10.13.14
Posted in Google, Oracle, Patents at 1:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Google takes its fight over API freedom to the Supreme Court in the Unites States and it also takes that longstanding patent harassment from the Microsoft- and Apple-backed troll (Rockstar) out of East Texas
“Google makes a series of compelling points in its petition,” writes Simon Phipps in relation to Google’s defence against Oracle (SCOracle, continuing the tradition of SCO’s copyrights misrepresentation). Google has found some material errors in interpretation of laws/cases, citing the corrupt CAFC with its utterly ridiculous ruling that we covered at the time. “These points alone seem strong to me,” says Phipps, “[b]ut Google also says CAFC has made a serious error that ignores the precedent of earlier SCOTUS decisions and violates the distinction between copyright and patent as monopolies.
“On the first point, Google refers back to the SCOTUS Lotus v Borland case in 1996. Google points out that “methods of operation embodied in computer programs are not entitled to copyright protection,” then asserts that the Java class APIs are a method of operating the Java class implementations. Since Android’s implementations of the Java APIs are Google’s original work, the company claims copyright does not apply.”
Oracle in the mean time is grabbing some talent from Google and it is not yet clear if there will be a SCOTUS case (the request for appeal may be denied). It is clear that CAFC does not understand software APIs or maybe it is just too corrupt (which becomes an accepted view these day), so this appeal has merit. As Pogson explained: “Copyright should not apply to other’s works. If you write software to work with some API, no other authour should be able to forbid that or to tax that. Yet, that’s what Oracle wants to do and they found a lower court that agreed with that despite that being an illegal extension of copyright to others’ work. Stranger still, Java is FLOSS…”
Here is some of the earliest coverage:
The legal fracas started when Google copied certain elements—names, declaration, and header lines—of the Java APIs in Android, and Oracle sued. A San Francisco federal judge largely sided with Google in 2012, saying that the code in question could not be copyrighted. But the federal appeals court reversed, and ruled that the “declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of the API packages are entitled to copyright protection.
This goes beyond patents and into copyrights on ideas/words. Oracle should not be allowed to win this as the is not just about Android but about software development in general.
Do remember that Oracle is in a pact with Microsoft and Apple when it comes to patents. They share control over CPTN, which is made out of Novell’s patents. There is a similar arrangement around Rockstar, which also involves Apple and Microsoft (Apple, Microsoft, Ericsson, RIM and Sony is the complete list). Joe Mullin says that Rockstar too is still harassing Google (Android) and Google has just managed to take the lawsuit of of the capital of trolls, East Texas:
It’s been nearly one year since Rockstar Consortium, a patent holding company owned in part by Microsoft and Apple, launched a major patent assault against Google. Now, the issue of where the case will be heard has finally been resolved—in Google’s favor.
Google took the case to the nation’s top patent court to get it out of East Texas and back to its home state, California. The matter of venue isn’t a mere sideline skirmish. East Texas courts are generally considered tough on patent defendants, with few cases resolving on summary judgment, stringent discovery rules, and last-minute scheduling decisions. Google’s Texas case was scheduled to be heard in front of US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who hears far more patent cases than any other district court judge in the nation.
The war against Android is a big deal for those of us who care about Free software and GNU/Linux. Let’s not lose sight of the fight against this kind of abuse. Public apathy helps crooked judges and abusive companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple. █
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Posted in Patents at 1:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The “genius” behind the infamous “one-click shopping” software patent
Summary: The barrier for acceptance of software patent applications is raised in the United States and patent lawsuits, many of which involve software these days, are down very sharply, based on new figures from Lex Machina
While some software patents survive the SCOTUS ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case (notably in banking), many software patents are being invalidated and applications fail (not many software patents are being granted, despite 92% of all patent applications ending up being granted as rubber-stamped patents). Existing holders of software patents may be reluctant to sue, knowing that any lawsuit may deem these patents invalid and hence incapable of imposing the signing of patent deals or serve as deterrents. As Timothy B. Lee put it the other day:
The patent office is rejecting a lot more software patents
A June Supreme Court decision on the legality of software patents has been sending shockwaves through the legal system. The case, called Alice v. CLS Bank, has led to a bunch of lower court decisions invalidating software patents. It may also have been responsible for September’s sharp decline in patent lawsuits.
The decision appears to be having another effect that could be even more important in the long run: it’s causing the patent office to reject a lot more patents on “business methods,” a category of software patent that is notorious for its high litigation rate. While that might be bad news for the people seeking these types of patents, it means that there could be a lot fewer patent troll lawsuits over the next two decades.
Here are some new figures that indicate massive decline in patent lawsuits after the Alice case:
Plaintiffs filed 329 new federal patent cases in September 2014, a 40% decrease from the 549 cases filed in September 2013.
After reaching a record high of 675 new cases filed in April 2014, filings over the last five months have tailed off significantly (see Figure 1).
Month-over-month comparisons of 2014 and 2013 reveals lower 2014 monthly totals since May (see Figure 2).
Here is the former author, Timothy B. Lee, addressing this matter:
In a June decision called CLS Bank v. Alice, the Supreme Court called into question the validity of many software patents. Since then, there have been over a dozen lower-court decisions invalidating software patents.
New data from the legal analytics firm Lex Machina suggests that the newfound judicial hostility toward software patents is making plaintiffs gunshy:
Patent lawsuits in September were down 40% from last year
Here is the trolls expert writing about it.
“Months after Alice v. CLS Bank, patent litigation has hit a near-record low,” explains Joe Mullin. “The drop comes shortly after new patent rules came down from the Supreme Court. Most notably, the Alice v. CLS Bank decision made it clear that courts shouldn’t accept “do it on a computer”-type patents as valid. That’s resulted in nearly a dozen patents being tossed out in a short period of time, and some patent trolls with dubious patents aren’t bothering to fight it out anymore.”
One other site, a front group for corporations, focuses on patent quality when slamming an Apple patent that was used against Android (and Linux by extension). Levy asks, “remember that “pinch to zoom” patent that Apple tried using against Samsung? That was filed on January 7, 2007.”
He shows a video about it and he adds: “The Jeff Han video clearly discloses pinch to zoom, nearly a year before Apple filed its patent application. While it’s true that the patent was eventually invalidated, it should never have issued. (And I’m sure there are many more “gesture” patents that are disclosed in this video, too.)”
Finally, Levy says: “If we’re serious about patent quality, examiners need to be able to find everything that’s out there. There are software tools to screenshot videos, and people could be hired to transcribe them. But examiners don’t have that help, and, in fact, many patent examiners are using outdated, inefficient equipment and software. It’s no wonder patents like “pinch to zoom” get issued.”
It sure looks like things are changing when it comes to patent bar (not barristers but bar for quality), though apparently only in the area of software. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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For the past year Google developers have been looking at dropping support for EXT* file-systems from ChromeOS while only today it’s making the rounds on the Internet and of course Linux fans are enraged.
While ChromeOS is based on Linux and EXT4 continues to be the most widely used Linux file-system and still is used by default on most Linux distributions, Google developers are dropping support for EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems from their ChromeOS user-interface.
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The Chromium project decided that the EXT family of filesystems are surplus to requirements, but has bowed to pressure and signalled it is willing to reverse the decision.
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Does Google want to give a fair segment of users a reason not to use ChromeOS? What were they thinking?
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Server
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It’s been said before, but maybe the time for Linux and i integration is finally drawing near.
“We have a fundamental belief that you can’t survive in this new world of mobile, social, big data, and cloud without being able to integrate and interface into the system of record in a secure and scalable manner,” says Stephen Leonard, general manager of IBM Systems and Technology Group sales.
IBM, with its major investment in Linux, thinks Power Systems are the best answer for making that integration and interface not only more effective, but also more cost efficient based on the existing systems of record and the data crunching performance that is being built into its hardware and software.
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Kernel Space
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Going back two years with the Linux 3.7 kernel was the initial 64-bit ARM support and now eleven kernel releases later the initial enablement is still being battened up. With Linux 3.18 there’s finally PCI support for ARM64.
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In the 3.18 mailbox pull request Jassi Brar explains, “A framework for Mailbox controllers and clients have been cooking for more than a year now. Everybody in the CC list had been copied on patchset revisions and most of them have made sounds of approval, though just one concrete Reviewed-by. The patchset has also been in linux-next for a couple of weeks now and no conflict has been reported. The framework has the backing of at least 5 platforms, though I can’t say if/when they upstream their drivers (some businesses have ‘changed’).”
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Users of Debian GNU/Linux will be able to continue using SysVinit as their init system, despite the project having switched to systemd as the default, according to the leader of the Debian project.
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Over the weekend the Reiser4 file-system patches were updated for Linux 3.16.1/3.16.2 kernel support and additionally for presenting SSD discard support for the long-in-development Linux FS. This latest Reiser4 file-system work was done by Ivan Shapovalov and Edward Shishkin.
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The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a project hosted by The Linux Foundation that enables technology companies, industry stakeholders and esteemed developers to collaboratively identify and fund critical open source projects that are in need of assistance, today issued a call for new grant proposals for open source projects seeking industry support.
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It was with great interest that I read Lennart Poettering’s missive on open source software development and his experiences in the field last week. There is some truth to his claims that discussions can get heated and things can be said that are perhaps uncouth and salty. Still, I can’t agree with his wholesale characterization of open source development as “sick” or “full of a**holes.”
I think, perhaps, that Lennart has been exposed to more troublesome technical discussions and descriptions than many in this field, but not because he is an innocent target. Rather, he conducts himself in such a way that it evokes this kind of reaction. To paraphrase an old saying, “If you run into a jerk in the morning, you ran into a jerk in the morning. If you run into jerks all day long, then maybe you’re the jerk.” I think it may in part apply here.
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Graphics Stack
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Intel OpenCL Linux compute support has landed for the forthcoming Broadwell processors.
Pushed this week by Yang Rong and other Intel OTC China staff was the initial Broadwell hardware enablement in Beignet, the Intel OpenCL Linux implementation. Beignet has been building up since the Ivy Bridge days and now in time for the debut of the first ultrabooks with Broadwell designs is the necessary GPGPU compute support.
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For users of Mesa stable releases rather than the exciting Git activity, there’s some new releases worth upgrading to.
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Mesa 10.3.1 has been released. Mesa 10.3.1 is a bug fix release fixing bugs since the 10.3 release, (see below for a list of changes).
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Applications
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After more than a year since the previous release, a new PhotoQt version was released today – 1.1 -, which introduces some interesting changes such as per-session rotation/flipping, new Quick Settings widget, improved fake transparency and more. Also, with this release, PhotoQt switched to Qt5 and Phonon.
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The first release candidate for the forthcoming Xen 4.5 is imminent ahead of the project’s plans to do the stable release in December. For those not keeping up to speed with Xen development, here’s a brief look at some of the changes expected for Xen 4.5.
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All of these text editors are console based applications which make them ideal for editing files on remote machines. Textadept also provides a graphical user interface, but remains fast and minimalist.
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Being one of the most flexible, text-based chatting protocol, IRC has been around for over 20 years and it is still heavily used to this day.
Here are five Internet Relay Chat clients with a graphical interface. Terminal-based IRC clients are not covered here. I also didn’t include (except for a Firefox extension included as a bonus – ChatZilla) clients which are available in general-purpose instant messaging applications, like Pidgin or Kopete, but if you use these, you should be aware they support IRC too, and for some users it may be a better option to use an application with unified interface for all the chatting protocols instead one separate program for each.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Wildfire Games has released the seventeenth alpha version of 0 A.D., which includes some important changes, such as a major gameplay rebalance, units on wall, improved mod support and more.
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The seventeenth alpha release is now out for the very promising 0 A.D. open-source real time strategy game.
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It has been raining heavily in my little corner of Scotland this week. For many people rain is just an annoyance which ceases to be an issue after they cross the threshold into their home but for me it can mean the complete lack of internet access.
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This is the sixth article in this series, in which I take a look at another 12 free, open-source games for Linux. Ranging from action to arcade or puzzle games, all of them should be available to install with your distribution’s package manager.
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Here is a look back at the last week on GamingOnLinux, an easy way to for you to keep up to date on what has happened in the past week for Linux Gaming! Sorted from lowest to highest to make sure you don’t miss the smaller news stories.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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After the first KF 5 release, I contacted the creator of the Krita mascot Kiki and the KF 5 dragons artwork, Tyson Tan, if he would be interested in design a Kate mascot, too. He immediately agreed to help out and after some months of roundtrips, here we go!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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A few days ago I wrote about the GNOME Infrastructure moving to FreeIPA, the post was mainly an announcement to the relevant involved parties with many informative details for contributors to properly migrate their account details off from the old authentication system to the new one. Today’s post is a follow-up to that announcement but it’s going to take into account the reasons about our choice to migrate to FreeIPA, what we found interesting and compelling about the software and why we think more projects (them being either smaller or bigger) should migrate to it. Additionally I’ll provide some details about how I performed the migration from our previous OpenLDAP setup with a step-by-step guide that will hopefully help more people to migrate the infrastructure they managed themselves.
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Around 20 people got together Saturday morning and, after bagels and coffee got together in a room and collected topics that everybody was interested in working on. With Christian in attendance, gnome-builder was high on the list, but OSTree and gnome-continuous also showed up several times on the list.
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Black Lab Linux started its life as a Windows XP alternative and the developers actually made a big deal about it. Even the interface was designed in such as way that it resembled the Windows XP desktop layout, at least to some degree. They since parted ways with that kind of desktop and statement, but they are still looking for their identity.
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For now, consider me skeptical of SEANux. After all, back in early 2012 the so-called AnonymousOS was released, a purported new operating system from the Anonymous collective – only to reportedly be found ridden with trojan horses.
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New Releases
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Smoothwall Express is a free firewall that is based on a GNU/Linux kernel that comes with an easy to use interface. The latest version available is now 3.1 and its been in the works for a long time.
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4MLinux Allinone Edition is a Linux operating system built from scratch that aims to be one of the smallest distros in the world that still retain much of the regular functionality of a normal OS. The developer has just released version 10.0 and it comes with some very important features.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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SUSE Linux, the German-American distributor of commercial-grade Linux operating systems that will soon be part of Micro Focus, is getting up to launch its much-awaited SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 operating system. And the Power8 machines from IBM are the first boxes that are being talked about running the updated Linux.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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We are very happy to present to you today the first integration of the cinnamon desktop environment into siduction. Cinnamon is a modern desktop based on GTK 3 with a classic look. It has been developed and published by the popular Linux Mint distribution since 2011. Recently Cinnamon version 2.2 has made it into Jessie, Debians upcoming release. A team of several Debian developers has worked on the packaging for about three months and has matured the whole set of packages. We can expect it to be functional.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical devs and the Ubuntu community have a good reason to celebrate these days because the Unity desktop environment is now four years old.
Unity is the default desktop environment in Ubuntu and it’s been around for four years now, although not for the desktop version of the distribution. It was first used in Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which was a flavor dedicated for Netbook use. In fact, Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.10 Maverick Meerkat was the first to adopt the new Unity desktop.
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Flavours and Variants
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The elementary OS Freya developers are now looking to get some wallpapers from the community, which will eventually be added to the final version of the operating system.
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The Linux Foundation launched a collaborative “Dronecode Project” aimed at creating a shared open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).
The not-for-profit Linux Foundation announced the Dronecode Project at its Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Düsseldorf today. Among the collaborative project’s first members is 3D Robotics, which is contributing technology from its widely used APM platform for UAV autopilots (formerly called “Ardupilot”). The Dronecode project will also incorporate technology from the PX4 project, led by Lorenz Meier of ETH, the Technical University of Zurich. Most APM projects either use Arduino circuitry or PX4′s open source Pixhawk hardware foundation.
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The new “Dronecode Project” will make it easier for developers that want to build systems or tools for unmanned aircraft system to have access to a common platform.
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As I’ve noted many times, one of the exciting things about open source is the way it is expanding to completely new areas. A good example of that is drones. People have a rather complicated view of drones: like most tools, they can be used for good or bad. But there’s no doubt that making the software that controls them open source is a step in the right direction, since it means that drones don’t remain the exclusive domain of big companies – or the military.
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A few months ago, I met Chris Anderson and Andy Jensen, CEO and COO of 3D Robotics, one of the leading manufacturers of commercial drones. They were interested in creating a software foundation for their open source drone projects and wanted to pattern it after the Linux Foundation. We quickly realized we could provide the collaborative and participatory infrastructure needed to advance the ecosystem, and Dronecode was born.
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Phones
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Android
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The launch of the Android 5.0 L update for Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10 is right around the corner. Or at least that’s what the latest reports are indicating. Google failed to reveal when the new Android version will be released for the public, but several sources are confirming that we might get the Android 5.0 L update sooner than expected.
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Decide what kind of community you like, because there are different ones. Again MySQL had a total of maybe 100 contributors over its lifespan of code, and we hired many of them into the company. That part of the community was relatively small. The community of users was enormous and still is. And the community of those who build an add-on to MySQL was enormous. You have different ways of doing them.
Then finally, and this is perhaps the most remarkable insight I’ve made about open source licensing models and governance, it’s very much about branding. This has to do with the fact that an open source license stipulates nothing about the name. If they do that, it means the name isn’t free, it is protected by copyright.
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Natalie Kozlowski is a front-end web developer at CodeGuard. She’s a self-taught coder who embraces open source and will be giving a talk about how to interact with your front-end developers at this year’s All Things Open conference in Raleigh.
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Alfresco Software is contributing to the Apache Software Foundation an open source integration, named Chemistry Parts. The integration connects Microsoft SharePoint to virtually any enterprise content management (ECM) system, including Alfresco, using the open standard CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) from OASIS. The integration is contributed by Alfresco to the Apache Chemistry project, which is an open source implementation of CMIS.
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Events/XDC
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The XDC2014 conference officially ended on Friday and was followed on Saturday by X.Org developers drinking wine and cycling around Bordeaux, France. For those not in attendance that haven’t been keeping up with all of the Phoronix articles, here’s a summary.
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The FreeRDS project was talked about at this past week’s XDC2014 conference in Bordeaux, France. FreeRDS is an open-source RDP server derived from FreeRDP.
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KWin/Wayland 5.1 gained support for the fullscreen shell interface. My idea when adding this was to not have to implement DRM support in KWin, but (for the time being) leverage Weston. This simplifies development and allows us to move forward on a higher speed. Jason Ekstrand’s talk showed that the fullscreen shell provides more interesting aspects than our use case. The shell can also be used for use cases such as screen sharing: a compositor renders in addition to a fullscreen shell provided by a different compositor which can use it to e.g. capture a video stream or forward an rdp session. Very interesting and quite useful that we already support it and won’t have to add additional support for rdp into each compositor.
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Databases
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The upcoming open-source OpenStack Juno cloud platform will now support more databases and database features.
When the open-source OpenStack Icehouse platform was released in April, the Trove database-as-a-service project was one of its key new features. Fast forward six months, and the OpenStack Juno release is set to debut on Oct. 16, complete with a long list of updates and improvements to Trove.
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Funding
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In fact, it is not really that money and Free Software are strange bedfellows. Not only is there nothing prohibiiting anyone to generate revenues with Free Software, it is even encouraged. We have adopted a (sane) practice for years, which is to provide binaries and source code of entire Free Software stacks for free. Reading the GPL you may notice that this is not at all something to be expected; if anything, you may sell your binaries tomorrow, and only give away your source code. The unhealthy part comes when the expectation that not only all this should be free, but that your time, expertise and your entire work should always remain free.
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BSD
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The LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang C/C++ language front-end now have support for the ARM Cortex-A17.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I’m happy to announce the 2014.10.11 release of GSRC, the GNU Source Release Collection. GSRC is a convenient means to fetch, build and install the latest GNU software from source via a BSD Ports-like system.
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Openness/Sharing
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Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
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Open Hardware
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A custom, affordable, open source quadcopter for the masses!
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Australian tennis star John Newcombe has lifted the lid on “party boy” George W. Bush and the drink-driving revelation that clouded his 2000 US presidential election campaign.
Bush, who served as president from 2001 to 2009, admitted to the drink-driving arrest that he kept secret for nearly 25 years just days ahead of the poll after the story broke on US networks.
The incident occurred in 1976 near his family’s Kennebunkport summer home in Maine, and followed a night’s drinking with Wimbledon champion Newcombe, who was also in the car.
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Health and Drugs
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In the small African country of Swaziland, the government is taking actions to impose sexual abstinence, trying to keep the nation’s women virgin as long as possible.
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First, the virus isn’t a viable bioweapon candidate. It doesn’t spread quickly—its R0, a measure of how infectious a virus is, is about 2. That means that, in a population where everyone is at risk, each infected person will, on average, infect two more people. But because someone with Ebola is infectious only when she shows symptoms, we’ve got plenty of chances to clamp down on an outbreak in a country with a developed public health system.
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While most media attention is on Ebola, polio has been spreading in Pakistan, where 200 Pakistanis have been diagnosed so far. This is greatest number of infections in more than a decade.
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But readers who can get beyond its excessive violence will find a compelling story of the Jamaican underworld and its uneasy relationship with the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century.
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If someone told you today that there was strong evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency once turned a blind eye to accusations of drug dealing by operatives it worked with, it might ring some distant, skeptical bell.
Did that really happen? That really happened. As part of their insurgency against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, some of the CIA-backed contras made money through drug smuggling, transgressions noted in a little-noticed 1988 Senate subcommittee report.
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It’s hard to know what to think about “Kill the Messenger,” and this makes it frustrating to watch. It tells the real-life story of Gary Webb, the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News reporter whose series on a “dark alliance” between the CIA and drug dealers made him seem on track to win a Pulitzer Prize. Then he came under attack by other papers for supposedly sloppy reporting, and his own newspaper refused to support him.
The movie has a point of view, which is that Webb was a great reporter, that the big newspapers went after him only because he scooped them, and that his own bosses were spineless individuals, with no right to call themselves journalists. Perhaps some of this is true. Perhaps all of this is true. Who knows? Still, one gets the sense, while watching, that there had to be another side to this story.
Here’s a case of a film that could have been better and more satisfying as a documentary. As a narrative feature, “Kill the Messenger” has no choice but to live up to the demands of drama. But what do you do with a story that must be told, that deserves to be told, but that’s not very good as a story? Alas, true stories are confined to the facts, and the facts here make for the death of drama — a movie that begins as “All the President’s Men Revisited” then shifts into the tale of a besieged fellow and his relationship with his family.
At first things look promising, for Webb and for the movie. As a reporter in the Sacramento bureau, Webb is put on to the story of CIA involvement in drug trafficking by a mystery woman (Paz Vega) and soon finds that everyone he asks about it becomes terrified, clams up, practically runs for the hills. So he knows he is on to something.
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Nearly two decades after a US reporter was humiliated for connecting the CIA to a drug-trafficking trade that funded the Nicaraguan Contras, important players in the scandal – which led to the journalist’s suicide – are coming forward to back his claims.
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In a scene from the new movie Kill the Messenger, investigative reporter Gary Webb (played by Jeremy Renner) says that he doesn’t believe in conspiracy theories. He does, however, believe in real conspiracies: “If I believe it, there’s nothing ‘theory’ about it.” The true story on which the movie is based, however, makes it clear that it’s not always obvious what’s a theory and what’s the truth.
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In a scene from the new movie Kill the Messenger, investigative reporter Gary Webb (played by Jeremy Renner) says that he doesn’t believe in conspiracy theories. He does, however, believe in real conspiracies: “If I believe it, there’s nothing ‘theory’ about it.” The true story on which the movie is based, however, makes it clear that it’s not always obvious what’s a theory and what’s the truth.
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By all appearances the 2004 death of the messenger, investigative reporter Garry Webb, from two gunshots to the head was a suicide. But before that his stories in the San Jose Mercury News linking the CIA to drug smuggling by rebels in Nicaragua and connecting it with the crack epidemic in cities here caused his professional demise.
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New York Times, The Washington Post and, especially, the Los Angeles Times went after Webb…
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With the public in the U.S. and Latin America becoming increasingly skeptical of the war on drugs, key figures in a scandal that once rocked the Central Intelligence Agency are coming forward to tell their stories in a new documentary and in a series of interviews with The Huffington Post.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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An FBI agent who led the US investigation into the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 has denied claims made by a former CIA officer who told Aurora News that FBI investigators did not read vital US intelligence material related to the attack.
Robert Baer, a retired CIA Officer who was based in the Middle East, had said, “I’ve been having exchanges with the FBI Investigators and they came right out and said they didn’t read the intelligence.
“I just find that extraordinary and then later for them to comment on the intelligence and say it’s no good; it’s amazing,” Baer said.
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Che Guevara’s body was uncovered from beneath a Bolivian landing strip 10 years after his death, but the truth behind how his body ended up in that secret burial location wouldn’t surface for several decades.
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It’s no coincidence that one month after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Washington Post published a commentary by former President Harry Truman asserting that the Central Intelligence Agency was dangerously out of control. Instead of merely collecting data, as Truman had intended when he created the agency in 1947, the CIA was implementing its own rogue policies, which included overthrowing elected governments around the world…
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“I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that the U.S. has been waging this war for its stated reasons and that it hopes to vanquish The Enemy and end the war.
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The CIA typically carries out such strikes in Pakistan’s tribal region and does not comment on the attacks, which have stirred anger in Pakistan over civilian casualties.
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Not long after American forces defeated the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein in 2003, caravans of trucks began to arrive at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on a regular basis, unloading an unusual cargo — pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills.
The cash, withdrawn from Iraqi government accounts held in the United States, was loaded onto Air Force C-17 transport planes bound for Baghdad, where the Bush administration hoped it would provide a quick financial infusion for Iraq’s new government and the country’s battered economy.
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The media has sensationalized the supposed threat from Isis even as intelligence agencies insisted that the group poses no immediate threat to the United States.
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I picked up my New York Times the other day and came upon an article about how federal officials are detaining Americans who are trying to fly to Syria to join the rebels there.
Great idea. But where were they when John McCain was flying to visit with the rebels inside Syria?
Much of the controversy over McCain’s visit there centers on whether the rebels he met were allied with the Islamic State. That’s an interesting debate and it looks like there were no direct ties. But I think a more important question is why a U.S. Senator saw fit to violate the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation to support those fighting to overthrow the government.
Or in other words, to support terrorists. That’s certainly the way the Syrian government sees the fighters, often from foreign nations, who are fighting to overthrow the regime.
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Turkey has agreed to support a new U.S.-led effort to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels, American officials say, as Ankara backs part of the work of an international coalition, while disagreeing on goals of the military effort in Syria.
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Selling war takes precedence. It’s glorified in the name of peace. It rages against one country after another. It’s official US policy.
Media scoundrels march in lockstep. Doing so enlists public support. Famed US journalist Walter Lippmann coined the phrase “manufacture of consent.”
It’s a euphemism for mind control. In 1917, George Creel first used it successfully to turn pacifist Americans into raging German-haters.
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The event known as the Cuban missile crisis, to many people the greatest of all Cold War crises, is a milestone in the history of the Cold War. “Generations to come,” praised Time magazine, “may well count John Kennedy’s resolve as one of the decisive moments of the 20th Century.” Yet there is perhaps no single event in recent history as contradictory and puzzling as this one.
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You would never know from most mainstream news reports that the Kurds defending the Syrian border city of Kobane from the Islamic Front advance are part of the Kurdistan Worker’s party or PKK widely regarded as a terrorist organization.
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According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck.
The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.”
A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide”. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.
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Vice President Joe Biden opened his mouth last week, let out some facts, and almost immediately had to apologize. In a speech at Harvard, Biden called out Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates for supplying unconditional aid and logistical support to Washington’s current Enemy No. 1: the organization now calling itself the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, as part of their attempt to overturn Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
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Early in his remarks, he explains his concerns with the methods used thus far in this particular intervention: “ISIS has grabbed up U.S., Saudi, Qatari weapons by the truckload, and we are now forced to fight against our own weapons … Reports show that the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have supplied roughly 600 tons of weapons to the militants in Syria in 2013 alone.”
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According to Linkedin, Jonathan Greenhill is a former “Senior Operations Officer, National Clandestine Service at Central Intelligence Agency” – sounds pretty serious, huh? New FARA filings indicate that Greenhill has now been hired to lobby for Sheikh Ali Hatem al-Suleirman.
Suleirman has been quoted by the Huffington Post as saying “The United States has empowered a bunch of crooks here in Iraq, people who used to live abroad in five-star hotels, while we were here suffering under Saddam. It was the United States that toppled Saddam, but these politicians took advantage of the confusion, they came aboard American tanks and claimed that they were the ones who defeated Saddam.”
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Very little was done in the organized Muslim community in northern Illinois after the FBI arrested Adel Daoud in September 2012. As his criminal case returns to the headlines because of his trial being postponed from next month until next summer, more local Muslim youth continue to make headlines for their thwarted efforts to join terrorist operations abroad. One local newspaper ran a frightening front-page headline “ISIS in Chicago.”
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Students at Harvard University have put America as a bigger threat to world peace than the so-called Islamic State (or ISIL) militant group, asserting the US actions in the Middle East are the main factors leading to the growth of such groups.
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President Barack Obama is finding himself with few friends in Washington.
His former Pentagon chief is criticizing his foreign policy. Longtime political advisers are questioning his campaign strategy. And Democrats locked in tough midterm campaigns don’t want Obama anywhere near them between now and Election Day next month.
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While at the time of writing only the US, the UK and Israel are known to have used armed drones in military operations, this is likely to change soon. Italy and France for example, began operating unarmed Reaper drones in 2011 and 2013 and are likely to begin armed operations in the near future. Many other countries are now using large and small drones for military reconnaissance and intelligence purposes and are likely to acquire or develop armed capability in the near future. While having only a relatively short history, armed drones it seems have a big future.
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Pakistani protesters have burned the American flag in a rally against the persisting US assassination drone strikes on Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions.
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Transparency Reporting
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An attorney’s bid for CIA records on the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy remains stalled, after a federal judge said Thursday that she can’t tell whether the government looked hard enough for the records.
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Finance
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The president has been adamant about helping American workers, so why is he throwing his support behind Jeff Bezos?
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On the morning of Oct. 2, the Bolivarian people of Venezuela awoke to the terrible news of a murder during the previous night of a young revolutionary couple. Robert Serra, 27, the youngest deputy to the National Assembly elected from the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and his life partner Maria Herrera were stabbed to death at their home in the parish of La Pastora, a working-class neighborhood of Caracas.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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“I was bribed by billionaires, I was bribed by the Americans to report…not exactly the truth.”
[...]
Some readers will see this and immediately dismiss it as Russian propaganda since the interview appeared on RT. This would be a serious mistake.
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Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (which is one of Germany’s largest newspapers), has decided to go public about the corruption of himself and the rest of the Western ‘news’ media, because he finds that this corruption is bringing Europe too close to a nuclear war against Russia, which he concludes the U.S. aristocracy that controls the CIA wants to bring about, or else to bring closer to the brink.
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Where shall we begin? Clinton’s lies about Serbia and Kosovo? George W. Bush’s lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction? Obama’s lies about Gaddafi and Assad’s use of chemical weapons? The lies about Iranian nukes? Obama’s lies about Ukraine? The demonization of Putin?
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Students at several Jefferson County, Colorado, high schools walked out to protest the school board’s recently proposed curriculum review committee that seeks to promote patriotism, respect for authority, free enterprise, plus the positive aspects of U.S. history.
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Privacy
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If the rumors about Kim Jong Un being ill health – or worse – prove true, the CIA wouldn’t be the first to know about it. No spy agency in the world would.
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The former spy said people who care anything at all about their privacy should as a rule, stay away from popular consumer Internet services like Facebook, and Google and Dropbox.
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The planned Oliver Stone film about National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden—played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt—and his quest for asylum in Russia, is still being shopped around to Hollywood studios and won’t start shooting for another three months. In the meantime, however, a thinly fictionalized version of the Snowden story just premiered on Russian television as part of an eight-episode spy drama, Where the Motherland Begins. And it has a peculiar twist, which implies that since he was a child, the former NSA contractor was, in a sense, groomed by a Russian intelligence agent.
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As far as intelligence agencies go, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has remained relatively low profile—attracting neither the intrigue of, say, the CIA nor the umbrage directed toward the National Security Agency.
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Applicants to the FBI’s internship program will have to answer potentially tricky questions if they want to be accepted by the investigative and intelligence agency. In addition to questions relating to drug use, potential interns are required to reveal their historic downloading habits.
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Yesterday, we mentioned the reports kicked off by Nate Hoffelder’s research that Adobe was spying on your ebook reading efforts and (even worse) sending the details as unencrypted plaintext. Adobe took its sweet time, but finally responded late last night (obnoxiously, Adobe refused to respond directly to Hoffelder at all, despite the fact that he broke the story).
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Between allegations that they manipulated benchmark interest rates or wrote faulty mortgages, banks have racked up more than $170 billion in litigation costs since 2008, according to an estimate by the Macquarie Group (MQG:AU). So some financial institutions are investing in technology that can sift through millions of e-mails, instant messages, and transcripts of telephone calls to spot suspicious behavior before it explodes into a mess of lawsuits and fines.
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Lawyers for Ross Ulbricht have spent the last two months shifting the focus from their client, charged with creating the billion-dollar drug market the Silk Road, and putting it onto the potential illegality of the FBI’s investigation. Now the judge in that case has spoken, and it’s clear she intends to put Ulbricht on trial, not the FBI.
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The National Security Agency relies on agents on the ground in China, Germany and South Korea to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices through what’s called “physical subversion,” according to documents released Friday by The Intercept.
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America’s National Security Agency (NSA) has implemented programs in China using secret agents to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices through “physical subversion,” reports The Intercept, a publication of independent journalism organization First Look Media.
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Civil Rights
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Ever since New York Times reporter James Risen received his first subpoena from the Justice Department more than six years ago, occasional news reports have skimmed the surface of a complex story. The usual gloss depicts a conflict between top officials who want to protect classified information and a journalist who wants to protect confidential sources. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Sterling—a former undercover CIA officer now facing charges under the Espionage Act, whom the feds want Risen to identify as his source—is cast as a disgruntled ex-employee in trouble for allegedly spilling the classified beans.
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Gen. Mike Hayden, the former National Security Agency chief, isn’t convinced that charges should be brought against a New York Times reporter who uncovered a covert military operation against Iran.
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Federal prosecutors hinted Friday they still intend to subpoena a New York Times reporter to testify in a case against a former CIA agent — a move that could put them in the position of advocating for penalties against a journalist for doing his job.
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The Justice Department is using new guidelines to reconsider whether to demand testimony from New York Times reporter James Risen in connection with a leak case against a former CIA officer, a federal prosecutor said Friday.
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More than a decade after CIA interrogators began using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Al-Qaeda operatives, expert opinion remains sharply divided over the efficacy—and moral justification—for using torture on terrorists. Over the years, the facts have been clouded by movies and TV shows in which torture always works and by the justifications of officials who have a stake in defending it.
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It’s a report that’s been the talk of Washington’s intelligence community for months, yet lawyers for the nation’s premier intelligence agency — the CIA — improbably maintained it didn’t have a copy.
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In a book released this week, a former CIA director and defense secretary said that the body of international terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was sent to the deep with the aid of some 300 pounds of chains.
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Moreover, the CIA and Disney have had a cozy relationship for a number of years. Robert Carey Broughton, Disney’s effects wizard, worked for the OSS in WWII. Disney makeup specialist John Chambers worked for the agency in the 60’s and the CIA is proud to say so. (2) (3)
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America’s plunge into the “dark side” last decade created a hidden history of shocking brutality, including torture and homicides, that the U.S. government would prefer to keep secret, even though many of the perpetrators are out of office, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
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Consortiumnews was there for you, since 1995, challenging Official Washington’s misguided “group think”…
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Apparently, Britain has been overcome with a racist frenzy as UKIP secure their first by-election seat in Southend on Sea. Well, Southend on Sea is hardly Britain and I cannot say I am totally surprised. This is Southend we’re talking about. Besides that, the UKIP guy who got in was already a well known Tory guy before he changed sides. They’ve obviously got a lot of media coverage and this seems a bit like a fluke. Maybe I should be more worried about this. It’s hard to tell.
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A former Florida corrections officer is facing multiple years in prison after he was convicted on several counts of possessing child porn.
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More recently, we learned that the C.I.A. spied on a Senate investigations committee. Although one senator described this espionage as “illegal” and a grave violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers, C.I.A. Director John Brennan — who indignantly denied that the C.I.A. would ever do such a thing before admitting that it did — retains his job, too.
In the 21st century United States, accountability is for little people. Citizens who commit crimes — and many who don’t — get arrested, charged, and prosecuted (and in Baltimore, they sometimes get beaten). Government and corporate officials who commit crimes, meanwhile, rarely face consequences.
The same is true of the nation’s financial elite. After the 2008 financial collapse, the Treasury Department rushed in to buttress the country’s financial institutions, funneling billions of dollars to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America among others. At only one company were executives forced out and shareholders punished; and the former executive of that rescued company, A.I.G., is now suing the government for the insult.
During the housing bubble, financial institutions committed, among other known acts: fraudulent robo-signing of mortgage documents, foreclosure fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud. No executive has been criminally prosecuted. Indeed, the settlements between banks and the Justice Department specifically granted releases for the banks’ illegal evictions and fraudulent robo-signing — in exchange for a fine, of course — thus precluding any further investigations. Shareholders pay the fines; bank executives keep their bonuses and their jobs.
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Apparently afraid Jones has a gun (because why else would another gun be out), the officer approaches the vehicle with an ax and smashes the window, sending glass flying into the back seat where Mahone’s two children are sitting. Almost immediately, Jamal Jones is tasered and dragged from the vehicle.
The seven-year-old begins crying. The fourteen-year-old continues to record with his cellphone.
Now, it’s a lawsuit.
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Thousands of protesters are enraged at the police for allegedly allowing them to be attacked last night by a mob in the commercial district of Mong Kok.
And though they won’t say it publicly, Hong Kong’s police are furious with the protesters in turn.
A police officer with years of experience tells GlobalPost that when the news came in that student protesters were being attacked Friday by disgruntled citizens — some of the them with gang ties — police officers were “cheering.”
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Daily Beast columnist and comedian Dean Obeidallah zeroed in on Maher’s quote that we referenced in our introduction, the part where Maher said women in Saudi Arabia can’t drive.
“You can criticize Muslims,” Obeidallah said on MSNBC’s The Ed Show on Oct. 6. “It’s about doing it responsibly. Don’t pick and choose and cherry-pick facts to define us by our worst examples. … Like Saudi Arabia, women can’t drive. That’s outrageous.”
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Mark Udall and Ron Wyden are taking their party to task on CIA torture — and the former might pay the price
Internet/Net Neutrality
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In the past, we’ve covered attempts by big broadband to astroturf their way into the debate on net neutrality, and it just comes off as so obviously fake that it appears rather pitiful. The latest attempt may be even worse. While consumer advocacy groups have been able to do a great job getting people to speak up and raise their concerns about keeping the internet open, often appealing to younger folks who have always grown up with the internet, it appears that the big broadband lobbyists are now trying to fake their way into getting the same folks on their side — and it comes off about as well as when your dad tries to act like a teenager, using new slang and trying to dress accordingly, but just making a total fool of himself. ProPublica has the details of a new effort by NCTA, the big broadband lobbying trade group run by former FCC chair Michael Powell (who is a big part of the reason we’re in this mess today), called “Onward Internet.” (ProPublica calls it a telco lobbying group, but NCTA is much more about cable interests).
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President Obama was apparently in California on a campaign swing for the fall election (trying to help out some candidates and raise money) yesterday and chose to discuss the various issues that are important to folks around here… by giving generally vague and empty statements that might be important if they were actually backed up by anything.
Intellectual Monopolies
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President Obama, no doubt fixated on his legacy, would love to win ratification of a major multi-lateral trade agreement now under negotiation with 11 other Pacific Rim countries.
[...]
As for the first problem, Obama doesn’t have trade promotion authority, or TPA, in his pocket and it’s far from certain that he’ll get it. TPA gives the president the power to submit finished free trade agreements to Congress for a simple up or down vote. Congress can’t alter the agreements in any way.
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Hundreds gathered to participate in a protest march against worldwide free trade agreements on Saturday in Helsinki. As of the afternoon, the demonstration had proceeded peacefully with no incidents of violence.
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Copyrights
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Danish ISPs have reached a ground-breaking agreement with the country’s leading anti-piracy group. In future, Rights Alliance will only need to obtain a single pirate site blocking order against one ISP and all the rest will voluntarily block the same domains.
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The hacking trial of Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm has concluded in Denmark. The prosecution insists that by finding crumbs all over the Swede, it must have been him with his hands in the cookie jar. The defense, on the other hand, maintain that Gottfrid is being blamed for the actions of others.
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The UK’s top IP advisor has published recommendations on how today’s youth should learn to respect copyright. The document envisions a mandatory copyright curriculum for all ages, online awareness campaigns, and a copyright education program run by the BBC.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.12.14
Posted in News Roundup at 2:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Lenovo should certainly supply no-OS PCs for people like me and let the world know what M$ is costing them. No business should get a free ride being able to charge an arbitrary amount without even disclosing the cost to the consumer. It’s not like an OS is not a user-serviceable part. Users can and do change OS. They should not be forced to pay for an OS they don’t use. I told Lenovo that. I hope they’re listening.
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A. Several media players are available for the Linux operating system, so you should not have any trouble finding a program to play the music files salvaged from your old Windows XP machine, which is now unsupported by Microsoft. Many programs cannot play tracks with copy restrictions built in, but if you converted the songs to unprotected MP3 files or another unrestricted format, they should play fine on a Linux system.
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Rather than Web archive files, developers will deploy new applications to the Google Cloud Platform using Docker containers with the application, a Jetty server and a streamlined version of the Linux OS. This approach will also make it possible for Google to offer pre-tested Docker container instances containing specific versions of Jetty, the OS and the Java Development Kit best suited for specific use cases.
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Desktop
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Kano is a device that allows its user to essentially make his or her own computer. The kit comes with a clear plastic case, speaker, keyboard, Wi-Fi dongle, and a Raspberry Pi. For those who are not familiar with Raspberry Pi, it is a $25 computer about the size of a credit card targeted for those that want to build their own computer and save money.
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Kernel Space
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John Linville is a principal engineer at Red Hat and the maintainer for wireless LANs in the Linux kernel. In this video he gives us a guided tour of his home office, including his Fedora and RHEL workstations, his collection of vintage hardware, and a few retro computing projects underway. (For more, see the full series of Linux kernel developer videos.)
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Chris Mason at Facebook sent in his Btrfs pull request on Friday for the Linux 3.18 kernel.
Notable Btrfs file-system changes for Linux 3.18 include cleaning up and improing the RAID recovery/repair support, fsync fixes, and a variety of other fixes and clean-ups. The rest of the changes are really just across the board while there’s around 2,000 lines of new code.
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While we’re just one week in for what’s expected to be a longer than usual merge window, here’s a look at the top work so far for the Linux 3.18 kernel.
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One of the main features for the Xen pull request submitted for the Linux 3.18 kernel are pvscsi front-end and back-end drivers. Xen’s pvSCSI yields support to use physical SCSI devices from within a Xen domain. The back-end pvSCSI driver running in the Domain-0 does the majority of the I/O work while the front-end driver running from domU passes the requests to the pvSCSI driver back-end.
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The media pull request was submitted yesterday for the Linux 3.18 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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As anticipated, Andy Ritger of NVIDIA presented at XDC2014 in Bordeaux, France the company’s plans to support alternative window managers beyond X11 when it comes to their Linux graphics driver. NVIDIA is working on some significant improvements to their closed-source Linux driver to support Mir and Wayland.
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Matt Turner, an Intel OTC developer and long-time open-source graphics contributor, presented at XDC2014 Bordeaux about progress made with their GLSL compiler. Connor Abbott, fresh out of high school who was an Intel intern this summer, presented his work on the new “NIR” intermediate representation.
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Samuel Pitoiset has been working hard to reverse-engineer NVIDIA’s hardware performance counters of their GPU and to allow them to be taken to their full potential under the open-source Nouveau Linux graphics driver.
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Keith Packard of Intel and the X.Org Server maintainer presented at this week’s XDC2014 Bordeaux conference about the state of GLAMOR, accelerating X.Org’s 2D over OpenGL / OpenGL ES in a device-independent manner rather than each hardware driver requiring custom 2D acceleration code-paths.
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When X.Org Foundation board member Martin Peres isn’t busy hacking on the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver, he’s often focusing on software security related work through his studies. One of his recent endeavors in trying to improve Linux security is working on a library for Wayland Security Modules (libWSM) to support security decision making on Wayland-based graphic stacks.
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The new OpenGL ABI does have the interest of other graphics driver developers and also the community as its main benefit is that it can allow for multiple GPU drivers to co-exist on the same system without running into any collisions over the OpenGL libraries, etc. The new ABI is also to promote EGL over GLX and allow multiple drivers to even exist for the same process. This is the first major OpenGL ABI update in more than ten years.
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Peter Hutterer on the behalf of the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors issued an update regarding their state at this year’s XDC2014 Bordeaux conference.
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Libinput is the library that’s been under development for one year now to try to work out a single input library implementation that can be shared by all Wayland compositors and other potential use-cases. Peter Hutterer gave an update on this input stack during this week’s XDC2014 conference in Bordeaux.
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Benchmarks
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The latest Linux graphics benchmarks I ran from the high-end Maxwell GeForce GTX 980 graphics card were some anti-aliasing tests.
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Curious if running Linux games via Steam’s Big Picture Mode causes a performance impact over a conventional desktop session?
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Applications
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In the past, I’ve covered various astronomy packages that help you explore the universe of deep space. But, space starts a lot closer to home. It actually begins a few hundred miles above your head. There are lots of things in orbit right above you. In this article, I look at one of the tools available to help you track the satellites that are whizzing around the Earth: Gpredict.
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Thunderbird is the powerful email client from Mozilla, with support for POP3 for keeping email locally and IMAP for remote storage. In addition, it features chat support, feeds reader and newsgroups. The interface is similar to the one of the newer versions of Firefox.
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Brackets is an open-source editor for web designers, developed by Adobe, with a wealth of features and a huge number of extensions, which can be installed in a few clicks, turning Brackets into a very powerful tool for web developers.
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Since just a few days ago I had a look at the latest SMPlayer release, it’s a good time now to overview yet another movie player written in Qt: QMPlay2.
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Proprietary
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Ubuntu Linux users no longer need to employ arcane workarounds to watch Netflix on their computers.
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Now that Netflix is finally letting people watch their steaming services on Linux, there is a sort of confusion among the Linux users regarding the supported platforms that has to be addressed.
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If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you’ve probably tried to stream video on Linux systems like Fedora. And as with many for-pay services, your experience varied. As of the latest Google Chrome browser release, though, your troubles are over.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine developers are contemplating a staging-like tree where new changes could be introduced faster before being mainlined inside Wine, but this idea doesn’t catch the fancy of all Wine developers.
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As a continuation of the article earlier about a kernel-like staging tree for Wine, there’s one mailing list post in particular that deserves its own post… It appears for at least the time being that the Direct3D command stream patches have been stalled from being mainlined.
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Games
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Borderlands 2 recently arrived for Linux, even after Gearbox president Randy Pitchford warned Linux users not to get their hopes up. Steam also just hit a milestone of over 700 Linux games available—712 at the moment. A full 18 percent of all the games available on Steam now support Linux and SteamOS! That’s not a bad start when SteamOS—the root cause of Linux’s gaming resurgence—hasn’t even been officially released yet.
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The 90′s Arcade Racer was funded on Kickstarter in February 2013 and a Linux version was promised by its creators. I am really waiting for this game, but somehow it is taking them a lot longer to develop than anticipated. The original release date was set for November 2013, and then they said it would come out this last summer.
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Linux gamers have a very interesting weekend ahead of them, with all kinds of titles getting massive discounts. One of the most interesting collections is called the Classic Explorer Pack and features three great games.
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Another World is one of the iconic games of the ‘90s and it’s been a reference point in gaming for the past 20 years. Now, Linux users can also buy the remastered version and enjoy it with the rest of the world.
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Regular readers may recall PCGamingWiki contributor soeb’s previous high level analyses of Civilization V and XCOM: Enemy Unknown (read here for our previous coverage), which looked at the visuals, performance and end user experiences provided by their Linux ports.
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Valve is currently working on their Steam Machines, which is their console that is powered by their version of Linux called SteamOS.
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A couple of old Sid Meier classics were released on Steam, more precisely Sid Meier’s Colonization, Pirates! Gold Plus and Sid Meier’s Cover Action.
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The pack includes three classic games, all ported to Linux, and the fans of these gems can buy all of them for 11,24€, with a 25% discount. The individual games cost 5.24€ each. The offer will be available until October 16.
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It’s still in early access as well, so it’s not yet feature complete, and it has mixed reviews, so it’s up to you how you feel about that.
It’s done by a different team than the other Shadowrun games, so it will play differently.
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The Hive is a story-driven real-time strategy game with nice and detailed graphics which was launched on Thursday on Steam Early Access for Windows. And it seems like developers Skydome are now working on a Linux version! At least according to what they said in a tweet and on their Steam forum.
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Wargame is a highly acclaimed real-time strategy with modern graphics, single-player and multi-player modes, different nations and a huge amount of units (over 750).
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Linux operating systems are present everywhere, not only in the homes of regular people. They are used in all sorts of projects, either for scientific or entertainment purposes. By the looks of it, KDE has been spotted in a short presentation video for the famous Weta Digital studio.
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As you may recall, I recently switched to GitBook.io as my primary publishing platform. Alas, my GitBook.io experiment didn’t last long. Everything worked smoothly until I encountered a rather serious issue: for some reason, EPUB, MOBI, and PDF files generated by the service didn’t include any images. I duly submitted a bug report and tried to contact the developers via Twitter, but I got no response.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Using the Raspberry Pi for around the past two years has generally been pretty fantastic. It took us a year or so to stop being surprised by just how much it was able to do in the various projects we saw or made ourselves. One thing that we always struggled with was web browsing though; Midori was slow and laggy and it would take up all the Raspberry Pi’s system resources as well.
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Reviews
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Edition with its abundance of games, choices of emulators and the fact it comes with Steam, PlayOnLinux and Dosbox pre-installed.
The system was stable in the most part but you can’t always guarantee what an emulator is going to do and on the odd occasion my screen resolution changed.
With so many games available the LXDE menu system felt a bit overloaded. Ways around this problem include adding your favourites to the panel at the top or installing either Slingscold for a nicer dash style display or Cairo as a dock.
All in all, SparkyLinux Gameover Edition provided me with the most fun that I have had in ages and it has been a welcome guest during my internet free week.
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ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 is the latest edition of the bleeding-edge edition of ROSA Desktop, a Linux desktop distribution from ROSA Laboratory, a Linux software solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia.
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One the greatest strengths of Mint 17 lies in its revised Update Manager which provides a lot more information than Ubuntu’s package management choices (Synaptic, Aptitude, dpkg, and Apt-Get) do about each update type (regular updates, security updates, backports, and romeo updates) which makes it much easier to maintain systems.
So, if you’re looking for an elegant, high-performance, easy-to-use, highly functional, stable, and maintainable desktop Linux that is a real alternative to Windows and perhaps the most user-friendly distribution available, Linux Mint 17 is probably what you want.
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New Releases
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4MLinux 10.0 Allinone Edition FINAL released.
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The BackBox Team is pleased to announce the updated release of BackBox Linux, the version 4.0!
This release includes features such as Linux Kernel 3.13, EFI mode, Anonymous mode, LVM + Disk encryption installer, privacy additions and armhf Debian packages.
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Like the phoenix rising from the ashes Lunar Linux is back with a vengeance; a lot of overhauling have been done all over the core tools, packages, installer and the ISO-builder. Even though our journey to reach this milestone have been a long one we hope that the changes and quality improvements we’ve made was worth the wait. So what are you waiting for? Go grab a copy of Lunar Linux while it is hot!
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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In today’s Linux news are reviews of Cylon Linux and OpenMandriva’s latest. Folks are all abuzz about a Netflix announcement from Canonical and more drones are discovered running Linux. In addition, we have several software stories to share with names like Marble, Epiphany, and Scribus.
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Slackware Family
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Debian Family
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FFmpeg 2.4.2 has kept the “Fresnel” codename and is now the most advanced version out there. The big release of the 2.4.x branch happened a month ago and this is just a maintenance iteration.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu 14.10 development cycle has been rather uneventful and no major features have been implemented. The same cannot be said about the thousands of other packages that are used in the operating system, as most of them have been updated. This is also true for the Linux kernel.
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At this year’s VISION exhibition, Vision Components (hall 1, stand F42) will showcase a new generation of intelligent cameras with innovative hardware and software. Operating with Linux firmware, the systems follow a new processor approach: until now, VC has been using freely programmable DSPs combined with the proprietary VCRT operating system which ensures optimal hardware utilization. Now, the VC Z series employs a new Xilinx hardware module that integrates FPGA logic and a dual core ARM processor. Both elements can be programmed. This design not only minimizes the required space on the board, but also enables a considerable speed boost, if required: since the FPGA can now be used for image processing, this process can be executed up to ten times faster than without FPGA support.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Yesterday we reported that UK online retailer unlocked mobiles had confirmed pre-orders for the Gear S, well today It looks like the momentum isn’t stopping there.
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Android
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After announcing that Android L would support 64-bit hardware way back in June, Google has finally released a 64-bit Android L developer preview emulator image. Curiously, though, it’s a 64-bit image for 64-bit Intel chips (Atom/Bay Trail) and not ARM. With Nvidia’s 64-bit Tegra K1 supposedly just around the corner, but no tools for developers to actually create or prepare 64-bit ARMv8 apps, what exactly is going on?
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“If privacy is important to you, the Blackphone is almost certainly what you’re after in a mobile device. Besides, you don’t have much choice currently. One thing I’m still coming to terms with, however, is the concept of selling peace of mind.
As Edward Snowden continues to leak information about how the NSA and other national government agencies were/are hoovering up every bit of personal data available to them, digital privacy has never been a hotter topic. With people wanting more control over how their data is handled, it was inevitable that products like the Blackphone would appear.”
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Before now, all those robots were controlled with an arcane, outmoded interface. Specifically, by remote operators using a joystick and a separate monitor based on a Linux platform, according to iRobot Technical Director of Defence and Security Orin Hoffman. Operating a mission-critical robot using an interface akin to a disembodied prize claw added stress to an already stressful task.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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In this age of technology there has been an ever increasing need for better mobile security, quite simply because we as a society use our mobile smartphones, and devices like tablets more than we use our computers these days. Attempted NSA email tapping and personal information hunting through Google and other sources as well as cyber attacks from hackers and cyber criminals is a big red flag that we need to do absolutely everything we can to protect ourselves from any such attack. Other examples of obvious reasons why better mobile security is needed can be summed up with the recent numerous accounts of leaked images from various cloud accounts and applications like the third party snapchat app from earlier. While nothing can replace the habit of making sure you have a decent password, one way to get better mobile security has been through the use of the Blackphone, a recently released Android based smartphone from Secret Circle which has highly advanced encryption standards to give the user back the control.
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Facebook has open sourced some of its community cookbooks to allow a wider world of software application developers to consider using Facebook’s Chef framework.
Facebook decided to release these findings after designing what it calls (in somewhat grandiose terms) “a new paradigm” that lets a software engineer make any change he/she needs, to any systems he/she owns, via simple data-driven APIs (while also scaling to Facebook’s huge infrastructure and minimizing the size of the team that would have to own the system).
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Pica8 kicked off a busy week in the increasingly competitive software-defined networking space, making moves that officials say will help fuel the adoption of Linux-based OSes on bare-metal switches.
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ONIE has been accepted by the Open Compute Project, and enables businesses to run a range of operating systems—such as Pica8′s PicOS or Cumulus Networks’ operating system—on the same switch hardware. Vendors like Pica8 and Cumulus Networks are championing the use of standards-based operating systems running on low-cost bare-metal switches as an alternative in the software-defined network (SDN) space to more expensive and complex hardware from the likes of Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks.
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Open Source 2.0 news has a lot in store for users that will surely light up their day!
Tech News World reported that users play major roles in the upgrade of features, functionalities, rewrites and new releases. Open Source 2.0 news alleged that its developers are trying to edge out their competitors’ dominance in the market.
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GitHub‘s Ben Balter urges government contractors to adopt open source products and software development practices to build on operational and cost efficiencies and ensure that information technology systems use mature code and receive continuous maintenance support.
Balter, who works to drive government awareness for GitHub, writes in a guest post published Thursday on FedScoop that contractors can gain operational benefits as well as attract potential customers by open-sourcing software.
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Events
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As I looked around the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing career fair (PDF) floor, I stopped by the Pinterest booth and learned that open source software plays a big role at the company. And even better, Pinterest now plays a big role in the world of open source software, too.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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It’s interesting to hear Mozilla taking this stance, because, after a series of kerfuffles with the Internet Advertising Bureau, the company is moving ahead with multiple initiatives that will put ads in front of Firefox browser users, including “directory tiles.”
It was back in August of 2013 that The Internet Advertising Bureau started firing off screed after screed against Mozilla for its plans to block advertising cookies in the Firefox browser by default. The bureau even took out newspaper ads claiming that Mozilla’s claims that it had a right to help users protect their privacy was basically hogwash.
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The specs and hardware of Sony Xperia SP reveal it is smaller but faster in performance than its fellow Android mid-range smartphone from the same label, Sony Xperia C. Both handsets have many similar features that they give their buyers a difficult time in choosing which smartphone to pick for their own.
Xperia SP debuted to conquer the mid-range sphere with loads of technology from its bigger brother Xperia Z, but with a price tag friendly to the budget-conscious buyers. Shortly following Xperia SP with its own set of specs and features to bet, was Xperia C.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Mark Voelker is no stranger to the OpenStack community. As a technical leader at Cisco and a co-founder of the Triangle OpenStack Meetup, Mark gets to see OpenStack from a lot of different lenses.
In this interview about his work at Cisco and his upcoming All Things Open talk, Mark shares his thoughts on where OpenStack is and where it’s heading as topics like Big Data and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) continue to emerge in the OpenStack roadmaps for many companies.
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Amazon boasts a broad range of tools for managing an EC2 instance, but partners say third-party and open source tools expand on Amazon’s offerings.
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Funding
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In the rarified world of ‘private data clouds’ a handful of companies dominate. On the open source side, Red Hat acquired Ceph for $175m and Gluster for $136m. Then there was EMC, which acquired ScaleIO for $200m.
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BSD
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In this process they’ve found more success making DragonFlyBSD’s kernel more like Linux than trying to adapt the complex, quick-moving drivers to their code-base. “It makes more sense to change the DragonFly kernel to behave like Linux than trying to constantly keep up and change the drivers to use *BSD-specific APIs. In a way I’m porting DragonFly to the drm drivers and not the drivers to DragonFly.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Guix talk of this summer’s GNU Hackers Meeting is now available on-line.
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Project Releases
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Basically it is a roughly 4 years old project. This is about two thirds the whole history of the Redis project. Yet, it is only today, that I’m releasing a Release Candidate, the first one, of Redis 3.0.0, which is the first version with Cluster support.
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A new release 0.1.0 of the RPushbullet package (interfacing the neat Pushbullet service) landed on CRAN today.
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Openness/Sharing
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In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the the future of Linux, Google’s Internet of Things (IoT) standard, a new Code.org crowdfunding campaign, and more!
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Open Hardware
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Crowdsupply is generally a good place to spot cool open source projects looking for funding: Tah is an Open source, Arduino-compatible Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) platform for use as a beacon, microcontroller, and HID device.
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Health/Nutrition
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In August 2014, CNN was accused of directly participating in the media blackout of the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) vaccine fraud.
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Six months into West Africa’s Ebola crisis, the international community is finally heeding calls for substantial intervention in the region.
On Sept. 16, U.S. President Barack Obama announced a multimillion-dollar U.S. response to the spreading contagion. The crisis, which began in March 2014, has killed over 2,600 people, an alarming figure that experts say will rise quickly if the disease is not contained.
Mr. Obama’s announcement came on the heels of growing international impatience with what critics have called the U.S. government’s “infuriatingly” slow response to the outbreak.
Assistance efforts have already stoked controversy, with a noticeable privilege of care being afforded to foreign healthcare workers over Africans.
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Duncan had come to the United States to marry his fiancée. He had contracted the disease in Liberia while helping a pregnant Ebola victim to the hospital. His family has voiced fears he was given inferior treatment because he is an African, not a U.S. national. Duncan, who had no health insurance, was initially sent home from a Dallas hospital, despite telling a nurse he had been to Liberia. New questions are also being raised about his treatment after he was diagnosed. Three other Ebola patients treated in the United States have received blood transfusions from survivors of the disease, but Duncan did not. There have been conflicting reports over whether one of the survivors, Dr. Kent Brantly, has a blood type that matched Duncan’s. Duncan’s fiancée, Louise Troh, was unable to see him before he died, as she was kept in isolation. In a statement, Troh said: “I trust a thorough examination will take place regarding all aspects of his care.”
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Security
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Some Snapchat users are waking up to an unpleasant surprise this morning. A cache nearly 13GB of private Snapchats is now circulating through 4Chan, in a leak the users have dubbed The Snappening. Snapchat has faced security problems before, but this time the fault appears to be with a third-party app used to catalog snaps that would otherwise be deleted. While users assumed the snaps would only be visible to Snapchat HQ and the third-party app, a data breach left them circulating through the open web.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has logged nearly 2,000 hours of drone flights over the continental U.S. on operations unrelated to immigration enforcement since 2011. This means the DHS is spying on Americans with drones, although they are not reporting precisely what they are doing or why.
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In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”. As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.S
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38 years ago, on October 6, 1976, Cubana Airlines Flight 455 was downed by terrorists, only now known to be CIA operatives; experts further claim it was not the only case when CIA was sponsoring terrorists.
“The US Government, being consistent with its stated commitment to fight terrorism, should act without double standards against those who, from US soil, have carried out terrorist acts against Cuba,” said Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba to Barbados Lisette Perez, as cited by the Barbados Advocate, during the ceremony of commemorating the victims at the Cubana Monument at Paynes Bay, Barbados.
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Three women who protested the United States’ use of drones are now facing federal charges – and $1,300 each in fines – after being accused of trying to enter the National Security Agency’s protected property in Maryland.
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Barack Obama could have been worse in terms of foreign policy. Now, worse is a silly word to use when you’re talking about life and death. It’s not going to comfort survivors to know that more people died in the last war or Hellfire missile strike than in this one that killed their loved ones.
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The play’s subject matter is not likely to become dated any time soon.
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In May 2013, some 11 years into the War on Terror, President Obama took a break from reviewing target sets and kill lists to deliver a much-anticipated “drone speech” at the National Defense University in Washington DC. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” Obama admonished; “we have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’”
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Five years after a brand-new President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, a substantial majority of his fellow countrymen believe he still doesn’t deserve it and never did.
The former state senator received the prestigious global prize in 2009 after having done little if anything to earn it.
Since then, however, Democrat Obama has ordered two troop surges into Afghanistan, initiated an air war to successfully oust Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi, who was then executed by a mob. That country has since fallen into a lawless chaos of feuding militias and terrorist training grounds.
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Yemen has been the target of the US drone programme like Pakistan and Somalia. And in revulsion at the drones, one of the slogans of the Houthis has been: “Death to America”. This strain could be seen across the Arab world and with ISIS breaking new ground and advancing in spite of US aerial bombing, the omens for the US and its allies do not seem promising.
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In continued resistance to escalating U.S. wars, 75 people marched and rallied at the gates of Hancock Air Force Base here on Oct. 5. The marchers came from across the region, including Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, Albany, Ithaca, Binghamton and Syracuse itself.
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On October 7, 2014, Kathy Kelly and Georgia Walker appeared before Judge Matt Whitworth in Jefferson City, MO, federal court on a charge of criminal trespass to a military facility. The charge was based on their participation, at Whiteman Air Force Base, in a June 1st 2014 rally protesting drone warfare. Kelly and Walker attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to the Base Commander, encouraging the commander to stop cooperating with any further usage of unmanned aerial vehicles, (drones) for surveillance and attacks.
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The government has publicly disapproved of the drone programme while tacitly agreeing to it in private with the US.
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Washington has developed a silent empire, a fourth branch of government alongside the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court: the national security state.
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Henry Kissinger projects the public image of a judicious elder statesman whose sweeping knowledge of history lets him rise above the petty concerns of today, in order to see what is truly in the national interest. Yet as Kissinger once said of Ronald Reagan, his knowledge of history is “tailored to support his firmly held preconceptions.” Instead of expanding his field of vision, Kissinger’s interpretation of the past becomes a set of blinders that prevent him from understanding either his country’s values or its interests. Most importantly, he cannot comprehend how fidelity to those values may advance the national interest.
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US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drew up plans to “smash Cuba” with air strikes nearly 40 years ago, government papers obtained by researchers show.
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In 1976, the Times reports, he was so “apoplectic” about Fidel Castro’s sending troops to support Communist insurgents in Angola that he wanted to, “as he said, ‘cobber the pipsqueak,” according to longtime Cuba expert Peter LeoGrande, who has co-authored a book with the relevant documents, newly declassified by the Ford Presidential Library.
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Transparency Reporting
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Having reviewed both sides of the argument comprehensively, it has become very clear to me who is on the right side of history in the clash of ideas and ethics between Google and WikiLeaks that is the main subject addressed in Assange’s 2014 book When Google Met WikiLeaks (read my review of Assange’s book here). Without a doubt, the ethics and deeds of WikiLeaks offer a far superior value system: one that reflects the public interest best.
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Julian Assange has entered Australia’s surveillance debate dismissing as “absurd” and “meaningless” government assurances that telecommunications interception is limited and subject to strict oversight.
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Finance
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The Washington Post is having some trouble figuring out why more Americans aren’t enthusiastic about the state of the economy, and why they’re not giving Barack Obama and Democratic politicians more credit for turning things around. But it’s not so hard to figure out.
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The EU believes that Luxembourg may have broken the law by giving Amazon special treatment. It may have been that the country offered the company lower tax rates. This isn’t illegal, but making corporate deals that aren’t available for all companies is, reports The New York Times.
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Censorship
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The Conservatives invoke charge of media censorship to justify a copyright law change to benefit political war rooms.
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President Erdogan’s new style of media censorship is less brutal—and much more effective.
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Like clockwork, another news organization is abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s hair-trigger take down process to stifle political commentary just when that commentary is most timely. This time it’s Gannett Co. Inc., a massive media conglomerate that owns, among many other publications, the Courier-Journal in Kentucky. The Courier-Journal’s editorial board interviewed a Democratic candidate for Senate, Alison Lundergan Grimes, and streamed the interview live. That stream included 40 uncomfortable seconds of the candidate trying desperately to avoid admitting she voted for President Obama (the president is none too popular in Kentucky). A critic posted the video clip online—and Gannett promptly took it down.
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Privacy
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Former National Security Agency (NSA) Director Keith Alexander has held investments in a corporation that identifies itself as a “world leader in cloud solutions.” And in a “data gathering and research” firm. And in a company that develops software that improves the quality of images captured by surveillance cameras. And in a radio frequency business that, among other things, manufactures amplifiers for air traffic control, radar, and surveillance.
The NSA once said that if revealed, this information [pdf below] would threaten national security.
The agency refused VICE News’ July request for copies of Alexander’s financial disclosure reports, which he is required to fill out annually under a federal law known as the Ethics and Government Act. The law also states that government agencies are required to release the files upon request.
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The check also revealed that a special tool called MUSCULAR had been deployed by NSA to keep a tab on Google and Yahoo data links. The same is being assisted by a British Agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
To do this, NSA and GCHQ first try to hack their way into the links and try to capture information sent to and fro through the fibre optic cables around the world.
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A drastic curtailment of government surveillance powers is scheduled to occur if the House of Representatives allows a crucial section of the U.S. Patriot Act to expire.
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And we have no recourse. If you resist, you go to jail, maybe not for long, not yet anyway, but jail is jail. Object to TSA and you miss your flight. They know it and use it. The courts do nothing about this. They too are feds.
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New Zealand Prime Minister John Key on Monday unveiled change to the government’s oversight of its intelligence agencies, following a long-running controversy over allegations of illegal spying.
Key announced he would take on the new role of Minister for National Security and Intelligence while delegating ministerial responsibility for the country’s two intelligence agencies — the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and the Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) — to Attorney-General Christopher Finlayson.
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The European Commission should disclose documents relating to the U.K.’s mass online surveillance activities, European ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has said.
The draft recommendation follows a complaint made last year by a German journalist, who asked the Commission for access to documents relating to British activities exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents included correspondence between the justice commissioner at the time, Viviane Reding, and the British foreign secretary at the time, William Hague, as well as a letter from Reding’s office to the U.K.’s permanent representative to the E.U., and letters from citizens to the Commission asking for the espionage to be investigated.
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With an uncommon view of history in action, a new documentary captures Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents as it unfolded in a Hong Kong hotel room.
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Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who blew the whistle on the US government’s mass surveillance programs, has been reunited in Russia with his long-time girlfriend, a new documentary shown on Friday revealed.
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Fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden has reunited in Russia with his girlfriend, according to a documentary premiered in New York.
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“Citizenfour,” the closest look we’ll ever have at how the largest leak in U.S. government history went down, is about to premier at the New York Film Festival.
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In response, politicians from all over the United States rushed to speak out in favor of cybersecurity laws, using the attack to spread fear in support of their legislation of choice.
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The hackers who stole information from 76 million households and 7 million businesses aren’t the only ones exploiting people in the JP Morgan Chase security breach. Politicians are, too.
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After failing to identify the potentially disastrous Heartbleed bug, the United States Department of Homeland Security has successfully lobbied to have the ability to conduct “regular and proactive scans” of civilian agency systems.
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At the end of the Laura Poitras doc, the famed informant registers shock over another who outranks him
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Citizenfour, new film on spying whistleblower Edward Snowden, shows journalist Greenwald discussing other source
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As Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour premieres in New York tonight, realscreen has learned of another major documentary on Edward Snowden in the works, set to launch in 2015.
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Early this morning, a mysterious statue of Edward Snowden appeared in Union Square Park in New York City, opposite the Abraham Lincoln Statue.
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“I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power,” Comey told CBS News’ Scott Pelley in an interview for “60 Minutes” that will air on Sunday. “You cannot trust people in power.
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One of the downsides to the news cycle is that no matter how big or hot a story is, something else inevitably comes along. The advent of ISIS and Ebola, combined with the passing of time, have pushed national security concerns out of the limelight — until, that is, someone at the NSA helps out by reminding us that yes, the agency still exists and yes, it still has some insane policies and restrictions.
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Steven Aftergood of FAS Secrecy News went searching for an answer to an almost-unanswerable conundrum. And he got the most nonanswer-like answer imaginable.
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Earlier this year the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Security Agency seeking a copy of a report it sent to Congress detailing authorized disclosures of classified information to the media. The request was rejected. Why? Because the report is classified.
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A lot of information has been leaked about the government and its various agencies, not the least of which being the NSA. Of course, not all leaks are unauthorized — the government itself will leak its own information at times, the reasons for which are varied and, despite requests otherwise, still secret. A recent Freedom of Information Act request for information about what leaks the government has made was denied due to claims of posing a potential threat to national security.
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To infiltrate foreign networks and gain access to sensitive systems, the NSA has been using the tactics of “physical subversion” – deploying undercover agents in Chinese, German, South Korean and possibly even American companies, The Intercept reports.
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The National Security Agency has had agents in China, Germany, and South Korea working on programs that use “physical subversion” to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
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As a much-anticipated documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden premiers in New York this evening, new revelations are being published simultaneously that expose more information about the NSA’s work to compromise computer networks and devices.
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Europe is taking a long hard look at its data protection laws in the post-Snowden climate. As US public cloud providers face scrutiny over Safe Harbour rules, the EU end users that rely on them are left with some pretty fundamental questions on their future of their cloud services.
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Translated into 16 languages, IFightSurveillance.org highlights images and quotes from activists, business leaders, lawyers and technologists. For instance, initial profiles include Vladan Sobjer, whose organization, SHARE Defense, helps Serbians learn about encryption; Ron Deibert, whose group, the Citizen Lab, analyzes malware and digital threats to vulnerable groups from Bahrain to Iran; and Anne Roth, whose own surveillance by German law enforcement led her to work for better protections for her fellow citizens.
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The EFF has launched a new site dedicated to educating users about how to resist pervasive surveillance online, through the promotion of encryption and other tools and the publication of first-person stories from people around the world who have fought surveillance in various ways.
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Why did Bradley Cooper and Jessica Alba fail to record a tip when they paid their cabbies during New York City taxi rides back in 2013? Why was Cooper near a Mediterranean restaurant in Greenwich Village? Why was Alba at a ritzy hotel in Soho?
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Mentioning the idea of separate, closed networks, even for ostensibly noble aims such as protecting privacy or guarding critical infrastructure, is sure to raise the spectre of balkanization ? the hypothetical scenario where the Internet mimics the political upheaval and splintering of the Balkans starting in the 19th Century.
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Part political thriller and part spy novel, Privacy Lost exposes domestic surveillance in a post-9/11 world.
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Before Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency and Prism made headlines, a group of technologists was dedicated to making the Internet more anonymous.
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Long before Edward Snowden blew the lid off the government’s widespread Internet snooping, an unknown Bay Area telecommunications company was striking back at an equally secretive but far more common tool in the FBI’s shadowy world of surveillance.
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Congress has quietly begun reviewing every U.S. government intelligence collection program. It’s got the potential to trigger the next big fight between The Hill and Obama’s spies.
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In an interview with CNBC, National Security Agency recruiter Steven LaFountain announced a half-dozen camps around the U.S. where kids as young as 13 have a chance to train with high-level programming experts to learn the fundamentals of preventing cyber attacks and other security breaches.
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Thankfully, legislation to limit the NSA’s power is being considered by Congress. The USA Freedom Act aims to end the collection of American citizens’ metadata and limit such programs as PRISM, the NSA program that collects and stores vast amounts of electronic data on national and international levels. This act would also limit the recording of phone calls to very specific circumstances and allow companies such as Google and Facebook to legally disclose government demands for users’ private data.
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When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit convenes Nov. 4 to hear a challenge to government surveillance, lawyers will make their case to one judge — Senior Judge David Sentelle — who has grappled in recent years with the intersection of individual privacy rights and technology.
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All sorts of law enforcement officials have angrily decried Apple and Google’s decisions, using all sorts of arguments against the idea of default encryption (including that old chestnut, the “think of the children” argument). One former DHS and NSA official even suggested that because China might forbid Apple from selling a device with encryption by default, the US should sink to the same level and forbid Apple from doing so here, in some sort of strange privacy race to the bottom.1 The common thread amongst all of this hysteria is that encryption will put vital evidence outside of the reach of law enforcement.
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A COMEDY CLUB in Barcelona is experimenting with charging punters per laugh using face-recognition technology.
The BBC reported that face-recognition software is being used at the Teatreneu club to track the enjoyment of a show and charge fans the equivalent of 23p per laugh. It would seem the club is literally looking to get the last laugh.
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The firm’s principal cyber-security strategist Jeff Jones was presenting at the IP Expo Europe exhibition in London on Thursday, where he suggested that the leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had impacted the Redmond technology giant and the cloud computing market as a whole.
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The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) heard on September 24 oral arguments on whether the secret surveillance program known as the System of Operative-Investigative Measures, or SORM, used by Russian law enforcement agencies violates the human right to privacy. The judgment is expected soon, however Russian experts doubt the ECHR will put an end to the controversial program.
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Once again, our annoyance and fear threshold for location-tracking technology is being tested anew.
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It’s right for people to be vigilant about privacy but often well-intentioned writers paint with too broad a brush or don’t bother to get the full story. This particular story focuses on the “conspiratorial” dimension of the beacon installation and fails to understand several important technical limitations of beacons.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) has turned the internet into a “giant surveillance platform,” a leading security specialist has said.
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The president’s spies continue to capture massive amounts of personal information about hundreds of millions of us and lie about it.
The president continues to dispatch his National Security Agency spies as if he were a law unto himself, and Congress — which is also being spied upon — has done nothing to protect the right to privacy that the Fourth Amendment was written to ensure. Congress has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, yet it has failed miserably to do so. But the spying is now so entrenched in government that a sinister and largely unnoticed problem lurks beneath the surface.
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The German Federal Intelligence Agency works closely with the USA, and because of that it may have violated laws. A parliamentary committee has launched an investigation into potential violations of privacy.
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The Big Brother threat frightens Germans more than the terror threat.
According to a recent survey, 67 percent of Germans view surveillance of their Internet activity by foreign secret services as the biggest threat to their freedom.
Control of Internet companies ranked second on the list of threats to freedom, with 61 percent of Germans concerned about these firms sharing their personal data with governments, according to the annual “Freedom Index Germany” survey conducted by the John Stuart Mill Institute and the Allensbach Institute.
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A provision of the “foreign fighters” national security bill currently being considered by Parliament would allow the same department that accidentally published details of thousands of asylum seekers’ identities to collect fingerprint and retina scans of every person entering and leaving Australia without legislative approval…
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Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden will speak via video chat from Moscow during the Observer Ideas festival this weekend in London
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Civil Rights
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By law, they’re Israeli colonies, but NPR’s guest calls them ‘neighborhoods’
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More doubts raised over forensics and statements of Burmese pair held for Hannah Witheridge and David Miller killings
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As a vocal critic of religion, it comes as no surprise that Bill finds fault with Islam. Yet to many, Bill’s vociferous support of Sam Harris statement that “Islam is the mother lode of all bad ideas” is deeply troubling.
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It was problematical even before I went. You had the feeling [President Lyndon] Johnson wasn’t telling the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin, but you couldn’t prove it. That the government was corrupt, but you couldn’t prove it. The North Vietnamese weren’t these kind people, like Jane Fonda said. You served the Constitution and if the president said go, that’s what you do. I could have gone to Sweden or Algeria. I just couldn’t have my friends over there doing the fighting.
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The Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban has rightly captured the world’s attention. But what about the invisible child victims of US drones?
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As Malala Yousafzai has told the media, that second when she was shot by the Taliban in Pakistan changed her life, (it is also changing the lives of others too), Malala has become a very marketable western commodity. My issue is not with Malala, I support and respect her wish of education for all, however (and it shames me to say this being British) I doubt she fully realizes the extent to which she is being exploited by her new “mentors” in the UK.
There is an element of risk to all now living in Pakistan since the US led War on Terror brought internal conflict to the region but there is only special treatment for some of those affected. Why not fly out every child harmed by US drones to the west for the most up to date medical care, there are plenty for wellwishers to assist.
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The Nobel Peace Prize is required by Alfred Nobel’s will, which created it, to go to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
The Nobel Committee insists on awarding the prize to either a leading maker of war or a person who has done some good work in an area other than peace.
The 2014 prize has been awarded to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay, which is not a person but two people, and they have not worked for fraternity between nations or the abolition or reduction of standing armies but for the rights of children. If the peace prize is to be a prize for random good works, then there is no reason not to give it to leading advocates for the rights of children. This is a big step up from giving it to leading makers of war. But then what of the prize for peace and the mission of ending war that Nobel included in his will in fulfillment of a promise to Bertha von Suttner?
Malala Yousafzay became a celebrity in Western media because she was a victim of designated enemies of Western empire. Had she been a victim of the governments of Saudi Arabia or Israel or any other kingdom or dictatorship being used by Western governments, we would not have heard so much about her suffering and her noble work. Were she primarily an advocate for the children being traumatized by drone strikes in Yemen or Pakistan, she’d be virtually unknown to U.S. television audiences.
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Without meaning to, Western supporters of Somali security forces were even arming various militias in the country, Sheikh said. The government was paying its soldiers very little, and irregularly, too. So many of the soldiers trained by the European training mission, EUTM, defected straight to their respective clan’s militia – and some to al-Shabab – taking all their freshly acquired skills with them.
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According to reports, the drone attacked hideouts of militants on the Cancharo Kandoa area of Afghanistan near Pakistan border.
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For Western critics of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is the quintessential resource for documenting his regime’s mass atrocities. But as the United States undertakes direct military involvement in Syria, the monitoring group’s methodical casualty counts and network of local sources have become a double-edged sword for Barack Obama’s administration.
No longer just a PR problem for the Assad regime and radical Syrian rebel groups, the monitoring organization has begun publishing allegations of civilian deaths at the hands of the U.S. military. And the observatory’s founder, Rami Abdul Rahman, says he’s not going to stop.
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Trash is mostly what Ryan Devereaux serves up in his recent piece on investigative journalist Gary Webb.
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The CIA hires officers who might succeed in the midst of ambiguity — the murk of uncertainty, pressure, and the obligation to act now — but can also affirm the principles we are sworn to serve. For me — a former CIA officer who spent decades trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, who lived with the impossible task of getting it right every time when all choices were fraught with ill consequence — one truth stood out in its simple clarity: Torture is wrong. No hypothetical can gainsay that, and no circumstance can justify making an exception.
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Today would have been John Lennon’s 74th(!) birthday had he not been gunned down on the sidewalk outside of The Dakota in December 1980. Before his death, his political activism and pacifism endeared him to millions, but certainly not to the United States government. Check out this May 1972 FBI memo re: “Security matter dash revolutionary activities” with notes from the deportation hearings the Nixon administration was throwing at him…
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10.10.14
Posted in News Roundup at 2:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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While Munich city council’s decision to replace Microsoft software with open-source alternatives made headlines, it is one of a number of municipalities across Germany to make such a move.
Across Germany at the national and local level authorities are running Linux and open-source software. The German federal employment office has migrated 13,000 public workstations from Windows NT to OpenSuse, and a number of German ubran areas are using or in the process of switching to open-source software on the desktop, including Isernhagen, Leipzig, Schwäbisch Hall and Treuchtlingen.
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Server
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Moving to Linux VDI desktops could save you from Windows licensing headaches, but there aren’t many enterprise situations where virtual Linux setups fit. For the most part, Linux VMs only suit a small number of virtual desktop users.
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Today’s Linux feeds brought news of the release of openSUSE 13.2 RC1 and Jiri Eischmann discusses GNOME and Wayland in Fedora 21. Matt Asay says CoreOS is an “existential threat to Linux vendors” and Jack Wallen says Linux users do have reason to be concerned over Adobe’s dropping Linux support. The Linux Voice says “you might be using the wrong Linux distribution” and Linus doesn’t have the time or any interest in Lennart Poettering’s problems.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a new batch of stable kernels: 3.16.5, 3.14.21, and 3.10.57.
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Graphics Stack
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It feels like we’re very close to the Radeon R9 300 series of GPUs, with AMD dropping the price of its Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X GPUs in the last week, but now news is floating around of the Pirate Islands-based architecture, AMD’s next-generation GPU.
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It’s been a while since last hearing anything from Tiago Vignatti out of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center in Brazil but the Wayland-focused developer has recently been working on Ozone-GBM, a new target for this abstraction layer used by Google’s Chrome/Chromium web-browser.
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Applications
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cool-retro-term is free and open source terminal emulator developed by the Italian programmer Filippo Scognamiglio which mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens, It has been designed to be eye-candy, customizable, and reasonably lightweight.
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Proprietary
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Netflix now runs on Linux without any tweaks or work-around what so ever. I just noticed it when I installed a new Ubuntu system (14.10), with Chrome Beta 39.x and out of curiosity opened Netflix. It worked flawlessly. No agent switcher required anymore
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Ubuntu and Linux users are now able to watch Netflix natively in Google Chrome after the company finally updated their user agent that was inconvenient for so many people.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Unigine Corp has revealed today that Unigine 2.0 has been under development for about one year and with this major revision to their technologically-amazing but seldom adopted engine is OpenGL 4.5 rendering support and other changes.
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Wadjet Eye Games make their first same-day release for Linux with the release of A Golden Wake today. Follow real estate agent Alfie Banks in this retelling of historical events during the Florida land boom in the early 1920s and the following Great Depression.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Cylon runs the classic GNOME 3 desktop on almost any hardware configuration made since 2007, but it is more suited to seasoned Linux users. Newcomers to Linux may not make an easy transition.
Still, Cylon Linux is highly usable out of the box. With its installed software, there’s little need for supplemental installations. The user experience, however, might be less than appealing for those who are not at home with the GNOME 3 desktop.
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Currently, dependencies and applications are installed into directories in /opt, and Listaller contains some logic to make applications find dependencies, and to talk to the package manager to install missing things. This has some drawbacks, like the need to install an application before using it, the need for applications to be relocatable, and application-installations being non-atomic.
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New Releases
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Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and Busybox, which make up the terminal. It just hit version 3.0.5.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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BTRFS is already used on OpenSUSE 13.2 Beta and OpenSUSE 13.2 RC and will be used by default on the OpenSUSE systems, starting with the final version of OpenSUSE 13.2. And since SUSE has assigned three developers for making BTRFS work on their system, Fedora can use the BTRFS optimizations already implemented on OpenSUSE.
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Over at the Fedora Project, we recently released the alpha version of Fedora 21. (And if the rest of this is all tl;dr, no problem – skip right to the pre-release download page, and there you are.)
Looking for a silly code name like in previous years? Sorry to disappoint – this is the first release to be just called by its number. That’s not all we’re doing differently, though. Last year, Fedora reached its 10-year anniversary, and as went into our second decade, we decided to take a step back and reflect on what changes it will take to continue to be a leading Free and Open Source Linux distribution over the next ten years.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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There are many Linux distributions available right now that claim to protect the privacy of their users, but very few actually do it properly. Tails is definitively among the top ones, if not the best. Now, a new version has been made available, but it’s just an RC for an upcoming release…
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Back in February, Canonical promised that its phone-centric Ubuntu Touch will be making its way to actual retail smartphones later this year. But Canonical promises many things and with the year coming to a close, it seems that that promise might either be delayed or, worse, broken entirely. But behold, a device bearing the likeness of the Meizu MX4 but also bearing within it Ubuntu’s mobile OS has just been spotted, fanning the flames of hope of a still possible Ubuntu phone soon.
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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of Ubuntu 14.10 Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.
Codenamed “Utopic Unicorn”, 14.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.
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The US Air Force has the drones, but now the US Navy has autonomous boats that can steer themselves, patrol a zone, and take a hostile posture, whatever that means. It was just a matter of time until someone thought of having some kind of drones that could guard a fleet on the water. The US Navy was happy to oblige.
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Axiomtek’s eBOX560-880-FL is a compact embedded PC with a choice of Intel Haswell dual-core SoCs, plus temperature, vibration, and IP40 ingress protection.
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The Pi Vessel is said to be made in Germany, but is available from a Dover, Delaware based startup called MSDGroup, one of many companies of the same name, but apparently not one that has a website. The Pi Vessel is available on Kickstarter through Nov. 5 starting at $89 without a Pi or $129 with either a Raspberry Pi Model B or the newer RPi Model B+.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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The openSUSE Project has just released openSUSE 13.2 RC1, and the developers are preparing to close the development cycle and get the final version out the door.
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Android
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“Apparently we are in violation of the terms and conditions because we are using the word ‘Android’ in our title rather than ‘For Android’,” he said.
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Three new Lenovo tablets land with (depending on your choice) Windows and Android. The Yoga Tablet 2 Pro also has an in-built pico-projector.
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For much of the past few years it’s been tough to argue why anyone should opt for an Android tablet rather than an iPad. Besides lower prices, there simply haven’t been compelling arguments to go recommend Android tablets over Apple’s iPads, which have a much more robust ecosystem. The Yoga 2 Pro changes that and the Android camp has something to truly get excited about. After watching a video on the Yoga 2 Pro’s display at a private Lenovo briefing last week I’ve been yearning to get one of my own.
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Synaq’s nondescript offices near the Sandton CBD feel laid back and comfortable. A large blackboard near the entrance has scribbles all over it. These offices check all the boxes of a start-up, but this business is far too big, and a few years too old, to fall into the start-up category.
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The good thing about open source projects getting killed off is that there always seems to be another to take its place. Here’s a look at this year’s carnage to date, including some free software and freeware.
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Events
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The Industry-Academia Partnership (IAP) conducted a Cloud Workshop at MIT on September 26. Speakers from industry and academia described their R&D efforts to meet the future needs of cloud computing, spanning the full scope of hardware (servers, storage and networking) and software solutions (operating systems, virtualization, cloud orchestration software, and big data analytics).
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The week after next the FOSS world will be brimming with opportunities to find out more about what’s going on in three separate shows around the country. If you are within a day’s drive of any of them — or if you are not adverse to flying — making it to one of them would be well worth the effort.
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In two weeks the All Things Open conference will be taking place in Raleigh, North Carolina. Penguins from all over will be gathering together to share ideas. And as one of the presenters this year, I started wondering, in what ways can you open source a conference presentation?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox OS is now available on three continents with 12 smartphones offered by 13 operators in 24 countries. As the only truly open mobile operating system, Firefox OS demonstrates the versatility of the Web as a platform, free of the limits and restrictions associated with proprietary mobile operating systems.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The open-source OpenStack Juno cloud platform is set to become generally available on October 16, bringing with it a long list of new networking capabilities. The new networking features aren’t just limited to the OpenStack Neutron networking project, either. They also include new features in the OpenStack Nova compute project.
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OpenStack has a long way to go before it reaches the nirvana state that one of its founders is claiming it has already attained.
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BSD
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The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1.5, the fifth security/bugfix update of the NetBSD 6.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons.
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Jean-Sébastien Pédron of the FreeBSD project gave an update at this week’s XDC2014 conference about the state of the graphics stack on FreeBSD.
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Public Services/Government
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Government contractors have traditionally been slow to embrace open source software. There’s a handful of reasons why that’s the case, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s why government contractors are embracing open source with increasing frequency…
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Openness/Sharing
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Ambient lighting setups are always a good time, but in general these setups are either complex, expensive, or they don’t work with enough things to make the experience worth it. The folks at Antumbra think they have a solution with Glow, which is a $35 LED cube that uses open source software to offer ambient lighting to any desktop setup.
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The term “open source” refers to something that can be modified because its design is publicly accessible. Open source software is computer software with its source code made available for modification or enhancement by anyone. Projects or initiatives that utilize this type of code are those that embrace and foster open exchange, collaborative participation, fast prototyping and community development.
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Programming
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D is a general purpose systems and applications programming language. It is a high level language, but retains the ability to write high performance code and interface directly with the operating system API’s and with hardware (dlang.org).
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Another son, Robert Sirleaf, resigned as chairman of Liberia’s state oil company, NOCAL, and stepped down from his role as a senior advisor to his mother last year.
Johnson Sirleaf said his resignation had nothing to do with accusations of favouritism, stating that he had simply completed his assignment to restructure NOCAL and draft a petroleum law.
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Health/Nutrition
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Medical experts further agree that it’s highly unlikely Ebola could mutate into a form that alters its mode of transmission. That type of mutation would be unprecedented according to Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello, who wrote: “We have been studying viruses for over 100 years, and we’ve never seen a human virus change the way it is transmitted,” and that “There is no reason to believe that Ebola virus is any different from any of the viruses that infect humans and have not changed the way that they are spread.”
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The report exposes the many ways in which GM crops threaten the environment and farmers’ livelihood…
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Security
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The likelihood that Apple delayed releasing a fix for the recent remotely exploitable vulnerability in Bash due to licensing issues is low, according to the executive director of the Free Software Foundation.
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International Dairy Queen, Inc. today confirmed that the systems of some DQ® locations and one Orange Julius® location in the U.S. had been infected with the widely-reported Backoff malware that is targeting retailers across the country. The company previously indicated that it was investigating a possible malware intrusion that may have affected some payment cards used at certain DQ locations in the U.S. Upon learning of the issue, the company conducted an extensive investigation and retained external forensic experts to help determine the facts.
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Whether you’re a nation or a citizen, cyber security is an ever-growing issue – new hacks or data breaches emerge daily, in which people’s information is exposed or leaked, from bank details to intimate photographs. But is the threat of being hacked something that you or I really need to worry about? And if someone did hack into your computer, what would they be able to do with the information they found?
Over the summer I decided to put these questions to the test. I got in touch with an ‘ethical hacker’ called John Yeo, who works for cyber security firm Trustwave, and asked him to try and hack me.
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An HP executive told security reporter Brian Krebs that that the certificate itself wasn’t compromised. HP Global Chief Information Security Officer Brett Wahlin said that HP had recently been alerted to the signed malware—a four-year old Windows Trojan—by Symantec. Wahlin said that it appears the malware, which had infected an HP employee’s computer, accidentally got digitally signed as part of a separate software package—and then sent a signed copy of itself back to its point of origin. Though the malware has since been distributed over the Internet while bearing HP’s certificate, Wahlin noted that the Trojan was never shipped to HP customers as part of the software package.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A desperate battle by progressive Kurdish-led resistance fighters is seeking to defend Kobanê from ISIS fundamentalist forces. Kobanê is in Rojava, or Western Kurdistan, is a predominantly Kurdish area in northern Syria that is a semi-autonomous “liberated zone” experiencing a social revolution.
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A Somerset County woman with a history of political activism faces federal charges after attempting to enter protected National Security Agency property to protest lethal American drone attacks around the world.
Manijeh Saba, a court interpreter, translator and long-time human rights activist from Franklin Township will appear in United States District Court in Baltimore Thursday for protesting on May 3 outside the gate of Fort Meade, MD against NSA surveillance providing targeting information for US drone attacks.
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Finance
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Maria lived in the United States for eighteen years. She worked multiple jobs while raising two sons, a daughter, and several grandchildren. On her way home from church one Sunday, she was stopped at a checkpoint outside her trailer park. Lacking the requisite papers to be in the country, her car was seized, and she was thrown into the merciless and well-greased US deportation mill.
About her forced removal and subsequent separation from her family, she said, “I became so sad I could barely move.”
Todd Miller, veteran journalist and author of Border Patrol Nation, uses Maria’s tragedy to show the incredible geographic and psychological reach of the Border Patrol and its proxy agencies — which now include local police forces who enforce immigration violations far from the border, and the first-ever state-run Border Patrol, South Carolina’s Immigration Enforcement Unit. The “border,” once a contested hot zone in the Southwest, has become a mobile vacuum, ready to disappear undocumented immigrants and devastate communities from Niagara Falls, New York to Miami, Florida.
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Censorship
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The week is highlighted by gatherings where people read from books that have been banned at one time or another. On one side, the annual event celebrates the freedom to read and the freedom of expression. On the other, it shines the spotlight on the bigger and more pervasive problem of censorship, which affects not just books but all means of expression.
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STREETS in Hong Kong have been filled with protesters calling for democratic reform and tweeting their experiences furiously. But in mainland China, people are struggling to discuss the unrest online. Censors have been poring over Weibo, China’s closely controlled version of Twitter, to scrub out even oblique references to it.
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Index is deeply concerned that the UK government has done little to press Bahrain to improve its human rights record. Bahrain’s insistence on the prosecution of Nabeel Rajab underlines the abysmal state of free expression in that country.
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Censorship can only perpetuate suspicion, not provide clarity.
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At the end of the conversation, Nasser was told that he could not board the departing plane, which in any case had already left. The faceless homeland security officer would not disclose the reason Nasser wasn’t allowed into the US.
“Just like that?” Nasser asked. “Just like that,” the homeland security officer responded.
Nasser’s talk was still held, via Skype. But Homeland Security did manage to prevent him from the warmth of a personal address, from speaking individually to fans of his work, and from fruitful discussions with other writers.
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Privacy
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Former NSA head Keith Alexander — the original Million Dollar (a month) Man and premier cybersecurity consultant to the banking industry — is taking his years of expertise (and several mysteriously non-public patents) on the road, speaking at whatever venue will have him.
[...]
This advice is less than useless. Those who actively seek contact with terrorists likely know to stay clear of surveilled channels. Those who aren’t seeking contact have their data (and sometimes communications) agnostically hoovered up by the US government’s various surveillance and investigatory arms.
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EX-NSA DIRECTOR Keith Alexander has defended the PRISM programme he oversaw, and has warned that if members of the public speak to terrorists they are likely to be a target for the agency.
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“When the Senate returns in November, it must pass the USA Freedom Act in order to protect Americans’ civil liberties and to ensure that American tech companies can begin to rebuild trust with their customers and flourish in the global economy,” he said in a statement.
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When it comes to political activism in America, it almost all focuses within the 202 area code. But over the last few years, it’s become clear we cannot count on Washington D.C. to rein in its own surveillance programs.
We need a different approach that engages activists and concerned Americans outside of the Beltway.
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Longtime reporters who cover the NSA know that any time we ask the obstinate spy agency for information, we’re probably going to hit a brick wall. But who would have thought that trying to obtain information about information the agency has already given us would lead to the same wall?
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It’s an assertion that defies common sense but speaks volumes about how the U.S. intelligence complex dodges accountability: The National Security Agency is arguing that even the secrets it has intentionally disclosed to reporters are still so secret that disclosing their disclosure threatens national security.
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Secrecy News submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on March 10, 2014, for “a copy of any notifications to Congress transmitted in the past 12 months concerning authorized public disclosures of intelligence information.”
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A report to Congress on authorized disclosures of classified intelligence to the media — not unauthorized disclosures — is classified and is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Agency said.
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Does your 13-year-old need something to do next summer? Here’s a novel idea: Send her to a special cybersecurity camp run by the NSA.
The beleaguered agency’s new program tries to catch the youngest computer-savvy recruits and inculcate loyalty before they become exposed to the libertarian ideals of Reddit or read the manifestos of Aaron Swartz.
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Kids across America no longer have to wait until college to plan on being a part of the National Security Agency. In fact, they could start preparing for their NSA careers as early as age 13.
The NSA has begun sponsoring cybersecurity camps for middle and high school students, agency recruiter Steven LaFountain told CNBC’s Eamon Javers in a recent interview. Six prototype camps launched this past summer, and the NSA hopes to eventually have a presence in schools in all 50 states.
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Against a backdrop of Snowden/NSA revelations and growing consumer concern about massive data breaches on the Internet, participants in the gathering (which was organized and hosted by Intel) seemed to echo a common refrain: written privacy policies aren’t getting the job done. “There’s a huge gap between a company’s privacy policy and what happens in systems,” said Danny Weitzner, co-founder of TrustLayers and the former Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy in the White House.
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Call it “privacy nihilism.” Whether you’re reading about the latest security breaches across the Net, or the jaw-dropping details of the latest NSA leak, or you’re explaining the importance of crypto to your blank-faced family, or struggling to stop your own government’s plans on burning your right to privacy, it’s sometimes easy to just throw up your hands in despair and give it all up.
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Twitter is suing the FBI and the Department of Justice to be able to release more information about government surveillance of its users.
The social media company filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco to publish its full “transparency report,” which documents government requests for user information. Twitter published a surveillance report in July but couldn’t include the exact number of national security requests it received because Internet companies are prohibited from disclosing that information, even if they didn’t get any requests.
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The pervasive dragnet surveillance of Americans revealed by the Edward Snowden documents has caused serious damage to the trust that enterprises and citizens had in the United States government and unless that trust is repaired, it could have serious effects on the Internet economy, a panel of prominent technology executives said.
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Speaking at the gym at the high school where he used to play basketball in the 1960s, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) gave a dire warning to a group of students and locals on Wednesday about the effects of government spying on Silicon Valley: “There is a clear and present danger to the Internet economy.”
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Here’s one that took place a couple of weeks ago at Georgetown on “The NSA, Privacy & the Global Internet: Perspectives on EO 12333.” Participants included law professors Nathan Sales, Laura Donohue, DNI General Counsel Bob Litt, and former State Department official John Tyre.
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Experts say ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden is a favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize, set to be announced Friday. But such a decision would cause huge complications for Norway with one of its closest allies, the US.
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The race for the Nobel peace prize, to be announced on Friday, has rarely been as open or unpredictable, experts say, with the pope and Edward Snowden tipped as possible winners. Snowden, the former intelligence analyst who revealed the extent of US global eavesdropping, was one of the joint winners of the “alternative Nobel peace prize” in September. A hero to some and a traitor to others, he would be a highly controversial choice for the 878,000-euro ($1.11-million) award. The Pakistani girls’ education campaigner Malala Yousafzai who was also a favourite in 2013 is also said to be in the running along with Pope Francis for his defence of the poor, and a Japanese pacifist group.
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NSA whistleblower Snowden will talk via videolink from Moscow this weekend about the future of privacy, surveillance technology and democratic oversight
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The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is expected to make a public appearance in a UK event this Sunday, speaking via video link from Moscow, The Guardian reported on Thursday.
“I’m tired of people endlessly rehashing the history of Mr Snowden’s revelations, and I’m sure he is too,” the Observer technology columnist John Naughton, who will lead the discussion with Snowden, was quoted as saying.
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In 1995, the US government tried – and failed – to categorise encryption as a weapon. Today, the same lines are being drawn and the same tactics repeated as the FBI wants to do the same. Here’s why they are wrong, and why they must fail again
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The USA Freedom Act certainly has its shortcomings, but it is important to weigh the options, consider the effects of not passing this measure and realize that in a sea of unsure government options, this is truly the best choice we have.
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NSA documents released by Edward Snowden show that the feds seriously deceived Congress and the courts in an effort to spy upon all of us and to use the gathered materials in criminal prosecutions, even though they told federal judges they would not. Among the more nefarious procedures the feds have engaged in is something called “parallel reconstruction.” This procedure seeks to hide the true and original source of information about a criminal defendant when it was obtained unlawfully.
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely-recognised as the inventor of the World Wide Web, has claimed that the UK’s electronic surveillance and oversight body GCHQ is trying to become more transparent on spying.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has challenged assurances by the Australian government that communications interception in the country was a matter of “strict oversight.”
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Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and other Silicon Valley executives say controversial government spying programs are undercutting the Internet economy and want Congress to step up stalled reform.
[...]
Schmidt and executives from Facebook Inc, Microsoft Corp. and other firms said revelations of extensive NSA surveillance are prompting governments in Europe and elsewhere to consider laws requiring that their citizens’ online data be stored within their national borders.
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At the Government Accountability Project (GAP), we began working with whistleblowers in the wake of Washington’s Watergate scandal, an episode that showed what our public officials were capable of when left to their own devices. In the years since then, as the U.S. adopted sweeping privatization and deregulation policies, GAP has come to provide legal help to whistleblowers from both public agencies and private firms.
When the first whistleblowers from the National Security Agency (NSA) came forward — before Edward Snowden — they reported not only violations of privacy and the Constitution, but fraud. After all, NSA cyberspying, cyberattacking and cyberdefending are largely done by private companies which are, by the way, paid lavishly. We can’t be sure exactly how lavishly, because although we’re the people paying them, we have no right to know what we’re paying for. It’s the black budget; it’s secret.
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It has been said that we are living in a post-NSA world. What this really amounts to is that we are now slightly more aware of the level of snooping that has been going on in the background for many years. There has been widespread outrage at the revelations made by Edward Snowden, and there have been similar concerns raised outside of the US. In the UK, the FBI-like National Crime Agency, wants greater powers to monitor emails and phone calls — and it wants the public to agree to this.
Director General of the NCA, Keith Bristow, spoke with the Guardian and said that the biggest threats to public safety are to be found online. He said that more powers to monitor online data is needed, and suggested that public resistance to this was down to the fact that he had thus far failed to properly explain why such powers are needed.
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Alarmingly, Keith Bristow, Director of the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), also known as Britain’s FBI, made a call to the public on Monday to obtain their consent to increase the surveillance capabilities of the state, and thus reduce their digital freedoms in return for more robust protections from organized cybercrime and terrorism.
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Foreign intelligence agencies and private companies collecting personal data online are the greatest threats to freedom in Germany, according to an annual poll.
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Chinese hacker unit PLA 61398 is hacking US companies harder than ever after bilateral talks between Beijing and Washington were interrupted by Snowden leaks, according to Mandiant boss Kevin Mandia.
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Beijing has lashed out at an allegation by FBI Director that Chinese hackers were guilty of causing billions of dollars of damage to the US economy. China accused the US of using such statements “to divert attention” from its own massive cyber-spying.
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The U.S. Justice Department said in a federal court filing on Monday that the government has the legal authority to hack into servers outside of the country without a warrant.
The claim came as part of the ongoing trial of the alleged operator of the Silk Road illicit drug website. The suspect, Ross Ulbricht, claimed that the government’s explanation for how they located the server of the anonymous website was “implausible,” claiming that it’s possible the FBI may have instead unlawfully colluded with the NSA to hack into the site – a technique known as parallel construction.
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Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA intercepts huge amounts of electronic data warrantlessly without our permission. However, that is not the only way the surveillance state violates our rights. The NSA uses other underhanded schemes behind-the-scenes to exploit us. One of them is known as ‘parallel construction.’
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I’m honored to be here to discuss the mass collection of Americans’ phone records by the NSA. Before getting into that program, though, it’s critical to recognize that this debate is not just about phone records, and it is not just about the NSA. This is a debate about the kind of society we want to live in. Do we want to live in a country in which the government routinely spies on hundreds of millions of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong? Or do we want to be true to the vision of our nation’s founders, who believed that the government should — as a general matter — leave us alone unless it has cause to invade our privacy. I think our founders got it right, and I hope you’ll agree, which is why you should vote for the resolution: Mass collection of our phone records violates the Fourth Amendment.
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In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s, and numerous other credible whistleblowers‘ irrefutable revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies are capturing and indefinitely storing millions of innocent Americans’ phone calls, emails, internet transactions, and even movements and whereabouts at any given time—Apple and other tech companies are rightfully responding to their customers’ demands for enhanced encryption to protect their privacy rights.
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Brands are slowly finding ways to make sense of image-based social networks such as Instagram and Tumblr, mining user photos for insight into how their products are used.
The rise of the ‘visual economy’ poses several challenges for marketers. One is understanding how consumers like to share post-production edits of their lives. Another challenge for brands is finding a way to participate in that activity with authenticity. And the final one is how to parse this visual data for insight.
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The bad news is that Americans are at far greater risk of having their phones hacked by their government than by Russian malware hackers.
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Consider, however, the reality of your relationship with your phone. First of all, it knows everything about you. It reads all your emails, sees all your pictures, learns your favorite websites, and even remembers the unsent texts you draft in the middle of the night. It tracks where you’ve been and when, who you’ve talked to and for how long — and if you have a particularly smart new phone, it also knows your resting heart rate and level of physical activity. The jobs that NSA and KGB spies would train for decades to master are now being handled by the little computer in your pocket. In its spare time. As a sideline entertainment. And what do you know about your phone, other than the megapixels of its camera or the gigabytes of its storage?
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Your phone records, your credit-card bills, your internet trail – the government has the power to summon it all on-demand, without telling you. Until now
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The integrity of the Internet could be at risk if Congress does not act to rein in the National Security Agency, Google head Eric Schmidt warned on Wednesday.
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Civil Rights
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Former NYPD police chief Ray Kelly is still telling his stop-and-frisk story to whoever will listen. The story is — and always has been — that if the NYPC isn’t allowed to make hundreds of thousands of unconstitutional stops every year, the city will slide back into lawlessness. The supporting evidence offered for this pending apocalypse never added up. Kelly claimed stop-and-frisk kept guns off the street but statistics maintained by the NYPD itself showed that the difference between stop-and-frisk-free 2003 and 2012′s 500,000+ stops was a grand total of 96 guns — a difference of .02%.
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“Last Week Tonight’s” John Oliver is again taking an entertaining swing at a subject that has made its way into Techdirt’s pages: asset seizure and forfeiture. Going beyond the “robbery at badgepoint” (Cory Doctorow’s term) to civil asset forfeiture (in which the government files suit against property that is presumed guilty of criminal ties), Oliver is his usual entertaining self while still managing to highlight the obscene depths these programs — started with the intent of breaking up criminal enterprises and returning assets to those defrauded, etc. — have sunk, thanks to the perversion of incentives.
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“Lets just say, homecoming this weekend is gonna go out with a bang,” it read, according to a statement from the Utah attorney general’s office.
The bulletin has since been deleted from the site, but still can be found through a Google search. It continued: “And the football game is gonna be one no one is ever gonna forget.”
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Presumably, the student was fully cleared of any potential wrongdoing and mocked gently for his use of the phrase “going out with a bang” by an officer drawing the shape of square with his opposing index fingers.
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The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 is to be awarded to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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President Barack Obama yesterday said he is still “unequivocally committed to net neutrality” and that he wants the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules that prevent Internet service providers from creating paid fast lanes.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has called on the Council of the European Union to publish the EU negotiating directives for the on-going Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations with the US. She has also proposed to the European Commission a range of practical measures to enable timely public access to TTIP documents, and to details of meetings with stakeholders. She has opened investigations involving both institutions.
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Copyrights
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As we’ve reported, France’s “three strikes and you’re out” law, known officially as Hadopi, has been a joke from start to finish. For example, the law’s first victim was convicted because his wife had downloaded some songs, while the law’s first suspension was cancelled for technical reasons. Despite these setbacks, and a change of government, France is persisting with this benighted scheme, and Numerama brings us the latest installment of this uniquely French farce (original in French.)
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10.09.14
Posted in News Roundup at 1:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Even before the fall school buying season started, Google sold a million Chromebooks to the education market. Google now aims, with its Chromebook for Work program, for these lightweight, Linux and cloud-based laptops to become just as popular for office-users.
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Dell recently announced Chrome OS devices for businesses. Adobe is bringing its suite of image editing software to Chrome OS devices, starting off with Photoshop for its education customers. These are the early signs of Chrome OS becoming a serious, and probably dominant player for businesses.
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A do-it-yourself computer kit that got its start through a Kickstarter campaign is now available to young would-be coders. Kano, which got its start through crowdfunding in 2013, is targeting its $150 kit at technology-minded kids ages 6 to 14.
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Kano has begun selling a $150, Raspberry Pi-based educational computer that teaches kids to program using visual tools and the Debian-based Kano OS.
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German cities are now setting examples for the rest of the world to move away from vendor-locked products to vendor neutral, open source based products. After the Munich success story another German town has moved to Linux.
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Server
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IBM is aiming to re-invent itself in a new hardware era where it no longer sells x86 based servers. IBM sold off its x86 server business to Lenovo in a $2.3 billion deal that officially closed on October 1.
Doug Balog is the General Manager of Power Systems within IBM’s System and Technology Group and it’s his job to advance the Power server market position in the new non-x86 era at IBM.
As contrast to the x86 business, which was largely about Linux, IBM’s Power business includes two other operating systems. IBM Power runs and supports both the AIX Unix as well as the IBM i operating system that was originally known as AS/400.
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It might be tempting to write off StorPool. They are, after all, not really ready for the enterprise, at least in terms of compatibility and interface. But for online application and cloud providers, StorPool sounds exactly like what they want from a storage solution. These organizations are often Linux only, don’t want to deal with a graphical interface, and want the flexibility to scale the way they need to scale at any moment in time.
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Given the transparent and collaborative nature of open source, it is no wonder that the technology is widely used all around the world. Countless organizations and industries have benefited immensely from open source software — with science and engineering among the sectors driving the charge.
In an industry that heavily relies on technology and innovation, the deployment of open source initiatives in the scientific field should come as no surprise. In fact, CERN, one of the most revered names in the world of science, extensively uses open source software — here’s why.
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While sometimes dismissed as the newest entrant in the “just enough operating system” pageant, CoreOS threatens to displace incumbent Linux distributions with a minimalist approach that seeks to emulate how Google and other Web companies manage distributed systems. CoreOS uses Docker to handle the addition and management of applications and services on a system.
Indeed, by changing the very definition of the Linux distribution, CoreOS is an “existential threat” to Red Hat, Canonical, and Suse, according to some suggestions. The question for Red Hat in particular will be whether it can embrace this new way of delivering Linux while keeping its revenue model alive.
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Kernel Space
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds has indicated that he has no interest in the problems faced by chief systemd developer Lennart Poettering that led to the latter blaming Torvalds for the negative feedback he (Poettering) has faced.
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Altera, Chelsio Communications, DataCentred, Imagination Technologies, and Travelping Are Latest Companies to Support Linux
[...]
About The Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at http://www.linuxfoundation.org.
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The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has been running well in our latest SSD benchmarks but with the forthcoming Linux 3.18 kernel it’s going to be in even better shape.
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Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate 3.17 kernel (RC1) just ahead of this year’s Kernel Summit. Noting that he would be travelling (and thus not able to keep up with a massive influx of patches), he had closed the “merge window” (the period of time during which disruptive churn is allowed in any kernel development cycle) for 3.17 one day early. He also noted that, typically of northern hemisphere summers, this merge window had been “slightly smaller than the last few ones”. New features pulled into 3.17-rc1 were spread all over the kernel. They include the getrandom() system call, and support for the “memfd” and “file sealing” features needed for kdbus.
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New versions of the Linux kernel will eventually make their way into all sorts of other devices, too. A new Linux kernel means improvements for Chromebooks, Android devices, network routers, and any number of other embedded devices.
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Added to the driver core interface is a new device coredump class. This new generic kernel interface can be used for dumping firmware “core dumps” to user-space over sysfs. This is primarily intended for wireless and graphics drivers (among other potential drivers of hardware that deal a lot with firmware blobs) to implement so they can dump their hardware firmware state to assist in debugging complicated issues where it could be within the firmware code.
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In this video from the LAD’14 Conference in Reims, Gabriele Paciucci from Intel presents: Current Status of the Adoption of ZFS as Backend File System for Lustre.
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Graphics Stack (Mostly AMD)
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Alex Deucher of AMD has taken the floor at XDC2014, which got underway today in France to provide an update on the company’s new unified open-source driver strategy. Compared to what I originally reported earlier in the year when breaking the news, there’s some notable changes but overall this is an exciting endeavor for AMD Linux customers with the open and closed source AMD GPU drivers going to share the same (open-source) Linux kernel driver.
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I am not a power user of Linux or any of the various distros but I believe something very big happened today. AMD has unveiled what they are calling the “AMDGPU” Kernel Driver; something that will form the base of Closed Source (Catalyst) and Open Source (e.g. Gallium3D) drivers in Linux. This appears to be a pretty big step judging from the amount of appreciation it is receiving from the linux community.
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The Linux 3.18 kernel will bring support for reading the core temperature of AMD’s forthcoming “Carrizo” APUs.
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New ARM platform coverage with this next major Linux kernel series include support for the SAMA5D4, BCM63XX family of DSL SOCs, the HiP04 server-class SoC, Amlogic Meson6 (8726MX) platform support, and support for the R-Car E2 r8a7794 SoC. The Atmel SAMA5D4 is an ARM Cortex-A5 based design, the BCM63XX has been known to OpenWRT fans, the Hisilicon HiP04 was enabled by the Linaro crew, and the r8a7794 is an automotive-geared SoC.
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If you go back more than seven years ago, lots of people took easy aim at the state of ATI/AMD’s Linux graphics drivers. Back then, they didn’t even have an open-source strategy… How times have changed.
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On Monday I wrote about AMD adding native object code support to their Radeon Gallium3D drivers and Clover. Besides being a huge performance win for OpenCL kernel compile times, this work is also instrumental as part of AMD’s open-source HSA Linux plans.
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Patches are pending to provide the xf86-video-modesetting with GLAMOR hardware acceleration support for 2D.
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Student developer Roy Spliet presented at XDC2014 Bordeaux this week about his X.Org Foundation funded work on improving GPU re-clocking for the open-source Nouveau (NVIDIA) Linux graphics driver. For NVA3/NVA5/NVA8 hardware owners, the reverse-engineered driver will soon start offering better performance with the GPU core and memory frequencies finally able to hit their rated targets.
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Applications
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LightDM GTK+ Greeter is the default Xubuntu (screenshot below) and Lubuntu LightDM greeter (login screen UI). For how to switch to it in Ubuntu (w/ Unity), etc., see THIS Ubuntu wiki article.
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During my search for a good Markdown editor for Linux, I came across a few that are good and a few that are not that good. See The search for a usable Markdown editor for my Linux desktop.
A few of those don’t have support for binary installation on RPM-based distributions, like Fedora, and attempts to install them using alien failed. I wrote about those at The pain of trying to install a .deb package on Fedora using Alien.
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TLP was updated to version 0.6 recently, receiving some fixes for Linux Kernel 3.15 and 3.16 along with systemd improvements and other changes.
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Proprietary
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Nervepoint Technologies Limited, the global leaders in virtualized password and identity self-service are pleased to announce we now support Linux within Access Manager, our self-service password solution. Available immediately this new feature empowers organizations to securely manage any Linux based system efficiently and effortlessly.
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So, what’s the big deal? Adobe has clearly shown it has zero interest in supporting our platform of choice. This is not new news. In fact, Reader hadn’t been updated for Linux since May, 2013. And what about the rest of Adobe products? Need I say more? And Reader for Linux has been in a pathetic state for a long time (even the Windows version is a mess). There are also other, better alternatives for Linux (such as Evince and Ocular).
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Instructionals/Technical
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It is difficult to describe the joy of watching an object that you have designed being materialized in front of your eyes. Even more satisfying is watching it print on a machine you built yourself with open source hardware and control with open source software on Linux.
A 3D printer creates things by laying down plastic a little bit at a time to build the object up in layers. Technically there are many ways to “3D print” an object. At the moment the most popular method is using a reel of plastic which is fed to a hot end that can heat up the plastic and deliver a given amount of it at a specific location.
The process of slowly adding material allows you to create objects which are difficult to create if you were starting with a block of material and removing the pieces that you don’t want. 3D printing also allows you to create things relatively cheaply; a tablet stand that precisely fits on a space on the kitchen bench might only cost you 50 cents in plastic.
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Games
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The sequel to the popular Halloween themed turn-based RPG Costume Quest was released today for Linux. This makes it the first Double Fine game to get a proper sequel on the PC.
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After more than a year in development, the real time strategy game Annex: Conquer the World 4.0 has now been released, boasting nearly twice the game content, including new armies, new modes of play, new maps, new tile-sets, and a much more refined gameplay. As of version 4.0 the game has also been released under a FOSS license.
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One week after its initial release on Steam for Linux, Stronghold 3 is available at an 80% off price in a special promotion that will end on October 13.
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The Kerbal Space Program is a game that masks it’s enormous depth under a cute-looking veneer. Kerbal-kind shares more in appearance with the lemmings of the eponymous 1991 game, than they do with the men and women who strap themselves to rockets in the real world. Don’t let this mislead you though, for although the cutesy characters don’t look hard, the science behind their space program is. (It is rocket science, after all.)
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Today should be a good day for you nostalgia lovers, because Shovel Knight has been released for Linux! Shovel Knight is a charming NES-Inspired platformer that was funded on Kickstarter and release for Windows back in June. The game has received a lot of critical praise; being described as a love letter to old school platformers. To celebrate I’ve bought a humble key (Includes DRM-Free and Steam key) to give one of our readers. If you want a shot read the instructions at the bottom of the article.
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Serious Sam 3: BFE is a first-person shooter, a prequel of Serious Sam: The First Encounter, set in a futuristic universe, with single-player, multi-player and coop modes.
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GOG.com has recently launched an up to 85% off promotion for several of its games. Under the name Mutator Promo, the discount covers a list of games which benefit of up to 85% price discount, and for each three games that you buy from the list, you will receive another one for free, randomly chosen. The list includes four Linux games, as shown below.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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According to my sources, the last stable release of XFCE was about two years ago. By anyone’s time line, that is a long time between stable releases. Bundle this issue with its apparent inability to play nicely with GTK3 friendly items and instead sticking to its older GTK roots. And others users have pointed out that the perceived GTK3 issues are largely with various desktop themes and the “fault” is to be directed at the GNOME project. Long story short, it’s a debate showing few signs of being resolved anytime soon.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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After a second long bugs triage since 4.3.0 release, we have worked hard to close another sets of reported issues.. See the new list of the issues closed in digiKam 4.4.0 available through the KDE Bugtracking System.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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One of the great benefits of Linux is that you can customize it however you’d like. And while some customizations can be completely unique, others can be oddly familiar to other operating systems. We’ve already shown you how you can make a Lubuntu installation look like Windows XP.
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Is your current Linux distribution really the best in town, or are you missing something even better?
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ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 is the fourth in the series and uses one of the latest KDE versions. It’s a distribution that aims to please a lot of users, even the ones who come from a Windows ecosystem.
The previous version of this distribution was released back in April, so the developers had a lot of time to improve upon the operating system. That doesn’t mean that ROSA changed too much. From a design point of view it’s still pretty much the same, but many of the included packages have been updated.
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New Releases
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The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.0.5 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
This is a bugfix release of the v3.0 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.14.20 kernel which has some critical security fixes.
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SparkyLinux 3.5.1 “Annagerman” Enlightenment 19 is ready to go.
Not so long ago, just three years I started my adventure with Enlightenment and Ubuntu.
At the beginning the name of the system was ue17r (Ubuntu E17 Remix) and it was far away from the current version of SparkyLinux. ue17r was a kind of experiment and I was trying to prove (myself) that a man such me, non-programmer, is able to do something what theoretically shouldn’t does.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Product Security track lots of data about every vulnerability affecting every Red Hat product. We make all this data available on our Measurement page and from time to time write various blog posts and reports about interesting metrics or trends.
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Private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Apprenda Inc. has just added support for the popular JBoss and Apache Tomcat web servers, a move which translates to deeper support for more Java applications.
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Fedora
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Fedora 21 Workstation (which is currently in alpha), contains a neat new application for quickly viewing and searching the logs of your system. It places all the system logs in a simple to use interface without having to dig through the filesystem or use a command line tool. This new application, simply called Logs should be installed by default on your Fedora 21 install and can be found in the Activities overview by simply searching for “Logs”.
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Fedora 21 will come with GNOME 3.14, which already runs reasonably well on Wayland. Want to find out? It’s super easy to try it out! Let’s take a look at how to run GNOME on Wayland in Fedora 21, what already works, and what is yet to be finished.
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Following last month’s release of Fedora 21 Alpha I played around with the GNOME Wayland session and shared my thoughts and ran some XWayland benchmarks. The Fedora Project Magazine has also now put the Fedora 21 gnome-session-wayland-session through its paces and delivered a brief write-up. In their write-up they cover a partial list of applications known to break under Wayland some shortcomings. They also do a brief overview of the Wayland architecture and other facts, if you’ve been living under a rock the past few years, or just not reading enough Phoronix.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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UbuTricks 14.10.08 has been released. This version arrives with 10 new added programs (two games and eight apps), a new version numbering system which follows the year.month.day scheme, and several other bug fixes and improvements.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has added a new offering to its training and education initiatives. This fall, the company is introducing a five-day OpenStack cloud computing training program, which it no doubt hopes will help generate expertise and familiarity with Ubuntu-friendly OpenStack distributions.
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We can’t wait for the day to see the very first Ubuntu-powered smartphone hitting the market. Canonical — which makes the popular Linux distribution — has been experimenting with few different Nexus devices but none of these were ready for prime time.
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The IoT consortium has formed a working group that will develop an open standard for smart lighting.
The AllSeen Alliance, one of several industry consortiums developing open standards for the Internet of things, is turning its attention to lights in homes and businesses.
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A mobile personal web server called “The Egg” runs Tizen on an Intel Atom and features a 12-hour battery, a 2.4-inch touchscreen, and up to 256GB of storage.
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Lascar launched a Linux-based DAQ system with a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen, an ARM9-based Freescale i.MX283 SoC, and a free GUI program.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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openSUSE 13.2 RC1 is baked and ready to serve!. This previous Beta release was a blast with almost 10.000 downloads. The community responded to the call and we had lot of eyes looking for bugs in openSUSE 13.2 Beta1. Many of them have been already squashed and openSUSE 13.2 Release Candidate 1 is here to prove it.
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It’s that time of the year when Linux users get to upgrade their systems – for free of cost, of course. All major distributions are slated for upgrade in the coming weeks including openSUSE (check out our dedicated openSUSE sub-magazine), Ubuntu and Fedora.
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We have all been waiting for the Tizen Samsung Gear S to be launched and it looks like unlocked-mobiles will be the first UK online retailer to begin pre-orders with a confirmed price. They are expecting to have Stock on the 24th October, and will have the Gear S retailing for £334.98 inc VAT.
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Android
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Around 45 percent of Android devices have a browser that is vulnerable to two serious security issues, but some countries have a considerably larger percentage of affected users than others, according to data from mobile security firm Lookout.
The two security issues were discovered over the past month by a security researcher named Rafay Baloch and were described as a privacy disaster by other researchers. They allow an attacker to bypass a core security boundary, called the same-origin policy (SOP), that exists in all browsers.
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iRobot on Thursday unveiled a new controller for its unmanned bomb disposal and discovery robots, an app that runs on every Android tablet.
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He gives an idea of what the Ansible open source community is all about, including the rewards and challenges of working with users who also happen to be talented developers. He answers this and more, like what he’d work on if he could just add one more hour to the day.
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GitHub last month reported that the number of government employees using the code sharing platform had tripled in the past year, to reach more than 10,000 users from 500 organizations. The accompanying graph (re-published here with permission) shows a steep adoption curve that perfectly illustrates a larger trend toward government use of open source practices and workflows over the past five years.
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It is not necessarily a requirement to have clouds built on an open source component, but there is no denying the prevalence and significance of open source staples such as Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL or Apache Web Server in cloud environments. Open source software can help smooth the transition to DevOps if people are familiar with its tenets, such as collaboration, communication and transparency.
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Broadly speaking, there are two types of open source software. The free software, which has a reciprocity requirement in it. Open source software which doesn’t.
We can have debates about the merits of those two groups for the whole evening. I think both of them are needed and it depends on the usage and the purpose of your project.
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Prior to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh this year, I asked Adrian Pomilio, UI developer at Teradata, a few questions about the session he’ll deliver, his favorite open source tools, and recent trends in UI/UX technology relevant to open source world.
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If you’re going to rely on some OSS, get in touch with the developers of those projects. Most OSS developers are quite community-oriented and usually helpful. In case your senior executives, regulatory, or QA folks have questions, you’ll be able to answer them easily if you’re in touch with the original developers. Also, if you need changes, some developers will likely be available for hire for making changes or helping with validation.
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Events
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Women in open source are making revolutionary contributions and paving the way for others as they innovate in the field. In tandem with the Grace Hopper conference happening this week, I put together a healthy dose of knowledge on the subject with a quick spotlight on five talented women in open source. A few of them give advice on working in tech.
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Preparation for the LCA 2015 is well under way, and earlybird tickets available now. The event will take place next year from January 12th to the 16th at the University of Auckland Business School, in the modern Owen G Glenn Building.
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This morning the annual X.Org Developers’ Conference (XDC) started in Bordeaux, France.
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Web Browsers
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A group of researchers is making news for building a new web privacy system for the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers that more efficiently handles JavaScript code among other tasks. In a paper introduced this week in conjunction with the Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, the researchers reported that 59 per cent of the biggest one million websites, and 77 per cent of the top 10,000 websites, incorporate jQuery, a tool that has been preyed on by hackers.
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Chrome
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Google officially released the Chrome 38 browser on Oct. 9, providing users with few new features. The main focus of Chrome 38 is stability and security fixes—lots of security fixes.
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Though Google didn’t bother to mention Linux, if you are running Chrome browser you can easily install the app from the Chrome Store. The app will be added to the Chrome Apps and you can easily access it from your Linux desktop.
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The primary features of the Chrome 39 Beta is JavaScript (ES6) Generators support for easier asynchronous programming, playback control support for Web Animations, a new Web Application Manifest option for wrapping meta-data around web applications, Beacon API support, scroll offset improvements for HiDPI support, and other changes.
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Mozilla
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When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In my case, I have a 3D printer, and every problem is an opportunity to stare at the hypnotic movements of the extruder.
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As my post last week indicated, I’m increasingly sceptical of Mozilla’s role as the key defender of the open Web, largely because of its decision to embrace DRM. Even as a purveyor of fine Web browsers, things don’t look so rosy. Two years ago, its global market share was fairly stable around 20%; a year ago, that slipped to around 19%; today, it’s slumped to 14%. Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome has overtaken Firefox as the number two browser, and holds around 21% of the market. Obviously, these figures are to be taken with a serious grain of salt, but I think the trend is real. So, given these developments, the obvious question that needs to be answered is: where exactly does Mozilla’s future lie?
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SaaS/Big Data
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As September ended, the Linux Foundation announced the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) Project, a group comprised primarily of telecom operators working across open source projects and vendors to implement Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) within their organizations. News has also steadily arrived from Red Hat about its work to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications technology into OpenStack.
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The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is *almost* at its next major release, known as Juno — but first there all the release candidates.
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Although it is only four years old, the OpenStack cloud computing project is already having a profound impact on the plumbing and architecture of many data centers. Yesterday, I reported on how Network functions virtualization (NFV) is becoming synonymous with OpenStack, and how NFV and OpenStack could effectively rip out the proprietary infrastructure found in network deployments at many organizations.
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Databases
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When you’re about to start a project and are trying to make a decision on the what applications to use, one way to proceed is to find out what other people have to say about the available options, especially from others with first-hand experience with those available options.
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What does it take to prepare SQL database storage for the Big Data age? Altiscale believes the answer is SQL-on-Hadoop as a service delivered through the cloud, which it has introduced through a new solution that it says is the first to make Hadoop File System (HDFS) data accessible through SQL interfaces.
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CMS
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Alfresco just reaffirmed its good-guy enterprise content management (ECM) credentials. It’s contributing an open source integration called Chemistry Pars to the Apache Software Foundation.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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After browsing through all the flashing lights and shiny colors in Dribbble, casual admirers might come to the conclusion that web design is a unique bespoke process. But looking closer you can see some motifs with two columns here, or a grid layout there. When it comes down to layouts, it makes sense to at least have a solid foundation as a starting point rather than coding all the layout and responsiveness yourself.
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Funding
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Now that the needed money has been raised, the brothers Nielsen can get to work evolving the quality of their product. As Jared said back in September, “Our production value continues to improve with each video and tutorial we create. ‘Superusers: The Legendary GNU/LINUX Show’ is leagues ahead of our first episode, ‘What is a Robot?’ The ten computer science videos proposed in our Indiegogo campaign will only be better. We will focus on improving our script writing, fine-tuning the balance of education and entertainment, incorporating more animations, and refining our audio/visual production techniques.”
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Openness/Sharing
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As of now, JuliusJS can only recognise a few words included in a sample dictionary. Programmers who want more will have to expand the software’s vocabulary themselves. But it’s an open source project. So it can grow.
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Wired U.K. has just done an interesting report on JuliusJS — an open source tool that lets software developers build voice-controlled applications for web browsers. Its developers want to usher in a whole new class of Siri-like apps for the desktop.
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Open Data
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Today Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council are pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of the Open Definition. The Definition “sets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content” and plays a key role in supporting the growing open data ecosystem.
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The question of how much data an individual should share was a key theme of Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote speech at IP Expo in London.
Addressing a packed conference room, the father of the web said opening up data for clinical trials is the only way to solve big problems and, in the event of a road accident, he would want any doctor to access his records.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Rich Geldreich, one of the original Valve Linux team members who started work on their VOGL OpenGL debugger, thinks it will take three years or more before the next-generation OpenGL materializes for users.
Geldreich sadly left Valve earlier this year without disclosing his reasons at the time. It turns out he’s now relocating back to Dallas, Texas and will be working for a start-up. The former Valve and former Microsoft developer has written his first blog post in a while and made a few interesting remarks:
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Science
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Prehistoric paintings at least 40,000 years old that depict animals — including one known as a “pig-deer” — and the outline of human hands in seven caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are rewriting the history of art.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Regular US drone strikes are back, killing people on Pakistani territory. The mother of all terrorists says it is targeting the terrorists but by now we should be wise enough to know that she’s up to something else. At a time when the Pak Armed Forces are successfully eliminating terrorists from the very area being droned, what axe is the meddlesome superpower trying to grind? Is it leveling the ground for introducing its new and deadlier ISIS offspring into Pakistan via Afghanistan?
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Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and secretary of defense, says that defeating our enemies in the Middle East and North Africa “is going to take a long time.” How long? “I think we’re looking at kind of a thirty-year war,” Panetta predicts.
Whether the United States will be involved in this war for thirty years is an open question. But the notion that such a lengthy war is necessary is nonsense.
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At least 23 people were killed and several others injured in three US drone strikes during last 36 hours in North Waziristan’s tribal region. In the latest attack, six people were killed and 11 injured when a US drone fired two missiles on militant Commander Mustaqeem’s centre in Kandghar area of Shawal on Wednesday.
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In President Obama’s six years in office, he’s ordered about eight times as many drone strikes as his predecessor did in eight years in office. Apparently, not everyone thinks that’s a good thing.
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A U.S. drone strike in Pakistan has reportedly killed at least four people. The victims were described as suspected militants in North Waziristan. At least 25 people have died this week in a series of U.S. strikes in tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
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At least four people were killed and two others injured in a US drone attack in the North Waziristan tribal region, security sources said.
Sources said that the drone fired missiles targeting a vehicle in the Loman area of Dattakhel Tehsil. Today’s strike is the fifth consecutive drone attack in the last five days, as the US-led drone campaign targets suspected militants and their hideouts in restive North and South Waziristan.
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There is certainly at least one way America is exceptional
The U.S. Empire today is the largest in world history with 1,100 military bases and outposts spreading over the globe, dwarfing the Alexander, Roman, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Spanish and British empires of yesteryear.
President Obama has urged Americans to shift attention to Asia but surreptitiously has increased militarism in Africa from A to Z (Algeria to Zambia). Africa swarms with U.S. military.
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The Obama administration has overseen an eightfold increase in the number of attacks flown by unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones.” These small, pilotless aircraft have become popular with the U.S. Air Force for their ability to take on dangerous missions deep inside hostile territory while keeping American servicemen out of harm’s way. Yet the American drone program has also come under harsh scrutiny by human rights groups.
[...]
I’m all for productive discussion of the covert war against terrorism in the Middle East. As we talk, however, remember to keep the focus on the real problem: an endless war against a nameless foe without concrete objectives. Don’t jump to conclusions just because some of our planes don’t have pilots in them.
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The dispute that occurred on the October 3 edition of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” between Maher and author Sam Harris, on the one hand, and prominent actor Ben Affleck, on the other, was revealing. In particular, it helped clarify the relationship between anti-Muslim bigotry, the “identity politics” of the affluent middle class and defense of American imperialist policy in the Middle East.
[...]
Affleck heatedly responded that those positions were “gross” and “racist.” He commented, “It’s like saying ‘you shifty Jew.’” When Harris went on to claim that “Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas,” Affleck responded, quite legitimately, “That’s an ugly thing to say.”
The actor continued, “How about the more than a billion people who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punish women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches… and don’t do any of the things that you’re saying all Muslims [do]?… [It’s] stereotyping.”
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Those days also seem to be over, as another US drone strike tore through Datta Khel, North Waziristan today killing two more people. It was the fifth distinct US strike against Waziristan in just four days.
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Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan said on Tuesday night that he was sure of general elections in the year 2015. “Elections will be held early next year. Nothing can stop ‘Naya (new) Pakistan’ from coming into being,” said Imran Khan while talking to a private TV channel. Elections would be announced in a month or two, Imran Khan added.
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The Central Intelligence Agency carried out four drone strikes against suspected militants in the North Waziristan Agency during the Eidul Azha holidays, killing 17 persons and causing injuries to several others.
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On October 7, 2014, Kathy Kelly and Georgia Walker appeared before Judge Matt Whitworth in Jefferson City, MO, federal court on a charge of criminal trespass to a military facility. The charge was based on their participation, at Whiteman Air Force Base, in a June 1st 2014 rally protesting drone warfare. Kelly and Walker attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to the Base Commander, encouraging the commander to stop cooperating with any further usage of unmanned aerial vehicles, (drones) for surveillance and attacks.
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UK trade relations with Israel between January and August 2014 are reported to have reached record levels, despite worldwide public outrage against the IDF’s recent military assault on Gaza.
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A report published last Tuesday claims that President Barack Obama’s once-strict standards regarding civilian deaths have fallen by the wayside, as US forces intensify air strikes against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.
What is most troubling about this specific report is that it conveys the notion that President Obama’s civilian-death standards were, at one time, tight or even “strict.”
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In an article for National Review Online, anti-Muslim activist David Horowitz described the benefits to conservatives of the recent beheadings carried out by the Islamic State terrorist group (ISIS).
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Horowitz is a former member of the New Left who, since his political conversion, has made a career out of alleging liberal bias on college campuses and accusing anyone who is not overtly Islamophobic of being in league with terrorists. The Southern Poverty Law Center described Horowitz as “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A recent Rolling Stone article documenting Koch Industries’ “lucrative blend of pollution, speculation, law-bending and self-righteousness” over the last few decades has sparked a string of personal attacks on the reporter, Tim Dickinson, by “KochFacts.com” and a point-by-point rebuttal from Rolling Stone.
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Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world’s largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don’t want you to know is how they made all that money
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Finance
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Fox News hyped a Watchdog.org study purporting to show Colorado recipients of government assistance programs accessed the government funds from exotic, out-of-state locations while on lavish vacations. But Fox’s report failed to mention that the study only found less than 2 percent of withdrawals fell into that category.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A tactic used by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to evade state public records laws has popped up in Florida, prompting a lawsuit against the Orange County mayor for allegedly using an internet dropbox to dodge transparency surrounding the county’s latest effort to thwart paid sick day legislation.
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A recent essay in Harper’s (10/14) roiled the waters at PBS by arguing that public television is too often geared towards serving the “aging upper class: their tastes, their pet agendas, their centrist politics.”
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To no one’s surprise, Jeff Bezos has made good on his promise to subsume the venerable Post into the Amazon machine
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Privacy
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On Monday, I was pleased to see that Robert X. Cringely shares my thoughts. In an article well worth reading on Forbes, he writes: “Here’s the simple truth: it makes no sense, none, nada, for a bank to send financial transactions over the public Internet. It makes no sense for a bank or any other company to build gateways between their private networks and the public Internet. If a company PC connects to both the corporate network and the Internet, then the corporate network is vulnerable.”
No kidding.
Again, retailers are being hit for billions of dollars, almost daily it seems; our military defenses are being constantly prodded and breached by foreign governments; and our infrastructure is a sitting duck waiting to be exploited. It’s time we realize that not everything needs to be online.
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Civil Rights
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So support for sharia law might not be all that revealing. But for Bill O’Reilly, it’s a chance to draw the conclusions you wish to draw about Muslims. The Pew poll also makes clear that Muslims do not “think their religion should dictate what happens in society.” Most who support sharia law think it should apply only to Muslims, and Pew notes that “most Muslims around the world express support for democracy, and most say it is a good thing when others are very free to practice their religion.”
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He tells me that he used to log on for his LulzSec romps using his school Internet account so it wasn’t a surprise that he got caught. It was a surprise that it took them so long. He recounts for me the day he got busted, waking up in his bed in Galway, Ireland surrounded by policemen with machine guns. He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep; it was so surreal he assumed it must be a bad dream.
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Which seems plausible. Less than 48 hours had passed and Hooks would have had no idea he was on the receiving end of a drug task force “investigation.” The word “investigation” receives the scariest of scare quotes, considering it mostly consisted of a multiple felon trying to explain away the gun, scale and meth in his possession. If the suspect had claimed he didn’t rob Hooks’ house, the police wouldn’t have believed him. But when this same suspect starts blabbering about finding meth during his robbery, the cops are all ears, as though he were Abraham Lincoln himself, swearing on a stack of Bibles.
How do we know all of this is bullshit? Because the police spent almost as much time searching Hooks’ house — nearly two days — as it did between the point Hooks’ house was invaded the first time (by confessed burglar Rodney Garrett) and the second time (by the SWAT team).
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A cellphone video released Tuesday shows police in Indiana breaking a car window and using a stun gun on a man after police stopped the driver for not wearing a seat belt.
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It was clear to Judi Feingold what she should do after she and seven other people broke into an FBI office near Philadelphia in 1971, removed every file and then anonymously distributed them to two members of Congress and three journalists:
Get out of town.
She took drastic steps. Remaining in Philadelphia seemed dangerous, so she left town and headed west, moved into the underground and lived under an assumed name, moving from place to place west of the Rockies for years, owning only a sleeping bag and what she could carry in her knapsack. As she was about to detach herself from her past geography and her personal connections, she called her parents and told them she had committed a nonviolent direct action “and was possibly being pursued by the federal government. I told them I could not be in touch by phone, and I would do my best to let them know how I was, but not where I was.”
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DRM
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Digital Editions even tracks which pages you’ve read. It might break a New Jersey Law.
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Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues.
A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe’s DRm for educational purposes when they noticed that Digital Editions 4, the newest version of Adobe’s Epub app, seemed to be sending an awful lot of data to Adobe’s servers.
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This column has written many times about the deep flaws of Digital Rights Management (DRM) – or “Digital Restrictions Management” as Richard Stallman rightly calls it – and the ridiculous laws that have been passed to “protect” it. What these effectively do is place copyright above basic rights – not just in the realm of copyright, but even in areas like privacy. Yesterday, another example of the folly of using DRM’d products came to light.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Much has been made over the last few weeks about the desires of the Prime Minister to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Cameron has said he wants to bring more powers back to London, because he doesn’t like the way it ‘hands power’ off – powers we British have given to that court more than 60 years ago. Most notably, he doesn’t like the way it often deals with his right wing agenda of disenfranchising people, and creeping towards a police state, but seems to be championing the way with misinformation.
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Copyrights
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More specifically, Article 5 of the Declaration poses that “any use of the data as a creative work” is subject to prior consent of the individual. Such a formulation completely ignores the fundamental role of the public domain as well as the exceptions and limitations to copyright, which are all essential in balancing and preserving the system.
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It’s now been 20 years since the Internet went mainstream. Today, every single aspect of private life, business, and civic society depends on a functioning net. Without it, you’re basically in exile from society.
In some countries, coding is now the most common profession. All growth sectors are heavily technology-dependent, which always means that the net is at underpinning all of it. All celebrated entrepreneurs have built super-scaling businesses enabled by the net. We also shop for food online, we date online, we build things together online.
It stands clear that the net is by far the most critical piece of infrastructure existing today. Not only does it build all future jobs, growth, economy, and entrepreneurship; we also exercise all our civil liberties, civic duties, and spend a lot of our social activities on this infrastructure. It’s more important than any other piece of infrastructure in society. We can do without the phone network, without cable TV, even without paved roads when we have the net.
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Google’s new and improved sitelinks section has introduced a novel feature that could prove unintentionally popular with Pirate Bay fans. Alongside the same feature for other sites, the search engine now displays a custom Pirate Bay search box complete with related AutoComplete suggestions. Needless to say, copyright holders are not going to be happy with these latest improvements.
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The future of copyright amendments crowdsourced by the Finnish public appear to be in doubt. The citizen-drafted proposals, which received 50,000 signatures, seek to decriminalize file-sharing, but Finland’s Education and Culture Committee now wants to reject the historic initiative.
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10.08.14
Posted in Patents at 11:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Patent propaganda and deception from patent lawyers (among other parasites such as patent trolls) continues to flood the Web, intersecting with reports that prove them totally wrong
Generalisations are never a good thing, but the vast majority of lawyers are greedy and self-centered. I can now say this based on personal experience (I will publish details later this year). The vast majority of them can only pretend to be something else (striving for ethics) and a small majority might actually be genuinely ethical. The typical lawyer’s goal it to maximise profit, nothing else (unless it brings publicity, hence profit at some future date). Anything he or she would say (often verging on lies) is designed to align with this goal but must be disguised as something else. They’re good with words. They love money. That’s why they decided to go to law school.
“They obviously don’t like to accept the reality that software patents are on the decline.”Patent lawyers are probably worse than most lawyers because they typically serve businesses and rich people. And look at what they do; they help acquisition of monopolies. It’s engagement in class war. They obviously don’t like to accept the reality that software patents (monopolies on algorithms) are on the decline. That is why they use straw man arguments, such as tackling bogus arguments that software patents are now “dead” (they are not) or as yet another lawyer put it, “Software Patents are Only as Dead as Schrödinger’s Cat”. Nowhere have we seen anyone claiming that software patents are dead, but this pro-software patents Web site finds such a straw man arguments useful. To quote: “The environment for patent applicants and examiners that has resulted from such inconsistent treatment of Alice by the USPTO is one in which neither examiners nor applicants have clear guidance about how the USPTO is interpreting and intends to apply the Alice decision. This makes it difficult for examiners to know whether and how to issue Alice-based rejections, and for applicants to know how to respond to such rejections. In this environment, software patents are not dead; instead, they are, like Schrödinger’s cat, in an indeterminate state, simultaneously dead and alive until examined by an observer.”
That is at least a more balanced article than previous ones from the same site, which take for instance just software patents in specific fields (like banking). It’s a lie by omission. They’re being selective to generate propaganda in their headlines and ultimately they bamboozle the world.
There is a lot of software patents propaganda following the SCOTUS decision and the large share it comes from patent law firms, as we demonstrated months ago (we gave dozens of examples). Do not let them win the information war as they did after In Re Bilski. They want to redefine what’s true.
Over in India, where software patents are definitely not legal, patent opportunists continue to pollute the press with ideas for patenting software patents and using them offensively, thanks to loopholes. Here is one ho says: “From both the cases, we can conclude that, patent rights may be enforced even though one of the elements in the claimed system or method is located outside the territory of the patent, provided that the beneficial use of the system occurs within the territory of the patent granted.”
Here is the messenger’s introduction:
About the author: Mr. Kartik Puttaiah has more than 17000 hours of experience in patent consulting.
On the other hand we have the strongly anti-software patents people, including Timothy B. Lee who published this long new series titled “Everything you need to know about software patents”. Here are the parts of this series:
What are software patents and why are they controversial?
Are software patents legal?
Why do so many patent lawsuits involve software?
Are software patents needed to promote innovation?
Could the patent office do more to scrutinize patents after they’ve been granted?
Do other countries allow patents on software?
You didn’t answer my question!
This is a good series and it helps explain where we stand. Sadly, however, Timothy B. Lee is being outweighed by a barraged of self-serving spam from law firms. That’s what the press is saturated with, maybe outnumbering writers like Timothy B. Lee by a factor of 1:5.
Meanwhile, reveals Mr. Levy (patent lawyer), there is a new lobbying group misleadingly named “Innovation Alliance”. It is actually a front for patent trolls and as Levy puts it, data does not back their claims, so they make stuff up:
The Innovation Alliance (an organization whose members include large patent trolls such as Tessera, InterDigital, and Qualcomm) has been pushing against patent reform in the name of the small inventor. They even have a Save the Inventor website set up. (And no, I’m not linking to it – you can find it easily enough.)
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Patent reform does not make it harder for legitimate patent infringement suits. And should we really avoid helping 3,700 operating companies because about a dozen patent owners a year might be slightly worse off than they are now?
Seems to me it’s up to the Innovation Alliance to prove there’s really an invention-copying problem before we derail attempts to deal with patent trolls.
As Simon Phipps from OSI points out, patent trolls are now feeling the pinch because software patents (their typical ammunition) are on the decline, which of course helps the Free software world and empowers OIN, too. It definitely is very bad for patent lawyers. Whatever is bad for patent lawyers is usually good for society (if not always). What does that say about patent lawyers? █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 10:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?”
–Microsoft's chief evangelist
Summary: Free/Open Source software (FOSS) must be a disaster to Microsoft’s bottom line because Microsoft is sending “Microsoft Disaster Response” to infiltrate and disrupt a conference about women in FOSS
Every time there is a FOSS conference that attracts Microsoft’s worst nightmare (developers not loyal to Windows) Microsoft attacks with moles. It’s not only distracting but actually disruptive and it is annoying a lot of attendants. It serves to marginalise or eliminate this group of Microsoft resistors. It’s a way to capture and dilute events and thus communities. It is the “Killing with kindness” approach that Microsoft repeatedly used in LinuxTag [1, 2, 3]. Germany is rapidly moving to GNU and Linux, so it’s a common target for bribes and FUD, as seen repeatedly in Munich.
Conference organisers should politely decline their participation (politely because otherwise Microsoft would use it to create a stigma of rudeness), recalling that Microsoft is suing companies that distribute FOSS over their FOSS distribution, using software patents they lobbied exceptionally hard for (even in Europe).
“Sadly, the opportunist Microsoft appears to have already given money to Grace Hopper conference organisers in exchange for participation, pretending that Microsoft is FOSS and that Microsoft is kind to women (both are gross reversals of the truth).”Do not let Microsoft pretend to be friends with female developers. There is plenty of sexism at Microsoft. This needn’t be the subject of this post as (we already covered some examples and showed how Microsoft had offered cruises with female prostitutes to Microsoft distributors [1, 2])). Microsoft is trying to keep it inside/quiet, unlike in FOSS where it happens out in the open because of the development nature.
Sadly, the opportunist Microsoft appears to have already given money to Grace Hopper conference organisers in exchange for participation, pretending that Microsoft is FOSS and that Microsoft is kind to women (both are gross reversals of the truth). To quote Red Hat’s news site:
Open Source Day at the Grace Hopper Celebration this year starts today! The program is committed to helping women grow their skills and interest in using open source technologies.
“Our program philosophy is about tackling disaster response challenges in partnership with other industry and technology experts,” said Harmony Mabrey of Microsoft Disaster Response.
Why is Microsoft in there? Because it essentially bribed for it.
What a face-saving name too. “Microsoft Disaster Response”. What utter FUD and PR. Microsoft uses disasters to rob the poor. Microsoft also destroys the credibility of this female-oriented conference, using it as a Trojan horse for Microsoft sales and Microsoft AstroTurfing. It is an insult both to FOSS and to feminism. █
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