05.03.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Finland, not Ukraine: A coup strategy that even the CIA would be jealous of
Summary: The thuggish Microsoft has successfully destroyed Nokia, rendering its data ‘property’ of Microsoft (and hence the NSA) and its patents a weapon for proxies against Linux/Android
THE former Finnish giant Nokia shows that lessons have not been learned since Novell. Companies are still committing suicide because they don’t quite grasp the criminality of Microsoft, including the Satya-’led’ Microsoft (he is not really in charge and he continues the Ballmer/Gates patent racketeering policies). Having seen the mole move away (after handing control over to Microsoft), Nokia gets a new CEO. But Nokia doesn’t matter anymore; it’s effectively dead and this was the goal of Elop. The orphaned Nokia patents will continue to be funneled to patent trolls, with guidance from Microsoft, as before (e.g. MOSAID). It’s all about attacking Android and Linux.
According to Nokia expert Ahonen, “Nokia smartphone sales are down to 7.1 million units in Q1. That is down 13% from Q4 and Nokia’s prelimary market share is now 2.5%.”
“The orphaned Nokia patents will continue to be funneled to patent trolls, with guidance from Microsoft, as before (e.g. MOSAID).”Microsoft did not need to aspire for great success or high market share for Nokia. That would only have made Nokia more expensive to completely take over. By destroying Nokia Microsoft can ensure that the huge stockpile of patents gets passed to a lot of trolls, harming Android. This is how Microsoft works and that’s the type of thinking; it’s all about destruction, not creation.
A borderline troll, Andrew Orlowski, says that “there’s one thing worse than a Microsoft cloud accessed mostly by iOS and Android consumer devices, it’s a Microsoft cloud that consumers don’t want to use at all. Perhaps a viable Android is the best acquisition Microsoft could have made?”
Surveillance through a massively-sabotaged Android fork is what Microsoft sought to do with Nokia, as we argued months ago. It’s not at all positive for Android and Google should try to stop this.
It is already apparent that Stephen Elop was a Trojan horse, no matter how much he still tries to deny it. Money talks and “Stephen Elop lands at Microsoft with $33m golden parachute,” which says a lot really. As Ahonen put it the other day:
As everybody knows Windows Phone only has 3% market share in smartphones (with Google’s Android over 80% and Apple’s iOS at 15%). And Microsoft is no ‘newcomer’ to smartphones it has made software for smartphones far longer than Apple’s iPhone or Google’s Android have even existed. Yes, Microsoft has been in mobile for a dozen years already. At its peak Microsoft’s Windows commanded 12% market share as the clear number 2 in the industry (behind Nokia’s Symbian). From day 1, Microsoft had dreamed of having Nokia become a Windows partner, which Nokia resisted for essentially a decade until the ex-Microsoft exec Stephen Elop came to run Nokia as CEO.
That was a Trojan horse strategy. Microsoft should never have been allowed to infiltrate Nokia, but eventually the company’s plot was “successful”. It wasn’t about helping Nokia. Elop was supposed to destroy Nokia. His goal was to cheapen Nokia, not help the company, leaving Nokia’s treasure of patents to trolls whom Microsoft strategically chooses after it scooped up the company for a ridiculously low price, along with customer data (from the EU, hence joining it into NSA PRISM, just like Skype from Europe). It’s truly a shame that the European Union could not ban data retention of this kind and could not prevent passage of all this data (and active communications/interception tools) to the #1 PRISM facilitator; instead, the European Union pursues silly projects which do more harm than good.
What a disaster this is! Always remember who destroyed Nokia. Contrary to appalling revisionism (common in US corporate media), Nokia was not a victim of itself. █
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Posted in Apple, Google, Patents, RAND, Samsung at 8:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Mistakes made in the EU as well
Summary: Software patents make an appearance in Europe again, this time in FRAND form
SOMETHING troubling has happened in the Apple vs. Samsung case, which is how Microsoft’s subversive club of Android foes (Nokia, Apple, and Microsoft plus smaller trolls for the most part) has been trying to make Android expensive, undermining its principal selling point, The patent-stacking battle, which Microsoft has been wittingly and visibly involved it (Microsoft supports Apple and Oracle of course), now reaches a phase of EU intervention:
EU moves to end smartphone patent wars in landmark ruling
The ruling will help to draw a line under long-running feuds between smartphone makers
Apple propaganda sites have been covering this case, saying that “jurors deciding the outcome of the second Apple vs Samsung trial haven’t yet returned a verdict, but their options are limited to a few possible outcomes, ranging from a fiery thermonuclear blast to a wintery new Dark Ages.”
Well, “thermonuclear” is a term borrowed from Steve Jobs himself. He strives for thermonuclear outcome. He is as apocalyptic as he is “visionary”.
Anyway, here is Richard Stallman’s response to the EU’s intervention:
The European Union is stopping Apple and Samsung from suing each other for patent infringement.
Unfortunately, its “solution” is a terrible mistake: imposing “reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms. In practice, this means patent licenses that discriminate against free software by charging license fees per copy, which free software developers can’t possibly pay. There is nothing “reasonable” about that.
FRAND, as we have argued for years, is a Trojan horse for software patents in the EU and elsewhere. We need to reject this. Ideally, the EU should just send Apple and its “thermonuclear” ambitions somewhere far away — a place where the Sun won’t shine. Apple is the aggressor here and it is part of a broader plot to undermine Android and Linux rather than outwit or provide technical competition. █
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Posted in IBM, Law, Patents, Red Hat at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Corporate overloads have successfully shot down any chance of attaining freedom for software developers
HAVING spent about a decade of my life fighting against software patents, it is just too hard to let the cause go. I sometimes revisit relevant news sites and blogs, hoping to find some relevant coverage, parliamentary action, activism, etc. Over the past year or so this has been a depressing exercise because on people’s lips there’s no longer (or rarely) the goal of eliminating software patents. Companies like Google joined the ranks of IBM and are now hiring patent lawyers, acquiring software patents, and so on. I had warned managers at Google about it and their responses to me were largely defeatist. The SCOTUS, which historically is just a plutocrats’ tool for authorising the plutocrat’s will, continues to support the USPTO’s patent maximalism (the USPTO is headed by corporations such as IBM).
There is no substantial bill seeking to truly reform the patent system and those which exist, including corresponding press coverage, are focusing on trolls, costs, and other side issues. The EFF, which once upon a time promised to fight against software patents, recently hired some more lawyers whose articles on the matter tend to be a waste of time (and whose focus is truly bizarre, misguided at best). Here is one new example, the latest of many that we covered last year:
The Supreme Court heard oral argument today in another patent case, Limelight Networks, Inc. v. Akamai Technologies, Inc. In this case, the Court considers what to do when one party performs some steps of a patented method and another party performs the remaining steps. Specifically, Akamai wants to hold Limelight liable for patent infringement even though its customers perform one of the steps of the patent (i.e. four steps are performed by Limelight, one by the customers). The Federal Circuit had ruled for Akamai and effectively held Limelight responsible for the actions of its customers.
But that’s not the point. The point is, patents like these should be out of scope, it doesn’t matter who performs which action, who pays for litigation, who the plaintiff is, and so forth. Even Red Hat, which takes pride in “Open Source” (not so much in freedom) focuses on “trolls” in this latest post on the topic:
Patent trolling—the aggressive assertion of weak or meritless patent claims by non-practicing entities—is a frequent target of disdain from open source enthusiasts. Thus it may be of some comfort to readers that the highest court in the US has recently decided the issue is worth looking into. Three cases have already been heard, but decisions are, as usual, still a ways off.
When even entities like the EFF and Red Hat waste their efforts (if not hijack the voice of patents opposition) trying to tackle the wrong question it seems clear that activists against software patents (that’s software developers, both free/libre and proprietary) are pretty much alone. We oughtn’t expect corporations, corporate press or even politicians to help our cause. They don’t understand, they don’t care, and if they care, then it’s not because they want to see software patents abolished. IBM is probably one of the worst pretenders; unlike Microsoft, it also tries to convince us that it’s on our side and many people fall for it. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 7:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The boycott of SUSE and Novell needs to go on because the huge damage caused by the Microsoft-Novell deal is not over
Novell is history, but its legacy continues to haunt GNU/Linux. Its orphaned project, Mono, is nowadays getting even closer to Microsoft through Xamarin (Mono is not completely dying just yet, as Microsoft-linked circles actively promote it), OOXML continues to cause migration woes (after Novell helped OOXML gain adoption), and Microsoft back doors in Linux, such as Hyper-V (the NSA can access virtual machines remotely), are foolishly promoted even by the Linux Foundation’s Web site right now (it links to this page from Microsoft and also to this other page from Microsoft, promoting Microsoft-taxed SUSE/Ballnux). 3 or so years after Novell virtually died we are still suffering from the decisions of Ron Hovsepian, Dragoon, and Jaffe, who is now putting DRM in the World World Web (as the W3C’s CEO). █
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05.02.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Nvidia is bringing supercomputer-class performance to its $192 Jetson TK1 computer, which is targeted at embedded devices but could be used as a Linux-based gaming PC.
The TK1 is an uncased board with all the major components on it, much like the popular Raspberry Pi. But the computer offers 300 gigaflops of performance, and Nvidia said it could be used as a PC for games supporting ARM processors and the Linux OS.
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Desktop
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A report from a few years ago (2003) showed government was still using IT only about 10% of the time and then mostly for typing. “Linux” only appeared once in that report and it was misspelled, “Linu x”. Spreading that other OS clearly was the goal.
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Power is not generally associated with Chromebooks, since they utilize either ARM processors, like tablets, or Intel’s Celeron processors. Google‘s Pixel was the only Chromebook that could be described as powerful because it uses one of Intel’s Core i5 processors. However, on Monday we saw an Acer Chromebook that is powered by an Intel Core i3 processor. This is a large jump from the usual low power processors found in most Chromebooks, and will offer that power at a much lower price than the Chromebook Pixel.
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So when you consider your next PC purchase, give ChromeOS a consideration and when you look at the sales on Amazon, it appears many people are starting to do just that. I would suggest though if you are looking for a Chromebook replacement to a bulky desktop PC with features you don’t need, you go for as large a screen as possible. 14″ seems to be the best size and accommodates web pages, apps et al, comfortably.
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Server
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When a Senior Director at Google, Gordon MacKen, showed off new Google server motherboard design based on IBM’s Power8 architecture, it sparked trouble for Intel. Since 1998, Google has used Intel processors based on x86 architecture to power its army of servers, but this sudden move to use IBM’s architecture is a reason for worry at Intel.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds, the principal force behind development of the Linux kernel and overseer of open source development for the Linux operating system, has been named the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award “for pioneering development of the Linux kernel using the open-source approach”.
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Graphics Stack
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The first version 1.5 release candidates of Wayland and the Weston compositor are now available.
Kristian Høgsberg announced today the first release candidates for Wayland/Weston 1.5. Kristian noted, “We’re at a historic low in terms of open bugs – as of this writing we have 15 bugs in wayland/weston bugzilla. There are a few more bugs we can fix and I expect more will come in as we start testing, but right now it’s looking pretty good.”
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Our latest focus in benchmarking the Linux 3.15 kernel is the Radeon DRM kernel graphics driver. There’s been some reports of small performance changes with this newest kernel currently under development, in part due to some video memory optimizations that landed this cycle. In this article are benchmarks of four AMD Radeon graphics cards when running Linux 3.14 and 3.15 Git.
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The pull request was sent in by AMD’s Christian König and tries to add support for their newly-announced Mullins APUs. This pull comes shortly after AMD announced open-source Mullins/Beema APU support, one day after the APUs were announced. Support for the new AMD graphics hardware might come in still for the Linux 3.15 kernel even though it’s past the merge window since the GPU is based upon AMD’s Kabini and mostly deals with adding new PCI IDs and enums to the kernel driver. There’s also the libdrm and Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D updates needed in user-space for complete support.
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The recent issues were expressed by NVIDIA and come from a change to the cursor handling with X.Org Server 1.16, which will be released around July of this year. A late change broke the video API/ABI driver interfaces and expressed concern to the open-source graphics driver developers. The issue was of concern since it came after the code freeze for X.Org Server 1.16.
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Another OpenGL extension can be crossed off the list for the goal until Mesa supports the OpenGL 4.4 specification.
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Building upon their open-source graphics driver support for the Tegra K1 and their revised code for handling this Kepler GPU in the ARM world, the third revision was sent out a short time ago by Alexandre Courbot.
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Benchmarks
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Applications
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Fotoxx 14.05, a free, open source Linux photo editing and collection management program that’s easy to use and install, is now available for download.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Dota 2, Valve’s own take on the famous Dota mod for Warcraft 3, has just received a fresh update for all platforms, bringing a long list of minor fixes.
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The developer behind the fun indie hit Vox a voxel based, action, adventure and creation game with a big focus on player created content has re-confirmed their plans for the Linux version. The good news is that the major content patch is now out, so once dust settles on that the Linux version will come!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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So SlideViewer was born. The beauty of it is that all our Qt developers can help to add features and fix bugs, and even more importantly, we no longer have to stare at incomprehensible error messages from LaTeX, or hunt down a book that will tell us how to get page numbers in the table of contents.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Packages for the release of KDE’s document suite Calligra 2.8.1 are available for Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and 13.10. You can get it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA (alongside KDE SC 4.13). They are also in our development release.
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Firefox has extra features that Konqueror doesn’t have and the add-ons might be a deal breaker for some people. The page rendering worked perfectly on every site I tried and to be honest I use it everyday so if it didn’t work I wouldn’t use it.
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The majority of my time spent on KDE, however, is spent working on details. To illustrate that work, I picked two examples of where I think I made a difference by caring about the details.
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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.13 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.10 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. It includes an update of Plasma Desktop to 4.11.8.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Here it is, the starting point of the GNOME 3.14 development cycle: the 3.13.1 snapshot release.
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The code that looks up and caches the album art was rewritten by Vadim, so it was a lot faster now. Also, the album art in the Albums view will now be loaded on-scroll – they won’t load unless they are not shown in the window.
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The GNOME developers announced that the latest version of GNOME Online Accounts, 3.13.1, has arrived and comes with just a couple of changes, which are quite important.
The 3.13.x branch of GNOME is strictly for development and it will eventually evolve into the stable 3.14, but that’s a long way ahead. Until then, the developer chose to make some very interesting changes
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The Clonezilla developers released a new development version for their Linux distro and they’ve decided to also cool down with the version numbering. The last version before the current one was labeled 2.2.3-39, but that evolved to 2.2.3-4, which is much more user friendly.
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4MLinux Media Edition, a special distribution with a wide set of multimedia tools and software, is now at version 8.2 Beta and comes with the latest tools and applications.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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This release is the culmination of a huge effort by our community to bring a fresh, new release of good quality to our supporters and – to the world!Smile
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I was really impressed by what I found. With ROSA Software Center, users will be able to perform all package software management tasks from one beautiful and user-friendly graphical application. Here are some screenshots. What these screenshots cannot show is the smooth transition as you navigate between the different aspects of the application. Also, the screenshots cannot show the speed with which the application takes to get stuff done. Installing and removing applications happens so fast it puts similar applications to shame.
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Red Hat Family
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The tool wraps apps in a portable, lightweight run-time that can execute on laptops, desktops, servers, clusters, hypervisors and even bare metal. Docker can be used to package and automate deployment of applications, databases and back-end systems. Docker is also now part of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service product.
Expected sometime later this year, RHEL 7 will incorporate Fedora 19 and be built around Linux kernel 3.10, the upstream kernel released last June that added support for timerless multitasking, block caching from SSDs and the ARM mixed-CPU architecture. It also changes the default file system to XFS, which supports hard drive volumes as large as 500 TB and integrates with Active Directory. In beta since December, the release candidate was made available on April 15
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Debian Family
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The volunteers who developed Tails, the open source operating system used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, this week released v1.0.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Following reports that Ubuntu for Android isn’t “in active development” anymore, the Ubuntu maker sent a statement to Android Authority confirming as much.
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For now, the Linux kernel available is 3.13.x, which is the same from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The system is basically identical with the previous one, even if there are some changes that have been implemented already.
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At the Embedded Linux Conference, Intel’s new Open Hardware Technical Evangelist showed off a Linux- and MinnowBoard based robot that mimics Doctor Who’s K-9.
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In part two of this series we load and test our critter-scaring Arduino sketch, and play scary motion-activated noises. First let’s go back to part 1 and dissect our simple EZ1 sensor-testing sketch.
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Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control experts at the Raytheon Co. Technical Services segment in Dulles, Va., will switch a major unmanned helicopter control system from Solaris to Linux software, and upgrade the system with universal UAV control qualities under terms of a $15.8 million contract.
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We all know about the Raspberry Pi, but it’s far from the only single-board computer out there that makers might find both useful and affordable.
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Phones
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Android
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Here is some good news for those gamers who have been hanging on to their Ouya consoles. Owners of the Ouya can now stream quite a range of Triple A titles to their little Ouya consoles. This technological feat could be achieved thanks to Play Cast media launching a new cloud gaming beta program.
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Open-source software is the philanthropic side of tech. While the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of the world are out making billions, amateurs are still hunched over their desks in bedrooms, classrooms and offices knocking out code for little more than the joy of it, and perhaps some recognition.
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Skylable has released LibreS3, an open source implementation of the Amazon S3 service, suitable for installing on private servers in a datacenter. LibreS3 uses Skylable SX, a “reliable, fully distributed cluster solution”, on the back end for deduplication and replication. LibreS3 joins a growing list of alternative, open source storage solutions available to the enterprise today.
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ActiveState applauds ongoing growth of Cloud Foundry open source project as Accenture, BNY Mellon, Capgemini, GE, Ericsson, Intel, NTT and Verizon intend to join Cloud Foundry foundation
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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For months now, Google has been pursuing a strategy that allows users of the Chrome browser to easily find and run “packaged apps” just like sophisticated web apps that users of Chrome OS are used to running. Chrome packaged apps are now available in the Chrome Web Store. We’ve covered the fact that this is emerging as a big differentiator for Google’s browser.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 29 was released yesterday with a completely rebranded interface, a new menu and many other changes. Read on to see what’s new in this release.
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SaaS/Big Data
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In the annals of enterprise open source adoption, concerns over security have always been present. In fact, there are many enterprises that still don’t allow their users to use open source browsers like Firefox, or use phones based on Android. Ask the IT department personnel at these companies what’s up, and they’ll tell you that they don’t trust these platforms and applications to be secure.
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BSD
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Looking at the release announcement and other sources such as the release page, it’s easy to see that there are numerous goodies in store for you: A whole new traffic shaping system to replace ALTQ, 64-bit time_t, cryptographically signed base sets and packages, automatic installation features, improved hardware support, and more.
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Openness/Sharing
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Health/Nutrition
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Back in 2008, European Food Safety Authority began pressing the chemical industry to provide safety information on a substance called diphenylamine, or DPA. Widely applied to apples after harvest, DPA prevents “storage scald”—brown spots that “becomes a concern when fruit is stored for several months,” according to Washington State University, reporting from the heartland of industrial-scale apple production.
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Human skin is a garden of microbes that is home to about 1,000 bacterial species. Most are benign, but some invade the skin and cause illness—of these, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are particularly dangerous.
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Security
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An open source expert believes OpenSSL’s custom license was partly responsible for the neglect behind Heartbleed
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Two Israeli and Palestinian teens, both accused of stone throwing, represent the vast disparities in the West Bank’s rule of law.
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Blackwater (or “Academi”) mercenaries have trained Brazil‘s killer cops for the World Cup, as the government plans to deploy 170,000 armed troops to crackdown on protests and social movements against FIFA. That would be one killer cop for almost every person they’ve evicted from their land and homes for the World Cup’s stadiums or parking lots.
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In an absurd show of force, and grotesque waste of tax payer money, 6 cops in a helicopter descend on a woman who is looking for pretty rocks in the middle of the desert!
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The world regards the US as a ‘pariah state’ and ‘the greatest threat to world peace’, with no competitor even close in the polls. But what does the world know?
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No one in Russia can vent his anger over NATO’s eastward expansion quite as vehemently as Viktor Baranez. The popular columnist with the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda (“Komsomol Truth”), which has a readership of millions, is fond of railing against the “insidious and reckless” Western military alliance. Russia, Baranez writes, must finally stop treating NATO as a partner.
Baranez, a retired colonel who was the Defense Ministry’s spokesman under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, asks why Russia should even consider joint maneuvers after being deceived by the West. NATO, he writes, “has pushed its way right up to our national borders with its guns.” He also argues that, in doing so, NATO has broken all the promises it made during the process of German reunification.
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The western presstitute media are relentlessly reporting about the kidnapped monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); kidnapped by pro-Russian protesters, allegedly helped by Russian special forces.
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Finance
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Before his death in February, Jackson Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was helping his constituents chart an economic plan whose main component was worker-owned cooperatives. In her recent article about Lumumba and cooperatives, Laura Flanders cites Collective Courage author Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s point that African-American leaders from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. DuBois were proponents of cooperatives. DuBois, Garvey and Lumumba understood that worker democracy was necessary for economic sovereignty and community solidarity.
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Wolff warns that we cannot band-aid capitalism. However laudable and even attainable may be suggestions from economists like Piketty or Dean Baker, to name just two, piecemeal policies designed to stop the system from funneling wealth upwards will not work for long. The elites are fully focused on preserving and expanding their fortunes, and the structure of the contemporary economy puts in the hands of a very few people in large corporate enterprises “both the incentive and the resources to roll back whatever adjustments a movement from below is able to make.”
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The IMF has confirmed a conditional loan of $17bn to Ukraine in what it touts as a rescue package aimed at stabilizing Ukraine as it seeks to maintain independence from a belligerent Russia. Instead, we are witnessing the final stages of the US-EU coup of Ukraine, and by implementing the conditions of the loan, the nation will be left destitute and dependent.
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Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, an outspoken socialist, claimed a victory Thursday after Mayor Ed Murray announced a plan to hike the city’s minimum wage to $15, which Sawant was a driving force behind. But she told HuffPost Live’s Alyona Minkovski that she isn’t totally happy with the plan, which gives big corporations years to phase in the new wage.
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In an expression of a “new populist” energy, thousands of demonstrators shut down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC on Monday as they demanded a livable wage and an end to the corporate domination of the national economy and politics.
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A good many Americans now know the high-finance games that JPMorgan Chase and other big banks like to play — at our expense. And big oil giants like ExxonMobil have been outraging Americans for years.
But plenty of other corporate giants that inflate our inequality have been flying under the radar screen. Who, for instance, has ever heard of Darden? Or Yum! Brands?
These little-known outfits just happen to rate as two of the biggest corporate behemoths in the restaurant industry. They’ve been squeezing workers — and soaking taxpayers — as relentlessly as any enterprises in America. Yet they barely have any national profile at all.
That may be about to change.
Last week, on the eve of the National Restaurant Association annual meeting, two top think tanks — the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and Demos in New York— released new studies that detail how America’s food-service giants are growing the gap between the nation’s rich and everyone else.
This week protesting restaurant workers will be taking that message to the streets. Many of these workers are currently laboring at the $2.13 hourly federal minimum wage for tipped workers, a base that hasn’t budged since 1991.
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Down is up. Sick is healthy. The RMS Titanic is seaworthy. Topsy-turvy logic is a speciality of the austerity brigade, and here they come dishing up a third helping. First, in 2010-11, they pledged that making historic cuts amid a global slump would definitely, absolutely secure a strong recovery. Then things went predictably belly-up, forcing Cameron and Osborne to dump their deficit-reduction plans and the eurocrats to make more bailouts. Yet these reversals were, naturally, “sticking to the course”. Now things don’t look quite as awful as they did a couple of years ago – and this somehow gets chalked up as a miraculous rebound.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Since consumer campaigning got GMOs labeled and crop restricting implemented in the United Kingdom, Cameron will likely have a hard time convincing UK consumers that all is well. However, Cameron is getting help in that quest from a little known group called the Science Media Centre (SMC), which helped release the report to great fanfare. The Guardian and The Independent published prominent coverage of the report, and it was featured by the BBC. The Independent and BBC coverage were both entirely uncritical, quoting the scientists handpicked by the SMC for its reporters’ briefing. The Guardian report was less glowing, but still quoted the SMC scientists and buried the reactions of critics below the fold. None of them mentioned that the report briefing was held by the SMC.
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Privacy
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A year ago there was no way I could have imagined being here, being honored in this room. When I began this, I never expected to receive the level of support that I did from the public. Having seen what happened to the people that came before, specifically Thomas Drake, it was an intimidating thing. I’d realized that the highest likelihood, the most likely outcome of returning this information to public hands would be that I would spend the rest of my life in prison. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.
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The actions of the Guardian in complying with the demands of the security services to destroy the computers containing Snowden’s revelations were cowardly in the extreme. There was a principle at stake here. The existence of other copies elsewhere is not the point. That does not make the hard drive destruction better, any more than Nazi book-burning was made OK by the existence of other copies of the books.
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Civil Rights
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It has been described as the conflict the Arab spring forgot, the last colony in Africa and a human rights scandal. Now British holidaymakers are being urged to respond to the situation in Western Sahara by boycotting its occupier, Morocco, as a destination.
A leading human rights activist from Western Sahara, Brahmin Dahane, 46, made the appeal after meeting members of the UK parliament to drum up support ahead of a UN security council debate on Tuesday.
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A005A 12 year old boy attempting to save a local youth club due to be closed by government cuts has been dragged from his classroom after his Facebook protest was spotted by anti-terror police. What’s even more shocking is this story is from December 2010…and things have only gotten worse.
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The lawyer for Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist in jail in Texas on charges related to his involvement with computer hackers, has called for an overhaul in the way technology cases are handled by the criminal justice system to counteract potential abuses and excessive prosecutorial aggression on the part of the US government.
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Buying a cell phone plan could make you powerless to sue your phone company if it defrauds you. Using a coupon to buy a box of cereal may mean you give up your right to sue if the food is tainted. Checking your grandmother into a nursing home could prevent you from holding the facility accountable for negligence. “Liking” something on Facebook could sign you on to a legally binding contract that you’ve never read.
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EFF is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them. You can try it out today:
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Some historians believe as many as 200,000 women were sent to frontline to be sexually abused between 1932 and 1945
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Following his weak attempt to diffuse concerns about his bogus “open internet” rules, FCC boss Tom Wheeler has decided to try again, by basically repeating what he said last week with slightly stronger language about how he won’t let broadband providers violate net neutrality. Of course, as many people have explained, the problem is that the new rules clearly aren’t strong enough, and leave open all sorts of ways to kill off basic neutrality online. Of course, the real problem is that the original 2010 “open internet” rules (which were really crafted by the telcos in the first place) didn’t really protect net neutrality in the first place, and the new rules are basically an even weaker version of those rules. But, have no fear, claims Wheeler, if these rules don’t work, he promises he’ll actually pull out the big gun, Title II, and reclassify broadband players as telco services rather than information services, allowing the FCC to put them under common carrier rules.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Mega.co.nz, the cloud storage company founded by Kim Dotcom, has seen the number of uploads triple in the past six months. Mega users now upload a total of half a billion files per month. According to Kim Dotcom, the MPAA and RIAA deserve some credit for the unprecedented growth.
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A few years ago, we wrote about how a guy named Dimitry Shirokov, with help from the law firm of Booth Sweet had taken on the “fathers” of copyright trolling in the US, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, who had formed an organization called US Copyright Group, which initiated the first round of mass copyright trolling in the US (before the likes of Prenda and others entered the space). Shirokov had tried to make his lawsuit a class action against the lawyers, claiming fraud and extortion. And while the class action part was unfortunately rejected, the case has ended with a victory for Shirokov, with the judge ordering DGW to pay $39,909.95 ($3,179.52 to Shirokov and the rest in attorneys’ fees to Booth Sweet).
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I began working with the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2012 for program and community support in India. With the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program, we focus on open access for scholarly publications to help communities enrich Wikipedia entries for Indic languages.
While I was negotiating with a few authors to relicense their copyrighted books to a Creative Commons license (a license that allows anyone to reuse, modify and use content), I began identifying certain areas of motivation for an author to donate their work as free content.
We worked closely with Goa University, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa Trust, and the Institute of Odia Studies and Research.
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It may seem like a wishy-washy answer, but there’s an alarming point nested within it: the Solicitor General’s office’s position that the interpretation of the law—which the executive branch has worked into our international trade obligations—is the only way for the law to be “properly construed.”
That in turn suggests that the executive branch believes it is responsible for properly constructing the law. Of course, that position stands in conflict with Marbury v. Madison, the case that established judicial review in 1803: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
That has serious implications for the democratic process. Here’s how it seems to work: the executive branch comes up with an interpretation of U.S. copyright law and then negotiates it into international agreements. It conducts these negotiations in secret, insisting that it needs no meaningful oversight because it doesn’t require a change in U.S. law.
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More or less overnight, betting companies slashed their odds of the Swedish Pirate Party’s re-election to the European Parliament. Where a re-election scenario used to give you 8x your money back in a bet with them, it now gives a mere 1.25x. It appears the betting companies know something that Swedish oldmedia haven’t picked up on yet.
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Kim Dotcom, the multi-millionaire hacker-turned-entrepreneur, was on the roof of his New Zealand mansion, handcuffed and surrounded.
One by one, his luxury cars were rolled out of garages and taken away. Dotcom’s accounts, in various different countries, were frozen.
His website, file storage service Megaupload, was shut down.
Filings made in a court in Virginia outlined the accusation. Dotcom, US authorities said, was the man behind a “criminal enterprise” which used Megaupload to profit from piracy on a “massive scale”. He faces more than 20 years in prison.
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After landing an early victory last week against Quentin Tarantino in their leaked screenplay row, Gawker is facing a new attack. In an amended complaint, Tarantino accuses Gawker of committing not only contributory infringement, but also direct infringement, after it illegally downloaded his script from a file-hosting site.
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05.01.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Once upon a time, if you ran a data center, you used virtual machine (VM) management programs (i.e., hypervisors) There was no other practical choice. This dates all the way back to the good old IBM 360 mainframe days with CP-67/CMS in 1967. Today, our data centers and clouds run more advanced hypervisors. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, is made up of nearly half-a-million Linux servers running the Xen hypervisor, while Microsoft’s Azure cloud relies upon its Hyper-V hypervisor.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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AMD rolled out the Beema and Mullins hardware yesterday. The AMD “Beema” APUs are targeted for mobile products like notebook PCs while AMD Mullins APUs are low-power processors for ultra low-powered devices. The low-end Mullins APUs sport Radeon R2/R3 Graphics. The AMD Mullins APUs include the A10 Micro-6700T, A4 Micro-6400T, and E1 Micro-6200Tl. The Beema APUs include the E2-6010, E2-6110, A4-6210, and A6-6310. The Mullins models top out at 4.5 Watts while the Beema APUs top out at 15 Watts.
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Applications
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Time for a sad story. I’m going to list slsc here today, even though in my entire career as a Linux enthusiast, I don’t recall ever having seen it work, on any distro, not even once.
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Proprietary
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RawTherapee is an application that specializes in the development of RAW images and it’s probably one the best you will find on the Linux platform. It comes with so many features that it might even put Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom to shame.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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7 Days to Die was a Kickstarter project about an open world, voxel-based, sandbox game that is a unique mash up of First Person Shooter, Survival Horror, Tower Defense and Role Playing Games combining combat, crafting, looting, mining, exploration, and character growth. The developer had promised a Linux version of the game during its campaign period, saying that they would release a Linux version 2 months after the initial launch. But even after the game was launched, there were no signs of a Linux version or any communications from the company. Now, after a long hiatus, a developer has said that they are indeed working on a Linux version and it should be ready in a couple of weeks.
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Gameloft recently dropped some more details on their upcoming game Modern Combat 5 which, Gameloft assures, is well on its way to be launched. This time around, Gameloft has released the full title and the story in which the game will take place. The new game is titled Modern Combat 5: Blackout.
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In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Brian Fargo, the boss at inXile Entertainment, the developer of Wasteland 2, has hailed Valve as the “savior of the PC” due to their efforts in making digital distribution such a success.
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Double Fine sure do love Linux don’t they! Hack ‘N’ Slash is looking good and will be release for Linux on the 6th of May, to go along with the release date we have a trailer for you!
Looks like currently it will be a Steam only release, so you will have to hold out if you want it fully DRM free with no Steam attached.
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This is fun, Ars Technica a rather big general tech news website has done a review of Gigabyte’s AMD powered mini gaming box and give it a demerit for its poor Linux support.
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For those not entirely up to date on their Awesomenauts, this month it received a whopper of an update and it might be time you gave it another go, especially with another major update looming.
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Wow Valve is on a roll for Linux gamers aren’t they! 39 more Linux games have been lit up to be included on Steam’s store.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I became the maintainer of KMyMoney reports after the original developer, Ace Jones, went away and was nowhere to be found.
By chance, I tried to fix a bug in a report, then fixed one more, later added feature here, another there. 5 years later anything that’s report-related in KMyMoney goes into my inbox.
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I was selected this year to work with KDE again, and the Plasma team! Just awesome! The project for 2014 is about Plasma Media Center (PMC), and more specifically DVB support on PMC! To accomplish that I’ll be using the LibVLC library, which is fun to code with. So, stay tuned because this summer, PMC will be able to play TV too! The following days i’ll update you with screenshots and repository links too for everyone interested.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3 is one of the most controversial desktop environments in open source history. Flame wars have raged back and forth between GNOME 3 advocates and critics for quite a while now. Datamation examines the history of GNOME 3 and considers whether or not the GNOME 3 developers violated design principles when they created it.
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GNOME 3 is usually defended in terms of design excellence. However, while GNOME has been developed with close attention to design, that does not mean that its basic foundations are as grounded in design principles as you might infer.
Rather, a look at GNOME 3′s early history shows that development was mostly a consistent realization of principles described early in the process — principles founded on the impressions of the Design Team and apparently backed by little theory. This inconsistency between how GNOME is marketed and how it was actually designed seems the major reason for its sometimes rocky reception.
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The changes are rather light this early on into the GNOME 3.13 development cycle, and there weren’t even any NEWS release files to accompany Mutter 3.13.1 and GNOME Shell 3.13.1, but both packages are now checked in for the imminent release of GNOME 3.13.1.
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Version 14.04 “Baboon” of NixOS, the Linux distribution built around the Nix purely-functional package manager, has been released.
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Pinguy OS 14.04 Mini (based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr) is already available for download, while the full release is scheduled for next week.
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Emmabuntüs Collective, the one that stands behind the Emmabuntüs Linux distribution, was recently named a finalist in a contest rewarding the cyber-activism. The competition in question is THE BOBS contest. It was organized ten years ago by a German radio and television to reward cyber-activism.
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A new stable point release for Debian GNU/Linux (Wheezy), an Update Pack for SolydXK (201404), and updates for MakuluLinux and Tanglu Aequorea Victoria
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If you’re looking to move away from Windows XP and Linux is an option, then here is our pick of linux-XP alternatives.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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One of Firefox’s big strengths as a web browser has always been it’s ability to be customized. The community has already developed a plethora of Themes and Plugins for Firefox users to utilize. Firefox 29 makes the experience of tweaking your browser that much easier with the new Customization Mode.
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Debian Family
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TAILS — The Amnesiac Incognito Live System — is a highly secure operating system intended to be booted from an external USB stick without leaving behind any trace of your activity on either your computer or the drive. It comes with a full suite multimedia creation, communications, and utility software, all configured to be as secure as possible out of the box.
It was Edward Snowden’s tradecraft tool of choice for harvesting and exfiltrating NSA documents. Yesterday, it went 1.0. If you need to turn a computer whose operating system you don’t trust into one that you can use with confidence, download the free disk image. (Note: TAILS won’t help you defend against hardware keyloggers, hidden CCTVs inside the computer, or some deep malware hidden in the BIOS). It’s free as in speech and free as in beer, and anyone can (and should) audit it.
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Tails’ website states that its member users have increased its wide-world adoption in the last 18 months by a multiple of 4. Its user members include Freedom of Press Foundation, Reporters without Borders and Bruce Schneier, security expert and writer who assisted Greenwald on how to read and digest the NSA documents. The NSA is a member user of Tails.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The release dates for Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, in all its stages has been published on one of the Ubuntu wikis.
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Ubuntu seemed to dominate much of the headlines today. Two new reviews emerged, both rather flattering for Ubuntu. This couldn’t come at a better time to draw attention away from Canonical’s decision to pull-back from their Ubuntu on Android project. An Aussie has discovered a most embarrassing security issue for Ubuntu while the release schedule for 14.10 is drafted.
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When it was first announced, the idea of Ubuntu for Android sounded excellent. Running Ubuntu – a popular Linux distribution for Desktops, similar to Windows or Mac OS X – alongside Android seemed a great idea. Being able to plug in your phone to a docking station connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse to turn your smartphone into your computer was something out of the future. However, the project never really got anywhere, as support from partner vendors was thin to say the least and now, it looks like Canonical has all but given up on the innovative project. News broke earlier in the week of the company behind Ubuntu ceasing development on the platform and since then a official word from Canonical has appeared.
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Ubuntu 14.04 marks a turning point for the popular Linux operating system. Here’s our Ubuntu 14.04 LTS review.
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That means that if you use Ubuntu 12.10, you should upgrade to Ubuntu 13.10 (Ubuntu 13.04 has already reached end of life) and then (recommended) to 14.04. That’s because after May 16 2014, “Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 12.10″.
It’s also important to mention that PPA maintainers will no longer be able to upload packages for Ubuntu 12.10 after that date.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Bodhi Linux systems are known for their minimalistic approach, and the current release is no different. The distribution was based from the get-go on Ubuntu 14.04, but the development of Bodhi started when Ubuntu 14.04 was still a Beta release. Now that the final version of Ubuntu has been released, Bodhi is ready to switch to Beta.
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Xubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, released with many improvement and updates. Come with LTS (Long Term Support) version Xubuntu 14.04 will be supported by xubuntu team and developer for 3 years. Without adding tons of new features, Xubuntu focuses on stability, simple, light and fully customizable.
Xubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr uses the Xfce desktop environment instead of Unity 7, so it works very well as a lightweight alternative to regular ubuntu desktop. On this release Xubuntu developers have introduced the new Whiskermenu a more modern menu with the ability to easily launch your favorite applications, as well as have a useful search bar and various customizations. You can also find the new Xfwm4 4.11 which includes support for Sync VBlank, Xfdesktop 4.11 and other updates.
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Phones
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Since its launch and slightly delayed shipping in 2012, we’ve seen Raspberry Pi computers used for everything from a bartender to robots to a bizarre musical instrument. Now dedicated tinkerer Dave Hunt has used a Model B to create a touchscreen smartphone called the PiPhone, though he readily admits that it would be easier and cheaper to pick up an (arguably much better looking) budget cellphone from a shop in the mall, “but hey, where’s the fun in that.”
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Android
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From today, Ouya players can play any of the games provided during the beta period for free. Games included with the service include Lego Batman, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Prince of Persia, Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing, Super Street Fighter IV, Dirt 3 and Mirror’s Edge.
Playcast says that only a small handful of games will be available today, and that the number will ramp up over the coming weeks as the service’s stability is proven. All games will be available to play using Ouya controllers.
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Google is developing a program called Android Silver, which would find carriers dedicating a section of their store to some of the top Android phones. The company is making this move to enhance development of premium Android smartphones and take total control over the Android ecosystem to compete with the Apple iPhone and the growing power of Samsung, the leading manufacturer of Android smartphones.
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Open source. What started as a simple description for software source code and a development model has moved far beyond that into a strong culture where presentation of patterns and models for debate is promoted. Open source has become a challenge to view the world in a pioneering way, looking for solutions that break from tradition, and doing so in a collective environment where transparency and openness are virtues that are held in the highest regard.
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LibreS3, a robust Open Source implementation of the Amazon S3 service, has just been released!
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Version 29 of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser went stable on Tuesday, showcasing a new design, deemed “Australis” that has been testing in the Firefox Nightly beta channel since November. Among the most noticeable features of this new design are the curved tabs and the Firefox Menu (similar to Chrome’s “hotdog menu“), which make for a much sleeker look, albeit a look much like its competitor browser, Google Chrome.
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This week, many of us are kicking the tires on the new version 29 of the Firefox browser, which is more than just an incremental release falling within Mozilla’s rapid release cycle. Version 29 includes the Australis interface, which has been in the works for five years and gives the browser several features similar to the ones found in Google Chrome. So far, I like version 29, and its updated look and feel are impressive.
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Mozilla launches its first open-source browser release in the post-Brendan Eich era.
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Firefox 29 has been revealed and is billed as the biggest update to the open source browser since Firefox 4 in 2011, with a new design and more customisation tools
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle today announced the beta availability of its Solaris 11.2 Unix operating system. The Solaris 11.2 release will be the second major update of Solaris in less than two years from Oracle, following the debut of Solaris 11.1 in October of 2012.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation announces that the first RC version of LibreOffice 4.2.4 has been released and is now available for download.
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When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, there was a lot of speculation about which Sun products and projects would continue and which would fall by the wayside. Solaris was among the products that many people felt wouldn’t have a bright future. On Tuesday, though, Oracle unveiled Solaris 11.2, which is only the second point release of Solaris since version 11 appeared in 2011.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Tibco Software announced late yesterday its plan to acquire privately-held open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft for $185 million. Under Tibco’s ownership, the current plan is to keep the JasperSoft’s BI brand intact.
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BSD
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OpenBSD is one of the few projects that manage to stick to a specific release schedule, so a new version of this operating system is usually made available twice a year. The previous OpenBSD release was on November 3, which means that now it’s time for another one.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Ukrainian crisis has not radically changed the international situation but it has precipitated ongoing developments. Western propaganda, which has never been stronger, especially hides the reality of Western decline to the populations of NATO, but has no further effect on political reality. Inexorably, Russia and China, assisted by the other BRICS, occupy their rightful place in international relations.
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The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that the Pentagon’s latest “action plan” is intended to address “concerns” held by Washington’s “closest allies in Asia” over the Obama administration’s willingness to confront Beijing. The newspaper said these allies “have told American counterparts” that the response to Russia’s “aggression” in Crimea “is seen as a possible litmus test of what Washington will do if China attempted a similar power grab.” It also noted that “concerns were raised” by South Korean officials last September after Obama’s last-minute decision to call off plans to bomb Syria—partly to avoid a potential military confrontation with Russia.
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Of course, it is possible that Kerry really believed he was speaking truths, having internalized the assumptions that flow from U.S. “exceptionalism,” which make words like “invasion,” “aggression” and “international law” inapplicable to us as the world’s police; and what might be a “completely trumped up pretext” if offered by the Russians is only a slight and excusable error or misjudgment when we do it. After all, the New York Times quickly used the word “aggression” in editorializing on the Crimea events (“Russia’s Aggression,” March 2, 2014), whereas it never used the word to describe the invasion-occupation of Iraq, nor did it mention the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001 to March 21, 2003 (Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper).
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War is Peace. What was known as a famous quote from George Orwell’s fiction 1984 has become a reality. Or maybe it is still fiction if you consider that the mainstream media is making up reality on a daily basis.
On April 28, 2014, the homepage of The Washington Post web site featured the picture of a nuclear explosion with the following title: “War is brutal. The alternative is worse.”
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The relationship between the US and Pakistan has deteriorated “alarmingly” over the course of the Afghan conflict, a former national security advisor to President Barack Obama has said.
Arguing that the role of Pakistan is crucial for resolving the Afghan crisis, Gen (rtd) James Jones, former National Security Advisor to Obama, said that there is absence of trust between Pakistan and the US now.
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People and Power investigates how Israeli drone technology came to be used by the US.
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In Marvel’s latest popcorn thriller, Captain America battles Hydra, a malevolent organization that has infiltrated the highest levels of the United States government. There are missile attacks, screeching car chases, enormous explosions, evil assassins, data-mining supercomputers and giant killer drones ready to obliterate millions of people.
Its inspiration?
President Obama, the optimistic candidate of hope and change.
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An Albany man who dressed as the Grim Reaper outside a Syracuse airbase to protest the U.S. drone aircraft program was acquitted this week of criminal charges.
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But Wagner said Block presented “passive resistance” when asked to leave the base property.
“She just declined to go,” Wagner said.
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An Iraqi judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought against certain individuals in the Iraqi government who killed George Bush with a drone strike in 2005—the lawsuit was filed by Bush family members.
Allowing a lawsuit against individuals “would hinder their ability in the future to act decisively in defense of Iraq interests” said the Iraqi judge.
I can understand the outrage that people here in America are experiencing right now. That a foreign judge would so easily dismiss something not based on it being right or wrong, but I based on keeping the door open so people from the judge’s country are free to kill more with drone strikes. They seem to carry out justice only when it is convenient for them and in their best interest.
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If you wanted proof that virtue is its own reward in theatreland, take a look at Lucy Ellinson’s performance in Grounded. She is nothing short of mesmerising as a Top Gun pilot, who, after having a baby, is reduced to doing shifts in front of a computer screen in an air-conditioned trailer near Las Vegas. Her job is to steer unmanned “drone” aircraft towards their targets in the Middle East. And then to press the button that blows the enemy combatants below to pieces.
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I had in mind to write about Tony Blair’s remarkable regurgitation of bloodlust and bile last week. The former British PM managed to tear himself away from his consulting work for dictatorships and other lucrative sidelines long enough to make a “major speech” calling for — guess what? — even more military intervention in the endless, global “War on Terror.” The fact that this war on terror — which he did so much to exacerbate during his time in power, not least in his mass-murder partnership with George W. Bush in Iraq — has actually spawned more terror, and left the primary ‘enemy,’ al Qaeda and its related groups, more powerful than ever, has obviously escaped the great global visionary. No doubt his mad, messianic glare — coupled with the dazzling glow of self-love — makes it hard for the poor wretch to see reality.
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Waterboarding, a technique in which water is poured over the angled face of a prisoner — so as to fill his nose, mouth and lungs — terrifyingly creates the feeling of drowning. “When performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique — without a doubt,” Malcolm Nance, former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego states. “There is no way to sugarcoat it,” he writes, referring to the fact that he personally witnessed and supervised the waterboarding of hundreds of U.S. military trainees who were drilling to resist torture.
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All that said, prior to revealing the mass conspiracy against the good guys, there are some moments where Captain America has to face the America we’re all more familiar with. He looks in on a group of veterans working to heal mentally after deployment. He even questions Fury’s assertion that killing terrorists before they commit crimes is really justice. It’s not security, but it’s surprising to see an action blockbuster.
It’s clear that Marvel didn’t think that governmental and social pressures that led to NSA’s domestic psying program made for superhero-grade entertainment, and maybe they’re right. I was still glad to see that the ideas of government openness were enshrined next to the usual superhero clichés of truth and justice. It was also just a very, very fun movie.
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On Tuesday, Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack more than an hour after his botched lethal injection began. Things went so wrong that the state of Oklahoma’s second scheduled execution for that night was stayed for 14 days.
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Remember around this time last year when President Obama gave his big ballyhooed Drone Speech, promising more transparency to the citizen-consumers of America about who, when, where and why he obliterates and maims with his flying missiles?
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It appears Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and her colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee have largely forgiven the U.S. intelligence community for eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their email correspondence.
Acting on the request of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Feinstein and her colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee voted on Monday to remove a provision from a major intelligence bill that would have required the U.S. government to disclose information about when drone strikes occur — especially overseas — as well as information about the victims of the drone strikes.
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Barack Obama promised to install his administration in a glass house lit up like the Super Bowl, with everything visible to the citizenry he serves. So you will not be surprised to learn that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wants nothing more than to keep the public well informed.
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Not a single major newspaper nor any national news broadcast has ever reported that on Feb. 6, 1985, a jury in Miami concluded that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
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The CIA does not give up its secrets easily. Even under public scrutiny and pressure from a Senate committee to declassify parts of a congressional report on harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, the CIA remains shadowed by its reluctance to open up about its operations and its past.
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The White House has directed the CIA to declassify parts of a Senate report criticizing harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, but history shows that the agency is accomplished at preventing embarrassing or damaging disclosures.
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After more than three years of civil war in Syria, the Obama administration may soon send shoulder-fired missiles to the rebels fighting the country’s dictator, Bashar Assad. But before the first missiles fly, they’ll have to be outfitted with fingerprint scanners and GPS systems designed to keep the weapons from falling into the wrong hands. There’s only one problem: It’s not clear the relatively high-tech security equipment will be compatible with the decidedly low-tech, twenty-year-old missiles.
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The CIA denied having any role in arming Libyan rebels before the deadly 2012 Benghazi attacks, despite reporting by TheBlaze that the U.S. was covertly involved in providing rebels with weapons during Libya’s civil war that ultimately ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda militants.
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On Sept. 11, 2011, an Armenian carrier from Albania landed in Benghazi, Libya. It was carrying 800,000 rounds of ammunition originating from Albanian surplus stocks. Three of those stocks belonged to armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, according to a 2013 United Nations investigation.
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This timeline was compiled by TheBlaze and For the Record as part of their investigation into the U.S. government’s actions regarding the diplomatic team in Benghazi — and how Al Qaeda-affiliated militants benefited from the lethal aid provided to rebel forces on the ground in Libya.
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In the face of continued revelations of United States’ torture policies during the Bush administration, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), today sent letters to President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel demanding an end to all ongoing practices of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees. The letter specifically calls for revoking techniques permitted in Appendix ‘M’ of the current Army Field Manual, such as solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, forms of sensory deprivation, and environmental manipulations, which individually and combined have been condemned internationally as forms of torture, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, and therefore violate the United States’ obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. In addition, PsySR expressed particularly concern that health professionals, including psychologists, have been engaged to support such efforts in violation of their ethical responsibilities.
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If you have to worry that your proxy militias will turn your own weapons against you, maybe it’s not such a good idea to give them weapons in the first place. Just a thought.
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James Petras, retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, wrote a damning article on September 18, 2002, exposing the Ford Foundation’s sinister choice of beneficiaries of its donations. He accused the CIA of using “philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source”.
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As first reported by the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg on April 17, during a pretrial hearing of a Guantanamo prisoner previously held at a series of CIA secret prisons, judge Army Col. James Pohl ordered the agency to provide the long-concealed “names of agents, interrogators and medical personnel who worked at the so-called black sites.”
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Judicial Watch, the conservative organization that has been FOIAing and FOIAing for an email record of the Obama administration’s talking points from the week of the Benghazi attack, has obtained one that loops White House adviser Ben Rhodes into the conversation with advice about how to massage the story for the White House. Sorry, that was a boring lede—this is the lede you want.
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It’s hard to defend Jay Carney, or the institution of the White House press secretary in general. We’re talking about a taxpayer-funded position that exists to feed spin to reporters who are at the top of their field and could be doing literally anything else. The Benghazi Smoking Gun naturally took up a chunk of today’s Carney briefing, and ABC News’ Jonathan Karl is being celebrated on the right for sticking it to the man and being “vindicated” for previous stories about the White House’s talking points role. Carney’s excuse—that Ben Rhodes’ email about the talking points was not about Benghazi per se, and didn’t need to be released—is his typical sort of ridiculousness.
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For a government worker, nothing concentrates the mind quicker or makes you at first angry and later perhaps more cautious than the prospect that you might go to jail for doing your job.
It’s a reminder from the conflict between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA over the panel’s more-than-6,300-page report on the CIA’s coercive interrogations during the administration of President George W. Bush. They included waterboarding and other torture-like methods.
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Finance
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The International Monetary Fund has approved a two-year $17.1 billion loan package for Ukraine. The immediate disbursement of $3.2 billion will allow Ukraine to avoid a potential debt default.
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I grew up in Western Europe in the 1980s. My teenage years were characterized by the Cold War between the United States and the now-collapsed Soviet Union. We learned that the West was liberty, and that the East was oppression. Presumably, the East learned the reverse in their corresponding teenage years. But when did the West become the enemy they painted?
It’s hard to communicate how everpresent the threat of nuclear war was. Basically, you could say that us who grew up in the 1980s didn’t expect to grow old. In this time of polarization and belligerence, identifying with your home team was more important than ever. In retrospect, it was a false sense of liberty that we were given – mass surveillance started with ECHELON and similar programs in the mid-1970s – but it was nevertheless a very strong sense of liberty.
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Today in the U.S., we can thank the immigrant rights movement for the rebirth of May Day. On May 1, 2006 over 2 million working people and their allies poured into the streets of America’s big cities. The immigrant rights mega-marches shut down the repressive, anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill that criminalized undocumented immigrants and other working people who show solidarity with them. 120 years after Haymarket, another attack from big business and right-wing politicians was beat back by the power of the people.
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The extraordinary success of Thomas Piketty’s best-seller shows that progressive ideas are at last winning
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If the government genuinely means to help people find work after a long spell of unemployment, they would not have come up with Help to Work, a curious plan that insists on a daily visit to the jobcentre or an enforced period of unpaid labour. If the government means to punish them and save its own face, the plan makes more sense.
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…the top 1% owning 40% of the wealth while the bottom 80% just own 7%.
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Censorship
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Is Twitter in trouble? The company reported first quarter earnings on Tuesday, and Wall Street immediately reacted with a big thumbs down. In just half an hour, Twitter’s stock price fell 9 percent, nearing its all-time post-IPO low.
The reasons why aren’t immediately clear. The overall numbers were mostly in line with analyst expectations, so much so that CEO Dick Costolo kicked off the company’s earnings call by declaring that “we had a great first quarter.” Twitter did register a net loss of $132 million for the quarter, which is a hefty chunk of change. But no one was expecting the company to turn a profit this quarter, and overall revenue doubled compared to last year’s first quarter, to $250 million.
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Newtownabbey council said “yes” when they cancelled what they labelled a blasphemous play, The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged), due to be performed by the Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC) earlier this year. Members of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a political party with roots in the Free Presbyterian Church, called for the show to be axed fearing it would offend and mock Christian beliefs.
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In protest of the crowd-funding site’s “censorship” of his TV movie project about convicted abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, McAleer commissioned a bold billboard near Kickstarter’s Brooklyn headquarters.
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In Uganda, journalists are not only dealing with outright censorship. It seems the government of president Yoweri Museveni is employing a strategy that is aimed at pushing journalists towards self-censorship using a broad range of measures. Although the Ugandan media has a very strong tradition of critical reporting some journalists are probably more prone to self-censor.
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Privacy
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Last week I received the kind of email that would have many startup founders jumping for joy – a cold pitch from a fairly well known VC firm, inquiring if we would like to have a conversation with them about possible funding. In addition to funding, there was hinting about help getting some high-profile customers onboard as well. As a (currently) self-funded startup which is fairly under-capitalized, it’s hard not to find something like that exciting. Surely in any sane universe I should have immediately replied to say “Yes, call me right now”.
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The NSA has lost the trust of the American people as a result of the Edward Snowden leaks, and needs to be more transparent to gain it back, the NSA’s new director said Wednesday in his first public comments since taking control of the embattled spy agency.
“I tell the [NSA] workforce out there as the new guy, let’s be honest with each other, the nation has lost a measure of trust in us,” Admiral Michael Rogers told a conference of the Women in Aerospace conference in Crystal City, Va.
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The Government Communications Headquarters has presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. However, a new document from the Edward Snowden collection shows that GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year.
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NSA watchers have seen this evasion a million times. Say that the “target” isn’t the American people, knowing most listeners will take that to mean that the NSA is spying on the private communications of foreigners or terrorists, not regular Americans.
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The U.S. needs more cyberwarriors, and it needs them fast, according to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. He plans to more than triple the size of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command over the next two years.
But where will they come from? These are not the kind of skills you can teach in basic training.
Enter the embattled National Security Agency. Its new director, Adm. Michael Rogers, also directs the Cyber Command. Ten miles down the road from the NSA, at a defense contractor’s office in Columbia, Md., the NSA recently held a live-fire cyberwarfare exercise aimed at developing more cyberwarriors.
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All of these ‘exhibits’ are part of current or past art projects exploring surveillance technology, social media or related issues, which seem to be growing almost as fast as the NSA mission statement and enemies list.
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Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting U.S. data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.
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For the first time, the federal court overseeing the country’s surveillance programs heard a formal argument this month that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of people’s phone records is illegal.
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British government’s draconian response to the Guardian’s reporting sees UK drop five places on Freedom House list
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Tuesday’s US supreme court arguments involved a seemingly basic legal question about the future of the Fourth Amendment: do police officers need a warrant to search the cellphone of a person they arrest? But the two privacy cases pit against each other two very different conceptions of what it means to be a supreme court in the first place – and what it means to do constitutional law in the 21st century.
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Facebook will now deliver targeted advertisements to practically any smartphone app, after unveiling a mobile ad network at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco.
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This week, the President is expected to release a report on big data, the result of a 90-day study that brought together experts and the public to weigh in on the opportunities and pitfalls of the collection and use of personal information in government, academia, and industry. Many people say that the solution to this discomforting level of personal data collection is simple: if you don’t like it, just opt out. But as my experience shows, it’s not as simple as that. And it may leave you feeling like a criminal.
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The German government on Wednesday rejected a testimony of whistleblower Edward Snowden through the German NSA panel, local media reported, citing a conclusion of the draft opinion of the government for the parliamentary committee.
According to information from the German media, a 27-page paper indicated that an invitation for the former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor would jeopardize the foreign and security interests of Germany considerably.
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Verizon Wireless will monitor customers’ activities on wireless devices as well as wired or Wi-Fi-connected desktop computers and laptops. Collected data on users’ online activity will then be passed to marketers for targeted advertising.
Verizon customers recently began receiving a notice from the company that it is “enhancing” its Relevant Mobile Advertising operations to glean more information from its customers, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“In addition to the customer information that’s currently part of the program, we will soon use an anonymous, unique identifier we create when you register on our websites,” Verizon Wireless tells customers.
“This identifier may allow an advertiser to use information they have about your visits to websites from your desktop computer to deliver marketing messages to mobile devices on our network.”
The telecom giant will automatically download a “cookie,” or tracking software, onto a user’s computer or device without explicit warning when the customer visits the company’s “My Verizon” website to view a bill or watch television programming online, according to Verizon spokeswoman Debra Lewis.
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Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who fled to Moscow last year after revealing details of massive U.S. intelligence-gathering programs, expects his asylum status in Russia to be renewed before it expires this summer, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
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Speaking during his keynote talk at Infosecurity Europe on Wednesday, Hypponen delved into whistle-blowing in the modern age and – looking at the revelations from Snowden – said that this was not just a case of the US ‘misbehaving’.
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Civil Rights
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It was after 10 p.m. on July 8, 2009, when Sandra Mansour answered her cellphone to the panicked voice of her daughter-in-law, Nasreen. A week earlier, Nasreen and her husband, Naji Mansour, had been detained in the southern Sudanese city of Juba by agents of the country’s internal security bureau. In the days since, Sandra had been desperately trying to find out where the couple was being held. Now Nasreen was calling to say that she’d been released—driven straight to the airport and booked on a flight to her native Kenya—but Naji remained in custody. He was being held in a dark, squalid basement cell, with a bucket for a bathroom and a dense swarm of mosquitoes that attacked his body as he slept. “You have to get him out of there,” Nasreen said. But she was unfamiliar with Juba and could only offer the barest details about where they’d been held. “He’s in a blue building. You’ve seen it. It’s not far from your hotel.”
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In a landmark decision, a federal judge in Milwaukee has struck down Wisconsin’s strict voter ID restrictions as both an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote and, for the first time, a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act based on the law’s “disproportionate racial impact and discriminatory result” of depriving “the right of Black and Latino citizens to vote on account of race or color.”
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Swartz committed suicide in January 2013 at age 26, but his reach and impact on the tech and tech-policy worlds were already enormous. A computer-programming prodigy, he worked on projects like RSS and Creative Commons before he was 16. He dove into politics and became an advocate and activist for publicly available content and an open Internet. But by the time of his death, Swartz was being federally prosecuted for downloading a huge quantity of copyrighted material from JSTOR, the online academic library, at MIT. He was facing jail time and fines.
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“The draft minimum age law is a real beacon of hope for the thousands of Yemeni girls vulnerable to being married off while still children,” said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “The government should act quickly on this measure and develop enforcement mechanisms to prevent even more girls from becoming victims of early and forced marriage.”
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The symptom of Sri Lanka phobia which is common among the politicians in the West, is caused through personal political ambitions. It comes from the presence of a large number of expatriates Tamils living in these Western countries. It makes the patients have a distorted view of human rights. They become blind to their own actions of violation of human rights, and war crimes.
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The nation’s highest court refused to hear a case that is challenging the authority and legality of the National Defense Authorization Act’s “Indefinite Detention” clause. The refusal to hear the case has plaintiffs calling for action.
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A group of journalists and activists who filed a lawsuit two years ago challenging a controversial provision in a national defense spending bill that they claimed allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens were dealt a crushing blow Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal.
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Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges – along with journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, activist Tangerine Bolen and others – sued the government to join the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans.
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The Supreme Court declined to hear the case that a group of activists, journalists, and academics including Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and Daniel Ellsberg brought against the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA.
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A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to “detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,” according to critics.
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Which leads me to a further thought. I am pretty sure I had no concept of people’s colour as a small child, and the following I know for certain. My elder children attended a primary school in Gravesend in which a little over half the children were Sikh. By age seven, they had absolutely no conception of any racial difference between themselves and any others in their class. It is a slender piece of evidence, but I am generally fairly convinced that racial difference is a taught construct.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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“The idea of net neutrality (or the Open Internet) has been discussed for a decade with no lasting results,” writes Wheeler in a lengthy blog post. “Today Internet Openness is being decided on an ad hoc basis by big companies. Further delay will only exacerbate this problem.”
Once again, Wheeler completely glosses over the fact that the only reason a federal appeals court gutted the previous neutrality rules was because a shortsighted FCC never thought to categorize Internet service providers as vital communications infrastructure. As numerous supporters of a true net neutrality have repeatedly pointed out, reclassifying ISPs would likely mean the FCC could reinstate the old rules (and possibly more stringent ones) and survive a legal challenge.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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While recording a movie strictly for personal use is entirely legal in UK cinemas, the same definitely cannot be said about the United States. Recording or ‘camming’ a movie in the U.S. can result in jail-time, particularly if the activity is connected to subsequent bootlegging or illegal online distribution.
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Send this to a friend
04.30.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Google already provided the Chromebook Business Management Console to businesses, but now these businesses can work with familiar companies to use it in their business. In addition, with major manufacturers offering Chromebooks, including Dell, HP, Samsung, Acer, and Lenovo, businesses can stick with a preferred brand and have a wide variety of Chromebooks to manage.
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Major laptop makers are paying attention and are adding Chromebooks to their product lines. They require basically the same production methods as their Windows laptops, so it’s a low-cost effort to build them. The Chromebook doesn’t require big hardware, so the component inventory is not too heavy.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds is back in the news, but this time it’s good. Torvalds tops the news tonight for being the recipient of a prestigious award. LibreOffice 4.1.6 was released today with about 90 fixes and squeezably fresh Tails 1.0 is making headlines. And our final story tonight, The Register is reporting that upgrading Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 “may knacker your Linux PC.”
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When electrical engineer Manjinder Bains learned in January that his employer’s planned restructuring would put his job at risk, he wasn’t sure what to do. There aren’t a lot of companies in his home town of Sacramento, Calif., that employ embedded developers with his skill set, he said, so finding a new job would be tough.
He decided to broaden his knowledge and his job prospects and signed up to take Linux Kernel Internals and Debugging (LFD320), a training course that teaches how the Linux kernel is built, and the tools used for debugging and monitoring the kernel. It would be the third training course Bains had taken with the Linux Foundation in the past year, but the first one he had paid for on his own – his employer had sponsored the first two.
“Boosting my Linux skills will make me more employable,” he said via phone last month.
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The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 3.14.2, has been announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, marking yet another update in the most recent stable release.
The updates and improvements that preceded the launch of the Linux kernel 3.14 branch indicated that this was going to be one of the most interesting releases in quite a while, but the updates for this version have been lagging a little behind.
In the past, the first updates to the fresh kernel were quite large and featured a multitude of fixes and changes. Either the new kernels are more stable and require less work, or the developers are focusing more on the upcoming 3.15 branch.
“I’m announcing the release of the 3.14.2 kernel. All users of the 3.14 kernel series must upgrade.”
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Two major backers — AMD and Mentor Graphics — have revamped their support for embedded Linux development. This week, the companies joined the advisory board of the Yocto Project, an open source initiative for creating custom Linux-based operating systems for embedded devices.
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The SystemTap team announces release 2.5, “boot loot”!
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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You can view more of these early Linux 3.13/3.14/3.15 kernel test results from the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VDA via OpenBenchmarking.org, but overall, there isn’t too much to get excited about with the results. When comparing these three kernel series, there wasn’t much in the way of performance changes for disk, graphics, or the computational workloads. The power usage also didn’t appear to change much between these recent versions of the Linux kernel.
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Applications
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sl is also smart enough to lump directories according to their contents. So for example, my wallpaper directory shows up under the “images” heading, and not just as a folder.
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BitTorrent clients feel right at home on Linux, and this means that there are a ton of them, all doing mostly the same thing, with some differences in features and the interface. Interestingly enough, some of the clients on the Linux platform try really hard to copy the way uTorrent looks and works on Windows, which is rather strange for a software.
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Video (formerly Totem) 3.12.1, the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment based on Gstreamer that features a playlist, a full-screen mode, seek and volume controls, as well as keyboard navigation, has been released and is now available for download.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Skulls of the Shogun, an arcade action game developed and published by 17-BIT on Steam, will also get a Linux version soon.
Skulls of the Shogun is a different action game that also uses a turn-based strategy gameplay, which makes this title a unique one.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Akademy is the KDE Community conference. It is where we meet, discuss plans for the future, get inspired, learn and get work done. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE, this is your chance to present your work and ideas at the Conference from September 6-12 in Brno, Czech Republic. The main days for talks are Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th of September. The rest of the week will be BoFs, unconference sessions and workshops.
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Jani Heikkinen of Digia has announced the RC candidate packages for Qt 5.3 via the Qt Project web server. These packages will become the official Qt 5.3 release candidates should no serious issues be uncovered in the next few days. It was shared that the goal is to put out this release candidate on Friday, 2 May.
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In order to organize these events, sooner or later you need a legal organization that provides financial support to these actions. You might not know that, in words of the founders, this was the main reason behind the foundation of KDE e.V. .
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With the introduction of webmail and mobile computing I am not sure how many people still have a need for a dedicated email client.
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My project is on implementing interactive tours in Marble. Tours are a set of related places in Marble with supporting media, visited in a defined timeline, which can be played back, and are useful for a range of tasks, like highlighting places of interest for sightseeing, or taking a trip of the highest skyscrapers of the world, or even showing historic events and political changes happening over decades.
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Last week I attended the KDE Frameworks Sprint, held in Blue Systems Barcelona office. Kevin put together the now traditional sticky note board and we started cranking through the tasks. I think we were quite productive, as this picture of the board at the end of the sprint can attest:
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Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the fifth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.12 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.9. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The guys behind the RAVEfinity project have released an updated Humanity Colors icon theme for Ubuntu 14.04 (and older), which work great with Ambiance and Radiance Colors GTK themes.
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As a general OS, Musix sounds a few sour notes. It has a meager collection of text editors, word processors and Web tools. You can do some real work with the software that is provided, but you might resort to manually installing some of the programs typically available in distro repositories but missing here. Musix also provides a poor user experience with its menus.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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With the Brazilian arm of Mandriva gaining activity, a new partner to on-board our partner ecosystem recently is Linux Solutions a leading consulting, services and solutions based company using Linux platform and offering a wide range of integrated programs and high technical quality since 15 years.Throughout its existence, Linux Solutions has handled more than 150 projects and assisted over 100 clients. More than 1000 students have also been trained. Linux Solutions specializes in clusters and various demands solutions in TCP / IP networks, such as file services, email, firewall, routing, proxy, among others
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Red Hat Family
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Linux operating system vendor Red Hat Inc said it will buy privately held storage systems provider Inktank Ceph Enterprise for $175 million to expand in the fast growing market for software-defined storage.
Inktank’s open-source Ceph software helps its customers replace legacy storage systems and increase the scale of their storage.
Red Hat said it expected the purchase to be completed in May this year. It also reaffirmed its 2015 outlook.
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Fedora
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The Wayland feature proposal for Fedora 21 is documented at length via the Fedora Project Wiki. X.Org Server support is expected to still stick-around for unsupported hardware/driver combinations and now that X.Org Server 1.16 has integrated XWayland support. Besides GNOME 3.14 and X.Org Server 1.16, on the software version side for Fedora 21 will also likely be Wayland 1.6.
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Debian Family
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Parsix GNU/Linux, a live and installation DVD based on Debian, aiming to provide a ready-to-use, easy-to-install desktop and laptop-optimized operating system, is now at version 6.0r0 and is ready for testing.
The developers’ ultimate goal is to offer users an easy-to-use OS based on Debian’s Wheezy branch, which makes use of the latest stable release of GNOME desktop environment.
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Tails, a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and that helps you use the Internet anonymously, has just reached version 1.0 after a long development period.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The idea was audacious: Combine Android, the most popular mobile version of Linux, with Ubuntu, the leading Linux desktop operating system, on a single smartphone that swapped between the two depending on whether the device was docked. Alas, Ubuntu for Android seems to have moved off the active roster as Canonical focuses on its own Ubuntu Touch project, and a new exchange on a Ubuntu project-tracking website seems to suggest Ubuntu for Android may be dead. (See update below.)
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Everyone knows that Ubuntu is not one of the most customizable operating systems, which is one of the problems that often come up in the Linux community. This is where the Ubuntu Tweak software will really help its users make head or tails of the Ubuntu Linux distro in a way that very few applications can.
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The Ubuntu developers have already started working on the next Ubuntu version, and the first development images have been produced. Don’t expect too much from the new Ubuntu build, at least not yet. It will be a couple of months until some major changes are visible
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An IoT survey targeting attendees of this week’s Embedded Linux Conference offers a MinnowBoard Max SBC giveaway, but anyone interested can participate.
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Via’s rugged, Linux-ready “AMOS-3003″ industrial computer for IoT builds on Via’s EPIA-P910 pico-ITX board, which features its 1.2GHz Nano E2 processor.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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We had anticipated that a special “camera” version of Samsung’s flagship device will be launched soon and here it is finally with the moniker ‘Galaxy K Zoom’. The device boasts of a 20.7-megapixel BSI CMOS sensor and 10X optical Zoom. This is not the first time Samsung has attempted to put zoom lenses on the back of a smartphone. Last year’s Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom featured similar 10x optical zoom, but it was a bulky mess, while Galaxy K Zoom has managed to keep a much slimmer profile at 0.8 inch thickness.
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Android
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The market for lightweight notebooks may get a lot messier in the coming weeks as Notebook Italia reports that HP is planning to release a 14-inch touchscreen laptop running Android, Google‘s mobile operating system for phones and tablets (and now wearables), rather than its Chrome OS operating system for lightweight notebooks. Notebook Italia claims to have found a demo video and promotional pictures tucked away on HP’s website. The videos have since been removed, but some screen grabs of the video are still up.
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Asus Fonepad 7 Dual SIM, the refreshed version of Fonepad 7 voice-calling tablet, is now available for purchase on Infibeam.com for INR 12,875. Powered by Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, the tablet supports dual-SIM functionality and voice-calling. The Fonepad 7 Dual SIM features a 7-inch screen with LED backlight and WXVGA screen IPS panel.
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The Android Silver project, which was rumored earlier this month, has today been corroborated by four fresh sources, all of whom point to a major shift in Google’s mobile strategy. The Information reports that the current scheme of offering Nexus-branded handsets with Google’s unadulterated vision of the best Android user experience will be scrapped, to be replaced by a set of high-end Silver phones that will closely adhere to it. The change is both expansive and expensive, as Google is said to be planning to spend heavily on promoting these devices in wireless carriers’ stores and through advertising, essentially subsidizing the development and marketing costs for its hardware partners.
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Noxel’s Android-based Xtream A700 signage player integrates Apple’s BLE-based iBeacon indoor positioning tech with Noxel’s cloud-based signage service.
Noxel claims its Xtream A700 is the most powerful Android signage computer around, and considering its quad-core system-on-chip and the relative novelty of Android signage, we imagine they are correct. Aside from the sheer performance, the device is notable for its use of Apple’s iBeacon indoor positioning technology, which can provide precise location information via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The device’s iBeacon support enables retailers and brand marketers to provide in-store navigation and location-specific push messaging to smartphones, says the company.
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“Taking into consideration the current stage of utilization of OSS in the Albanian public administration, the local ICT business experience and capacities and the current education system, it is strongly recommended to the Albanian government to start implementing initially the neutral approach combined with some enabling initiatives, thus recognizing, guaranteeing and ensuring fair and equal competition of OSS with other proprietary software.”
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Open source software (OSS) has had a huge impact on the development of technology today. From apps and web browsers to content management platforms and operating systems, there’s no doubt that open source projects have influenced the way that we create and access information.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The Google Chrome 35 Beta, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, is now available for download and is ready for testing.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 29 has been released and it’s causing quite a wave of controversy among Firefox users. Firefox 29 comes with a new interface called Australis that features rounded tabs, along with a menu icon in the top right corner. As you might imagine, some users are having trouble adjusting to the new interface and are making their feelings very clear to the Firefox developers.
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Mozilla is launching its most important release of Firefox in a very long time today. After almost two years of working on its Australis redesign, the company is now finally ready to bring it to its stable release channel.
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Firefox 30 also has a new Box Model Highlighter, new CSS property support, ECMAScript 6.0 support improvements, and many other changes. While Firefox 30 is now in a beta state, it will be officially released in June.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The improved accessibility features included in today’s new version of Apache OpenOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools, is good news for public administrations, expects Rob Weir, Project Management Committee Member at the Apache Software Foundation. Public administrations favour software solutions with strong accessibility support, he says. “By including Iaccesible2 support, we’ve removed a potential objection against the adoption of OpenOffice.”
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Oracle has put out the first public beta of the forthcoming Solaris 11.2 operating system release. The big focus of Solaris 11.2 is on embracing support for cloud computing.
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CMS
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Education
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The case in the article linked below describes some US colleges that were faced with $millions per annum of payments to a few corporations for permission to have computers the colleges owned compute stuff like finances and enrolments. One university spent $100million installing some software from Oracle and setting it up (Oracle charges ~$10 per employee per function per annum and ~$1000 per user per function per annum. It adds up to $millions per college per annum.). Now they are spending ~$1million per annum instead, contributing to a FLOSS project, Kuali, which will do what they want how they want it done. They share with a bunch of other colleges all with similar motivations. By sharing the load, each college gets what it needs for a lot less than paying some corporation multiple times what software costs to develop. The world does not owe big corporations a living. Make them earn it by competing on price/performance instead of lock-in.
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Healthcare
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The daily management and operation of a hospital requires enormous effort. These days, most hospitals utilize Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to centralize facility operations including inventory, budgets, invoicing, and employee management. Any hospital administrator will tell you that ERP software is essential to efficiently managing their hospital as the software lowers inventory costs and improves efficiencies and quality.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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The council of Poland’s capital will this year donate 400 PCs to schools in the city, to be refurbished with Ubuntu Linux and educational applications, in a joint-venture with the Foundation of the Free and Open Source Software (FWIOO). Announcing the project, Warsaw city’s department for education, praised the “beautiful idea of a common, selfless work for others” ingrained in free and open source. “It also brings huge economic and functional merit to schools and students.”
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Science
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In the course of a month, Peter Hodes plans to visit Poland, Israel, Germany and South Africa. Wherever he goes – even Australia – he always makes sure to get home in 42 hours or less. The reason? He’s a volunteer stem cell courier. Here he describes his unusual pastime.
Since March 2012, I’ve done 89 trips – of those, 51 have been abroad. I have 42 hours to carry stem cells in my little box because I’ve got two ice packs and that’s how long they last.
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Health/Nutrition
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Common infections and minor scratches could soon kill because antibiotics are becoming useless against new superbugs, World Health Organisation warns
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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And so many years later, his followers are still fighting. Even with the U.S. withdrawing the bulk of its troops this year, up to 10,000 Special Operations forces, CIA paramilitaries, and their proxies will likely stay behind to battle the Haqqanis, the Taliban, and similar outfits in a war that seemingly has no end. With such entrenched enemies, the conflict today has an air of inevitability — but it could all have gone so differently.
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Available in bright blues and hot pinks, rifles for kids sell in their thousands in America. They look like toys – but they’re lethal. An-Sofie Kesteleyn travelled to photograph this juvenile army
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In case you have been asleep for the past 61 years, the CIA overthrew Mossadegh in 1953. This kept the Shah in power for another 26 years until in 1979 the people mind you, and not Islam, overthrew him, and were then hijacked by Islam, which eventually became the IRHI or the Islamic Republic of Hijacked Iran.
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When President Obama decided sometime during his first term that he wanted to be able to use unmanned aerial drones in foreign lands to kill people — including Americans — he instructed Attorney General Eric Holder to find a way to make it legal — despite the absolute prohibition on governmental extra-judicial killing in federal and state laws and in the Constitution itself.
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US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh disclosed the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib 10 years ago. But as he told DW, he is convinced that the US hasn’t learned any lessons from it.
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Earlier this month, CIA-operated drones killed as many as 55 people in Yemen in several separate strikes. Although it was claimed that those killed were “militants,” according to press reports at least three civilians were killed and at least five others wounded. That makes at least 92 U.S. drone attacks against Yemen during the Obama administration, which have killed nearly 1,000 people including many civilians.
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One week ago, multiple air strikes, including possible drone strikes, in Yemen were reported. An escalation in counterterrorism operations took place with many alleged “militants” being reported killed but the names of them were not announced. It is unclear if any senior al Qaeda leaders were killed but the governments have claimed success.
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So many years later, they seem to be repeating the process in Yemen. They are now escalating a “successful” drone and special operations war against a group in that impoverished land that calls itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The drones turn out to be pretty good at knocking off various figures in that movement, but they are in another sense like a godsend for it. In what are called “targeted killings,” but might better be termed (as Paul Woodward has) “speculative murders,” they repeatedly wipe out civilians, including women, children, and in one recent case, part of a wedding party. They are Washington’s calling card of death and as such they only ensure that more Yemenis will join or support AQAP.
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Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has definitely come up with some of the most shocking ways to kill people, from gasp-inducing beheadings to blood-spattered Red Weddings. But in an interview with Rolling Stone, Martin says the way we engage in modern warfare is far more brutal.
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Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin condemned drone attacks in a recent interview, claiming that the method of killing enemies is not personal enough.
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The Senate’s decision is particularly troubling in view of how reticent the administration itself continues to be about the drone program. To date, Obama has publicly admitted to the deaths of only four people in targeted killing operations. That came in May 2013, when, in conjunction with a speech at the National Defense University, and, in his words, “to facilitate transparency and debate on the issue,” President Obama acknowledged for the first time that the United States had killed four Americans in drone strikes. But according to credible accounts, Obama has overseen the killing of several thousand people in drone strikes since taking office. Why only admit to the four Americans’ deaths? Is the issue of targeted killings only appropriate for debate when we kill our own citizens? Don’t all human beings have a right to life?
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Feinstein’s relationship with drones is, of course, somewhat hypocritical. She feels there should be stricter regulations on commercial drone usage (partially prompted by a non-commercial drone appearing outside her house during a Code Pink anti-NSA protest) and seems generally opposed to drone surveillance. However, she does stand strongly behind the nation’s counterterrorism efforts and believes killing people with drones (rather than just watching them) is more acceptable.
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The U.S. Senate has dropped a provision from an intelligence bill that would have required President Barack Obama’s administration to disclose the number of people killed or injured in drone attacks conducted by the U.S. in other countries.
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Hundreds crowded in to listen to Dr. Cornel West speak about the relationship between racism, poverty and drones in Syracuse.
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But after hearing civil rights activist Cornel West talk about the connections between racism, poverty and drones at Tucker Missionary Baptist Church, Jones said it “riled” her up and she decided to join hundreds of others protesting the United States’ use of drones in military actions.
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Canada is being urged to lead a new international effort to ban so-called “killer robots” — the new generation of deadly high-tech equipment that can select and fire on targets without human help.
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Somewhere deep in a lab in China, scientists are working toward building autonomous military machines that could some day end up on a battlefield.
It’s not just China. Russia and Israel are working on their own deadly hardware.
The U.K., U.S. and South Korea have even conducted tests on autonomous weapons in military scenarios.
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The killing of two Australian citizens is not end of the conversation, but the beginning. If these men were threats to national security, then the public deserves to know why
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Parliament voted to prohibit drone strikes in mid-December 2013. Votes from Yemen’s parliament can be struck down by the president and are non-binding.
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Australian military and intelligence personnel involved in controversial US drone targeting operations could face crimes against humanity charges, according to former prime minister Malcolm Fraser.
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The Almighty answers to no one in exercising the power of life and death over His creatures, and the president of the United States, despite the powerful weapons at his hand, can make no such claim. Barack Obama has some explaining to do for his drone killings of purported terrorists.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled last week that the Obama administration must allow the public to review the internal legal documents that justify the president’s drone killings of those, including American citizens, who are suspected of terrorism. The Justice Department had claimed that White House executive privilege shields its internal records from public scrutiny, but the court said by releasing selected portions of the documents, the administration waived its right to secrecy.
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Transparency Reporting
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It’s no secret that many in the US government would love to find a way to charge Wikileaks and Julian Assange with criminal activities for reporting on leaks. However, as many have pointed out, doing so would create a firestorm, because it’s difficult to see how what Wikileaks did is any different than what any news publication would do in publishing leaked documents. The attack on press freedom would be a major problem. Still, the Justice Department has spent years trying to come up with any way possible to charge Assange with a crime. They even tortured Chelsea Manning and then offered her a deal if she lied and claimed that she “conspired” with Assange to release the State Department cables. That didn’t work. Even as the DOJ couldn’t produce any evidence that Manning and Assange conspired, the Defense Department insisted it had to be true. Last year, however, there were finally reports that the DOJ was just about ready to admit that it had no legal case against Assange, with officials effectively admitting that it would be tantamount to suing a newspaper.
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Finance
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Perhaps this is our dystopian, Piketty-esque future: a small class of ultra-wealthy rentiers; a breakdown of public safety because the rich employ their own private security forces and don’t feel like funding anything further; a retainer class of managerial drones; and then everyone else—sullen and resentful, but kept in line by the hard men in dark glasses toting automatic weapons and driving armored limos.
Actually, probably not. Eventually robots will provide better security services than fragile human beings, so the security forces will be out of jobs too. By then, however, even the ultra-wealthy won’t care if robots produce enough to make life lovely for everyone. Sure, they’ll still want their share of the still-scarce status goods—coastal property, penthouse apartments, original Rembrandts—but beyond that why should they care if everyone lives like kings? They won’t, and we probably will. As long as we don’t all kill ourselves first.
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Prison governors have been ordered to cut the cost of holding inmates in England’s bulging jails by £149m a year, as part of a radical programme designed to slash the costs of incarceration by £2,200 a year per prison place.
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The Supreme Court heard arguments today over whether public employee who testify under subpoena at public corruption trials should be protected by the First Amendment. The position of President Barack Obama’s administration appears to be that they should not be protected.
The case is Lane v. Franks and it involves Edward Lane, who according to NPR was “hired in 2006 to head a program for juvenile offenders” at Central Alabama Community College that provided “counseling and education as an alternative to incarceration.” The program “received substantial federal funds.”
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Porn. It’s what the internet is for, as they say. Also, it’s very hard for some people to avoid. Entire governments, too. But what about the little people with big parts that make all this wonderfully ubiquitous smut possible? It’s easy to forget about the hard (ahem) working individuals that make these small businesses and big industry spurt out their wares like (insert grossest applicable analogy here). And now it’s apparently difficult for those mostly-young laborers to get paid, since some banks seem to have adopted a rather convenient moral code when it comes to who can open accounts with their institutions.
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Does income inequality matter to the richest Americans? Not very much. Here’s why. And it’s more than just greed-is-good– it’s because the rich will just get richer.
A study by economists at Washington University in St. Louis tells us stagnant income for the bottom 95 percent of wage earners makes it impossible for them to consume as they did in the years before the downturn. Consumer spending, some say, drives the U.S. economy, and is likely to continue to continue to dominate, as the decomposition of America’s industrial base dilutes old economy sales of appliances, cars, steel and the like. That should be bad news for the super-wealthy, us buying less stuff?
But that same study shows that while rising inequality reduced income growth for the bottom 95 percent of beginning around 1980, the group’s consumption growth did not fall proportionally at first. Instead, lower savings and hyper-available credit (remember Countrywide mortgages and usurous re-fi’s?) put the middle and bottom portions of our society on an unsustainable financial path which increased spending until it triggered the Great Recession. So, without surprise, consumption fell sharply in the recession, consistent with tighter borrowing constraints. Meanwhile, America’s the top earners’ wealth grew. The recession represented the largest redistribution of wealth in this century.
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Privacy
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For the past nine months, Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, tried to hide from the Internet the fact that she’s pregnant — and it wasn’t easy.
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Alexander was told that Lobban might ask about the safeguards in place to prevent any data that GCHQ shared with the NSA from being handed to others, such as Israel, who might use it in “lethal operations.”
Under the heading “key topic areas,” the document notes that gaining “unsupervised access” to data collected by the NSA under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “remains on GCHQ’s wish list and is something its leadership still desires.”
Section 702 of FISA grants the NSA wide latitude to collect the email and phone communications of “persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” It authorizes PRISM and several other programs – with codenames such as BLARNEY and STORMBREW – that covertly mine communications directly from phone lines and internet cables.
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FOR the past 10 months, a major international scandal has engulfed some of the world’s largest employers of mathematicians. These organisations stand accused of law-breaking on an industrial scale and are now the object of widespread outrage. How has the mathematics community responded? Largely by ignoring it.
Those employers – the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – have been systematically monitoring as much of our lives as they can, including our emails, texts, phone and Skype calls, web browsing, bank transactions and location data. They have tapped internet trunk cables, bugged charities and political leaders, conducted economic espionage, hacked cloud servers and disrupted lawful activist groups, all under the banner of national security. The goal, to quote former NSA director Keith Alexander, is to “collect all the signals, all the time”.
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Jail for Journalists Publishing Leaks, Immunity for Intelligence Personnel
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William Blum, the author of the book, “Rogue State,” said that while the object of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in the post Cold War era has been relegated to history, many are not inclined to believe that subversion has lost its relevance. Rather, it has only been redirected at overthrowing governments that refuse to tow the line gleaned from the NED’s slogan of “Supporting Freedom Around the World.”
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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is attempting to conceal unclassified information about the structure and function of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the leading role of the Central Intelligence Agency in collecting human intelligence.
Last month, ODNI issued a heavily redacted version of its Intelligence Community Directive 304 on “Human Intelligence.” The redacted document was produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Robert Sesek, and posted on ScribD.
The new redactions come as a surprise because most of the censored text had already been published by ODNI itself in an earlier iteration of the same unclassified Directive from 2008. That document has since been removed from the ODNI website but it is preserved on the FAS website here.
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Lawmakers in the House have killed a bill that would have banned drones from flying over areas deemed “critical infrastructure” in Louisiana.
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National Security Agency-leaker Edward Snowden called on one of the best-known Espionage Act lawyers last year when he entered into plea negotiations with the United States government.
According to a Tuesday article in the New York Times, Plato Cacheris, a prominent Washington, D.C. lawyer and name-partner at Trout Cacheris, has been working for nearly a year to get Snowden a deal from the United States government. According to the Times, Snowden hired Cacheris, who has previously represented convicted spies Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, and convicted leaker Lawrence Franklin, in the hopes of securing a plea bargain that would spare him significant jail time. Snowden, who fled to Moscow last year after being charged with multiple violations of the Espionage Act stemming from his decision to leak details of N.S.A. eavesdropping programs to The Guardian, is facing 30 years in prison.
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Angela Merkel should ask Barack Obama to destroy her NSA file when she meets the American president in Washington later this week, a leading German opposition politician has told the Guardian.
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THE UNITED STATES National Security Agency (NSA) has advised the American people that although it knows that telling them about security issues is in the public interest, it will not always do that.
Following the exposure of the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL, the NSA explained its stance via the White House blog, sort of, and revealed that each security vulnerability that comes its way is assessed on a range of merits and will only be disclosed depending on its risk assessment.
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The agency has launched an initiative to strengthen contacts between tech-heavy U.S. American colleges and universities. The project will coordinate academic collaboration to best protect Internet infrastructure. Already, the NSA has awarded funds and resources to Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland, and the University of North Carolina to set up so-called “lablets” on their campuses.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel meets US President Barack Obama this week with shared fears over the mounting Ukraine crisis helping to mend ties ruptured by the NSA eavesdropping scandal.
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Students and faculty are trying to raise awareness about surveillance in the United States.
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In a stirring editorial in the New Scientist, University of Edinburgh mathematician Tom Leinster calls on the world’s mathematicians to boycott working for the NSA, which describes itself as the “largest employer of mathematicians in the US” and which may the world’s number one employer of mathematicians.
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Several proposals have been put forward that would address the National Security Agency (NSA) spying abuses of privacy and human rights as documented in the Edward Snowden revelations. Four legislative pathways to curbing privacy abuses stand out, yet none comply fully with the 13 International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance. However, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the proposals is a worthy starting point, while another of the bills would make the situation worse than it already is.
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The Guardian has picked up three Webby awards for work including interactive coverage of the NSA files and a video report on the exploitation of migrant workers in Qatar.
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American law enforcement has long advocated for universal “kill switches” in cellphones to cut down on mobile device thefts. Now the Department of Justice argues that the same remote locking and data-wiping technology represents a threat to police investigations–one that means they should be free to search phones without a warrant.
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A false reading by a license-plate scanner mounted on a Prairie Village police car led officers to stop an innocent motorist on 75th Street Monday — an incident that has the PV-based attorney questioning the department’s protocol for officers unholstering their weapons.
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Civil Rights
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The vast majority of felony cases don’t end in decisions regarding guilt or innocence. Instead, 93 percent are subject to plea bargains. Of the remainder, most convictions aren’t reexamined carefully—appeals tend to focus on technicalities of the case rather than matters of guilt or innocence.
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In the latest example of a troubling trend in which companies play the role of law enforcement and moral police, Chase Bank has shut down the personal bank accounts of hundreds of adult entertainers.
We’ve written before about the dire consequences to online speech when service providers start acting like content police. These same consequences are applicable when financial services make decisions about to whom they provide services.
Just as ISPs and search engines can become weak links for digital speech, too often financial service providers are pressured by the government to shut down speech or punish speakers who would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. It’s unclear whether this is an example of government pressure, an internal corporate decision, or some combination.
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Parliamentary Ombudsman Petri Jääskeläinen says there is no evidence that Finnish officials had any knowledge of the alleged use of Finnish airspace or airports for prisoner rendition flights by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) between 2001 and 2006.
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The failure of an official investigation to uncover hard evidence of Finland’s alleged role in the US-led programmes of rendition and secret detention a decade ago is deeply disappointing, said Amnesty International today.
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Today, staffers on the Senate intelligence panel as well as CIA officers and perhaps contractors could be potential subjects of a preliminary DOJ criminal inquiry into the handling of the “Panetta Review,” a set of controversial classified documents that fell into the hands of Senate investigators working on the panel’s probe.
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How much should the American public be allowed to know about the use of torture and other forms of cruelty practiced by U.S. interrogators against captives of the war on terror? Everything.
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Despite all evidence to the contrary, many Americans continue to believe that brutality, torture and rank illegality is the road to national safety.
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Because of his reputation for brutality, Gulalai was someone both sides of the war wanted gone. The Taliban tried at least twice to kill him. Despite Gulalai’s ties to the CIA and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, United Nations officials and U.S. coalition partners sought to rein him in or have him removed.
Today, Gulalai lives in a pink two-story house in Southern California, on a street of stucco homes on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
How he managed to land in the United States remains murky. Afghan officials and former Gulalai colleagues said that his U.S. connections — and mounting concern about his safety — account for his extraordinary accommodation.
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An Army psychiatrist said the accused USS Cole bomber was given adequate access to treatment for his mental health problems, although he admitted he had no access the secret CIA files documenting the suspect’s extensive torture, the Miami Herald reports.
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The US government has always been the first to call out other nations with poor track records on human rights abuses. Invariably they are the two nations viewed most threatening to America’s global hegemony and power – rivals Russia and China.
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Oklahoma changed its execution protocols twice this year. State officials have five options for lethal injections, including a new three-drug mixture that was used for the first time Tuesday.
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We often hear about the police planting drugs or guns on people, but how about buildings? Something needed to be done to make marijuana dispensaries in California appear dangerous, and two officers of the law had an idea: “Why don’t we just plant some illegal stuff in there?
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Last week, an obscure but potentially internet-transforming document was leaked from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. It revealed that government regulators are considering rules that would give big companies a chance to make their online services run faster than smaller ones.
The proposed rules were revealed in the New York Times, and they would overturn the principle of “network neutrality” on the internet. Put simply, network neutrality allows you to use services from rich companies like Google and small startups with equal speed through your ISP. You can read a blog hosted on somebody’s home server, and it loads just as quickly as a blog on Tumblr.
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Recently, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, came under fire for reportedly proposing exceedingly weak “open Internet rules.” If the reports are correct, the FCC will allow broadband providers like Comcast to make special deals that give some companies preferential treatment, as long as those deals are “commercially reasonable.”
In other words, rather then requiring broadband providers to treat all Internet traffic more or less equally, the FCC will permit them to create an Internet “fast lane” and shake down content providers like Netflix, Google and Amazon for the right to travel in it.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver, pioneers of the BitTorrent copyright troll cases in the United States, have thrown in the towel. The law firm conceded defeat in a fraud and abuse case that was brought against them by an alleged pirate, and were ordered to pay nearly $40,000.
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Earlier this month the New Zealand High Court said that police could no longer hold onto property seized from Kim Dotcom during the 2012 raid on his mansion. Today and at the eleventh hour, the Crown indicated that it intends to fight by filing an appeal to keep control of Dotcom’s property.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 6:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Credit: Will Hill
Summary: How awareness of mass surveillance can propel Free software to dominance in more areas of computing
FOR a number of decades people such as Richard Stallman have been trying to persuade the public that Free software should be favoured, not because of nationalism, branding, or even cost but because only with Free software can the user (person or business) be in control. Techrights has covered the NSA’s abuses for a number of years (even well before the leaks) and recently observed great public concern when it comes to mass surveillance. Where apathy used to prevail there are now strong sentiments and people are eager to make informed choices that protect their rights.
When advocating Free software to people (not just GNU/Linux but even browsers like Firefox) it is worth using the privacy card. It really seems to help a lot. █
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