly backed the plan.
White House officials conceded on Friday that the president’s hard-fought-for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal would not pass Congress, as lawmakers there prepared for the anti-global trade policies of President-elect Donald Trump.
Donald Trump ran as a populist enemy of the global financial elite. In other news, Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager who has somehow secured a position as a key Trump economic adviser despite being a member of the global financial elite Trump has vowed to crush, tells the Financial Times that Trump will eliminate a rule requiring financial advisers to follow their clients’ best interests. The rule came about in response to a long-standing practice, exposed most blatantly in the wake of the housing crash, by which advisers would dump products onto their clients in order to get them off their own firm’s balance sheet. The Obama rule requires financial advisers to follow their clients’ fiduciary interest.
Did you want to buy a Blu-ray copy of Academy Award-winning movie Birdman from Amazon? If you’re not an Amazon Prime member, you’re out of luck. The retailer has begun to restrict sales of some items to its members.
British businesses have abandoned investment plans worth more than €£65 billion since the vote to leave the European Union five months ago.
A survey of more than 1,000 companies found that uncertainty about the UK’s future in the single market and the falling value of sterling were driving down investment.
China's state-run newspaper says the government would respond with "countermeasures" if President-elect Donald Trump starts a trade war against the country, warning that the sales of iPhones and US cars would suffer a "setback." In an editorial published on Sunday, the Global Times said it would be "naive" for Trump to follow through on his campaign promises to implement a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the US and to declare the country a currency manipulator.
Trump repeatedly targeted China during his presidential campaign, vowing to take a tougher stance on trade in the hopes of reviving manufacturing in the US. In its editorial, the Global Times dismissed the notion that Trump alone could implement a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports, though it warned that any protectionist measure could leave trade "paralyzed."
Britain must “adapt to the moment and evolve its thinking” to become a global leader in free trade, Theresa May is to say.
The prime minister will pledge to lead the charge in remaking globalisation, days after Donald Trump was elected US president on the promise of protecting American industry and ending a string of free trade agreements.
May’s speech will be seen as an attempt to reposition the UK after the Brexit vote and the US presidential election and as a response to Nigel Farage becoming the first UK politician to meet the president-elect over the weekend.
On Thursday morning I was doing some work with the radio on, which was playing In Our Time, the Radio 4 programme which discusses ideas and events from through history. It’s a simple formula: get a topic, get three experts on the topic and a moderator, talk for 45 minutes.
Donald Trump’s surprise victory shows that Britain has to regain control over immigration and deal with its own “overlooked” communities, Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to say Monday evening, according to London’s the Telegraph.
In her first major speech since Trump won America’s top office, May will say that the U.S. election stunner — coming close on the heels of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June — is evidence that “change is in the air” and that Britain must do more for the working class and voters on low incomes who feel “overlooked,” the paper reported.
CETA, the planned free trade agreement between the EU and Canada has been approved by the EU governments and will be now discussed and voted on in the European Parliament. The vote is scheduled for end of 2016 or early 2017.
Today (8 November) sees the launch of the final phase of the campaign entitled “CETA CHECK”. Civil society organizations from all EU countries will call on citizens to ask Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to vote against CETA. The campaign is supported by the EU-wide Stop TTIP alliance which, together with the self-organized Stop TTIP European Citizens’ Initiative, collected over 3.5 million signatures against TTIP & CETA.
Donald Trump’s election has likely given a massive lifeline to Deutsche Bank, the German financial firm that has been rocked recently by rumors that they would have to pay a $14 billion fine to the Justice Department over crisis-related mortgage abuses.
That money is unlikely to ever be imposed, now that one of Deutsche Bank’s biggest borrowers – Trump – will soon be sitting in the White House.
That conflict of interest is one of the innumerable ones facing Trump as he leaves his life of grifting behind and becomes the nation’s chief executive. While the Justice Department is nominally independent of the White House, I had to stop writing this sentence because of constant laughing. Trump could easily move to protect his personal investments by aiding his business partner Deutsche Bank.
I could never have imagined it. That an economic and trade agreement between the EU and Canada could turn into a soap opera involving a small region of Belgium. Yet that’s what happened: for two weeks, a four-letter word, Ceta, resonated on factory floors and offices, in homes, schools and cafes the length and breadth of Wallonia, the region I have the privilege to be president of, as our parliament delayed the deal.
Donald Trump campaigned on protecting Social Security. At the Miami GOP presidential debate in March, he said he would “do everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it is; to make this country rich again.” In August, his campaign told CNNMoney that “We will not cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, but protect them both.”
But two of the people said to be helming the president-elect’s Social Security Administration (SSA) transition team have a record of hostility to the program.
On Tuesday, Maine became the first state to challenge America’s first-past-the-post voting system, as voters approved, by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent, a referendum instituting ranked-choice voting for state and federal elections. It’s by far the biggest victory for a reform movement that has attracted high-profile endorsements from politicians like John McCain and Howard Dean but had so far failed to gain traction beyond a few progressive American cities. For Maine, it’s a shift that could make third-party voting more viable overnight—by eliminating the ability of third-parties to play spoiler.
Scottish Independence activists take part in an Independence 2 rally, outside the SNP conference in Glasgow, mid-October, 2016. Jane Barlow/Press Association. All rights reserved.Amidst the rapidly changing politics of Brexit, and the furore around the Article 50 judgement, it seems that the big division between the government and opposition parties is whether the UK heads towards a ‘soft’ or a ‘hard’ Brexit. But with Theresa May denying she wants a hard Brexit, and Labour and the LibDems not in the same place on what a soft Brexit looks like, the question arises both as to how meaningful the soft/hard distinction is, and whether any of the parties really know what they want.
That swamp is looking mighty damp. And this doesn't touch on the fact that top execs from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have been floated as Trump's Treasury Secretary. Draining that swamp, huh? Remember Bannon's quote about how people were sick of Clinton's ties to Wall Street? Should we remind you that Bannon used to work at Goldman Sachs himself?
Anyway, let's just address two responses I'm sure will likely appear in the comments below -- perhaps by people so furious that we're insulting "their guy" that they won't read this far: Yes, Clinton would have brought in probably just as many lobbyists. Just as President Obama campaigned on stopping the power of lobbyists in DC... and then went ahead and brought a bunch into his administration, it's almost certain that Clinton would have done the same. But the Trump campaign's explicit claim was that it would be breaking away from lobbyists, crony capitalists and close ties to Wall Street at the very time it was bringing those people into the campaign.
Every four years, the bizarre, undemocratic institution at the heart of American democracy, the Electoral College, gets more vocal detractors. That is particularly the case in years like this one, when the mechanism awards the presidency to the runner-up in the national popular vote, Donald Trump.
“The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump,” Michael Moore wrote on Facebook post Wednesday. “The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College.”
Urged on by Lady Gaga, more than a million people signed a petition on Thursday calling on the electors, when they meet next month, to ignore the current rules, which bind them to voting for the winner of their state and cast their ballots instead for the winner of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton.
President-elect Donald Trump’s first White House hire tells you everything you need to know about his commitment to his campaign’s bigoted message. Stephen Bannon, an anti-Semite who ran the white nationalist “alt-right” website Breitbart News before taking a leave of absence to become the Trump campaign CEO, will be Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor.
On November 13, Trump released a statement announcing Bannon’s hiring. The same statement noted that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus would become Trump’s chief of staff. While White House chief of staff is typically the most senior position in the White House, the press release named Bannon first and described the two as “equal partners” in the Trump administration.
Donald Trump has time to alter his proposed policies. But if he doesn’t, the ACLU will fight him every step of the way.
This morning, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, and the ACLU has a message for him.
President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression.
Amid the growing post-election call for a "reckoning" within the Democratic Party, Rep. Keith Ellison on Minnesota has swiftly emerged as the favored progressive choice to lead that transition.
The far-right leader of the French National Front, Marine Le Pen, has hailed Donald Trump’s victory in the US election and claimed they are both part of a “new world” being built in the wake of Brexit.
Le Pen was interviewed on The Andrew Marr Show on Remembrance Sunday – a move which has angered critics of Le Pen’s right-wing nationalist politics and provoked protests outside the BBC studio.
Mr. Bannon’s selection demonstrated the power of grass-roots activists who backed Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Some of them have long traded in the conspiracy theories and sometimes racist messages of Breitbart News, the website that Mr. Bannon ran for much of the last decade. Continue reading the main story
The site has accused President Obama of “importing more hating Muslims”; compared Planned Parenthood’s work to the Holocaust; called the conservative commentator Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew”; and advised female victims of online harassment to “just log off” and stop “screwing up the internet for men,” illustrating that point with a picture of a crying child.
Days after dismissing the suggestion that Facebook swayed the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg elaborated on his comments Saturday on his own page on the social network.
While the Facebook CEO stood firm on the notion that fake news articles were somehow responsible for discouraging its users from voting for Hillary Clinton, he did also say that his company was looking at ways to continue cutting down on the appearance of hoaxes on the platform.
“We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The Facebook CEO also made clear, however, that there is a fine line between battling fake news and getting into the murkier territory of deciding what information is factual or not.
Donald Trump says he’ll continue to tweet as president.
In a preview clip of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview to air Sunday, the president-elect said social media is a “modern form of communication” that played a key role in his election victory.
“When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story or when somebody other than you and another– a network, or whatever, because of course, CBS would never do a thing like that right? I have a method of fighting back,” Trump told Lesley Stahl.
During Canada's nightmarish Stephen Harper years -- when an Arctic country with two oceanic coastlines and major freshwater reserves was ruled by a ruthless climate-denier -- science librarian John Dupuis did yeoman service documenting and rounding up the assault on science that was an essential part of Harper's payback to the oil interests he represented.
Now America is to be governed by man who believes that climate change is a Chinese conspiracy, whose EPA team is led by a man who says climate change is "nothing to worry about," who campaigned on a promise to revive the coal industry and bring back the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Dupuis is making ready to document the coming Trump campaign against science. In an era of catastrophic climate change, climate denial means war on science, because reality has a well-known liberal bias and people who observe and document reality are therefore enemies of the state.
Among the exceptional things about America is that, along with North Korea, we are one of a very few nations that have our schools begin the day with a pledge of allegiance. Unlike North Korea, however, our pledge also includes a reference to God.
When Donald Trump becomes commander in chief in January, he will take on presidential powers that have never been more expansive and unchecked.
He’ll control an unaccountable drone program, and the prison at Guantanamo Bay. His FBI, including a network of 15,000 paid informants, already has a record of spying on mosques and activists, and his NSA’s surveillance empire is ubiquitous and governed by arcane rules, most of which remain secret. He will inherit bombing campaigns in seven Muslim countries, the de facto ability to declare war unilaterally, and a massive nuclear arsenal — much of which is on hair-trigger alert.
Caught off guard by Hillary Clinton’s election defeat, Democrats who defended these powers under President Obama may suddenly be having second thoughts as the White House gets handed over to a man they described — with good reason — as “unhinged,” and “dangerously unfit.”
The hub of the NSC is the NSC Principals Committee, a kind of super cabinet. Its nerve center is the Situation Room in the West Wing basement. Twelve of the 13 people depicted in the famous White House photo taken in the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden operation were connected to the NSC. By law, the Principals Committee includes the president, vice president, and secretaries of defense, state, and, since 2007, energy. The committee’s exact composition varies from meeting to meeting, to be decided by the president and senior White House staff. Within the broad strokes of the original 1947 law, as updated over the years and then amended by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, NSC quite literally makes its own rules, and those rules are set by the president.
Throughout this election I said I didn’t believe Trump wanted to win. And judging from the Podesta emails, the DNC helped engineer the Trump ascension to the Republican nomination. Trump was the only guy (along with Ted Cruz) more repulsive to the public than Hillary Clinton. Which keeps reminding me of Mel Brooks’ The Producers.
Two-thirds of the world's internet users live under regimes of government censorship, according to a report released today. The report from Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, finds that internet freedom across the globe declined for a sixth consecutive year in 2016, as governments cracked down on social media services and messaging apps.
The findings are based on an analysis of web freedom in 65 countries, covering 88 percent of the world's online population. Freedom House ranked China as the worst abuser of internet freedom for the second consecutive year, followed by Syria and Iran. (The report does not include North Korea.) Online freedom in the US increased slightly over the year due to the USA Freedom Act, which limits the bulk collection of metadata carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies.
In my last column, I outlined how the Power of Narrative is the biggest power anybody can hold in society, and the civil unrest that follows when it is handed over. I wrote a little bit about parallels between the printing press and today’s Internet in terms of how that power is shifting. However, most people aren’t prepared for just how far rulers are prepared to go to defend their power of narrative: judging by history, they would rather have people killed than thinking freely.
They say that people who don’t study history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history (and meanwhile, those who do study history are doomed to stand by watching others repeat those same mistakes). Therefore, it is absolutely vital to understand the power struggles around the printing press.
I wrote in my last column that Martin Luther’s mass-printed bibles in German and French, the so-called Luther Bibles, enabled the common folk to completely bypass the clergy’s reading of bibles in Latin, enabling them to go straight to the source material and cut out a gatekeeper, something that led to a century of civil war.
Since being declared the winner of the Presidential election, Donald Trump has actually played the part of an actual President-elect quite well. His victory speech was quite gracious and welcoming. His meeting with President Obama appeared to go well. Of course, anyone who's watched him during the campaign knew it couldn't last, but perhaps, maybe, he'd actually be presidential for a few weeks or (could we dare?) a few months? But, nope. All it took was about 48 hours and the man who four years ago demanded that people "march on Washington" because President Obama was re-elected, used his very first tweet as the President elect to shit all over the First Amendment.
Veteran filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan has criticised censorship in cinema, saying it is "totally unwanted" and feels television programmes are the ones which should be censored.
Many television programmes, especially soap operas, are even showcasing crime on prime time after giving prior announcement, the 75-year-old Dadasaheb Phalke awardee said.
He also questioned the display of anti-smoking and liquor messages on the movie screen and said if smoking and drinking were injurious to health, it should be banned. "There is no need for cinema to bear its burden," he said.
This election year may have been something of a clusterfuck for just about everyone... but it was damn good for CNN. The cable news channel that was generally filled with some of the most idiotic and meaningless banter made out like a bandit, apparently bringing in a billion dollars in profit by being the country's official organ player in a grand circus of political entertainment. The hiring of direct partisans on both sides, the failure to do very much actual deep looking at anything, and the complete pointlessness of whatever a Wolf Blitzer is all seemed to delight in turning anything about issues into horse race he said/she said soundbites.
And now it's being an annoying copyright asshole too.
The “SNL” episode was an emotionally charged one, showing comedian and host Dave Chappelle tackle last week’s election of Republican Donald J. Trump with some scathing material that made use of words that are often not utilized on TV. After referring to a vulgar term for the female anatomy, Chappelle quickly apologized to Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of the late-night institution, on the air. The episode opened with cast member Kate McKinnon playing Hillary Clinton singing the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah.” “I’m not giving up, and neither should you,” the character told viewers.
The Raleigh, N.C. affiliate of NBC censored “Saturday Night Live” in nine different parts of last night’s broadcast, citing language used by comedian and host Dave Chappelle and raising concerns on social media of whether broadcasters could become more wary of edgy content under an administration led by President-elect Donald Trump.
I should say up front that I'm a big supporter of Fight for the Future and the work they do, and while some may take this post as a slam on them, it is anything but. We're very much on the same page on nearly everything, but it caught my attention when FftF's Evan Greer wrote a piece asking President Obama to "shut down" the NSA's mass surveillance systems before Donald Trump gets control of it all. Specifically the article says "before it's too late." While I'd love to see Obama shut down the NSA's mass surveillance system, it's time to admit that it is too late. Anything the President does to that effect in this lame duck session can, and will, be reversed on day one of the Trump administration. Perhaps there's some value in the symbolic gesture, but let's face the facts: it's too late.
Should law enforcement get an all access, long-term pass to a teenager’s cell phone, just because he or she had a run in with police? That question is in front of California’s highest court, and in an amicus brief filed earlier this month, EFF and the three California offices of the ACLU warned that it was a highly invasive and unconstitutional condition of juvenile parole.
You probably don’t expect the government to log and track your personally identifying information, despite having broken no laws, just because you attended an event at the fairgrounds. That would be preposterous in the Land of the Free.
But, according to the Wall Street Journal, federal agencies have joined forces with local police to deploy automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology at gun shows, with the aim of collecting attendees' plate information—without an explicit target. Gun show patrons are typically concerned about their Second Amendment rights, but what about the First Amendment?
ALPRs are high-speed camera systems that capture the license plates of every vehicle that passes into view. These images are then translated into machine-readable characters that can be run through police and driver databases. The scans are also often added to massive ALPR databases. In aggregate, this data can reveal patterns of behavior, such as when you leave for work, where you sleep at night, what doctors you visit, who you hang out with, and, yes, whether you attend gun shows.
ALPR is a form of mass surveillance since it captures information on every driver, not just those suspected of involvement in crimes. Most states and local jurisdictions have not enacted any kind of public accountability for these systems.
On Tuesday, Americans handed the U.S. presidency to a racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, climate-science-denying, misogynistic, revenge-obsessed ego-maniac — and with it control over a vast and all-too-unaccountable intelligence apparatus; and in a speech less than three weeks ago, Trump promised to sue all of the women who have come forward with sexual assault accusations against him.
Trump has repeatedly shown utter disrespect for the rule of law. He doesn’t believe in freedom of religion. He advocates torture. He has said he’ll instruct his Justice Department to investigate Black Lives Matter activists, and it’s likely he’ll appoint Rudy Giuliani, of New York City’s racist and unconstitutional “stop-and-frisk” fame, as his attorney general to do the investigating. The New York Times also reports that “Mr. Trump still privately muses about all the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day.”
With Trump eager to misuse his power and get revenge on his perceived enemies, it’s reasonable to conclude there will be a parallel increase in abuse of power in law enforcement and the intelligence community. Activists who put their bodies on the line trying to protect basic rights — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, civil rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, privacy rights — will face the brunt of it.
Thanks to 16 years of relentless and illegal expansion of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, Trump is about to have more tools of surveillance at his disposal than any tyrant ever has. Those preparing for the long fight ahead must protect themselves, even if doing so can be technically complicated.
The best approach varies from situation to situation, but here are some first steps that activists and other concerned citizens should take.
The Lawfare blog, run by the Brookings Institution, has long reliably been a good source to go to for reading what defenders of mass surveillance and the surveillance state are thinking -- in a non-hysterical way. While I disagree with much of what's posted on there, it tends to be thoughtful and interesting reading. Its founder and Editor-in-Chief is Ben Wittes, who's always good for an impassioned defense of the NSA's surveillance on Americans, and was all in on forcing tech companies to break encryption. He wasn't worried, you see, because he was quite sure the NSA would never spy on him. Because, you know, he's a good guy.
Representatives from the Swedish prosecutor's office and the Swedish police will be present while questions are put to the WikiLeaks founder by an Ecuadorian official on Monday.
Mr Assange has been granted political asylum by Ecuador and has been living inside the embassy for over four years.
He believes that if he leaves the embassy he will be extradited to the United States for questioning over the activities of WikiLeaks.
He denies the allegation against him and has been offering to be interviewed at the embassy.
Turkish prosecutors are seeking long jail terms or life sentences for nine staff of a pro-Kurdish newspaper, including prize-winning novelist Asli Erdogan, on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization and harming national unity, state-run media said on Thursday.
Erdogan, who is not related to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, was jailed pending trial in August after police detained her and two dozen more staff from the Ozgur Gundem newspaper, which was closed by court order on a charge of spreading propaganda of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
What’s happening right now in North Dakota is reflective of many things: the violent desperation of extractive industry and the willingness of the state to act as its enforcers, counterposed with the peaceful power of people gathered in simple defense of the water, land and life of their community and the wider world.
The main Paris attacks suspect, Salah Abdeslam, has become even more radicalized since being imprisoned for his presumed role in the slaughter of 130 people a year ago, his former lawyer has said.
“He’s got a beard, he’s become a true fundamentalist whereas before he was a kid wearing Nike trainers,” Belgian lawyer Sven Mary told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant’s Saturday edition.
Belgian-born French national Abdeslam is believed to be the only jihadist survivor of the November 13 attacks in the French capital that Belgian authorities claim were orchestrated by the Islamic State high command.
After four months on the run, the 27-year-old of Moroccan origin was arrested in Brussels in March and subsequently transferred to France in April.
Jail bosses fear a race war could break out behind bars after €hardened killers set up protection groups against Muslim convicts.
The Sunday People can reveal that €governors have been given an urgent €security warning about one new network called Death Before Dishonour.
The group – calling themselves DBD for short – have formed to protect €themselves against what they claim is an increasing risk from Muslim inmates.
But it raises the threat of further meltdown in our crisis-hit jails.
Members of the gangs are being €recruited from special Close Supervision Centres set up to hold the most dangerous convicts – often violent lifers.
For more than 30 years, sharia courts enforcing Islamic law have been operating quietly across Britain. But two official inquiries have put them in the spotlight amid accusations that they discriminate against women.
Very little is known about them, even their number, which one study by the University of Reading puts at 30, while the British think tank Civitas estimates there are 85.
Sharia courts or councils, as they prefer to be called, mainly pronounce on Islamic divorces, which today constitute 90 percent of the cases they handle.
They range from groups of Muslim scholars attached to a mosque, to informal organisations or even a single imam.
The eighth episode of Ars Technica Live is coming up next Wednesday, November 16, in Oakland, California, at Longitude! Join Ars Technica editors Dan Goodin and Annalee Newitz with guest Morgan Marquis-Boire for a conversation about infosec, surveillance, and digital authoritarianism.
Marquis-Boire is a New Zealand-born hacker, security researcher, and journalist. He is the director of security for First Look Media and a contributing writer for The Intercept. Prior to this, he worked at Google. Marquis-Boire is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto, focusing on state-sponsored hacking and the global surveillance industry. He currently serves as a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as an advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Amnesty International.
I don’t think we’re even close to being able to say that we are defeating torture or have eradicated it. It’s hard to make that assessment, however, because in all countries, torture fluctuates for different reasons — sometimes it’s used more extensively, and sometimes it’s used less extensively.
What I think has happened, however, mostly in this six-year period, but maybe a little earlier as well and hopefully continuing, is an increased awareness of the need to apply the prism of torture to situations that we don’t commonly associate with torture.
For example, there are forms of imprisonment — like solitary confinement — that undoubtedly are cruel, but that the public does not associate with torture. This also includes the mistreatment of people in settings other than detention or during criminal investigations — for example, in healthcare or social care settings.
I think we are also making inroads in associating the prohibition against torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment with the prohibition on discrimination of all forms. This gives us more awareness of the need to look at the mistreatment of women and girls — and also LGBT persons and other groups whose mistreatment we typically think of as discrimination — under the prism of torture.
Should prosecutors have the ability to take advantage of unclear laws to bring charges for behavior far beyond the problem Congress was trying to address? We don’t think so. When not carefully limited, criminal laws give prosecutors too much power to go after innocent individuals for innocuous behavior, like violating a website's terms of use by using a partner’s password to post something for them or print out a boarding pass. And that’s terrifying. It’s also contrary to a long-held constitutional rule requiring vague criminal statutes to be interpreted narrowly—called the Rule of Lenity—intended to ensure that people have clear and unambiguous notice in the letter of the law itself of what behavior could land them in prison.
But recently released federal guidelines for prosecutions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), intended to assist prosecutors in deciding when to bring charges under the notoriously vague federal statute targeting computer break-ins, demonstrate that prosecutors have far too much discretion in applying the CFAA. What’s more, the guidelines all but condone use of the CFAA to prosecute cases for political gain, under the guise of “deterrence.”
As it became increasingly clear that Donald Trump was about to win the presidency on Tuesday night, mental health staff were on call at San Quentin Prison and at the Central California Women’s Facility, where anxiety was running high over a separate election result. By the next day the men and women on death row would know whether Californians had voted to spare their lives — by passing Proposition 62, abolishing the death penalty — or hasten their deaths, by passing Proposition 66, aimed to quicken executions. “They are understandably concerned,” California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Terry Thornton told me earlier that day, pointing out that many are already under treatment for mental illness. The results of the ballot initiatives “could be destabilizing.”
It’s hard to imagine a place more heavily monitored than California’s death row, where isolation, strip-searches, and suicide watch are a fact of life. Yet CDCR counts 25 suicides among the condemned since 1978, the year a ballot initiative dramatically expanded the crimes punishable by execution in California. With the same people responsible for that initiative now campaigning against the death penalty, no one had more at stake in their success on Election Day than the nearly 750 people facing execution in California.
In an era when bystander recordings of police shootings have shined a much-needed light on law enforcement activities—greatly contributing to public discussion about police use of force—it’s never been more important to establish that citizen journalists have a free speech right to record and share videos of public police activity, EFF told a federal appeals court today.
“Individuals have the unambiguous right under the First Amendment to record police officers exercising their official duties in public,” said EFF Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. “Bystander videos published online have alerted the public to the use of deadly force in numerous cases—Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, the list goes on. These recordings have informed the public and elected officials about what is happening on our streets. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the process of taking these photos and videos is protected by the First Amendment as an inherently expressive activity or as a form of informat
Early into your tenure, you conducted a worldwide study that concluded that solitary confinement can amount to torture. You’ve now just released a new report that builds upon that 2011 report and provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of the use of solitary confinement in 35 jurisdictions, including several states here in the U.S. What is your assessment of the state of the campaign to end solitary confinement both worldwide and here in the U.S.?
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take control of the American executive branch, he will have a weapon at his disposal that few if any presidents have enjoyed—a direct connection to a faithful media operation that reaches millions of loyal populist readers in the form of Breitbart, the self-styled honey badger of alt-right journalism.
Other presidents have had strategies for going around the mainstream media. Franklin Roosevelt had his Fireside Chats on the radio, but his broadcasts were sporadic and rarely ran more than half an hour long. Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson enjoyed direct lines to the top at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the television networks, where they directed their angry Bat-calls in hopes of manipulating coverage.
With Donald Trump now the President elect, all eyes in telecom have turned to what happens now in regards to FCC telecom enforcement generally, and our shiny new net neutrality rules specifically. Trump has proclaimed he opposes net neutrality, despite making it abundantly clear he doesn't appear to actually know what it is (he appears to falsely believe it has something to do with the fairness doctrine). As such most people believe he'll work to gut the current FCC, which as we've noted has, for the first time in arguably twenty years or so, actually been doing a few things to actually help broadband consumers and sector competition.
This is not the only attempt to re-direct money from the Internet giants towards newspapers and magazines. As Ars has reported, the European Commission wishes to introduce a new ancillary copyright for publishers that will last for 20 years. The idea once again is to force big online companies like Google to pay money to traditional publishers.
Leaving aside the fact that the ancillary copyright idea will cause huge collateral damage to the Internet, it's the wrong approach for the same reason that the digital levy is wrong. Both seek to punish Google and Facebook for being too successful at gaining online advertising.
The rancour towards them is made plain in last week's letter, where "digital intermediaries such as Google and Facebook" are described as "amassing eye-watering profits and paying minimal tax in the UK." Most people would agree that they should be paying their fair share of taxes, but trying to demonise them for their "eye-watering profits" reveals the underlying envy.
It should be well-known by readers of this site that copyright trolls are essentially bullies. They send out their settlement threat letters, hoping to extort money from a public that typically doesn't know better than to be terrified by the legalese claims within the letters. It's a practice fraught with deception, as the evidence referenced in the letters typically amounts to nothing more than an IP address -- which itself may or may not be correct -- while the threats themselves can often times include consequences not remotely plausible. Still, the bullying goes on, because it works enough to make it profitable.
That's why it's important to highlight how these bullies tend to respond when a target decides to stand up to them. Much like the bullies we've had in our personal lives, they tend to run away as quickly as possible. One recent example of this is James Collins, who received a troll letter from LHF Productions, the company behind the movie London Has Fallen. The company accused Collins of both downloading the movie via BitTorrent, as well as then making it available to others via the same means. Rather than acquiescing, however, Collins got himself a lawyer and had him punch back.
DMCA takedown notices are designed to take down infringing content, but they regularly target legitimate content as well. Just recently a local distributor of Dreamworks' "Trolls" movie tried to have several TorrentFreak links removed from Google for merely referencing "copyright trolls."
Aussie movie company Village Roadshow has invited aspiring filmmakers to showcase their work in a competition to highlight the effects of piracy on the industry. Entrants have been uploading their work online unprotected, and it's fair to say that most think that piracy is a terrifying thing.
In our view, Samsung does not have a viable copyright claim against these YouTube videos. Even if Samsung does own a related copyright—perhaps in the design of its logo or in the phone’s screen image—it cannot use that copyright to control all depictions of its phones. Reviews and news coverage need to show images of the phone. And even snarky commentary, like footage of the GTA V mod, is fair use.
If it doesn’t have a viable copyright claim, why did Samsung send DMCA takedown notices? We asked Samsung’s counsel (the notices were sent on Samsung’s behalf by the 900-lawyer firm Paul Hastings LLP) but received no response. It appears that Samsung took the easy path to removing content it did not like by making a copyright claim where none existed. DMCA takedown notices are, by far, the quickest and easiest way to get speech removed from the Internet. That makes them irresistible for companies, individuals, and even governments eager to censor online speech.
Under a new rule from the Copyright Office, website owners could be exposed to massive risk of copyright liability simply for neglecting to submit an online form on time. The rule could eliminate the safe harbor status that thousands of websites receive under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).