02.18.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Categorised outline of news from yesterday evening and so far today
Honours
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Four journalists who reported on the extent of the U.S. National Security Agency’s secret surveillance based on documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden are among the winners of the 65th annual George Polk Awards in Journalism.
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Students at Glasgow University are going to the polls to chose their new rector, with nominees including whistleblower Edward Snowden. The computer analyst was nominated by a group of students at the university who said they had received Mr Snowden’s approval through his lawyer.
War on Journalism
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First Amendment rights matter most. Without them all other freedoms are at risk. Post-9/11 policies threaten them.
Bush waged war against them. Obama escalated it. He promised transparency, accountability and reform. He called whistleblowing “acts of courage and patriotism.” He said one thing. He did another.
Press freedoms are endangered. An October Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report discussed Obama and the press.
Journalists say he’s waging war on dissent. He exceeds the worst of George Bush. He’s heading America on a fast track to tyranny.
War on Free Thought/Reading
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Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution.
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UNITED STATES AND BRITISH spying agencies the National Security Agency (NSA) and Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) are digging into the lives of Wikileaks supporters and visitors to other contentious websites, according to documents released by communications surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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US spy agency, the NSA, and its British equivalent, the GCHQ, deployed Internet surveillance technologies against Wikileaks in a campaign that also encouraged international governments to take action against the website’s founder, according to newly leaked documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Surveillance in Video Games
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“Now even when you’re just recreationally playing video games, you can’t have fun either. You have to be careful what you say. You don’t want to say a word that can flag you and you get a visit from a law enforcement officer or something,” Marmolejo said.
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Valve is looking at your browsing history right now, if a recent report is to be believed. It seems that the company’s Valve Anti Cheat system (VAC) reportedly looks at all the domains you have visited, and if it finds that you’ve frequented hack sites, who knows what actions it will take.
War on Lawyers
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Jesselyn Radack, a human rights lawyer representing Edward Snowden, has claimed that she was detained and questioned in a “very hostile” manner on Saturday by London Heathrow Airport’s Customs staff.
Radack told civil liberties blog Firedoglake that she was taken to a room to be questioned by a Heathrow Border Force officer who showed very little interest in her passport documents but subjected her to questioning about whistle-blowers Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.
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She was “stone face cold” during the interrogation but afterward was shaking and in tears. “How did he know to bring up those names?”
This blatant attempt to intimidate Snowden’s lawyer, who was informed that she was on an “inhibited persons list,” comes in the wake of news that a US law firm was spied upon as it advised the Indonesian government in a trade dispute with Australia. It confirms that for the US and UK governments, nothing is exempt from their total surveillance, not even information traditionally covered by attorney-client privilege.
Australia
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Indonesia’s angry foreign minister says it “is a little too much” to suggest shrimp exports have an impact on Australian security.
NSA Leadership
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The National Security Agency (NSA) will send its recommendations for where to store telephone metadata records to President Obama later this week, the outgoing NSA director said Friday in a speech defending his agency’s surveillance tactics. General Keith Alexander, who is retiring as NSA director next month, did not say where he thinks the data should be held. President Obama recommended on January 17th that the government stop holding Americans’ phone call records, but pushing the data out to either telephone companies or to a third party are both seen as having significant drawbacks.
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The Director of National Intelligence has admitted that, in hindsight, the US intelligence community would have been smarter to disclose some details about how telephone records belonging to millions of Americans have been collected for years.
Partisanship
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Last June, on behalf all Americans, I filed two class action lawsuits against President Barack Hussein Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, NSA Director Keith Alexander, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Justice (DOJ) and federal Judge Roger Vinson of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), who authorized and issued an illegal order allowing the NSA to intercept and collect so-called telephonic and Internet metadata on nearly the entire U.S. citizenry. Metadata allows the government to access and track the most intimate details of a person’s private and professional life.
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Drones
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There will be drone legislation introduced in the Iowa legislature addressing privacy and surveillance issues. How much more ought we be concerned with the killing of civilians (a fate much worse than losing privacy) done with the dollars, and in the name of, Iowans.
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The once-extraordinary circumstances required for the US to assassinate a human being have become all too ordinary
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In service since 1984, the American AGM-114 Hellfire missile has not only proved enormously useful in the war on terror, it has also defeated numerous efforts to replace it with something better. It didn’t help that an improved Hellfire, Hellfire II, appeared in 1994 and over 30,000 have been produced so far. These have been the most frequently used American missiles for over a decade, with over 16,000 fired in training or (mostly) combat since 2001.
Militarism
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I had a heck of a time making sense of the U.S. Navy’s new motto “A Global Force for Good” until I realized that it meant “We are a global force, and wherever we go we’re never leaving.”
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Torture
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The federal correctional institution of Loretto, Pennsylvania, where former CIA officer John Kiriakou is serving a thirty-month jail sentence, appears to be scrambling to find any way they can to stop him from sending letters from prison. He has written another letter that details what seem to be clear acts of retaliation.
Since August of last year, Firedoglake has been publishing “Letters from Loretto,” by Kiriakou, an imprisoned whistleblower who was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under the George W. Bush administration. He was convicted in October 2012 after he pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) when he provided the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter. He was sentenced in January 2013 of this year and reported to prison on February 28, 2013.
Firedoglake has been publishing Kiriakou’s “Letters from Loretto” since the summer of last year. In fact, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) considers copies of Kiriakou’s letters to be a danger to the Loretto prison: a threat to the “security, good order or discipline of the institution” or “to the protection of the public” or a document that “might facilitate criminal activity.”
In Kiriakou’s most recent letter from prison, written on February 10, he reports a threat allegedly made by a “senior prison official,” who told him months ago that officials have discussed putting him in “diesel therapy” for the rest of his sentence.
Coup
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On the same day, former military chief Major General Khalifa Hifter called for the parliament and government to be suspended, in an announcement some described as a coup attempt.
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It is quite interesting that the newspaper chose to place Hifter’s “ridiculous” coup in an Egyptian context. There is a more immediate and far more relevant context which the newspaper and its veteran correspondents should know very well. It is no secret that Hifter has had strong backing from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for nearly three decades.
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Venezuela is a country engulfed in myth in the US media. It is almost impossible to get the truth from corporate media outlets. Indeed, Venezuela may be the most lied about country in the US media. Sadly, groups that had been previously trusted like Human Rights Watch have joined the anti-Venezuela propaganda campaign and their reports on the country have been rebutted in great detail. In this current round of misinformation, the presence of propaganda against Venezuela also been evident in the social media.
The misinformation in the United States is because Venezuela is the lynch pin of the movement of Latin America away from US domination. Further, the oligarch class in Venezuela continues to control much of the media and big business interests. They are able to have a big influence on the economy, create scarcity of key goods and can impact the value of Venezuelan currency by flooding Venezuela with off-market US dollars. The oligarchs lost big in recent municipal elections and have lost national elections to Chavez and Maduro repeatedly. Not only is Venezuela a challenge to US hegemony in the Americas, it is a challenge to big finance capitalism. It has rejected the corporate-based neoliberal economics that the US is pushing throughout the world to the detriment of most people and the benefit of the wealthy. For all these reasons Venezuela is a top target of the United States and the oligarchs in Venezuela.
Police
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Thousands of farmers marched on Brazil’s capital Wednesday in the face of riot police, tear gas and rubber bullets, demanding justice for the millions of landless farmers they say have suffered for years under the country’s agricultural policies.
The farmers, organized by the Landless Workers Movement (MST), numbered around 16,000 in the streets of Brasília where they were confronted by riot police in the city center as they headed towards the presidential palace.
Many of the MST protesters today are angry that President Dilma Rousseff is backtracking from the policies of the past two administrations and allowing “agro-business to undercut chances of land reform.”
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If a recent night out at Denny’s is any indication, public life may not go back to normal any time soon for one California police officer even after being acquitted of murder.
Former Fullerton, California, police officer Manuel Ramos was one of two officials accused of beating a homeless schizophrenic man named Kelly Thomas to death back in 2011. Thomas was beaten and tasered multiple times during the confrontation, which left him in a coma. He died five days later in a hospital bed.
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A Valentine’s Day outing turned tragic for one Oklahoma family who claims five police officers beat their father to death during a confrontation outside a local movie theater.
The death is currently under investigation, and three police officers have been placed on administrative leave as the probe unfolds.
The incident occurred February 14 in Moore, Oklahoma, when an argument erupted between Nair Rodriguez and her daughter Lunahi. Nair slapped her daughter during the dispute and ended up leaving the theater. When Luis Rodriguez chased after his wife in a bid to stop her, law enforcement officials intervened and asked for his identification.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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So, could it be that CryEngine is actually about to announce Linux support? Seems not so far fetched now with this new information.
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Pixel counters, pick up your magnifying glasses: Konami has revealed that the PS4 version of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes will be the only one that runs at a full 1080 lines of vertical resolution on HDTVs, with Xbox One and last-generation players stuck at 720p resolution. Both the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game will run at 60 frames per second, Konami said, while versions for the older PS3 and Xbox 360 will only run at 30 frames per second.
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One of the founders of the CD Projekt RED, spoke about why the developer of The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077 has not yet shown any support towards Linux.
Iwinski believes that if you are going to support Linux, you cannot simply pick one distribution to support. Instead, he feels that CD Projekt RED would have to support at least five.
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There is very little information as to what will be in the DLC, looking at the different teaser trailers and the name of the expansion, it’s easy to put it altogether to think that it will contain at least a bunch of new scary monsters to die from.
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“Created by real world astronauts, scientists and architects. Build vast colonies and cities. Explore the many unknowns of our universe!” That’s the tagline of the ambitious space sim/real time strategy game Kickstarter project by Space Enigma Studios, who is also promising day one Linux support.
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Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians, the spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics from creator Yasumi Matsuno, has crossed its crowdfunding goal with hours to spare. The game is in development for iOS and Android devices, but the additional funding will allow the publisher Playdek to release on PC, Mac, and Linux as well.
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In GhostControl Inc you manage a team of ghost hunters and free London from paranormal terror in turn-based battles. Develop your own strategy and build your business well.
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Wow has it been a year already? A year ago today Valve released the Linux version of Steam to everyone. Removing the beta tag on the client and having the first big Linux sale.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Linphone was the first open source software to use the session initiation protocol (SIP) with VoIP. The open software has voice, video and messaging features that can be used with any SIP VoIP operator. And because of its open source nature, it can be distributed for free.
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FFmpeg and its forked Libav have each added an H.265 / HEVC encoder today to their respective code-bases.
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While the world’s best commercial graphic applications come with packed with features, they also come with a price tag many find hard to justify.
Though there are plenty of less expensive alternatives, the simple truth is: It’s hard to get cheaper than free.
Today we’re going to look some of the free, open source graphic apps available, and see if they are a viable replacement.
If you are currently unfamiliar with the abundance of free open source graphic apps now available, you may well be missing out.
The best open source graphic applications on this list are comparable in quality to their leading commercial equivalents.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about desktop environments and frameworks for GNU/Linux
GNOME
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We are getting closer to the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.12 desktop environment, so I thought that it would be a very good idea to drop here some of the major features that will be implemented in this release of GNOME.
Therefore, GNOME 3.12 will be the first release to fully support the modern Wayland display server, as well as the first release with a fully working version of the GNOME Software app that was introduced in GNOME 3.10 as a preview.
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The GNOME Project has released a new milestone version of the package that contains the default icon theme and wallpapers for the upcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.12 desktop environment.
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The GNOME Project, through Matthias Clasen, has announced that the fifth milestone of the upcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.12 desktop environment is now available for testing, featuring many updated applications, bugfixes, and updated translations.
KDE
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KDE Frameworks 5 entered alpha stage on 14th this month. The Frameworks 5 is the foundation for the next generation KDE interface. The tech preview of Frameworks 5 was released a month back. The next alpha is scheduled to be released on March 1st.
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Today KDE released the first alpha of Frameworks 5, part of a series of releases leading up to the final version planned for June 2014. This release includes progress since the Frameworks 5 Tech Preview in the beginning of this year.
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You can also access the program here, with links to the awesome set of slides used during the presentations at DevDays 2013.
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A recent post by Phoronix predicted that Nepomuk would stop being supported and be obsolete by this year. The article claimed, “It appears there isn’t much of a future left to KDE‘s Nepomuk framework that was developed at a cost of 17 million Euros… It’s going to be replaced going forward in the KDE land.”
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The Kubuntu 14.04 Alpha 2 release introduces KDE Applications 4.12.1, an improved version of the buggy USB Creator application, Mozilla Firefox 25, on-demand installation for Gwenview’s plugins, and automatic crash reporting.
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After it came out some months ago that Canonical was trying to charge Linux Mint for its usage of Ubuntu as a base for the Linux distribution, the lead Kubuntu developer has made it clear that anyone is free to base off their KDE-focused Ubuntu distribution without fear of being charged.
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According to the results of our FOSS Force Desktop Poll, our readers prefer KDE over any other desktop environment by a wide margin. In fact, all other desktops were practically left at the gate.
The poll accompanied Ken Starks’ article Those Krazy Kids & KDE, which talked about the preference his Reglue kids express for the KDE desktop. Because Starks’ article focused on KDE, GNOME 3 and Cinnamon, we focused our poll on those same three desktops. However, we included an “Other” category, under which another desktop could be entered. The poll asked the question, “Which desktop environment do you prefer?”
Hawaii
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The Enlightenment Wayland Compositor wasn’t the only Wayland desktop project seeing attention at FOSDEM earlier this month, but the Qt5-based Hawaii desktop also received some stage time.
Enlightenment
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It’s that time again! Stefan is off this week testing mountain robustness, so I’ve been pressed into service as the temporary pre-release release manager for this pre-release release.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Kernel-centric news items from the past few days
Kernel Space
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Linux kernel 3.14 RC3 includes several updated drivers (GPU, media, block, etc.), architecture updates (x86, ARM64, s390), filesystem improvements (Btrfs, VFS, NFS, OCFS, and kernfs fixes), as well as various mm and tooling (perf) improvements.
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Linus Torvalds, the man behind the wonderful project Linux and Git was offered job by Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Inc. Torvalds never met Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft but he met Jobs in the year 2000 when he was working with Transmeta corporation, an American fabless semiconductor company. Jobs invited Torvalds to Cupertino Camps of Apple. Torvalds was offered thick salary and remarkable position within the organization and was supposed to do Non-Linux things at Apple. This was the point, Torvalds disagreed. Moreover Torvalds did not like the Mac Kernel, Mach.
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Earlier this month at the OpenDaylight Summit, the software defined networking project announced its first code release, called Hydrogen.
Their open source controller is now available for download, published for everyone to see and use. But the structure and culture that got the project to this point, about one year after its formation, isn’t so readily available for outsiders to see and understand.
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As users everywhere begin to warm up to the benefits of running multiple operating systems in tandem, virtualization has become one of the hottest corners of the technology arena. Many open source tools are helping to drive this trend, and that is making the work of the Open Virtualization Alliance very important. The group has been up and running for years, and late last year it joined the Linux Foundation in an effort to integrate its efforts more closely with the Linux community.
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All of the code for kdbus is living within its own Git repository right now and also there’s code within the systemd Git while a compile-time switch must be activated now within systemd. Developers are hoping kdbus will be reviewed and merged into the upstream Linux kernel this year. Lennart shared a couple of kdbus features out on the horizon include sandboxing support, yielding CPU time to destination, priority inheritance, and priority queues.
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Graphics Stack
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This new multi-touch touch-pad implementation presents support for one / two / three finger tapping, two-finger scrolling, clickfinger, drag-n-drop on clickpads, and single-touch touch-pad support. There’s also work underway in the clickpad software button support and better timeout handling. Other possible features include trackstick mode support, disable-while-tapping, pinch/rotation support, and other features.
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An SGI fan and Phoronix reader happened to have an old set of SGI tapes dating back to the 90′s regarding “Tech Talk” and “KGSI Radio” on SGI wares. The Phoronix reader, Steven Hill, digitized these recordings and obtained permission to release them from SGI after formally being marked confidential.
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AMD has published a second version of their open-source Linux driver code for exposing the “VCE” video engine on modern Radeon GPUs under Linux via OpenMAX for accelerated H.264 video encoding.
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The Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver has picked up support for another OpenGL extension that’s mandated by the OpenGL 4.1 specification.
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For those curious how AMD’s Catalyst Linux performance is doing as we get 2014 underway with the first Catalyst 14.1 beta, here are benchmarks from nine different AMD Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux and running this latest publicly available driver when looking at both the OpenGL graphics and OpenCL compute performance.
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02.17.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Sunday’s and Monday’s coverage of surveillance matters and foreign policy that’s connected to it
Unity
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Who or what could get them thinking the same?
Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency.
By exposing the NSA’s vast surveillance web, Snowden created a link between tea partyers and liberals — two tribes camped on opposite sides of the nation’s political chasm.
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Academics have joined the fight against mass surveillance. Two open letters were published last month from the academic and research communities. One is signed by U.S. information security and cryptography researchers, and the other is signed by over one thousand scholars from a wide range of disciplines who work in universities all over the world.
Europe
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday she would talk to French President Francois Hollande about building up a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States.
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In the interview: The president of the German Domestic Intelligence Service Hans-Georg Maassen
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Reform
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The big blow is in the Senate, where chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D – VT) was the author of the legislation and has loudly pushed the reforms for months. Yet he too is suddenly in the “wait and see” camp, apparently content to give the Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt on reforms that will likely never come.
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Legislation to rein in the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs has stalled in the House and Senate.
Lawyers
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Congratulations to Ben Wittes who, with this post, demonstrates how the NSA can “spy” on Americans without “targeting” them.
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Asked about the report, Abbott said: “We never comment on operational intelligence matters”.
Australia did not use any intelligence it gathers “to the detriment of other countries”, he told reporters in Bourke in western NSW.
“We use it for the benefit of our friends. We use it to uphold our values. We use it to protect our citizens and the citizens of other countries.
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A new leak from NSA documents obtained by whisteblower Edward Snowden have cast light on Australia’s national security agency — the Australian Signals Directorate — and its access to Indonesia’s telecoms network.
Journalism
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The three journalists who broke the National Security Agency revelations from Edward Snowden in the Guardian are among the recipients of the prestigious 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism.
Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras will receive the award for national security reporting, along with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post.
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Surveillance
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Google’s found a new tracking tool, and it’s called the Streak plugin, an email watchdog that allows users to tell just when their sent messages were opened — and where the recipients were when they read them.
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How has whistleblower Edward Snowden’s exposés affected the ways organisations deal with internal and external security threats?
Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass internet surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s GCHQ has caused consternation around the world, particularly in Europe.
Human Rights (Foreign Policy)
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Karim Khan is a lucky man. When you’re picked up by 20 armed thugs, some in police uniform – aka the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – you can be “disappeared” forever. A mass grave in Balochistan, in the south-west of the country, has just been found, filled with the “missing” from previous arrests. But eight days after he was lifted and – by his own testimony, that of his lawyer Shasad Akbar and the marks still visible on his body – tortured, Mr Khan is back at his Pakistani home. His crime: complaining about US drone attacks – American missiles fired by pilotless aircraft – on civilians inside Pakistan in President Obama’s Strangelove-style operation against al-Qa’ida.
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Michael Ratner: Eliminating Targets Based on NSA spying but not verified by human intelligence demonstrates Obama’s false promise of oversight
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If the U.S. must withdraw all forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, alternative sites will be needed for drone strikes on Pakistan targets.
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Fox News’ Chris Wallace baselessly suggested that Hillary Clinton dishonestly conflated the 2012 attacks on diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, with protests sparked by an anti-Islam video.
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While the Obama Administration issued a statement assuring Americans that most of Libya’s weapons, including shoulder-fired Manpads, had been secured, NATO’s then-military committee chairman, Admiral Giampaolo di Paola, was not so sure. His fear that Libyan Manpads could be scattered “from Kenya to Kunduz [Afghanistan]” subsequently materialized.
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At the moment, we are threatened with a return to a pre-Constitutional situation that Americans would once have dismissed out of hand, a society in which the head of state can take a citizen’s life on his own say-so. If it’s the model for the building of post-Constitutional America, we’re in trouble. Indeed the stakes are high, whether we notice or not.
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Abd al-Wahhab al-Humayqani says the United States is doing more to stoke terrorism here, in the heartland of al-Qaida’s most active franchise, than to defeat it. What the United States ought to do, he argues, is strengthen Yemen’s state institutions rather than create enemies by carrying out drone strikes.
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The U.S. is making plans to set up drone bases in Central Asia in the case that the government of Afghanistan doesn’t allow U.S. troops to remain in that country past this year, the Los Angeles Times has reported. The military wants to maintain the ability to carry out attacks against militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan even if it has no military presence in those countries, and the next best options are the Central Asian states. The officials interviewed didn’t specify which countries were being considered: “There are contingency plans for alternatives in the north,” said one official quoted by the paper.
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Civil Rights (Police)
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The eight Los Angeles police officers who shot at two women over 100 times will not lose their jobs. They won’t even be suspended. They’ll just get some additional training.
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Detective Peter Valentin (top) and (from left) Detective Vincent Orsini, Sgt. Fritz Glemaud and Detective Warren Rohan are among the 55 NYPD cops who have been sued at least 10 times over the past decade.
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Mass-murderer Anders Breivik has issued a second letter of complaint about the conditions he’s endured in a Norwegian prison since killing 77 teenagers attending a conference for the youth wing of a left-wing political party (here’s the first, which runs to 27 pages and features a demand for moisturizer). This time around, Breivik is upset that he is forced to use an outdated Playstation 2 and isn’t allowed to choose his own games; wants his uncomfortable cell-chair replaced with an armchair or sofa; and more. He threatens a hunger-strike if his 12 demands are not met.
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02.16.14
Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: 2014 news picks that focus on programming and development, especially of Free software or using Free software tools
Demise of Proprietary
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HTML5 developers queried recently by tools vendor Sencha remain dedicated to building apps via Web technologies, even as doubts have been cast on how effective HTML5 is vis à vis native development. Many of those same developers, however, have dropped support for the classic Microsoft Windows platform.
Surveying 2,128 business application developers from the HTML5 development community, including users of its own tools, Sencha found that 70-plus percent of developers planned to do more with HTML5 in the 2013 timeframe than they had done the previous year. And 75 percent will work further with HTML5 in 2014. More than 60 percent of developers have migrated to HTML5 and hybrid development for primary applications. For the coming year, just 4 percent of HTML5 developers plan to cut back on HTML5.
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I still remember IBM’s provocative announcement in 2001 that it was putting $1 billion toward the development and promotion of Linux. While such billion-dollar commitments from IBM are now so routine as to be unremarkable, back then a billion dollars meant a lot. I was working for an embedded Linux vendor at the time, and most of our sales cycle was spent explaining why GPL-licensed Linux wasn’t the technology equivalent of terminal cancer. (Thanks in part to Microsoft’s contribution.)
Google
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The second video features Jason Hibbets’s full interview with Chris DiBona Open Source Director at Google. Find out how DiBona measures his performance, why he once called open source “brutal,” and more on working for Google and the future of open source.
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Over 280 attendees representing 177 mentoring organizations gathered for a two-day, code-munity extravaganza celebrating the conclusion of Google Summer of Code with the annual Mentor Summit held at Google in Mountain View, California.
GitHub
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GitHub’s position as the repository of choice for open source community projects is today one of dominance, most would argue.
Officially often referred to as a “web-based revision control service” (rather than simply a software code repository), this classification is an obvious nod to the site’s inherent level of active community involvement as open projects are continuously developed, refined and augmented.
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So, what’s the problem? Well, that’s simple. It seems that Fox News’ technology department –run by a motley crew of half-witted quick-study-types– failed to explain GitHub, and also disregarded both spelling and punctuation in favor of adopting what I would describe as a rogue journalistic style; a style that exists far beyond the confines of traditional English language rules. It is now with great pleasure that I flog the holy-hell out of the following screen capture in an attempt to make them cry.
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I have an open source script for a specific site (I’m trying not to call anything by name here) that a few other developers and I recently moved to GitHub. We’ve been joined by several new developers since we moved to the new system, including one very active one in particular. However, this active one has started changing a lot of the project.
First of all, he deleted our versioning system (not like Git, but like that—we called it versions v4.1.16) and said it would be better to simply push the code to the site when we think it’s ready. Now there’s no centralized place to put release notes, which has become annoying.
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GitHub has become the de facto repository for open source projects. So, we were excited for the opportunity to sit down with GitHub’s co-founder and CIO Scott Chacon during the All Things Open Conference in Raleigh, NC.
Python
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One year ago the Puerto Rico Python Interest Group (prPIG) was founded on one purpose; to create a sustainable user community based on software development in Puerto Rico. On February 20, 2014 we will celebrate our first anniversary with an open format meeting with lightning talks from the community.
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Programming languages are crucial to a programmer as they boosts their productivity. Keeping in mind the fact that programmers may not be comfortable with all the coding languages around, we thought of compiling a list of programming languages set to make it big in 2014.
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Python community, friends, fellow developers, we need to talk. On December 3rd, 2008 Python 3.0 was first released. At the time it was widely said that Python 3 adoption was going to be a long process, it was referred to as a five year process. We’ve just passed the five year mark.
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In an article entitled “Python Displacing R As The Programming Language For Data Science,” MongoDB’s Matt Asay made an argument that has been circulating for some time now. As Python has steadily improved its data science credentials, from Numpy to Pandas, with even R’s dominant ggplot2 charting library having been ported, its viability as a real data science platform improves daily. More than any other language in fact, save perhaps Java, Python is rapidly becoming a lingua franca, with footholds in every technology arena from the desktop to the server.
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Git
LLVM
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It looks like there’s finally going to be stable point releases of the LLVM compiler infrastructure for pushing out bug-fixes quicker, whether you’re using the Clang C/C++ compiler or depending upon LLVM for your GPU driver compiler back-end.
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It’s nearly one month late but the LLVM 3.4 compiler infrastructure is now available with the updated Clang C/C++ compiler front-end, the usual LLVM sub-projects, and also some new compiler tools.
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The release of LLVM 3.4 is imminent and with the major compiler infrastructure upgrade comes update to the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end, LLDB debugger, and other LLVM sub-projects. LLVM 3.4 is a very righteous release and in celebration of its forthcoming release, it’s back into compiler benchmarking season at Phoronix.
Ruby
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Ruby 2.1 has many improvements including speedup without severe incompatibilities.
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The Ruby project has done a new major release on Christmas for their popular programming language. Ruby offers performance speed-ups but without severe incompatibilities, according to the release announcement.
Misc.
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Regular readers of this column won’t be surprised to hear that I love both Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. Rails has been my primary server-side Web development framework for about eight years, and it has managed to provide solutions for a large number of consulting and personal projects. As for PostgreSQL, I’ve been using it for about 15 years, and I continue to be amazed by the functionality it has gained in that time. PostgreSQL is no longer just a relational database. It’s also a platform supporting the storage and retrieval of many types of data, built on a rock-solid, ACID-compliant, transactional core.
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In the sometimes dark and mysterious world of computers, I see open source programming and community around it as a force of good. Open source sparks and kindles a connection between people that I think is hard to find elsewhere in programming. Working with open source, a programmer builds important and powerful collaboration skills. This is significant because many of us (programmers and self-proclaimed nerds) are rather antisocial. Open source programming helps us cultivate social behaviors like sharing, improved communication, and collaborating towards a common goal.
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So by the mid-1980s, programming in schools was surging…
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The Checkpoint-Restore Tool has reached version 1.0 as part of the CRIU project. Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace allows for users to freeze running applications and checkpoint it to the hard drive as a file and that checkpoint can then be restored to a running process later on. CRIU is different from suspend-and-resume with the Linux kernel in that this is a tool for handling individual programs and it is implemented in user-space.
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The development team behind the Clutter software, a library for creating compelling, portable, dynamic and fast graphical user interfaces (GUI), has announced a few days ago that the second maintenance release of the stable Clutter 1.16 branch is available for download.
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Jim Kukunas of Intel OTC published the set of 13 patches on Monday that include medium and quick deflate strategies, a faster hash function with SSE 4.2 support, PCLMULQDQ-optimized CRC folding, SSE2 hash shifting, and other changes/tuning.
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