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02.13.15

Links 13/2/2015: Krita 2.9 and Calligra 2.9 Betas, Ubuntu in Drones

Posted in News Roundup at 6:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How we used an open source meme generator to promote our journalism

    One of the tasks of a digital team in any major news organisation is to make the newsroom more efficient. We leverage new technologies in ways that haven’t been done before, and at a pace that’s challenging to keep up with. At The Times and Sunday Times, our team is constantly on the lookout for ways of improving our editorial workflow, and ensuring we get the very best from our great quality journalism.

  • With Joyent’s Blessings, and New Members, The Node.js Foundation Takes Shape

    A foundation can do a lot for an open source project. Just look at The OpenStack Foundation or The Linux Foundation. This week, Node.js, the very popular server-side JavaScript framework that is used for building and running websites and online applications, got its own foundation. Among other things, that means that Joyent will no longer solely govern Node.js. The foundation should help the project gain more contributions and develop more quickly.

  • Enterprise Software 2015: Mobility, Cloud and Open Source

    The economy is looking up mean that business budgets will likely see healthy growth in the new year. Forrester is predicting 4 to 6 percent growth for 2015 global IT budgets, reaching $620 billion. Much of the growth in spending will go towards technology like analytics, mobile, as-a-service, and enterprise applications like ERP and CRM. The US will lead IT spending, followed by India and the UK.

  • I Do Not Fear the Greeks Bearing Gifts

    Free software is particularly well-suite to Greece because it is a small market compared to those for the anglophone or francophone worlds, say. That means software is unlikely to be produced in regional versions as a priority. Open source, of course, can be modified by anyone, allowing localised versions of existing free software to be produced easily. All of these considerations apply elsewhere, especially among smaller countries, and it has always been something of a mystery to me why they don’t embrace open source more readily.

  • Hortonworks Teams With Others on Hadoop Data Governance Framework
  • Hortonworks and Hitachi Data Systems partner to deliver Apache Hadoop to the enterprise
  • Meet Myriad, a new project for running Hadoop on Mesos

    What he means is that companies will no longer have to run Hadoop on one set of resources, while running the web servers, Spark and any other number of workloads on other resources managed by Mesos. Essentially, all of these things will now be available as data center services residing on the same set of machines. Mesos has always supported Hadoop as a workload type — and companies including Twitter and Airbnb have taken advantage of this — but YARN has appeal as the default resource manager for newer distributions of Hadoop because it’s designed specifically for that platform and, well, is one of the foundations of those newer distributions.

  • A new open source big data framework

    MapR and Mesosphere are announcing a new open source big data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacentres.

  • New open-source Myriad project unifies Apache YARN and Apache Mesos resource management
  • ONF expands open-source software development

    The Open Networking Forum (ONF), a non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), has announced the appointment of Saurav Das as principal system architect, and the establishment of a new project to build upon the OpenFlow Configuration and Management Protocol (OF-CONFIG) to support Open vSwitch (OVS). Saurav’s contributions to ONF and the announcement of this project build on the organisation’s open-source software efforts that began with the OpenFlow Driver competition, followed by ONF SampleTap and the Segment Routing project SPRING-OPEN, all of which were completed in 2014. Open-source software is a key route to developing de factor standards and fostering interoperability, both of which are ONF goals.

  • Google releases open-source tool for evaluating cloud performance

    This week Google announced it would provide a cloud computing performance evaluator called PerKit Benchmarker. The evaluation tool is hosted on the open-source collaboration site Github, and will allow users of the Google Cloud Platform, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure to measure their current provider’s performance against industry-established benchmarks.

  • Open Source Node.js To Get its Own Foundation

    Node.js, the popular open-source, server-side JavaScript runtime project, will soon be governed by an independent foundation, its chief commercial sponsor announced this week.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Hortonworks dishes out Hadoop for HDS: Mmmm, open source with big vendor gravy

      HDS will offer open-source data muncher Hadoop to the enterprise after doing a deal with Hortonworks.

      Hadoop distributor Hortonworks has signed an agreement with HDS to jointly promote and support the software. HDS can now deliver Hortonworks’ Data Platform (HDP), Hadoop in other words, to its enterprise customers.

      Hortonworks strategic marketing veep John Kreisa offered this canned quote: “The strategic agreement also provides a joint engineering commitment for the two companies on current and future projects that will help make Hadoop enterprise-ready.”

  • Databases

    • Sisense, Simba Partner Around MongoDB NoSQL Business Analytics

      Hadoop has made lots of big data headlines by now. But in a reminder that it is only part of the open source big data story, Sisense and Simba partnered this week to deliver data analytics via MongoDB, the open source NoSQL platform, which is increasingly importance in production big data use.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.3.22 Brings Support for Linux Kernel 3.19, X.Org Server 1.17, Windows 10 Preview

      That was pretty fast! It looks like Oracle knows what it is doing and just updated its awesome VirtualBox virtualization software, which we have to admit that we use every day here on Softpedia to test all sorts of distributions of GNU/Linux and many other Linux-related applications, to version 4.3.22, bringing initial support for the recently released Linux kernel 3.19.

  • Funding

  • Public Services/Government

    • How open source delivers for government

      Amid the well-deserved hype around the impact of cloud technology and big data analytics, it is possible that casual industry watchers may have missed the real story behind the recent wave of IT re-architecting.

      Enabling many of these recent, powerful trends is a newly validated embrace of open source software technology. The movement to OSS solutions is empowering system designers and solution architects to re-examine methodologies that evolved out of the legacy proprietary, closed source software license model. Put simply, OSS allows developers of IT systems to create better results and cut costs.

  • Licensing

    • CC BY 4.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0 added to our list of free licenses

      The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licenses are now on our list of free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.

      We have updated our list of Various Licenses and Comments about Them to include the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Both of these licenses are free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.

      CC BY 4.0 is a noncopyleft license that is compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3), meaning you can combine a CC BY 4.0 licensed work with a GPLv3 licensed work a larger work that is then released under the terms of GPLv3.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Commuter disruption after motorist drives car on to tram tracks in Wythenshawe

    The white Fiat drove on to the line at Baguley this afternoon, causing delays to services between Cornbrook and Manchester Airport.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Chris Matthews Calls for ‘Rambo Kind of Stuff’ as Response to Real-World Violence

      In response to Matthews’ call for “bombing the hell out of them,” Sheehan does make an important point about ISIS’s well-publicized display of violence, which is “they did this for a purpose.” The purpose he proposes–”They’re doing this to try to intimidate us so that we go home”–is implausible, since ISIS surely knows that the United States, like most countries, generally responds to violence with more violence. It’s much more likely that ISIS, like the Al-Qaeda movement it springs from, believes spectacular acts of terror will draw a military response from the United States that will help it to build its movement (Extra!, 7/11). But at least Sheehan is thinking of violence as being part of a political strategy rather than as a form of emotional release, as Matthews seems to see it:

    • Nagging questions on US role in Mamasapano mission

      Questions persist over the true role of the United States in the events leading up to the deadly encounter in Mamasapano and in the immediate aftermath.

      Did the US provide all or part of the intelligence that formed the basis for the ill-fated Special Action Force operation?

      Were its operatives involved in the planning of the mission and in its execution?

    • Protesters call for Aquino resignation

      “The blood debt of the US which include the genocide of 1.5 million Filipinos in the Filipino-American war remain unpaid and their atrocities continue to spiral up. They’re even using Filipino troops as pawns in their interventionist terror war such as what happened the covert SAF operation Mamasapano,” said Charisse Bañez, national spokesperson of the League of Filipino Students.

      Vencer Crisostomo, Anakbayan National Chair, said that Aquino “sacrificed his own troops in the name of the US war on terror.”

      “This disastrous collaboration between Aquino and the US is a disrespect to all the victims of the Filipino genocide during Filipino-American War,” said Crisostomo.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Instrumentalizing Fear to Control Encrypted Communications is Dangerously Anti-Democratic

      Recent Paris attacks have triggered a wave of securitarian discourse and dangerous upcoming legislative measures that are spreading way beyond France. Increased control of communications online, surveillance, attacks against anonymous speech and encryption are already on the table, under the pretence of fighting an invisible enemy in a perpetual war.

    • Facebook and “Corporate Friends” Threat Exchange?

      Fahwad Al-Khadoumi (nsnbc) : Facebook teamed up with several corporate “friends” to adapt Facebook’s in-house software to identify cyber threats and their source with other corporations. Countering cyber threats sounds positive while there are serious questions about transparency when smaller, independent media fall victim to major corporation’s unwillingness to reveal the source of attacks resulted in websites being closed for hours or days. Transparency, yes, but for whom?

    • Court upholds NSA snooping

      The challenge against the controversial Upstream program was tossed out because additional defense from the government would have required “impermissible disclosure of state secret information,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his decision.

    • New York Times columnist David Carr has died. Here is his last interview, with Edward Snowden

      David Carr, the 58-year-old media columnist for the New York Times, collapsed suddenly at the newspaper’s office this evening and died after being rushed to the hospital.

      Carr was previously the editor-in-chief of Washington City Paper and the author of a memoir, Year of the Gun, about his recovery from drug addiction and cancer while raising two young daughters.

    • SOCIALIZE THE DATA CENTRES!

      Technology companies can enact all sorts of political agendas, and right now the dominant agendas enforce neoliberalism and austerity, using centralized data to identify immigrants to be deported, or poor people likely to default on their debts. Yet I believe there is a huge positive potential in the accumulation of more data, in a good institutional—and by that I mean political—setup. Once you monitor one part of my activity and offer me some proposals or predictions about it, it’s reasonable to suppose your service would be better if you also monitored my other activities. The fact that Google monitors my Web searches, my email, my location, makes its predictions in each of these categories much more accurate than if it were to monitor only one of them. If you take this logic to its ultimate conclusion, it becomes clear you don’t want two hundred different providers of information services—you want just one, because the scale-effects make things much easier for users. The big question, of course, is whether that player has to be a private capitalist corporation, or some federated, publicly-run set of services that could reach a data-sharing agreement free of monitoring by intelligence agencies.

    • David Carr, Influential New York Times Media Columnist, Dead At 58

      New York Times columnist David Carr, one of the most incisive and influential writers on the media business, died Thursday night after collapsing in the paper’s midtown Manhattan newsroom. He was 58.

      Times executive editor Dean Baquet informed staff of the death of their “wonderful, esteemed colleague” in a newsroom memo.

      [...]

      Earlier Thursday, Carr moderated a TimesTalk on the National Security Agency leaks with Edward Snowden, and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Within hours, he was dead.

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

    • Keurig Delivers DRM in a Cup

      Who would’ve thought it possible that digital rights management (DRM) would come to the coffee business? Well, it has. Believe it or not, Keurig now includes DRM on their coffee makers. Why? To keep users from using anything but Keurig coffee pods on their machines, of course. You know, just like the DRM used by some printer manufacturers to keep you coming back (and coming back) for their branded replacement ink cartridges instead of opting for the much cheaper store brand.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The secret business plan that could spell the end for SMEs

      Despite its extensive implications, TTIP has generated relatively little coverage, not least because negotiations are shrouded in secrecy and conducted primarily with corporate lobbyists, who have minimal obligations to the public interest. So clandestine are the talks that the few MEPs that are granted access can only view the plans in their original documentation, in a secure location, with the threat of espionage charges if they try to make copies or share the details with the public.

02.12.15

Links 12/2/2015: ChaletOS, Linux 3.20 Features

Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Five ways open source middleware can impact unmanned systems

    Traditionally thought of as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), or kinetic action platforms, unmanned systems are now filling roles such as command and control communications, meteorological survey, and resupply, and explosive ordnance disposal platforms. Historically, these platforms have been developed and fielded as standalone systems built by different vendors with unique and often proprietary payloads, control mechanisms and data formats. But this process has created limitations on interoperability and increased costs, leading the DoD to look at other, more viable options, including commercially supported open source middleware.

  • The privacy differential – why don’t more non-US and open source firms use the NSA as marketing collateral?

    The shockwaves generated by Edward Snowden’s revelations of the close collaboration between US tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple and the NSA are still reverberating through the industry. Those disclosures, together with related ones such as the involvement of the NSA in industrial espionage, as well as the asymmetric nature of US law when it comes to gathering data from foreign individuals, present something of an open goal for non-US technology companies – or so one might have thought.

    On the face of it, then, it is surprising that non-US technology firms and others that can distance themselves from the US law are not proclaiming this fact more loudly. After all, there must be a considerable number of organisations that would dearly love to locate their data as far away from the attentions of the NSA as possible.

  • The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of why I don’t always work in the open

    When you choose not to work in the open, what are your reasons? Are they Good, Bad or Ugly? What are your suggestions for how those of us who want to work more in the open can all do better?

  • Joyent: Never mind those other forkers, Node.js has a foundation now, too

    The popular, open source Node.js JavaScript runtime engine is getting a new foundation to manage its development, in a move that could help mend the recent schism in the project’s community.

  • Google’s new open-source PerfKit framework watches cloud application performance

    Google’s latest foray into the open-source realm is a framework it’s calling “PerfKit,” which is designed to measure application performance in the cloud, the company announced Wednesday.

  • Open source data-driven discovery at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

    The Apache Software Foundation has, since those early days, been at the forefront of challenging problems. Within the context of this article, the ASF has both fostered, and continues to host keynote scientific projects such as Apache OODT (a Top Level Project at the ASF which originally came from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory), to recently incubating projects such as Singa (an efficient, scalable and easy-to-use distributed platform for training deep learning models used currently within Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Deep Belief Network as examples).

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • A Watershed Moment to Protect the Free and Open Web

        Corporations that seek to control the Web, massive government and corporate surveillance, chilling effects on free expression — all of these issues will be harder to address if the next billions coming online think that the Internet exists solely within the walled gardens of platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. The greatest danger is people relinquishing their control to gatekeepers that get to decide the rules about what we see and what we create.

      • Cities need to be able to earn digital badges

        When I first heard of Mozilla Open Badges, my heart skipped a beat. Wisely implemented, digital badges can help individuals and communities focus their energies on worthy goals.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Nice kitty: MongoDB 3.0 (with Tiger Inside)

      The open source cross-platform document-oriented database company MongoDB has reached version 3.0 this month.

      The new iteration sees significant changes in its storage layer performance and scalability.

  • Healthcare

  • Funding

    • The Open-Source Question

      You’d be forgiven for thinking that the tech world is a loathsome hotbed of rapacious venture capitalists, airheaded trend-riders, and publicity hounds. That’s the image presented by much of the tech press, which prizes stories about the Montgomery Burnses of the tech world over ones about its more idealistic denizens.

    • Payments

      With the new website, we’ve decided to revise how we promote and handle payments. We understand that this has rubbed some people the wrong way, and in the spirit of addressing concerns, we’ve decided to write this post. Keep in mind that this was a really difficult post to right. It covers sensitive territory, and it becomes difficult to choose the right words without offending anyone. That said, here’s our best explanation:

    • Should you pay for Elementary OS?

      Elementary OS has attracted a lot of attention lately. But a controversy is brewing over how the distro developers are setting up their new site for payments by users. The Elementary OS site is being redesigned to encourage users to pay for the distro. But should the Elementary OS developers expect a payment in the first place?

    • Jahia Completed a $22.5 Million Round of Financing From Invus
    • Jahia Completed a $22.5 Million Round of Financing From Invus
    • Growth & Expansion: Jahia Receives $22.5 million Round of Funding
    • Open Source Jahia Raises $22.5M to Grow Enterprise Clients

      Jahia is getting a $22.5 million cash infusion from Invus, a New York City-based investment firm, the Geneva, Switzerland-based open source content management system (CMS) vendor announced today.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Will you be my cryptovalentine?

      Valentine’s day is this Saturday and, if you’re like us, you’re either trying to pick the right gift or wishing you had someone to exchange gifts with. We wish you luck with that. But there’s something important that you can do regardless of your relationship status:

  • Project Releases

    • CMlyst got it’s first release

      Now that Cutelyst is allowing me to write web applications with the tools I like, I can use it to build the kind of web applications I need but am not fine with using the existing ones…

    • Cutelyst 0.6.0 is released

      Cutelyst, the Qt/C++ web framework just got another step into API stabilization.

      Since 0.3.0 I’ve been trying to take the most request per second out of it, and because of that I decided to replace most QStrings with QByteArrays, the allocation call is indeed simpler in QByteArray but since most of Qt use QString for strings it started to create a problem rather than solving one. Grantlee didn’t play nice with QByteArray breaking ifequal and in the end some implicit conversions from UTF-8 were triggered.

  • Public Services/Government

    • DISA Unveils Online, Open Source Collaboration Tool for DoD

      The Defense Information Systems Agency is launching a web-based, open source collaboration tool for the Defense Department that provides webconferencing, chat and instant messaging functions for employees based in the U.S. and abroad.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Eric S. Raymond Calls LLVM The “Superior Compiler” To GCC

      Joining in on the heated discussion that originated over Richard Stallman voicing concerns over adding LLVM’s LLDB debugger support to Emacs, Eric S Raymond has come out to once again voice his support in favor of LLVM/Clang and express his feelings that GCC’s leading days are over.

    • Perl creator Larry Wall: Rethought version 6 due this year

      Despite criticisms such as it having a “cryptic syntax,” the Perl language has remained prominent in language popularity assessments, even if popularity has declined and a planned upgrade has been slow to appear. Designed by Larry Wall, the scripting language is suited for tasks ranging from quick prototyping to Web programming and system management tasks, and it’s part of the prominent LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/PHP/Python) open source stack. At the recent FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Wall revealed intentions to have the long-awaited Perl 6 release out in a beta version in September and generally available by December. Wall answered some questions from InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill via email about what’s planned for the language and responded to criticisms.

    • Learn to crunch big data with R

      Get started using the open source R programming language to do statistical computing and graphics on large data sets

Leftovers

  • Apple’s chorus of critics: How wrong can they be?

    Your daughter comes home from school with a report card studded with A’s. You (1) give her a hug and raise her allowance or (2) ground her and tell her you know she’ll never do this well again.

    Perversely enough, too many pundits and academics have chosen option No. 2 since Apple CEO Tim Cook presented investors the company’s most recent financial report card — a fourth-quarter earnings story that featured record sales at Apple, rapid growth, and (most important) a quarterly profit that is the largest ever recorded by a publicly traded company.

  • Russian woman dies after dropping charging iPhone into bathtub

    A young Russian woman has died after her charging iPhone fell into the bathtub in her Moscow flat.

    Yevgenia Sviridenko, 24, who was originally from Omsk, more than 2,000 miles from the Russian capital, was discovered by her flatmate in the bath on Monday evening, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported according to The Moscow Times.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Barbarians are made, not born – here’s how ISIS was created by the United States

      The US destruction of Fallujah in 2004 was a prime motivation for the growth of ISIS.

    • Senate confirms new Pentagon chief

      The Senate on Thursday confirmed Ashton Carter as President Obama’s new secretary of Defense in a 93-5 vote.

      Carter, 60, will be the 25th secretary of Defense and Obama’s fourth. He is expected to be sworn into office next week

    • Obama Asks Congress to Authorize War That’s Already Started

      As the U.S. continues to bomb the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, President Obama asked Congress today to approve a new legal framework for the ongoing military campaign.

      The administration’s draft law “would not authorize long-term, large-scale ground combat operations” like Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama wrote in a letter accompanying the proposal. The draft’s actual language is vague, allowing for ground troops in what Obama described as “limited circumstances,” like special operations and rescue missions.

      The authorization would have no geographic limitations and allow action against “associated persons or forces” of the Islamic State. It would expire in three years.

    • Ukraine arrests journalist after call to dodge draft

      Ukraine’s security service arrested a journalist on treason charges Sunday after he posted a video online urging people to dodge the country’s new military draft, his wife and officials said.

      Ruslan Kotsaba — a television journalist from the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk — was ordered held in custody for 60 days pending investigations, his wife, Uliana, wrote on Facebook.

    • Life in the Emerald City: Houthis Control Yemen, But They Don’t Yet Govern It

      Just weeks after a coup that ousted Yemen’s Western-backed government, the capital of Yemen is a city painted in green, mostly with spray paint.

      Green tree trunks, green sidewalks, green walls and even a green Ford F-350 bearing the Houthi slogan, which includes the words “Death to America,” on each side of the iconic American truck, about 340 of which the Pentagon shipped to Yemen over the past few years.

    • Endless War? Obama Sends Congress Expansive Anti-ISIS Measure 6 Months After Bombing Began

      President Obama has sent Congress a formal request to authorize military force against the Islamic State six months after the U.S. began bombing Iraq and Syria. The resolution imposes a three-year limit on U.S. operations, but does not put any geographic constraints. It also opens the door for ground combat operations in limited circumstances. The resolution’s broad language covers military action against the Islamic State as well as “individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside [ISIS] or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” The resolution also leaves in place the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force Congress enacted one week after the Sept. 11, 2001, which has been used to justify U.S. action in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and beyond, and which Obama had previously called for repealing. We speak with Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of many books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

    • Congress, Don’t Be Fooled; Obama Still Believes in Unlimited War

      PRESIDENT OBAMA is going before Congress to request authorization for the limited use of military force in a battle of up to three years against the Islamic State. On the surface, this looks like a welcome recognition of Congress’s ultimate authority in matters of war and peace. But unless the resolution put forward by the White House is amended, it will have the opposite effect. Congressional support will amount to the ringing endorsement of unlimited presidential war making.

      Whatever else they decide, the House and Senate should revise the White House initiative to guarantee that it won’t have this tragic result. First do no harm; before proceeding with a debate over the limits of our continuing military engagement, Congress should make it impossible for future presidents to evade its final decision.

    • The Seduction of Brian Williams: Embedded with the Military

      He is a liar of course, someone who did not tell the truth no matter the reason or excuse, a bad trait for a journalist. Williams lied about being RPG’ed in a helicopter over Iraq; he did not see any variant of what you can see in the photo above. And that’s not a hard thing to “misremember.”

      But if there is any reason to forgive Williams, it was that he was seduced by both his own conflation of his sad little life as a talking head and the “brave troops,” and, more clearly, by the process of embedding with the military. I know. I saw it.

    • The Minsk Peace Deal: Farce Or Sellout? — Paul Craig Roberts

      As Washington is not a partner to the Minsk peace deal, how can there be peace when Washington has made policy decisions to escalate the conflict and to use the conflict as a proxy war between the US and Russia?

    • New York City Police Officer Is Said to Be Indicted in Shooting Death of Akai Gurley

      A New York City police officer was indicted Tuesday in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in a Brooklyn public housing complex stairwell in November, several people familiar with the grand jury’s decision said.

    • Obama to Seek War Power Bill From Congress, to Fight ISIS

      The Obama administration has informed lawmakers that the president will seek a formal authorization to fight the Islamic State that would prohibit the use of “enduring offensive ground forces” and limit engagement to three years. The approach offers what the White House hopes is a middle way on Capitol Hill for those on the right and left who remain deeply skeptical of its plans to thwart extremist groups.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Privacy

    • Samsung Ad Injections Perfectly Illustrate Why I Want My ‘Smart’ TV To Be As Dumb As Possible

      Samsung has been doing a great job this week illustrating why consumers should want their televisions to be as dumb as technologically possible. The company took heat for much of the week after its privacy policy revealed Samsung smart TVs have been collecting and analyzing user living room conversations in order to improve voice recognition technology. While that’s fairly common for voice recognition tech, the idea of living room gear that spies on you has been something cable operators have been patenting for years. And while Samsung has changed its privacy policy language to more clearly illustrate what it’s doing, the fact that smart TV security is relatively awful has many people quite justly concerned about smart TVs becoming another poorly-guarded repository for consumer data.

    • Movie review: Citizenfour

      About 20 minutes into this electrifying, often terrifying documentary, the film-maker shows for the first time the man we have come to know as Edward Snowden. The ex-NSA employee who blew the whistle on the US Government’s spying on its citizens is a familiar face only because of 24 hours of interviews this film’s maker compiled over eight days in a Hong Kong hotel room. But when he first appears, he’s talking to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald about how they will deal with what Greenwald calls “the ‘you’ story”.

    • Jewel v. NSA: Making Sense of a Disappointing Decision Over Mass Surveillance

      A federal court in San Francisco sided with the U.S. Department of Justice, ruling that the plaintiffs could not win a significant portion of the case—a Fourth Amendment challenge to the NSA’s tapping of the Internet backbone—without disclosure of classified information that would harm national security. In other words, Judge Jeffrey White found that “state secrets” can trump the judicial process and held that EFF’s clients could not prove they have standing.

    • Judge Rules You Can’t Sue the NSA for Secretly Spying on You Unless You Prove You’re Being Secretly Spied On

      Advocates for less government snooping suffered a blow Tuesday when a federal judge in California ruled that a group of citizens can not sue the National Security Agency to stop the “upstream” collection of their data.

  • Civil Rights

    • More Power For Bad Cops: NYPD Head Supports Raising ‘Resisting Arrest’ To A Felony

      The most half-baked “weapon” in any policeman’s arsenal should never be raised to the level of a felony. “Resisting arrest” is the charge brought when bad cops run out of better ideas. This truism runs through nearly every law enforcement agency in the country. When you take a look at videographers and photographers who have been arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights (and backed by a DOJ statement), you’ll see plenty of “resisting arrest” charges.

    • Northern Va. woman dies after being stunned by deputies

      A 37-year-old woman has died after deputies in northern Virginia used a Taser stun gun on her while she was in custody.

      Natasha McKenna of Alexandria was taken off life support Sunday, five days after she was stunned at the Fairfax County jail, the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.

      McKenna was in the process of being transported from the Fairfax County jail to the Alexandria city jail Tuesday when deputies say she failed to comply with their commands and resisted them. A deputy then used a Taser to restrain her, sheriff’s Lt. Steve Elbert said Monday.

    • Hundreds of South Carolina Inmates Sent to Solitary Confinement Over Facebook

      In the South Carolina prison system, accessing Facebook is an offense on par with murder, rape, rioting, escape and hostage-taking.

      Back in 2012, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) made “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site” a Level 1 offense [PDF], a category reserved for the most violent violations of prison conduct policies. It’s one of the most common Level 1 offense charges brought against inmates, many of whom, like most social network users, want to remain in contact with friends and family in the outside world and keep up on current events. Some inmates ask their families to access their online accounts for them, while many access the Internet themselves through a contraband cell phone (possession of which is yet another Level 1 offense).

    • Pasco, Washington, police have killed more people than police in Germany and the UK combined

      With just 59,000 residents, the Pasco police department in Washington state have shot and killed four people in the past six months—more than police in the entire United Kingdom, which has over 80,000,000 citizens, in the past three years combined. In fact, Pasco police are on pace to have more police shootings than Germany, also with 80,000,000 citizens, over the current 12 month period.

    • U.S. Drops to 49th in World Press Freedom Rankings, Worst Since Obama Became President

      Each year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group’s 2015 ranking was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th.

      That is the lowest ranking ever during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S. was ranked 53rd). The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Salvador, Tonga, Chile and Botswana.

    • ‘Drastic decline’ in world media freedom

      Media freedom has suffered a ‘drastic decline’ worldwide last year in part because of extremist groups such as Islamic State and Boko Haram, the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders says. – See more at: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/europe/2015/02/12/-drastic-decline–in-world-media-freedom.html#sthash.dLBZAYMJ.dpuf

    • How the Chapel Hill Victims Deserve to Be Mourned

      I didn’t know Yusor Mohammad, Deah Shaddy Barakat or Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha — the victims of Craig Stephen Hicks’ shooting spree in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – but I recognize them. Anyone who has spent time in American Muslim communities would, and that’s partly why this horrible crime is so painful. I realize I’m making assumptions and maybe getting sentimental in the process, but I can’t help it. The personalities that come through from the testimonies of friends and family, the record of the efforts and achievements of these young people, and the photographs that radiate such joy and life are all too familiar to miss.

    • Conservatives Dance On Grave Of ISIL Hostage: ‘Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel B**ch’

      Not all conservatives used the death of American hostage Kayla Mueller to highlight the brutality of the Islamic State — some decided to focus their disgust on the 26-year-old’s humanitarian work for Palestinians.

      “No tears for the newly-departed Kayla Mueller, the ISIS hostage whose parents confirmed today that she is dead,” conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote on Tuesday, under the headline, “Kayla Mueller: Dead ISIS Hostage Was Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel Bitch.”

      “Mueller was a Jew-hating, anti-Israel piece of crap who worked with HAMAS and helped Palestinians harass Israeli soldiers and block them from doing their job of keeping Islamic terrorists out of Israel,” she wrote.

      Schlussel condemned Mueller’s humanitarian work in the “so-called ‘West Bank’” to prevent the demolition of “terrorists’ ‘houses.’”

    • Trapped in Baku

      A press freedom advocate — and husband of an American servicewoman — went to the U.S. embassy in Azerbaijan, fearing for his life. But he was turned away.

    • Azerbaijani journalist sheltering in Swiss embassy
    • Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry: Emin Huseynov went into hiding at Swiss embassy to avoid investigation

      Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hikmet Hajiyev said in this regard that the investigation carried out under the court verdict discovered that chairman of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety Emin Huseynov has engaged in illegal business over unregistered grant contracts, making a great deal of money – AZN 1,575,956 – but evading from taxes AZN 247,551 tax to be paid to the state budget.

    • German Embassy Releases “Alarming” Declaration to Residents in Venezuela

      Caracas, February 11th, 2015. (Venezuelanalysis)- The German Embassy in Caracas has alarmed political observers in Venezuela by publishing what the press has described as an “alarming” official declaration to its citizens in the South American country.

      Published on February 5th, the declaration is written and signed by the Chargé d’Affaires at the German Embassy, Dr. Jörg Polster. It began to make the rounds on social media networks over the last two days.

      In the statement, German diplomat Polster informs readers that the embassy is extremely “worried” about the current situation in the country and advises German residents to take a number of “precautions in the face of the crisis”.

    • Google’s new robo-dog stalks premises, withstands hard kicks (VIDEO)
    • US bill seeks to tie massive trade pact to EU rejection of BDS

      Bipartisan lawmakers aim to make renunciation of Israel boycott efforts in Europe a key negotiating point in largest free trade deal in history

    • A Worthless Piece of Paper

      President George W. Bush was fond of saying that “9/11 changed everything.” He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts.

      During his presidency, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This legislation permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when those warrants are served on custodians of records — like doctors, lawyers, telecoms, computer servers, banks and even the Post Office.

      Such purported statutory authority directly violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to privacy in our “persons, houses, papers and effects.” That includes just about everything held by the custodians of our records. Privacy is not only a constitutional right protected by the document; it is also a natural right. We possess the right to privacy by virtue of our humanity. Our rights come from within us — whether you believe we are the highest progression of biological forces or the intended creations of an Almighty God — they do not come from the government.

    • Protesters call for Aquino resignation

      Nationalists and anti-imperialists marched to commemorate the 116th year of the Philippine-American War on Feb. 4, with a call to make President Aquino, suspended Police chief Alan Purisima, and the US government accountable for the recent Mamasapano deaths.

    • Egyptian Court Orders Release of 2 Al Jazeera Journalists

      An Egyptian court on Thursday ordered the release of two journalists jailed for more than a year on charges of broadcasting false news in a conspiracy with the Muslim Brotherhood.

      The release followed the publication this week of a previously undisclosed opinion by Egypt’s highest appeals court condemning the journalists’ conviction as baseless when it ordered a retrial at the beginning of this year. The release also comes at a time when the Egyptian government appears to be trying to allay some of the international criticism it has received after a series of harsh and hasty criminal convictions issued during a crackdown on dissent after the military takeover in July 2013.

    • Denial of Refugee Protection For Matt DeHart

      On Monday, February 9th, Matt DeHart’s parents, Paul and Leann, received notice by mail from the Refugee Protection Division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board that the family’s claim for Refugee Protection had been denied. The family fled the United States after Matt was interrogated and tortured during an FBI espionage investigation in which child pornography charges were hastily filed after Matt was detained at the Canadian border, an action which was triggered by an espionage alert.

    • Matt DeHart Denied Asylum in Canada

      Matt DeHart claims that all his troubles stem from a file uploaded, twice, to a Tor server he ran out of a closet in his parent’s home. An FBI investigation into something the CIA might have done.

    • Matt DeHart, former American soldier claiming he was tortured by U.S., loses bid for asylum in Canada

      Mr. DeHart testified the pornography charges are a ruse to investigate an espionage and national security probe tied to his involvement in Anonymous and his operation of a “hidden” Internet server used to leak a classified U.S. government document, likely destined to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing organization.

    • Jails Have Become Warehouses for the Poor, Ill and Addicted, a Report Says

      Jails across the country have become vast warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to post bail or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves, according to a report issued Wednesday.

      The study, “Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America,” found that the majority of those incarcerated in local and county jails are there for minor violations, including driving with suspended licenses, shoplifting or evading subway fares, and have been jailed for longer periods of time over the past 30 years because they are unable to pay court-imposed costs.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • “Canada Remains A Safe Haven For Online Piracy”

        The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups keep hammering on Canada for its lacking anti-piracy enforcement. The groups label Canada a “safe haven” for both file-sharers and online pirate sites, and ask the U.S. Government to intervene.

      • Copyright Monopolist Claims Legal, Non-Infringing “Fair Use” Is Like AGGRAVATED RAPE

        In a fuming blog article, David Newhoff claims that non-infringing, legal uses of copyrighted works – that is, of people’s own property – are like “aggravated rape” when made without unneeded consent of the monopoly holder. Newhoff tries to scold the crucial concept of “fair use” in copyright monopoly doctrine, the concept which explicitly says that some usages are not covered by the monopoly and therefore not up to the monopoly holder, and ends saying that if you don’t grant permission and can’t set limits, it’s “aggravated rape”. Just when you think copyright monopoly zealots can’t sink any lower, they surprise you with one of the few creativities they’ve ever shown.

      • YouTube Flags Cat Purring as Copyright Infringing Music

        YouTube’s automated takedown tool is known for its flaws, but this week it crossed a line by attacking a purring cat. According to YouTube’s Content-ID system both EMI Publishing and PRS own the rights to a 12 second purring loop. The cat in question, Phantom, has filed a dispute and hopes to reclaim his rights.

      • US’s ‘Naughty List’ Of Countries Whose Intellectual Property Rules We Don’t Like Is A Joke That’s No Longer Funny

        Mocking the ridiculous “Special 301 report” from the US Trade Representative has become something of an annual sport around these parts. As we’ve explained, the whole concept of the report is something of a joke: copyright, patent and trademark maximalists send in reports to the USTR, claiming which countries don’t do enough to respect US intellectual property, and the USTR — via no systematic or objective process — rewrites those complaints into a report that declares certain countries “naughty” for their practices. The whole thing is such a joke that even those in the government will openly mock it. As I’ve said in the past, I once saw the head of the US Copyright Office openly joke about the purely arbitrary nature of the 301 report at a conference. Countries like Canada — which are regularly named to the report, despite having copyright laws that are, in many areas, more stringent than the US’s — have openly declared that they do not find the Special 301 process to be legitimate, and thus do not pay any attention to it. A couple of years ago, Chile also made it clear that it felt the 301 process was illegitimate.

      • Torrent Site: Copyright Troll Had Staff Access to Member Data

        Empornium, one of the leading private torrent trackers for adult content, says it believes a copyright troll gained access to a staff moderation account and is now using obtained data to threaten its users. The revelations may shine light on why some Empornium users have received settlement threats with no lawsuit filed and no notice from their ISPs.

      • BitTorrent’s Original Content Deal Makes Bid for Reputability

        The move might be an effort to appear more legitimate to advertisers and others within entertainment content distribution circles. The BitTorrent file-sharing protocol is often linked with users of the downloading software exchanging content in violation of intellectual property laws. The first project under this original video distribution agreement is the movie Children of the Machine.

Links 12/2/2015: Black Lab Linux KDE Edition, Android SmartWatches

Posted in News Roundup at 6:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Is GNU/Linux becoming too complex for its own good?

    A Debian developer, who faced issues with some minor tasks on his own machines, has now raised the question whether the distribution being built is too complex to understand and debug.

  • Server

    • Docker Popularity A Game-Changer For Cloud, Linux?

      What’s the next step for Docker, one of Silicon’s Valley’s hottest startups?

      It’s not an initial public offering — at least not this year, apparently. The well-funded, lean company says that it’s in no rush to go public.

  • Kernel Space

    • Top 10 Features of Linux Kernel 3.19

      Linux kernel 3.19 has been officially announced by none other than its father, Linus Torvalds, on February 8, 2015. It is a great release that brings some very interesting features. Because we didn’t have access to a complete list of its features at the moment of writing the news article about its availability, we have decided to drop another one that highlights Linux 3.19 kernel’s prominent features.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • A eulogy to CrunchBang, the Linux distro that time passed by

      DistroWatch.com is currently tracking 287 active Linux distributions. That’s a lot, but not every Linux distribution is a massive project. For every Ubuntu or Fedora, there are many more hobbyist distributions created and run by one or two people. Sometimes they grow into their own large projects, like Linux Mint did. And sometimes a developer decides to pull the plug, as CrunchBang’s developer recently did.

      [...]

      In the end, hobbyist Linux distributions are created to scratch an itch. Developers may eventually find that itch has been solved elsewhere, or may not want to put the long hours into scratching it anymore. CrunchBang no doubt has users who use and love it, even today—but the end of CrunchBang doesn’t have to be sad. CrunchBang’s developer now believes the larger Linux ecosystem has improved so much that CrunchBang is no longer necessary.

      That’s good news for everyone, including Newborough, who now gets to spend his valuable time on something else. Thanks for a killer run, Philip.

    • Security Onion: A Linux Distro For IDS, NSM, And Log Management

      Security Onion is a Linux distribution for intrusion detection, network security monitoring, and log management. It’s based on Ubuntu and contains Snort, Suricata, Bro, Sguil, Squert, Snorby, ELSA, Xplico, Network Miner, and many other security tools. Security Onion is a platform that allows you to monitor your network for security alerts. It’s simple enough to run in small environments without many issues and allows advanced users to deploy distributed systems that can be used in network enterprise type environments.

    • Getting Started with Linux: Another Look at UberStudent

      Time flies. It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been four years since I first took a look at a Linux distribution called UberStudent. Back then it was in its 1.0 release, called “Cicero.” The latest release, “Epicurus,” came out in mid-January, with a version number of 4.1.

      There are a lot of Linux distributions out there. What makes this one worth checking out?

      As with previous releases, what makes UberStudent unique is its target audience, and the software and little added touches it has as a result.

    • New Releases

      • Black Lab Linux Releases 32-bit Edition of Their KDE-Based Distro

        In a world where everyone tries to drop 32-bit support for their OSes, Black Lab Linux developers have announced on Twitter that they’ve released a 32-bit version of their KDE-based distribution in order to support installations of the Black Lab Linux KDE Edition 6.0 SR1 operating system on low-end computers or machines with old/semi-old hardware components.

    • Arch Family

      • Satire: Linus Torvalds awarded Arch Linux as the most consumer friendly distribution

        Richard M Stallman congratulated Arch for their achievement but also pointed out the areas where he thinks Arch needs improvement, “Arch’s lack of support of DRM and binary blobs are the only areas where I see hurdles in the wide-spread adoption of Linux. We have elevated the DRM implementation project at FSF to boost work on it. Today Arch is the second most popular operating system and this gap is only due to Arch’s bad philosophy of pure Open Source software. I think they should start offering proprietary and patented applications in their repositories.”

    • Red Hat Family

      • UAE Exchange consolidates data centres with Red Hat Linux

        Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that UAE Exchange, a leading foreign exchange and money transfer brand, has successfully created a scalable, secure, robust and high-performance datacenter environment by consolidating its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

      • Red Hat Upgrades Virtualization Platform

        The prolific developers at Red Hat have been relatively quiet in the New Year. Now, the open source leader is picking up the pace with the introduction of the latest version of its enterprise virtualization tool.

        The company announced general availability this week of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 aiming to offer tighter integration with OpenStack while promising to ease deployment of IT infrastructures for traditional virtualization workloads along with enterprise-level cloud infrastructure.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • CrunchBang, Elementary, and other Linux Complications

          The top stories today are more thoughts on CrunchBang and Elementary OS’ move to raise capital. My Linux Rig spoke to Matthew Miller from Fedora about his desktop and Adam Williamson announced Fedora 22 Anacoda/DNF testing day. Canonical pats itself on the back for a job well done in media production and John Goerzen hits the complexity nail on the head.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi robot’s explained

      Is the Pi robot a specific product or just a concept? An easy answer for some, but not everyone knows the score

    • Hackable Pi-like SBC opts for 1.6GHz quad-core STB SoC

      Shenzhen Xunlong has launched a $59 open-spec “Orange Pi Plus” SBC with a 1.6GHz quad-core Allwinner H3 SoC, 40-pin Pi-compatible expansion, WiFi, and SATA.

      In December when Shenzhen Xunlong Software announced its open-spec, Linux- and Android-ready Orange Pi and Orange Pi Mini SBCs, both of which use the dual-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner A20 system-on-chip, the company also briefly noted an upcoming, quad-core Orange Pi Plus. The Plus was said to offer a quad-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner A31 SoC with a PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU. Instead, the shipping version, now available at AliExpress for $59, arrives with Allwinner’s new quad-core Cortex–A7 based H3 SoC and a Mali-400 MP2 GPU.

    • Linux-based mobile manipulation robots due soon

      Former Unbounded Robotics execs have launched “Fetch Robotics” with $3 million in funding, and will ship a ROS-on-Linux mobile manipulator bot in Q2 2015.

      A startup called Fetch Robotics has announced $3 million in Series A financing from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and Shasta Ventures, along with a development team that jumped from the apparently now defunct Unbounded Robotics. Fetch Robotics plans to announce and ship two mobile manipulation robots in the second quarter that are aimed principally at the logistics and light industrial markets, “as well as for other human-robot collaboration opportunities,” says the company.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Russian Federation to help Tizen and Sailfish battle Android and iOS

          The Tizen Operating System has got unexpected interest from the Russian Federation, as the Minister of Communications and Mass Communications Nikolai Nikiforov showed his enthusiasm for the Tizen based Samsung Z1 and the “de-monopolization of the global IT-ecosystems”. When prompted about the lack of software, Nikiforov said that conditions will be created to promote the independent mobile OS.

        • Tizen Operating System in Samsung 2015 Smart TVs

          Samsung’s 2015 TV Line up will be Tizen, and they have confirmed that they will be dropping Android as a suitable TV platform for them. Using Tizen and EFL for its User Interface, Tizen TVs will have great multitasking between applications and movie streaming services, and great gaming potential with Sony’s PlayStation Now service, and much more!

        • Sony SmartWatch 3 Review: The Best-Performing Android Smartwatch Yet

          Sony’s been trying the smartwatch thing for years, but the original SmartWatch and the SmartWatch 2 both… what’s the word I’m looking for here? Sucked? Yeah. But the SmartWatch 3 has solid performance and two nifty features you won’t find on any other Android Wear. It’s the first with built-in GPS and a screen you can read without backlighting.

          Android Wear watches are off to a pretty decent start. The Moto 360, the LG G Watch R, and the Asus ZenWatch are all lovely and useful in their own ways. So why might you buy a Sony smartwatch instead?

      • Android

        • How Secure is Your Android? Mobile Antivirus Apps Tested

          Most of us will never see our Android antivirus apps spit out a warning because most of us will never encounter malware on our phones. So how can you tell if your Android antivirus is actually protecting your phone against the malware that sometimes sneaks onto Google Play or is installed by an overbearing spouse? Independent testing lab AV-Test is here with the answers.

        • Nokia’s HERE maps updated on Android and Windows Phone

          Nokia has announced that an update for its Windows Phone and Android Here mapping apps will be rolling out from today.

        • How to automatically unlock your Chromebook when your Android phone’s nearby

          Google is working hard to kill the password. If you want to live in that future now, you can turn on a feature that automatically unlocks your Chromebook whenever you wander near it with your Android phone in your pocket.

        • How to Download Android 5.0.2 Lollipop for Nexus 5?

          The Android Lollipop 5.0.2 update has been made available to some Nexus devices, including the Nexus 7 2012 and 2013 models and the Nexus 10. However, there is still no sign of the update for the Nexus 5 or the Nexus 4. While both the Nexus 6 and the Nexus 9 come with Android 5.0, apparently, the Nexus 5 Android 5.0 Lollipop update has been suspended because it was reported that the update causes the device’s battery to drain at a faster than normal rate.

        • Unofficial app opens up PS4 remote play on Android devices

          To this point, the PlayStation 4′s novel Remote Play function was only accessible on the PlayStation Vita, PlayStation TV, and certain Xperia mobile phones. That’s no longer the case, thanks to an unofficial port that lets the official PS4 Remote Play app work on practically any modern Android device.

        • HTC One M8 and LG G3 pick up Android 5.0 Lollipop

          AT&T began deploying Android 5.0.1 for its LG G3 variant on Tuesday. The carrier will automatically push the roughly 700MB update over the air, but eager users can also manually search for the file by navigating to Settings>General>About phone>Software Update.

        • Here are all of the phones that can get Google’s massive new Android update today

          Google started pushing out its latest version of Android in November, but most Android phone owners are still waiting for the update.

        • What’s Up With Android Wear?

          Research firm Canalys says just 720,000 smartwatches powered by Android Wear, Google’s operating system for wearable devices, shipped in the last six months of 2014.

        • HTC Could Be The Next Android Partner To Ditch Google In Smartwatches
        • JW Player Brings Its Video Player To Android Apps

          JW Player, the streaming video company that (in the words of its president Chris Mahl) helps online publishers find “life after YouTube, or life beyond YouTube,” has made a big move onto mobile with the general release of its Android SDK.

          The player already worked in mobile web browsers, so it wasn’t entirely absent from Android. But this will allow publishers to include the players directly in their apps, to customize its appearance, and to include video advertising.

        • Android Lollipop Review: Google’s Material Design Delivers The Goods

          Regardless of the tinkering Google’s engineers have done under the bonnet, the most noticeable improvement has to be the overall look. Google is calling Android’s fetching new aesthetic “Material Design” and it’s all about giving the OS a more welcoming look. It’s mostly flat colours, clever use of shadow and UI elements which look like layers of paper stacked on top of one another. Google has left behind the world of skeuomorphic design ­–– just like Apple did with iOS 7 –– and the end result is something that looks less cluttered and more eye-catching.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Finally: The best phablet in the world is getting Android Lollipop

        After releasing Android 5.0 Lollipop updates for a variety of top flagship handsets in the past weeks, including the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 3, Samsung has started rolling out the one official Lollipop ROM certain smartphone buyers were waiting for, the one made for the Galaxy Note 4.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Puppet Labs community manager on setting expectations

    The other side of community involvement in an open source project is the end users. It’s hard to be a successful open source project if no one is using it! But aside from providing documentation and forums, how else can projects and users connect?

    Kara Sowles, community manager for Puppet LabsOne way is a users group, a type of club where the members all share an interest in a particular arena. SHARE is one of the oldest computer users group around. The basic idea behind a users group is to provide more resources and share information among a local cell, provide support, encouragement, new ideas, mailing lists, and more. There are some challenges with belonging to a users group, managing a users group, and representing your open source project in a users group.

  • Cisco Takes Open Source Route to Policy Revamp

    Cisco is developing open source tools designed to allow network operators to describe policy in more meaningful terms.

    The Noiro Networks team inside Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) is trying to solve the problem of network policy that doesn’t make sense in an application-centric world. Typical networking policy uses networking language — describing traffic flows or or whether specific ports are allowed to connect with each other. Instead, the Noiro Networks team is looking to describe policies in terms of how applications are allowed to interoperate, says Thomas Graf, a principal software engineer at Cisco working on Noiro Networks.

  • Without open source, there would be no DevOps

    If we’re going to do DevOps, we have to give up open source. Right? Wait, we’re an Agile shop, so we have to give that up, too. Right?

    Over the last five years or so, I’ve talked with a lot of people confused about what it means to “do DevOps,” and clearly concerned about having to give up other things that have already proven their value in order to adopt DevOps. The bad news is, we’ve not done a good job in the DevOps community of nailing down what DevOps is and what it isn’t at an earlier stage in our development.

  • Google Launches Open-Source, Cross-Cloud Benchmarking Tool

    Google today launched PerfKit, an open-source cloud-benchmarking tool that, in Google’s words, is an “effort to define a canonical set of benchmarks to measure and compare cloud offerings.” The PerfKit tools currently support Google’s own Compute Engine, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure clouds. Google says it has worked on this project with over 30 researchers, companies and customers, including ARM, Canonical, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Rackspace and Red Hat.

  • Events

    • Oregon State University Open Source Lab hosts 160 projects

      The South California Linux Expo (SCALE) is an annual event aiming to provide educational opportunities on the topic of open source software. This is SCALE13X, and prior to the event I caught up with one of the speakers, Emily Durham, who will give a talk called Human Hacking.

      Emily Dunham of Open Source Lab at OSUEmily is currently finishing her final year in computer science at Oregon State University (OSU), where she is the student systems engineer at the OSU Open Source Lab. Previous to that gig at OSU, she helped run the Robotics Club, Linux Users Group, and Security Club. Emily has 7 years of experience in open source communities, and I talked with her regarding her career and life, open hardware, community psychology, and of course, her upcoming talk at SCALE13X.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Myriad Project Marries YARN and Apache Mesos Resource Management

      There are a lot of interesting announcements arriving as the O’Reilly Strata event rolls out. In one notable example, MapR and Mesosphere have announced a new open source Big Data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacenters. The initiative was kicked off by a developer at Ebay and turned into a collaborative effort between multiple companies. The project is now approaching Apache incubation.

  • Funding

    • Hitachi’s Acquisition of Pentaho Makes it a Big Data Analytics Player

      We’ve been watching the Big Data space pick up momentum as 2015 begins, and now Hitachi Data Systems Corporation has announced its intent to acquire Pentaho in what is being billed as “the largest private Big Data acquisition transaction to date.” Hitachi claims that the acquisition will accelerate enterprise adoption of Big Data technologies and solutions through “easier, faster deployment, leading to faster ROI.”

  • BSD

  • Licensing

    • Open Source Debate: Copyleft vs. Permissive Licenses

      Most discussions of free software licenses bore listeners. In fact, licenses are usually of such little interest that 85%of the projects on Github fail to have one.

      However, one aspect of licensing never fails to stir partisan responses: the debate over the relative advantages of copyleft licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL), and permissive licenses such as the MIT or the Apache 2 licenses.

      You only have to follow the links to Occupy GPL! that are making the rounds to see the emotions that this unending debate can still stir. Calling for an end to “GPL purism,” and dismissing the GPL as “not a free license,” the site calls on readers to use permissive licenses instead, describing them as “truly OSS [Open Source Software] licenses and urging readers to “Join the Fight!”

      Occupy GPL! itself is unlikely to have a future. Anonymous calls to actions rarely succeed; people prefer to know who is giving the call to arms before they muster at the barricades. Nor is the site’s outdated name and inconsistent diction, nor the high number of exclamation and question marks likely to inspire many readers. Still, the fact that the site exists at all, and the counter-responses in comments on Google+ show that the old debate is still very much alive.

    • Confessions of a Recovering Proprietary Programmer, Part XIII

      As a recovering proprietary programmer, I can assure you that things work a bit differently in the open-source world, so some adjustment is required. But participation in an open-source project can be very rewarding and worthwhile!

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Wikileaks shows US funded Mamasapano operation – solon

      Secret embassy cables leaked by WikiLeaks in 2010 reveal the United States’ heavy involvement in the Philippines’ counter-terrorism efforts including the botched police operation in Mamasapano, Maguindanao, a party-list congressman claimed on Wednesday.

      Kabataan Party-list Rep. Terry Ridon said the cables, which were from 2005 to early 2010, show how the US government planned to operate covertly within the ranks of Philippine forces.

    • Killing of 3 Muslims in US elicits criticism over media blackout

      A shooting in the US, which has reportedly left three Muslims dead in a North Carolina university town, has set social media buzzing over accusations of double standards, with major media outlets failing to report the story.

    • U.S. Dumps Massive Load, of Weapons and Ammunition, in Lebanon

      The U.S. ambassador to Lebanon announced a new shipment of weapons and ammunition have arrived in Beirut, the latest American assistance to Lebanon’s army as it fights ISIS along its border with Syria. The Ambassador said the equipment includes more than 70 M198 howitzers and over 26 million rounds of ammunition and artillery “of all shapes and sizes, including heavy artillery.”

      “We are very proud of this top-of-the-line equipment. This is the best that there is in the marketplace. It’s what our soldiers use,” the Ambassador continued. “I know that in a matter of days it’s going to be what your brave soldiers are using in the battle to defeat terrorism and extremism.”

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Ecuador to Take Assange Case to UN Human Rights Council

      The Republic of Ecuador will take the case of its most famous asylum seeker, Julian Assange, to the U.N. Human Rights Council, according to reports this week.

    • Britain: Julian Assange Duty Is Draining Police Coffers, London Chief Says

      London’s police chief said Tuesday that the cost of keeping watch on Julian Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy there, was draining resources and must be reviewed. Mr. Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, sought refuge in the embassy in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning on sexual assault allegations, which he denies. London’s Metropolitan Police have been standing guard around the clock to prevent him from fleeing, at a cost of about $15 million since the operation began. Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe told LBC Radio that officials were considering “how we can do that differently in the future, because it’s sucking our resources in.” Mr. Assange says the allegations were trumped up to facilitate his extradition ultimately to the United States, where he could be put on trial over huge leaks of information to WikiLeaks.

    • Cameras could cut £10m bill for watching Assange

      A review of the round-the-clock operation to guard Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, was announced by Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe yesterday.

    • Met Chief considering pulling the plug on £10m Assange operation

      The UK’s most senior police chief says he is reviewing the operation to guard WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange because it is “sucking” their resources. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg last week revealed the cost of the surveillance operation outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London had reached around £10m. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe told LBC radio: “We are reviewing the way forward there.” Mr Assange, who has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, has been living at the embassy since June 2012.

    • Julian Assange security ‘sucking Met Police resources’

      Security costs for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange are to be reviewed, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe has said.

      Maintaining a guard for Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in central London has cost £10m, according to figures disclosed to LBC radio.

  • Finance

    • Hidden cards in HSBC game of leaks

      The newspaper argued that similar policies would be followed by journalists in other parts of the globe, saying that it wouldn’t be responsible to just dump information on all account holders, as this could unnecesarily expose them to criminals after the extent of their wealth became public. Although no relevant accounts were tied to government officials by La Nación yet, investigations were said to be ongoing.

    • HSBC files show Tories raised over £5m from HSBC Swiss account holders

      Conservative donors, peers and a high profile MP are listed among the wealthy who legally held accounts in Switzerland with HSBC’s private bank, for a wide variety of reasons.

      Their ranks include Zac Goldsmith, MP for Richmond Park, plus his brother the financier Ben Goldsmith, and a Swiss resident, German-born automotive heir Georg von Opel, who has donated six-figure sums in the past two years.

      Peers named in the HSBC files include Lord Sterling of Plaistow, the P&O shipping and ports entrepreneur who was ennobled by Margaret Thatcher, and Lord Fink, who was a party treasurer under David Cameron and has given £3m to the Conservatives.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • How Reality TV Is Teaching Us to Accept the American Police State

      February 04, 2015 “ICH” – Americans love their reality TV shows—the drama, the insults, the bullying, the callousness, the damaged relationships delivered through the lens of a surveillance camera—and there’s no shortage of such dehumanizing spectacles to be found on or off screen, whether it’s Cops, Real Housewives or the heavy-handed tactics of police officers who break down doors first and ask questions later.

  • Privacy

    • Google is ‘privatized NSA’, unexamined deaths, & C of E censorship (E173)

      Afshin Rattansi goes underground on Google’s shady privacy record. Kristinn Hrafnsson, lawyer for WikiLeaks, warns that it appears Google is “not a benign company, it has sinister aims,” and reveals that it wants to be a dominant part of the military intelligence complex, handing information to the US government. Dr. Suzy Lishman, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, warns up to 10,000 deaths every year should be referred for further investigation, but are not due to massive numbers of death certificates being filled out minimally or wrong. We look into why the Church of England is removing the right to free speech for one of its vicars. Boris Johnson meets Hillary Clinton to discuss ISIS in New York. And if you’re a war-wounded veteran, you’d better hope you were injured after April 2005 – or you may lose most of your compensation to pay for basic care.

    • Philip K. Dick Warned Us About the Internet of Things in 1969

      Be careful about what you say in your living room if your new TV is on. News broke earlier this week that Samsung’s Web-connected SmartTV can listen to, record, and send what the television hears to a third-party company. The television doesn’t watch you watch it back, but it is listening.

    • Mayor Muriel Bowser Orders D.C. Fire to Lift Radio Encryption

      D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has ordered the D.C. Fire Department to lift the encryption of the department’s radios.

      News4′s Mark Segraves broke the news on Twitter Tuesday night.

      She has instructed the fire chief to stop encrypting the department’s radio transmissions beginning Friday morning. Encryption of the radios prohibits anyone except fire personnel from listening to the radio transmissions.

    • Obama asks Germany “to give us the benefit of the doubt” on NSA spying

      President Barack Obama asked Germans to give the United States the “benefit of the doubt” when it comes to snooping by the National Security Agency.

      In a Monday joint press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel held at the White House on Monday, Obama said he recognizes “the sensitivities around this issue.”

      In October 2013, German media reported that Merkel had “strong suspicions” that her personal cellphone was being monitored by American authorities.

      White House spokesman Jay Carney unequivocally told reporters at the time that such surveillance was not continuing, but he did not directly deny the allegations of past conduct. The next year, Germany decided not to renew its government contract with Verizon, citing concerns over spying by the National Security Agency.

    • Laura Poitras on Citizenfour, Edward Snowden and whistleblowers

      The first glimpse the world had of Edward Snowden was in a short video in a dark Hong Kong hotel room. But film-maker Laura Poitras’ journey with the NSA whistleblower began much earlier.

    • Oscar-Nominated Edward Snowden Documentary CITIZENFOUR to Debut on HBO 2/23
    • Court Says NSA Spying too Secret to Stop

      In a ruling handed down Tuesday, a federal district judge in California refused to rule that NSA collection of Internet and phone content without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, and dismissed part of a lawsuit challenging the spy agency program.

    • Judge White Makes Crucial Error While Capitulating to State Secrets, Again

      Ah well, all that discussion probably counts as a state secret. A concept which is getting more and more farcical every year.

    • Surveillance and the Vanishing Right to Know

      Despite the continuing torrent of disclosures concerning previously secret and wide-ranging government surveillance efforts, many criminal defendants are not getting notice of the secret surveillance authorities used in their cases. This is a serious problem—one felt acutely by defendants, but one that also has immense consequences for the public at large in an age of mass surveillance. To those whose liberty is not on the line, the right of criminal defendants to notice might seem like a narrow, procedural issue. It is not. In a world of multiplying surveillance techniques used in secret, the criminal defendant’s right to notice of surveillance used against him is vanishing—and this shift presents a fundamental obstacle for defendants, and a basic, structural problem for courts and the public.

    • EFF Vows to Continue the Fight Against Mass Surveillance After Disappointing Ruling

      EFF will keep fighting the unlawful, unconstitutional surveillance of ordinary Americans by the U.S. government. Today’s ruling in Jewel v. NSA was not a declaration that NSA spying is legal. The judge decided instead that “state secrets” prevented him from ruling whether the program is constitutional.

    • Judge rules for NSA in warrantless search case

      A U.S. judge on Tuesday ruled in favor of the National Security Agency in a lawsuit challenging the interception of Internet communications without a warrant, according to a court filing.

      U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California wrote the plaintiffs failed to establish legal standing to pursue a claim that the government violated the Fourth Amendment.

    • Surveillance and Freedom of the Media

      These findings are the result of the exposure of mass surveillance that seriously undermines the safety of journalistic sources, the safety of whistleblowers and freedom of the media, in stark contrast with a meaningful democracy where access to information, privacy and freedom of expression is protected.

    • Twitter Reports a Surge in Government Data Requests

      Twitter on Monday released its twice-yearly transparency report, showing a surge in government requests for users’ Twitter information.

      The report, which discloses the frequency with which government agencies from around the world ask Twitter to hand over data on specific users, said total requests rose by 40 percent, to about 2,871, compared with the company’s last report, in July. The latest requests came from more than 50 countries.

    • If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?

      The Snowden docs show us that high value targets have been getting compromised forever, and while the game does heavily favour offence, how is it possible that defence hasn’t racked up a single catch? The immediate conclusions for defensive vendors is that they are either ineffective or, worse, wilfully ignorant. However, for buyers of defensive software and gear, questions still remain.

    • The state most excited for “Fifty Shades of Grey” will surprise you

      TheWrap in conjunction with Facebook took a look at some of the chatter about the film — and its stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan — online. The data came from likes, comments and shares about the movie on Facebook. “For the past seven days, 3.7 million people had over 6 million interactions related to the Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson romp on Facebook,” TheWrap reported.

    • Breaking smart TV surveillance capabilities may be a felony

      Customers who are concerned about the surveillance capabilities of Samsung’s smart TVs have another headache to worry about: Tampering with the machine to disable such components may be a felony.

      Samsung’s privacy policy raised concerns with privacy activists who spotlighted the warning: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.” Now there are concerns that tinkering with the software by tech-savvy customers may run afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

      “Most smart TVs on the market have taken technological measures to prevent users from accessing or modifying firmware in order to prevent illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted material. But users could technically face felony charges for circumventing lockdown restrictions — even if the modifications they’re trying to make are legal under copyright law,” Slate reported Tuesday.

    • Who Else Listens To Your TV?

      That’s not exactly what the Terms say; they note that “if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted”. So we’re not just talking about the sort of data Google Now or Siri sends to their service provider (the phrase after you have started the voice recognition). Samsung also sends the commands themselves, plus any conversation around them. From that description, it seems the whole stream of conversation is likely to be sent.

  • Civil Rights

    • Jeffrey Sterling’s trial by metadata: Free speech stories

      When a Washington, DC, area jury convicted Jeffrey Sterling of multiple counts of espionage, the smoking gun wasn’t a key bit of classified information found in the former CIA officer’s possession; it was a trail of phone calls and emails of unknown content.

      The information about where those calls and emails went, however – to a New York Times reporter – was enough to convince a jury to send Sterling to prison for up to 80 years.

      According to the US Justice Department, Sterling was providing Risen with details of a failed CIA attempt to undermine Iran’s nuclear programme by having a Russian scientist code-named Merlin pass along intentionally flawed blueprints. Risen then exposed the operation in his 2005 book, State of War.

    • Map of 73 Years of Lynchings

      The most recent data on lynching, compiled by the Equal Justice Initiative, shows premeditated murders carried out by at least three people from 1877 to 1950 in 12 Southern states. The killers claimed to be enforcing some form of social justice. The alleged offenses that prompted the lynchings included political activism and testifying in court. FEB. 9, 2015 Related Article

    • Lynching as Racial Terrorism

      It is important to remember that the hangings, burnings and dismemberments of black American men, women and children that were relatively common in this country between the Civil War and World War II were often public events. They were sometimes advertised in newspapers and drew hundreds and even thousands of white spectators, including elected officials and leading citizens who were so swept up in the carnivals of death that they posed with their children for keepsake photographs within arm’s length of mutilated black corpses.

      These episodes of horrific, communitywide violence have been erased from civic memory in lynching-belt states like Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi. But that will change if Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney, succeeds in his mission to build markers and memorials at lynching sites throughout the South as a way of forcing communities and the country to confront an era of racial terror directly and recognize the role that it played in shaping the current racial landscape.

      Mr. Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, took a step in that direction on Tuesday when it released a report that chronicles nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950. The report focuses on what it describes as “racial terror lynchings,” which were used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. Victims in these cases were often murdered without being accused of actual crimes but for minor social transgressions that included talking back to whites or insisting on fairness and basic rights.

      The report is the result of five years of hard work. Researchers reviewed local newspapers, historical archives and court records; interviewed local historians, survivors and victims’ descendants; and scrutinized contemporaneously published articles in African-American newspapers, which took a closer interest in these matters than the white press. In the end, researchers found at least 700 more lynchings in the 12 states than were previously reported, suggesting that “racial terror lynching” was far more common than was generally believed.

    • Watch one of Jon Stewart’s most famous moments: his epic Crossfire appearance

      Crossfire’s whole premise was a debate between left and right, one that at times degenerated into a shouting match. Stewart often criticized the show as dumbing down American public discourse. And, when Crossfire’s hosts invited him on to debate, he embarrassed them.

      “You’re partisan — what do you call it — hacks,” Stewart said, to a stunned Carlson and Begala. “Stop hurting America.” Here’s the clip…

    • Privacy experts question Obama’s plan for new agency to counter cyber threats

      White House to unveil on Tuesday the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center but critics fear an expansion of government monitoring of online data

    • Judge Nap on New Cybersecurity Agency: ‘Lost Liberties Don’t Come Back’

      “I believe that the people who build these things have the ability to make them absolutely attack-proof, but in order to do that, they have to make them impervious to government intrusion,” Judge Nap said, adding that any government agency big enough to protect us is big enough to surveil us.

      “The Internet cannot be protected by the government, because the government will never permit a system that it can’t zero into,” Judge Nap said, concluding that he would “absolutely not” establish this agency.

      Watch Judge Nap and Stuart

    • Torture and the CIA’s Unaccountability Boards

      Last Saturday, January 31, CIA Inspector General David Buckley resigned after a little more than four years in office. His departure came at the end of the same month his office published a scathing report that found the agency committed serious wrongdoings in connection to its rendition, detention, and torture program. It was also the same month that his report was swept aside by a parallel investigation conducted by a CIA “Accountability Board” that was hand-picked by agency leadership. Unsurprisingly, the Accountability Board recommended holding no one accountable for any failings.

    • Guantánamo Bay: wheels of justice turn slowly – at $7,600 a minute

      The Guantánamo Bay war court is now costing US taxpayers over $7,600 per minute, according to new Pentagon figures.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Google is seriously taking on US telecom

      First it conquered search. Then it was online video and advertising. Now Google is turning its attention toward telecom — and it’s no experiment.

      In recent months, Google has said it’s bringing ultra-fast Internet to at least 18 US cities, including Atlanta and Nashville. It announced pilot tests of a low-cost, modular smartphone. The company’s joined an influential lobbying group for upstart telecom firms. And now Google is considering an entry into wireless service, as first reported by The Information, a technology news site founded by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin.

    • Hello HTTP/2, Goodbye SPDY

      HTTP is the fundamental networking protocol that powers the web. The majority of sites use version 1.1 of HTTP, which was defined in 1999 with RFC2616. A lot has changed on the web since then, and a new version of the protocol named HTTP/2 is well on the road to standardization. We plan to gradually roll out support for HTTP/2 in Chrome 40 in the upcoming weeks.

    • Wall Street Knows Darn Well That FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules Won’t Harm Broadband: Stocks Went Up

      And, indeed, it appears the stock market acted accordingly. Following Tom Wheeler’s official announcement that the FCC would move to reclassify under Title II, all the key broadband players saw their stocks jump up, not down. If it was really that bad, you would have seen the opposite.

02.11.15

Links 11/2/2015: First Ubuntu Phone on Sale Today, Tizen 2.3 Source Code Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Node v0.12.0 (Stable)

    We are excited to announce the availability of Node.js v0.12! It has been a long process, and we want to thank contributors and all of the community who waited patiently for this event. Node.js has such a vibrant and enthusiastic community, and we’re very lucky to have you all supporting us.

  • A Foundation for Node.js as a Community Struggles with Reconciliation

    In a bid to quell an uprising within the Node.js ranks, vendor sponsor Joyent has announced an independent foundation to provide an open governance structure for the project.

    Though big players including IBM, PayPal and Microsoft will be involved, CEO Scott Hammond said the foundation will help ensure all voices are heard.

  • Node.js is getting its own open-source, independent foundation

    Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript framework, is getting its own open-source foundation and will no longer be governed by Joyent, the cloud-infrastructure provider plans to announce on Tuesday. It should take around two to three months before the foundation is formally established, and until then, Joyent will remain the corporate steward of the Node.js open-source project, according to Joyent.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Making the Case for Open Source Browsers

      In the past, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the go-to Web browser for Internet users. But end-user confidence in Internet Explorer appears to be waning.

      Last summer, Google Chrome passed Internet Explorer in combined U.S. desktop and mobile Internet market share for the first time. Chrome now holds 31.8 percent of total market share compared to Internet Explorer’s 30.9 percent share. Furthermore, Chrome has been growing at a rate of 6 percent year over year from 2008, while Explorer has been decreasing at a rate of 6 percent during the same time frame.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS dongle redesign to add quad-core SoC, DRM

        The Firefox OS-based “Matchstick” media player has been delayed a half year to August, and will receive an overhaul to move to a quad-core SoC and add DRM.

      • Outspoken on Open

        One thing I am trying to convince folks though is that working in the open is not so hard that we ignore the principles of working in the open and avoid trying to build a good foundation of open processes. One thing I am finding when I have these discussions though is people do not always feel empowered to speak out about working in the open. Simply put teams and organizations will get in these status quos where they put off this hard work and nobody really comes around often to challenge the status quo because often the debates that pursue of working in the open are filled with disagreement.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • 3D Robotics unveils Tower, its open-source, customizable drone flight-control app

      Are you the kind of drone pilot that wants to do things with your aircraft no one’s thought of before? If so, then Tower, the new open-source flight control app from 3D Robotics, could well be for you.

    • 3D Robotics Opens Its Flight Control App For Drones To Developers

      3D Robotics, the largest U.S.-based drone manufacturer, today announced the launch of its open-source Tower flight control app for drone copters and planes on Android phones and tablets. The app gives users a few new ways to talk to their drones, but far more importantly, it offers developers a new way to build new features for drones into the app without having to reinvent the wheel by starting from scratch.

    • MAGEEC energy reduction – open start-ups column

      Modelling energy usage is not enough, so an energy measurement board (the ‘MAGEEC Wand’) has been created, which can be applied to a range of embedded architectures. MAGEEC was presented at GNU Tools Cauldron – the annual gathering of GNU tools developers (CC- licensed video and slides at gnu.org) – this July in Cambridge, on the Atmel AVR. Since this, further work has completed the “proof of concept” framework, which fits both GCC and LLVM compilers – a working system that currently awaits further optimisations.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source Virtual Reality gains 13 more partners, gives away VR kits to universities

        Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), the initiative from Razer and Sensics to connect multiple VR software and hardware partners together, had a good handful of partners at CES 2015, and 13 more have been announced today. The new partners include Jaunt — a maker of cinematic VR experiences that already has apps for Google Cardboard — plus a few game developers, audio and interface accessory companies.

      • Open Source Virtual Reality grows even bigger with a dozen new partners

        Open Source Virtual Reality, a Razer-spearheaded coalition that was introduced at CES 2015 in January, has announced 12 new partners.

        OSVR aims to build an open source VR platform that developers and hardware makers can use to create virtual reality devices and experiences across multiple operating systems

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • US Healthcare Is So Screwed I Fly to Britain for My Medication

      Every six months, like clockwork, I fly home to the UK for three days for one reason: to pick up my supply of prescription medication.

      I consider myself lucky—drugs are cheap there, where a national health service exists that I can partake of as a UK citizen. The very vast majority of Americans are not as fortunate. John Oliver, fellow Brit, comedian, and host of Last Week Tonight, said Sunday in a skit about Big Pharma that the cost of drug spending in the U.S. last year “works out to be about a thousand dollars per person.”

    • xKoch Cartel Blocking Medicaid Expansion, Denying Hundreds of Thousands Care

      Radical right-wingers in a series of red states are punishing hundreds of thousands of low-income people by blocking efforts by Republican governors to expand Medicaid—state-run health care—by modifying Obamacare to include Republican ideas.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • REPORT: Women Are Underrepresented In Cable News Segments On Foreign Affairs, National Security

      Enormous Gender Disparity Present Across All Three Outlets. Fox News featured women in roughly 25 percent of recorded segments, while MSNBC and CNN each featured female guests in just over 20 percent of segments discussing foreign affairs and national security.

    • The U.S. Media and the 13-Year-Old Yemeni Boy Burned to Death Last Month by a U.S. Drone

      On January 26, the New York Times claimed that “a CIA drone strike in Yemen. . . . killed three suspected Qaeda fighters on Monday.” How did they know the identity of the dead? As usual, it was in part because “American officials said.” There was not a whiff of skepticism about this claim despite the fact that “a senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, declined to confirm the names of the victims” and “a C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.”

      That NYT article did cite what it called “a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP), who provided the names of the three victims, one of whom was “Mohammed Toiman al-Jahmi, a Yemeni teenager whose father and brother were previously killed in American drone strikes.” The article added that “the Qaeda member did not know Mr. Jahmi’s age but said he was a member of the terrorist group.”

      In fact, as the Guardian reported today, “Mr. Jahmi’s age” was 13 on the day the American drone ended his life. Just months earlier, the Yemeni teenager told that paper that “he lived in constant fear of the ‘death machines’ in the sky that had already killed his father and brother.” It was 2011 when “an unmanned combat drone killed his father and teenage brother as they were out herding the family’s camels.” In the strike two weeks ago, Mohammed was killed along with his brother-in-law and a third man.

    • We dream about drones, said 13-year-old Yemeni before his death in a CIA strike

      Mohammed Tuaiman becomes the third member of his family to be killed by what he called ‘death machines’ in the sky months after Guardian interview

    • Obama’s Christian Right Critics Agree with Islamic State

      At least part of the reason for this is that many American officials have continued in Bush’s tradition of defining the U.S. conflict with extremist Middle Eastern groups as a grand civilizational and religious battle, thus playing in to the same sharply polarizing narrative those groups seek to promote.

    • Ukraine: Artillery Fire, Not ‘Tactical Nuke’ Attack, Sets Off Large Donetsk Explosion

      On Sunday night, a series of YouTube videos appear to show a large explosion in Donetsk, Ukraine (several can be watched here). However, it wasn’t a “tactical nuclear weapon,” as some social media users claimed, but just a big blast–reportedly Ukrainian army artillery fire hitting an ammunition depot held by the rebel Donetsk People’s Republic.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • The Importance of Whistleblowers

      …in-depth look at the vital role of whistleblowers in ensuring public safety and government accountability.

    • Julian Assange ‘sucking police resources’: UK cop

      British police are reviewing the operation to guard WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the UK’s most senior officer has said.

      Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe told LBC radio that the force is assessing its options due to the pressure the operation at the Ecuadorian embassy in London is putting on resources.

      “We won’t talk about tactics but we are reviewing what options we have. It is sucking our resources,” he said.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • 2015 Could Be The Year Canada Elects A Prime Minister Who Actually Cares About Climate

      Harper, who assumed office in 2006 and who has been a staunch supporter of Canada’s tar sands industry, has tried to silence activists who speak out against the industry. But he hasn’t stopped there: his administration has been accused of muzzling its scientists and meteorologists in an attempt to stop certain information on climate change or environmental issues from reaching the public. Under Harper, Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol — which the prime minister once referred to as a “socialist scheme” — in 2011 and cut about 500 jobs from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 2013. The government also closed seven scientific libraries in 2014.

  • Finance

    • Billionaire’s Paper Hopes Well-Off Will Identify With Wealthy

      Given this lopsided distribution of income gains, it’s not irrational for people who make quite a bit more than the median income to identify with the middle class and applaud policies that are aimed at curbing the accumulation of wealth by the super-wealthy. But Edsall’s argument for the failure of middle-class populism depends on better-off voters who think of themselves as middle class not really being middle class–and knowing somehow that when politicians talk about the “middle-class,” they aren’t talking about them.

    • HSBC Swiss leaks: Spain’s Podemos party hires whistleblower Falciani to combat tax evasion and fraud
    • Global Capitalism’s Terrifying New Math

      McKinsey, one of the world’s preeminent business consultants, released a sobering new report this week detailing that, worldwide, total debt has risen by 40.1 percent — or $57 trillion — since the financial crisis of 2008. “Debt,” here, can mean many things: debt to other countries and international institutions, as in Greece and Italy, which were bailed out by the troika; it also means debt to financial institutions, or household and personal debt of the kind those of us paying off mortgages, medical debt or student loans here in the states know all too well. It all means bad news for the economy.

    • A game of Chicken

      On Wednesday, the European Central Bank announced that it would no longer accept Greek government debt as collateral for loans. This move, it turns out, was more symbolic than substantive. Still, the moment of truth is clearly approaching.

    • New Evidence That Half of the US Is Broke

      Half of our nation, by all reasonable estimates of human need, is in poverty. The jubilant headlines above speak for people whose view is distorted by growing financial wealth. The argument for a barely surviving half of America has been made before, but important new data is available to strengthen the case.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Brian Powell: New GOP Hearing Will Feature Notorious Right-Wing Media Misinformers

      An upcoming House Oversight Committee hearing features two conservative media darlings infamous for their anti-immigrant rhetoric and peddling misinformation about voter fraud and election law.

    • The New York Times’ Nuclear Uncertainty Principles

      I don’t know that there’s anyone who seriously argues that there’s any actual doubt that Israel has nuclear weapons; if there were any lingering questions, they were resolved by the revelations of Mordechai Vanunu, a whistleblower who exposed details of Israel’s nuclear warhead lab in 1986 and was imprisoned by Israel for 18 years as punishment. Later on in the piece, in fact, the Times notes that “the Arms Control Association, a research group in Washington, says Israel is believed to have 100 to 200 warheads.”But it’s still treated as claim to be attributed to a source rather than a verified fact.

    • Tell Us How You Really Feel About Fast Track Opponents, New York Times

      A hundred and fifty plus 72 is 222 congressmembers, or 51 percent of the House of Representatives. That’s a pretty big “fringe.”

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Is smart technology really a threat to our privacy?

      Fitness trackers and even Samsung televisions are becoming more advanced, and that data can inadvertently reveal sensitive things we never meant to make public

    • Addresses, SSNs, phone numbers released by former Gov. Jeb Bush in e-mail dump

      On Tuesday, former Florida governor Jeb Bush published Volume 1 of an e-book detailing all of his official correspondence while in gubernatorial office. Although the e-book is edited and e-mail addresses have been redacted, the Governor’s Office also published six Outlook files full of all of Bush’s unredacted correspondence—creating a trove of full names connected with personal e-mail addresses, home addresses, phone numbers and even social security numbers, as The Verge first reported.

      [....]

      The scope of the e-mails is vast and includes everything from automated messages to brief summaries of the state of Cuban refugees who arrived on Florida’s shores to oddly personal e-mails from constituents. Some e-mails include correspondence that had not been addressed to Bush originally but showed up when part of an e-mail was forwarded to him. Other e-mails include personal information about people who aren’t involved in the e-mail thread at all. “Did you get this? Eric’s wife is being induced tomorrow a.m. so we’ll be out of town for a while. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your family!” one cheerily reads.

    • After months of silence from feds on flying phone surveillance, EFF sues

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit Monday in order to learn more about the United States Marshals Service’s use of airborne cell-site simulators.

      The San Francisco-based advocacy group filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of Justice (DOJ), the USMS’ parent agency, shortly after the revelations came to light in November 2014. However, the DOJ has not produced any responsive documents and has long exceeded the 30-day deadline as defined under the FOIA law.

      In the suit, which was filed in federal court in Washington, DC, the EFF asks the court to compel the DOJ to immediately produce the documents. The DOJ did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

    • No One Can Stop Craigslist, but Facebook Is Trying Again

      Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the only one in Silicon Valley with Craigslist envy. A decade ago, Google tried to meld classified ads with other crowdsourced content in a website called Google Base. The service never took off, and it now redirects to a site soliciting retailers to list on Google’s shopping search engine. Along with the big companies, countless startups have set out to make prettier, more functional versions of Craigslist, only to fail.

    • FBI really doesn’t want anyone to know about “stingray” use by local cops

      If you’ve ever filed a public records request with your local police department to learn more about how cell-site simulators are used in your community—chances are good that the FBI knows about it. And the FBI will attempt to “prevent disclosure” of such information.

      Not only can these devices, commonly known as “stingrays,” be used to determine a phone’s location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. During the act of locating a phone, stingrays also sweep up information about nearby phones. Last fall, Ars reported on how a handful of cities across America are currently upgrading to new hardware that can target 4G LTE phones.

    • NSA Claims Iran Learned from Western Cyberattacks

      The U.S. Government often warns of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks from adversaries, but it may have actually contributed to those capabilities in the case of Iran.

      A top secret National Security Agency document from April 2013 reveals that the U.S. intelligence community is worried that the West’s campaign of aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks enabled Iran to improve its own capabilities by studying and then replicating those tactics.

      The NSA is specifically concerned that Iran’s cyberweapons will become increasingly potent and sophisticated by virtue of learning from the attacks that have been launched against that country. “Iran’s destructive cyber attack against Saudi Aramco in August 2012, during which data was destroyed on tens of thousands of computers, was the first such attack NSA has observed from this adversary,” the NSA document states. “Iran, having been a victim of a similar cyber attack against its own oil industry in April 2012, has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport

      Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report that three of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen, the main airport in Norway. This way the travelers can have their body photographed without cloths when visiting Norway. Of course this horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that “now travelers can move past the security check point faster and more efficiently”, but fail to mention that the machines in question take pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the public. The article is written in a way that leave the impression that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create the sketch figures. In reality the same nude pictures are still taken, but not presented to everyone. They are still available for the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.

    • The Guardian Hires Chelsea Manning

      Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 after being convicted of leaking classified national security documents to WikiLeaks.

    • FBI monitored and critiqued African American writers for decades

      Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Peter Sunde: Pirate Bay Still Has The Right To Defend Itself

        Today it was revealed that a Swedish prosecutor is trying to force the .SE registry, via a court case, to ban ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se from being in use. He even wants to go so far as to claim the domains for the state in order to put up a ‘stop’ logo on them.

      • File-Sharing Icon RapidShare Shuts Down

        RapidShare, once the most popular file-hosting service in the Internet, has announced that it will shut down next month. The company doesn’t cite a reason for the surprising shutdown, but losing the majority of its users in recent years after the implementation of tough anti-piracy measures is likely to be connected.

        [...]

        RapidShare fought many legal battles with entertainment companies seeking to hold the company liable for the actions of its users, and to top it off the site was called out by the U.S. Government as a “notorious market.”

      • Megaupload Programmer Arrested in The U.S.

        Andrus Nomm, one of the seven Megaupload employees indicted by the United States, has been arrested. The U.S. authorities have yet to comment on the arrest of the programmer but Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken believes that he may have cut a deal with the FBI.

02.10.15

Links 10/2/2015: Linux 3.19, LXQt 0.9

Posted in News Roundup at 7:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • How About a Chromebook on Steroids?

      There’s been a lot of interesting Linux news of late. Not just GNU/Linux, but all types of Linux, Android, Chrome OS, Firefox OS, embedded (IoT), cloud computing, cars, TVs, just about anything you can think of. But truth be told, I’d like to see more Linux on the desktop — just as Linus Torvalds said he would like to see that.

      The recent purchase of a Chromebook for my son got me thinking about a new opportunity for Linux on the desktop. This is not an idea for getting a standard GNU/Linux desktop to automagically replace all existing Windows desktops, but to leverage the cloud computing paradigm with a bulked­-up Chromebook-­like system that would be workable for 80 to 90 percent of personal, school, and business needs.

  • Kernel Space

    • VLC Gains Support For Systemd’s Journal

      The latest open-source desktop program making optional use of systemd is the popular VLC media player.

      As of this morning, there’s now a native logger module for the systemd journal within VLC.

    • The Best Changes & Features Of The Linux 3.19 Kernel

      Last Sunday when releasing Linux 3.19-rc7, Linus Torvalds mentioned he was looking at doing the official 3.19 release in one week. It seems to have been a relatively calm week to end out 3.19 development with no nasty regressions turning up, so chances are in a few hours he’ll have the new release out the door.

    • Linux 3.19 Kernel Released

      The Linux 3.19 kernel was tagged in Git close to an hour ago now. Surprisingly, as of writing this news post, Linus Torvalds has yet to issue any Linux 3.19 release announcement but things went according to plan as per last week with the plans for 3.19 final.

    • Linux 3.19 released for your computing pleasure

      News of the release emerged in a typically economical Sunday evening post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, in which Torvalds noted there are still a couple of bugs in this release but they were pretty obscure so “… while I was tempted a couple of times to do an rc8, there really wasn’t any reason for it.”

    • Linux Kernel 3.19 Officially Released, Merge Window for Linux Kernel 3.20 Now Open

      Good news for all users of a GNU/Linux operating system, as Linus Torvalds announced the immediate availability for download of the Linux 3.19 kernel, which brings interesting features, the usual bugfixes, and general performance improvements.

    • The AllSeen Alliance’s Philip DesAutels on the Internet of Things

      As the AllSeen Alliance’s senior director of IoT, Philip DesAutels (shown) works with Alliance members to advance the Internet of Everything by building out an open source software framework, AllJoyn, to seamlessly connect a range of objects and devices in homes, cars and businesses. He oversees and guides all aspects of the Alliance, from governance and technology, to the developer community and marketing efforts.

    • Live Kernel Patching Support Called For Linux 3.20 Kernel

      It looks like the infrastructure to facilitate live kernel patching will be added to the Linux 3.20 kernel, the result of collaboration for SUSE’s kGraft and Red Hat’s Kpatch.

      Last year SUSE and Red Hat introduced their own live kernel patching mechanisms after not knowing each company was independently working on a solution for patching running versions of the Linux kernel against basic security/bug fixes. In the months since the unveiling of kGraft and Kpatch, the kernel developers have been working together to come up with a common base that addresses the needs of each implementation. That common work for supporting Kpatch and kGraft is now what’s ready for merging into Linux 3.20.

    • Linux Kernel 3.19 stable released, Install/Upgrade in Ubuntu/Linux Mint
    • Best Software Ever isn’t systemd

      Today in the Linuxsphere the systemd controversy doesn’t seem to be subsiding as the main reason for it is no more. Jim Zemlin blogged about The Linux Foundation’s efforts to save small but key projects from starving to death as well as contributing to the security process. Speaking of security, a new trojan has been identified that can open backdoors on Linux servers that can, among other things, participate in DDoS attacks. Matt Hartley shares his list of the best software ever for Linux and Leif Lodahl declares LibreOffice better than the competitors.

    • Linux 3.20 To Support New HID Hardware, Improve Logitech HID++ Support

      The HID subsystem work for Linux 3.20 includes improvements to the Logitech HID++ protocol implementation, support for composite RMI devices, a new driver for the BETOP force feedback controller, new hardware support in the Wacom driver, and various fixes. The fixes and new device ID additions are “all over the place” for HID drivers.

    • Benchmarks

      • Intel Core i3 5010U NUC5i3RYB Broadwell Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

        While my full Linux review of the NUC5i3RYH / Core i3 5010U will come in the days ahead on Phoronix, this weekend I uploaded some preliminary benchmark data for those curious. The Intel Core i3 5010U features a dual-core processor with Hyper Threading and is clocked at 2.1GHz for its frequency without Hyper Threading. The i3-5010U has a 15 Watt TDP, 3MB cache, and supports DDR3L/LPDDR3 1600/1333MHz memory. The graphics processor is Intel HD Graphics 5500 with a maximum frequency of 900MHz.

      • Intel Iris Graphics Performance On Linux 3.19 Shows Some Regressions

        For any Intel Haswell Linux users with Iris Graphics thinking of switching to the Linux 3.19 kernel when it’s released in what might just be a few hours, be forewarned as testing this weekend revealed there looks to be an OpenGL performance regression attributed to this new kernel.

  • Applications

    • MKVToolnix 7.6.0 Out Now, Helps You Split, Convert and Merge MKV (Matroska) Files

      Version 7.6.0 of the powerful MKVToolNix software is now available for download, still providing computer users with one of the best collection of tools for analyzing, converting, merging, and splitting Matroska (popularly known as MKV) files on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

    • CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) 2.0 .2 Now Available for Download

      For hardcore geeks, Common UNIX Printing System or simply CUPS is an open-source printing layer for UNIX-like operating systems, including GNU/Linux, BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD), Solaris, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. For end users, CUPS is that piece of software that lets them add printers, manage printers, as well as print documents on their computers.

    • Graphical profiling under Linux

      The Oyranos library became quite slower during the last development cycle for 0.9.6 . That is pretty normal, as new features were added and more ideas waited for implementation letting not much room for all details as wanted. The last two weeks, I took a break and mainly searched for bottlenecks inside the code base and wanted to bring performance back to satisfactory levels. One good starting point for optimisations in Oyranos are the speed tests inside the test suite. But that gives only help on starting a few points. What I wished to be easy, is seeing where code paths spend lots of time and perhaps, which line inside the source file takes much computation time.

    • Best Linux Software of All Time

      Over the years, there have been a number of claims that the Linux desktop is lacking in terms of good, highly useful software. Today, I’m aiming to put this myth to bed once and for all. Continue reading for my list of the top ten best applications for Linux.

    • Icemon 3.0 release

      It is my pleasure to finally release Icemon 3.0 to the public. If you don’t know it — Icemon is a GUI monitor for Icecream, a distributed compiler system.

    • regexProgram: Add to your education

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Distributing games and applications

        Within a short period, two people showed up with proposals for games for inclusion with GNOME 3.16. One is a 2048 clone, the other is a revival of Atomix (last maintenance was GNOME 2.14). Both proposals seem to be maintained by just one person.

      • You Only Live Once: But you share many lives

        As a story-based adventure it’s a decent attempt, even if it has some omissions or streamlining that work against its overall purpose. It’s not the finest thing ever to grace the screen of my lowly Pentium 4, but I wouldn’t mind trying it again, just for fun.

      • Dead Island Patch Released For Linux, Finally Playable (Updated)

        Dead Island has been patched to fix multiple issues in the Linux version, so it looks like it’s properly playable now months after release. It may have taken over 3 months for the game to get these fixed, but it’s good to see the port wasn’t forgotten about as we thought previously.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • LXQt 0.9.0 released with new theme

      LXQt 0.9.0 has been released, dropping compatibility with Qt 4 and setting the minimum version required to be Qt 5.3. This release features lots of internal cleanups and refactorings which should make it faster. The release also utilise KDE Frameworks for the first time, KWindowSystem replaces the XFitMan library, KGuiAddons replaces a dependency on xlib in lxqt-panel.

    • LXQt 0.9 Released, Now Requires Qt5 & KDE Frameworks 5

      Version 0.9 of the lightweight LXQt desktop environment was released this Sunday. LXQt is the next-generation, lightweight desktop derived in part from the LXDE and Razor-Qt desktops. LXQt 0.9 is the release that begins to enforce Qt5.

      LXQt 0.9 abandons Qt4 compatibility and now requires Qt 5.3 or newer. LXQt 0.8 that was released last October had full Qt5 support while maintaining Qt4 compatibility, but this new version focuses exclusively on modern Qt5 library support.

    • Manjaro Linux LXQt 0.8.12 Is Now Available for Download – Screenshot Tour

      Three days after the official announcement of Manjaro Linux 0.8.12, a point release that brings only a couple of changes, such as out-of-the-box support for Microsoft’s exFAT filesystem and Pacman 4.2 package manager, the Manjaro community released today the LXQt edition of the acclaimed Arch Linux-based computer operating system. At the moment of writing this article, only the 32-bit Live image was available for download, but that’s more than enough for us to take a quick screenshot tour of the release.

    • EFL 1.13 is Out

      After three months of development work we are proud to announce the release of version 1.13 of EFL, Elementary, Evas Generic Loaders and Emotion Generic Players.
      In this 12 weeks we got over 700 commits from 68 authors in EFL alone. Doing 111275 line insertions and 28292 line deletions. Elementary has another 370 commits by 48 authors.

    • Enlightenment EFL 1.13 Released

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Season of KDE 2014 Post #3: Mission Accomplished!

        I started off my Project under Season of KDE 2014 with a motive to design and revamp KDE’s own blog aggregator, PlanetKDE. Initiated by my mentor Jonathan Riddell, back in 2008, this website did an amazing job of scraping off content from KDE’s bloggers.

      • Plasma 5.2 review – Fire all weapons!

        Plasma 5 has the potential to revitalize the Linux world, it’s that important and meaningful. Of course, we must not forget that applications play their critical role, but if you need to sell your product, the first look, the very first impression is important. And in that regard, Plasma has everything to gain and lose. After what happened with Gnome, it’s the one remaining bastion of sanity in the Linux desktop world. And so we begin.

      • A Masterpiece In The Making

        A 15 minute review of the forthcoming Plasma 5 distro

      • What I can say about KDE Plasma 5 that I can’t say about Windows 8

        I’ve never really had the time to explore KDE Plasma 5 since it was released back in July 2014. I’ve played with it a bit, but not much.

        Now that it’s at version 5.2 and at that stage when its deemed almost ready for primetime, that is, ready to replace all aspects of KDE Plasma 4, I decided to kick the tires a little bit harder.

        To do that, I had to download and install an ISO image of a release candidate of KaOS – KaOS-kf5 ISO 2015.01.25.

        KaOS is a KDE-centric Linux distribution that uses a rolling release development model. It was inspired by Arch Linux and uses that distribution’s package manager. Tt also makes use of the Calamares graphical installer, which I wrote about recently (see Calamares will be the graphical installer on the next OpenMandriva edition).

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Bugzilla upgraded to 4.4.

        Dear GNOME community, you all owe Krzesimir Nowak, Andrea Veri, and Olav Vitters some icecream and drinks: The Bugzilla software running on bugzilla.gnome.org has been upgraded to the latest stable version available.

  • Distributions

    • When Linux Distros Are Abandoned

      We’ve had some fairly high profile Linux distros fold up their tents and move along. Whether due to a lack of financial support or the project growing larger than a one man dev team can manage, distros do go away. It’s never for a good reason but the fact remains: When a distro ceases to exist, a lot of people get left in the lurch.

    • Reviews

      • Review: Manjaro Linux 0.8.12 “Ascella” Xfce

        It has been a while since I reviewed Manjaro Linux. In fact, my last review of it was almost 2 years ago. Since then, I have seen a lot of news about how much it has grown and how good it has gotten. I figured I should give it another review.

        For those who don’t remember, Manjaro is a distribution that based on Arch Linux. It maintains a rolling-release base, and it is compatible with most Arch repositories, though some of its repositories are its own. It officially supports KDE and Xfce, though community editions exist for other DEs as well.

      • First impressions of ArchBSD 2014.09.04

        From a practical point of view, I’m sure most people will stick with running either Arch Linux or vanilla FreeBSD. However, as an experiment into what is possible, ArchBSD does provide us with something interesting, something a little different. With some work to flesh out the documentation and more volunteers to keep the base operating system up to date, I think ArchBSD could be a viable server operating system.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Calamares will be the graphical installer on the next OpenMandriva edition

        News from OpenMandriva has it that the next release of the distribution will feature the Calamares graphical installer.

        Calamares is a “distribution independent installer framework” that features a modular design with 25 modules already implemented. It has plugin interfaces for C++, Python and a generic process, and an advanced partitioning tool with support for DOS and GPT partition tables.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • systemd Or Poettering, Name Your Poison

        The issue is the same as I have with the boot-times for my desktop PC, systemd makes assumptions that break Debian systems. In my case, systemd insists on every other service starting and running before attempting to start X, the thing I want up ASAP. In the case of the bug reported above, how the system time was handled over a reboot is changed with systemd. The old behaviour was that the clock was stored and retrieved so things survived reboots nicely. No more. Poettering et al have decided that time should be set by NTP or other means and systemd should not have anything to do with that although systemd is replacing the old init that did… BREAKAGE!!! Now I know why Linus swears so much! If a change to systemd breaks user’s systems, it’s a bug in systemd, not that the world needs to change to be the way Poettering wants. Putting folks who break things in charge of millions of systems is a tragedy of huge proportions. People should not have to rewrite init scripts to switch to systemd. Otherwise, systemd should get the Hell out of our way… or go away…

      • Has modern Linux lost its way? (Some thoughts on jessie)

        For years, I used to run Debian sid (unstable) on all my personal machines. Laptops, workstations, sometimes even my personal servers years ago ran sid. Sid was, as its name implies, unstable. Sometimes things broke. But it wasn’t a big deal, because I could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was. It was the price I paid for the latest and greatest.

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • High end dev board taps Allwinner’s octa-core A80 SoC

      Merrii announced a high end, Android- and Linux-ready “H88 Hummingbird” SBC based on the octa-core Cortex-A15/-A7 Allwinner A80 SoC.

      The second-generation Raspberry Pi 2 managed to maintain its $35 price despite moving to a quad-core Cortex-A7 system-on-chip, but faster, pricier quad- and octa-core ARM SoCs haven’t seen as much traction in the single board computer scene. Yet, just as we’ve seen a lot of SBCs based on the Cortex-A7 based Allwinner A20 or Cortex–A9 based Allwinner A31, several companies and community projects are now trying out the octa-core Allwinner A80. The A80 combines four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores in a Big.Little configuration.

    • February Exeter Linux user group write up and prevew of the Feb Torbay Pi jam
    • Linaro launches open ARM SBC spec, and an octa-core SBC

      Linaro has launched an open-source spec for ARM SBCs called “96Boards,” first available in a $129 “Hikey” SBC, featuring a Huawei octa-core Cortex-A53 SoC.

      Linaro, the ARM-backed not-for-profit engineering organization that has aimed to standardize open source Linux and Android software for Cortex-A processors, is now trying to do the same thing for hardware.f Linaro, which is owned by ARM and many of its top system-on-chip licensees, has launched 96Boards.org, a cross between a single board computer hacker community and an x86-style hardware standards organization.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Netflix airs its developers’ Dirty Laundry

    Netflix has developed a platform, using soon-to-be open source tools, that probes for vulnerabilities and monitor data leakage.

    One initiative dubbed the “Dirty Laundry Project” monitors for Netflix assets unintentionally exposed by its staff.

  • 4 open-source monitoring tools that deserve a look

    Network monitoring is a key component in making sure your network is running smoothly. However, it is important to distinguish between network monitoring and network management. For the most part, network monitoring tools report issues and findings, but as a rule provide no way to take action to solve reported issues.

  • Best open source monitoring tools

    We found all four products to be capable network monitoring tools that performed well in our basic tasks such as checking for host availability and measuring bandwidth usage. Beyond the basics, there were quite a few differences in terms of features, granularity and configuration options.

  • Building a better matching solution with Mensa

    I’ve been designing and developing commercial software for more than 30 years, and I’m pleased to announce that for the first time, some of my software has been released as a new open source project. For open source at Dell, it’s a Java project called Mensa.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack’s inflection point, developer tools, and more
    • ownCloud Server 8 Officially Released, a Self-Hosted Dropbox Alternative

      ownCloud reached version 8 today, February 9, 2015. We’re talking about the ownCloud Server, a powerful, open-source, free, and self-hosted file sharing solution that offers easier and faster file syncing and sharing functionality, along with numerous other attractive features. ownCloud Server is considered by many a Dropbox replacement and it is distributed in two editions, ownCloud Community Edition and ownCloud Enterprise Edition.

    • With version 8, ownCloud becomes a viable Google Drive replacement

      When you put your data in the public cloud — whether it be Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, or other services. It’s dictated by the terms and services of the service provider and is subject to laws that may give the government full access to your data without giving you the slightest hint of any compromise.

    • VMware Builds a Cloud Bridge Between Open Source, Proprietary Tools

      VMware has remained in the news cycle since its announcements on the cloud computing front last week. In a blog post, the company announced the launch of VMware Integrated OpenStack, which, notably, is available for use, free of charge, with VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus, vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus and all editions of vCloud Suite. The company is also pushing its vision of “one cloud, any app, any device.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Continues Moving Along With C++11 Adoption

      With the recent release of LibreOffice 4.4 there was a significant bump in compiler requirements in order to begin allowing LibreOffice developers to use basic C++11 functionality. Going forward, the compiler requirements will continue to rise as the developers of this open-source office suite seek to utilize more modern C++ features.

    • Is LibreOffice better than the competitor?

      Let’s have a look at some of the areas where LibreOffice is actually BETTER than the competitor Microsoft Office.

  • CMS

    • What’s New in February for Open Source CMS

      It goes without saying that WordPress is big — the Goliath of free and open source content management systems (CMS). WordPress is the number 1 CMS system currently in use, and increased its usage on more than 2 million domains since June 2014.

  • Funding

    • Answering the Call for Werner Koch’s Everywhere

      This past week the person who manages one of the world’s most important cryptography projects, Werner Koch, went from going broke to raising more than $100,000 for his project, GNU Privacy Guard. This is in addition to the $60,000 The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) dedicated to Werner last month. GnuPG is used not just to encrypt and authenticate email but provides the confirmation that software packages and releases are what they claim to be. Facebook, Stripe and others are answering the calls to support the individuals who are developing the world’s most critical digital infrastructure.

    • Mission: ​Funding all those small but important open-source projects

      In 2014, OpenSSL had a gigantic security problem: Heartbleed. Its root cause? A combination of blind trust in the open-source programming method and a shoe-string budget. Less than a year later Werner Koch, author and sole maintainer of the popular Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) email encryption program, revealed he was going broke supporting GnuPG.

      Koch’s story had a happy ending. First, The Linux Foundation, via its Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), donated $60,000 to GnuPG. Then, e-payments vendor Stripe and Facebook agreed to sponsor the program’s development to the tune of $50,000 a year.

    • To avert another Heartbleed, group narrows list of projects in need of support
    • Linux Foundation’s CII Continues to Fund Open-Source Security Efforts

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Google Drive for Linux may be coming soon
    • Postfix 3.0 Released With SMTP UTF8 & Other New Mail Server Features

      The Postfix open-source mail server software reached the big 3.0 milestone on Sunday with various improvements to this Sendmail alternative.

      The release of Postfix 3.0.0 stable brings SMTP UTF8 support for internationalized domain names and address local parts, support for Postfix dynamically-linked libraries and database plug-ins, support for operations on multiple look-up tables, support for pseudo-tables, table-driven transformations of DNS lookup results, an improved configuration file syntax, and per-session command profiles.

      More details on Postfix 3.0 can be discovered from Postfix.org.

    • RPushbullet 0.2.0

      A new releases of the RPushbullet package (interfacing the neat Pushbullet service) arrived on CRAN today.

      It brings several weeks of extensions, corrections and cleanups—with key contributions by Mike Birdgeneau and Henrik Bengtsson.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Athens region considers switch to open source

      The Greek region of Attica, encompassing Athens, is considering a switch to free and open source solutions. Representatives of the regional authority discussed the move with the Greek Free/Open Source Software society. GFOSS has offered to help modernise Attica’s ICT policies.

    • DISA rolling out new open source, online collaboration tool for DoD employees across globe

      A new open source, online collaboration tool will allow Defense Department employees to easily and securely web conference and instantly chat from anywhere around the world.

      The Defense Information Systems Agency is expanding the capability called Defense Collaboration Services, or DCS, across the department, according to a Feb. 6 press release from the Air Force.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Measuring the value of open hardware design

        With the rise of distributed manufacturing of 3D printing, hardware designs released under open source licenses are increasing exponentially. These designs—for everything from phone cases to prosthetic hands for children—can have an enormous value for those who need and want them.

        [...]

        The results of Pearce’s case study analysis were shocking. “Millions of dollars of value can be created by designers if they share their work under open licenses, says Pearce. “For individuals or funding organizations interested in doing the most good and maximizing value for the public it is clear that supporting open designs should be a top priority.”

      • ONetSwitch Networking Open Source Hardware (video)

        Makers, developers and hobbyists looking to add networking functionality to their projects in the form of NAS, VPN and Firewall features may be interested in a new piece of open source hardware called the ONetSwitch developed by MeshSr.

Leftovers

  • Fire department called after robot vacuum “attacks” sleeping owner

    One day the robots may rebel against humans, taking control of the world and turning us into a relatively green source of energy. But today is not that day, even if one such robot did “attack” its owner in South Korea.

  • Behind RadioShack’s Collapse Is a Tiny Distressed Lender

    To most outside observers, the collapse of RadioShack Corp. was set in motion years, if not decades, ago.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Isis is cruel but so are bombs and drones

      • If the video of a prisoner being burned to death displays “a level of brutality shocking even by the standards” of Islamic State, how should we describe the actions of the US and UK around the world? According to a 2012 joint report from the NYU and Stanford University law schools on US drone strikes in Pakistan, “the missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration”. Similarly barbaric, in 2008 the Sunday Times reported British forces were using Hellfire missiles in Afghanistan, creating “a pressure wave which sucks the air out of victims, shreds their internal organs and crushes their bodies”.

    • Amid New Claims, Calls Intensify to Declassify Saudi Chapter of 9/11 Report

      ‘I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia,’ says former senator and commission member

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Whistleblower? Thief? Hero? Introducing the Source of the Data that Shook HSBC

      Hervé Falciani’s long, strange journey from bank computer expert to jailed fugitive to candidate for office to spokesman for whistleblowers

      They almost had him.

      On December 22, 2008, Swiss federal police handcuffed 36-year-old Hervé Falciani, a systems specialist they suspected of stealing data from HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), his employer, and trying to sell it to banks in Lebanon. They seized his computer, searched his Geneva home and interrogated him for hours.

      Then – on the condition that he return the next day for more questioning – they let him go.

    • HSBC helped clients ‘avoid taxes and hide millions’

      According to a report released on Sunday, files analyzed by 140 reporters in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) have revealed that British banking giant HSBC provided accounts to international criminals, corrupt businessmen, politicians and celebrities.

      “HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws,” ICIJ reported.

    • HSBC bank ‘helped clients dodge millions in tax’

      Britain’s biggest bank helped wealthy clients cheat the UK out of millions of pounds in tax, the BBC has learned.

      Panorama has seen thousands of accounts from HSBC’s private bank in Switzerland leaked by a whistleblower in 2007.

      They show bankers helped clients evade tax and offered deals to help tax dodgers stay ahead of the law.

      HSBC admitted that some individuals took advantage of bank secrecy to hold undeclared accounts. But it said it has now “fundamentally changed”.

    • HSBC sheltered murky cash linked to dictators, arms dealers

      Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channelled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag-men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.

    • New Claims That HSBC Aided Tax Evaders

      HSBC found itself under fire again on Monday after news reports over the weekend provided more details about long-running accusations that its Swiss private banking arm helped clients hide billions of dollars in assets from international tax authorities before 2007.

      In a report released on Sunday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an organization based in Washington, said that secret documents revealed that bank employees had reassured clients that HSBC would not disclose details of their accounts to tax authorities in their home countries and discussed options to avoid paying taxes on those assets. Also contributing to the report were the newspaper Le Monde in France, The Guardian in Britain, the BBC program “Panorama” and CBS News’s “60 Minutes.”

    • US government faces pressure after biggest leak in banking history

      The US government will come under intense pressure this week to explain what action it took after receiving a massive cache of leaked data that revealed how the Swiss banking arm of HSBC, the world’s second-largest bank, helped wealthy customers conceal billions of dollars of assets.

      The leaked files, which reveal how HSBC advised some clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, were obtained through an international collaboration of news outlets, including the Guardian, the French daily Le Monde, CBS 60 Minutes and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

      The files reveal how HSBC’s Swiss private bank colluded with some clients to conceal undeclared “black” accounts from domestic tax authorities across the world and provided services to international criminals and other high-risk individuals.

    • HSBC Swiss files: leading Australian figures held offshore bank accounts

      Prominent Australian political and business figures are among thousands of people identified as Swiss bank account holders, a cache of leaked documents from the Swiss arm of the HSBC bank shows.

      They include the late media mogul Kerry Packer and the former ANZ Bank chairman Charles Goode.

      The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and the Guardian has accessed data on the accounts, which reveal unprecedented insights into offshore banking with the Swiss arm of the bank.

    • HSBC sheltered murky cash linked to dictators, arms dealers

      Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channelled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag-men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.

    • Banking Giant HSBC Sheltered Murky Cash Linked to Dictators and Arms Dealers

      Team of journalists from 45 countries unearths secret bank accounts maintained for criminals, traffickers, tax dodgers, politicians and celebrities

      Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.

      The leaked files, based on the inner workings of HSBC’s Swiss private banking arm, relate to accounts holding more than $100 billion. They provide a rare glimpse inside the super-secret Swiss banking system — one the public has never seen before.

    • HSBC files show how Swiss bank helped clients dodge taxes and hide millions

      HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files.

    • Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: “TTIP will lead to Contraction of GDP, Personal Incomes, Employment, Increase in Financial Instability”

      Some projections endorsed by the European Commission point to positive, though negligible, gains in terms of GDP and personal incomes. Others make greater claims, asserting that the deal will add over £100 billion to the UK and European economies every year.

    • TTIP talks – Africa remains left out

      The EU and the US are negotiating their proposed free trade agreement behind closed doors. Third countries, for instance in Africa, have no say in these talks, although the deal could have a far-reaching impact on them.

    • HSBC list: Switzerland says it’s ‘stolen data’, may not share info with India

      With a new ‘HSBC list’ of Swiss bank accounts revealing over 1,000 Indian names, Switzerland today said these are from “stolen data” — an assertion that might make it difficult for India to get details on these accounts without any additional evidence.

    • The Breaking HSBC Scandal Reveals UK Govt Is Chief Henchman Of The Mafia Banking System

      An international collaboration of media outlets have leaked HSBC files which prove the Bank has actively sought to undermine domestic tax laws and keep millions of pounds from reaching the UK Treasury – but what is truly remarkable, it the complicity of the UK government in helping the 1% avoid paying their dues.

    • Israelis held $10 billion in secret Swiss bank accounts

      The only countries that held more money in the HSBC branch were 11,235 Swiss with $31 billion, 8,844 Britons with $21.7 billion, 1,138 Venezuelans with $14.7 billion, 4,193 Americans with $13.4 billion and 9,187 French with $12.5 billion.

    • R23bn stashed in Swiss banks

      Hundreds of South Africans have stashed more than $2-billion (about R23-billion) in accounts at Swiss banking group HSBC, details of which have now emerged in a leak that shines a new spotlight on the secretive world of Swiss banking.

    • 200,000 people were prosecuted for not having a TV licence last year but HMRC won’t prosecute Swiss tax cheats

      Last year more than 200,000 people were prosecuted for not having a TV licence.

      More than fifty – many of them women – went to prison for it.

      But HMRC say it is not in the public interest to prosecute tax criminals and the bankers and accountants who set arrangements for them.

  • Censorship

    • KickassTorrents Taken Down By Domain Name Seizure

      KickassTorrents has lost access to its Kickass.so domain name and is currently offline. The Somalian domain of the most-visited torrent site on the Internet is now listed as “banned” by the .SO registry, forcing the site’s operators to find a new home.

  • Privacy

    • Samsung: watch what you say in front of our TVs, they’re sending your words to third parties

      Part of the Samsung Smarttv EULA: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”

    • Guest Post: The Library Freedom Project: Bringing privacy and anonymity to libraries

      My name is Alison, and I’m the founder of the Library Freedom Project, an initiative that aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries. It’s a partnership among librarians, technologists, attorneys, and privacy advocates to teach librarians about surveillance threats, privacy rights, and privacy-protecting technology tools. So far, we’ve been all over Massachusetts and parts of New England, and we have been awarded a generous grant from the Knight Foundation to bring privacy training to libraries across the United States.

      We teach librarians three things. Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts teaches the current state of digital surveillance. Jessie Rossman, an attorney and surveillance law expert also from the ACLU of Massachusetts, offers a privacy-focused “know your rights” training. I teach technology tools – like Tor and Tails .

    • We’ll ask GCHQ to DELETE records of ‘MILLIONS’ of people – Privacy International

      Campaigning group Privacy International is preparing to help “potentially millions” of people request that their GCHQ records be deleted, following a landmark ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal on Friday.

      The IPT ruled that the intelligence-sharing relationship between the US and UK had been unlawful prior to December 2014, because the rules governing the UK’s access to the National Security Agency’s PRISM and UPSTREAM programmes had been kept secret.

    • GCHQ snooping ruling does not go far enough, says Open Rights Group

      The recent ruling that mass surveillance of UK citizens’ internet communications by the UK intelligence services was unlawful until the end of 2014 does not go far enough, according to Open Rights Group.

      The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled that UK intelligence agency GCHQ had breached the Human Rights Act by using intelligence on UK residents from the US National Security Agency (NSA).

    • Osgerby: Iowa’s important attempts to block the NSA

      For the state of Iowa to step forward, alongside others, in mitigating the powers of the NSA comes as a pleasant surprise. The federal agency has shown that it has no intention of reining in their surveillance.

    • Shy, retiring British spies come out as MEGA HACKERS

      The UK government slipped out consultation documents on “equipment interference” and “interception of communications” (read: computer hacking by police and g-men) on Friday.

      They were made public on the same day that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that the spying revelations exposed by master blabbermouth Edward Snowden had accidentally made British spooks’ data-sharing love-in with the NSA legal.

    • Snowden documentary CitizenFour wins DGA award for director Laura Poitras

      A documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has won the prestigious Directors Guild Award as best movie in the category. Laura Poitras, the director of Citizenfour, received her award at a ceremony in Los Angeles on Saturday.

    • Professor Big Brother and his radical students – who should we fear most?

      The Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill 2014-15, having been rushed through the House of Commons with alarming speed and ease, has passed its second reading in the House of Lords. It is now in the final committee stages and on course to become law within a matter of weeks.

    • U.S.-German Spy Spat Unresolved as Merkel Visits Obama

      The unresolved fallout between the U.S. and Germany over espionage and mass surveillance has slid to the background ahead of a visit today by Chancellor Angela Merkel to Washington, according to her top aide.

    • Merkel, Obama ponder Ukraine and security in Washington

      As Chancellor Merkel visits President Obama on Monday, the US sees Europe as a continent in crisis. Two experts take on the roles of Germany and the US to tease out the countries’ views on key international issues.

    • Merkel, Obama to Meet During Trying Times for U.S.-German Relations

      Polarizing divisions will color President Barack Obama’s discussions with German Chancellor Angela Merkel when the supposedly staunch allies meet at the White House on Monday for talks expected to primarily address the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

      The meeting comes after a year of lingering tensions in a relationship that, at least publicly, was tested by reports of CIA spying and National Security Agency surveillance of the phone calls of Merkel and other European leaders.

    • Firm that vetted Snowden files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

      Altegrity Inc, owner of the company that carried out background checks on former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday as it implements a restructuring deal with its lenders.

      Altegrity, which owns USIS Investigations Services, listed assets and liabilities of more than $1 billion, according to court documents.

      The company said some of its lenders, including funds managed by Third Avenue Management, Litespeed Management LLC and Mudrick Capital Management LP, have committed to provide $90 million in debtor-in-possession financing.

    • DNI Report on Implementation of Signals Intelligence Reforms: Some Highlights

      These enhanced minimization procedures collectively represent a response to heavy criticism that Section 702 constitutes a “backdoor” that would allow the intelligence community to monitor the communications of American citizens, without a warrant, if these communications were incidentally collected as a result of surveillance on foreign persons.

    • WATCH OUT, it’s WATCHING YOU as you WATCH IT! (Your Samsung TV that is)

      Let’s go to another room so that the telly can’t hear us! Samsung’s smart TVs don’t just respond to your spoken commands any more – they also tell unspecified third parties what you’re saying while you sit in from of them.

    • Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet

      Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.

    • How to Create an Anonymous Email Account

      Not long ago, the sharing economy seemed to have taken over. Privacy was dead, and no one cared. But that was until revelations about government spying and worse came to light. Today, it seems just as many people are sharing…but many do so with more caution.

      For some of us, the need to go truly anonymous is more important than ever. But when you go to a service online and its first three choices for signup are to use your existing Google, Facebook, or Twitter account credentials, it’s almost like a subtle background check. Other services—like Google—expect you to share a phone number and older email address—to sign up (and if not at initial signup, you’ll need them for activations later). So you’re not exactly hiding your tracks.

    • Inside the Strange Fight Over Mark Zuckerberg’s Bedroom

      The e-mail was blunt: Mark Zuckerberg had no interest in playing nice with the guy from next door.

      “How do we make this go away?” a Zuckerberg adviser wrote to his real estate agent. “MZ is not going to take a meeting with him … ever.”

      Now that 2013 e-mail, and others like it, are at the center of property war gone rogue. On one side is Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook Inc. On the other is the businessman from next door, a real estate developer who hoped to profit from Zuckerberg’s desire for privacy.

    • Samsung’s Smart TVs Are Collecting And Storing Your Private Conversations

      Guess who’s eavesdropping on you now? It’s not some nefarious government agency (although, rest assured, there has been no downturn in surveillance). Nope, it’s that smart TV you paid good money for and invited into your home.

    • Samsung smart TV policy allows company to listen in on users

      The new privacy policy for Samsung’s smart TVs allows the company and its partners to listen in on everything their users say.

      The policy has drawn the ire of internet users, who compared it with George Orwell’s dystopian fiction 1984.

    • How to lose a job BEFORE you even start: Teen fired after complaining on Twitter about starting ‘f*** a** job’ at pizza parlor

      A Texas teenager has been fired from her job at a pizza parlor before she even started after she sent out a tweet complaining about the gig and her new boss saw it.

    • There are other funding options than the USG

      Some folks have taken issue with this, going so far as to call Tor employees “government contractors.” On the one hand, this is pretty sensational talk: In much of Europe, for example, public funding of advocacy isn’t uncommon. On the other hand, there are real issues with implicitly supporting what is ultimately an imperialist agenda by taking US government funds.

    • California Introduces Bill To Ban Warrantless Spying

      Backed by a number of tech companies, California is eyeing state legislation to protect its citizens from warrantless government surveillance of e-mails, text messages and cellphone communications. The proposed legislation is being backed by state senators Mark Leno, a Democrat, and Joel Anderson, a Republican.

    • Tor: the last bastion of online anonymity, but is it still secure after Silk Road?

      The Silk Road trial has concluded, with Ross Ulbricht found guilty of running the anonymous online marketplace for illegal goods. But questions remain over how the FBI found its way through Tor, the software that allows anonymous, untraceable use of the web, to gather the evidence against him.

      The development of anonymising software such as Tor and Bitcoin has forced law enforcement to develop the expertise needed to identify those using them. But if anything, what we know about the FBI’s case suggests it was tip-offs, inside men, confessions, and Ulbricht’s own errors that were responsible for his conviction.

      This is the main problem with these systems: breaking or circumventing anonymity software is hard, but it’s easy to build up evidence against an individual once you can target surveillance, and wait for them to slip up.

    • Advanced German Technology: How a German-Arab Shell Corporation Tries to Sell a New State Trojan “Made in Germany”

      A German-Arab web of companies advertises a new government spyware “made in Germany” at international surveillance industry trade shows. In a lengthy investigation, we gathered background information on companies and actors involved. It remains unclear, whether the company even has a finished product for sale, nevertheless they continue to promote the product – directly to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

  • Civil Rights

    • The NYPD’s chief supports harsher penalties for resisting arrest. That’s a horrifying idea.

      During widespread protests in New York last summer after the killing of Eric Garner by police officer Daniel Pantaleo (who was not charged in Garner’s killing), New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton had this message for protesters: “You must submit to arrest, you cannot resist …The place to argue your case is in the courts, not in the streets.”

    • Surviving the Nazis, Only to Be Jailed by America
    • One dead in police shooting

      A 74-year-old man is dead and an officer is on administrative leave pending an investigation into the fatal shooting. Police say Officer Josh Lefevers shot and killed James Howard Allen after Allen pointed a gun at the officer in his home and refused to drop the weapon.

    • Case Dismissed Against Man Aggressively Arrested on Video for Drinking Iced Tea in Public

      It took nearly two years, but a North Carolina judge dismissed a case against a man who was arrested for drinking a can of Arizona Iced Tea in a parking lot of a liquor store.

      And only because it was captured on video.

      Otherwise, the cop’s word would have been treated as gospel, resulting in a conviction of trespassing and resisting arrest against Christopher Lamont Beatty, a former soldier who is also a hip hop musician known as Xstravagant.

      But even despite the video evidence, prosecutors along with his own lawyer, tried to get him to agree to a plea deal where he would accept probation and community service.

      In other words, they wanted him to admit to a crime he did not commit without even having the chance to be tried for that crime.

    • CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou: Prosecute CIA Case Officers Who Flouted the Law & Tortured Detainees

      CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who was released from a federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, last week, after serving about 23 months in jail, called for CIA case officers to be prosecuted for “flouting” the law when they tortured detainees.

      In an interview for “Democracy Now!”, Kiriakou addressed the shocking details in the executive summary of the Senate intelligence committee report on the CIA’s torture program. He said he understood that President Barack Obama was not going to pursue the prosecution of CIA officials who carried out torture. Obama was not going to prosecute officers who carried out the “day-to-day torture program.” Lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department were going to get a pass too. However, there are officers, who clearly violated the law, when they carried out interrogations.

    • Exclusive: Freed CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Says “I Would Do It All Again” to Expose Torture

      In a broadcast exclusive interview, we spend the hour with John Kiriakou, a retired CIA agent who has just been released from prison after blowing the whistle on the George W. Bush administration’s torture program. In 2007, Kiriakou became the first CIA official to publicly confirm and detail the agency’s use of waterboarding. In January 2013, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. Under a plea deal, Kiriakou admitted to a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing the identity of a covert officer involved in the torture program to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. In return, prosecutors dropped charges brought under the Espionage Act. Kiriakou is the only official to be jailed for any reason relating to CIA torture. Supporters say he was unfairly targeted in the Obama administration’s crackdown on government whistleblowers. A father of five, Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA as an analyst and case officer, leading the team that found high-ranking al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in 2002. He joins us from his home in Virginia, where he remains under house arrest for three months while completing his sentence. In a wide-ranging interview, Kiriakou says, “I would do it all over again,” after seeing the outlawing of torture after he came forward. Kiriakou also responds to the details of the partially released Senate Committee Report on the CIA’s use of torture; argues NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did a “great national service,” but will not get a fair trial if he returns to the United States; and describes the conditions inside FCI Loretto, the federal prison where he served his sentence and saw prisoners die with “terrifying frequency” from lack of proper medical care.

    • Thousands of Secret Torture Photos
    • ‘A Line in the Sand’ in Fight to Release Thousands of Prisoner Abuse Photos

      A federal judge is demanding that the government explain, photo-by-photo, why it can’t release hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pictures showing detainee abuse by U.S. forces at military prison sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.

      In a courtroom in the Southern District of New York yesterday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, which asserted that the threat of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda exploiting the images for propaganda should override the public’s right to see any of the photos.

    • Is Your Child a Terrorist? U.S. Government Questionnaire Rates Families at Risk for Extremism

      Are you, your family or your community at risk of turning to violent extremism? That’s the premise behind a rating system devised by the National Counterterrorism Center, according to a document marked For Official Use Only and obtained by The Intercept.

      The document–and the rating system–is part of a wider strategy for Countering Violent Extremism, which calls for local community and religious leaders to work together with law enforcement and other government agencies. The White House has made this approach a centerpiece of its response to terrorist attacks around the world and in the wake of the Paris attacks, announced plans to host an international summit on Countering Violent Extremism on February 18th.

    • New Jeb Bush Chief Technology Officer Deleting Old Tweets About “Sluts”

      Ethan Czahor’s tweets began disappearing today after news broke that he had been hired by Jeb Bush. A spokesperson for Bush told BuzzFeed News: “Governor Bush believes the comments were inappropriate. They have been deleted at our request. Ethan is a great talent in the tech world and we are very excited to have him on board the Right to Rise PAC.” Czahor also apologized in a tweet on Monday.

    • Guantánamo hearing halted by supposed CIA ‘black site’ worker serving as war court linguist

      The 9/11 trial judge abruptly recessed the first hearing in the case since August on Monday after some of the alleged Sept. 11 plotters said they recognized a war court linguist as a former secret CIA prison worker.

      Alleged plot deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh, 42, made the revelation just moments into the hearing by informing the judge he had a problem with his courtroom translator. The interpreter, Bin al Shibh claimed, worked for the CIA during his 2002 through 2006 detention at a so-called “Black Site.”

    • The Reporter Resists His Government

      In early 2003, James Risen, an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, prepared a story about a covert CIA effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. Before publishing it, he informed the CIA of his findings and asked for comment. On April 30, 2003, according to a subsequent Justice Department court filing, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice met with Risen and Jill Abramson, then the Times’s Washington bureau chief. Tenet and Rice urged the Times to hold Risen’s story because, they said, it would “compromise national security” and endanger the life of a particular CIA recruit. (The agent is referred to in the Justice filing as “Human Asset No. 1.”) Eventually, the Times informed the CIA that it would not publish Risen’s story. Abramson said recently that she regrets the decision.

    • US contractor wants Abu Ghraib lawsuit scrapped

      A US defense contractor that provided interrogators to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq sought to have a federal judge dismiss a lawsuit because its employees were working under military control in wartime.

      Four former inmates of the notorious prison, where horrific abuses took place during the Iraq war that damaged US credibility, have sued CACI International Inc. for torturing them ahead of interrogations.

    • Greenwald: Shedding Light on the Exercise of Power in the Dark

      I do think there have been some very significant changes as a result of [our] reporting. There hasn’t been a lot of legislation passed. But I never thought that the place to look for restrictions on the power of the U.S. government would be the U.S. government itself, because human beings generally don’t walk around thinking about ways to restrict their own power.

      I think the much more significant changes are the changes in consciousness that people have, not just about surveillance but about privacy, the role of government, their relationship to it, the dangers of exercising power in the dark and the role of journalism as well.

      There are all kinds of ways that surveillance is now being curbed, from other governments acting in coalition to impede U.S. hegemony over the Internet to technology companies like Facebook, Yahoo and Google knowing that, unless they make a real commitment to protecting their users’ privacy, they’re going to lose a generation of users to other countries’ companies.

    • Waterboarding Whistleblower Released From Prison, Two Months After Torture Report’s Release Vindicated His Actions

      It wasn’t former director Leon Panetta, who was ultimately responsible for the actions of his agency. It wasn’t any number of agents, officials or supervisors who directly or indirectly participated in the ultimately useless torture of detainees. It wasn’t the private contractors who profited from these horrendous acts committed in the name of “national security.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • One small step for the FCC …

      In the excitement following FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s announcement that he would propose Title II classification for Internet service providers, it’s important that we understand a few things. First, this is not a done deal yet, though it looks likely to pass. Second, this is only the first step in a long and arduous journey.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Why We Should Rename TAFTA/TTIP As The ‘Atlantic Car Trade Agreement’

      Since the gains for this industry are expected to be so large, and those for other industries so small, why not drop all the contentious stuff that threatens to derail the whole deal, and concentrate on cars? In any case, it would be more honest to rename the TTIP proposal as the “Atlantic Car Trade Agreement,” since that’s what it is really about. We could even call it “ACTA” for short.

02.08.15

Links 8/2/2015: Fluxbox 1.3.7, GNU Lightning 2.1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 12:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • BSD

    • PC-BSD 10.1.1 Cinnamon review

      The last PC-BSD release I reviewed was PC-BSD 10.1. And that was actually just late last year. You may read that review at PC-BSD 10.1 review.

      It was the worst edition of any distribution I have even reviewed.

      An installation of the Cinnamon desktop, which shipped with Cinnamon 2.2, was especially bad. Out of the box, it was unusable. When PC-BSD 10.1.1 was released (on February 2 2015), I knew I had to take another look at a Cinnamon installation.

      So that’s what this article is about – a cursory review of an installation of PC-BSD 10.1.1 Cinnamon.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Leftovers

  • Sochi Winter Olympic stadiums lie empty and abandoned

    Pictures have emerged showing the Sochi Olympics Winter Park standing empty and neglected just a year after Russian president Vladimir Putin pumped billions into the venue.

    Many of the custom built stadiums, which cost an estimated $51 billion in total, now appear deserted and unused.

    The companies that maintain the facilities are reportedly struggling to stay afloat as tourist numbers plummet.

  • Nick Clegg to lose his seat at the next election, poll finds

    The Deputy Prime Minister is found to be trailing Labour by 10 points in his Sheffield Hallam constituency, according to a survey for the trade union Unite.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Security services capable of bypassing encryption, draft code reveals

      Britain’s security services have acknowledged they have the worldwide capability to bypass the growing use of encryption by internet companies by attacking the computers themselves.

      The Home Office release of the innocuously sounding “draft equipment interference code of practice” on Friday put into the public domain the rules and safeguards surrounding the use of computer hacking outside the UK by the security services for the first time.

      The publication of the draft code follows David Cameron’s speech last month in which he pledged to break into encryption and ensure there was no “safe space” for terrorists or serious criminals which could not be monitored online by the security services with a ministerial warrant, effectively spelling out how it might be done.

    • Did North Korea Really Hack Sony?

      The Obama administration has accused North Korea of hacking Sony in retaliation for “The Interview,” a goofball comedy about assassinating the country’s real-life leader, but the case may be another politicized rush to judgment by the U.S. government, writes James DiEugenio.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Over 100 Boko Haram fighters killed in group’s first Niger attack

      The government of Niger claims it killed over 100 fighters from Islamic militant group Boko Haram when the fighters attacked within the borders of the country for the first time.

    • Book review: ‘American Reckoning’ takes a look at Vietnam and the mistakes we keep making

      President John F. Kennedy increased U.S. involvement, and the CIA encouraged the assassination of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, which led to a succession of unstable and short-lived juntas.

      Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Baines Johnson embarked upon the massive escalation that would bring us the Vietnam War as we came to know it and that would bring an end to his presidency.

    • Obama’s Drones Have Killed More Than the Spanish Inquisition

      So Barack Obama has killed at least 2,500 in drone strikes during the six years of his presidency, not including those killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Spanish Inquisition reportedly killed 2,250 over 350 years. For comparative purposes, I would note, as I reported here at PJ Media last month, that Boko Haram reportedly killed 2,000 over several days in a massacre in Northern Nigeria.

    • U.S.-NATO Threaten Wider War in Ukraine

      Nothing good so far has come out of all the high-level meetings in Kiev and Moscow. US-NATO continue to threaten Russia with more and wider war in Ukraine. Russia is basically told they have to accept the US-NATO backed onslaught in eastern Ukraine. Russia must stop supporting eastern self-defense forces or expect even more of the west’s Strategy of Tension.

    • CIA job interview leads to criminal investigation of Green Beret

      A Green Beret officer who was stripped of a prestigious valor award and dropped from the Special Forces fell out of favor with Army officials after the CIA shared information it gathered about him while he was going through screening for a potential job, according to officials familiar with the case.

    • Ukraine Conflict Escalates as Poroshenko Requests Aid

      If a decision is made to honor Poroshenko’s request for aid in the escalating conflict in Ukraine, action will not be taken right away. An anonymous official said that a public effort to arm Poroshenko’s troops could cause tension between the United States and its allies in NATO and the EU. The official also said that it would take time to decide what to send. In the past, the government has sent Soviet-made weapons from a CIA warehouse in North Carolina. The official said that this could be a viable option in this case, if the United States decides to offer support.

    • Killing Fidel

      These were largely courtesy of the CIA, which reportedly devised no fewer than 638 plots to kill him, ranging from your typical poisoned handkerchief scheme to fungus-infected diving suits and exploding molluscs.

    • Is ‘American Sniper’ the perfect military recruitment film?

      While watching the film, I kept waiting for something to be said or even suggested, about the deeper reason our military was in Iraq other than the film’s repetitive message: “They are the bad guys and we are the good guys.”

      I kept hoping to at least see a Chevron Oil rig burning in the distance.

      One scene was quite effective in portraying even the women and children as evil, showing a veiled mother and child in an almost Madonna and child way, beautiful but evil and carrying a grenade. The message here was that all Iraqis were evil, men, women and children, and all of the American troops there were the good guys.

    • Oil, Empire, and False Paradox: Washington’s Contrasting Responses to the Deaths of King Abdullah and Hugo Chavez

      Obama and Washington had a very different response to the March 2013 death of Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela who used his nation’s also remarkable oil wealth to reduce poverty and inequality in his nation. Chavez won respect and even adoration from much of his nation’s citizenry, including especially the poor, even as he offered remarkable tolerance and freedom to wealthy elites who hated him and his egalitarian agenda.

      Surely, then, the president of the world’s self-proclaimed greatest democracy, the United States, reacted to Chavez’s death with words of sympathy and respect that went beyond the reverence and compassion he expressed for the deceased king of an absolutist, arch-repressive, and ultra-reactionary dictatorship, right? Hardly. The White House responded with the following dismissive and disrespectful statement: “At Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history, the United States remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights” – a commitment that finds curious expression in Washington’s longstanding support for the Saudi dictatorship.

    • Was the Saudi Government Complicit in the 9/11 Attacks?

      The brouhaha about possible Saudi Arabian funding of Al Qaeda in the run-up to the September 11, 2001, attacks is being fueled from two directions. It is being pushed by Zacarias Moussaoui, sometimes called the “twentieth hijacker,” now serving a life sentence in a federal supermax penitentiary. There are also allegations of Saudi funding in a congressional report on 9/11, a portion of which has not been released. That Saudi Arabia or its royal family were complicit in an attack on New York and Washington is completely implausible. The Saudi ruling class long ago decided that they would trade foreign policy independence for an American security umbrella, given that they preside over a small country with enormous petroleum wealth and resources, and could not protect themselves from external threats. Moreover, they are heavily invested in the New York stock market, and took an enormous bath on September 12 and after, as the latter suddenly lost half its value. The whole idea is a nonstarter.

    • Saudi Arabia, 9/11 and the “war on terror”
    • 9/11: Classified information on the Saudis

      A CIA leak and the a reading of the 28 pages by two US senators had revealed that there was enough evidence to show the involvement of the Saudis in the attack. A CIA leaked memo had gone on to show that it was not the Al-Qaeda or the Taliban that carried out this attack, but it was Saudi Arabia.

      Further the memo also went on to read that wealthy Saudis, diplomats and intelligence officials employed by the Saudi Royal family had helped the hijackers with both logistics and finances.

      The pages which had been blacked out by the Bush administration suggest that the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles had facilitated the arrival of two hijakers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in 2000.

      A Saudi intelligence official named Osama Bassnan and a spy Omar Bayoumi established a base in San Diego which housed the hijackers. This was the same place where al Qaeda cleric Ankar Al-Awlaki met with the hijackers.

      [...]

      Some of the pages even indicate that a huge amount of money had been sent to the hijackers. Specific information suggests the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar had sent $130,000 to Saudi intelligence agent Osama Bassnan.

      Although Prince Bandar had claimed that this money was a donation made to Bassnan who had an ailing wife, the US had managed to track that this money had infact reached the hijackers. There was also a trail that Prince Bandar had paid for the establishment of an Islamic Centre in Virgina which was incidentally close to the Pentagon.

    • US officials: 9/11 plotter’s claims Saudi royals aided al-Qaida ‘inconceivable’

      Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called ‘20th hijacker’ in the 9/11 plot, has alleged that Saudi diplomat discussed plans to shoot down Air Force One

    • Jailed al Qaeda operative makes explosive claims about Saudi royals funding pre-9/11 terror

      A convicted al-Qaeda operative has claimed that members of the terrorist network received extensive financial support from members of the Saudi royal family throughout the late 1990′s and into 2000, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

    • Venezuela: Media attacks part of US-backed coup

      There is a coup underway in Venezuela. The pieces are all falling into place like a bad CIA movie.

      At every turn, a new traitor is revealed, a betrayal is born, full of promises to reveal the smoking gun that will justify the unjustifiable. Infiltrations are rampant, rumours spread like wildfire, and the panic mentality threatens to overcome logic.

      Headlines scream danger, crisis and imminent demise, while the usual suspects declare covert war on a people whose only crime is being gatekeeper to the largest pot of black gold in the world.

    • Political conflict between Argentinian president and intelligence agencies intensifies

      The fallout in Argentina from the mysterious death of a prosecutor in January has exposed to the public a power struggle at the highest levels of the state.

      On February 1, a Buenos Aires newspaper reported that prosecutor Alberto Nisman—who was found dead on January 18 with a suspicious gunshot wound to the head—had prepared draft warrants for the arrest of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Foreign Minister Hector Timmerman, and Congressman Andres Larroque preceding his death.

    • GOP’s 2016 war primary
    • What Steven F. Cohen & Other Liberals Get Wrong About Obama & Ukraine’s War

      The founder of Stratfor, the “private CIA” firm, says that the overthrow of Viktor Yanokovych in Ukraine in February 2014 was “the most blatant coup in history.” The President of the Czech Republic contrasts that coup versus Czechoslovakia’s authentically democratic 1968 “Velvet Revolution,” and he says that “only poorly informed people” don’t know that the governmental overthrow in Ukraine in 2014 was a coup. America’s liberals, then, are indeed poorly informed, and they are so partly because they don’t want to know the truth about Obama; America’s conservatives, by contrast, simply hate Obama, merely because he’s a black Democratic politician (and any President who has been so good to Wall Street would be loved by them if he were a white Republican); they don’t mind (and they actually support) that Obama hates Russia and institutes an ethnic cleansing campaign in his aggressive war against Russia. Whereas conservatives don’t mind Obama’s ethnic-cleansing campaign to get rid of pro-Russians in Ukraine, liberals don’t want to know about it. The result is actually conservatives reigning in both Parties, not just in one: we now have one-party government, in all but name.

    • Op-Ed: Clashes continue in Libya in spite of ceasefire

      Clashes took place in Benghazi where pro-government forces led by CIA-linked General Khalifa Haftar have been trying to retake the city from an umbrella group of Islamist militias opposed to the Tobruk governent.

    • Mughniyeh assassination signals decline of NATO’s genocidal colonial rule over Middle East

      The cowardly NATO assassinations of Hezbollah’s top commander Imad Mughniyeh (2008) and his son Jihad Mughniyeh (2015) which both took place outside any battlefield, highlights the criminal nature of colonial militarism which does not recognize ‘military rules of engagement’ because it has never had any legal grounds for being in the Middle East.

    • This Is Reportedly The CIA’s Shadowy Car Bomb Facility In North Carolina

      In 2008, Lebanese terrorist overlord Imad Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria. Twisted metal wreckage was all that remained of his Mitsubishi Pajero. And according to a report from the Washington Post, the CIA built and tested the entire system at a secret facility, somewhere in North Carolina.

    • Unfortunate Timing: New NBC Show Will Have Scene of Man Being Burned Alive

      NBC’s new show Allegiance, debuting tomorrow night, starts out with a scene of a man being burned alive, which appears to be a case of very unfortunate timing, given what’s been in the news this week.

    • Departure of CIA’s top watchdog signals roadblocks to reining in agency

      When word recently leaked that the CIA inspector general was preparing to step down, agency Director John Brennan issued a glowing statement about his watchdog’s work.

      Left unsaid was the role CIA Inspector General David Buckley had in refereeing one of the most acrimonious disputes between a spy director and his congressional overseers in decades.

    • What the Warren Commission Didn’t Know

      A member of the panel that investigated JFK’s death now worries he was a victim of a “massive cover-up.”

    • Warren Commission Member: JFK Shooting Was a Conspiracy

      Lee Harvey Oswald may have been part of a conspiracy, according to investigative reporter Philip Shenon, whose book “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination,” has just been issued in paperback.

    • Warren Commission a CIA Cover-up?

      However, David Slawson was a young lawyer who became a part of the Warren Commission in January, 1964. He is now 83-years of age. The retired law professor now believes that he and the other members of the commission victims of a ‘massive cover-up.’

      Slawson’s individual assignment within the Warren Commission was to investigate whether there was any involvement from a foreign nation in the assassination of President Kennedy. Until last year, he was certain that his reported findings were accurate. Recently he discovered that the CIA and other agencies withheld large amounts of information from his investigation. He has now determined that others were aware of Oswald’s plans before the shooting occurred. With the definition of ‘conspiracy,’ when at least two people conspire to commit a wrongful act, Slawson now is certain that a conspiracy did exist.

    • New JFK Conspiracy Theory: Warren Commission Lawyer Claim Of CIA Cover-Up Just More Disinformation?
    • Ukrainian forces already use US cluster munitions: Former CIA contractor

      A former CIA contractor says since the Ukrainian forces are using cluster bombs and illegal weapons against civilians, Washington’s decision to provide Kiev with further lethal aid does not make any difference.

    • U.S. Mulls Arming Ukraine Against Russian-Backed Separatists as Truce Talks Collapse
    • Islamic State: Is the US-led coalition working six months on?

      A series of recent setbacks underlines this point. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has quietly withdrawn from strike missions in Syria, with questions emerging about how far any country other than the US is now operating over it.

    • Former Church Committee Staffers Urge Overhaul Of Spy Agency Oversight

      It’s no secret that the mid-20th century was a dirty time for U.S. intelligence agencies. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was waging personal wars through the government, infiltrating social movements and encouraging civil rights leaders to commit suicide. The CIA was working with the Mafia to assassinate foreign leaders, and had gotten into the business of overthrowing foreign governments, leaving a trail of fractured regimes through Africa and the Middle East.

    • Did the US Win the Greek Elections?

      In most countries controlled by the Emperor the most important “asset” are the military.

    • Chechen leader blames US & Western intel for Islamic State terrorists

      Kadyrov also suggested the West was backing IS in order to distract public attention from numerous problems in the Middle East, in the hope of destroying Islamic nations from inside.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • IRS is overwhelmed by identity theft fraud

      Rashia Wilson bought a $92,000 Audi, proclaimed herself a millionaire, and announced on her Facebook page that she was “the queen of IRS tax fraud,” as prosecutors told the story.

      But even more than her flamboyance, it was the seeming ease of her crime that was most stunning: She and an accomplice were alleged to have hijacked the identities of other taxpayers to get fraudulent refunds. They used stolen Social Security numbers, a computer, and basic knowledge of how to file a tax return, according to the government.

    • Economic Plan Is a Quandary for Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

      With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy.

      Mrs. Clinton has not had to wade into domestic policy since before she became secretary of state in 2009, and she has spent the past few months engaged in policy discussions with economists on the left and closer to the Democratic Party’s center who are grappling with the discontent set off by the gap between rich and poor. Sorting through the often divergent advice to develop an economic plan could affect the timing and planning of the official announcement of her campaign.

    • Controversial tycoon Lajos Simicska on his estranged patron, Viktor Orbán

      Business tycoon and former Fidesz insider Lajos Simicska, speaking out as the key editors of his media group resigned, apparently in protest against Simicska’s threat to launch a “media war” against Orbán’s government.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The great illusion of free press

      William Colby, ex-director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a man who should know Western media: “The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Not long after becoming a whistle-blower Colby died in a freak canoeing accident.

    • CIA in the Crosshairs

      Not only did Williams lie just one time about the incident, he’d done it numerous times over the years.

    • Report: Brian Williams’ account of Hurricane Katrina coverage in question

      Further scrutiny of NBC News anchor Brian Williams’ other past statements began to surface Friday when the New Orleans Advocate reported that the newsman’s account of his experience covering Hurricane Katrina may not be entirely accurate.

      In a 2006 interview with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Williams said he witnessed a body floating in the French Quarter area of the city. “When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country,” Williams told Eisner, who suggested in the interview that Williams emerged from former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw’s shadow with his Katrina coverage.

    • Anchors Aweigh

      But the caustic media big shots who once roamed the land were gone, and “there was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top,” as one NBC News reporter put it.

    • The Interview

      You don’t have to be North Korean to be annoyed by this film.

    • The Interview? Kim Jong-Un, you really shouldn’t have bothered

      There’s a whole host of people that’ll tell you that comedy can’t be insulting – by its very nature, it’s a joke, therefore it’s not an insult. What they forget is, if it’s not funny, it’s just sort of sad and offensive.

    • The Interview is another Rogan and Franco comedy… Take that for what you will
    • “The Interview”, Dangerous Lies, Propaganda For Imperialist Murder and Aggression

      As the South Korean government, which has executed hundreds of thousands of leftists and suspected leftists, now bans the Unified Progressive Party (UPP), which got 10% of the vote in the last election, so too the U.S. imperialists are ratcheting up their economic sanctions and cyber attacks on North Korea. They are doing this partially on unsubstantiated accusations of terrorist threats flowing from the idiotic movie “The Interview”.

      Korea was divided by the U.S. imperialists after WW II who imposed a far right capitalist dictatorship on South Korea that carried out mass executions of hundreds of thousands of leftists and suspected leftists. While in the south the new government employed the torturers and murderers of the Japanese occupation, in the north a new government was born out of the leadership that fought against Japanese occupation. Through social revolution they established a planned socialist economy that greatly benefitted the working class. In the 1950s the United States sent troops to Korea and carried out a brutal war against the Korean people in an attempt to destroy the social revolution in the north and protect the brutal capitalist dictatorship in the south. In that war, conservative estimates are that the U.S. murdered 3,000,000 people. North Koreans, perhaps more accurately, estimate 5,000,000 people.

      Korea is one country and discussion of reunification is popular. Leninist -Trotskyists also call for Korean reunification, but only through a social revolution in the South. Kim Il Sung’s illusions in a peaceful reunification after the imperialists murdered 5,000,000 people is a deadly pipe dream. The only reunification the imperialists and the capitalist government in the South will agree to is one that annexes the north and destroys the gains of the North Korean Revolution, much as was done to East Germany. For any useful reunification to occur, the brutally repressive capitalist state of South Korea must be smashed in a proletarian socialist revolution. In addition, the highly deformed Stalinist government in the DPRK that promotes these kinds of deadly illusions really needs to be swept away in a political revolution as well. That is a revolution that overthrows the Stalinist bureaucracy and establishes workers democracy and an internationalist revolutionary program, while at the same time maintaining the social gains of the revolution including the socialist planned economy, socialist food distribution, free education to higher grade levels than the South, and guaranteed free socialized healthcare.

    • Seth Rogan’s The Interview ‘wreaks of deluded arrogance and poor taste’

      JAMES FRANCO and Seth Rogen reteam for this infamous comedy romp that’s finally released after generating global headlines for all the wrong reasons.

      [...]

      VERDICT: An abomination of a comedy, pitched to the lowest common denominator, with some seriously questionable intent to boot.

  • Censorship

    • What could be more absurd than censorship on campus?

      Last week, students at Goldsmiths College in London banned a performance by the fantastic feminist comedian Kate Smurthwaite in an act of neurotic prudery that bordered on the insane. Her show was on freedom of speech – yes, yes, I know. She told me that Goldsmiths did not close it because of what she had planned to say, but because she had once said that the police should arrest men who go with prostitutes and that she was against patriarchal clerics forcing women to wear the burqa. In the demonology of campus politics, these were not legitimate opinions that could be contested in robust debate. They marked her as a “whoreophobe” and “Islamophobe”, who must be silenced.

    • Spiked criticises Oxford’s “censorship”

      Online magazine Spiked has published a ranking of the attitudes of British universities towards free speech, placing Oxford in the “red” category. The website states that universities in this category, the “most censorious” one, have “banned and actively censored ideas on campus”.

    • How the academy green-lit student censorship

      Spiked’s Free Speech University Rankings, which launched this week, shows that many of the day-to-day restrictions on campus free speech emanate not from universities but rather from students themselves. This free-speech league table came out in the same week as a debate about the impact of the government’s proposed anti-terror legislation on higher education really took off. Vice chancellors have taken to the airwaves, started petitions, and penned letters to national newspapers in defence of academic freedom. It would be easy to get the impression that students have created an environment in which banning things on a whim is the new normal, while academics look on in horror and champion the cause of free speech.

    • The 3 places where Facebook censors you the most

      This isn’t about your photos or public messages violating Facebook’s own rules, like posting pornography. This is Facebook (FB, Tech30) acting as a government censor on that country’s behalf.

      It’s worst in India, Turkey and Pakistan, where thousands of pages and photos get pulled down every year for “blasphemy,” criticizing the government or posting something that’s religiously offensive.

    • India’s Censorship Board Bleeped Out ‘Bombay’ From a Music Video

      Mihir Joshi, an Indian musician recording his first album last year, needed a word to rhyme with today in one of his songs and found one that he thought fit perfectly. But India’s Central Board of Film Certification disagreed, and replaced it with a beep when the music video debuted on TV over the weekend.

    • China Widens Online TV Censorship Rules To Include Hong Kong Shows
    • How reporters are experiencing censorship on social media

      “As a correspondent, I just shared a piece of news that was true with my followers. Sharing this kind of news with people is my job,” Yazıcı said. Her colleague, Taraf’s political editor Dicle Baştürk, received a similar notification and did not delete her tweet. She says it’s still visible. Days later, Baştürk received another email from Twitter informing her that the company may still have to remove it.

    • All aboard the dox bus! Suburban Express owner keeps going after customers [Updated]

      Dennis Toeppen, the owner of the Illinois bus company Suburban Express, has become something of a legend for the way he manages his company’s reputation online and deals with customers who fail to play by his rules. Still facing a trial in Lake County for misdemeanor charges of electronic harassment, Toeppen has continued to police reviews of Suburban Express on Yelp and other services, using his company’s website as a way to call out those who he believes have wronged him. From his perspective, this is just digital self-defense; from the perspective of his targets, it’s Internet intimidation and an attempt to damage the reputations of anyone who complains about how Toeppen does business.

    • Judge orders action over photographs depicting US military abuse

      The US Department of Defense has been given a week to explain why it has not yet complied with a federal court order to list the individual exemptions for the disclosure of over 2,000 photographs depicting military abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    • Court presses US govt to act on withheld photos of post-9/11 detainee abuse

  • Privacy

    • Facebook will soon be able to ID you in any photo

      Appear in a photo taken at a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic, and your friends might recognize you. But a machine probably won’t—at least for now. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you, has trained on dozens of photos of your face, and has high-quality images to examine, your anonymity is safe. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for doing all that is beginning to blossom.

    • White House Seeks Boost In Spy Agency Funding

      The Obama administration requested $53.9 billion for its spy agencies in the year beginning Oct. 1, up sharply from its request of $45.6 billion last year.

      The money would be used to fund operations spread across six federal departments, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

    • Ronald Bailey: Abolish the Intelligence-Industrial Complex

      In 1991, Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N.Y.) introduced The End the Cold War Act that would have abolished the Central Intelligence Agency and transferred all of its functions to the Department of State. The Act declared that “the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency as a separate entity during the Cold War undermined the role of the Department of State as the primary agency of the United States Government formulating and conducting foreign policy and providing information to the President concerning the state of world affairs.”

    • Report: Britain’s GCHQ threatens to end work with Germany’s BND spy agency

      The German magazine Focus says Britain has threatened to cease cooperation with Germany’s BND intelligence service. The BND in turn has been accused by a Berlin inquiry panel of withholding documents.

    • US-German Intelligence Rift Hits New High

      Germany’s Parliament is getting ready to review the NSA with a Parliamentary inquiry. Both Britain and the U.S. are threatening to discontinue sharing intelligence with Germany as a result. This ‘threat’ has not been verified. However, with tensions as they are and a crisis meeting to discuss intelligence in Germany’s intelligence sharing, the threat may be genuine.

    • Britain ‘threatens to stop sharing intelligence’ with Germany
    • Good News! Your Samsung TV Is Probably Spying On You For Third Parties.

      This shouldn’t come as much of a shock, but your Smart TV is probably spying on you. This doesn’t mean it is out to do something malicious or that the machine has become self-aware, but it does mean that advertisers and third parties have another route to figure out how to reach you.

    • Before Snowden, There Was the Citizens Commission

      Director Johanna Hamilton talks about her latest documentary, “1971.” On March 8, 1971, The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, as they called themselves, broke into a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, took every file, and shared them with the American public. These actions exposed COINTELPRO, the FBI’s illegal surveillance program that involved the intimidation of law-abiding Americans and helped lead to the country’s first Congressional investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies. Never caught, forty-three years later, these everyday Americans – parents, teachers and citizens – publicly reveal themselves for the first time and share their story in this documentary. Hamilton is joined by two members of The Citizens’ Commission, Bonnie Raines and John Raines. The film opens at Cinema Village February 6.

    • ‘Trust us’ mantra undermined by GCHQ tribunal judgment

      For more than 18 months the response from the security services to the disclosure by Edward Snowden of the mass harvesting of personal data of British citizens has been to say: “Trust us, nothing we are doing is unlawful.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Virginia House Committee Passes Anti-NDAA Indefinite Detention Bill, 20-0

      Yesterday, an important committee in the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill to take action against federal indefinite detention powers. The unanimous tally was 20-0.

    • Washington State Bill Takes Steps to Nullify NDAA Indefinite Detention

      A bill introduced in the Washington state legislature would prohibit the state from assisting the federal government in the indefinite detention without due process under provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) or any other federal acts purporting to authorize such powers.

    • Mississippi Bill a First Step to Nullify NDAA Indefinite Detention

      A bill up for consideration in the Mississippi Senate would prohibit the state from assisting the federal government in the indefinite detention without due process under provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), or any other federal acts purporting to authorize such powers.

    • Sweden Tells the UN that Indefinite Detention Without Charge is Fine

      The United Kingdom’s costs for its embassy “siege” against Julian Assange, who has not been charged with an offence, has hit 10 million pounds, Scotland Yard confirmed today.

    • The Saudis are every bit as sickening as Islamic State

      We’re all braced for another grotesque video clip from the fundamentalist nutters of the so-called Islamic State, because they’ve released a primer on the likely beheading of two Japanese hostages – unless Tokyo will hand over a $US200 million ransom in the coming days.

      IS’s video production values are sickeningly creepy – the prisoners in orange jumpsuits; their would-be executioner in black, wielding a knife and spewing bile.

    • How The Left Failed France’s Muslims – OpEd

      The real breeding ground for extremism stems from the treatment of immigrant groups within Europe. Racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination have driven a generation of young migrants to radical movements as a solution to an absence of job prospects, poor education, deteriorated neighborhoods, lack of respect, and repeated bouts in jail. Ironically, the crackdown on these communities in the aftermath of the attacks could potentially escalate the problem.

    • When Silencing Dissent Isn’t News

      So, what if I told you that an internationally known American – a 75-year-old Army veteran and a longtime official at the Central Intelligence Agency, someone who had famously questioned the imperious Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about his Iraq War lies in a public event that led evening newscasts in 2006 – was recently denied entry to a public speech by another Iraq War icon, Gen. David Petraeus, and – despite having paid for a ticket – was brutally arrested by the police and jailed?

      Wouldn’t that be a story? Wouldn’t that be something that the news media, especially the “liberal” news media, should jump all over? Wouldn’t a newspaper like the New York Times just love something like that?

      But what if I told you that the New York Times wasn’t interested at all? You might think that perhaps the event occurred in some distant hamlet, maybe a small college town where there wasn’t much media, so it just fell through the cracks.

      Yet, this story actually played out in New York City, the media capital of the world, on the Upper East Side at the 92nd Street Y in full view of hundreds of New Yorkers on the night of Oct. 30, 2014. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern was roughly arrested, with the police ignoring his howls of pain as they pulled his arms behind his back. (McGovern had recently suffered a painful shoulder injury from a fall.}

    • Video Shows NYPD Arresting Former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern When He Tried to Attend Petraeus Event
    • Convicting Sterling to Chill Whistleblowing
    • Imprisoned CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Reacts to How Loretto Handled a Prison Guard’s Suicide

      CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who has been serving a prison sentence at the federal correctional institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania, has written a letter reporting that a correctional officer committed suicide in January. How the prison officials handled the death stood in stark contrast to the treatment prisoners experience when an inmate dies or an inmate needs to go to a funeral for an immediate family member.

      For much of Kiriakou’s prison sentence, Firedoglake has published his “Letters from Loretto.” He was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under President George W. Bush’s administration. In October 2012, he pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) when he confirmed the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter. He was sentenced in January 2013 and reported to prison on February 28, 2013.

      Kiriakou writes in the letter dated January 22, 2015, that he did not know the officer or ever “have any contact with him,” however, it is his understanding that the man was a “nice guy,” someone “friendly, reasonable and honest.” He feels very sorry for his family, but the response from staff was “fascinating.”

      As a CIA officer, when he lost a colleague, a star would go up on the agency’s Wall of Honor. Everyone would move on. That is not how the prison chose to handle the death.

    • John Kiriakou Torture Whistleblower Released
    • Greek-American CIA Whistleblower Released From Jail
    • CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou released from prison
    • CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Released from Prison
    • CIA Torture Whistleblower Released From Prison, Subject to House Arrest
    • CIA Torture Whistleblower Released From Prison

      John Kiriakou was the first whistleblower to reveal that torture was the official policy of the the Goerge W. Bush Administration.

    • Whistleblower John Kiriakou, only person jailed over CIA torture program, is out of prison
    • CIA agent from New Castle who shared secrets released from prison
    • Ex-CIA agent, a New Castle native, starting over after prison sentence

      “I knew I was not guilty, and my attorneys knew I was not guilty, but a jury would convict a ham sandwich given a chance,” he said.

      The government pursued the prosecution on the leak because of the 2007 television interviews, he said.

      “I’ve maintained from the very beginning, as did my attorneys, that my case was not about a leak. My case was about torture,” he said.

      A Justice Department spokesman said Kiriakou has made the whistleblower retaliation claim since he was indicted.

    • Exiles from Chagos Islands given hope of returning soon to their lost paradise

      It is a scandal stretching across six decades: the forced removal of hundreds of native people from a British overseas territory to make way for a US military base. That Diego Garcia, the main island in the Chagos archipelago – seven atolls in the Indian Ocean – has played a part in the CIA’s torture programme has only added to Britain’s sense of shame.

    • War on terror shouldn’t justify torture: UN Rights Chief

      The United Nations, which is the legal guardian of scores of human rights treaties banning torture, unlawful imprisonment, degrading treatment of prisoners of war and enforced disappearances, is troubled that an increasing number of countries are justifying violations of UN conventions on grounds of fighting terrorism in conflict zones.

    • In his first interview since leaving prison, CIA torture whistleblower says it was ‘worth it’

      The ex-CIA officer who first blew the whistle on the agency’s waterboarding practice says the 30-month prison sentence he got for revealing classified information was “worth it.”

      “It’s been a terrible three years, and it’s ruined me financially and personally, but in the greater picture it’s all been worth it,” John Kiriakou told Fusion over the phone from Arlington, Virginia, where he just began serving an 85-day house arrest sentence. It was his first interview since leaving a federal prison in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

      “I’m proud I had a role in seeing that torture is now banned in the United States,” he said.

      For now, he’s only able to leave his home to go to a halfway house or to church, so Kiriakou, 50, is struggling to wrap his head around everything that happened while he was behind bars—namely the release of the Senate’s torture report less than two months ago.

    • Obama won’t return ‘torture report’ without court OK

      The Obama Administration is pledging that it won’t destroy or return copies of the full-length Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA detention and interrogation practices without permission from the federal courts.

      In a court filing Friday night, the Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge James Boasberg not to grant an American Civil Liberties Union motion seeking to block the government from returning the unabridged versions of the so-called torture report to the Senate as new Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has requested.

      However, Justice Department lawyers agreed not to send the report back to the Hill while the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit is pending, unless they seek Boasberg’s okay to do so.

    • Who? When? Why? 10 Times the Bible Says Torture is OK

      When conservative Christians claim that the Bible God condones torture, they’re not making it up. A close look at the good book reveals why so many Christians past and present have adopted an Iron Age attitude toward brutality.

    • Birth of a shadow doctrine: How a small group of lawyers launched a war against international law

      When the hijacked airplanes hit the World Trade Towers on 9/11, John Yoo was working in his Justice Department office in Washington, D.C. At the time, he was assigned to one of the most crucial legal departments in the federal government, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Although he was an important lawyer in the administration of President Bush, Yoo himself was not well known outside of a close circle of Washington bureaucrats and policy wonks. He wasn’t famous. But all of that would change very quickly.

      Yoo had taken a leave of absence from Berkeley Law School to work for the Bush administration. His academic work had focused on constitutional law and foreign affairs, and he had earned a reputation for being a strong supporter of presidential war powers. According to Yoo, the president of the United States has virtually unlimited power as the constitutionally appointed commander in chief of the armed forces. Although Congress can play some role in times of war, Yoo had insisted in a series of law review articles that this role was secondary at best. In times of crisis, presidential power always trumps congressional deliberation.

    • Change of attitude from democratization to authoritarianism

      Everybody gets upset by the anti-democratic acts, the shelving of the Constitution, the non-compliance with judicial decisions and the pressure on the business world, civil society and opposition parties.

      Maybe we should just be sad about people who, after being humiliated in the past and imprisoned for exercising fundamental rights, embraced democratic reforms and standards, only to abandon this democratic stance. Maybe we should be just sad about a person or a group of people who have been against a single-party regime for many years but have started to implement one. We should be sad about people who, after arguing that they would subscribe to religious and ethical principles, violated all ethical rules and considerations once they acquired power.

    • Anti-Islam frenzy in France targets kids

      An 8-year-old boy in Nice, a small city on France’s Mediterranean coast near Italy, was hauled out of school to the police station. The boy’s father was called, television crews were summoned and headlines blared about the boy allegedly not respecting the minute of silence for Charlie Hebdo victims. An atmosphere of frenzied overreaction was created. (TV2, Jan. 28)

    • Political Dysfunction at Home Erodes US Leadership Abroad

      The US leadership role in the world is undermined by political dysfunction and polarization in the country, the US National Security Strategy released on Friday stated.

      [...]

      A CIA torture report released in December detailed a wide range of practices used by the agency, including waterboarding, mock executions, prolonged sleep deprivation and threats of sexual abuse in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

    • DOJ Probe Into Alleged Senate and CIA Torture Report Crimes Is Shrouded in Secrecy

      Last year, government lawyers made inquires into allegations that CIA personnel and Senate Intelligence Committee staffers broke federal laws in connection with the committee’s work on the Senate torture report. But the Department of Justice has classified dozens of pages of documents related to that investigation.

      [...]

      VICE News filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for those criminal referrals as well as all documents that “refer” to it. In a letter dated January 26, the Justice Department’s National Security Division said it identified about 85 pages — and that it was withholding all but two pages on grounds that disclosure would threaten national security, result in an unwarranted invasion of privacy, and reveal behind-the-scenes deliberations.

    • Focus of Feinstein’s Intelligence Committee uproar shifts from CIA to Democratic Senate staffers

      Many in Congress and the news media were surprised by a recent CIA Accountability Board report that cleared CIA personnel of wrongdoing in last year’s spying-on-Congress scandal, a finding that contradicted a July 2014 report by the CIA Inspector General. However, a close reading of both reports — which were released in unclassified form last month — indicates that the fault in this affair lies almost entirely with the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose staff appeared to have engaged in serious misconduct, including trying to smuggle a camera into a secure CIA facility, hacking into a CIA computer system, and stealing and misusing classified documents subject to attorney-client privilege.

    • Former undercover CIA man discloses Norway connection

      Mr Krongard was Executive Director of the CIA from 2001 to 2004 and a former chairman of Alex. Brown and Sons, a Baltimore investment bank.

      After being recruited, Hale says he helped run a fake company created under a legitimate corporation the Agency created.

      The fake company included shipping and trucking companies which Hale ran whilst leading the bank.

      Hale travelled extensively to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Poland, Denmark, and Norway. This was in order to provide cover to operatives supposedly working for the company.

    • Sen. Richard Burr, stop burying the CIA detention and torture report

      “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived,” wrote Maya Angelou, “but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” We call on U.S. Sen. Richard Burr to stop trying to unlive our nation’s ugly torture program, and face it with courage.

    • Torture and the CIA’s Unaccountability Boards

      Last Saturday, January 31, CIA Inspector General David Buckley resigned after a little more than four years in office. His departure came at the end of the same month his office published a scathing report that found the agency committed serious wrongdoings in connection to its rendition, detention, and torture program. It was also the same month that his report was swept aside by a parallel investigation conducted by a CIA “Accountability Board” that was hand-picked by agency leadership. Unsurprisingly, the Accountability Board recommended holding no one accountable for any failings.

    • Sen. Richard Burr, stop burying the CIA detention and torture report (COMMENTARY)
    • Gary Gloster and Christina Cowger: Burr should end efforts to bury torture report

      Winston-Salem’s own Sen. Richard Burr is at the center of an epic struggle over whether we will be allowed to know the truth about the taxpayer-funded torture that stains our nation’s soul. He has taken an astonishing action that appears at odds with both law and morality.

      Sen. Burr, now chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently wrote to the White House insisting that all copies of his committee’s 6,900-page report on CIA torture be “returned immediately.” The report had been distributed to many agencies and departments within the executive branch, and the idea of its being totally wrapped in secrecy again is ludicrous.

    • Enhanced Misinformation Techniques

      The FAIR study reviewed the guests of several popular news shows in the week when the report was most prominently discussed. The surveyed programs included the five Sunday talk shows (NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, ABC’s This Week, Fox News Sunday, and CNN’s State of the Union) along with four weekday news shows (MSNBC’s Hardball, Fox’s Special Report, CNN’s Situation Room, and the PBS NewsHour).

      [...]

      Only 18 guests articulated clear opposition to the CIA’s torture practices. That’s just half the number who spoke up in support.

    • UK to launch probe in country’s involvement in CIA torture: David Cameron

      British prime minister David Cameron has hinted that UK will launch an investigation by an independent inquiry into the country’s involvement in CIA torture.

      The Intelligence Security Committee (ISC) is already investigating whether British officials were complicit in torture overseas.

      Revelations were made recently that British overseas territory of Diego Garcia had been used to interrogate terrorist suspects.

    • UN human rights chief makes 1st official US visit since 2007

      He also has expressed concern at the “disproportionate” number of young black Americans who die in encounters with police officers and the high rate of blacks in U.S. prisons and on death row.

    • China Accuses Human Rights Watch Of Working For U.S. Government

      The article continues with a condemnation of a petition from Nobel Peace Prize winners Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Mairead Corrigan Maguire, with 129 other signatories, which criticized HRW for having “close ties to the U.S. government which call into question its independence.” There has been plenty of mudslinging back and forth about this, but in essence, the authors of the petition contend that Human Rights Watch employs too many former American officials, including veterans of the CIA and a former NATO Secretary General, thus compromising the independence of the group. They think this influence causes Human Rights Watch to go easy on American violations.

    • Don’t Call them Expats, They are Immigrants like Everyone Else

      According to Wikidpedia, “An expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of the person’s upbringing. The word comes from the Latin terms ex (“out of”) and patria (“country, fatherland”).”

      Defined that way, you should expect any person going to work outside of his or her country for a period of time would be an expat regardless of his skin color, country, etc.

      That is not the case in reality: expat is a term reserved exclusively for western White people going to work abroad.

      Africans are immigrants.
      Arabs are immigrants.
      Asians are immigrants.
      However Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for inferior races.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net neutrality forever? Not if the lawyers can stop it

      After waffling for months on the question of Net neutrality, who would have guessed that former telecom lobbyist Tom Wheeler would argue such a strong case for reclassifying broadband as a Title II common carrier? Though the FCC steered clear of onerous regulation, the reaction from telecoms has been largely a howl of distress.

    • Anti-Net Neutrality Propaganda Reaches Insane Levels With Bad Actors And Porn Parody

      There’s been plenty of propaganda concerning the net neutrality fight, but with FCC boss Tom Wheeler finally making it official that the FCC is going to move to reclassify broadband, it’s kicked into high gear of ridiculousness. An astroturfing front group that’s anti-net neutrality is trying to make a “viral” anti-net neutrality video, and it did so in the most bizarre way, by making an attempted parody porno video, based on the classic “cable guy” porno trope.

  • DRM

02.07.15

Links 7/2/2015: Manjaro 0.8.12, Korora 21

Posted in News Roundup at 8:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Exclusive: Seafile Founder Daniel Pan Talks About His Open Source Cloud Software

    Cloud has become one of the buzzwords in modern computing; there are so many advantages of cloud that it can’t be ignored. It is becoming an integral part of our IT infrastructure. However cloud poses a serious threat to the ownership of data and raises many privacy-related questions. The best solution is to ‘own’ your cloud, either though an on-premise cloud running in a local network disconnected from the Internet or one running on your own secure server. Seafile is one of the most promising, open source-based cloud projects.

  • Cisco Helping Advance Open Source in Networking

    Last week I was in Italia at the Cisco Live! Milano event where I also had the opportunity to speak about OpenDaylight (ODL) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). What stood out for me the most during my time there was the tremendous progress being made on technologies that are really disrupting the networking space

    SDN and NFV have been advancing innovation in the networking industry over the past few years, but it’s still early, and not many of the technologies have made it out of the lab and into the networks – until now.

  • Events

    • My first experience at FOSDEM
    • Linux Plumbers Conference call for proposals

      The calls for proposals (CFPs) for Linux Plumbers Conference microconferences and refereed track presentations are now up. The conference will be held August 19-21 in Seattle, WA, co-located (and overlapping one day) with LinuxCon North America.

    • X.Org’s XDC2015 Conference Is Happening In Toronto

      The X.Org Board of Directors have decided on Toronto, Canada as the location for this year’s annual X.Org Developers’ Conference.

    • Wayland/Weston 1.7.0 RC2 Released

      The second release candidates to Wayland 1.7 and the reference Weston compositor is now available.

      Wayland 1.7 RC2 fixes a regression on older systems (Ubuntu 12.04 ea) and a fix for a test failure on systems with the Yama Linux Security Module enabled. Wayland 1.7 RC1 was released last week.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Dip in Hadoop data lake can be bracing for big data users

      Encouraged by the promise of cost savings and better efficiency, early adopters are wading into Hadoop as a central reservoir for their analytics data.

    • 4 Lessons for Every Entrepreneur Creating Big Data Solutions

      I recently taught an MBA course at the University of San Francisco titled the “Big Data MBA.” In working with the students to apply Big Data concepts and techniques to their use cases, I came away with a few observations that could be applied by any entrepreneur.

    • Exclusive: Pivotal CEO says open source Hadoop tech is coming

      Pivotal, the cloud computing spinoff from EMC and VMware that launched in 2013, is preparing to blow up its big data business by open sourcing a whole lot of it.

      Rumors of changes began circulating in November, after CRN reported that Pivotal was in the process of laying off about 60 people, many of which worked on the big data products. The flames were stoked again on Friday by a report in VentureBeat claiming the company might cease development of its Hadoop distribution and/or open source various pieces of its database technology such as Greenplum and HAWQ.

    • Second OpenStack Kilo Milestone Now Available

      Though the open-source OpenStack cloud platform only has two major releases in any given year, each release is preceded by a steady cadence of incremental milestone updates.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The Bazaar has become Cathedral

      In recent times Red Hat has proven, through their political maneuvering and control over the GNU/Linux community, the need to rethink the definition of “Software Libre”. The violent and absurd landing of systemd over 99% of the GNU/Linux distributions is proving that it is not enough that the source code of the software is free for users to be free. We have lost the freedom of choice, control, and decisions made on our systems.

      In the times we live is not enough that the source code is released under the GPL license to ensure that software is free. Some years ago, when words GNU and Linux perhaps were known to few, and the companies behind them were not competing for the millions of dollars generated today, perhaps this was true. But today there are other variables at play such as freedom of developers and users.

      Whoever controls the free software developers will be able to control his users. It has become clear that even though the source code is free, if the user loses his ability to choose freely and hasn’t resources (knowledge, time and money) to adapt the code to your needs and/or preferences, ” freedom “is an empty word.

    • RMS Feels There’s “A Systematic Effort To Attack GNU Packages”

      Richard Stallman has come out against support for basic LLVM debugger (LLDB) support within Emacs’ Gud.el as he equates it to an attack on GNU packages.

    • GNU C library version 2.21 released

      The GNU C Library version 2.21 is now available.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Can Open-Source Voting Tech Fix The U.S. Elections System?

      “Our nation’s elections systems and technology are woefully antiquated. They are officially obsolete,” says Greg Miller of the TrustTheVote Project, an initiative to make our voting system accurate, verifiable, transparent, and secure. He adds: “It’s crazy that citizens are using twentieth-century technology to talk to government using twentieth-century technology to respond.”

      Miller and others are on a mission to change that with an entirely new voting infrastructure built on open-source technology. They say open source, a development model that’s publicly accessible and freely licensed, has the power to upend the entire elections technology market, dislodging incumbent voting machine companies and putting the electorate at the helm.

  • Licensing

    • Tips to Consider Before Using Open Source Code

      You’ve found an amazing open source project that you think will enhance your proprietary software. But before you and your team of developers can get to work incorporating someone else’s code into your own product, there are some basic steps that you need to take.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Emulation on the Raspberry Pi 2, Git Game, and more

      This week the team at Raspberry Pi unvieled the Raspberry Pi 2. Its increased horsepower means that emulation of the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1 are possible, as the Raspberry Pi team shows us with some gameplay footage of Mario Kart 64 and Spyro the Dragon.

    • Risk of the Commons

      Free and Open Source software has revolutionized how the world consumes software. Linux, BSD, httpd, nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and thousands of other software products are consumed voraciously. But almost universally people are only consuming. And generally that’s okay. Sharing is one of the key tenets and strengths – that we are able to freely share code to help our neighbor.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Chomsky and Kissinger Agree: Avoid Historic Tragedy in Ukraine

      In other words, Kissinger blames the U.S. and Europe for the current catastrophe in Ukraine. Kissinger does not begin at the point where there is military conflict. He recognizes that the problems in Ukraine began with Europe and the U.S. seeking to lure Ukraine into an alliance with Western powers with promises of economic aid. This led to the demonstrations in Kiev. And, as we learned from Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the U.S. spent $5 billion in building opposition to the government in Ukraine.

    • New allegations renew old questions about Saudi Arabia, 9-11

      For years, some current and former American officials have been urging President Barack Obama to release secret files they say document links between the government of Saudi Arabia and the Sept. 11 attacks.

    • What are Saudi Arabia’s ties to al-Qaeda? Barack Obama to consider releasing secret sections of 9/11 terror inquiry

      Questions over the 28-page section of the congressional report have been raised this week following the deposition of imprisoned former al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui in which he claimed major Saudi figures were donors to his group in late 1990s.

      Saudi officials have denied this.

      According to White House spokesman Josh Earnest, US intelligence last year began reevaluating the decision to classify the section following a request from congress, though no timescale for the decision was given.

    • Unauthorized Government Killing by Drones, Bombs, or Other Means Is Still Murder

      Although U.S. drones firing missiles at suspected bad guys in faraway places — such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — have gotten much publicity in recent years, it was recently revealed that the CIA assassinated top Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mugniyah with a good old-fashioned car bomb in Damascus, Syria with President George W. Bush’s strident approval in 2008. Because of an executive order, signed in 1975 by President Gerald Ford, prohibiting assassinations by the CIA, presidents usually get around that order by using the military to kill an enemy bigwig and then make the disingenuous claim that it was merely taking out a “command and control” target rather than an assassination. In this case, Bush, never one to observe constitutional or legal niceties, became incensed that the CIA director was being too timid in carrying out the hit using the exploding car. The real issue in such cases is not whether it is more dangerous to liberty to kill the enemy using a high-tech drone or a more traditional car bomb, but whether it constitutional to do either.

    • Does latest drone strike on al Shabaab signal change in US tactics in Somalia?

      But despite their vaunted precision, there are reports the latest strike in Somalia, on January 31, killed or injured civilians.

    • Drone strikes kill at least ‘45 militants’ in Somalia

      At least 45 suspected al-Shabaab militants have been killed in drone strikes in Southern Somalia on Saturday, a government official said.

    • US drone kills al-Shabaab commander

      A commander of Islamist militant group al-Shabaab was killed in a US drone attack in Somalia, the East African nation’s National Intelligence and Security Agency said Wednesday.

      “The killed al-Shabaab commander is called Abdinur Mahdi, also known as Yusuf Dheeg,” NISA said in a statement.

      Dheeg, who was killed on Saturday, was in charge of coordinating attacks inside and outside of Somalia, as well as assassinations and suicide bombings, the statement added.

    • Almost 2,500 now killed by covert US drone strikes since Obama inauguration six years ago: The Bureau’s report for January 2015

      At least 2,464 people have now been killed by US drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones since President Barack Obama’s inauguration six years ago, the Bureau’s latest monthly report reveals.

    • You Never Die Twice. Lack of transparency in the CIA and military drone killings.

      This week Women Against War and members of several other Capital District peace groups joined in a Statewide lobbying initiative of our two Senators, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, after having to re-schedule our Monday appointments due to the foot of snow and more that fell on the area.

    • Technology, Weapons and the Future

      According to Peter Singer, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute, “The first predator drones were used in 1995 during the Balkan conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. By 2000, the Air Force was developing ways to weaponize predator drones, as they were previously used exclusively in spy missions. When the US started the war in Iraq, back in 2003, there were a handful of drones in the air. By 2010, there were over 5,300 drones operating in Iraqi airspace. Additionally, the US went into Iraq with zero unmanned ground systems. By 2010, there were over 12,000 operating in the combat zone.”

    • Three BBC journalists questioned for using drone in Davos no-fly zone

      Three BBC journalists have been questioned by Swiss police for breaching high-level security protocols by using a drone at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.

    • Letter: Slow down acceptance of drones

      My fear is that some of the dishonest people in government will abuse drones and push for drone strikes on U.S. soil. Food for thought.

    • US Military Lost $400 Million Worth Of Weapons In Yemen

      It was recently reported that $400 million worth of US military weapons went missing in Yemen over the past several years. The equipment includes helicopters, night-vision gear, surveillance equipment, military radios and airplanes.

    • Pentagon loses track of weaponry sent to Yemen in recent years

      Chaos in the functionally leaderless country has seen Houthi rebels reportedly take control of Yemeni military’s arms depots and bases

    • No, I Will Not Watch American Sniper

      America’s war machine breeds enemies faster than the US can kill them, argues Larry Beck.

    • Blowback: the failure of remote-control warfare

      As Europe still reels from the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks in Paris, something far more profound to Western security is happening largely unnoticed—the failure of remote-control warfare. Open Briefing’s remote-control warfare briefing for January, commissioned by the Remote Control project, identified and analysed several trends, which taken together indicate the tactics and technologies deployed are coming back to haunt those Western powers that have embraced them in recent years.

    • What is a defensive weapon?

      President Obama is being urged to supply Ukraine with “defensive lethal assistance”, which sounds almost like a contradiction in terms. James Morgan asks what people mean by “defensive” weapons – and finds out it’s what a hedgehog has.

      It’s widely believed in the US, and in other Nato countries, that Russia is not only arming the rebels but sending soldiers to fight alongside them, so the pressure is increasing on the White House to ramp up military supplies to the Ukrainian government to help it resist a new offensive.

      Currently the US only provides non-lethal equipment, such as gas masks, night-vision goggles and radar. How much further can it go without escalating the conflict or being seen as an aggressor?

    • Ukraine crisis: Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande to fly to Russia: February 5 as it happened

      The leaders of Germany and France fly to Kiev and Moscow with new Ukraine peace plan as Nato bolsters eastern Europe against Russia and EU agrees new sanctions. Follow the latest developments

    • Why Arming Ukraine Will Backfire

      Vladimir Putin has restarted his war against Ukraine, and the U.S. and Europe are unsure how to respond. While Europe has apparently decided that no toughening of economic sanctions is called for, some in Washington are calling for equipping Ukraine with lethal weapons.

      Yet arming Ukraine is likely to backfire: It risks misleading the country — which is now pressing to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — into believing the U.S. will do what it takes to defeat Russia. It also risks encouraging Russia to expand the war, because it knows the U.S. and its NATO allies don’t have sufficient interests at stake to go all the way. The parallels often drawn with the war in Bosnia, where a U.S. arms and training program eventually turned the war and forced a peace, aren’t helpful: Serbia was a military minnow next to Putin’s nuclear-armed Russia.

    • The Military’s Next Big Recruiting Ground May Be Virtual

      Video gamers are more prepared for military service than people the same age were in previous generations.

      “We don’t need Top Gun pilots anymore, we need Revenge of the Nerds,” said Missy Cummings, former US Navy pilot, Assoc. Prof. of Aeronautics, MIT in Drone Wars: The Gamers Recruited To Kill, a documentary film about gamers and drone operators.

    • American Sniper: Humanizing and Glorifying a Mass Murderer for the Empire

      Many who are praising the film say the movie is about him, not about the politics of the Iraq war. “It’s a movie about a man, a character study,” said lead actor Bradley Cooper. “The hope is that you can somehow have your eyes opened to the struggle of a soldier, as opposed to the specificity of the war.” Others argue American Sniper is “both a tribute to the warrior and a lament for war,” as the Associated Press reviewer wrote.

      Bullshit. Regardless of the intentions of those making these claims, bullshit.

      This is a profoundly reactionary movie. American Sniper humanizes and glorifies Chris Kyle, an unrepentant Christian fundamentalist mass murderer, who killed 160 Iraqis (supposedly the most “kills” by any U.S. soldier in history). Meanwhile, the movie demonizes and dehumanizes every single Iraqi (with the possible exception of one family), portraying them as evil terrorists and “savages” who deserve to die.

      By telling this story through Kyle’s eyes and purported experience (and prettifying that story), American Sniper weaves a fable about the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its role in the world: America is a force for good. Whatever its mistakes, the U.S. sends its military to places like Iraq to try to protect the innocent and destroy evil. It promotes the outlook that only America and American lives count and anything goes to “defend” them. This is the big lie on the big screen.

    • America’s New Invisible Air Force

      The Pentagon is doubling down on the development of a new arsenal of stealth fighters, bombers, and drones in its newly unveiled budget for next year.

      Never mind the “fifth generation” stealth jets currently rolling off defense contractor assembly lines. The Pentagon is starting to pour money into three different projects to research and develop “sixth-generation” stealth fighters, plus funding for a new Air Force stealth bomber and new Navy carrier-based stealth drone.

    • The invisible face of terror

      Brussels. Ottawa. Sydney. Paris. “Terrorist” attacks in these western cities in the last one year have claimed 29 lives. Add to this the beheadings of western citizens by the Islamic State. The horror evoked by these has led to an outcry against Islam and fierce debates about the necessity of reform in Islam. In France, 3.7 million people marched in solidarity — in the largest public rally since the Second World War — with the victims of Charlie Hebdo to show that western civilisation cannot be defeated by Islamic fanatics.

      We are back to the days of 9/11 and other terror events in the West, and the debate assumes familiar directions: freedom of speech versus violent threats to it and the enlightened West versus barbaric Islam. We are presented this black and white world even by non-Muslim and non-western nations who have joined the project of moderating and domesticating Islam. Of course, there have been nuanced positions which have affirmed the right to free speech while at the same time calling out Charlie Hebdo for its racist portrayals of Islam. But the issue is larger than this.

    • White House seeks big increase in Pentagon budget

      The Pentagon would get $585 billion next year under the Obama administration’s proposed budget, reversing a five-year decline in military spending and blowing past mandatory spending caps imposed by Congress.

    • ISIS Ranks Grow as Fast as U.S. Bombs Can Wipe Them Out

      The Pentagon has said it has killed 6,000 fighters since coalition strikes began five months ago; the intelligence community estimates 4,000 foreign fighters have entered the fray since September. (A higher estimate, made by The Washington Post, holds that 5,000 foreign fighters have flowed into the two countries since October.)

    • [Satire] “They are out there murdering people”

      New Zealand’s contribution to oppressed peoples’ fighting US imperialism will be high on the agenda of his talks in Wellington today with British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond.

    • COMMENTARY: But what shall we do with the #Fallen120000?

      Agonizing as it may be, we need to stand humbly before all these fraught, painful questions because the problem in Mindanao is neither just a military, a legal, or an institutional problem—something that could be solved by increased firepower, policy formulation or institutional reengineering. It is ultimately and inescapably a moral problem: something that could only be solved by resolving broader questions of power and justice—and thus, something, that could only be solved through politics in the broader sense of the term: politics not as wheeling and dealing, but politics as the struggle over how we should live with our fellow human beings, over how should organize our society so we can live the “good life”—the kind of politics that people will kill and die for.

    • US drone watched Mamasapano debacle

      They were not alone. Big Brother was up there monitoring their every move.

      “Kasalukuyan pong nag-e-encounter ang 5th Battalion sa Maguindanao para sa misyon kay Marwan” (The 5th Battalion is right now engaged in a mission in Maguindanao against Marwan), an officer from the assault team said, recording what was happening on the ground about 8 in the morning of Jan. 25 in Mamasapano, Maguindanao.

    • US drone helped locate PNP-SAF in Mamasapano —source

      A drone sent by the United States was key in locating pinned Philippine National Police Special Action Force units during the recent Mamasapano operation where 44 elite lawmen were killed, “24 Oras” reported on Wednesday.

      According to the GMA News source, the US sent a drone to Mamasapano, Maguindanao after the PNP-SAF asked for support.

    • Child or militant? 6th-grader killed in US drone strike in Yemen (VIDEO)

      Relatives describe Mohammed as a joyful 12 year old, enjoying school. When he was killed in a latest drone strike in Yemen, authorities listed him as a ‘militant’. The family previously lost Mohammed’s father and brother in a similar attack.

      Mohammed Saleh Qayed Taeiman had been among the three killed in the drone strike last week, according to the Yemeni National Organization for Drone Victims (NODV). It also said that previous US drone strikes had killed Mohammed’s father and his brother in 2011, and in a separate attack, another brother had been injured.

    • IHC grills cop for not registering drone strike murder case

      The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has summoned Islamabad Police Inspector General (IG) Tahir Alam Khan on February, 9 in contempt of court case against Islamabad Secretariat Police station house officer (SHO) for not registering murder case of two people killed in a drone attack in the area of Mir Ali at South Waziristan in 2009.

      As the case came up for hearing before IHC Monday, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, counsel for petitioner Karim Khan, Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Nawaz Bhatti from Secretariat Police Station and legal counsel Abdul Rauf appeared in the court.

    • Is Obama Keeping His Promise to Constrain the Use of Drones?

      While it is unclear if they were drone strikes versus another type of aerial assault, BIJ notes that 2014 saw the highest number of confirmed U.S. drone strikes in the east African nation of any year despite the administration’s praise of Somali government reforms.

    • US Drone Strike Kills Four in Yemen

      This is the first attack since Monday, when the US similarly destroyed a car in Maarib and similarly labeled all of the slain “al-Qaeda” only for one to turn out to be a 12-year-old student.

    • Stop Using Drones in My Name

      A 12-year-old Pakistani boy who lost his grandmother in a U.S.-led drone strike says he is afraid of the blue sky; he would rather see the gray sky because he knows then that the drones will not fly. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’S), commonly known as drones, and particularly armed drones, are most effective when weather conditions provide for clear visibility, hence the better ability to hit identified targets. Drones aren’t flown on overcast days due to cloud cover and lack of visibility.

    • Drones a deplorable evil

      A policy of targeted extrajudicial assassination is by its very nature immoral.

      [...]

      Once extrajudicial killing was policy reserved for rogue nations like Nazi Germany and communist Russia. Rep. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the AUMF, said in her dissenting vote, “Let us not become the evil we deplore.” We now know that drone warfare, no matter how it is managed, is in fact a deplorable evil.

    • Jordan Executes Two Militants After IS Kills Pilot

      Jordan executed two Iraqi prisoners Wednesday, in answer to the Islamic State group’s killing of a Jordanian hostage in Syria.

      Jordanian officials hanged an Iraqi woman sentenced to death for her role in a 2005 suicide bombing in Amman. It also executed another Iraqi who had ties to al-Qaida.

    • Terrorists or “Freedom Fighters”? Recruited by the CIA

      When ISIS beheaded two American journalists, there was outrage and denunciation throughout the West, but when the same ISIS beheaded hundreds of Syrian soldiers, and meticulously filmed these war crime, this was hardly reported anywhere. In addition, almost from the very beginning of the Syrian tragedy, al-Qaeda groups have been killing and torturing not only soldiers but police, government workers and officials, journalists, Christian church people, aid workers, women and children, as well as suicide bombings in market places. All this was covered up in the mainstream media, and when the Syrian government correctly denounced this as terrorism, this was ignored or denounced as “Assad’s propaganda.”

      So why weren’t these atrocities reported in the western media? If this was reported it would have run counter to Washington’s proclaimed agenda that “Assad has to go,” so the mainstream media followed the official line. There is nothing new in this. History shows that the media supported every Western-launched war, insurrection and coup – the wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and coups such as those on Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, and most recently in Ukraine.

    • Ron Paul: The failed ‘Yemen model’

      If Yemen is any kind of model, it is a model of how badly U.S. interventionism has failed.

    • American Sniper: A Model American

      From record ticket sales to major media accolades, from the halls of Congress to the White House, the nation has spoken: “American Sniper” is all-American. Chris Kyle—the most lethal killer in U.S. military history, a true hero, a brave warrior—has been anointed as a role model for all that America has come to stand for.

    • Did the U.S.-Israeli killing of Mughniyah violate international law?

      Over the weekend, The Washington Post reported on a joint U.S.-Israeli operation that killed Imad Mughniyah—Hezbollah’s reported chief of international operations—on the streets of Damascus in 2008. The account raises questions about whether the killing violated international law, and central to the Post’s story is the assessment that these actions “pushed American legal boundaries.”

    • Systemic Series of Monstrous Crimes (3-4)

      Consider the staggering number of murders of innocent human beings committed by the United States government — and ask yourselves how many Auroras those murders represent. I have tried to make calculations of this kind before: using conservative estimates of the deaths in Iraq, the murders in that country alone represent a 9/11 every day for five years. An equivalent number of Auroras would be much higher. modified from Arthur Silber

    • Cozying up to dictators hurts American interests

      So what happened? The Arab Spring didn’t go as hoped — and the United States began to lose the war. An al-Qaida offshoot shockingly conquered large swaths of Iraq and Syria. Libya descended into civil war. Yemen, which Obama cited just last year as proof of his successful strategy, is on a similar downward spiral. The Taliban is gaining ground in Afghanistan. Boko Haram is carving out another space for barbarism in Nigeria.

    • Born at War

      We’ve been trained to think of war preparations — and the wars that result from being so incredibly prepared for wars — as necessary if regrettable. What if, however, in the long view that this book allows us, war turns out to be counterproductive on its own terms? What if war endangers those who wage it rather than protecting them? Imagine, for a moment, how many countries Canada would have to invade and occupy before it could successfully generate anti-Canadian terrorist networks to rival the hatred and resentment currently organized against the United States.

    • The U.S. Intelligence Community is Bigger Than Ever, But is It Worth It?

      The U.S. spends nearly $1 trillion on national security programs and agencies annually, more than any other nation in the world. Yet despite this enormous investment, there is not enough evidence to show the public that these programs are keeping Americans any safer – especially in the intelligence community. Excessive government secrecy prohibits the public and oversight agencies alike from determining whether our expensive intelligence enterprise is worth the investment.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • The UK Government Has Now Spent £10M On Julian Assange

      The UK government has now spent £10 million keeping Wikileaker Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

      A website set up by Wikileaks supporters, called govwaste.co.uk, has a counter on the front page that has just creeped past the £10,000,000 mark. The website reads: “Julian Assange has been effectively detained without charge since December 2010.

    • Nick Clegg In Spat With Julian Assange, Could Face Legal Action

      Nick Clegg could face legal action following remarks made about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Speaking on LBC on Thursday, the deputy prime minister commented on Assange’s long stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the £10 million cost of policing the building – comments Assange believes could be defamatory.

    • Silenced: The War on Whistleblowers

      In SILENCED: The War on Whistleblowers, three Americans reveal the persecution they’ve faced after they dared to question U.S. National Security policy in post 9/11 America. Everyone knows the name Edward Snowden, the fugitive and former intelligence contractor, but Academy Award nominated documentarian James Spione introduces us to three other whistleblowers of the era, speaking for the first time in one film, who discuss in dramatic and unprecedented detail the evolution of the government’s increasingly harsh response to unauthorized disclosures.

  • Finance

    • Bonafide Raises $850k to Build Reputation System for Bitcoin

      The funding round, which comes from Quest Venture Partners, Crypto Currency Partners and the AngelList Bitcoin Syndicate, among others, is a step towards creating a scoring system for addresses on bitcoin’s network.

    • Map: The Most Common* Job In Every State
    • Obama Budget Boosts Military Spending, Taxes on Wealthy

      President Obama has unveiled his $4 trillion budget proposal for next year, asking Congress to raise taxes for the wealthy and corporations to help fund education and fix crumbling infrastructure. The plan includes tax cuts for some poor and middle-class families. It also seeks to recoup losses from corporations that stash an estimated $2 trillion overseas by taxing such earnings at 14 percent, still less than half of the 35 percent rate for profits made in the United States. The budget takes aim at the high cost of prescription drugs, proposes a new agency to regulate food safety, and seeks $1 billion to curb immigration from Central America. It also calls for a 4.5 percent increase in military spending, including a $534 billion base budget for the Pentagon, plus $51 billion to fund U.S. involvement in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Speaking at the Department of Homeland Security, Obama said across-the-board cuts known as sequestration would hurt the military.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • USA Today Responds: ‘Criticizing Violent Islamists Does Not Tarnish All Muslims’

      I’ll save you the trouble of writing a rejection letter, because I know why you wouldn’t run cartoons like these: You would recognize that lumping people together who have nothing in common but their religion is straight-out bigotry. You wouldn’t take it seriously as a defense if I pointed out that the Lord’s Resistance Army and McVeigh really were bad guys.

    • The GOP: Still the Party of Stupid

      Mitt Romney definitely had his down sides as a candidate: the retread factor, and, as I noted two weeks ago, the fact that he made all those dramatic and (apparently) wrong predictions about the future of the economy. But I will say this for him. He did pass the this-guy-looks-and-sounds-like-a-plausible-president test. I always thought that was his greatest strength. He’s central casting.

    • Brian Williams taking himself off air temporarily

      Brian Williams said he is temporarily stepping away from the “NBC Nightly News” amid questions about his memories of war coverage in Iraq, calling it “painfully apparent” that he has become a distracting news story.

      In a memo Saturday to NBC News staff that was released by the network, the anchorman said that as managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” he is taking himself off the broadcast for several days. Weekend anchor Lester Holt will fill in, Williams said.

  • Censorship

    • Guardian, Salon Show How Keeping And Fixing News Comments Isn’t Hard If You Give Half A Damn

      We’ve been talking a lot lately about how the new school of website design (with ReCode, Bloomberg, and Vox at the vanguard) has involved a misguided war on the traditional comment section. Websites are gleefully eliminating the primary engagement mechanism with their community and then adding insult to injury by pretending it’s because they really, really love “conversation.” Of course the truth is many sites just don’t want to pay moderators, don’t think their community offers any valuable insight, or don’t like how it “looks” when thirty people simultaneously tell their writers they’ve got story facts completely and painfully wrong.

    • China seizes 8,000 rolls of toilet paper printed with image of Hong Kong chief

      An official of the Hong Kong Democratic party says Chinese authorities have seized about 8,000 rolls of toilet paper printed with the image of the territory’s pro-Beijing chief executive, Leung Chun-ying.

      Lo Kin-hei, a vice-chairman of the liberal party, said on Saturday that police seized the toilet paper and another 20,000 packages of tissue paper from a factory in the Chinese city of Shenzhen where a friend of the party placed the order to obscure the party as the true buyer.

    • What the CIA didn’t want Americans to know

      Agency brass tried to spike a story implicating the CIA in the killing of a top Hezbollah terrorist. Newsweek complied. The Post didn’t.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Justice for Sale – Part 1: Declining Faith, Rising Police Violence

      This is the first article in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how discourse regarding law enforcement related issues in the US has been constructed to justify abuse by the police.

    • Conservative Media Bash Obama For Mentioning Crusades At Prayer Breakfast

      Conservative media lashed out at President Obama for mentioning the Crusades and Inquisition at the National Prayer Breakfast after condemning the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) as a “death cult” that distorts Islam.

    • Fox Gave Defense Lobbyist An Undisclosed Platform To Slam Obama On Client’s Behalf

      Guest Attacked Obama For Not Letting Company His Firm Represents Sell Drone To Jordan

    • The Police State Is Upon Us

      Anyone paying attention knows that 9/11 has been used to create a police/warfare state. Years ago, NSA official William Binney warned Americans about the universal spying by the National Security Agency, to little effect. Recently, Edward Snowden proved the all-inclusive NSA spying by releasing spy documents, enough of which have been made available by Glenn Greenwald to establish the fact of NSA illegal and unconstitutional spying, spying that has no legal, constitutional, or “national security” reasons. Yet Americans are not up in arms. Americans have accepted the government’s offenses against them as necessary protection against “terrorists.”

    • Armstrong given two tickets after car crash

      Former pro cyclist Lance Armstrong was issued two traffic citations in January for allegedly hitting two parked vehicles in Aspen’s West End and leaving the scene — with his girlfriend apparently telling police initially that she had been behind the wheel in order to avoid national headlines.

    • Ignoring America’s true greatness

      Messrs. Petraeus and O’Hanlan are unconcerned about the nation’s alarmng liberty and justice deficit. The President plays prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to kill any American citizen he decreees based on secret evidence is a threat to the national security. Thousands of innocent civilians abroad are killed by predator drones. The National Security Agency conducts surveillance against the entire United States population without suspicion that even a single target has been complicit in crime or international terrorism.

      Individuals are detained indefinitely without accusation or trial at Guantanamo Bay. Eighteenth century British legal scholar William Blackstone — who was gospel to the Founding Fathers — wrote: “[T]o bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom.”

    • The US Already Running Special Ops Missions In 105 Countries In 2015

      In the dead of night, they swept in aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Landing in a remote region of one of the most volatile countries on the planet, they raided a village and soon found themselves in a life-or-death firefight. It was the second time in two weeks that elite U.S. Navy SEALs had attempted to rescue American photojournalist Luke Somers. And it was the second time they failed.

    • America desperately needs constitutional convention

      The imperial presidency persists. Look at Obama and his drones. Look at George W. Bush. Bush, who lost the popular vote, stole the 2000 election with the Electoral College’s help. As for the Senate, it is surely the world’s most undemocratic legislative body. Since every state gets two senators, one Californian voter has some 1.5 percent of a Wyoming voter’s power. Wyoming’s population is smaller than NJ’s Bergen or Middlesex counties. Senators from Mississippi or Utah can then filibuster and kill reforms voters from demographic mega-states like California or New York demand. These states are less urbanized and diverse in general. With growing inequality between the classes and races, and growing repression in the form of mass incarceration, we need to radically reform and amend our Constitution. As political scientist Daniel Lazare said, the alternative would be, “the old pre-reform Mississippi state legislature stamping on democracy — forever.” I’m sorry Lincoln’s ghost, but that’s not a Union worth saving. But hey, maybe Hillary can save us.

    • CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Released to House Arrest

      Under the terms of his house arrest, Kiriakou is unable to give media interviews at this time.

      Radack said he eventually hopes to be an anti-torture and prison reform advocate.

      Kiriakou’s official release date is May 1, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website.

    • Aaron Swartz stood up for freedom and fairness – and was hounded to his death

      On Monday, BBC Four screened a remarkable film in its Storyville series. The Internet’s Own Boy told the story of the life and tragic death of Aaron Swartz, the leading geek wunderkind of his generation who was hounded to suicide at the age of 26 by a vindictive US administration. The film is still available on BBC iPlayer, and if you do nothing else this weekend make time to watch it, because it’s the most revealing source of insights about how the state approaches the internet since Edward Snowden first broke cover.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Here’s What That Dumb Porn Parody Gets Wrong On Net Neutrality

      Net neutrality propaganda is starting to get weird. A brand new interest group showed up this week with a confusing porn parody that seems to equate Title II reclassification of the internet with dragnet surveillance, among other fallacies. It’s a good chance to talk about what the Federal Communications Commission’s new open internet policy is — and what it isn’t.

      An anti-big government campaign backed by a US Senator released this godawful video that looks like a tasteless ripoff of the age-old “cable guy” porn cliché — except you know not to actually expect any sex because it’s YouTube.

02.06.15

Links 6/2/2015: CrunchBang Linux Ends, Ubuntu Phone From BQ

Posted in News Roundup at 6:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Easing into open source

    Open source scares people. And tossing them into the deep end usually doesn’t help dampen that fear. Instead, we need to help ease people into using open source. Scott Nesbitt, technology coach and writer, shares some advice to help you do that.

    First, curb the urge to get on open source soapbox. Instead, go for the heart of it—show them how they can do their work with it.

    Open source is not only for the techie. So, explain to people they don’t have to be a coder. They can learn to code, but it’s not required.

  • Coreboot Ports Over XGI Framebuffer Support From Linux Kernel

    The Coreboot project has now ported over the XGI Z9s frame-buffer support from the Linux kernel.

  • DreamHost Celebrates Open Source Throughout February
  • Legalese and coding? Yup, it’s the open-source FOSDEM shindig

    FOSDEM doesn’t get the ra-ra headlines or (thankfully) the “booth babes” but the conference does get networking and top technologists (and Belgian beer). I saw a couple of my tech heroes and big cheeses here a few minutes apart just before writing this, for example, and got some top advice for a specific tech issue a breath later.

    I also saw photos of RMS (Richard Stallman) at large a few paces away, though I didn’t get to meet him in person and buy one of his badges, alas…

    Man-flu and technicolour yawning on the second day didn’t stop me having riotous fun with geekery, champers and IP lawyers this year!

  • Which Light Weight, Open Source Web Server is Right for You?

    If you use Linux, most likely Apache is your web server of choice. Apache is a great choice. It’s incredibly powerful, very reliable, and secure. There may, however, be certain deployments that either do not need all of the features found in Apache, do not have the resources to support Apache (such as in the case of an embedded system), or need something easier to manage. If that’s the case, fear not ─ there are plenty of light weight, open source, web servers out there ready to meet and exceed your needs.

  • Lightning Strikes at Salesforce with DIY Development Platform

    Salesforce’s new Lightning platform aims to make it easier for ordinary folks to build apps, and leverages open source tech to do so.

  • Is Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry open enough?

    A year ago, Pivotal announced its intent to set up a foundation for the open source Cloud Foundry project, but issues lurk in the bylaws and ownership of the name

  • Events

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • The art of learning OpenStack

      Trying to learn more about what OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project, might have to offer? Need some help figuring something out, or inspiration for a new approach to try? We’re here to help. We have gathered some of the best how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips published over the past month into this handy collection.

    • Hadoop Adjuncts Proliferate: YARN, Koya, Slider, and, Yes…Kafka

      Lately we’ve been covering tools that orbit Hadoop in the Big Data ecosystem, ranging from Elastic Search to Qubole, which offers analytics on Hadoop data as a service (HaaS), to the Apache Spark project. In this arena, Kafka and YARN are much talked about. YARN is a sub-project of Hadoop at the Apache Software Foundation that takes Hadoop beyond batch to enable broader data-processing. Kafka allows a single cluster to serve as the central data backbone for a large organization. With it, data streams are partitioned and spread over a cluster of machines to allow data streams larger than the capability of any single machine.

    • ClusterHQ Raises $12 Million, Building Data Layer for Docker

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle tosses its Linux into Docker’s repository

      Oracle sometimes seems to be a bit miffed by enthusiasm for Linux container darling Docker because its own Solaris “Zones” have done containers for ages.

      Big Red also knows in its heart of hearts that Solaris isn’t for everyone, but reckons its own Linux is for anyone who fancies robust, well-supported Torvalds-spawn. And given that Docker needs an OS in which to run containers, Oracle has therefore decided to make Oracle Linux available in the Docker repository. The company will also package an Oracle-maintained version of MySQL and pop it in the same place.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Autoconf Archive – News: Noteworthy changes in release 2015.02.04
    • GNU C Library 2.21 Released With Bug & Security Fixes

      Version 2.21 of the GNU C Library is now available. Glibc 2.21 fixes a lot of issues while also adding some new functionality.

      Glibc 2.21 has many bug fixes, several security fixes, a port to the Altera Nios II platform, a new sempahore algorithm, support for TSX lock elision on PowerPC, optimized string functions for AArch64, support for new MIPS ABI extensions, and many other changes.

      More details on glibc 2.21 can be found via the mailing list release announcement. Other GNU C Library 2.21 details can be found via the Sourceware.org Wiki.

    • FSF JavaScript guidelines picked up by Posteo Webmail

      Over the last few months, Webmail provider Posteo has been working with the FSF to license and tag all JavaScript on their Web site and Webmail system so that it is immediately identifiable as free software. They have also done everything possible to ensure that it is 100% compatible with the GNU LibreJS browser extension, which automatically blocks any potentially nonfree JavaScript, making it easy to browse the Web in freedom. This is an outstanding effort in defense of the freedom of Posteo’s users, and the company deserves recognition for it. We hope others will follow their lead.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Half of IT in Bizkaia province to be open source

      This year half of all the software applications at the Diputación Foral de Bizkaia (the provincial council of Bizkaia, Spain) will be open source, up from 25 percent in November 2014. The goal was announced on 12 November at the start of the LibreCon software conference. “Open-source technology offers competitiveness and savings, boosts the economy, promotes knowledge and makes us more transparent”, a press statement quotes Counsellor of the Presidency, Unai Rementeria, as saying.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Six Things Technology Has Made Insanely Cheap

      Innovation makes things cheaper, which frees up cash for consumers to buy other things. That drives the virtuous cycle of economic growth. We dug into the inflation data, more formally known as the personal consumption expenditures price index, to highlight some of the items that have seen the biggest discounts.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Time to put mental health front and centre for this year’s general election

      The imperative to improve mental health in the UK is primarily a moral one. That said, even a hard-nosed economist, insensible to the suffering of individuals, should appreciate the benefits that better mental healthcare can bring. Unsurprisingly given its prevalence, mental illness has a huge economic impact: a 2010 report by the Centre for Mental Health estimated the aggregate costs in 2009-10 as £105.2 billion – rather more than the total NHS budget for the same year, £95.8 billion. As for the benefits of treatment, a report just released by the same Centre finds that, for every £1 invested in group cognitive-behavioural therapy for adolescents suffering from anxiety, £31 is saved in wider costs.

  • Security

    • Now Sharyl Attkisson’s Lawyer Suggests Her Personal Computer Wasn’t Hacked

      Sharyl Attkisson’s lawyer told the Daily Beast that an investigation that found no evidence her personal computer was hacked is “irrelevant” because it reviewed the wrong computer, despite her own repeated claims that the desktop in question had been compromised. He also falsely claimed her lawsuit against the federal government for alleged hacking was focused solely on a separate work computer.

    • Sneaky Linux malware comes with sophisticated custom-built rootkit

      A malware program designed for Linux systems, including embedded devices with ARM architecture, uses a sophisticated kernel rootkit that’s custom built for each infection.

    • DDoS malware for Linux systems comes with sophisticated custom-built rootkit

      A malware program designed for Linux systems, including embedded devices with ARM architecture, uses a sophisticated kernel rootkit that’s custom built for each infection.

    • UK government asks: How’s our hacking?

      We know that the NSA likes taking unsolicited action inside the computers of others. We know the FBI is also very much into hacking.

      Now, the UK government is telling the world that its spies and cops are hackers too — and has asked the public what they think about it

      In a new unprecedented document released on Friday, the UK government released the guidelines and rules that all British spy and law enforcement agencies have to follow in their “equipment interference” activities.

    • Friday’s security updates

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Fiery Cage and the Lynching Tree, Brutality’s Never Far Away
    • [Old] The War Photo No One Would Publish

      When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War. But the media wouldn’t run the picture.

    • ‘A Line in the Sand’ in Fight to Release Thousands of Prisoner Abuse Photos

      A federal judge is demanding that the government explain, photo-by-photo, why it can’t release hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pictures showing detainee abuse by U.S. forces at military prison sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.

      In a courtroom in the Southern District of New York yesterday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, which asserted that the threat of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda exploiting the images for propaganda should override the public’s right to see any of the photos.

    • Meet The Group That Now Rules Yemen

      Thirteen years ago they were just a few men, disaffected students and farmers, shouting outside a rural mosque in the north Yemeni highlands. Today, they are in charge. They’re known popularly as the Huthis; the U.S. believes they are an Iranian proxy and Saudi Arabia has already fought one war with them.

    • A Blackwater World Order

      The privatization of America’s wars swells the ranks of armies for hire across the globe.

    • Anarchists vs. ISIS: The Revolution in Syria Nobody’s Talking About

      The Middle East today is the last place anyone in mainstream western thought would think to look for progressive political thought, and even less to see those thoughts translated into action. Our image of the region is one of dictatorships, military juntas and theocracies built on the ruins of the former Ottoman Empire, or hollow states like Afghanistan, and increasingly Pakistan, where anything outside the capitol is like Mad Max. The idea of part of the region being not just free, but well on its way to utopian, isn’t one that you’re going to find on mainstream media.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Why the secret criminal investigation of WikiLeaks is troubling for journalists

      Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia began investigating WikiLeaks in 2010 after the site posted some of the quarter-million State Department cables leaked by Chelsea Manning.

      Last month, an official from the Department of Justice publicly confirmed the investigation is still ongoing. It was the first time anyone, including WikiLeaks’ own defense team, has gotten such confirmation since April 2014.

    • Supreme Court Rules in Favor of TSA Whistleblower Robert MacLean

      Whistleblower laws exist because government officials do not always act in the nation’s best interests.

      The Obama administration, in its war on whistleblowers, just lost a major battle. Major in its venue — the Supreme Court — and major in its implications for future whistleblower cases.

    • Senator Wyden Follows Up With Eric Holder On All Of The Requests The DOJ Has Totally Ignored

      As Attorney General Eric Holder is about to leave office, Senator Ron Wyden has sent him a letter more or less asking if he was planning to actually respond to the various requests that Wyden had sent to Holder in the past, which Holder has conveniently ignored. Wyden notes, accurately, that the government’s continued secrecy on a variety of issues “has led to an erosion of public confidence that has made it more difficult for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to do their jobs.”

    • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may sue UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg for ‘rape’ comment

      WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange is considering suing UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg for defamation over comments made regarding Assange’s legal situation.

      Speaking on LBC radio on Thursday (5 February), Clegg said that Assange should go to Sweden to “face very serious allegations and charges of potential rape.”

      Assange has been accused of sexually assaulting two women in Stockholm in 2010, however no formal charges have been made and Assange denies the allegations.

    • Assange considers law suit against UK Deputy Prime Minister
    • Scotland Yard has spent more than £10 million guarding Julian Assange in Ecuadorian Embassy

      Scotland Yard have spent more than £10 million on policing the Ecuadorian Embassy where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been avoiding extradition.

      Mr Assange was granted asylum by the government of Ecuador and has been holed up in the building in Knightsbridge since 2012.

      The Metropolitan Police have posted round-the-clock police officers outside the building ever since, costing an estimated £10,500 a day.

  • Finance

    • The Billionaires at Burning Man

      For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even more elaborate one the following year. In 2014 he’d invite up to 120 people to join him at a camp that would make the Burning Man experience feel something like staying at a pop-up W Hotel. To fund his grand venture, he’d charge $16,500 per head.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Some Other Tall Tales Brian Williams Might Want to Apologize For

      NBC Nightly News anchor Brian William has apologized for falsely claiming (NBC, 1/30/15) that “during the invasion of Iraq…the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.”

    • Rumors of the Walker Probe’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

      After a January 30, 2015 ruling from Milwaukee-based federal Judge Charles Clevert, some declared that the “John Doe” probe into alleged campaign finance violations by Governor Scott Walker’s campaign was dead.

      The Franklin Center’s Wisconsin Reporter website claimed that Judge Clevert’s decision “effectively pulled the life support plug” on the investigation. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s right-wing columnist Christian Schneider repeated his erroneous “zombie law” claim, declaring that the ruling “almost certainly means the end of the most recent John Doe investigation.”

  • Censorship

    • Google Chrome Dragged Into Internet Censorship Fight

      Google’s lawsuit against Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood is a crucial case for the future of SOPA-like Internet filters in the U.S. This week Digital Citizens Alliance, Stop Child Predators and others voiced their support for the Attorney General, suggesting that Google Chrome should be censored as well.

    • France Implements Administrative Net Censorship

      After review by the French Cabinet last Wednesday, the implementation decree for the administrative blocking of pedopornographic and terrorist websites was published today.

  • Privacy

    • WhatsApp security bug shows private pictures to strangers

      A security problem in WhatsApp means that anyone can see users’ profile photos, even if they have been set to be viewable to friends only, according to security researchers.

    • Proposed changes to US data collection fall short of NSA reformers’ goals

      US intelligence community issues limited list of tweaks to data collection and surveillance at end of year-long effort to respond to Snowden revelations

    • The Newest Reforms on SIGINT Collection Still Leave Loopholes

      Director of National Intelligence James Clapper this morning released a report detailing new rules aimed at reforming the way signals intelligence is collected and stored by certain members of the United States Intelligence Community (IC). The long-awaited changes follow up on an order announced by President Obama one year ago that laid out the White House’s principles governing the collection of signals intelligence. That order, commonly known as PPD-28, purports to place limits on the use of data collected in bulk and to increase privacy protections related to the data collected, regardless of nationality.

    • Lawmakers Call for Investigation Into Verizon’s Use of Mobile ‘Supercookies’

      Three Democratic lawmakers on the influential Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation are calling on federal regulators to investigate Verizon for its practice of using unique customer codes to track the online activities of its wireless subscribers.

    • Two things I’ve learned from using Tor Browser

      So for the past three months I’ve been using Tor Browser to surf the Web, not as a primary browser, but as a secondary browser. Firefox is my primary browser.

      Together with using StartPage as my search engine, I feel much better about my privacy while surfing the Internet. Using Tor Browser leads to a tad slower browsing experience, but I knew that going in, so no complaints there.

    • DEA using license-plate readers to take photos of US drivers, documents reveal

      The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is using license-plate reader technology to photograph motorists and passengers in the US as part of an official exercise to build a database on people’s lives.

      According to DEA documents published on Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the agency is capturing images of occupants in the front and rear seats of vehicles in a programme that monitors Americans’ travel patterns on a wider scale than previously thought.

    • Investigative Journalists and Digital Security

      About two-thirds of investigative journalists surveyed (64%) believe that the U.S. government has probably collected data about their phone calls, emails or online communications, and eight-in-ten believe that being a journalist increases the likelihood that their data will be collected. Those who report on national security, foreign affairs or the federal government are particularly likely to believe the government has already collected data about their electronic communications (71% say this is the case), according to a new survey of members of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) – a nonprofit member organization for journalists – by the Pew Research Center in association with Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism

    • Russia might start blocking Internet anonymizers like Tor

      Leonid Levin, the head of the Duma’s committee on public communications policy, wants to grant police the extrajudicial power to block access to Internet anonymizers and “the means of accessing anonymous networks, such as Tor.”

    • GCHQ-NSA intelligence sharing unlawful, says UK surveillance tribunal
    • UK-US surveillance regime was unlawful ‘for seven years’

      Regulations governing access to intercepted information obtained by NSA breached human rights laws, according to Investigatory Powers Tribunal

    • GCHQ spying on British citizens was unlawful, secret court rules in shock decision
    • GCHQ’s Internet surveillance with US ruled unlawful

      Spy agency could now be forced to reveal whether it spied on civil rights groups after watchdog human rights ruling

    • UK tribunal says intelligence-sharing with U.S. was unlawful

      A British tribunal ruled on Friday that some aspects of intelligence-sharing between security agencies in Britain and the United States were unlawful until December 2014, in a ground-breaking case brought by civil liberties groups.

      The Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that Britain’s GCHQ had acted unlawfully in accessing data on millions of people in Britain that had been collected by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), because the arrangements were secret.

      Campaign groups Liberty, Privacy International, Amnesty International and others brought the case following revelations about mass surveillance made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

    • Electronic Surveillance by Spy Agencies Was Illegal, British Court Says

      The court that oversees intelligence agencies in Britain ruled on Friday that the electronic mass surveillance of cellphone and other online communications data had been conducted unlawfully.

      The legal decision, the first time the court has ruled against the British intelligence services since the tribunal was created in 2000, relates to information that was shared between British security agencies and the National Security Agency of the United States before December 2014.

      Although privacy campaigners claimed the decision as a victory, many experts said the British and American intelligence agencies would continue to share information obtained with electronic surveillance, even if they had to slightly alter their techniques to comply with human rights law.

    • In Historic Ruling, U.K. Surveillance Secrecy Declared Unlawful

      The United Kingdom’s top surveillance agency has acted unlawfully by keeping details about the scope of its Internet spying operations secret, a British court ruled in an unprecedented judgment issued on Friday.

      Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, was found to have breached human rights laws by concealing information about how it accesses surveillance data collected by its American counterpart, the National Security Agency.

  • Civil Rights

    • Polaneczky: Innocent frequent flier detained after run-in with TSA

      Once the items were deemed harmless, Vanderklok says, he told Kieser that if someone had only told him what “organic matter” meant, he could have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Kieser then became confrontational. Vanderklok says he calmly asked to file a complaint. He then waited while someone was supposedly retrieving the proper form.

      Instead, Kieser summoned the Philadelphia Police. Vanderklok was taken to an airport holding cell, and his personal belongings – including his phone – were confiscated while police “investigated” him.

      Vanderklok was detained for three hours in the holding cell, missing his plane. Then he was handcuffed, taken to the 18th District at 55th and Pine and placed in another cell.

      He says that no one – neither the police officers at the airport nor the detectives at the 18th – told him why he was there. He didn’t find out until he was arraigned at 2 a.m. that he was being charged with “threatening the placement of a bomb” and making “terroristic threats.”

      Vanderklok’s Kafkaesque odyssey finally ended at 4 a.m., when his wife paid 10 percent of his $40,000 bail.

      When I heard this story, my first thought was that Vanderklok had to have said or done something outrageous for others to respond with such alarm. In fact, Kieser said as much at Vanderklok’s trial on April 8, 2013.

      [...]

      But here’s the thing: Airport surveillance videos show nothing of the sort.

    • Fairfax SWAT team raids high stakes Great Falls poker game, seizes cash, terrifies players

      On a quiet weeknight among the stately manors of Great Falls, ten men sat around a table in the basement of a private home last November playing high stakes poker. Suddenly, masked and heavily armed SWAT team officers from the Fairfax County Police Department burst through the door, pointed their assault rifles at the players and ordered them to put their hands on the table. The players complied. Their cash was seized, including a reported $150,000 from the game’s host, and eight of the ten players were charged with the Class 3 misdemeanor of illegal gambling, punishable by a maximum fine of $500. The minimum buy-in for the game was $20,000, with re-buys allowed if you lost your first twenty grand.

      [...]

      “It’s crazy,” said the regular, looking back on the night of the raid. “They had this ‘shock and awe’ with all of these guys, with their rifles up and wearing ski masks.” He noted that the Justice Department recently revamped its guidelines for civil forfeiture cases, following reports by The Post about abuses of the seizure process by police around the country, including Fairfax. But in Virginia, the seizure law remains the same, and agencies may keep what they seize, after going through a court process.

    • When Cops Break Bad: Inside a Police Force Gone Wild

      Looking west from the scrub and boulders of the Sandia Mountains, the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, sprawls across the valley of the Rio Grande, surrounded by the vast openness of the high desert. On the city’s eastern edge, the winding roads and cul-de-sacs of tony subdivisions in the Northeast Heights abruptly give way to the foothills of the mountains, whose sharp red peaks tower over the city.

    • Coca-Cola pulls Twitter campaign after it was tricked into quoting Mein Kampf

      Coca-Cola has been forced to withdraw a Twitter advertising campaign after a counter-campaign by Gawker tricked it into tweeting large chunks of the introduction to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

      For the campaign, which was called “Make it Happy” and introduced in an ad spot during the Super Bowl, Coke invited people to reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”.

      The idea was that an automatic algorithm would then convert the tweets, using an encoding system called ASCII, into pictures of happy things – such as an adorable mouse, a palm tree wearing sunglasses or a chicken drumstick wearing a cowboy hat.

      In a press release, Coca-Cola said its aim was to “tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads across the internet”.

    • U.S. official: “No coincidence” Islamic State victims in Guantanamo-like jumpsuits

      A top U.S. defense official said it was “no coincidence” that recent Islamic State videos of the savage executions of Jordanian and Japanese hostages showed the victims wearing orange jumpsuits, “believed by many to be the symbol of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.”

    • Fox Host Offers Brazenly Dishonest Defense For Calling Bipolar Disorder “Made Up”

      Fox News Radio host Tom Sullivan is backtracking and brazenly lying about his controversial remarks calling bipolar disorder “made up” and “the latest fad.” While Sullivan now claims his remarks were taken “out of context,” this defense is preposterous. He repeatedly dismissed the validity of bipolar disorder and the clip used by Media Matters was the same one posted by his employer with the headline “(AUDIO) Bipolar Woman Says She DESERVES Disability Benefits. Tom Tells Her She’s WRONG!”

    • An Elite That Has Lost the Impulse to Police Itself

      Few in public life are as contemptuous of privacy as Stewart Baker, an attorney whose career has included stints at the NSA and Department of Homeland Security. He is a staunch defender of most every U.S. government surveillance effort. As Americans expressed alarm at the scope of spying revealed by Edward Snowden, he delivered a speech asserting that they were engaged in an irrational moral panic.

      But even this man, who believes that bulk, warrantless surveillance is fine under the Fourth Amendment, acknowledges that the Drug Enforcement Administration deserves censure for secretly operating surveillance programs. In fact, he believes that the DEA’s behavior was egregious enough that the public’s failure to respond more forcefully calls the value of transparency itself into question.

      Yet he isn’t personally condemning the DEA.

    • HAPPY TRIGGER/LOVELY HORSE/Zool/TWO FACE – Open Source for Cyber Defence/Progress
    • CIA’s Merlin Was Arranging Fake Nuclear Deals on an AOL Account Shared with His Wife and Kids

      Witness after witness in the Jeffrey Sterling trial made claims about how closely held the program was. “More closely held than any other program,” Walter C, a physicist who worked on the program described. “More closely held,” David Shedd, currently head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and head of Counterproliferation Operations until just after the Merlin op.

      Of course, Bob S’ admission that — when FBI showed him a list, in 2003, of 90 people cleared into the program, he said it was incomplete — suggests all those claims are overstated.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Undoing Michael Powell’s Mischief at the FCC

      Michael Powell tried to do for broadband Internet what his father did for Iraq.

      One of the first things George W. Bush did after he was installed in the Oval Office was to put the younger Powell, who was fond of saying things like “the oppressor here is regulation” (Washington Post, 1/23/01), in charge of the agency that regulates media. His blithe attitude toward the consequences of his beloved market was perhaps best expressed by his dismissal of concerns over the digital divide (Chicago Tribune, 2/7/01): “You know, I think there’s a Mercedes divide. I’d like to have one; I can’t afford one.”

    • Morning Joe’s Net Neutrality Conflict Of Interest

      MSNBC’s Harold Ford, Jr. used air time to push net neutrality myths without disclosing his relationship to the telecom industry, which has contributed millions of dollars to lobbying against net neutrality regulations.

    • Stop Saying That The FCC Is ‘Treating Internet As A Utility’ — It’s Not

      Now that FCC boss Tom Wheeler has made it official that he’s going to present rules to reclassify broadband under Title II for the purpose of implementing stronger net neutrality rules (details still to come…), the opponents to this effort have come out of the woodwork to insist, over and over again, that reclassifying is “treating the internet as a utility.” The cable industry’s main lobbyists, NCTA, decried “Wheeler’s proposal to impose the heavy burden of Title II public utility regulation….” and AT&T screamed about how “these regulations that we’re talking about are public-utility-style regulations…” Former Congressman Rick Boucher, who is now lobbying for AT&T whined that “subjecting broadband to public utility regulation under Title II is unnecessary.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • MSNBC’s The Ed Show Highlights Report On Media’s Poor Coverage Of Historic Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations
    • I’ve seen the secrets of TTIP, and it is built for corporations not citizens

      It appears that, even though I am past 50, my opportunities to become a spy have not expired. This is because, as an MEP, I have now been granted privileged access to the European parliament restricted reading room to explore documents relating to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal. But before I had the right to see such “top secret” documents, which are restricted from the gaze of most EU citizens, I was required to sign a document of some 14 pages, reminding me that “EU institutions are a valuable target” and of the dangers of espionage. Crucially, I had to agree not to share any of the contents with those I represent.

    • Copyrights

      • Data retention: the copyright mafia want laws in place

        Australia’s current Prime Minister Tony Abbott has asked the Opposition to back data retention laws by mid-March, playing the security card to try and pressure Labor leader Bill Shorten.

        But, as I’ve pointed out on more than one occasion, this rush to retain data of internet users is for other reasons. One, to satisfy big American media companies who want to use retained data to threated those whom they deem to be copyright violators.

        Australian ISPs have been given until April by the government to agree on a scheme for preventing what the big film and music companies call copyright theft. The mid-March deadline for passing data retention laws fits into that scheme neatly.

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