06.25.14
Posted in Courtroom, Deception, Patents at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The LLP echo chamber
Summary: Heaps of editorials and analyses from patent-centric firms pretend that nothing has changed after the Supreme Court abolished patents on “abstract ideas” (as opposed to working implementations)
POTENTIALLY substantial patent changes are afoot, especially owing to a decision from SCOTUS. A new article by Timothy B. Lee chastises this court for not understanding technology, which is a typical problem with judges. “The Supreme Court doesn’t understand software, and that’s a problem,” says Lee. “Patent litigation has become a huge problem for the software industry. And on Thursday, the Supreme Court could have solved that problem with the stroke of a pen. Precedents dating back to the 1970s place strict limits on software patents. The court could have clearly reiterated that those old precedents still apply, and that they rule out most patents on software.
“Instead, perhaps fearing the backlash from invalidating billions of dollars worth of patents, the court took an incremental approach. It ruled that the specific patent at issue in the case was invalid. But it didn’t articulate any clear rules for software patents more generally. In effect, the court kicked the can down the road, leaving a huge question mark floating over most software patents.”
SCOTUS can hardly distinguish between UML, pseudo code, and source code. The ambiguities left behind are already being exploited by patent lawyers and here is a new example from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, another from Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox P.L.L.C., and one from Choate Hall & Stewart LLP, to name just three (these flood the media these days, day after day). Well, at first came lots of media reports (written by journalists) declaring a lot of software patents dead and later came (and still comes) the flood of “analyses” by lawyers, rewriting the history to assure their clients that it is worth patenting software and that nothing has really changed.
In recent days we found more examples from Proskauer Rose LLP, saying that “Applying this rationale, the Court found that the claims at issue recited computer steps that are “purely conventional” and a “basic function[] of a computer.”15 The Supreme Court therefore affirmed the Federal Circuit and held the claims were ineligible under § 101.”
The SCOTUS decision was too weak in some sense and law firms are spinning it in their favour. Here is an example where the title says “Supreme Court silent on general eligibility of software patents” (not entirely true). Cooley LLP , Fenwick & West LLP, Seyfarth Shaw LLP and Lathrop & Gage LLP also try to assure their clients that patenting more algorithms is OK, as if nothing has changed. “Although the Court’s decision provides some clarity concerning the inventive effect of reciting computer implementation within patent claims,” says the last analysis, “there remains some ambiguity concerning how courts will define “abstract ideas” moving forward (indeed, the Court stated that it “need not labor to delimit the precise contours of the ‘abstract ideas’ category in this case”).”
Code is already copyrighted, so one might argue that patenting anything but code would be patenting “abstract ideas”. Suffice to say, this is not what greedy patent lawyers are going to tell customers for whom they produce useless papers that the USPTO almost blindly stamps for approval.
Patent lawyers continue to rely on the ignorance or gullibility among judges (who are themselves lawyers and are rarely technical enough to grasp programming). Perhaps any court that deals with patents should have an imperative to be technical. CAFC, for example, needs to be abolished for being corrupt and also utterly dumb on technology. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Countering the very disturbing marketing illusion that Facebook and its (in part) owner Microsoft are warming up to FOSS while in reality they hoard patents and use them offensively
Surveillance giant and meta-advertising company Facebook has been running an effective campaign to openwash its data centres, hardware, programming tools, and software, despite the fact that Facebook is proprietary and very malicious. Facebook is also partly owned by Microsoft and passes its data to Microsoft, which uses people's data against them. Facebook, like Microsoft, is close to the NSA and we noted in daily links, there is a high-profile European court case dealing with it.
Facebook not only started with misappropriation of source code (Mark Zuckerberg took over people’s work that they had paid him for) but also with unoriginal ideas. There were sites like Facebook before it (far less privacy-infringing), well before Zuckerberg scraped people’s faces off Web sites to make his first controversial site that got him in a lot of disciplinary trouble.
There is a patent case underway, potentially showing Facebook’s lack of originality. The plaintiff is a Dutch programmer, not a patent troll. It is going to be interesting to see how it ends up, not just because it involves darn patents but because it may teach Facebook, which hoards patents, a lesson about the harms of software patents. While Facebook tries to openwash its operations it is a usually patenting a lot of basic software ideas and also using these to sue companies. How ‘open’ is that? Patent extortion, just like Microsoft.
“Facebook is also partly owned by Microsoft and passes its data to Microsoft, which uses people’s data against them.”The UBM-run Dr. Dobbs continues its campaign of openwashing of Microsoft, especially courtesy of Mono and .NET booster Andrew Binstock (he is the Executive Editor of the site). Here he is paying lip service to Microsoft again, giving it much needed help it by using the “.NET section” of a news site to openwash .NET. “How far the company has come from its early dismissal of open source,” says Binstock, but has he really paid attention? The very fact that Andrew Binstock is the Executive Editor should say a lot about whose agenda is served at Dr. Dobbs these days (after the acquisition).
Microsoft’s Android pretense, as mentioned the other day, is that it is actually a backer while in reality it extorts Android and runs a program for ‘licensing’ Android (which is not a Microsoft product). When Microsoft ‘tips’ an Android phone it should not be shocking because it is part of the plan to legitimise extortion, pretending (e.g. to regulators) that Microsoft is not a hostile actor. At the same time as this article there is an unusually high volume of articles with Microsoft revisionism along those lines.
Overall, these campaigns of openwashing and especially the efforts from Microsoft boosters like Binstock ought to remind us to keep our eyes open and our brains working. There is a deception endeavour going on. In some internal documents that came out through legal action Microsoft speaks very explicitly of the needs for such endeavours. █
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Posted in Patents at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Obsession with shares instead of sharing
Summary: Deviation from the mentality which says ideas should be patented and ‘protected’ (meaning that others are prevented from using similar ideas) based on new examples from the media
THE world of MBAs is vastly different from that of engineers. When all that matters is oneself (financially), then the notion of sharing makes little sense, as long as one can exploit or hoard others’ work (the selfish approach). This is why, despite engineers’ spirit of sharing (wanting to show their achievements), many companies continue to embrace secrecy and isolation.
Bloomberg (Wall Street-friendly press) gives its press platform to a famous patent troll, Jay Walker. This grooming piece is highly disturbing as it helps the likes of Walker (patent trolls) and the USPTO make patents seem almost synonymous with innovation (classic lie). Monopoly and protectionism are being spun as a wonderful thing. That’s what corporate media likes to do. It’s repeated so often that many people actually believe it without questioning.
“Monopoly and protectionism are being spun as a wonderful thing.”We recently countered the marketing nonsense that associated/conflated de-weaponising patents with becoming “open source”. Tesla did not open up designs of cars and make them downloadable or anything, but the corporate press sure helps Tesla’s marketing by stating that “Tesla founder has given away patents on electric car technology” (not given away actually). This is shameless PR for reasons that we highlighted before. “Elon Musk took the decision to invest heavily in patent protection. Without patents, Tesla won’t have any control over the commercial opportunities of its inventions,” says this generally poor coverage from the financial press (equating patents with currency). A Red Hat site did yet another article about this, saying that “Elon Musk and crew at Tesla Motors made some big waves last week. In case you missed this recent news roundup, it was announced that Tesla is effectively relinquishing their patent portfolio—particularly around charging stations.”
Here is a VC (venture capitalist) who opposes software patents (Fred Wilson is one of several) weighing in again. To quote: “If you did a topic analysis on AVC over the past 10+ years that I’ve been blogging, I suspect patent reform would rate highly. I’ve been advocating for eliminating software patents and cutting back patent protection broadly as loudly and frequently as I can. I believe that sharing intellectual property will lead to way more innovation than hoarding and protecting it. I’ve seen a huge amount of pain and agony inflicted on innovative companies by trolls and “inventors” who never did anything other than write their ideas down on paper. Having ideas is not innovation. Making something new and different and putting it into the market is innovation.”
So basically, several VCs too want to see a society that shares ideas. Patents may not be needed at all. Even investors can reject them. Patents are a threat when counterparts and trolls use them. Here is a post titled “What If Drug Patents Were Written Like Software Patents?” To quote: “Not happening, that one, and it’s a good thing. But stuff nearly that vague and idiotic is all over the software patent landscape. Such patents list a superficially impressive amount of detail about how their “invention” is to be implemented, but all too often, that scheme turns out to mean something like “Someone uses a computer to contact a web server” or “Someone turns on their mobile phone”. It would be as if we in the drug industry could enable our compounds by citing a few synthetic organic chemistry textbooks – that’s how you make ‘em, right there!”
In general, much of the whole patent hype is inherently bad, as it encourages isolation. Tesla is at least realising this after it wasted a lot of money patenting a lot of stuff. For that Tesla deserves some credit. It acknowledges its wasteful mistakes now, grasping a culture of sharing instead. The lesson we should learn from Tesla is not patents giveaway; we should learn from Tesla’s error and avoid this error by never patenting stuff in the first place. Tesla merely gave back what it took away. █
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06.24.14
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The press is awash with Microsoft propaganda that negates truths, such as Microsoft as having “warmth towards open source” (like lawsuits), Microsoft having big share in virtualisation (based on revenue/sales alone), and Microsoft “continu[ing] Android push” (actually, extorting and derailing Android)
EVERY now and then we see some Microsoft openwashing that we are urged to respond to. There are some propaganda agents out there (some working directly for Microsoft) whose aim is to portray Microsoft as privacy-respecting, Open Source-friendly, law-obeying/abiding, and competition-respecting. Earlier today we saw a pro-Microsoft site saying that “Microsoft Refuses To Open Source VB6″, then issuing the following revisionist nonesense: “With Microsoft’s new warmth towards open source it seems a small thing to ask for VB6 to be open sourced.”
There is no “new warmth towards open source”, there is openwashing and propaganda, that’s all. Microsoft pretended to have open-sourced some very old software a few months ago, but that was a sheer lie, promoted for the most part by Microsoft-friendly sites that disregard facts. We need to keep track of such lies, which usually come from sites that have historically been linked to Microsoft (sometimes their writers come from Microsoft).
Here is the MSN-connected (Microsoft, and Microsoft Windows-run) Fool.com belittling Red Hat by warping the way one counts share in virtualisation (they count sales, but Free software is rarely actually sold). It’s the same propaganda line that Gartner and IDC use when it comes to servers share. They give the illusion that proprietary software dominates virtualisation, but that’s nonsense. VMware is linked to the NSA through RSA, and it is run by people from Microsoft (the NSA’s #1 PRISM partner and more). Like Hyper-V, VMware is proprietary and it probably facilitates back door access like Hyper-V does (Hyper-V runs on Windows, which has back doors, hence Hyper-V and every guest VM under it has an NSA back door). We need to find back against disinformation that belittles the share of GNU/Linux and Free software by framing it as a purely financial question.
The third example for today comes from an Android-hostile site. It now gives the illusion (again) that Microsoft supports Android rather than what it actually does. Microsoft extorts Android and derails it by trying to turn a portion of it into a Microsoft surveillance platform.
All the examples above show us not journalism but agenda disguised as reporting. Please report such coverage to us so that we can counter it. █
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Posted in Fraud, Microsoft, Open XML at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
OOXML: When crime pays off
Summary: Reports from the European Commission’s Web site reveal the degree to which OOXML is successfully derailing migrations to Free/libre software in the public sector
SOME of the criminals involved in the OOXML festival of corruption have already left Microsoft (e.g. Oliver Bell, who joined a Gates-funded Gates grooming operation) or joined Microsoft (e.g. Peter O’Kelly), so holding them accountable would be hard, especially now that years have passed and conditions have changed. Microsoft got away with a lot of crime, including bribery. Nobody was sent to jail or even put on trial. Microsoft is above the law, no doubt. It’s an international problem that we find also in the case of large banks, not just software companies with strong ties to the NSA for example.
According to this new report from the European Commission’s Web site, “Open source [is] hindered by OOXML incompatibilities” (as intended and planned by Microsoft). To qoute: “The mixing of outdated and incompatible versions of OOXML, an XML document format, is hindering implementation in open source office alternatives, according to a study published on the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) today. The different OOXML versions also pose difficulties for public administrations that use different proprietary office suite versions, and the inconsistencies are causing problems with older documents. The OOXML document format is hindering the interoperability of suites of office productivity tools.”
There is also this accompanying report titled “Complex singularity versus openness”.
“Does not even mention ODF,” pointed out one of our readers about this article. “When M$ forced it’s XML file-format on the world for office suites it deliberately created lock-in,” wrote Pogson.
This once again reminds us why Microsoft went as far as criminal activities. It sought to prevent people all around the world from taking their data to better platforms or even create new data in formats that would continue to make the data accessible. To us at Techrights is has always been somewhat of an outrageous mystery that nobody was sent to jail for it. It shows that the system which purports to uphold justice is very arbitrary and unjust, with Microsoft positioned on the side of immunity while it helps secret agencies illegally violate rights of citizens. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 10:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: “Games for Windows Live” may be dead; Steam Machines run GNU/Linux and Microsoft’s attempt to make hardware still fail very badly, and it extends beyond Xbox
THE other day I was approached by someone who had abandoned Windows for games. With Steam OS (and Steam for various other GNU/Linux distributions), one does not need Windows. Historically, many gamers said they kept Windows around just for games, but now the situation is being reversed. There are Windows users who turn to GNU/Linux just for the games. It’s a real problem for Windows and rumours say that Microsoft is officially shutting down “Games for Windows Live”. The ‘damage control’ from Microsoft, or the issuance of face-saving PR, really speaks volumes. “Reports of GFWL’s death have been greatly exaggerated,” says the subheader, but we already know, based on previous dead Microsoft products (many of them games-related), that this is just an attempt to play a linguistic game (semantics) to deny the inevitable. According to this other new review of Microsoft hardware (which has historically been a disaster like Xbox 360), “Microsoft’s latest tablet, the Surface Pro 3 [...] one of the hardest of its kind to repair, giving it a laughably low score of just one out of 10.”
The only thing that keeps Microsoft paid for the time being (and some people locked in) is Microsoft Office, owing to Microsoft crimes that the next post will recall. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Russia’s government has been flirting with the idea of switching to open source for some time, but often that’s been just another example of waving the threat around to encourage Microsoft to offer more favourable licensing terms for using its software, as has happened frequently in the UK. However, a new move by the Russian authorities might finally see them making the switch:
Russia’s Industry and Trade Ministry plans to replace US microchips Intel and AMD, used in government’s computers, with domestically-produced micro processor Baikal in a project worth dozens of millions of dollars, business daily Kommersant reported Thursday.
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Desktop
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Despite all the improvements we have made over the years, Linux is still too hard. We need more users, more designers, and more UX experts looking at and using Linux desktops every day to isolate and eliminate these pain points. The way we gain more users is concentrate on the user experience during every step of development. The more people we have extolling the virtues of the Linux desktop, the more people it will attract to the platform. Eventually, developers will follow the people, but we’ve got to provide a solid foundation first.
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Server
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On the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers, which a group of researchers update twice each year to coincide with supercomputing conferences, the combined performance of all the machines increased from 250 petaflops in November 2013 to 274 petaflops in June 2014.
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While there are competing vendors, chip architectures, core counts and networking fabrics at play in the list of the worlds top 500 supercomputers, when it comes to the operating system of choice, there is no debate. Linux dominates the list with a 97 percent share, being installed on 485 systems on the top 500 list.
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IBM is accelerating the adoption of open technologies for cloud computing, with the goal of assisting enterprises in integrating existing infrastructures into the cloud space. To this end, IBM said it is working on an open integration model with Docker, an open source platform for developers and systems administrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications, and the open source Docker project community.
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At the invitation only Linux Enterprise End-User Summit held at the Convene Center Financial District, Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s executive director, told an audience of several hundred Wall Street executives and top Linux developers what he sees as the future of technology.
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Kernel Space
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SUSE developers continue to pursue mainlining their kGraft approach that’s an alternative to the existing Kslice option or Red Hat’s Kpatch mechanism for live kernel patching. To date there’s been no concerted effort to try to merge these kGraft and Kpatch solutions. Today’s revision to kGraft addresses developer comments during the first round of upstream kernel developer review.
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Applications
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LFTP 4.5.2, a sophisticated file transfer program with a command-line interface that supports FTP, HTTP, FISH, SFTP, HTTPS, and FTPS protocols, is now available for download.
Every operation made with LFTP is reliable, which means that, if any non-fatal error occurs, the operation is retried automatically.
This latest version of LFTP is not a big update, but the developers have made a few interesting changes and improvements.
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FFmpeg 2.2.4 is the latest major release and this current build is just a maintenance version, with a few updates and minor changes.
“It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 2.2 release branch, which was cut from master on 2014-03-01. Amongst lots of other changes, it includes all changes from ffmpeg-mt, libav master of 2014-03-01, libav 10.1 as of 2014-06-23,” reads the official announcement.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Back in 2006, when I was contemplating a move from Windows to Linux, I knew I would have to give up computer games. This wasn’t because there were no games written for Linux, it’s just that they weren’t very good. Most of the best commercial games were (and still are) written for Windows, but that’s been changing dramatically over the last year, thanks to Steam, the Internet-based software distribution platform from Valve Corp.
The move to support Linux came fairly late but is drawing impetus from the top.
In July 2012, Valve managing director Gabe Newell had complained that Windows 8 was “a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.”
Observing that many people still stayed away from Linux because of a lack of games, he said Valve was working to bring Steam titles to Linux as a hedging strategy.
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However, following a string of harassment from Linux users in the Steam forums (and perhaps more worryingly, in private emails), the developer has stated that he is now only working on the port in a much more limited way and has abandoned working on it in his spare time since the abuse has taken away any enjoyment he got from it. As a result, the port will take far longer than anticipated. At the same time, I fear that any ‘backlash’ of abusive comments could lead to all work being abandoned…
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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As Michael Bohlender (known to some e.g. for his GSoC project about Kmail Active last year) needed to do some interviews for his anthropology course at the university he decided to reactive the People behind KDE series or, as they are now named, the People of KDE series.
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Plasma Media Center 1.2 was released as a Christmas gift. Now, we bring to you Plasma Media Center 1.3! As always, we have made sure to make it easier to enjoy your favorite videos, music and photos – both from your collection as well as online sources. A big focus has been performance improvements when showing you the media on your computer as well as general polish for the UI.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Boxes is an GNOME application in Fedora that is used to create, manage, and run virtual machines, and Google Summer of Code student Adrien Plazas is working on implementing multiple monitor support in Boxes.
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In a recent forum post, John Lindgren, Audacious Manager and Developer, notes that the long-term goal is to switch to Qt however, the GTK+ interfaces need to remain stable in the meantime and “going back to GTK2 appears to be the only way to achieve this”.
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GNOME Boxes is still on the road of maturing into a nice open-source program for managing virtual machines and remote systems.
GNOME Boxes is a very easy-to-use program from the GNOME Desktop that uses libvirt for managing virtual machines with the various forms of Linux virtualization or connecting to a remote system. Of course, virt-manager remains the dominant open-source Linux solution in this area, but GNOME Boxes continues to work out very nicely for strictly desktop users and other simple use-cases.
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A special PPA containing GTK+ applications with support for Mir has been recently created, enabling the users to test the new file manager, browser, image viewer and other apps specially developed for Mir and currently used only on Ubuntu Touch. For now, only Gedit, Gnome Calculator and Simple Scan are available for Mir, but new apps will join this list soon.
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I thought it might help a few people (including myself!) to perform the following categorized and referenced summary of the current “families” of non-commercial Linux distros. All of these distros have brief descriptions and rankings at the DistroWatch.com listing site [1].
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There are quite a few Linux distributions that take direct aim at the Windows users, but not all of them are as appreciated as Zorin OS. The developers have managed to release a fresh take on the old desktop paradigm used by Windows. It somewhat resembles that well-known interface, but it manages to also feel new.
This latest edition is still in the development stages and it will take a while until it is ready, but, from the looks of it, Zorin OS 9 RC is already a winner. It’s now based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), which was released a couple of months ago, meaning that it will also come with extended support.
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The Clonezilla team has just a released a new development version for this Linux distribution, but unlike the latest versions, the current build integrates a larger number of improvements, besides the regular Debian updates.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of June 24, 2014,” reads the official announcement.
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New Releases
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Another Makulu Linux distribution was released today, and that’s always good news! This time it is the KDE desktop for the Makulu 6.x series. The Xfce version of this was just released a couple of weeks ago, so i don’t exptect for there to be any major surprised: I hope that means this will not be a very lengthy post.
As usual, the release announcement gives a good overview of the what and why in this release. The most important specifics are that it is built on Linux kernel 3.14.7 and KDE SC 4.13.1. The download images are available from the Makulu Linux KDE page, it is a 32-bit (i686) build that is approximately 1.7GB in size. It is a hybrid ISO, so you can burn it to disk or dump it with dd to a USB stick, and it does not support UEFI boot.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia is a fork of the good old Mandriva, uses systemd as the default init event manager and GRUB1, while all the modern systems have switched to GRUB2. As you may know, Mageia 4 has been released in February 2014.
Recently, a point release of Mageia 4, Mageia 4.1 has been released, being powered by Kernel 3.12.21, in all the traditional flavors: KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce, RazorQt, MATE, and Cinnamon.
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Arch Family
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Arch Linux fans are frequently requesting more benchmarks of their preferred Linux distribution at Phoronix over claims that it’s faster than the likes of Ubuntu, more versatile, etc. Every once in a while I do deliver benchmarks of Arch but it’s not too frequent given that it’s a rolling-release distribution that’s very open to end-user tweaking and modification, thus hard to give a defined reference point for other users to compare their results against ours, as opposed to just say “download XYZ ISO, install, and then benchmark!” Thus when benchmarking a distribution like Gentoo or Arch, I prefer using one of the derivatives that at least deploys out of the box quickly, gives some sane default values to use for benchmarking, etc.
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Red Hat Family
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Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat believes the wait should be over. In a phone conversation over a two-day period following Red Hat’s earnings report last week, Whitehurst assured me his company has a stacked deck in that all-important new frontier known as OpenStack. With the sort of confidence you would expect for someone of Whitehurst’s pedigree, he proclaimed “no one knows OpenStack better than us.” Investors and analysts have no reason to doubt him.
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Fedora
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Now that systemd is running along nicely within the Fedora camp, the latest heated topic is over DNF with it expected to replace Yum in Fedora 22.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As the adoption rate of Linux on the desktop grows, so does the number of people who are considering making the switch to Ubuntu. These folks have heard all the good things, but, as per usual, not enough in the reality check department.
This article will offer a reality check, in addition to offering some critical advice to anyone thinking of making the leap over to Linux on the desktop.
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Ubuntu.com, the website of Canonical’s Linux-based operating system for PCs, servers, the cloud and (maybe soon) mobile devices, has received a series of subtle but significant upgrades recently, and more are on the way. Here’s a look at the latest site updates and additions for the cloud, Canonical’s partner network and more.
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After it reaches EOL, Ubuntu 13.10 will be still usable, but the users will not receive any updates and security patches anymore. Also, the developers will not be able to add applications on Lauchpad, with support for Ubuntu 13.10. Along with the EOL of Ubuntu 13.10, also the derivative systems like Linux Mint 16 will die.
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The Ubuntu One file service has been shut down by Canonical and the announcement was made a while back. Now, the company is also providing a very useful script for users to download their files before the service is closed for good and becomes inaccessible.
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Now that Mir 0.3 is past, Canonical developers remain hard at work on introducing new functionality to the Mir Display Server for the Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic Unicorn” release cycle.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17 Xfce includes enhancements to Update Manager, new artwork, better language settings, Xfce 4.10, long term support and much more.
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The team behind Linux Mint unveiled its latest update this week—Mint 17 using kernel 3.13.0-24, nicknamed “Qiana.” The new release indicates a major change in direction for what has quickly become one of the most popular Linux distros available today. Mint 17 is based on Ubuntu 14.04, and this decision appears to have one major driver. Consistency.
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Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
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The Linux Mint team has announced the release of Linux Mint 17 KDE codenamed Qiana. It’s based on KDE Software Compilation 4.13.0.
Some of the new features of LMK 17 include the ‘Update Manager’, which the team says “…shows more information, it looks better, it feels faster, and it gets less in your way. It no longer needs to reload itself in root mode when you click on it. It no longer checks for an Internet connection or waits for the network manager and it no longer locks the APT cache at session startup.”
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As you may know, Elementary OS is a popular Ubuntu derivative, which most likely has the most beautiful user interface amongst the Ubuntu derivatives (using Pantheon, a customized Gnome Shell version as the default DE). Due to the fact that the Elementary developers use only the LTS versions of Ubuntu as code base, Elementary OS 0.2 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Elementary OS 0.3 (not yet released) is based on Ubuntu 14.04.
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When we consider the Linux desktop, most often GNOME 3, Ubuntu Unity, KDE, Cinnamon, and XFCE come to mind. Those desktops range from the old-school functional to the new-school modern. Each has its strengths and weaknesses along with a vocal following to give it a push into the eyes of the public. For the most part, we use one of those desktops with little thought to making a switch. That’s been my modus operandi for the longest time. Ubuntu Unity has been my desktop. I enjoy its combination of efficiency, powerhouse search, and modern flare.
But then along comes Linux Deepin, a distribution from China that looks to upturn the Linux desktop with an almost Apple-like sensibility. Linux Deepin offers a keen UI design that outshines most every desktop you’ve experienced. Along with that total redesign of the UI, comes a few bonus apps that might easily steal the show from most default apps.
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This latest iteration of Peppermint was released a year ago and, back then, it was using Ubuntu 13.04. The developers have moved up from that version and they are now using Ubuntu 14.04, which is the latest LTS released by Canonical.
Future Peppermint users will benefit from this decision made by the developers because it means that the support period for the OS will most likely coincide with the one for Ubuntu, which is five years.
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Toughpad FZ-X1 is powered by the Android 4.2.2 operating system and runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 series 1.7GHz Quad Core processor.
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Atrust unveiled a “t66″ thin client that runs Linux on a quad-core Freescale i.MX6 SoC, and supports Citrix ICA/HDX, RDP, and VMWare Horizon View protocols.
As power consumption grows in priority, the thin client world is increasingly turning to ARM processors. Atrust Computer Corp. offers a number of ARM-based thin clients, and like its x86-based Intel Atom- and Via-based systems, they run a custom Atrust Linux OS. While the company’s previous ARM systems ran on single-core Cortex-A8-based Sitara system-on-chips from Texas Instruments, the Atrust t66 runs on a faster, quad-core, Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6. No clock rate was supplied for the t66, but the i.MX6 typically runs at 1.2GHz, and offers 2D, 3D, and video coprocessors.
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Quirky unveiled an open, Linux-based “Wink” home automation hub and mobile app that control devices available at GE, The Home Depot, and elsewhere.
New York City based Quirky announced its new Wink subsidiary, home automation hub, and smartphone app in The New York Times, and released a brief announcement in preparation for next week’s full launch. A Quirky rep confirmed our suspicions that the Wink Hub runs embedded Linux, but offered no further hardware details.
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Nest has announced its Nest Developer Program to create a more connected home. That could mean a fully automated experience is not too far off.
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Nest Labs is buying Dropcam for $555 million, and will integrate Dropcam’s Linux-based surveillance cameras into its own Linux-based home automation system.
Nest’s deal to acquire Dropcam for $555 million was revealed by Recode and confirmed in a Nest blog post by co-founder Matt Rogers. The acquisition follows Nest’s own acquisition by Google for $3.2 billion, announced back in January.
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Dropcam is probably the most popular home monitoring start-up, and now the company is owned by Google. Dropcam was acquired recently by Nest for a cool $555 million, the same company Google acquired for $3.2 billion just four months ago.
According to the company, it is undertaking this acquisition on its own without Google’s oversight. Furthermore, we understand that Dropcam will be folded into the Nest brand after everything is completed, and employees of the company will have to adopt the culture at Nest.
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Phones
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The third “early adopter” release of Jolla’s Sailfish OS platform is now available for Google’s Nexus 4 “Mako” smart-phone.
As actual Jolla hardware is still in short supply around the world, Jolla continues investing in their Sailfish for Android effort to port their interesting Linux-based MeeGo-derived platform to various Android devices. With today’s Sailfish OS EA3 release for the Nexus 4 there’s Jolla Store support and much more.
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Ballnux
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Android
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Two years after the initial launch in the US, Google’s now infamous Glasses are finally available to buy in the UK. However they are not going cheap retailing in the UK for a neat £1000 (roughly $1650). Furthermore Google have restricted the sale of Glass to only individuals over the age of 18 and who have a credit card. This is probably due to the technology still being in a ‘beta’ stage and Google not wanting to expose minors to the technology which was of yet is undecided as to its health and eye complications.
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It’s the end of a fiscal year and the beginning of a lot of headaches. It’s as if every part of your body screams “pay your taxes!” But hey, who has the time to sit down and crunch all those numbers? It gets even more difficult to manage them if you are always on the move.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, don’t worry. We have a list of Android apps you can use to help you manage your taxes no matter where you go.
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Michael Williams, BIRT Product Evangelist & Forums Manager at Actuate, outlines some key points to keep in mind for building your own open source community.
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Cisco says it is experimenting with ciphers it claims can better protect traffic privacy in cloud systems and result in bandwidth and storage savings.
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Cisco has released a new open-source block cipher called FNR that is designed for encrypting small chunks of data, such as MAC addresses or IP addresses. The cipher is still in the experimental stage, but Cisco has released the source code and a demo application.
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Open source is the combined contributions of millions of independent volunteers. This single concept brings with it a few inherent realities. In this article let’s look at a few potentially concerning points about the nature of open source contributions.
One of the major, oft-touted benefits of open source software is the diverse, large, and ever ready army of developers contributing to the project. This can be an incredibly powerful argument when demonstrating the value of open source to a corporation. However, the larger the community and the bigger the pool of contributors the more opportunity there exists for problems or potential security risks.
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Events
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Open source is a growing and arguably successful strategy for making our corner of the world a better place. While altruism motivates many individuals and some companies to make things open source, others are in it for the money. On the other hand, many companies use or are forced to use open source for its perceived cost-saving value, often disregarding its risks. So what’s the business case for open source?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Yesterday, the Knight-Mozilla Open News initiative announced that it will lead a collaboration among Mozilla, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to create a new platform. With $3.89 million in funding, they’ll work together on a platform that will allow readers and users to upload pictures, videos, and other media for news outlets to use. From the release:
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SaaS/Big Data
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ownCloud is organizing an ownCloud conference/hackathon at the Technische Universität Berlin this August. And as Steffen Lindner shared on twitter, the German REWE supermarket is offering cheap tickets to go to Berlin from all over Germany during the event!
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As the cloud market matures, customer behavior is changing and questions remain about where the true value of the technology will lie in the future.
A group of industry professionals tackled a variety of topics as part of a panel discussion on the future of the cloud last week at a Cloud Standards Customer Council symposium. They discussed the impact of savvy customers and looked ahead at trends around burgeoning cloud services, vendor lock-in issues and the role of open source.
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“When it gets there, we will support the OpenStack API,” Mikos relented.
Dholakia noted that CloudStack, like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, has long maintained a “compatibility layer for the Amazon API precisely because, as business folk, we follow the dollars.”
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Over the last several months, GoGrid CEO John Keagy has been quietly holding meetings with partners and rivals alike to share an ambitious plan.
His brainchild has the potential to shake up the entire cloud services industry by uniting some of its largest players around an open source project: a universal cloud orchestration engine called OpenOrchestration.org.
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Databases
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CMS
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Being able to present that content effectively depends on having the right foundation for your site, and that means choosing a content management system (CMS) that will best match up with your site’s intended purpose.
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Healthcare
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I ask more questions in this survey of free and open source healthcare developers for my thesis project: “The state of open source electronic medical records: An anthropology study.” My goal is to better understand the characteristics, motivations, and knowledge background of healthcare developers in order to determine what is behind the success of free/open source software in healthcare.
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BSD
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With LLVM developers already having lots of C++1y / C++14 support implemented, they have begun working on “highly experimental” support for C++1z — the next major revision to the C++ programming language anticipated for release in 2017.
C++14/C++1y should be officially released this year as a small update over C++11, for which LLVM/Clang (and GCC) already have decent support. In fact, with the current Clang 3.4 stable release all of the key C++11 functionality should be in place.
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Public Services/Government
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The Swiss government is to survey the economic potential of public administrations’ use of open source software, and the federal government is to review its 2005 strategy on this type of software solutions, following questions by two members of the Swiss Parliamentarian Group on Digital Sustainability.
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Licensing
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Open source is an environment where no permission is required to use the source code; the flexibility to do as you wish is already provided. The open source license creates this permissionless environment, and developers are able to gather around a source code commons to meet their individual needs without having to seek approval from anywhere. Requiring a CLA to contribute immediately obstructs this goal.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open source software has been brought to wider public attention by brands like Linux and Firefox, both of which who have thrived to gigantic proportions due to their open nature. The concept of open source is quite simple and Wikipedia essentializes it quite well:
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Open Hardware
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Open Sensor Platform accelerates sensor device software development for ARM-based mobile computers, wearables and IoT devices.
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Programming
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“I do think that everybody should learn to code, at least on a basic level,” said Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone. “It would teach them to break down a problem into small, manageable portions and solve each of those parts logically.” It’s actually “less about the code itself than solving a problem logically,” he said. “That’s a skill that I think everybody should have.”
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Hardware
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Intel has asked AMD about access to their Mantle technology for experimenting with this graphics API alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL.
Intel and AMD confirmed to PCWorld that the two companies were communicating about Mantle cooperation but “[Intel] remains committed to what it calls open standards like Microsoft’s DirectX API.”
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Security
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Do you know that the URL bar in your browser is a potential security hole? I didn’t either. I barely look at the thing unless I’m punching in a search term. But according to Drew Davidson, vice president of design at ÄKTA, that thin strip of UI chrome is a little keyhole that a hacker can use to infiltrate a company’s website.
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In the wake of Heartbleed, there may soon be as many variants of the open source OpenSSL software for encrypting Web traffic as there are Pokemon characters—or something like that. A few days ago, Google (GOOG) became the latest organization to announce its own OpenSSL spin, which it’s calling BoringSSL.
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Rob Clark, the developer employed by Red Hat who has near single-handedly been developing Freedreno as a reverse-engineered, open-source GPU driver for Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics hardware, made a big discovery. Rob was playing around with the Amazon Fire TV that boasts a Qualcomm SoC and runs on the Qualcomm proprietary graphics driver when discovering a “high risk” security issue.
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Sometimes it feels like the whole world went and got crazy. It’s true, with every passing day, all types of newfangled gadgets, doodads and wild ideas are released. Google is at the forefront, with Google Glass, self-driving cars and Nest internet-connected thermostats. Truth be told, I’m hardly a Luddite, but I am wary of having a computer and camera strapped to my head or having my home connected to the internet.
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The Internet-of-Things is a thing. If you haven’t heard about it yet, get ready because we’re in the early stages of an explosion of technology that will connect, monitor, and in some cases share almost every aspect of our lives. Fortinet conducted a survey of consumers to find out what people think about the security and privacy concerns of the Internet-of-Things.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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“The Polish-American alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of security. It’s bullshit.” – Polish Foreign Minister Radoslav Sikorski, secretly taped in early 2014. Discuss. Use only one side of the paper.
The publication of Radoslav Sikorski’s comments in the Polish weekly magazine Wprost will not help his bid to become the European Union’s foreign policy chief, but there are senior foreign policy officials elsewhere who might be tempted to make similar remarks (though perhaps not in alcohol-fuelled conversations in well-known restaurants where they might be overheard). And there are those in Washington who are saying the same thing.
[...]
Despite the general US obsession with the “terrorist threat”, Obama may actually realise how little the outcome of the current turmoil in Iraq really matters to American security, and Iraq’s oil, post-fracking, is not even a consideration any more. No core American national interests here. So the US cavalry will not be riding over the hill to the rescue.
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A secret government memo was released Monday that reveals that the Obama administration used the war against al-Qaida to justify the use of drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorism overseas.
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This morning, a federal appeals court released a government memorandum, dated July 16, 2010, authorizing both the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen, in Yemen.
The publication of the Office of Legal Counsel memo comes, as the court noted, after a lengthy delay. The ACLU (along with the New York Times) has been fighting for this memo since we first asked for it in a Freedom of Information Act request submitted in October 2011.
Today’s release by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is an important victory for transparency. But while the memo advances the public record in significant ways, it still does not answer many key questions about the government’s claimed authority to kill U.S. citizens outside of active battlefields. Here are several important takeaways from today’s release.
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The 41-page memo — whose contents had previously been summarized and released piecemeal — was heavily redacted for national security reasons, with several entire pages and other passages whited out.
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The Obama administration justified using drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorism overseas by citing the war against al-Qaida and by saying a surprise attack against an American in a foreign land would not violate the laws of war, according to a previously secret government memorandum.
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Alternatively, Barron suggests, a government gets to use force if doing so is part of a war. This, of course, ignores the UN Charter and the Kellogg Briand Pact and the illegality of wars, as well as the novelty of claiming that a war exists everywhere on earth forever and ever. (None of Barron’s arguments justifies governmental murder on US soil any less than off US soil.)
In essence, Barron seems to argue, the people who wrote the laws were thinking about private citizens and terrorists, not the government (which, somehow, cannot be a terrorist), and therefore it’s OK for the government to violate the laws.
Then there’s the problem of Congressional authorization of war, or lack thereof, which Barron gets around by pretending that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force was as broad as the White House pretends rather than worded to allow targeting only those responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
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“I believe every American has the right to know when their government believes it is allowed to kill them, and the public release of this memo is a positive step toward reducing the secrecy that surrounds this question,” Sen. Ron Wyden said in a statement. “However, there are many important questions that this memo does not address.”
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In May of 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder published a letter in response to requests from Senator Patrick Leahey for more information on the justification of targeted killings, as it applies to American Citizens. Holder wrote that Americans could be targeted “in a foreign country against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qa’ida or its associated forces, and who is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans, in the following circumstances: (1) the U.S. government has determined, after a thorough and careful review, that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; (2) capture is not feasible; and (3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”
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Below that, the memo cites Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) v. Government of Israel, a 2006 Israeli Supreme Court decision that ruled that the targeted assassinations of hundreds of Palestinians since the start of the second intifada were legal and did not violate international law.
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According to many strategic experts and journalists like Seymour Hersh, the ISIS, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (who was released from a US captivity in 2007 or 2009 is a CIA asset), are basically covert operations of US-Saudi intelligence agencies. If true, once again we see the evidence of CIA-Mossad creating terror organisations to achieve their strategic objectives, which would prove that the US and its allies deploy terror to attain their strategic objectives.
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Ahmed Chalabi rolled into a displaced persons camp in northern Iraq on Saturday with his entourage, and held an impromptu press conference that looked very much like a campaign stop.
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The very details of the ISIS military success in the key Iraqi oil center, Mosul, are suspect. According to well-informed Iraqi journalists, ISIS overran the strategic Mosul region, site of some of the world’s most prolific oilfields, with barely a shot fired in resistance. According to one report, residents of Tikrit reported remarkable displays of “soldiers handing over their weapons and uniforms peacefully to militants who ordinarily would have been expected to kill government soldiers on the spot.”
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Syrian rebel groups are recruiting 15-year-old children to battle against the government forces after promising them a free education, says the Human Rights Watch report, released on June, 23. Worse still, those groups are strongly backed by the US and Israel, US political commentator told Radio VR.
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To this administration, transparency comes in the form of deleted pages. But too much of America’s legal excuse for killing an American citizen remains classified
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US justifies killings as acts of war despite civilian deaths, global precedent.
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The DOJ memo confirms that the government’s drone killing program is built on gross distortions of law.
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Instead, the memo turns out to be a slapdash pastiche of legal theories — some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law — that was clearly tailored to the desired result. Perhaps the administration held out so long to avoid exposing the thin foundation on which it based such a momentous decision.
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The first 11 pages of the 41-page document were redacted. The Justice Department’s justification for a CIA strike of al-Awlaki was also heavily redacted.
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Sitting in front of screens pressing kill buttons drone pilots often don’t have enough knowledge about what is going on in the area they target and what they are doing to the people in that zone. This removes an important moral barrier making killing as easy as in a computer game. As technology rapidly develops, new drones are getting better surveillance cameras and operators have opportunity to watch their targets better. This restores the crucial moral constraint to a certain extent. At the same time technology development is fraught with another danger which is higher automation of many killer robots including UAVs, says Mark Coeckelbergh, a professor of philosophy at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.
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A wave of air strikes by the Pakistani military in the country’s tribal northwest has killed at least 291 people, including a minimum 16 civilians, over the past six months, a Bureau investigation has found.
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The first purchase orders have been made for the Skunk Riot Control Copter, a terrifying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with paintballs, pepper spray and blinding flashlights.
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Ciesielka said, “We expect the capability of this drone detection system to evolve over time, like any technology. We at DDC need testers to provide valid feedback. All technology has to start somewhere.
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Blair and Clinton are both set to speak at the festival on Monday, along with former CIA Director David Petraeus.
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Franco and Rogen play “celebrity journalists” who land an interview with Kim, which prompts the CIA to recruit them in an assassination plot.
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It is unseemly that the quiet passing of John Hadden – an American who tried to avert Israel’s 1967 attack on Egypt, and then keep it from escalating – is so utterly overshadowed by laudatory obituaries for the Israeli he exposed looting weapons-grade nuclear material from Pennsylvania.
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It’s embarrassing to admit when obvious click-bait headlines work like a charm, but when BuzzFeed ran the headline, “Is This The Craziest Rant A Fox News Host Has Ever Done?” it proved hard to resist. After all, we’ve seen some pretty crazy rants over the years.
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There’s a certain rhythm to politics, an element of predictability that is as reliable as the tides, or a finely made Swiss timepiece. Among these imperturbable political rhythms is the hackery of Ed Klein: Whenever Hillary Clinton is in the news, it’s guaranteed that Klein will pop up with a salacious and poorly sourced book attacking the former first lady, and that it will get a lot of attention from conservatives who should know better than to trust Klein but don’t actually care.
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That’s in contrast to the relatively stable competition of the last 20 years, when Democrats have won four of six presidential elections and Republicans won House majorities in eight of 10 congressional contests, always by less than landslide margins. The parties’ stands on issues have remained familiar from one cycle to the next.
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Advocates of a noninterventionist foreign policy and the restoration of civil liberties in America haven’t had a reason to be optimistic in the past decade or so – but that is rapidly changing.
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The problem might be how “well-briefed” David Gregory is. Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program; there are some allegations that the country may have done some research that was geared towards eventual weapons development, but those allegations remain just that–allegations.
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A few days ago, Hillary Clinton was interviewed on Fox News by Greta Van Susteren and Bret Baier. Many viewers were expecting a half hour of painful questions and accusations. After all, Van Susteren is the Fox News host who slammed comedian Jon Stewart, grilled congressional candidate Mike Dickinson, and came head to head with fellow Fox News anchor Erick Erickson.
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During an interview this afternoon on the NSA revelations leaked by Edward Snowden last year, Shepard Smith and Glenn Greenwald got into a tense exchange over how Fox News’ coverage of President Obama impacts U.S. soldiers.
“Do you spend any time worrying that people might have died in this?” Smith asked Greenwald.
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Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald tells the story of whistleblower Edward Snowden in a new book called No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State. Greenwald is also the author of How Would a Patriot Act? and With Liberty and Justice for Some. He is a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator. And, since he began breaking the stories of the NSA’s mass surveillance he has taken on a new role as a founding editor of the new media outlet, The Intercept.
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Transparency Reporting
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WikiLeaks last week again pierced the veil of official secrecy that surrounds global trade negotiations. The peek it gave us should alarm everyone.
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Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyers on Tuesday filed a court petition to withdraw an arrest warrant for the WikiLeaks founder who has spent two years at Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden.
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The Union of Journalists in Kazakhstan (KZO) has awarded a top prize to Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, for his oustanding efforts in investigative journalism.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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I thought of that when I saw the new issue of Time magazine (6/30/14), which featured a short item on Kevin McCarthy, the new majority leader in Congress. As such, he is someone who certainly will be wielding enormous political power.
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The federal judge who halted the state investigation, Rudolph Randa, wrote an opinion so detached from First Amendment precedent, Wisconsin law, and the facts of the case that many legal experts believe that it will be reversed by the Seventh Circuit appellate court reviewing it. (Plus, Randa’s May 6 ruling was a preliminary ruling, not a final decision.) Other legal experts think Randa should not even be involved in the case, given that he is a regular attendee at “judicial junkets” funded by the Bradley and Koch foundations, which are closely tied to Walker and the group that filed the federal lawsuit, Wisconsin Club for Growth.
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“A solid majority of American adults say that social media have no influence at all on their purchasing decisions — suggesting that the advertising may be reaching smaller segments of the market, or that the influence on consumers is indirect or goes unnoticed,” Gallup concluded. The company said people are more likely to consult in-store displays, television commercials, mail catalogs and magazines than a brand’s Facebook or Twitter account when making a purchasing decision.
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Censorship
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Russia has asked Twitter to block access to a dozen accounts it deems “extremist”, the head of the country’s telecoms watchdog said, as Moscow seeks greater control over internet sites based beyond its borders.
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Privacy
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Law enforcement agencies are generally pretty happy with their automatic license plate readers. It allows them to harvest millions of plate/location records without having to exit their vehicles, much less slow them down. It also allows them to spring from their cruisers with guns out and force non-car thieves into submissive positions while they perform the sort of due diligence that should have been completed long before the cops/guns exited their respective holders.
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As a result of an Open Rights Group campaign, over 1300 customers have written to their internet service providers (ISPs) to ask why they are still retaining their web, email, SMS and phone data.
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On the contrary, GMail is a bit easier because I already use my aliases everywhere so I just need to open a Kolab account and update my forwarding rules. However we’re all Gmail users now.
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Professor and critic of Edward Snowden on leave after ‘sexting’ conversation with woman anonymously posted on the internet
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John Schindler—a former NSA counterintelligence officer and “secrecy expert” who made a name for himself in Conservative circles by trashing Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Glenn Greenwald—has deleted his Twitter and has been put on leave from his teaching post at Naval War College after a rather indecent communique went public on Twitter this weekend, reports Adam Weinstein at Gawker.
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The support of both Democrats and Republicans to an amendment that blocks warrantless searches of email and phone calls bodes well that Congress will rein in government spying on citizens, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., told The Enquirer on Monday.
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Glenn Greenwald is set to disclose new documents revealing which kinds of citizens are targeted by National Security Agency surveillance, he said Monday.
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Poland’s beleaguered government is scrambling to limit fallout from a high-profile eavesdropping scandal after its foreign minister was allegedly caught on tape slamming Warsaw’s alliance with the United States as “worthless”.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk struck a defiant note after reports of the secret recording.
“The Polish government will not be dictated to by people who illegally planted these bugs… whether by ill-will, naivety, greed or to serve political interests,” he told journalists on Monday.
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There would be no welcome mat in California for the National Security Agency under a measure now making its way through the state Legislature.
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Cirrus Insight, an app for integrating Salesforce with Gmail and Google Apps, announced today the launch of email tracking for Gmail.
Cirrus Insight email tracking allows users to receive real-time notifications when someone opens an email; view the time/date, location, and device on which email opens occurred; and log email tracking-information to the activity history in Salesforce.
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Your online identity and activity is vulnerable to prying eyes and while these anti-snooping devices attempt to protect you, your actions and choices will finally determine the level of your online privacy
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We already wrote about how Reps. Goodlatte and Ruppersberger misrepresented the milestone amendment put forth by Reps. Massie, Lofgren and Sensenbrenner to defund the NSA’s backdoor searches and mandates to put (different kinds of) backdoors in technology. However, we’d heard that the House leadership was so desperate to block the amendment that they put a totally misleading description on it — and it’s true…
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The United States still lacks adequate legal protection for such whistleblowers as Edward Snowden, one year after he sought asylum in Russia, a lawyer for the pressure group Human Rights Watch said.
“It is particularly ironic that of all the issues raised by the Snowden revelations, the one that gets the least attention and effort seems to be protection of national security and intelligence sector whistleblowers like Mr Snowden himself,” Dinah PoKempner told RIA Novosti.
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Germany and Switzerland impress our readers with their privacy laws – but a lot of people vote for “other”
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There are times, albeit rare, when a gridlocked U.S. House of Representatives does something meaningful. On Thursday, the House passed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that zeroes out funding for (some) National Security Agency mischief.
[...]
Only two members of Washington’s Congressional delegation, Reps. Doc Hastings and Dave Reichert, voted no. Rep. Suzan DelBene, an amendment co-sponsor, wrote in a tweet, “Good news in the fight to rein in the #NSA. Last night the House passed a measure to cut funding for NSA ‘backdoors.’”
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Up to $1 million, monthly. That’s the consulting fee former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander charges banks interested in his advice on cyber security. A small price to pay for the expertise of a guy who has arguably done more than anyone to undermine cyber security in the United States. Said Alexander, who retired from the NSA back in March amid fallout over the agency’s controversial surveillance practices, “It would be devastating if one of our major banks was hit, because they’re so interconnected.”
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Three Senators suggest President Obama could end the phone and internet dragnet today. Update: Time to cash in for General Keith “Haystack” Alexander, chief Panopticon ideologue. Recently he pitched his wares to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. His asking price for advice is $600,000 a month (down from a million). No doubt he regrets the problems he’s caused for U.S. tech firms, but on a personal level, the future could not be brighter.
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A measure adopted by the House to bar the National Security Agency from meddling with encryption standards was inserted into a defense appropriations bill and approved on a voice vote.
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In the latest gaffe to demonstrate the privacy perils of anonymized data, New York City officials have inadvertently revealed the detailed comings and goings of individual taxi drivers over more than 173 million trips.
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Rights
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The dreadful violence and destruction the West has inflicted and promoted in recent years in its efforts to gain control of the mineral resources of the Middle East continues to play out. Those who see communities with which they identify abroad engaged in military conflict will always produce a small number of people going to join the fight. This is in no sense unusual, and in no sense a threat to ordinary citizens in the UK. The link to terrorism here is entirely a fiction. The unfortunate thing is that the mainstream media allows no outlet for people to mock its false assertions and point out its sinister agenda.
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Reflecting on mass incarceration in the United States, which he has experienced firsthand during his time in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution of Loretto, Pennsylvania, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou advocates for prison sentencing reform in his latest letter from jail.
Firedoglake has been publishing “Letters from Loretto” by Kiriakou, who was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under the George W. Bush administration. He was convicted in October 2012 after 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.
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The release of a long-delayed, $40 million Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s “rendition, detention and interrogation” program during the George W. Bush administration is pending final approval from the Obama White House, Politico reported.
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The Obama administration is inching toward declassification of the Senate’s report on the CIA’s controversial interrogation techniques.
The Central Intelligence Agency has finished redacting sensitive information from a 500-page summary of the 6,800-page report that the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to make public in April, Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in an interview Monday night.
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Slightly more than three months after the police shooting of homeless camper James Boyd catapulted Albuquerque into the international spotlight, activists returned to the streets to advance their movement against police brutality.
On a blistering Summer Solstice Day, whose blazing mid-day sky was oddly crested by a half-moon, more than 200 people marched up Central Avenue near the University of New Mexico chanting “Justice Now” and “They say justified, we say homicide!”
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Based on the most recent report issued by federal monitor Robert Warshaw, the Oakland Police Department will most likely require months of additional monitoring by the court — after eleven years of failure to comply with the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA). No other city in the United States has required this length of time to bring its police department into compliance with a federal consent decree.
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We all know about the scope of National Security Agency (NSA) spying. It’s fair to say at this point in our lives that the notion of privacy is all but dead and gone. However, it didn’t start there. In her book, Mrs. Chumley takes us on a ride through history, reminding us of the original intentions of the Founding Fathers versus the assault on the original design by “21st century realities.”
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Nominations are now open for EFF’s 23rd Annual Pioneer Awards, to be presented this fall in San Francisco. EFF established the Pioneer Awards in 1992 to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology. Nominations are open until midnight on Wednesday, July 2. Nominate the next Pioneer Award winner today!
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The “Open Wireless Movement” was devised years ago by the EFF, Free Press, Mozilla and others to advocate for the sharing of broadband via publicly-accessible Wi-Fi hotspots. At the upcoming Hackers on Planet Earth conference, the group says they’re going to unveil new “Open Wireless Router” firmware that simplifies the process of safely and securely offering free Wi-Fi without hindering your own network.
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The only trouble is that, here in the year 2014, complaints about a fast-lane don’t make much sense. Today, privileged companies—including Google, Facebook, and Netflix—already benefit from what are essentially internet fast lanes, and this has been the case for years. Such web giants—and others—now have direct connections to big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, and they run dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs. In technical lingo, these are known as “peering connections” and “content delivery servers,” and they’re a vital part of the way the internet works.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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As well as all the varied developments I discussed in the previous TTIP update, plenty has been happening recently in the hotly-contested area of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has published another of its informative reviews of developments in the ISDS field [.pdf]. This edition is particularly welcome since it focuses on the interaction between the EU and US.
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Copyrights
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Several UK Internet providers have quietly added a list of new domains to their secretive anti-piracy blocklists. TorrentFreak was able to confirm that several popular torrent site proxies were added over the past weekend. However, the blocked domains have been quickly replaced by new ones, continuing the cat-and-mouse game that never seems to end.
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Think it’s fine use downloaded images in your own website, poster or publication? You could be breaking copyright law… We show you how to use images legally and find free images that are available for commercial use.
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06.23.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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ARM Revolution
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These will, of course, run some */Linux operating system. At the rate the government replaces PCs this changeover could take years or, if they accelerate the change, just a year or two. I expect countries like China and India have the will and ability to make such changes. This is a clever move because the savings on hardware could more or less pay for the cost of changing software. The move to */Linux accelerates.
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Thinkpad X60 is old, Core Duo@1.8GHz, 2GB RAM notebook. But it is still pretty usable desktop machine, as long as Gnome2 is used, number of Chromium tabs does not grow “unreasonable”, and development is not attempted there. But eats a bit too much power.
OLPC 1.75 is ARM v7@0.8GHz, .5GB RAM. According to my tests, it should be equivalent to Core Solo@0.43GHz. Would that make an usable desktop?
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Kernel Space
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Besides the Nouveau driver performance being faster thanks to experimental re-clocking when using the Linux 3.16 kernel, there are also performance improvements to note with some generations of AMD graphics processors.
The changes found within Linux 3.16 to benefit the Radeon DRM graphics performance are the GPU VM optimizations and large PTE support. Separate from this performance-related work for this kernel-side open-source AMD update is also HDMI deep color support, HDMI audio clean-ups, and other bug-fixes.
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Graphics Stack
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The start of the Gallium3D “mega drivers” patches by Emil Velikov are starting to land in Mesa. First up, the patches to consolidate the Gallium3D VDPAU and XvMC support into single libraries for supporting multiple drivers.
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Benchmarks
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This weekend I ran some quick and dirty link-time optimization (LTO) benchmarks from a GCC 4.10 compiler snapshot from earlier this month. Here’s the results.
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Applications
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Calibre 1.41, an eBook reader, editor, and library management software, has been released and comes with a few very interesting features, including a new tool for setting the metadata.
Calibre is a software that serves many purposes and can be used as an eBook conversion tool, eBook reader, eBook editor, and much more. One of the most important functions of the application is metadata management, which is crucial when dealing with eBooks.
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It’s easier than ever to get your own SIPs account, whether you’re making it through Ekiga, a third-party site or even setting it up yourself on a home server. Jitsi is the app that gets the very most out of whatever you set up, even if you don’t plan to use SIPs. Thanks to its ability to connect to other chat services, it becomes an all-in-one chat and IM client for however you want to contact people.
The sheer wealth of settings available in Jitsi is also astonishing, allowing you to tweak specific timeout, port and other connection settings you may never actually need to change. The rest of the clients did not offer settings nearly this deep, and the codecs available were definitely a plus.
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We need to talk. If you’re a software designer or a programmer of some merit, we really need to have a quick discussion about your application.
Over the past year and a half or so, I’ve been scraping the landscape for text-based programs and trying them out for fun. It’s one part hobby, one part attempt to build something like a directory of available software, and one part pruning away the things that don’t work at this point in history.
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Proprietary
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The Opera Internet browser has finally received a new Linux version, bringing it almost up to date with the Windows and Mac OS X platforms.
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Opera web browser hasn’t been updated for Linux since version 12.16 (about a year ago) – until today, when the Opera desktop team announced that they released Opera 24 for Linux on the Developer stream…
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I just noticed Warsow 1.51 was released earlier this month and this open-source first person shooter has some decent changes for being a release coming not too long after the introduction of Warsow 1.5.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Those familiar with running development versions of KDE software are familiar with the idea of having to sometimes remove their whole development install directory and “start all over” in order to resolve some types of build errors.
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I have completed the MPRIS specifications Tracklist interface for PMC. Now other applications can view and control the current playlist in PMC over DBus. This was a part of my GSoC project. This interface will allow me to send commands to PMC, asking it to play a particular song in the playlist. After some changes to the Simon MPRIS plug-in, a user will be able to play a song in the current playlist by naming it. As the Simon plug-in is itself based on MPRIS specifications, it will be able to interact with any media player following the MPRIS specs.
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New Releases
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The Long Awaited update to the KDE Edition is now over, Stability, Speed and Beauty is what drives this edition. This Edition is a special one for me because I worked on most of it while being extremely sick to the point where I could not walk, with nothing but a bed, laptop and time on my hands I went to work on this baby and this is the result.
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The Netrunner Team today released Netrunner 14 Frontier – 32bit and 64bit versions. The release follows Kubuntus support cycle, giving it a full 5 year support life via the backport repos.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro 0.8.10 has received its Update-Pack 1, getting regular kernel updates and latest upstream packages. This update adds some new Gnome3 packages, latest linux kernels, drivers and many updated applications needed for performing your tasks.
According to the official announcement available in the Manjaro blog, KF5 got updated to 4.100 version, the latest mesa 10.2.1 with a better working mhwd is included and the following kernels are supported.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical’s Orange Box, the portable server cluster that the company intends to use to showcase OpenStack, MAAS, Juju and other aspects of the Ubuntu Linux-based cloud, is out. Here’s what it’s all about.
For starters, it’s important to understand what the Orange Box is not: A revenue-generating hardware product from Canonical. The company has given no indication so far that it plans to sell these devices on a large scale—although if you truly want you can buy one, for the equivalent of around $12,900, from TranquilPC Limited, the company that has the contract for manufacturing them.
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Flavours and Variants
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“Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.13.2 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.10 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE,” said the leader of the Kubuntu project, Jonathan Riddell.
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Many users have raised this issue in the last few weeks and the elementary OS developers were forced to abandon the Isis codename in order to make sure that people don’t make any connections.
“elementary obviously has no ties to the militant group known as ISIS – and we don’t think people will get us confused – but we want to both recognize the ongoing turmoil and choose a less controversial name. Freya is a Norse goddess of love and beauty. As we push our design forward, a goddess associated with beauty makes a lot of sense. And evoking the powerful emotion of love is always a good thing!” said the devs on their Google+ account.
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The PiTFT is one of our favourite little things for the Raspberry Pi, making it much more portable than it naturally is and opening it up to many more cool projects than you could do before. The one thing it did lack was proper, modern touch screen controls such as swiping and gesture but this has now been added thanks to Xstroke.
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Late last month, the Debian project voted to adopt a community code of conduct, a set of guidelines for acceptable participation in its official communication channels. Members agreed to abide by the following principles:
Be respectful
Assume good faith
Be collaborative
Try to be concise
Be open
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Coraline Ehmke has developed apps for the web for 20 years. In that time, she’s learned a lot about open source culture and what makes a community of contributors tick. At the Great Wide Open conference this year, Coraline gave a talk about diversity in open source.
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Providing a common gateway for web services, caching web requests or providing anonymity are some of the ways organizations use proxy servers. Commercial proxy products, especially cloud offerings, are plentiful, but we wondered if open source or free products could provide enterprise-grade proxy services.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Not long after it was revealed that Mozilla was working on adding support for Google’s Chromecast in their mobile iterations of the Firefox browser, it appears that they are also creating a device of their own, with functions similar to the Chromecast. The device, which was created by an unknown hardware manufacturer, looks similar to a Chromecast dongle and runs Firefox OS, according to tweets from Christian Heilmann, a “Mozilla Developer Evangelist“. He describes the device as a “fully open TV casting prototype”, which is pretty much the Chromecast, but more open.
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This week Open Source Bridge will kick off in Portland and I’m extremely excited that Mozilla will once again be sponsoring this wonderful event. This will also mark my second year attending.
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Mozilla cites two major advantages of using WebIDE as compared with developing apps for competing platforms. In-browser development tools are already familiar to the enormous number of Web developers that exist, so using them for application development minimizes the number of new tools and new skills that must be learned.
Second, they’re extremely lightweight as development tools go. The substantial size of downloading tools such as Xcode or Visual Studio, in addition to the cost of developer licenses on other platforms, can limit their appeal and usability, especially in emerging markets. Putting the tools into the browser means that Mozilla’s reach is near universal.
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SaaS/Big Data
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An open-source OpenStack effort, known as Ironic, is a key enabler for Rackspace’s new OnMetal offering, which also supports the Docker container model.
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU Parallel 20140622 (‘Brazil’) has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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I’ve been doing some work with Eclipse Orion, a web-centric IDE with some interesting attributes, so I was interested to see news of forthcoming language support enhancements coming in Orion 6.0. Lots of interesting bits like syntax highlighting that brings in Arduino files, new documentation generators, the ability to use all the tooling while the JavaScript is embedded in HTML, better tunable JavaScript validation with new rules and so on… worth checking out.
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AN Adelaide man who had his gun licence photo taken with a colander on his head says it is significant to his religion — the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — and he should not have had to undertake a psychological test.
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Hardware
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The Australian Finance Review has just published a new story that suggests that the NSA may have hardware level backdoors built into current generation AMD and Intel processors. Leading security expert Steve Blank says that he first caught on to the practice when he noticed that the NSA had access to Microsoft emails before they were encrypted. He says that he would be extremely surprised if the NSA did not have access to a processor microcode level backdoor on every PC in America.
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Russian news outlet Kommersant has reported that the nation’s government wants to ditch Intel and AMD processors in favour of a locally-developed ARM effort.
The outlet’s report suggests three state-owned Russian companies are banding together to develop to be called “Baikal” that will use ARM’s 64-bit kernel Cortex A-57 as its base design, offer at least eight cores, be built with a 28nm process and run at 2GHz or more in PCs or servers.
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Security
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Reuters, the international news agency, was reportedly been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army – a hacking group who support the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and attack news organizations.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In a recitation of death and destruction, a federal prosecutor on Tuesday chronicled for a jury the alleged conduct of four Blackwater security guards accused of killing 14 Iraqis and wounding 18 others in downtown Baghdad nearly seven years ago.
In opening statements at the trial of the four guards, Assistant U.S. Attorney T. Patrick Martin said some of the victims were “simply trying to get out” of the way of gunfire from Blackwater guards. “Fourteen died, 18 injured. For what?” he said.
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In a review of a new book by a journalist who claims George Bush lied to the country in the run up to the Iraq war, National Journal columnist Ron Fournier insists that Obama has been just as bad as Bush with his constant stream of lies to the country.
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Shortly after the day’s final bell rang and hundreds of youngsters ran outside Lickdale Elementary School with their book bags and lunchboxes, a military drone fell from the sky.
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Whether it’s bombs or boots that are sent to stop them, the fallout will provide the militants with dangerously effective propaganda for their cause
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Drones are often called unmanned aircraft. But there is a lot of human drama when they crash. Drone pilots and other crew members swear, scream and yell at their remote-control video screens when the aircraft fly out of control. Those moments are often captured by audio recorders in ground control stations.
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The Israeli military struck Syrian army positions in the Golan Heights overnight Sunday in retaliation for an attack earlier in the day that killed an Israeli teen and injured three other people.
Fighter jets fired missiles at nine targets on the Syrian side of the border, including military command posts and firing positions. An artillery unit that uses high-precision Tamuz missiles was also employed in the strike, the military said in a statement. It confirmed direct hits.
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For the first time in nearly six months, U.S. drone strikes hit Pakistan’s tribal region three times in less than a week, killing at least 20 militants with suspected ties to the Haqqani network.
The hiatus was the longest pause in the controversial CIA program since 2006, and the drones’ sudden return begs the questions: Why now? And is this the beginning of a renewed drone campaign in Pakistan?
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With ‘official’ America debating how to respond to what at present appears to be a Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Iraq the question both within and outside of the US is: why do America and the Americans have any say in the matter? The last quarter century of US engagement in Iraq has been a series of military and geopolitical blunders with catastrophic consequences across the Middle East. The answer of course, as it was with the mis-sold invasions of 1990 and 2003, is Operation Iraqi Liberation, oil. The dim hubris of Bush / Cheney / Rumsfeld / Rice that broke ‘Iraq’ into sectarian factions has been met by leading Democrats with claims that the war was ‘mismanaged’ and that Iraq remains of some vaguely specified ‘vital interest.’ The moral, ethical and societal sickness that has US President Obama now sending murder robots (drones) and additional troops to force the will of ‘official’ Washington onto what remains of the national government of Iraq misses that it was this very same will that caused the social / political catastrophe now claimed to be in need of rectification.
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Shaw argues that evidence available, evidence gone missing and discrepancies simply don’t add up to the official story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone that day.
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Speaking to the BBC on Friday , former top CIA official, Graham Fuller, admitted that he wrote a reference letter for the Gülen movement leader, Fethullah Gülen, after the FBI resisted granting him permanent residency status between 2006 to 2010.
The former top official and Middle East expert, yet claimed that there was no relation between the Gülen movement and CIA, during the BBC interview on his newly released book “Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East.”
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The United Nations Human Rights Council, currently sitting in Geneva, has heard testimony from leaders of the Venezuela protest movement and from the survivor of the car crash that killed Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá.
The hearings on human rights in Venezuela and Cuba, was organized by a coalition of NGO’s as an official event inside the Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 17.
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A high Israeli official was quoted recently saying it was Iran’s influence that is most dangerous in the region, not that of ISIS. Of course, that should tell us a great deal. In this part of the world, Israel’s views count for far more than those of all the other countries put together, at least, so far as the United States’ government is concerned, the ridiculous lopsidedness in that reflecting the best Congress campaign funding can buy.
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Five months ago, a Kurdish intelligence “asset” walked into a base and said he had information to hand over.
The capture by jihadists the month before of two Sunni cities in western Iraq was just the beginning, he said. There would soon be a major onslaught on Sunni territories.
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A new report says the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants were trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Jordan more than two years ago.
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Senator Rand Paul said the US government has been arming ISIS militants in Syria and funding its allies.
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Indeed, Mafia Dons have learned the hard way after RICO not to give clear cut instructions to their operatives. Obama, our Capo Di Tutti Capi, has learned his lesson well. He lets his capos — heads of the IRS, DOJ, CIA, know how to proceed with vague injunctions that set the tone.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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From climate change to Crimea, the natural gas industry is supreme at exploiting crisis for private gain – what I call the shock doctrine
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Timelapse: All spills of crude oil crude bitumen and synthetic crude in Alberta each year from 1975-2012. Each dot is one spill; dot size does not indicate spill size. Source: Energy Resources Conservation Board
Alberta’s had an average of two crude oil spills a day, every day for the past 37 years.
That makes 28,666 crude oil spills in total, plus another 31,453 spills of just about any other substance you can think of putting in a pipeline – from salt water to liquid petroleum.
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Finance
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An estimated 50,000 people marched through London, including supporters of Stop the War, CND and other peace groups who called for warfare spending to be cut and not welfare services.
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Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers, the Guardian can reveal.
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She has no idea who Lionel Messi is and her home country isn’t even playing, but Pakistani mother-of-five Gulshan Bibi can’t wait for the World Cup – because she helped make the balls.
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The NY Times, in It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave, explores the trend of increasing numbers of young people continuing to live with their parents after college.
The article notes that one in five people in their 20s and early 30s currently lives with parents, and 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from parents. In the prior generation, only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support.
The common explanation for the change is that young people had the misfortune of growing up during several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends.
Today, almost 45 percent of 25-year-olds, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000, and more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, causing them to make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree.
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Censorship
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The level of political support in Sweden for blocking, for blocking outside the rule of law and for the export of the filtering and blocking services of the Swedish internet filtering company NetClean is quite extraordinary.
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Privacy
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Dropcam, a San Francisco based home surveillance company has on their official blog post revealed that they have been acquired by Nest. Nest, a Google owned company, confirmed on their blog the acquisition and also the fact that this acquisition will not change anything for either of the companies’ immediate future, as both Nest products as well as the Dropcam products will be available to customers without any change. The deal went down for $555 million.
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A watchdog group this week called on Congress to investigate federal record-keeping practices to determine why the government has repeatedly lost e-mails that could shed light on alleged wrongdoing.
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European officials have often acted as though excessive government surveillance was solely an American problem. The recent release of a legal statement from a senior British counterterrorism official, Charles Farr, shows that the United States government is certainly not alone in justifying such practices.
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Yesterday, Reps Reps. Ron Desantis (R-Fla.) and Cedric Richmond (D-La.) became the 217th and 218th members of the House to sign on to the Email Privacy Act. More than half of the 435 members of the House of Representatives now formally support updating the outdated law governing the privacy of our electronic communications and requiring police to get a warrant before they read our emails, look at our online photo albums, or view our texts. Among those 218 members who have endorsed reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) are 136 Republicans – more than half of the members of the majority party.
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Being as these folks stand up OpenStack, I also took the time to find out what it’s like to work with the community and whether it’s really as much of a pain to work with as everyone claims.
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With the revelations of Edward Snowden, Beijing has fittingly dismissed the nuanced American distinction. Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has infiltrated into Huawei Technologies, a hi-tech Chinese multinational company. A recent Foreign Policy article confirmed that an elite NSA ultra-secret China hacking group “successfully penetrated” Chinese computers and its telecommunication industry for the past 15 years.
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Take for example a situation happening across the United States, but most recently exemplified in a records request in Florida. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a public records request with a police department in Sarasota, Fla., for information on a surveillance tool called “Stingray,” which is used by law enforcement agencies across the country to mass collect data.
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“We’re working on that story now,” said Greenwald, who grew up in New York and lives in Rio de Janeiro with his longtime partner, David Miranda. “It’s highly likely it will be out before the end of the month. It will be reporting on the people the NSA is targeting domestically.”
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Join the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB) at the main entrance to NSA Menwith Hill, HG1 4QZ, on Friday 4 July from 5pm to 9pm for the annual “Independence FROM America” demonstration.
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Prime Minister John Key took a secret trip to the NSA spy agency while he was in Washington last week.
It is not surprising that he went — he made the same trip the last time he was in Washington in 2011.
This time, it was left off the published schedule of meetings that is handed out to the news media. Last time, it was declared.
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The results of a Stuff Ipsos poll released last week shows 71.6 per cent of Kiwis believe United States spy agencies are gathering data on New Zealanders and 61.8 per cent of those people do not support the US being able to do so.
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Prime Minister John Key took a secret trip to the NSA spy agency while he was in Washington last week.
It is not surprising that he went — he made the same trip the last time he was in Washington in 2011.
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Millennials are criticized for broadcasting too many intimate details of our everyday lives online. We readily publish what we had for lunch, when we went to the gym, relationship status updates, and more. Things more senior generations might deem “TMI” are standard online chatter for us; however, there is a method to the madness. Global connectivity has enabled us to open new lines of communication with people across town, across the country, and across the world. We see value in being able to speak freely, giving us access to new ideas and cultures through comparing the human experience, hemisphere to hemisphere.
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Bill Would Ban NSA from Undermining NIST Crypto Standards
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The U.S. Department of Defense is immersed in studies about…people like you. The Pentagon wants to know why folks who don’t themselves engage in violence to overthrow the prevailing order become, what the military calls, “supporters of political violence.” And by that they mean, everyone who opposes U.S military policy in the world, or the repressive policies of U.S. allies and proxies, or who opposes the racially repressive U.S. criminal justice system, or who wants to push the One Percent off their economic and political pedestals so they can’t lord it over the rest of us. (I’m sure you recognize yourself somewhere in that list.)
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Apple is going to implement random MAC addresses technology in its iOS8 devices, an anonymity-granting technique which late computer prodigy Aaron Swartz was accused of using to carry out his infamous MIT hack.
Swartz, who faced criminal prosecution on charges of mass downloading academic documents and articles, was also accused of using MAC (Media Access Control) spoofing address technology to gain access to MIT’s subscription database.
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In a Capitol Hill hearing room two summers ago, privacy activist Christopher Soghoian organized a stunning demonstration of some new police surveillance technology. A small group of congressional staffers were handed “clean” cellphones and invited to start calling each other while, off to the side, a Berkeley communications researcher named Kurtis Heimerl turned on his gear. After a few minutes, Soghoian told the staffers to hang up—and then Heimerl played back their conversations. Not only that, the two men told the staffers, the digital eavesdropping equipment was capable of sucking all the data from their phones—emails, contact files, music, videos—whatever was on them.
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Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has been awarded the Fritz Bauer Prize of the German Humanist Union, a prominent civil rights organization, for exposing the controversial surveillance practices of the NSA and its accomplices.
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A year has passed since the American former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden began revealing the massive scope of Internet surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency.
His disclosures have elicited public outrage and sharp rebukes from close U.S. allies like Germany, upending rosy assumptions about how free and secure the Internet and telecommunications networks really are.
Single-handedly Snowden has changed how people regard their phones, tablets and laptops, and sparked a public debate about the protection of personal data.
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The National Security Agency’s (NSA) reach of spying on worldwide communications is even broader than previously reported, according to new information leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In addition to working with allied spy agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, the NSA has partnered with other, unnamed foreign governments to access enormous volumes of emails, phone calls and Internet data.
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Civil Rights
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A poll about attitudes to Westminster on the influential parenting website Mumsnet has revealed startling levels of disillusionment with a male-dominated political system
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On June 12, Brazilian police fired tear gas on a group of 50 unarmed marchers blocking a highway leading to the World Cup arena in São Paulo. On June 15 in Rio de Janeiro another 200 marchers faced floods of tear gas and stun grenades in their approach to Maracana stadium. Armed with an arsenal of less lethal weapons and employing tactics imported from U.S. SWAT teams in the early 2000s, police clad in riot gear are deploying forceful tactics, wielding batons and releasing chemical agents at close range. In Brazil, this style of protest policing is not only a common form of political control, but also a booming business.
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The cost for this year, $454.1 million to operate, staff and build at the prison complex, comes from a report by the Defense Department’s Office of the Comptroller.
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No way, no how will President Obama send a terrorist to Guantanamo Bay. But how about a few weeks on a Navy warship to chat with U.S. interrogators without a Miranda warning? Welcome aboard the President’s floating not-so-secret prison.
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When I saw the Washington Post’s banner headline, “U.S. sees risk in Iraq airstrikes,” I thought, “doesn’t that say it all.” The Post apparently didn’t deem it newsworthy to publish a story headlined: “Iraqis see risk in U.S. airstrikes.” Then, in an accompanying article, authors Gregg Jaffe and Kevin Maurer observed nonchalantly that “Iraq and the Iraqi people remain something of an abstraction,” a point that drove me to distraction.
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Pressure is mounting on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to form a less sectarian government or to resign. A representative of the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for the creation of what he described as a new “effective” government. On Thursday, The New York Times revealed the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Robert Beecroft, and the State Department’s top official in Iraq, Brett McGurk, recently met with the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who has been described as a potential candidate to replace al-Maliki. Chalabi is the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA-funded Iraqi exile group that strongly pushed for the 2003 U.S. invasion. The INC helped drum up pre-war claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. The group provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration, U.S. lawmakers and journalists. We are joined by Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine.
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The Interview, a new action comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, has elicited choice comments from North Korea for showing the “desperation” of American society. Due out in October, the film tells the tale of two US journalists who are given the opportunity to interview North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, then recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.
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