06.15.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you’ve not yet tried Linux Voice, you’re missing out on the most in-depth tutorials, features, reviews and interviews in the GNU/Linux and Free Software world. Every issue is packed with 115 pages of content from the most experienced writers in the business, and we donate 50% of our profits back to the community….
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My how the times have changed. At one point, HP and Microsoft were sharing friendship bracelets and having slumber parties. In fact, over the last decade, HP was a major player with Microsoft. Those days are gone. The juggernaut that was once Microsoft is slowly toppling and companies like HP are seeing the writing on the wall. That writing includes the likes of Android, Linux, iOS — platforms perfect for mobile and embedded systems.
To that end, Hewlett Packard has decided to kick Microsoft to the curb and develop their own operating system that will power all of their future devices. In particular, HP is working on a device they call “The Machine.” This new device will be made up of several new technologies — including a new type of memory — and will run a new operating system based on…
Wait for it…
Linux.
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A recurring Linux joke / horror story is running the command rm –rf /. Imagine if it actually happened? What would or could you do to recover?
Linux specialist Kyle Kelley recently decided to see what happened if he launched a new Linux server and ran rm –rf / as root.
This command is the remove (delete) command, with the flags –rf indicating to run recursively down all folders and subfolders, and to force deletion even if the file is ordinarily read-only. The / indicates the command is to run from the top-most root directory in Linux.
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Desktop
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That system is Wine, a software “go-between” that lets users run Windows applications without a copy of Microsoft Windows. Wine isn’t an operating system in its own right, just a layer that sits on top of free systems like Linux. It doesn’t run every Windows program but offers seamless compatibility on many of the most recent and popular applications. Used in conjunction with a free graphical operating system like Ubuntu, it’s an option that could save you up to £80 on Microsoft’s current asking price.
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Server
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Enterprises want to move into hybrid cloud services now and will probably spend the next several years making that move, according to Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud services at VMware. It won’t be an instant transition. He says that VMware, unlike Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, is in a good position to help them do so.
Lodge was on the road Thursday, visiting InformationWeek offices and other spots in his own “anti-cloud washing” campaign. He had a list of the requirements for a hybrid cloud and explained why some cloud services that talk about providing hybrid services probably can’t really do it. In case you’re wondering, he means Amazon Web Services, which struck a nerve inside VMware when it announced the AWS vCenter management portal, the connection between the VMware vCenter management console and Amazon’s EC2.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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While EXT4 didn’t see any exciting changes for the Linux 3.16 merge window, the XFS and Btrfs file-systems are continuing to receive a great deal of upstream improvements.
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The 3.14.7, 3.10.43, and 3.4.93 stable kernel updates are available; each contains another long list of important fixes.
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Software engineer Thomas Gibbons remembers from an early age working with his father to set up mail servers in their home in Kidderminster, England. His dad, Christopher Gibbons, a BT (British Telecom) engineer, was always eager to teach him about things he expressed interested in, he said via phone this week.
“He got me into programming as well. I’m where I am today because of my father’s faith in me,” Gibbons said. “Whenever I wanted to learn something, he said ‘Great, we’ll learn it together.”
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Matthew Garrett sent in the x86 platform driver updates on Tuesday that are going into the Linux 3.16 kernel. This pull request is interesting for Dell Latitude laptop owners.
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For developers and debug-willing Linux enthusiasts, the Intel GPU Tools 1.7 open-source release is now available.
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Graphics Stack
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The first beta driver in NVIDIA’s forthcoming “Release 340″ driver series for blob-using Linux users is now available.
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Another OpenGL 4 extension has landed in Mesa by Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center crew for the Mesa 10.3 release at the end of the summer.
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Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.2.1.
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Wayland 1.5 is released. It’s a pretty exciting release, with plenty of features, but the most exciting thing about it is that we can begin work on Wayland 1.6!
… No, I’m serious. Wayland 1.6′s release schedule matches up pretty well with GNOME’s. Wayland 1.6 will be released in the coming weeks before GNOME 3.14, the first version of GNOME with full Wayland support out of the box.
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The Linux graphics benchmarks we have to publish today at Phoronix are some tests of the Intel “ILO” Gallium3D driver that is independently developed by LunarG as an unofficial alternative to the classic Intel Mesa DRI driver that’s officially supported by the Intel Open-Source Technology Center.
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At Apple’s recent WWDC event besides announcing a new 3D graphics API, Apple also announced Swift, a new programming. However, Apple developers don’t yet know — or can’t admit — whether Swift will ultimately be open-source or made to be cross-platform.
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Benchmarks
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After last weekend delivering 30-way Intel/AMD/NVIDIA 2D Linux benchmarks this weekend I have some results comparing the GeForce GPU performance for 2D operations between the open-source Nouveau driver and the closed-source proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine 1.7.20 was delayed an extra two weeks due to outside scheduling conflicts, but that new release is now available. While the release schedule was twice as long, the release isn’t too particularly exciting.
Found within Wine 1.7.20 is X11 drag and drop fixes, more C/C++ run-time functions have been implemented, fixes for more memory issues found by Valgrind, OLE storage fixes, and various other bug-fixes. This release has 88 bug-fixes found within this development version after the extended cycle.
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Games
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E3 and all of its shiny new game launches may be winding down, but the gaming goodness is just getting started. Friday morning, games site GOG.com launched its summer games sale, unloading a slew of games at dirt-cheap prices, with deals being swapped out day-by-day and even hour-by-hour.
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Linux is slowly becoming a gaming alternative, but it’s still a long way from consoles and Windows. How long will it take to see Linux represented at the E3 Expo in full effect, just like all the other platforms?
Making predictions is very hard, especially about the future. This simple statement from physicist Niels Bohr explains very well why it’s difficult to anticipate what will happen in the world of technology. Some things evolve faster than we can predict and others seem to stagnate…
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Ever since Valve released Steam for Linux, I had been hoping that Sid Meier’s Civilization V would come to the platform. In truth, I didn’t actually expect it to happen – not even after Beyond Earth was announced for Linux. As the game was announced for the OS earlier this week, though, this is one of those times I’m glad reality diverged from my beliefs.
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Team Fortress 2, the online multiplayer game developed by Valve, has been updated and a number of fixes have been implemented.
Team Fortress 2 has been available on the Linux platform for some time now and the developers have released lots of patches for the game already.
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2K and Firaxis Games announce that the Linux version of Civilization V has been released and the port has been made by Aspyr Media.
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When summer arrives, many games sites starts to sell out cheap games. We have found several games that works perfectly on Linux.
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Linux’s gaming potential is about more than SteamOS and blockbuster ports. Earlier this year, GOG.com announced plans to bring a bevy of classic games to Ubuntu and Mint Linux this fall, with more than 100 games expected to be available at launch. Expect them to work just fine with SteamOS when the operating system finally launches sometime in 2015, too.
Speaking of Steam, it’s not the big-name games but the indies that are driving Steam for Linux’s true growth. After launching with a mere 60 native games just over a year ago, Steam for Linux now stands at more than 300 games strong—tremendous growth in a very short time. More and more games—like Europa Universalis IV, and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and Dota 2, and Starbound—are starting to launch Linux versions alongside Windows counterparts.
It’s still not quite the year of Linux on the desktop, but one thing’s for certain: Linux’s gaming prospects are looking brighter than ever before.
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While LGP was once the leading source for providing Linux-native games, these days there isn’t much to say for them and their web-site remains offline one and a half months after trying to do a server upgrade.
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Crytek has been after hiring Linux programmers for years now and a Phoronix reader pointed out there’s a fresh job posting for working at Crytek in Frankfurt, Germany on the OS X and Linux versions of CryENGINE. The job posting is for an engine programmer working on Linux and Mac to maintain the support for CryENGINE, contribute to the development of CryENGINE’s OpenGL renderer, maintain and improve low-level engine subsystems, ensure the reliability of their UNIX-based build systems, provide training, and carry out other tasks.
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Sid Meier’s Civilization V was announced today by Aspyr Media for Linux and SteamOS. The release targets SteamOS on current-gen hardware and is supporting Ubuntu 14.04. Future Civilization V Linux updates will expand the range of supported graphics cards.
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An updated version of the open-source OpenRA engine is out, the project with the goal of being a libre/free real-time strategy project recreating the original Command and Conquer titles.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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First I would like to say that this release would not have been possible without the excellent user community effort that arrived to help by lending their time and knowledge, after the very bumpy beta debut. Thanks to all of you.
Team members also deserve recognition for tolerating difficulties with the beta and internal frustrations that needed to be addressed. Kudos. Now on with the release notes.
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The latest addition to the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries is Elua, a Lua-based Just-in-Time application runtime stack.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This is one of our first interviews with the excited attendees of the Randa meetings and today you shall get a glimpse into the mind, workings and makings of Cristian Oneț who has been with KDE since quite some time now and has been a prominent contributor.
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The KDE Project developers have revealed that the second Beta version of the next-generation Plasma workspace has been released.
Plasma Next has been built to eventually replace the current KDE Plasma, which seems to have run its course. This doesn’t means that the current Plasma used by the KDE project won’t be supported anymore, just that a change is coming in the near future.
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The Google developers have launched a new version of their Chrome browser, but this is just the development branch. It’s possible that some of the features integrated in this version of the browser will never make it to Beta and Stable.
Google Chrome Dev is the place where the developers implement new features and where the majority of fixes are added. There have been very few times when the Dev release wasn’t large, and this is not one of those times.
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Before you follow my instructions to install Plasma 5 on your system, keep in mind that Plasma 5 is under heavy development and the stable release has not been made. Since it’s in development stage, there are (as expected) issues. Some of the issue you should be aware of include the missing wallpaper, icons may stop working now and then and Plasma Network Manager is missing as well.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Sorry for a bit belated post. In the last month I attended GNOME.Asia, held in Beijing this year, in conjunction with FUDCon APAC. The conference was perfectly organized and I had a lot of fun with the enthusiastic people. Congratulations to the organizers on the successful event.
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One day while hanging around at the #gnome-design IRC channel, Allan Day made me aware of the fact that default avatars in GNOME could use a revamp. Sounded like a nice adventure, so I began following an exciting yet challenging path, aiming to find the treasure that is good avatar conceptual design.
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This may not be such a big deal on Linux, where distributions generally have ‘their’ theme, not to mention the many packaged and readily available themes. So, basically no Linux user ever sees the default GTK+ theme. The situation is very different on other platforms, where GTK+ is often bundled with applications, and it may not be easy to install themes, or get the bundled GTK+ to use them.
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The latest change abound for GNOME 3.14 is a new default theme for the GTK+ tool-kit.
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This article is a review of the latest edition of Antergos – Antergos 2014.05.26, a desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Like Manjaro, another Arch Linux-based desktop distribution, it is a relatively young distribution, and like its parent distribution, is a rolling release distribution.
A rolling release distribution is an install-once-update-forever distribution. That is, once a system is installed, there’s no need to reinstall when a new version is released.
The Antergos installer offers a choice of six desktop environments – Cinnamon, GNOME 3, KDE, MATE, Openbox and Xfce. This review features materials from test installations of the Cinnamon, GNOME 3, and KDE desktops.
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New Releases
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MythTV, a Digital Video Recorder and home media center hub featuring automatic commercial detection/skipping, intelligent schedule recording, parental control, remote administration, and many more other functions, is now at version 0.27.1.
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There were some nice items in the feeds on this unluckiest day of the month. Jack Germain says Pinguy OS is about as good GNOME as you can get. Andrew Powell asks Is Ubuntu’s Unity Really All That Bad Nowadays? And GamingOnLinux.com says Linux is “heating up” over at Steam. These stories and more on this Friday the 13th.
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Pinguy OS is easy to misjudge as being too basic for serious users. There is little to do but launch your applications and go about your computing tasks. It may not satisfy power users who like to control navigation with keyboard shortcuts and advanced system settings. However, if you are a normal computer user who just wants your system to work from the start, Pinguy OS has a lot going for it.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva SA is proud to announce the official Europe launch of the “out of the box” QNAP IT Management Station with its partner QNAP (Quality Network Appliance Provider) Systems, Inc., that aims to deliver comprehensive offerings of cutting edge network attached storage (NAS) and network video recorder (NVR) solutions featured with ease-of-use, robust operation, large storage capacity, and trustworthy reliability.
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Arch Family
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Few months ago I wrote about Xulrunner/AArch64 patches. Today I was able to make use result of them.
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The Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is out with its 0.8.10 update for its flagship Xfce version plus their editions for KDE, Openbox, and minimal “net” environment.
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Red Hat Family
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The same week as Red Hat announced the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, the CentOS community is now out with a public QA release for testing.
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After three and a half years in development, a major milestone update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat’s flagship Linux platform, debuts.
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Many of you probably noticed (or were gleefully anticipating) the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 today. Which means it’s a really super day to be a Red Hat employee — seeing the culmination of so much open source work come together as the next major version of our flagship product is pretty inspiring.
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Fedora
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Fedora 20 was released last December and the Fedora 21 schedule puts the next release as no earlier than mid-October, but there’s already a call for delaying this next version of Fedora Linux.
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Eariler this week, Mozilla released version 30 of their popular web browser, Firefox, and now Firefox 30 is available in the official Fedora Repositories for Fedora 20 (the Fedora 19 update is still in the testing phase).
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If you are missing a software in Fedora, it’s possible to ask for it and maybe someone will pick it up and make a rpm package for it.
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The feature proposal is moving forward for replacing the Yum package manager with the next-generation DNF solution for Fedora 22.
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Debian Family
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Getting MATE ready for Debian has been hard work for the MATE Packaging Team, but it looks like they’ve pulled it off.
“The MATE desktop environment is a fork of what was formerly known as the GNOME v2 desktop environment. The MATE upstream developers have performed a really good job in integrating the old GNOME code with latest technologies like DConf an GSettings.’
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The anonymous operating system that Edward Snowden used to evade the National Security Agency has more than doubled in popularity and use in the last year since the NSA whistleblower first made headlines.
The Amnesic Incognito Live System, known widely as Tails, was booted up 11,107 times per day in the last month, according to its developers. That number equates to a boot once every seven seconds or 344,328 boots over the entire month.
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Debian is a big system. At the time of writing, the unstable distribution has more than 20,000 source packages, building more then 40,000 binary packages on the amd64 architecture. The number of inter-dependencies between binary packages is mind-boggling: the entire dependency graph for the amd64 architecture contains a little more than 375,000 edges. If you want to expand the phrase “package A depends on package B”, there are more than 375,000 pairs of packages A and B that can be used.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth is hosting his keynote right now for the latest Ubuntu Online Developer Summit. Mark mostly talked about Ubuntu Phone, the forthcoming BQ phone hardware, Unity 8, OpenStack, LXC / Docker, and cloud computing in general… During the question and answer period, he was just asked about Mir driver support.
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The latest Internet-based Ubuntu Developer Summit ended yesterday. For those not up to speed on your Phoronix reading, here’s a recap of the most interesting topics.
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Ever since the Mir announcement made by Canonical last year, the community has met the decision with some resistance. The Ubuntu developers have explained on numerous occasions why they chose this path for their systems and it all has to do with control.
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After testing the developer’s build of Ubuntu Touch smartphone OS in 2013, the company behind Ubuntu Linux (Canonical) has finally confirmed that it will soon release its first batch of entry-level smartphones running the open-source operating system later this year. The company has teamed up with Meizu and Bq to be its initial Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). As compared to the open source Firefox OS released last year in consortium with Alacatel, the mobile edition of Ubuntu is not an HTML 5 or browser-based ecosystem. Similar to Android, it loads native Ubuntu applications (messaging, phone, and camera) flawlessly, even with the absence of wireless connectivity.
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Canonical has just released a new Ubuntu 14.10 image that only comes with the new Unity 8 as the default desktop environment, but don’t expect it to become one of the main releases in October.
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Now, don’t get me wrong – when it comes to choice of desktop interface it’s a very subjective matter and often a matter of taste and what you, as the user, finds most comfortable and/or productive. Still, browse through various forums, comment sections or blogs across the internet concerning Unity or even Linux desktops in general and you’ll still likely find plenty of negativity towards Canonical’s flagship desktop offering. However, I do believe some of the common criticisms leveled at Unity are based on some of the early incarnations of that desktop. Is it really so bad nowadays?
Of course, amongst all the perceived ‘hate’ and general negativity for Unity, there are also users with positive reactions who either are new to Unity and find it to be a good, stable and easy to use desktop or they are users who once disliked Unity based on it’s earlier versions but since trying out the Unity of today (say, Unity as it stands in Ubuntu 14.04) have had a change of heart.
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Besides figuring out SSD caching and other features for Ubuntu Server 14.10, developers at Canonical and other stakeholders are figuring out Ubuntu Server’s future with systemd in the long-term.
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Ubuntu developers are moving forward with their plans to support Click packages on the Ubuntu desktop.
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A question and answer session was held today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for those interested in the Mir Display Server and next-generation Unity 8 desktop with its focus on convergence.
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Canonical developer Michael Hall says that there are over 10,000 unique users running Ubuntu phone OS on their devices. Where did this number come from? Did they tracked the number of download? No, that would be too vague to conclude how many users are actually using the mobile OS.
Ubuntu Phone users have to log into their Ubuntu One account (U1 file storage and music was discontinued this year), so that they can get updates or manage applications, just the way it works with Android, iOS or Windows 8. This gives Canonical the ability to know how many users used their U1 account to connect to the store and that’s where these numbers are coming from.
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Flavours and Variants
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Marvell has posted detailed datasheets on its previously opaque Armada 370 SoC, used in Linux-based NAS systems from Buffalo, Netgear, and Synology.
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Samsung have delivered several Tizen powered Smart cameras and now according to a new leak, they are getting ready to deliver another Tizen based flagship model named the Samsung NX1. The expected announcement of this new Camera is thought to be at the Photokina event in September.
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Codethink demonstrated its Baserock Linux stack running the new Linux 3.15 kernel and an open source graphics driver stack on Nvidia’s Jetson TK1 SBC.
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Phones
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The UK Online electronics retailer MobileFun have listed the Tizen based Samsung Z (SM-Z910F) as a unlocked smartphone on their site, with a release date to be confirmed. We are expecting a Russian launch event soon and MobileFun have confirmed directly to Tizen Experts that they are looking at stocking the Samsung Z in the near future, and will also be looking at selling a range of accompanying accessories.
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Android
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Early reports are suggesting OnePlus One devices are finally ready to begin shipping to customers.
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A couple of years ago, I needed an oscilloscope for a fun electronics project I was working on: a 500W Tesla coil. I’d already spent quite a bit of money importing a kit of parts for the project from the United States, so the budget for the scope was pretty tight.
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If there is a “right way” to come in to open source, then surely this is it. So many people answered to say that their first brush with open source projects was that they spotted a problem somewhere in a tool they were using, and offered a fix. Open source is the combined effort of countless humans doing exactly this, and I was pleased and encouraged to find this as the biggest chunk of responders.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has pulled a “Chrome” by adding a search box to the new tab page in Firefox 31, which reached beta status yesterday and is slated to ship in final form on July 22.
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FireFox OS is the smartphone operating system from Mozilla. It is based on web technologies and FireFox OS apps are written in HTML5. Using WebGL FireFox apps can access the hardware elements of the smartphone and provide experience like a true native app. FireFox For Android 29 is bringing the Open Web Apps ecosystem to Android.
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Mozilla has today extended its Open Web App repackaging to Android.
Users of Firefox for Android are now able to install apps from the Firefox Marketplace, and have them install and behave like a regular Android app.
“As a developer, you can now build your Open Web App for Firefox OS devices and have that app reach millions of existing Firefox for Android users without having to change a single line of code,” said the announcement blog post.
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The Mozilla Foundation and chip maker Spreadtrum have partnered with two Indian vendors to launch ultra-low-cost smartphones in the next few months. Spreadtrum said the phones could cost just $25.
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Mozilla has officially released Firefox 30 for all supported operating systems. Firefox 30 is minor release as compared to 29 that came in with many new changes and complete user interface design. Some new features have been introduced in both desktop and mobile versions including the addition of new languages. Series of changes in were also implemented in the developer version of Firefox 30.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The deal, which ownCloud, Inc. announced June 11, involves 18 research and applied science universities in the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany. Together, the institutions—which are collaborating under the name Sync & Share NRW—serve up to 500,000 users who will take advantage of ownCloud’s file syncing technologies, the company reported.
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Databases
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As we’ve been covering recently, Icehouse, the next major release of the OpenStack cloud platform, is picking up steam. One notable thing about Icehouse is that it has introduced a new database-as-a-service feature, focused on building and managing relational databases, called Trove.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Education
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Preparations are under way for the biggest change in the UK’s approach to computing education – but Raspberry Pi’s education expert Clive Beale reveals that the government is not putting enough money where its mouth is
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BSD
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The third BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.
This is expected to be the final -BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.
The image checksums follow at the end of this email.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GNU Compiler Collection version 4.7.4 has been released.
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I am pleased to announce the release of GNU ddrescue 1.18.1.
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Licensing
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I’ve had my disagreements with Joyent’s management of the Node.js project. In fact, I am generally auto-skeptical of any Open Source and/or Free Software project run by a for-profit company. However, I also like to give credit where credit is due.
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Developers won’t be required to sign contributor license agreements before contributing to the open source software platform, although Node.js will still be distributed under the MIT License.
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Openness/Sharing
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In late November 2012, the Open Source Malaria (OSM) team gained a new member who lived and worked almost 1700 kilometers away from the synthetic chemistry hub at the University of Sydney. Of course, collaboration across continents is not unusual for scientists, but until recently, recruitment in less than 140 characters certainly was.
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When it comes to opening up your work there is, ironically, a bit of a secret. Here it is: being open—in open science, open source software, or any other open community—can be hard. Sometimes it can be harder than being closed. In an effort to attract more people to the cause, advocates of openness tend to tout its benefits.
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As its base layer, DINAA adapts governmental heritage management datasets for broader open and public uses. DINAA is an exercise in open government data and community data sharing based on open source standards and ethics. DINAA (from construction, through rollout, and into future planning) is an example of how digital is simply the way we do archaeology now, and what that means for us as professionals and social scientists.
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Science
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F1000Research, a scientific journal with a strong focus on open access and life sciences, operates quite differently than even the average open access journal. The team there uses new approaches to publishing scientific research; a few of their most noteable characteristics are:
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References and citations are what make the scientific and academic worlds go round. Everyone has their own system for keeping track of their research, from dumping everything onto a desk, to dumping everything into a folder (I like to call this the Pensky Method), to dumping everything into folders on a computer.
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As scientists and researchers develop new and better methods for collecting data, from new sensor technology to advancements in data mining techniques, the sheer volume of data to be analyzed grows accordingly. For big data, you need big clusters, and OpenStack has proven to be an important tool for many scientific institutions seeking to manage and orchestrate their machines and workloads.
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Open Hardware
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Two MIT grad students offer up DIY brain-recording gear
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Programming
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In my last few articles, I looked at several different Python modules that are useful for doing computations. But, what tools are available to help you analyze the results from those computations? Although you could do some statistical analysis, sometimes the best tool is a graphical representation of the results. The human mind is extremely good at spotting patterns and seeing trends in visual information. To this end, the standard Python module for this type of work is matplotlib. With matplotlib, you can create complex graphics of your data to help you discover relations.
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This May 22, 2013 file photo shows Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner on Capitol Hill in Washington. The IRS says it has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy. The IRS told congressional investigators Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner’s emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups. The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. But an untold number are gone. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
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Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.
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People in the UK should stop being “bashful” about being British, the prime minister has urged.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, David Cameron said the country should be “far more muscular” in promoting its values and institutions.
He repeated Education Secretary Michael Gove’s call to promote “British values” in the classroom following the Trojan Horse claims in Birmingham schools.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Documents released under FoI reveal ‘enhanced collaboration’ plans, raising questions over independence of UK deterrent
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The removal of nuclear weapons from Scottish soil should be part of a post-independence constitution, according to Scotland’s deputy first minister.
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Tony Blair has urged western governments to recognise that they need to take an active role in the Middle East, saying the west should consider military options short of sending ground troops.
The former prime minister said there was a huge range of options available, including air strikes and drones as used in Libya.
Blair was speaking on UK morning TV shows after writing a lengthy essay setting out how to respond to the Iraq crisis, including his belief that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not the cause of the country’s implosion.
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Tehran hints at cooperation with US to aid Nouri al-Maliki as jihadist group threatens to take Baghdad
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All roads lead to Baghdad and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is following them all, north from Syria and Turkey to south. Reading Western headlines, two fact-deficient narratives have begun gaining traction. The first is that this constitutes a “failure” of US policy in the Middle East, an alibi as to how the US and its NATO partners should in no way be seen as complicit in the current coordinated, massive, immensely funded and heavily armed terror blitzkrieg toward Baghdad. The second is how ISIS appears to have “sprung” from the sand dunes and date trees as a nearly professional military traveling in convoys of matching Toyota trucks without explanation.
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Political convergence between Republicans and Democrats has successfully passed popular legislation.
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He affirmed that after the 9/11 attacks, the US has ordered its tools in the Persian Gulf to close windows of terrorism, but after the outbreak of the crisis in Syria, it sent billions of Dollars through the Persian Gulf Arab states to the terrorist groups to kill the Syrians.
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Rahmat, meanwhile, hates and fears the drones, which deal death and destruction from above in a land where there’s already too much of both. Directly and indirectly, they cut him off from a better future, and even fuel support for the Taliban.
“For me the research was about figuring out what that world is like,” said Nacer. “There’s a great website, Living Under Drones, that’s exactly what it is, what life under drones is like. It’s terror, all the time, because drones are up there 24/7.”
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One party chooses to concentrate on the destruction of a State Department/CIA outpost in Africa…
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Bergdahl Critics Didn’t Howl When Bush Freed Prisoners
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These developments include the June 5 Islamabad High Court order to lodge a murder case against ex-CIA station chief, Jonathan Banks, the June 6 Karachi Airport attack by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of the Govt-TTP talks, the rising terrorist activities of the Haqqani network across the border in Afghanistan and the May 31 release of a US soldier who was reportedly being kept in the Waziristan tribal belt by the Haqqanis.
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What happens if China or North Korea start to undertake the same actions as the United States is taking? Japan will also face a similar problem as its Self-Defense Forces plan to introduce three UAVs in five years starting this fiscal year.
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The U.S. Military’s Campaign Against Media Freedom
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Footage from the scene then showed protesters upturning several diplomatic cars parked in front of the embassy. The vehicles also had their number plates ripped off and were covered by graffiti. Someone drew several swastikas in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on one of the cars.
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The U.S. formally ended its occupation of Japan, while maintaining a vast military presence, in 1952. The economy, largely due to U.S. military special procurements, had finally revived to the 1937 level during the Korean War, then grown to 150% of that level by 1952. There was stability; labor demonstrations and protests against U.S. bases were common and sometimes violent, but there was nothing remotely resembling civil war. It surely was a success story, from Washington’s point of view, if not necessarily from the point of view of the Japanese obliged to forego neutrality in the Cold War.
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An additional explanation of slow growth is now receiving attention, however. It is the persistence and expectation of peace.
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Going to Iraq for the first time was like lighting a lighter and putting it under your hand. You get burnt badly, but the lighter company got to make money. You should have learned the lesson.
Now Republicans want us to do it again. They want us to put our hands on the lighter again, because they probably get paid for buying the lighters or that’s how they control the mindset of misinformed Americans.
Republican leaders are not idiots (they are smart and know a majority of Americans have below average IQ (thanks to glorification of not going to school, dropping out or making it to expensive to get any education) and they won’t be able to fully understand these issues so they hit where they know it will work. And they are doing it again with Iraq, making us all forget it it was a fraud and Bush should be serving life time sentence for murder of innocent men & women or US armed forces as well as innocent Irqis.
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According to your website you’ve got about six jobs, Google says you own seven or eight houses and you privately jet about the world a lot visiting media moguls, their wives, their ranches and their yachts.
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A new round of comments from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko has revealed Pentagon waste was even more staggering than previously imagined, with billions likely spent on war materiel that was not only never used, but never even sent to Afghanistan.
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The present problems of Iraq are 100% down to our murderous invasion and occupation.
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As Iraq faces a growing insurgency in the north that is threatening to pull the country apart, the country’s Ministry of Communications has blocked access to a number of social media sites on Friday.
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Wealthy Gulf neighbours and the West fear for the stability of Yemen, which shares a long border with the world’s top oil exporter, Saudi Arabia.
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Computer Weekly can illustrate how a UK network connection forms part of a US weapons targeting system that has slaughtered civilians in anti-terrorist attacks gone wrong.
The illustrations add credibility to a legal challenge begun last month over a 2012 contract BT won to build the UK branch of the system – a fibre optic network line between RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire and Camp Lemonnier, a US military base in Djibouti, North Africa.
British officials had been slow to finger the BT contract under human rights rules because they said there was no evidence to suggest the UK connection was associated with US drone strikes, let alone any that had gone wrong.
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Eventually, being in charge of this new kind of death-from-above exacts an emotional and even hallucinatory toll, building up to a crescendo with shattering consequences.
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Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s largest and most influential human rights organizations, is facing an unusual amount of public criticism. Two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, and a group of over 100 scholars have written an open letter criticizing what they describe as a revolving door with the U.S. government that impacts HRW’s work in certain countries, including Venezuela. The letter urges HRW to bar those who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy from serving as staff, advisers or board members. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth has defended his organization’s independence, responding: “We are careful to ensure that prior affiliations do not affect the impartiality of Human Rights Watch’s work. … We routinely expose, document and denounce human rights violations by the US government, including torture, indefinite detention, illegal renditions, unchecked mass surveillance, abusive use of drones, harsh sentencing and racial disparity in criminal justice, and an unfair and ineffective immigration system.” We host a debate between HRW counsel Reed Brody and Keane Bhatt, a writer and activist who organized the open letter.
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Former US President George H W Bush celebrated his 90th birthday today by making a tandem parachute jump near his summer home in Maine, fulfilling a promise made five years ago despite having lost the use of his legs.
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Their reality is seen in bipartisan politicians creating a deficit of trillions of dollars to fund the unlawful wars of choice against Afghanistan and Iraq, and then failing to anticipate and provide adequate care for the large number of wounded veterans returning home. The long delays and cover-ups in treating veterans at the Phoenix VA medical center and elsewhere indicate that no soldiers are left behind—until they come home. Never mind that there would be no need for such extensive medical care for “wounded warriors” if former President George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney– and their neocon advisors—had not launched these unnecessary, illegal pre-emptive wars.
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Queensland parents Neill and Bronwyn Dowrick are demanding federal authorities provide hard evidence to show the Islam convert and English language teacher had been “radicalised’’ and become a foot soldier in the Holy War.
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Apparently in a belated but calculated reaction, Pakistan strongly condemned Thursday the two incidents of drone strikes near Miranshah in North Waziristan which reportedly killed at least 16 foreign militants amid suspicions the two countries coordinated over the attack in the aftermath of a Taliban siege of Karachi airport.
Reports earlier quoted two unnamed government officials as saying Islamabad had given the Americans ‘express approval’ for the strikes. Underlining Pakistan’s alarm over the brazen Taliban attack on the airport, just weeks after peace talks with the militants stalled, the top officials told Reuters a ‘joint Pakistan-US operation’ had been ordered to hit the insurgents.
Another official said Pakistan had asked the United States for help after the attack on the country’s busiest airport on Sunday, and would be intensifying air strikes on militant hideouts in coming days.
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The intriguing aspect of the revival of the drone strikes is whether they have been restarted with the ‘express approval’ of Pakistan.
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At a time when the American CIA’s targeted killing programme in the tribal areas of Pakistan was winding down, some recent developments seem to have made the US resume its deadly drone strikes after an unprecedented break of six months.
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After an unanticipated long break, the American CIA resumed its controversial drone programme in Pakistan’s restive North Waziristan tribal region raising concerns among its critics whether Islamabad has given a tacit go-ahead for fresh strikes.
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When CIA Director John Brennan — then the White House counterterrorism adviser — laid out the Obama administration’s new approach to fighting Islamist terrorism on June 29, 2011, he mocked conservatives who suggested that Islamist extremists were plotting to re-establish a caliphate across the Middle East.
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“Coming into my freshman year, I was very interested in the history of intelligence and espionage, which was something I didn’t know much about. I ended up working with two great professors – one of whom actually spent 30 years as an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War – and continued researching the CIA even after my career focus shifted to business and finance.”
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The CIA doesn’t need a brand. If anything, the agency is supposed to be all about discretion and secretiveness, meaning that it should be defined solely by its conspicuous absence. In fact, if the CIA ever wanted to run a TV ad, it should consist of 30 seconds of silence and a black screen. People would be left scratching their heads, unsure about who would even pay for such a thing, let alone what the objective was. And that would be the whole idea.
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What made Doctor Zhivago such a bitter pill for Khrushchev’s regime to swallow? Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s book, which was a head-on indictment of Soviet crimes, Pasternak’s novel was a poetic and abstract work, most of whose literary energy goes into miraculously vivid descriptions of weather and nature. Indeed, Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s first and only novel; before he started writing it, in 1945, he had been famous as a lyric poet and translator of Shakespeare. It was partly Pasternak’s great stature as a poet—he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times on the strength of his verse alone—that made it difficult for the Soviet leadership to deal with him. If even Stalin, in his massacre of Soviet writers, had taken care to spare Pasternak, how could Khrushchev—who was supposed to be presiding over a “thaw” in Soviet cultural life—dare to silence or jail him?
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Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer, in 2012, had accused the United States Government of funding environmental group Greenpeace via the CIA to undermine Australia’s coal mining sector. He was reportedly angry at Greenpeace’s plan to use lawyers to thwart future coal mining projects and claimed that funding is coming from an American environmental charity, the Rockefeller Foundation. He alleged it is funded by the CIA and is trying to harm Australia’s industry and help American interests.
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America’s neocons won’t let go of their Middle East delusions, now trying to leverage the worsening crisis in Iraq into an excuse to return U.S. forces to that tragic country while also escalating military involvement in Syria, a compounding of misjudgments, say Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.
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The US has a disastrous record of involvement in ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts in Central America.
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Transparency Reporting
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Sigurður Ingi Þórðarson, also known as “Siggi Hacker”, will tomorrow arrive in Reykjanes District Court to face charges of embezzlement, fraud, and theft adding up to about 30 million ISK.
DV reports that Sigurður faces a total of 18 counts of the charges, ranging from funneling millions into a private bank account from Wikileaks to using the accounts of companies to which he did not belong to buy everything from laptops to fast food.
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The FTA granted greater rights to US investors. These included Colorado-based Newmont Mining, which had billions of dollars of interests in the area affected by protests.
Newmont, the world’s second-largest gold-mining company, holds a majority stake in Yanacocha, one of the world’s largest gold mines. Newmont is now developing the Conga mine, the biggest ever foreign investment in Peru.
Another cable, sent on June 5, provides an account of the outbreak of violence. Police sources cited by the ambassador said about 600 police moved on the blockade outside Bagua involving thousands of protesters.
Police started firing after a group of about 60 of their own became isolated and surrounded by the Amazonian protesters. Police sources claim that protesters triggered the violence by firing on a helicopter that was shooting tear gas into the crowd in support of the isolated police.
The police shot dead 10 protesters. Human rights groups later reported six indigenous men as missing, presumed dead.
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The very day 33-year old Michael Hastings died last year, he was busily contacting friends and associates including WikiLeaks to report that he was under an FBI investigation. He feared that his car had been tampered with, and even went so far as to ask a neighbor friend if he could borrow her car just hours before his death. Hastings also announced that he was about to release a major bombshell of a news story involving covert operations deployed by US intelligence agencies, specifically targeting current CIA Director John Brennan. The UK’s Daily Mirror published an August 15, 2013 article stating the CIA contractor Stratfor’s president claimed that Brennan was on a “witch hunt” for investigative journalists, which of course is consistent with the Obama administration.
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Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko handed to the US Embassy in Kiev inside information on the forging of a coalition government in 2006, according to Wikileaks data.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In the face of expanding energy regulations, stepped-up Democratic attacks and the ongoing fight over Obamacare, the billionaire Koch brothers and scores of wealthy allies have set an initial 2014 fundraising target of $290 million which should boost GOP candidates and support dozens of conservative groups—including a new energy initiative with what looks like a deregulatory, pro-consumer spin, The Daily Beast has learned.
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Campaigners have managed to keep the Congo national park free from drilling just as protected sites elsewhere are being cravenly redrawn
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Finance
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Lord Lucan was smuggled out of Britain to a remote Greek monastery by a former MI5 agent after the murder of his children’s nanny.
The sensational claim is made in a new book which tells how spook James Gurney helped to mastermind the elaborate escape.
Gurney says he moved the fugitive from a country pub in Kent to a remote safe house in Wiltshire before they boarded a flight from Heathrow to Greece.
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The last decade in Canada has seen the strengthening of the instruments of repression of the Canadian State such that we can now begin to describe and analyze the neoliberal containment state as a specific set of policies and institutions. These policies and institutions are aimed at containing the growing social ‘disorder’ and emerging resistance that have resulted from 30 years of the neoliberal economic order.
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It’s no secret that the city of Detroit is not the thriving industrial city that it once was, but as things decay over time, it’s sometimes hard to notice just how drastic some of the changes have been. Redditor Scarbane has compiled a startling collection of images from Google Street View showing just how much things have deteriorated in just a few years. These pictures broke my heart a little bit…
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Every year taxpayers subsidize Walmart – the world’s wealthiest corporation 1 – to the tune of $7.8 BILLION!
HUH? Walmart, America’s largest private employer, raked in $17 billion in profit last year 2; its owners, the Walton family, have more wealth than the bottom 42% of Americans combined 3. But every year, Walmart’s poverty wages and extensive tax dodging cost taxpayers $7.8 BILLION in subsidies.
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Mr. Rockefeller, the son of David Rockefeller and an advisory trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, was the only person on board the aircraft, an airport official said.
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The auction of the 29,000 bitcoins is scheduled to take place on the 27th of June over 12 hours. Interested bidders need to register themselves by 12 p.m. EST of 23rd June. They are also required to make a deposit of $200,000 through wire from a bank within the US. In addition, the participants need to provide a government issued ID and prove that they are not affiliated or related in anyways to either Ulbricht or Silk Road. All the bitcoins will be broken up into 10 chunks with each bidder able to bid on multiple chunks.
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Looking to buy some Bitcoin? The US government has plenty to sell. It’s put up for auction the more than 29,000 bitcoins that it seized from the underground drug sales site Silk Road earlier this year, all of which are currently valued at close to $18 million. The auction will occur and close later this month, and bidders won’t be required to purchase the entire, expensive chunk. Instead, it’ll be broken up into 10 chunks, most of which are worth about $1.8 million, and interested parties can bid on as many chunks as they want.
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According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s $1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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ABC-VEgasWhen a husband and wife allegedly murdered two police officers and a bystander in Las Vegas, the story received a lot of coverage. But it was coverage that mostly failed to call the crimes “terrorism,” despite the alleged killers leaving behind a note that said, “The revolution is beginning,” and a Revolutionary-era “Don’t Tread on Me” flag closely associated with both the Patriot and Tea Party movements (Hatewatch, 6/9/14). The couple, both white, were also associated with far-right causes and had expressed extreme hostility toward authorities.
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When a reporter fabricates stories, or passes along government lies as truth, people can get killed.
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Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013) is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.
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Censorship
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Twitter has suspended at least six accounts affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the extremist group gaining ground in Iraq and Syria since fighting escalated this week.
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Egyptian security forces confiscated copies of a human rights group’s newsletter, saying the publication threatened the government, the head of the group said Sunday.
Gamal Eid, the head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, said police seized 1,000 copies of the publication, entitled Wasla, or Link, from the print shop the night before, also arresting a worker at the press.
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A Tribe Called Red’s Ian “Deejay NDN” Campeau has become one of Canada’s most high-profile First Nations activists. As his Ottawa-based electronic music crew have surfed EDM’s wave to unprecedented heights — including a Juno Award for breakthrough group and Rolling Stone shoutout — Campeau has used his public profile to raise awareness about respecting Aboriginal culture.
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Steve Coogan has become a patron of Index on Censorship, the international organisation that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.
“We are delighted that Steve has agreed to be a patron of Index,” said its newly appointed chief executive Jodie Ginsberg.
“Comedians, writers and performers often bear the brunt of attempts to stifle free expression – in both authoritarian regimes and in democracies.”
Coogan said: “Creative and artistic freedom of expression is something to be cherished where it exists and fought for where it doesn’t. This is what Index on Censorship does. I am pleased to lend my support and patronage to such an important cause.”
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A new report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN) has strongly condemned “soft censorship” by governments and regulators as a “very serious threat to media independence and the very viability of media companies”. WAN, which is the umbrella organization of newspapers representing more than 18,000 publications and 15,000 online sites in 120 countries around the world, has urgently called for rapid action to stop this blatant repression of media and press freedom.
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Censorship in China affects many popular Internet services and websites, but there are ways to make do
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Privacy
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Surfing the Internet?? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is watching your every move on Web, and this time even more closure.
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Although privacy is now guaranteed under article 23 of the new constitution, an “NSA-like” agency – the Technical Agency for Telecommunications (ATT) – was also created back in November. Fears remain that Tunisia may not yet have turned the page on the Ben Ali surveillance era in spite of its new constitution.
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One year after Edward Snowden exposed the spying at the NSA, can the internet be re-set?
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The revelations drew international criticism, and led to the resignation of more than 33 DAS agents, more than a dozen of arrests and the eventual dismantling of the intelligence agency.
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So Secretary of State John Kerry thinks that Edward Snowden should “man up” and return to the United States. Well, fair enough, but should Kerry and other senior government officials “man up” and tell the public about the extent of spying on U.S. citizens as well as on our allies? Should they not reveal the civilian casualties of our drone strikes in allied countries such as Pakistan or Yemen?
Kerry also states that Snowden “should trust the American system of justice.” Tragically, the system is doing nothing to halt the illegal drone strike bombing in countries with whom we are not at war, nor the long-term imprisonment of individuals without bringing them to trial. It seems that the American system of justice has fallen far short of its ideals. The NSA and CIA are totally unaccountable to either Congress or the Courts.
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US pushing local police departments to keep quiet on cell-phone surveillance technology
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Wyden made news last year when he caught Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper in an obvious lie. Asked whether the National Security Agency collects “any type of data at all on millions of Americans,” Clapper said, “No, sir.” Wyden said he had written numerous letters to Clapper and NSA’s then-head Keith Alexander, seeking clarification on the agency’s programs.
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Rarely do you get a chance to ask a just-retired FBI director whether he had “any legal qualms” about what, in football, is called “illegal procedure,” but at the Justice Department is called “parallel construction.”
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Law and computer science both have their codes, but they’re disparate. Legal code is often fuzzy and qualitative. Computer code is precise and quantitative. Not surprisingly, law and computer science tend to attract different people. It’s not that the twain shall never meet; it’s just that they seldom do.
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No, the pro-Hillary activists aren’t tapping your phones, but they are just as humorless as the spy agency when mocked. In November, we reported that the NSA and Homeland Security Department were none too pleased about parody products sold online using an altered image of their logo, such as a T-shirt with: “Peeping while you’re sleeping” inside the NSA seal and under that, “The NSA, the only part of the government that actually listens.”
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Congressman Steve Stockman Friday asked the National Security Agency to turn over all its metadata on the email accounts of former Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations division director Lois Lerner for the period between January 2009 and April 2011.
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The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals said no this week to tracking your movements using data from your cell phone without a warrant when it declared that this information is constitutionally protected.
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Yes, this is exactly what you think it means. The NSA can listen to your conversations and use your camera when you power off your phone. Sounds crazy, but it can happen.
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India’s new Bharatiya Janata Party government has come under pressure to scrap Aadhaar, the program which aims to enroll all of the country’s residents through biometrics.
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Last month, we wrote about how the USA Freedom Act was completely changed at the last minute in secret. This was even after the bill had been marked up and approved unanimously by two committees (Judiciary and Intelligence). Then the White House (read: NSA) came in and basically changed the bill around entirely, such that some say it’s even worse than before. Earlier this week, it even came out that the very author of the USA Freedom Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, was frozen out of the final negotiations on his own bill, such that the final product looked nothing like the original. While some in Congress tried to warn their colleagues that the bill they were voting on had been changed in secret, many Representatives didn’t fully comprehend what happened, and the bill passed.
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JOHN Kerry, the United States Secretary of State, has stepped in to oversee the investigation of reports that the National Security Agency is intercepting and recording all cell phone conversations in The Bahamas, with the ability to store them for up to 30 days.
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Thought the NSA was bad? Local police and the Obama administration are hoovering cellphone location data from inside your house, and a crackdown could lead to surveillance reform
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In a 2013 Pew Internet poll, for instance, 86 percent of internet users reported “taking steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints.” This ranged from encrypting email to clearing cookies and masking internet protocol (IP) addresses to avoiding using their real name on virtual networks. The same poll found that 68 percent of users believe existing privacy protection laws are inadequate. The poll says nothing of mobile data privacy.
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A year on from Edward Snowden’s revelations around state sponsored mass surveillance programs, some of the major players in the online and technological world (including Google, Mozilla, Twitter and Reddit) have launched the Reset the Net campaign.
The program aims to increase people’s awareness and uptake of privacy and security tools so they can better resist surveillance, particularly that conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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I would like to give a brief history lesson to those who have either forgotten the past or wish to ignore it. In 1933, the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act in response to a terrorist attack. It gave Chancellor Adolf Hitler the power to enact laws without the involvement of the legislative body.
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Thousands of demonstrators might be camped outside GCHQ in Cheltenham for three days later this summer.
Activists who are angry at reports that GCHQ and its American sister agency NSA have developed large programmes of mass surveillance of phone and internet traffic are calling for a three-day protest outside the ‘doughnut’ in Hubble Road from August 29 to September 1.
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Google just bought Skybox Imaging for $500m to gain access to its capability to take real-time, high-resolution satellite images/videos of the whole world daily. Last week Google sources told the WSJ that Google was planning to spend $1-3 billion on “180 small, high capacity satellites at lower altitudes than traditional satellites” to enable two-way Internet access. In April, Google bought Titan Aerospace – which makes solar-powered, high-flying drones that Titan calls “atmospheric satellites” — for Internet access to remote areas and for disaster relief. And in March Google CEO Larry Page shared his ambitions that Project Loon “could build a world-wide mesh of these balloons that can cover the whole planet.”
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The Times cited Fellwock’s claim that the United States had encircled the Communist world with at least 2,000 electronic listening posts on land or on naval vessels or aircraft. It discussed his description of CIA covert action in Thailand, the NSA’s role in finding Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia, and the stationing of the electronic intelligence ship USS Liberty near the Israeli coast, where our the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) attacked it, killing 34 Americans. Throughout, the article treated Fellwock as a whistleblower, not a traitor.
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Nine states this year placed new legal limits on police cellphone surveillance after revelations that law enforcement agencies across the country are gathering cellphone data of thousands of people at once, often without warrants or without regard to whether they are criminal targets.
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On June 12, 2014 Senator Wyden asked for permission to address the U.S. Senate regarding the Intelligence authorization bill. There he spoke of the contributions of whistleblowers.
A whistleblower (whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person who exposes misconduct, alleged dishonest or illegal activity occurring in an organization.
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Over 150,000 French people have supported a petition urging President Francois Hollande to grant NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum in France after his refugee status expires in Russia in July.
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Oliver Stone may have purchased the film rights to Edward Snowden’s life story, but it seems as if the French are aiming for the rights to Snowden’s freedom by petitioning to grant him political asylum.
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Earlier this week, Simon Davies, the “Privacy Surgeon,” published a global analysis of the impact of the Edward Snowden revelations over the past year. The report, entitled A Crisis of Accountability demonstrates that, despite many strong and sweeping declarations, the overwhelming majority of the world’s governments have failed to take meaningful action in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
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Civil Rights
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The US government used informants and spies to coax Osmakac into making “radical YouTube videos”. The FBI eventually got him to buy fake weapons, with money the FBI gave him, and then arrested him on felony charges. Osmakac’s trial is like many others in the US, where the government prosecutes Muslims and Arab-Americans for pre-emptive crimes–crimes the FBI sets up, but that are not actually committed. Osmakac’s defense said that the FBI entrapped a mentally ill man.
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The federal prosecutors are using recordings from two FBI informants who had been spying on Osmakac or months. However, he had been talking with and led on by FBI informants for much longer. Sami Osmakac’s brother Avni Osmakac, said he had “seen agents around his house every day since 2010.” Their house frequently had undercover police vehicles parked nearby. Back then Sami had worked as a grocery stocker for a local market. This is where they think he met the first government informant. From there he spent over a year being coaxed and pushed by agents into making “radical YouTube videos”. He was eventually guided into buying fake weapons with money given to him by the FBI. Government videos show FBI informants teaching and pushing Sami into committing acts of terrorism.
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Osmakac was using government money to buy government weapons, Tragos said. The FBI was on “both sides of this transaction.”
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Michael Hastings was one of our generation’s best, most driven, and fearless reporters. His work at Rolling Stone changed the course of the American war in Afghanistan. At BuzzFeed, he told the story of the 2012 election and was building a beat on the dark side of Hollywood when he was killed in a car crash at 33, one year ago.
Michael’s obsessive observation, his drive to figure it out, extended to his own profession. In his last years, he became obsessed with the internet, seeing, more so than most of his peers, that it would be a great home for big narratives. But Michael was ready for the change because he had seen the big changes shaking his business up close, watching the death throes of a great print institution as a young reporter for Newsweek from 2003 to 2008. It turns out that he observed that experience with the same obsessiveness and the same reflection.
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The notorious US private militia group Academi – previously known as Blackwater – trained Brazilian security forces in North Carolina in preparation for the current World Cup in Brazil, as reported by sportswriter Dave Zirin. Zirin pointed to the 2009 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, which revealed that Washington viewed the expected World Cup-related crises as opportunities for US involvement. Zirin wrote that for Washington, “Brazil’s misery created room for opportunism.”
Capitalism’s bullets follow the World Cup just as they do Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed with the US. Five years ago this month, protests were raging in northern Peru where thousands of indigenous Awajun and Wambis men, women and children were blockading roads against oil, logging and gas exploitation on Amazonian land. The Peruvian government, having just signed an FTA with the US, was unsure how to deal with the protests – partly because the controversial concessions in the Amazon were granted to meet the FTA requirements. According to a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, on June 1st, 2009 the US State Department sent a message to the US Embassy in Lima: “Should Congress and [Peruvian] President Garcia give in to the [protesters’] pressure, there would be implications for the recently implemented Peru-US Free Trade Agreement.” Four days later, the Peruvian government responded to the protest with deadly violence, leading to a conflict which left 32 dead.
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The war against London’s “anti-homeless” spikes escalated today from sign-waving to radical criminal action. In the small hours of the morning, some activists dressed as builders poured concrete over the metal spikes outside a Tesco Metro on Regent Street, before vowing to strike again.
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Social science is being militarised to develop ‘operational tools’ to target peaceful activists and protest movements
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U.S. officials thought they saw such an opening on July 2 when Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expressed support for Snowden, left Moscow aboard his presidential aircraft. The decision to divert that plane ended in embarrassment when it was searched in Vienna and Snowden was not aboard.
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The story’s credibility is greatly enhanced by virtue of who wrote it. Duncan Campbell has an unmatched track record for covering the world of spies and surveillance, which includes being the first to reveal the existence of both GCHQ and Echelon, the precursor to today’s Five Eyes surveillance system.
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As the whistleblowing NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden made his dramatic escape to Russia a year ago, a secret US government jet – previously employed in CIA “rendition” flights on which terror suspects disappeared into invisible “black” imprisonment – flew into Europe in a bid to spirit him back to America, the Register can reveal.
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Still, many take pictures. Crowds gather in front of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate in waves, photographing it almost synchronously, because you can’t not take a picture of it. Some people pose under it and have their companions take their pictures. A few people take selfies. It’s weird. Where does the impulse to take a picture of the entrance to a place of horror come from? Because hardly anyone took pictures when it was happening? As evidence that you have visited?
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While many Americans don’t seem to comprehend what’s happening all around them, the U.S government is implementing more methods of surveillance over this society and many of its agencies are acquiring more powerful weaponry. And now we are also seeing state and local law enforcement agencies following this government’s initiative of establishing greater and greater control over the American people. And that most certainly does not bode well for those who still value their privacy and rights under the Constitution.
It seems as if the U.S. government is waging two Wars on Terror; one in foreign lands against Al-Qaeda and one here within this country and society. So with that in mind let’s examine some of the distinct similarities that are present in the U.S. government’s foreign surveillance and methods of hunting down suspected terrorists around the world and those same strategies and tactics that it and various other law enforcement agencies are using here in America.
First let’s talk about surveillance. It’s no secret that, for many decades, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been conducting comprehensive surveillance operations on various foreign governments and specific individuals in those countries. That’s been going on for so long that few Americans even give it a second thought.
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In a key transparency case, a federal judge has ordered the United States government to hand over four orders and one opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) published in secret between 2005 and 2008. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers will then review those documents in private.
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Senior legislative counsel for the ACLU estimates that if the Senate has its way, 100 U.S. citizens could immediately find themselves in Guantánamo-like indefinite detention.
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After dropping Palermo off, Keys was pulled over by TLC investigators and accused of operating the black Town Car as an illegal cab, according to the lawsuit filed last week in Queens Supreme Court.
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The life of a taxi driver is hard. When cabbies start a shift, they owe about $100 to their company as payment just for the opportunity drive a taxi. They might not break even until halfway through their shift, or maybe not at all that day. In most American cities, they have to work very long hours to make a living.
During a shift, taxi drivers play a strange form of roulette when they pick up anonymous customers. The customer could be a pleasant family that tips them well, a drunk college kid that vomits in their car, or a violent criminal that robs and assaults them. After the customer leaves the car, there is no record of their behavior in the taxi.
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Anyone who has gone through school in the United States knows that history textbooks devote a lot of attention to the so-called “Good War”: World War II. A typical textbook, Holt McDougal’s The Americans, includes 61 pages covering the buildup to World War II and the war itself. Today’s texts acknowledge “blemishes” like the internment of Japanese Americans, but the texts either ignore or gloss over the fact that for almost a decade, during the earliest fascist invasions of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Western democracies encouraged rather than fought Hitler and Mussolini, and sometimes gave them material aid.
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The self-defeating logic of militarised social science targets anti-capitalist ‘extremists’ in the new ‘age of uncertainty’
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The fair use doctrine permits the unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works in order to create a full-text searchable database, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled June 10.
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This week, MPAA chief and former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd praised pirate site blockades as an important anti-piracy measure. Speaking at the IP Summit in London, Dodd said that ISP blockades are one of the most effective tools available. Does this mean that Hollywood will try to get these blacklists in place on its home turf?
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Informing the masses about the activities of settlement-seeking copyright trolls is what FightCopyrightTrolls.com does best, so no surprise that its rivals are now hitting back. In a motion revealed this week, the world’s most prolific filer of lawsuits against BitTorrent users accuses the site of running an Internet hate group that is both “criminal and scary”.
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With the copyright lawsuit factory formerly known as Prenda Law now mired in sanctions, a California company called Malibu Media has become the most litigious copyright holder in the US.
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City of London Police and Hollywood’s Federation Against Copyright Theft are claiming big results in a new government IP crime report. PIPCU say they have suspended 2,359 UK domains and cut off payment to 19 sites, with FACT claiming the closure of 117 pirate sites and the arrest of seven release group members in the past 12 months.
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06.13.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I’m not a big hardware guy. At all. Specs mean very little to me. However, Sean’s hardware is interesting, as it’s a Novena, something he developed himself. And of course, because he’s working with Linux, he’s able to get things to run pretty well. I have no idea what the future of the Novena is, but I love that people can make new devices that will be able to access familiar software and interfaces. Microsoft is making Windows cost-free for certain devices. It’s a smarter strategy than charging manufacturers, but until they let people get under the hood of the code, they’re going to have a hard time reaching new, experimental devices. Which is actually OK with me, since I’m happy to have Linux in as many places as possible.
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Desktop
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Last year, the Sioux Falls, South Dakota school district in the U.S. purchased a fleet of Chromebooks–portable computers runnng Google’s Chrome OS–for use by students, and now, a year later, school district officials are out with a review of the experience. Specifically, the Sioux Falls School District spent over $4.5 million on Chromebooks to arm students in third through twelfth grades with, and the School Board is heralding the program’s success.
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Retail giant Woolworths has announced a massive IT transformation program, confirming it will phase out its huge collection of Microsoft Windows desktops in favour of 8000 Google Chrome OS machines.
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The HP Chromebook 14, with its 14-inch screen, 1.4-GHz Intel Celeron 2955U processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB SSD, is a capable companion. It offers an inexpensive means of computing well in virtually any Wi-Fi environment. However, the Chrome OS isn’t for everyone. Costing $299, you can turn a Chromebook into an inexpensive PC running Linux.
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Looking around the BIOS let me set the Secure Boot to boot other OSes. It wouldn’t let me just disable it completely. I set the boot order to boot the DVD drive first and tried to run those Linux live disks. Mageia 4 wasn’t going to let me change the video driver from VESA no matter what. Cinnamon crashed once loading NVIDIA drivers in Mint 17. openSUSE behaved the best in giving me nice video support. I figured I’d install openSUSE and use it until Mint 17 came out in the KDE version.
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Server
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Should Intel Relevant Products/Services Xeon-based system manufacturers be worried? IBM just started shipping the next generation of Power Systems services with its Power8 processor Relevant Products/Services. The processor can be licensed and is open for development through the OpenPower Foundation — and Big Blue is making some big claims.
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This morning, Google also unveiled new tools that make it easier to merely run Docker containers on its cloud services, and other cloud companies–such as Amazon and Rackspace–have embraced Docker in similar fashion. Docker is one step towards a world where we can treat all cloud services like one giant computer, and a tool like Kubernetes is the next.
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Kernel Space
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The heart and soul of science is collecting data and finding patterns in it. The heart and soul of mathematics is manipulating symbols for the purposes of analyzing data and solving problems. The revised curricula in K-12 education in mathematics, science, and technology education all emphasize the ability to solve problems using IT, including some hardware and programming. See for example, Manitoba’s Grade 9 Mathematics Curriculum. Programming is like being able to read and to write and to do basic maths. I was overjoyed when the curriculum was revised in the late 1990s. Students who used to drop out of highschool over an inability to do “traditional” maths could finally excel at solving problems because they could edit and revise spreadsheets in seconds and get the spreadsheet itself to verify solutions. There was no longer an easy way to get the wrong answer. There was an easy way to get the right answer, like brute force/trying every reasonable value until the right one was found… Even weak students could understand the concept and some of them were better at that kind of maths than the “smart” kids.
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The developers have made quite a few changes to the software and, as usual, it’s difficult to list them all. Unlike a few of the previous releases, this is actually safe to use and users have been advised to upgrade to the new version, although it’s more likely that the distro makers will take care of that.
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Graphics Stack
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David Airlie of Red Hat sent in the DRM pull request for the 3.16 merge window with a plethora of changes this time around:
- The Nouveau driver has initial support for the GK20A Kepler graphics core found within the Tegra K1 ARM SoC.
- The other big Nouveau change is initial support for re-clocking on certain generations of NVIDIA chipsets. The support is limited to a few series where it should be working, is static, and can be rather buggy.
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Roy Spliet, an existing contributor to Nouveau, has managed to secure EVoC funding to reverse-engineer and implement NVA3/5/8 voltage and frequency scaling support within the open-source Nouveau driver. “For this project, I aim to tie these loose ends together for NVIDIAs NVA3/5/8 GPUs. His “REclock” proposal states, “I intend to fully reverse engineer several subcomponents related to voltage and frequency scaling, try to get a full understanding of the clock tree and use this gained knowledge to further improve the nouveau voltage and frequency scaling implementation for said GPUs.”
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A new African student developer from Cameroon, Nyah Check, has proposed working on Shatter with financing provided by the Endless Vacation of Code. Here’s the synopsis for what he hopes to accomplish, “This project seeks to support shatter rendering in a multi-head Xephyr by dividing rendering between multiple Xephyr GPUs screens by using the impedance layer to the X server. This will comprise of polishing the current implementation of the impedance layer and testing for shatter rendering on two Xephyr GPU screens. This would be the scope of this summer’s project which will eventually continue to completely add shatter and replace Xinerama by splitting the protocol objects from the driver objects modularizing the acceleration architectures and framebuffer layers under the driver rending layer and the damage, protocol decode layers under the protocol layer interface, communicating through the impedance layer interface. This removes duplicate protocol processing and storage of information lowering Xinerama multiplexing to the impedance layer boundary. This would enable multiplexing below the protocol screen.”
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Benchmarks
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After carrying out all of the PCI Express graphics cards at my disposal for last week’s open-source tests, I then immediately turned to testing all of the supported GPUs by the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers. Today’s comparison is still large (35 graphics cards) but smaller than the earlier comparison because the latest mainline drivers don’t support the diverse selection of Radeon and GeForce GPUs going back as many years as the open-source drivers. NVIDIA does maintain multiple legacy drivers that work well with updated Linux distributions, but for the Radeon HD 4000 series and older hardware, AMD doesn’t really maintain their legacy Catalyst Linux driver for new Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases. As a result, just the latest mainline AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA driver releases were testing, which gives us support for the GeForce 8 series and newer and on the AMD side is the Radeon HD 5000 series and newer.
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Applications
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Docker has spun off a key open source component of its Linux Containerization tech, making it possible for Google, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Parallels to collaborate on its development and make Linux Containerization the successor to traditional hypervisor-based virtualization.
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Docker, the open source container virtualization platform, released software version 1.0, signaling that it is officially ready for prime time. And the Docker team has launched an enterprise support program and a system integrator initiative to accompany it.
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Start up ttyload and you’ll see hints of things like tload, nload and even htop, in a way.
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trn claims to be an improvement upon the ancient rn newsreader, but I’m bewildered and discombobulated by this one. By all rights it should work, but it’s seriously playing hardball.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Kevin VanDine of Canonical has announced his work on Bacon2D… a 2D game engine designed in part to push gaming for Ubuntu Touch/Phone.
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Right now Linux gamers only have OpenGL renderers to exploit and recently OpenGL has come under a lot of scrutiny with one of the complaints being that it’s too high-level compared to Mantle, DirectX 12, or even Apple’s Metal. In terms of Mantle support on Linux, AMD has said in the past that it could come and they would like to see it come, but there are no active plans with no engineering resources being devoted to the process of actually porting it over to their Catalyst Linux driver but its feasibility is still being determined. This latest AMD Gaming blog post gives a bit more of a renewed hope that we could see Mantle on Linux given the reference and AMD’s continued investment into this proprietary graphics API.
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Sid Meier’s Civilization V, that stalwart of the 4X genre, is now available on Linux, thanks to Aspyr Media. Designed to work with SteamOS, the Linux port has all of the same features and options available on the Windows and Mac versions, including Steam Play support, achievements, and support for the incoming Steam Controller.
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Several 1990′s era videogames created by the founders of Richardson, Texas-based id Software–John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack–have just been made available via open source, by the company that owns the rights to those games. The old, classic games–which include HOvertank3D, Catacomb, TheCatacomb, Catacomb3D, and other titles–were created by the founders of id Software at Softdisk, in Shreveport, Louisiana, before the three founded id Software. The games have all been open sourced under the Gnu Public License (GPL) by current owner Flat Rock Software.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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I recently updated xfce4-power-manager to release 1.3.0 on my COPR repo. Here are screenshots from the latest releas, which has had a significant makeover. Smile
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Despite my involvement in KDE and free software operating systems, one of the features I’ve always loved from Qt is how we can use it to develop an application that can be used on any platform. Since I got my first /programmable/ phone, I’ve wanted to get my projects to work there, especially through all Nokia approaches to the issue, and I’ve managed to do so with relative success.
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Remember People behind KDE? It was an interview series with members of the community. I always enjoyed reading it because it showed, that KDE is software produced by dedicated and enthusiastic people and that it is possible to become one of them. So eventually I did.
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KDE 4.13.2 is shipping today with more than 40 known bug-fixes with many of the fixes involving the Kontact, Umbrello, Konqueror, and Dolphin applications. There’s also important fixes for Kopete.
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Last summer, while looking for a new mail client, I stumbled upon Trojitá, a lightweight IMAP client based on Qt. The largest drawback from my point of view was the missing support for PGP and S/MIME. After looking at the code I figured I could try to implement the missing features.
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Also, I’ve finished up the KAuth support when adding/removing repos (already pushed to the master of Muon). Most importantly, I’ve started integrating apt-listbugs a most important component of Debian. What does this mean and how it will affect the end-user? Well, having apt-listbugs integrated means that the user will be warned when installing packages if the packages have some serious/grave/critical bugs!
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Five years ago, the Krita team decided raise funds to raise Krita to the level of a professional applications . That fundraiser was successful beyond all expectations and enabled us to release Krita 2.4, the first version of Krita ready for professional artists!
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Having a standard tool for mockups within KDE would have the benefit that everyone could learn to use it and mockups could be shared or collaboratively edited in its format.
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On our Plasma 5 build status page most of the packages are now a pleasing green colour. For the first time today I installed them all and logged in and… it worked! It took a bit of removing old caches and obsolete installs that’d I’d been making in the months previously and that nice temporary Next wallpaper everyone uses doesn’t really get shipped so I had to add that and the icons sometimes work and sometimes don’t and there’s no plasma-nm release yet so I had to grab a copy and build that before I could use the network. But with some fiddle and wee bit ay faff, it works!
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Recently, we ran a study on the reorganization of the KDE system settings (Re-sort KDE control modules and Results of Card Sorting the KDE System Settings). Both the number of participants as well as the discussion in the forum proved the huge interest in this topic.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Most of the work I’ve being doing since last report is improving the TVDB source in Grilo Plugins in order to have a cache for all data that you have once downloaded from thetvdb.com.
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New Releases
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GParted is a free partition manager that enables you to resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss. The latest stable release is GParted Live 0.19.0-1 announced on June 11, 2014.
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Clonezilla Live 2.2.3-19, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do bare metal backup and recovery, has been released and is now available for download.
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Emmabuntüs, a distribution created for reconditioning old computers that relies on the robustness of Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, is now at version 3 Beta.
The Emmabuntüs 3 distribution is intended to be sleek, accessible, and equitable, and this latest version of the OS is just as light as the previous ones, despite the fact that it is using another base, which is more advanced.
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Michael Tremer, a developer for the ipfire.org team, has announced that IPFire 2.13 Core 78, a new stable build of the popular Linux-based firewall distribution, has been released to implement the latest OpenSSL fixes.
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KaOS is a very interesting operating system because the developers are choosing their own path. This is one of the few Linux distributions out there that are not based on another OS and everything is built from scratch.
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Gentoo Family
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Same as Arch Linux, Gentoo is an Open Source meta-distribution build from sources, based on Linux Kernel, embracing the same rolling release model, aimed for speed and complete customizable for different hardware architectures which compiles software sources locally for best performance using an advanced package management – Portage.
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Arch Family
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Manjaro Linux has reached the version 0.8.10, bringing many new features, updated translations, lots of fixes and the latest software packages such as LibreOffice 4.2.4. According to the official announcement the followings are included in this release of this linux distribution that is becoming very popular:
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Manjaro KDE is the KDE edition of Manjaro Linux, a desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Manjaro 0.8.10 KDE is the latest edition, released at the same time as the Xfce and Openbox editions.
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Red Hat Family
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RHEL 7 “marks Red Hat’s embrace of cloud computing in a couple of ways, along with the operating system’s usual dedication to enterprise stability and predictability,” said Jay Lyman, a senior analyst at 451 Research. Red Hat seeks to do for enterprise applications “what we’ve seen with mostly Web and mobile applications thus far — that is, make them more lightweight, portable and standardized.”
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It basically boils down to the fact that in the open source world, the majority of work is done on open source UNIX-like operating systems such as GNU/Linux, *BSD, and somewhat recently in the IllumOS space. Each of these options are solid choices for server-side use, with varying preferences on which is the best. I think the server market share in recent years is evidence of this. However, the desktop has kind of been the peak of the mountaintop that we’ve yet reached. In the past few years there’s been an influx of people who I think have given up on the desktop, have put down their distro of choice, and picked up a Mac because it offers a UNIX-like work environment with a nice polished “out of box” experience. I don’t think this is inherently wrong or evil, but I do think that we all owe it to ourselves, and to our community, to sit back and ask: “What is this $thing lacking that makes me not want to use it?” (Though most often that $thing is GNOME3, Unity, Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, or some distro that ships with the desktop by default.)
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Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its open-source operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, promoting it as the foundation of an “open hybrid cloud” that delivers emerging new capabilities like application containers.
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The big news while I was offline was the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 yesterday. Another topic grabbing lots of headlines is the release of Sid Meier’s Civilization V on Steam for Linux. Fedora 21 may be delayed and Linux 3.15 was released. And finally today, www.makeuseof.com takes a look at Gnome Flashback, another GNOME 2 clone.
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For some companies, the first question after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 was: “When will CentOS 7 be out?” The answer is soon.
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Enterprise Linux users, awake! Red Hat has finally released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and it looks like it’s going to run on everything, from the server in the back-room, to datacenters and the cloud.
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Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 for all customers and partners, marking the beginning of a new branch for one of the most used Linux operating systems in the world.
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Fedora
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This week in Fedora I wanted to go over some of the new badges that have come out and show how to get them. With the upcoming release of Fedora 21 there is a lot of chances to earn some pretty cool badges and show off your Fedora! As always, if you have an awesome idea for a badge you can submit your idea and if it gets approved then you can say “Yeah I thought of the idea for that badge” oh did I mention you get a badge for that!
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DNF was forked from Yum in January 2012 and available for experimenting…
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In a blog post to Ubuntu One users, the organization said that its role as an open platform was to promote third-party services. However, the increasing amounts of free storage provided by top competitors such as Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox made it unfeasible for the organization to continue competing effectively.
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When booting up the Ubuntu 14.10 latest image with systemd 204, the system (to some surprise) booted fine and I encountered no immediate issues. The laptop has been running fine since today and was pleased it was a trouble-free experience. Coming up soon I’ll run some boot speed tests, etc. Still though it’s worth reiterating that it’s not yet clear when systemd will become the default on Ubuntu Linux, just sometime before the 16.04 LTS release.
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It’s interesting too seen how such an old video can still get people riled up and some users have even suggested that this was a report paid by Microsoft to smear a Linux distribution.
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Creating a base of user advocates from existing “fans” of Meizu and Ubuntu will be key to driving the early success of Ubuntu in the mobile market, Cristian Parrino, VP of mobile and online services for Canonical, told Mobile Asia Daily.
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We wrote a while back about this interesting collection of Ubuntu operating systems from the 14.04 LTS release and numerous users expressed their interest in downloading and trying Ubuntu AIO DVD.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi, a minimalistic Linux operating system based on Ubuntu and that has really low requirements, has reached version 3.0.0 RC1.
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Canonical’s Unity interface in Ubuntu has fiercely polarized Linux users ever since it was released. Now some are calling for a MATE version of Ubuntu, which would provide a more traditional desktop interface that resembles what Ubuntu looked like before Unity. The VAR Guy thinks it might be good for Ubuntu and for the MATE project if such a release happened.
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Suddenly, consumer-oriented private cloud storage devices are everywhere, with many — if not most — running Linux. The market segment has blossomed thanks to growing concerns over government cyber-spying, notably in the case of the U.S. National Security Agency and the Chinese military. There is also growing unease about sharing of user data by mobile carriers, financial firms, and high-tech companies, as well as fears about cyber-criminals.
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Parrot is prepping two Linux-based mini-drones: a $160 “Jumping Sumo” wheeled robot and a $100 “Rolling Spider” quadrocopter that can fly, roll, or climb.
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THE RASPBERRY PI FOUNDATION has announced hardware sales of three million and a casual visit with the Queen for a bit of show and tell.
The Raspberry Pi computer has been a solid mover since its release and its sales have grown from one million to two million, and now three million.
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Mikronaut launched a “RoboPi” robot controller for the Raspberry Pi, while Emlid tapped Indiegogo for its Pi-ready “Navio” shield for drone autopilots.
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Phones
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A “Console OS” Kickstarter project is building an Android 4.4 fork for Intel CPUs on everything from PCs to tablets, complete with a dual-boot option.
Intel is hoping to spur a new wave of dual-boot Android/Windows 2-and-1s and tablets with its Atom Z3000 and upcoming, newly announced Core M processors. So far, however, Android has yet to make much of dent in the PC market, either as a standalone or dual-boot OS.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is working diligently to offer $25 smartphones to customers in India this year, which likely would hasten the end of the feature phone. The open source Firefox mobile operating system will be featured, along with a list of modest entry-level specs. Key to the success of the endeavor will be attracting developers to create apps for devices that aren’t likely to generate much revenue.
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Mozilla said that Spreadtrum’s $25 Firefox OS phone will soon be carried by Intex and Spice in India, and it also signed up Taiwan-based Chunghwa Telecom.
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It seems Mozilla is targeting emerging markets and developing nations with $25 cell phones. This is tremendous news, and an admirable focus for Mozilla, but it is not without risk.
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The Science Lab was created to serve as a neutral broker and hub for the open science community—a means of bridging the gap between the early adopters and the many scientists who understand the value of open science, but who have not yet (for a number of reasons) mapped that understanding onto their day-to-day workflow. We strive to connect and support the activity of the open research community and its diverse stakeholders (researchers, coders, funders, publishers) to work towards the common goal of making research more like the web: open, collaborative and accessible.
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Mozilla has released Firefox 30.0 FINAL for desktop, with Firefox for Android 30.0 also imminent.
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SaaS/Big Data
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I’ve been following the Designate project, which provide OpenStack DesignateDNS-as-a-Service for OpenStack for some time. It’s a project that seems painfully obvious to me, enabling DNS features within an OpenStack cloud deployment.
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Databases
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Percona Server 5.6.17-66.0, an enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL that will allow queries to run faster and more consistently and to consolidate servers on powerful hardware, is now available for download.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The University where I worked determined that it was in the best interests of the institution (and the students) to migrate to LibreOffice. This happened in 2011, but the process was slow.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This is the announcement of a new bug-fix release of GNU gettext.
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Public Services/Government
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The desktop computer systems of government healthcare organisations in the Spanish region of Extremadura all rely on free and open source software solutions. Over the past year, close to 10,000 computer workstations in public health care organisations have migrated to a customised version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.
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Licensing
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Unified collaboration software vendor Zimbra announced the release of a beta version of Zimbra Collaboration 8.5 to the open source community under the GNU Public License V2 license. Calling it a “commitment to community-powered open source innovation,” company officials say the move is part of an overall plan to distribute future versions of the Zimbra Collaboration Open Source Edition under Open Source Initiative-approved licenses.
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Openness/Sharing
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Back in April, I noted that we had potentially a big win in the form of the opening up of drug safety data in the light of recent scandals that have seen big pharma companies hiding adverse effects of their products, often with fatal results. As I warned, we weren’t there yet, since the drug companies really don’t want their dirty washing for all to see, and they have been lobbying extremely hard to water down the provisions.
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One of the most striking and important developments in the world of technology over the last two decades or so has been the rise of an alternative mode of production that is open, collaborative and global. This began in the world of software, with Richard Stallman’s GNU project, but has now been extended to the realms of text, data, science and hardware, among others. The free sharing of information to form a kind of digital commons, which lies at the heart of these projects, has also been applied to business, albeit in the modified form of collaborative consumption — things like Airbnb. These different manifestations of fundamentally similar ideas have sprung up in a largely uncoordinated way, but an interesting question is whether they could be drawn together into a unified approach, applied to a whole country, say. That’s what Ecuador’s FLOK Society (original in Spanish) has been exploring. “FLOK” is derived from “free”, “libre” and “open knowledge”; here’s how David Bollier, an expert on the commons, describes the project:
The FLOK Society bills its mission as “designing a world for the commons.” The research project will focus on many interrelated themes, including open education; open innovation and science; “arts and meaning-making activities”; open design commons; distributed manufacturing; and sustainable agriculture; and open machining. The research will also explore enabling legal and institutional frameworks to support open productive capacities; new sorts of open technical infrastructures and systems for privacy, security, data ownership and digital rights; and ways to mutualize the physical infrastructures of collective life and promote collaborative consumption.
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Bad things have been happening in some Birmingham schools: children have been taught things that are hard to reconcile with the broader culture and values of the country in which they live and which provides them with that education. That’s the consensus at Westminster, and Politicians will spend the day arguing about who is to blame, how this happened and how it can be stopped from happening again. Was it Michael Gove? Or Ofsted? Or Birmingham council? Or the governors? Or a whole political class that tacitly endorses a doctrine of multiculturalism, while turning a blind eye to its more troubling consequences? Everyone will have their preferred mixture of answers, so I don’t intend to offer you mine here. Instead, there’s one group that’s curiously absent from the conversation here: parents.
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Back in April, we wrote about the travesty of the very best reporters on everything Supreme Court related, SCOTUSblog, still not having a press pass to the Supreme Court. The issue is somewhat complicated, in part because of the seriously arcane credentialing process involved. Basically, the Supreme Court looks kindly on reporters who already are credentialed by the Senate. But the Senate credentialing process involves the “Standing Committee of Correspondents” who get to decide who else to let in. The committee, basically, are journalists who have already been let into the club deciding who else can join them. When you set up a guild that lets you exclude innovative and disruptive players, guess what happens?
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Issues seem to have begun this morning, as several users noted an inability to download the Skype app following its release. Some users attempting to download the app received a message indicating the app was no longer available for download.
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Science
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So, this weekend’s news in the tech world was flooded with a “story” about how a “chatbot” passed the Turing Test for “the first time,” with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that’s what they do. First, here’s the press release from the University of Reading,
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Health/Nutrition
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This report, co-published by DPA and MAPS, illustrates a decades-long pattern of behavior that demonstrates the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) inability to exercise its responsibilities in a fair and impartial manner or to act in accord with the scientific evidence. The report’s case studies reveal a number of DEA practices that maintain the existing, scientifically unsupported drug scheduling system and obstruct research that might alter current drug schedules. In addition to marijuana, the report also examines the DEA’s speed in moving to ban MDMA, synthetic cannabinoids, and synthetic stimulants. In contrast to the DEA’s failure to act in a timely fashion when confronted with evidence for scheduling certain drugs less severely, the agency has shown repeatedly that it can move quickly when it wants to prohibit a substance. The report recommends that responsibility for determining drug classifications and other health determinations should be completely removed from the DEA and transferred to another agency, perhaps even a non-governmental entity such as the National Academy of Sciences. The report also recommends the DEA should be ordered to end the federal government’s unjustifiable monopoly on the supply of research-grade marijuana available for federally approved research. No other drug is available from only a single governmental source for research purposes.
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Hawai’i has become “ground zero” in the controversy over genetically modified (GMO) crops and pesticides. With the seed crop industry (including conventional as well as GMO crops) reaping $146.3 million a year in sales resulting from its activities in Hawai’i, the out-of-state pesticide and GMO firms Syngenta, Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Dow Chemical, BASF, and Bayer CropScience have brought substantial sums of corporate cash into the state’s relatively small political arena.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In early 2012, members of the hacking collective Anonymous carried out a series of cyber attacks on government and corporate websites in Brazil. They did so under the direction of a hacker who, unbeknownst to them, was wearing another hat: helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation carry out one of its biggest cybercrime investigations to date.
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Sitting inside a medium-security federal prison in Kentucky, Jeremy Hammond looks defiant and frustrated.
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It is now extremely difficult for the media to pretend that everything is OK in Iraq, bar the odd car bomb. The AL-Maliki regime has been in the remarkable position of being both pro-Iranian and supported by the West with masses of military hardware – substantial quantities of which is now in the hands of ISIS. I don’t expect Al-Maliki to fall soon, but his area of control is decreasing by the hour. Whether the Al-Maliki regime has been any less vicious than that of Saddam Hussein is arguable. Certainly there has been a great deal less social freedom in Iraq.
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Raddatz went on to talk about ab out how more than 200 Americans had “given their lives to secure this city,” and that Mosul “is just the latest city to spiral out of control after the US pulled out”–which might suggest that Iraqi cities were in fine shape when they were occupied by US troops.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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BP Plc (BP/) must pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in claims after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt disputed payments stemming from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
In a one-sentence order issued today, the justices said they wouldn’t put a hold on lower court rulings that require the oil company to begin making the payments, part of a $9.2 billion accord.
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Last week we reported on a former Navy SEAL chief named David Cooper who was hired by the nonprofit group NextGen Climate to determine how vulnerable the controversial final leg of the Keystone pipeline network might be to terrorism. In a 14-page report, Cooper determined that it would be “easy to execute a catastrophic attack” on the fourth segment of the pipeline system, based on a mock attack he carried out on the completed Keystone I, or Gulf Coast Pipeline, which came online in January. He went on to describe multiple scenarios for spills ranging from 1.02 to 7.24 million gallons of diluted bitumen, the viscous, toxic, low quality oil derived from Alberta’s tar sands.
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Finance
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The moment to hoard cheap coffee beans has passed. The price of coffee futures peaked in April, and those higher commodity costs are now trickling down to grocery stores. J.M. Smucker (SJM) on Tuesday announced that it has increased the price of its packaged coffee, including the country’s best-selling brand, Folgers, as well as packaged Dunkin’ Donuts beans, by an average 9 percent.
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According to its filing with the SEC, the web-hosting company had revenues of more than $1.1bn in 2013
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Or consult the 2012 State of Working America report from the Economic Policy Institute, which features a number of distressing statistics on black unemployment (consistently about twice as high for blacks as for whites, though it would be hard to say that there are “plenty” of jobs for anyone, with overall unemployment at 6.9 percent) and racial disparities in median family income.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Guardian has just published its eighth article in three days pushing Gordon Brown’s views on independence. This one warns Scots they would not be able to watch the BBC after independence.
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The description of alleged “raids” of private homes in Wisconsin’s John Doe criminal dark money investigation has captured the imagination of Republicans across the country as supposed evidence of the investigation’s political motivations.
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Privacy
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A federal appeals court has for the first time said law enforcement can’t snoop on phone location records without a warrant
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Here is an interview I did on 5th June, the anniversary of the start of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the global surveillance infrastructure that is being built.
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The government and police regularly use location data pulled off of cell phone towers to put criminals at the scenes of crimes—often without a warrant. Well, an appeals court ruled today that the practice is unconstitutional, in one of the strongest judicial defenses of technology privacy rights we’ve seen in a while.
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US pushing local police departments to keep quiet on cell-phone surveillance technology
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Marc Andrews wrote Hidden Persuasion to highlight the various methods advertisers use to lure us in. Here the World Wildlife Fund uses anthropomorphism to establish an emotional connection with users. The lion is experiencing secondary emotions (shame, disbelief), which are thought to be distinctly human. This make us feel closer to the animal, thus more likely to donate.
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You know, you’d think that the “intelligence community” would be a bit more intelligent. As we’ve discussed many, many times, nearly all of the estimates of “harm” concerning Ed Snowden’s actions were based on the faulty assumption that he “took” (and revealed) every document he ever “touched” while at NSA — somewhere around 1.7 million (sometimes referred to as 1.5 million, but then upped to 1.7 million). Except that two of the reporters who got the documents, Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill, have both said from the very beginning that it was about 60,000.
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Facebook Inc.’s photo-sharing application Instagram will add advertising in Canada, the U.K. and Australia later this year.
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Most of you have probably used Tor before, but I2P may be unfamiliar. Both are anonymization networks that allow people to obfuscate where their traffic is coming from, and also host services (web sites for example) without it being tied back to them. This talk will give an overview of both, but will focus on real world stories of how people were deanonymized. Example cases like Eldo Kim & the Harvard Bomb Threat, Hector Xavier Monsegur (Sabu)/Jeremy Hammond (sup_g) & LulzSec, Freedom Hosting & Eric Eoin Marques and finally Ross William Ulbricht/“Dread Pirate Roberts” of the SilkRoad, will be used to explain how people have been caught and how it could have been avoided.
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On a bright April morning in Menlo Park, California, I became an Internet spy.
This was easier than it sounds because I had a willing target. I had partnered with National Public Radio (NPR) tech correspondent Steve Henn for an experiment in Internet surveillance. For one week, while Henn researched a story, he allowed himself to be watched—acting as a stand-in, in effect, for everyone who uses Internet-connected devices. How much of our lives do we really reveal simply by going online?
[...]
The experiment unfolded in two phases. In the first, we simply observed Henn’s normal Internet traffic. In the second, Henn, Porcello, and I stopped the broad surveillance of Henn and turned our tools on specific traffic created by leading Web applications and services. Here’s what we found.
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Civil Rights
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The Telegraph has obtained documents that raise questions on US treatment of John Stewart, a key campaigner against Heathrow’s third runway, who the US said had threatened Barak Obama
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Much of this is the kind of activity carried out in the form of attacks sponsored by governments outside the UK — or, as in the case of the NSA, directly by those governments. Despite the recent grandstanding by the US when it filed criminal charges against members of the Chinese military whom it accuses of espionage, there is little hope of ever persuading the main players to hand over their citizens for trial, so the new UK law will be largely ineffectual against the most serious threats.
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London mayor justifies the speed of the £218,000 purchase by saying the machines are needed in case of disorder this summer
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Up to 12,000 black-cab drivers expected to block traffic in central London with cabbies in Europe staging similar protests
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The streets of half a dozen European capitals will be jammed by strikes on Wednesday, as licensed cabbies in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Milan and Lisbon join their London colleagues in demonstrating against a technology that threatens their livelihood.
Uber is one of a wave of new apps, which also include Hailo and Kabbee, that allows users to see the nearest registered cars and hail them from their smartphone. The services are particularly popular with private-hire drivers, who now have an advantage over licensed drivers.
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This is a heartrending documentary from Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC. The terrible fate of the Palestinians at the hands of a world which has accepted the ludicrous claim to a religious Israeli right to their land is incomprehensible in a rational world. The brutality of Israeli soldiers, motivated by views of racial and religious superiority, towards children is sickening.
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There is just one problem with demanding an apology over this: The West Bank is currently under Israeli occupation. This was true whenever Clinton made her first visit. So the CNN host is demanding to know whether Clinton will apologize for saying something perfectly accurate.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Netflix will keep telling customers that ISPs are to blame for bad video.
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Last week, it transpired that the big cable companies were bankrolling fake consumer groups like Broadband for America and The American Consumer Institute. These “independent consumer advocacy groups” are, in truth, nothing of the sort, and instead represent the interests of its benefactors, in the fight against net neutrality. If that wasn’t bad enough, VICE is now reporting that several of the real community groups (oh, and an Ohio bed-and-breakfast) that were signed up as supporters of Broadband for America were either duped into joining, or were signed up to the cause without their consent or knowledge.
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Some time on Tuesday afternoon, about 50,000 Comcast Internet customers in Houston will become part of a massive public Wi-Fi hotspot network, a number that will swell to 150,000 by the end of June.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The RIAA’s latest tax filings reveal that the anti-piracy group’s revenue has hit a record low as membership dues from record labels continue to decline. But despite the downward trend RIAA CEO Cary Sherman received nearly $500,000 in bonuses in addition to his million dollar salary.
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A United States District Court Judge has just granted Kim Dotcom’s request to put the MPAA and RIAA civil actions against him on hold . The reprieve, which will last seven weeks, expressly allows the entertainment companies the freedom to freeze Dotcom’s assets anywhere in the world if that is deemed necessary.
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His real “crime” as far as the Hollywood moguls are concerned is for doing something he hasn’t yet been convicted of any crime for – establishing Megaupload Ltd. Wikipedia describes it as follows: “Megaupload was a file hosting and sharing online service in which users could share links to files for viewing or editing….. The company was successful. However, millions of people from across the globe used Megaupload to store and access copies of TV shows, feature films, songs, porn, and software. Eventually it had over 150 employees, US$175 million revenues, and 50 million daily visitors. At its peak Megaupload was estimated to be the 13th most popular site on the internet and responsible for 4% of all internet traffic.”
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Fair use enjoyed a major victory in court today. In Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that strongly underscores a fair use justification for a major book scanning program. For those counting along at home, today’s decision marks another in a serious streak of judicial findings of fair use for mass book digitization, including Authors Guild v. Google, Cambridge University Press v. Becker, and the district court opinion in the HathiTrust case itself.
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An ISP that won a prolonged legal battle against a Hollywood-affiliated anti-piracy group has rejected plans to introduce three strikes and site blocking. Today, ISP iiNet is also urging citizens to pressure the government and fight back against the “foreign interests” attempting to dictate Australian policy.
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Growing copyright cop Rightscorp hopes to be a profitable alternative to “six strikes.”
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An announcement later this week will confirm Google as a member of a new coalition to cut off “pirate” sites from their ad revenue. Following similar initiatives in the U.S. and UK, a Memorandum of Understanding between the online advertising industry and the music and movie industries in Italy will signal a creation of a central body to tackle the piracy issue.
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The MPAA is concerned that innovation in the film industry will be ruined if consumers get the right to resell movies and other media purchased online. Responding to discussions in a congressional hearing this week, the MPAA warns that this move would limit consumer choices and kill innovation.
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Send this to a friend
06.12.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Nine out of ten (87 percent) of hiring managers in Europe have “hiring Linux talent” on their list of priorities and almost half (48 percent) say they are looking to hire people with Linux skills within the next six months.
But while they either need or want to hire more people with Linux skills, the data from the Linux Foundation suggests that this is easier said than done. Almost all — 93 percent — of the managers surveyed said they were having difficulty finding IT professionals with the Linux skills required and a quarter (25 percent) said they have “delayed projects as a result”.
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Desktop
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With Father’s Day right around the corner, some dads out there might be requesting a new Chromebook. Chromebooks, which run Google’s Chrome OS, have quietly become quite popular among notebook buyers. As of this writing, Chromebooks are among the top 20 most popular computers available on Amazon, and sales continue to grow steadily. Although the devices got off to a slow start, Google has found a way to attract customers. With that in mind it might be a good time to revisit Chromebooks’ operating system, Chrome OS, and talk about key features that make the Chromebook so attractive. While users were uncertain at first about the concept of using a Web-based operating system, Chrome OS morphed into something far more usable and appealing to the average computer user since it was first released in 2009. Not only are computer users more comfortable with accessing cloud applications and storing their data in the cloud, but Google has added a number of features that make it convenient to use Chrome OS productively. This eWEEK slide show will cover the factors that made this platform appealing to notebook PC users.
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Server
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Cloud computing has really become the buzz term for any online service. Your web browser is a client connecting to a server or clusters of servers hosted anywhere in the world. The point is that you don’t care. You don’t need to know.
Generally speaking I have barely touched the surface. We all use the cloud everyday and most of us don’t even think about it.
How does the cloud affect the everyday linux user? It turns out quite a bit.
Is the cloud a good or bad thing? Neither. Each service has to be judged on it’s own merits.
The term “The Cloud” is just something marketing people and the technical press get excited about. Anyone remember when they kept using the term “Web 2.0″?
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Thanks to the advent of multicore processors, the average data center these days has access to a massive amount of compute capacity. Tapping into it efficiently, though, is another thing altogether.
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Kernel Space
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The official release announcement from Linus Torvalds has yet to come down the pipe, but today’s 3.15 final release was expected. For those not up to date on our Linux 3.15 kernel coverage, there’s been dozens of articles in recent weeks about this latest major kernel update. A summary of this new kernel’s top features can be found via the aptly named The Top Features Of The Linux 3.15 Kernel article. There’s a lot of great stuff in this new kernel release for everyone!
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Linux kernel 3.14.6 is now the most advanced version of the kernel, at least for a few hours before the final version of the 3.15 branch is out (unless something weird happens and the launch is postponed).
The kernel developers have made quite an effort and this latest updates is one of the biggest so far. It’s still a young kernel and it’s not sure that it will reach the LTS status. There are already a number of long term support in existence already, but you can never know.
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The suspend and resume code impacts users who run Linux on laptop computers where there is a need to suspend disk and operating system operations when a device is closed and then start up again when the device is opened. Williams noted that his code contribution was inspired by an analysis and proposal from Intel developer Todd Brandt. Brandt’s proposal specifically dealt with a suspend/resume speed improvement, enabling a rapid wakeup from a device’s suspend state
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The MIPS architecture pull for the Linux 3.16 merge window pull is full of prominent changes for this next kernel version.
First up, with the MIPS changes comes initial support for the Octeon 3. The Octeon 3 is Cavium’s new multi-core processor line-up announced at the end of 2013. The OCTEON III is MIPS64-based and optimized for Wind River Linux and VxWorks. The Octeon III claims up to 120GHz of 64-bit processing and is aimed for high-performance computing environments.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the latest batch of stable kernels: 3.14.6, 3.10.42, and 3.4.92. As usual, each contains fixes all over the tree and users of those kernel series should upgrade.
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Samsung has sent in their F2FS pull request for the Linux 3.16 to provide a number of enhancements for the Flash Friendly File-System.
Improvements for the F2FS file-system with the Linux 3.16 kernel include enhanced wait_on_page_writeback, support for SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE, readahead flow enhancements, enhanced I/O flushes, support for fiemap, support for trace-maps, support for large volumes over two Terabytes, and a number of bug-fixes and clean-ups.
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Rackspace has lately been in the news for its stock market gains and a potential acquisition. But over the past 16 years the company has become well known, first as a web hosting provider built on Linux and open source, and later as a pioneer of the open source cloud and founder of the OpenStack cloud platform.
In May, Rackspace became a Xen Project member and was one of three companies to join the Linux Foundation as a corporate member, along with CoreOS and Cumulus Networks.
“Many of the applications and infrastructure that we need to run for internal use or for customers run best on Linux,” said Paul Voccio, Senior Director of Software Development at Rackspace, via email. “This includes all the popular language frameworks and open virtualization platforms such as Xen, LXC, KVM, Docker, etc.”
In this Q&A, Voccio discusses the role of Rackspace in the cloud, how the company uses Linux, why they joined the Linux Foundation, as well as current trends and future technologies in the data center.
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Graphics Stack
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According to the changelog, various improvements and corrections have been made to the information reported to GL applications via the KHR_debug and ARB_debug_output extensions, a bug that caused the GLX applications that simultaneously created drawables on multiple X servers to crash when swapping buffers has been fixed, and the nvidia-settings option has been updated to report all valid names for each target when querying target types, e.g. “nvidia-settings -q gpus.”
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Applications
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What makes this important, even vital, news to the larger world of system administrators, datacenter managers, and cloud architects, is that Google, Red Hat, and Parallels are now helping build the program. Indeed, they will work with Docker as core maintainers of the code. Canonical’s Ubuntu container engineers will also be working on it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The CD Projekt Red studio has announced that the upcoming The Witcher 3 action RPG is also arriving on SteamOS, which means that it will feature Linux support.
The interesting fact about this announcement is that the studio has yet to make a formal statement, and they chose a more indirect way to tell Linux users that they will be able to play the game. If you happened to open Steam today, you might have noticed that The Witcher 3 game also said that is coming to SteamOS.
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The Steam developers usually release quite few intermediary Steam versions, between major stable updates. This is one of the most interesting Beta updates so far in this cycle and the VR support that was just introduced will certainly make it into the next version.
It looks like virtual reality is the next-gen feature that will be pursued by all the major gaming companies. Oculus is already having an impact on the industry, Sony is working on their own version, and Valve will most likely present their own solution soon enough. With all these advancements made with VR, it’s good to see that Linux is on the forefront.
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Interstellar Marines, a tactical FPS developed and published by Zero Point Software, has just received Linux support with the latest patch.
Interstellar Marines is a very promising first-person shooter and its developers said that they took inspiration from Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. The game has been built mainly as a multiplayer experience, but a limited single-player is also available.
The latest update for the Interstellar Marines also brought support for the Linux platform and it looks like this title aims to be one of the best-looking on the open source platform…
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The third beta is out today ahead of the final release expected in July. This third beta brings many bug-fixes and other minor enhancements to ease in porting of software to this next-generation KDE stack.
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The latest monthly point release update to KDE 4.13 is now available.
KDE 4.13.2 is shipping today with more than 40 known bug-fixes with many of the fixes involving the Kontact, Umbrello, Konqueror, and Dolphin applications. There’s also important fixes for Kopete.
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Hello, This is my second report for my GSoC. This week i was working on the Wallpapers and the Activities Configuration. While there was the support for changing the wallpapers the UI was more focused on a desktop rather than a touch device, which wasn’t exactly what we needed for Plasma Active. So the new UI looks like the old one (Plasma Active 1), and the only small change is that we don’t show the wallpaper name.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The player bar now uses all horizontal space available, which I based on new mockups for playback buffer by Jakub Steiner (except that it still has the repeat/shuffle menu). With this, the song title and album song has more space, and it will no longer just show an ellipsis when the window is small.
Updating of views is further refined, so it will not interfere when in selection mode. Tooltips were added to the buttons. Right-clicking songs inside albums in Albums view now starts selection mode. Albums list in Artists view are now insensitive when in selection mode.
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The Trevilla theme pack is made for people who like to have a flat desktop and it comes with clean headers and buttons that are very good for a minimalistic experience.
The Trevilla designers are not the only ones using this flat look for themes. In fact, more and more distros come with flat desktops and it looks like these types of decorations are not going anywhere…
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The GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee is happy to announce the preliminary results for this year’s Board of Directors elections:
Sriram Ramkrishna
Ekaterina Gerasimova
Karen Sandler
Tobias Mueller
Andrea Veri
Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Jeff Fortin
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Ubuntu GNOME is a popular spin of Ubuntu that uses the GNOME desktop instead of Unity. Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 has been updated to include GNOME 3.10, and GNOME Classic. This release also includes some gorgeous new backgrounds that will spruce up you Ubuntu GNOME desktop. And since it’s a long term support release you will be able to run it for the next few years with the maximum amount of stability and polish.
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The GParted Life project undergoes dormant periods and hardly are any updates released, but now it looks like two versions have arrived inside a week.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2014/Jun/09),” reads the official announcement.
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New Releases
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The OpenELEC makers are following the XBMC development cycle very closely and they have released a new version of their distribution, 4.0.4. It comes packed with all the goodies from XBMC 13.1 “Gotham” and the devs have made some changes of their own.
“This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.0.3. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes to XBMC 13.1 (final) which contains a lot of fixes for issues found after the XBMC-13.0 release (some of them we already shipped with OpenELEC-4.0.0).
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The Linux platform is home to quite a few operating systems dedicated to sound, video, and graphics editing. Some are better than others, but they all try to do the same thing and get some free tools in the hand of the people who need them the most.
The advantage of Tango Studio is that you don’t need to configure almost anything in the operating system and most of the tools just work, without any extra input from the user. It’s a very helpful OS, especially for the people who just want to work and not tinker with a Linux distribution…
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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“We prepared mhwd to support newer proprietary drivers. MHWD 0.3.901 reflect these changes. Blueman got updatedto support the latest bluez 5.19. We kept Wayland 1.4.0, as any higher version breaks bluetooth support. We have to deal with that later. Beside some libreoffice language acks,python updates, a newer Cinnamon we pushed also regular upstream updates to this update-pack,” said the developers in the official announcement.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees the business opportunity of a generation in what he calls a computing paradigm shift from client server to cloud architectures. “In those paradigm shifts, generally new winners emerge,” says Whitehurst and he intends to make sure Red Hat is one of those winners. His logic is sound and simple: disruptive technologies like the cloud that arise every couple decades level the playing field between large, established firms and smaller, innovative challengers since everyone, from corporate behemoth to a couple guys in a garage, starts from the same spot and must play by the same unfamiliar and changeable rules. With the cloud “there’s less of an installed based and an opportunity for new winners to be chosen,” Whitehurst adds. His mission is “to see that open source is the default choice for next generation architecture” and that Red Hat is the preferred choice, particularly for enterprise IT, of open source providers.
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Red Hat was just sending out press invites this afternoon for a virtual event tomorrow regarding “an exciting product” that will be announced.
Registration for the online event happening tomorrow (10 June) at 11AM EST can be found at RedHat.com. The site says it’s about, “redefining the enterprise OS.”
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Fedora
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If you’re a big-time open source fanatic like me, you probably get questions about open source alternatives to proprietary tools rather frequently. From the ‘Alternatives to Microsoft® Visio®’ department, here are three tips that should help designers who use Visio in an open source environment. If you need an open source option for opening Visio files, a revived open source application for creating diagrams, or a lesser-known open source tool for converting Visio® stencils, these tips are for you…
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Debian Family
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Elive, a complete operating system for your computer, built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet the needs of any user while still offering the eye-candy with minimal hardware requirements, has advanced to version 2.2.6 Beta and is available for download.
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Technologic is sampling a fast-booting “TS-4740″ COM that runs Debian on a 1GHz, ARM9 PXA168 SoC and offers a 25K-LUTs Spartan-5 FPGA and gigabit Ethernet.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A session happened this morning about the Unity8 Desktop Preview Image as a way for early adopters and developers to try out the Unity 8 and Mir stack ported to the desktop on the Ubuntu 14.10 base, while the official Ubuntu 14.10 release image will still be using Unity 7 with the X.Org Server. Those interested in learning more about this image and the plans can find the details via summit.ubuntu.com with the Google Hangout Video plus notes.
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The Core i7 4790K has an 88 Watt TDP over 84 Watts on the Core i7 4770K but aside from the higher clock frequencies and thermal/power improvements, the i7-4790K shares much in common with the i7-4770K when it comes to being a quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading, 22nm manufacturing, DDR3-1600MHz memory support, and sports HD Graphics 4600. Like the i7-4770K, the HD Graphics 4600 top out at 1.25GHz. Pricing on the Intel Core i7 4790K is currently about $340 USD from major Internet retailers.
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Making the switch to Ubuntu – or any popular Linux distribution – is more than the mere act of changing operating systems. You must also have apps that allow you to get work done.
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Flavours and Variants
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At Bodhi we work firmly on a “its ready when its ready schedule” as opposed to sticking to our set release goals and churning out something we are not happy with. Better late than never as the saying goes! Just ten days after the targeted release date I am happy to share our first Release Candidate for Bodhi Linux’s third major release…
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This was originally supposed to be a comparison test against Antergos, which is another distribution that ships GNOME 3/Shell and aims for new users to Linux. Unfortunately, Antergos refused to boot. Therefore, what is left is a typical review of Pinguy OS, albeit with some more critical remarks than usual about how well it really caters to newbies (left over from when this article was a comparison test). Follow the jump to see what it is like…
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This current version of Linux Mint 17 KDE “Qiana” comes with KDE 4.13.0, which is the latest version available right now. The rest of the packages are in place and, if you ever opened a KDE-powered distro, then you won’t be surprised by anything.
Just like the other flavors that have been released so far, this one is also based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and will benefit from an extended support period, after it becomes stable, of course. The Linux mint developers announced a while ago that they intended to only base their distros on LTS versions of Ubuntu…
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If the end of XP demonstrated anything, it’s that disruption ensues when an OS reaches end of life. Linux users have long had LTS releases to stave off some of that, but the new Linux Mint 17 offers even more stability. Not only will it be supported until 2019, but it’s also built on a base that was made to last.
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WeIO is sampling a tiny open source board, running OpenWRT Linux on an Atheros/MIPS module, that enables IoT applications controlled entirely via HTML5 code.
Billed as “The Web of Things for Creators,” the fully open source, GPL3-licensed WeIO module is notable for its HTML5 programming interface and Python-based Tornado web server. Together, these let you connect and control objects from any device using only a web browser, says Paris-based WeIO. Designed for low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices, WeIO lets developers easily connect objects so they communicate with each other, or hook up to Internet services like social networks, says the company.
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Musaic is prepping an OpenWRT Linux and AllJoyn AllPlay-enabled wireless speaker and Internet radio that doubles as a home automation hub.
U.K.-based Musaic ended its Kickstarter round in April, surpassing its goal of raising 60,000 U.K. Pounds, and promising products by September starting at 160 Pounds (about $269). Recently, the Musaic system was selected along with four other finalists by the John Lewis JLAB technology incubator program, which starts today. Commercial sales will open in the fall.
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Phones
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Android
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OnePlus has managed to create a bit of a buzz around their latest smartphone. Called ‘One’ (but I’ll go with the OnePlus One for most of this review to avoid the confusion with HTC) this is a handset that goes out of its way to be attractive. The styling is simple but functional, the specs are close to the top of the range in the world of Android, and the price is stunning. It’s not a typo, it actually starts at £229 in the UK ($299 in the US) for the 16 GB model.
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When a buyer goes to purchase a new smartphone, he or she is often confronted with a tough choice. With so many flagship smartphones in the market today, which ones to choose from? There’s the Galaxy S5, which is a widely popular phone from Samsung and then there’s the iPhone 5s, which comes from the world’s most valuable tech company. And, as if that wasn’t confusing enough, Google offers its own flagship device known as Nexus 5.
While the three smartphones mentioned above are wildly popular, users have a tough time investing their hard-earned cash into. That’s why, we’ve written this article to help you buy the best phone amongst the big 3. So, without further ado, here’s a quick comparison between the Galaxy S5, Nexus 5 and iPhone 5s.
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Q: Where and why is SlimPort being implemented?
A: SlimPort was first implemented in the Google Nexus 4 back in 2012 and has continued to be used in a number of high-end tablets and smartphones from Fujitsu, Asustek, LG, and ZTE, as well as finding its way into Chromebooks from brands like Hewlett-Packard (HP), among others. The key is that the technology enables more features and can reduce costs. For example, users want to have the ability to take mobile audio and video and get it up on a big screen. Previously, the ability to get the video off of a tablet/smartphone was typically done by running it through a micro-HDMI port. Using SlimPort allowed the OEMs to drop the micro-HDMI port and simply run everything through the five-pin micro-USB port that is needed for charging. SlimPort simply takes control of the connector when a SlimPort dongle is plugged in, and while the devices are connected, SlimPort enables the display to also charge the mobile device. In 2013, support for Full HD was added but we really expect the technology to take off this year with SlimPort Pro.
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Release day is here again, with CM 11.0 M7 hitting the download servers. Last week’s post included the highlights from the changelog, but we’ll it again for those of you who prefer tl;dr.
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Most everyone, at least the tech-savvy who read this, are familiar with VLC Player — the Video LAN Client. It’s a jack-of-all trades media player, that is capable of handling pretty much any format you can throw at it, no matter how obscure it may be.
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Luis Gomez is Principal Software Test Engineer at Brocade and currently coordinates the Integration Group at OpenDaylight. Prior to this, Luis worked many years at Ericsson in end-to-end solution integration and verification for radio, fixed, core and transport functions…
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One problem is that the GitHub generation does not seem to care as much about code vetting as did coders in earlier years. In the time span from 2007 to 2010, open source became very popular. Enterprises tried to manage it, according to MongoDB’s Assay.
“My sense is that developers do not really look at licenses any more. They are not even looking at which license is applied and does it comply. I think these are issues that attorneys look at, though. I do not think the developers are thinking a lot about the licenses anymore,” he said.
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Secret-squirrel military tech bureau DARPA has designed a series of computer games which can help to verify open source software.
It is working on the games under the auspices of its Crowd Sourced Formal Verification programme.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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ADI technology analyst Tyler White speculated that two underlying market forces are boosting Google’s numbers. “First, device defaults matter,” White said. “Internet Explorer leverages its Windows OS dominance to gain share as the default Web browser for the majority of people online. Today mobile OS is more important, giving Google and Apple a leg up with default status on Android and iOS.”
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Mozilla
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The Firefox 30 release announcement is imminent with the source and binaries for the upcoming browser update now being available.
For those interested, Mozilla Firefox 30.0 can be obtained from the Mozilla FTP server while we’re still waiting for the official release announcement, which is likely coming in the day ahead.
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Education
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Ellis, who co-coordinated POSSE with Drexel professor Greg Hislop, told a crowd of nearly 20 faculty members from colleges and universities across the country that embedding their computer science students in open source communities could facilitate a kind of engagement traditional classroom experiences just can’t offer. But, she said, students and professors alike should be prepared for a bit of culture shock if they aren’t prepared to embrace the open source way.
So Ellis derived 16 maxims from free and open source culture—what she calls “FOSSisms”—to explain how open source values might transform computer science education.
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BSD
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DragonFly, a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX, has reached version 3.8.
DragonFly 3.8 is not as big as the previous release, but there are some very important features that have been added by the developers and it really warrants an update if you have an older version of this distro.
“DragonFly binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, which makes it possible to use current identification and authentication technologies such as PAM and NSS to manage user accounts. Some libraries have been moved to /lib to support this.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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RMS argues that “open source” misses the point, but a counter argument is that the name “Free Software” can sound like “free as in beer” – like malware-ridden Windows freeware. So we want to hear from you: which term do you use? Is it really important to you? Do you think RMS should have chosen a better word than “Free” originally, such as “Libre”?
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As anticipated, 3.15 was released upstream earlier today, and the scripts I updated yesterday have now done their job: 3.15-gnu sources are now available at http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/ and shortly on mirrors too.
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Public Services/Government
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Tender documents issued this morning have confirmed that the Australian government will push ahead with seeking to build a whole-of-government content management system based on the open source Drupal platform.
The Department of Finance has made an approach to market seeking request for proposals for ‘GovCMS’, which the RFP states will be based on Drupal and delivered via a public cloud service.
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Although it’s good to see open standards in there, it’s disappointing that the Policy Exchange did not go further and call for open source, which is the most effective way of implementing those open standards. Simply mandating open standards allows lock-in through inertia – the argument being that the re-training costs etc. etc. make moving to new implementations of open standards too expensive. That’s a ridiculous way of looking at things, because it pretty much ensures that the status quo is maintained. What the Manifesto should have called for was a default use of open source software throughout government, unless there are compelling and clearly-articulable reasons not to take that route.
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Licensing
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For nearly a decade, a battle has raged between two distinct camps regarding something called Contributor Licensing Agreements (CLAs). In my personal capacity, I’ve written extensively on the issue. This article below is a summary on the basics of why CLA’s aren’t necessary, and on Conservancy’s typical recommendations to its projects regarding the issue.
In the most general sense, a CLA is a formal legal contract between a contributor to a FLOSS project and the “project” itself0. Ostensibly, this agreement seeks to assure the project, and/or its governing legal entity, has the appropriate permissions to incorporate contributed patches, changes, and/or improvements to the software and then distribute the resulting larger work.
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Health/Nutrition
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An immense scandal involving pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has been unfolding in China over the last year. It centers on a massive bribery operation uncovered by Chinese police that included nearly every aspect of GSK’s business in China. Billions of yuan in bribes were channeled through an immense network to buy off doctors, hospitals, healthcare organizations, and even government officials to boost sales of GSK drugs.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Two drone strikes launched by the US military killed at least 16 suspected militants in Pakistan’s northwest tribal area bordering Afghanistan, local media reported on Thursday.
According to media reports, a US drone fired eight missiles in Dande Darpakhel area near North Waziristan tribal area which killed at least ten suspected militants and wounded four others in early hours of Thursday. The drones targeted four different compounds and a pick-up truck. At least five to ten drones were flying in the area near Miranshah tribal area when the strike took place, said the reports.
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People may wonder why we are protesting drones. The answer is simple: More than 2,400 men, women and children, more than 270 of them civilians, have died in drone attacks, according to an analysis by the Bureau of Investigate Journalism.
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KT MCFARLAND: We’ve seen in the past when Gitmo grads have been released, they have gone back to join the fight. If we’re going to do this, if we’re going to start releasing Gitmo prisoners, here’s what we ought to do. We have a lot of drones. I think we ought to put a drone 24/7, for the rest of their natural lives, hovering over each one of these Gitmo/Taliban grads. And the minute they join the fight, the minute they step out of line, waste ‘em.
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In Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, Hard Choices, the former secretary of state defends the administration’s use of drone strikes in the face of knotty ethical and legal questions.
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The White House has assumed all power over life and death — at home and abroad — and has created a brand-new category of individual — one who can be indiscriminately deprived of all rights altogether.
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The Government of Pakistan condemns the two incidents of US drone strikes that took place near Miranshah in North Waziristan on 11 and 12 June, the Foreign Office stated.
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Two hours after her official briefing, Foreign Office spokesperson Tasneem Aslam confirmed and condemned two pre-dawn US drone strikes that struck militant hideouts in North Waziristan in the past 24 hours.
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Islamabad (AFP) – Pakistan on Thursday condemned the first US drone strikes on its soil this year despite suspicions the two countries coordinated over the attack in the aftermath of a Taliban siege of Karachi airport.
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Though the Pakistani government is back to the old strategy of labeling everyone slain “suspects,” none of the victims in either attack were actually named, and there was no indication the US even suspected they had a high-profile target in sight.
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Finance
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Privacy
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Deutsche Telekom, operating in 14 countries including the US, Spain and Poland, has already published data for Germany
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Edward Snowden has secured his highest endorsement yet in the US when former vice-president Al Gore described the leaking of top secret intelligence documents as “an important service”.
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Former vice president and global warming activist Al Gore forayed into the world of government surveillance on Tuesday, claiming that the National Security Agency’s constitutional violations are “way more serious” than any crime Edward Snowden committed in leaking secret documents.
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THE UNITED STATES National Security Agency (NSA) has defended its failure to comply with a request for evidence in a lawsuit by saying that its systems are “too complicated” to prevent data from being deleted.
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The National Security Agency is using a new argument for not retaining the data it gathers about users’ online activity: The NSA is just too complex.
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Making any adjustments to the way the National Security Agency collects intelligence —even court orders to ensure that evidence isn’t deleted by the NSA’s spying infrastructure — would bring great harm to the United States, officials say.
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The American fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden has claimed that the US National Security Agency (NSA), which works with the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), can eavesdrop through the mic inside an iPhone even when the device is switched off. The claim has been confirmed by several experts, reports Sina’s tech news web portal.
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Inspired by the NSA’s ANT Catalog of spyware and surveillance tools, The NSA Playset project invites hackers to reproduce easy, at-home versions of the NSA’s spy-tools arsenal — and NSA-style silly names are required.
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The NSA is particularly pleased with the security features in Apple’s iPhone which allows it to spy on people when they think it is switched off.
Edward Snowden said that the NSA can get into an iPhone, turn it on remotely if it’s off and can they turn on apps?
The Tame Apple Press dismissed the claim as “magical” – after all the iPhone was designed by Steve Jobs and is totally unhackable and completely secure. The fact that it usually takes experts less than a minute to break into one is neither here nor there.
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Observing corruption, waste and fraud drove NSA whistleblowers Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney to reveal government wrongdoing – June 11, 14
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The Silicon Valley tech giants want to reform government surveillance on the Internet? That’s what they say, anyway. In an open letter to U.S. Senators, technology titans such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, and Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer joined forces to urge Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act to “help restore the confidence of Internet users here and around the world, while keeping citizens safe.”
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According to some researchers, metadata could actually reveal a lot about you and your activities.
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Fuel to the fire of financial privacy with fiat currency has been added this week: details of transactions shared between banks and the NSA being made public.
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Thanks to hacker Michael Ossmann, you can now build gadgets like the National Security Agency uses to intercept communications from the comfort of your own home.
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International law firm Hogan Lovells has been tapped to represent the government of the Bahamas after a May report by The Intercept, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revealed that the NSA had been recording all cell phone conversations made into, out of, and within the island country.
[...]
The NSA surveillance was being carried out, unbeknownst to Bahamian officials, using an advanced system known as SOMALGET, which enables the NSA to record and replay all cell phone calls for about a month, according to The Intercept report.
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A working quantum computer would open the door to easily breaking the strongest encryption tools in use today, including a standard known as RSA, named for the initials of its creators. RSA scrambles communications, making them unreadable to anyone but the intended recipient, without requiring the use of a shared password. It is commonly used in Web browsers to secure financial transactions and in encrypted e-mails. RSA is used because of the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Breaking the encryption involves finding those two numbers. This cannot be done in a reasonable amount of time on a classical computer.
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Civil Rights
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The Obama administration covers for Bush-era secrets.
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The new president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, welcomed a delegation of secret services from Atlanticist countries, headed by the CIA Director of the National Service of Covert Operations, Frank Archibald.
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The extreme right-wing organisation boasts it is ‘more radical than the BNP’ and is targeting students and universities in the UK to spread its message of hate
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The so-called “transparency journalism site” that helps people submit public information requests to US government agencies, decided to launch legal action because, it says, the CIA frustrates its work.
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MuckRock, a transparency journalism site that helps people submit public information requests to US government agencies, today revealed it is suing the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act.
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British intelligence played a vital role in smuggling copies of Boris Pasternak’s banned novel Doctor Zhivago to Soviet readers, with MI6 secretly passing the Russian manuscript to the CIA, a new book reveals.
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As the agency strives to craft a cuddly new image, we mustn’t allow it to whitewash its history of torture and murder
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Radical transparency website Wikileaks has been a thorn in the side of the American intelligence community for long. And as the CIA joined Twitter this month, the Wikileaks account, which many believe to be controlled by founder Julian Assange, welcomed it in their own inimitable way.
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August and technophobic literary journal released a barrage of reminders of agency’s controversial interrogation techniques
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Afshin Rattansi goes underground on a story making big headlines across the Atlantic – net neutrality. But our own government seems suspiciously quiet on the subject, and leader of the Pirate Party UK Loz Kaye says it’s because politicians want to retain the power to control the internet. Amidst D-Day commemorations across the continent, historian and author of War Horse Michael Morpugo warns against glorifying war. Plus, the Chilcot inquiry is set to review some heavily-redacted evidence: we review who’s on the panel. A new report claims 4,000 of us are at risk of losing our homes per week – and the figure will only go up. Plus, what’s she done now? The Duchess of Cambridge gets it royally wrong as she attends a wedding at the Dorchester hotel.
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Send this to a friend
06.08.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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ZBOSS Linux 6.5 was released on Friday as a RHEL-based “enterprise” Linux distribution that ships with the ZFS file-system by default.
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In 1991, 22-year old Finnish computer programmer Linus Torvalds released his own operating system. Opening with the message “Hello everybody out there,” (a now-iconic phrase among Linux fans), he posted the source code online. People alternately contributed their abilities to improve it where they could or went off to build their own things with it.
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The latest Linux 3.16 kernel pull request worth covering on Phoronix are the latest LLVMLinux patches for being able to compile the kernel with Clang rather than GCC.
With Linux 3.15 came the patch-set to come close to being able to compile under Clang and now with Linux 3.16 it’s a bit closer. A set of five LLVMLinux patches are called for merging that affect ARM and Shash Crypto code.
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The Linux 3.15 kernel isn’t even expected for release until later today, but thanks to the Linux 3.16 merge window opening a week early to adjust to Linus Torvalds’ upcoming schedule, we already have a good idea for a portion of the changes for the next kernel cycle.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa 10.1.5 was just released this Friday evening while we’re still waiting for the imminent release of the major Mesa 10.2 release unless it was delayed again.
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AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is a bit closer to supporting OpenGL 4.0 via the GLSL 4.00 specification requirements thanks to a new patch set published on Friday by Marek Olšák.
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The Linux graphics developers within Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center have already prepared a fresh batch of changes that will land with the Linux 3.17 kernel — even though the Linux 3.15 kernel hasn’t been released yet and the Linux 3.16 kernel merge window opened early.
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ARM has already submitted their results of their graphics driver for several Mali graphics processors for OpenGL ES 3.1 certification by the Khronos Group.
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Benchmarks
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The tested graphics processors for this article included the:
1: Intel HD 4600
2: NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT
3: NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT
4: NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT
5: NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX
6: NVIDIA GeForce GT 220
7: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
8: NVIDIA GeForce GT 520
9: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti
10: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650
11: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
12: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
13: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
14: NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN
15: AMD Radeon X1800XT
16: AMD Radeon HD 4550
17: AMD Radeon HD 4670
18: AMD Radeon HD 4770
19: AMD Radeon HD 4830
20: AMD Radeon HD 4850
21: AMD Radeon HD 4870
22: AMD Radeon HD 4890
23: AMD Radeon HD 5770
24: AMD Radeon HD 5830
25: AMD Radeon HD 6450
26: AMD Radeon HD 6570
27: AMD Radeon HD 6770
28: AMD Radeon HD 6870
29: AMD Radeon HD 6950
30: AMD Radeon HD 7850
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Applications
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The original traceroute application must be about a thousand years old by now. I can remember messing with something like it ~20 years ago on a Windows machine, and promptly tossing it aside for a graphical version that showed where the IP addresses were located on the globe. Far more interesting.
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XBMC 13.0 “Gotham” was probably the best release made by its developers and incorporated numerous features and some very cool options. The devs started working on an update for XBMC almost right away after the launch and, a Release Candidate later, the 13.1 version arrived.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The developers behind 7 Days To Die do like to tease us and then repeatedly go silent now don’t they? Here’s the latest on what’s going on and it’s not good as usual.
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Valve has funded work by LunarG on a project codenamed “Glassy Mesa” to deliver potential performance improvements on the open-source Mesa graphics driver stack.
Glassy Mesa is an experimental project using LunarGLASS for plugging LLVM into Mesa for shader compilation and run-time improvements. LunarGLASS originated back in 2010 as using LLVM IR as the base intermediate representation for the shader and kernel compiler stack. LunarGLASS has performance potential via taking advantage of LLVM’s many optimization passes.
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Besides Mesa 10.1.5 being released last night, Mesa 10.2 made it out late last night followed immediately by Mesa 10.2.1 to take care of a build failure that sneaked into the final release.
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The Witcher: Wild Hunt is the third installment in CD Projekt Red’s open-world action role-playing video game series, which is very popular among fans of western RPG titles. The game was announced as a next-gen title for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The developer also mentioned that it would bring the game to Linux if SteamOS, in future, provides constant Linux environment, which it did, and now it looks like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to SteamOS.
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For anyone firing up Steam today for some weekend gaming, you may notice there’s a large advertisement on Steam’s main page with a notice that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to SteamOS (Linux).
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FLASHOUT 2 is a fantastic looking fast paced futuristic racer that is now available on Linux. It looks a lot like the old Wipeout games that’s for sure.
They confirmed to us in the past that they were developing all versions next to each other, so to regular readers it should be no surprise that it has day 1 Linux support!
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The latest major update to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 was released this week and the Linux support has taken another step forward.
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This is the 10th PC and Android bundle, which contains 10 games, 9 of them also playable on our beloved Linux OS!
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Before sometime I got in touch with KDE community and was overwhelmed by it. Then I became a member of this community and started exploring about open source environment. The most fascinating thing about KDE community members is how committed they are to open source technology. Through IRC I would be able to contact with genius coders all over the globe. It’s been quite a time that I am using open source software. It is very much important to aware people about open source. We can have access to all robust and efficient soft wares for free. After being a part of KDE it interested me to use open source systems and I am really enjoying this.
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The new pretty thing that is taking away my time is the activity switcher which got a rather big revamp for the next release of Plasma.
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As you already know, Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta is released on 3rd June.
Many distros like Fedora, openSUSE, KUbuntu have already packaged this beta in their repositories
So to make life of Archers easier, I have uploaded PKGBUILD for Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on AUR.
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I am Anuj Pahuja(alasin), a Computer Science undergraduate from BITS Pilani, India. It is my first GSoC and I can’t thank KDE Community enough for accepting me as a student.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Most of the themes that can pull this Mac OS X transformation work on desktop environments like GNOME, MATE, Xfce, and so on, but not all of them work in Unity. The designer of this particular version made it compatible with GTK 3.10 and it works in Ubuntu as well.
“The goal is to keep it as close as possible to ambiance on the code base with the same look as the original cupertino. If that isn’t possible for an element I will prefer the look of cupertino,” said the designer on gnome-look.org.
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New Releases
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GParted Live 0.19.0 Beta 1, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, has been released and is now available for download.
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Robolinux 7.5.3 is a fast and easy to use Linux distribution based on Debian, and its developer thinks that it can be the solution for people who look to protect their privacy.
If you remember from previous releases of Robolinux, the developer of this particular distribution came up with a working idea on how to move people from the Windows platform to Linux without them having to give up their favorite applications.
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SparkyLinux 3.4, a lightweight, fast, and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customized LXDE, e17, and Razor-Qt desktops is now available for download.
The SparkyLinux 3.34 “Annagerman” system is built on Debian GNU/Linux “Jessie” and is not all that different from the previous versions in the series, at least not in this particular aspect.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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OpenMandriva Lx 2014 is the latest edition of OpenMandriva, a desktop Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Linux. It is one of the distributions that rose out of the ashes of Mandriva Linux; the other being Mageia, and, to some extent, ROSA Desktop.
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Red Hat Family
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Several weeks back, we reviewed Scientific Linux 6.5, a rather spartan incarnation of the legendary RHEL 6, which might be considered too boring and outdated for modern home use. Well, not so. Once long ago, I showed you how to transform CentOS into a home use beast.
Today, we will do it again, with the most comprehensive guide on Scientific Linux pimping ever made on Planet Earth. Here, you get a bit of everything, and then so. Best of all? This guide is also relevant for CentOS and even Fedora, so make sure you keep it close to your heart. Let’s go.
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Fedora
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Matthew Miller just announced that fortnightly public Fedora Board meetings are starting up again. The first meeting will be on Monday the 9th of June at 17:00 UTC time. (Matthew notes in the email to fedora-announce that the command date -d ’2014-06-09 17:00 UTC’ is an easy way to convert this into the timezone on your Fedora machine.)
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We previously posted about some of the logo design ideas that Máirín Duffy was working on for the 3 products of fedora.next (Cloud, Server, and Workstation). Since that post, Máirín has also posted a bunch of other iterations, and I also entered the fray with a few ideas of my own. Now, Máirín has done another round of design ideas. Check them out, and join the discussion over on her blog.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This week, Apple announced the new OS X Yosemite, and Linux users across the Linux-verse stood up and proclaimed “Oooo, I’d like to lay my hands on the lily-livered swab is writ that forgery!” Why so up in arms? Because Apple has done what Apple does — riff on features from other platforms and claim they’ve recreated a wheel that will make your life far easier. What did they do this time? Let’s chat.
One of the big features of OS X Yosemite is included in the Spotlight tool. For those who don’t know, Spotlight is the OS X search tool that, up until Yosemite, searched the local drive. As of Yosemite, anyone who has touched the Ubuntu Unity Dash will notice something very similar to Scopes.
[...]
When Ubuntu released Unity Scopes, a very large and very vocal group from the Linux community cried foul, that Scopes was an invasion of privacy, was insecure, and would probably steal their identity…
…maybe not that last bit. But there was plenty of backlash from the community (many of whom didn’t even use Ubuntu).
How will the Apple community react when they start using the Scopes-like feature in Yosemite? They’ll love it. They’ll realize how convenient it is to be able to, from one location, search their local drive, Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and countless other sources.
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You would think that writing about the latest version of Ubuntu 14.04 would be easy but it is hard to write about one of the biggest Linux distributions without repeating everyone else’s sentiments or covering the same ground that was covered with Ubuntu 13.10.
With that in mind please don’t be disappointed that much of what I will be writing here has been written before.
There is nothing revolutionary about Ubuntu 14.04, especially if you have already tried Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 12.04. The improvements to Ubuntu have been slow and steady.
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Earlier this year, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2014) in Barcelona, Canonical has announced the first two phone manufacturers that will create Ubuntu Touch-based smartphones: Meizu and Bq.
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Flavours and Variants
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There’s been much talk in the past about creating a spin/derivative of Ubuntu Linux using the MATE Desktop Environment fork of GNOME2. While no spin materialized for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, talk of developing a new spin is again happening.
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Linux Mint 17 Qiana is the latest version of linux mint that based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it was released and announced by Linux Mint Developer a few days ago. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. In addition, The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016.
Linux Mint usually comes with four desktop editions: Cinnamon Desktop Environment, MATE Desktop Environment, KDE and XFCE, although currently, only Cinnamon and MATE editions are available, XFCE and KDE edition should arrive shortly.
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Phones
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NSA-grade security is now coming to an Android device near you.
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The Samsung Z looks and feels very much like Samsung’s Android smartphones. There’s the tiles section at the top of the home screen, with some app icons at the botton, and there’s the pull-down notifications and settings tray at the very top. You also get the hardware Back and Menu buttons, in addition to the main Home button. The Settings app looks almost identical to Samsung’s Android version.
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LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an application protocol for accessing directory services. It runs on a layer above the TCP/IP stack incorporating simplified encoding methods, and offers a convenient way to connect to, search, and modify Internet directories, specifically X.500-based directory services. It is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol. LDAP utilizes a client-server model.
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While it initially seemed revolutionary, open source software is actually rooted in traditional IT processes. Technology, after all, has always been about collaboration and continuous improvement. (In the early days of the ARPANET, for example, researchers established a “request for comments” procedure to improve the project.) Of course, there have been trepidations raised about open source. But the always-active open source communities are more than happy to address any concerns. As a result, more than one-half of the software acquired over the next several years will be open source, according to industry research.
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SaaS/Big Data
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SQL is the gateway drug to enterprise adoption says analysts at recent developer conference. Hadoop Summit, leading big data developer conference, saw the maturation of the Hadoop ecosystem. Hadoop is one of the necessary requirements in realizing the promise of Big Data’s application growth in the enterprise, and key players have emerged among those most influential in this development.
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Databases
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SQLite 3.8.5, an in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine, has been released with an impressive list of changes and improvements.
Most of the SQLite releases are maintenance ones, but from time to time the developers make some important changes. The current update features a few new options, so an update is recommended.
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BSD
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One week after FreeBSD 9.3 went into beta, the second beta update is now available.
FreeBSD 9.3 is the next major FreeBSD 9 update due out that brings down some features from FreeBSD 10.0 like the Radeon KMS/DRM driver support, Xen HVM support, Apple MacBook trackpad support, disables hardware random number generators by default, and has a ton of other changes.
FreeBSD enthusiasts can find out more about the forthcoming 9.3 update via the tentative release notes. FreeBSD 9.3 is expected to be officially released in mid-July.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I wanted to make this post to make it clear to the community regarding GNUstep’s position on the new Swift language. If the language is released as open source then GNUstep will fully support it. If it is, however, not released as open source then we will either take steps to create an implementation ourselves or provide any assistance needed to a group of people other than ourselves who are willing to take that on.
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Yesterday was a big day for defending our freedom and privacy on the Internet. The FSF and its supporters joined the ranks of thousands for Reset the Net, the biggest-ever day of action against bulk surveillance.
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Not only the pixmaps and colours can be changed, also the style of the interface. This include the menu style (vertical, in-window or Mac OS style), the scrollbar position (right or left), the behaviour of contextual menus, popup list and pulldown list (so these can have similar behaviour of the gtk components). The Silver theme include an style that let users run GNUstep’s apps on, for example, Gnome without problems.
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GNU remotecontrol relies on OS file access restrictions, Apache authentication, MySQL authentication, and SSL encryption to secure your data. Talk to us you want to find out how you can further strengthen the security of your system, or you have suggestions for improving the security of our current system architecture.
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The developers behind the Nettle project are out with a new major update to their dual-licensed GPLv2 and LGPLv3+ cryptographics library.
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Security
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Queen’s Speech: Hackers who risk lives by attacking food, energy and police computer networks face life in prison
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Several vulnerabilities have been patched in the Linux kernel that could have led to a denial of service or privilege escalation.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In a 2010 speech, Robert Bergdahl claimed that the man who held Bowe “recently lost a son to a CIA missile drone strike.” The reports at the time appear to back him up.
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NEW YORK — The U.S. government, citing possible “exceptionally grave harm to national security,” told a federal appeals court it wants to give the public less information about its legal justification for using drones to kill Americans suspected of terrorism overseas.
The Justice Department, Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency made the request in papers submitted late Thursday to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal.
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Washington, Jun 6 (Prensa Latina) The White House asked Friday a federal judge for authorization to publish the minor possible quantity of information about the ” legal arguments ” of the Government to kill American citizens by means of the use of drones.
Several government agencies, including the CIA, made an application to the appellate court in the city of New York, to avoid delivering texts to The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who had requested under the mandate of the Freedom of Information Act.
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In his drama Drones, filmmaker Rick Rosenthal poses complex security, political and ethical questions about drone attacks in the ongoing war against global terrorism.
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A young Queenslander killed in a US drone strike in Yemen told his family he was teaching English there and, while there may have been more to the story than that, his family say they have been denied a burial, a death certificate and closure.
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Now he’s got one thumb on the drones and the other on the Oval Office TV remote control watching “Plays of the Week” on ESPN.
Sounds like a boss to me.
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A silenced press has broader implications. For instance, journalists are kept out of North Waziristan, where the U.S. has been concentrating its drone strikes. Washington says these strikes are killing mostly militants, and are nearly always effective operations. Islamabad claims that large numbers of civilians – including children – are being killed. The two governments present very different numbers. Without journalists to investigate, who is to say where the truth lies?
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‘I have no faith left in a judiciary that refuses even to hear whether Abdulrahman, an American child, was wrongfully killed by his own government.’.
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Transparency Reporting
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For which, the whistleblower organisation Wikileaks replied: “@CIA we look forward to sharing great classified info about you,” along with links to CIA-related revelations in the Wikileaks website.
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Newly revealed chat logs may corroborate an imprisoned hacker’s story: An informant facilitated Anonymous’ attacks on Stratfor and hundreds of foreign websites.
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An Australian man killed in a US drone strike in Yemen moved to Christchurch to escape a troubled past, friends say.
Christopher Havard, 27, was killed in Yemen last November alongside dual Australian-New Zealand national Daryl Jones, who went by the name Muslim bin John.
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I have concluded that, regardless of any personal egos involved, Julian Assange (in his bold creation of Wikileaks), Edward Snowden (NSA whistleblower), and other individuals who have put their lives and careers on the line for all of us … are, to America and the world, HEROES. For that, I thank them.
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The Ecuadorean ambassador to London says that a £6 million policing bill after two years of stalemate over Julian Assange is “not our problem”.
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In the near future governments will control every aspect of human life, with even human DNA taken at birth and encoded right into your ID, says Julian Assange. A conference in New York discusses whether the internet might become a tool of suppression.
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Finance
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C. J. Polychroniou, for Truthout: It is widely believed that the advanced liberal societies are suffering a crisis of democracy, a view you share wholeheartedly, although the empirical research, with its positivist bias, tends to be more cautious. In what ways is there less democracy today in places like the United States than there was, say, 20 or 30 years ago?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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I despair sometimes that society as a whole has lost all sense of how a democracy ought to operate. State abuse has become the norm.
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Censorship
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Anti-coup protest organizer Sombat Boonngam-anong, captured Thursday, tracked using his IP address
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The Serbian government is facing increasingly frequent accusations of web censorship. The interventions by the OSCE and the European Commission, the reactions of prime minister Vučić
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The most recent – and perhaps unintended – turn of the screw came on May 12 when the Media Development Authority (MDA) released its proposed amendments to the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act for public consultation.
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The publishing industry’s inexplicable surrender to RSS worker Dinanath Batra’s recent barrage of demands to cleanse their books on Indian history of “anti-Hindu” content seems to have created a quick and easy censorship model that is likely to be a quite a hit with the religious fringe.
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14 cartoonists have left satirical magazine El Jueves over the past 24 hours and leading Spanish daily El Mundo has suspended two correspondents over censorship accusations on Twitter.
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Spain’s royal accession faced its first dispute last night over plans to grant the outgoing king legal privileges against prosecution for paternity scandals.
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Privacy
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Moms and dads from across the political spectrum have mobilized into an unexpected political force in recent months to fight the data mining of their children. In a frenzy of activity, they’ve catapulted student privacy — an issue that was barely on anyone’s radar last spring — to prominence in statehouses from New York to Florida to Wyoming.
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In January, the math community had its big event of the year — the Joint Mathematics Meeting — where 3,000 mathematicians and math students gathered to talk about new advances in the field and jostle for jobs. The National Security Agency is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country and so it always has a sizeable presence at the event to recruit new candidates. This year, it was even easier for the agency as the four-day conference took place at the Baltimore Convention Center, just 22 minutes away from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Thomas Hales, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who describes himself as a “mathematician who’s upset about what’s going on,” is dismayed at the idea of the brightest minds in his field going to work for the agency. In reaction to the Snowden revelations — which started exactly a year ago – about NSA’s mass surveillance and compromising of encryption standards, Hales gave a grant to the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation to fly a representative to Baltimore to try to convince mathematicians young and old not to go help the agency with data-mining and encryption-breaking.
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On June the 5th last year, British newspaper the Guardian published the first leaks from US intelligence worker Edward Snowden. Exactly one year on – Mr. Snowden, who is wanted in America on espionage charges, remains in Russia on temporary asylum. CCTV UK correspondent Dan Whitehead takes a look at what effect the intelligence leaks have had on governments and security agencies worldwide.
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A private server startup has raised over $1 million in less than an hour and a half, breaking the crowdfunding record.
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A federal judge in California withdrew a temporary order requiring the National Security Agency to retain the data it collects under a controversial and little understood section of the FISA Amendments Act after the NSA argued that being forced to hold onto the data would both be illegal and overwhelm its computer systems, rendering the United States and its allies vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
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Encrypted Gmail. Transparency from mobile providers. Maybe even a legal ‘revolt’ against ‘Orwellian’ surveillance. But until we get real reform, NSA and Co may survive in the shadows
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More e-mail providers are using encryption, meaning messages can’t be intercepted and read by the NSA or hackers.
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One year ago Thursday, one of the most consequential leaks of classified U.S. government documents in history exploded onto the world scene: The first story based on documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden was published. Americans finally knew the spy agency was sucking up virtually all of the data about who they called and when.
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The good news from Glenn Greenwald’s latest book is that we’ve arrived at the future that science fiction always promised. The bad news is that, rather than jetpacks, we’re getting a cyberpunk dystopia – less Isaac Asimov and more William Gibson, as it were.
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Reflecting on the one year anniversary of Edward Snowden’s first revelations of rampant NSA surveillance program overreach, a whistleblower who preceded him sees both light and darkness on the horizon for the public’s rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of association.
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Abby Martin features an exclusive interview with Top NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney, NSA Technical Director (1965 – 2001) & Kirk Wiebe, Senior NSA Analyst (1975 – 2001). The panel discusses the history behind the NSA’s illegal spying, both domestically and abroad, as well as their experience as witnesses to the agency’s transformation into an unconstitutional surveillance apparatus following the events of 9/11 and the FBI’s determination to crack down on their dissent.
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Influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is taking the Obama administration to task for its response to the international scandal over U.S. surveillance and the resulting harm to U.S. tech companies.
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“Now, Eric Schnowden has his time, he gets an hour on TV, he gets a hoorah from Brian Williams, but I think we ought to say to the national security staff that while we look at the constitutionality and other issues here that we do not demonize them,” she added.
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Thursday marks exactly one year since whistleblower Edward Snowden’s first revelations were published in the Guardian newspaper. But before the world knew about Snowden, two other National Security Agency (NSA) employees had already described the massive reach of the agency’s activities.
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Yesterday’s transparency report from Vodafone raised a very intriguing question: why did Vodafone feel obliged to redact aggregate surveillance statistics from their UK report?
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The performer Stephen Fry condemned the government’s failure to act over the Snowden revelations at the start of the Don’t Spy on Us Day of Action in London today.
In a pre-recorded video, Fry said that using the fear of terrorism, “is a duplicitous and deeply wrong means of excusing something as base as spying on the citizens of your own country”.
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The self-created end of privacy in the United States was brought about as much by technology as desire. Those who claim there is little new here — the government read the mail of and wiretapped the calls and conversations of Americans under COINTELPROfrom 1956 to at least 1971 – do not understand the impact of technology.
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Everyone is writing and thinking about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose first revelations were published one year ago today. But it was also one year ago that Chelsea Manning’s trial began at Fort Meade in Maryland.
Manning provided the “Collateral Murder” video, hundreds of thousands of military incident reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and hundreds of thousands of United States diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. She was convicted of multiple offenses including five Espionage Act offenses in 2013 and was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.
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Civil Rights
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The Gates Foundation is all about solutions that make the greatest impact on vulnerable populations. So why ignore the 68,000 women who die each year from unsafe abortions?
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A new study concluding that Americans tend to take hurricanes with female names less seriously than those with male names proves just how implicitly sexism is embedded in the culture of this nation. And a look at these photos of a Tennessee survivor of domestic violence should also perhaps elicit the question: “What is it about the culture of the U.S. that generates such misogyny?” – See more at: http://uprisingradio.org/home/2014/06/06/the-common-roots-of-misogynist-culture-in-pakistan-and-the-u-s/#sthash.GpiU1MKA.dpuf
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Freed US soldier Bowe Bergdahl developed a love for Afghan green tea, taught his captors badminton, and even celebrated Christmas and Easter with the hardline militants, a Pakistani militant commander told AFP Sunday.
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The Islamabad High Court’s recent ruling ordering the registration of an FIR against the CIA’s former boss in Islamabad is the latest in a series of embarrassing verdicts that have been handed down due to poor coordination between the federation’s counsels and government departments.
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Too often “the law” is nothing more than prejudice embedded in jargon.
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With a plot that sounds like a Jason Bourne move, on June 2 the Supreme Court declined to review Risen v. United States, a case raising an important question on First Amendment protections for the media but in a context that understandably left conservatives concerned over national security.
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The CIA is close to finishing its review of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and hopes to have it ready by July 4, Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said.
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One of the greatest Serbian writers, and surely the greatest witness of Serbian 20th century and a man who was directly involved in all the most crucial events of Serbia’s history from World War II until a few days ago when he passed away at age of 93, left his legacy to his friend and publisher Slobodan Gavrilovic.
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Top senators thought you wouldn’t notice. Behind closed doors, they wrote up new indefinite detention and Guantánamo provisions in the annual defense policy bill, and then waited 11 days to quietly file the bill.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Kim Dotcom is pulling out all the stops in his fight against the U.S. government and his adversaries in Hollywood. On the table now sits a $5 million bounty for anyone prepared to reveal behind-the-scenes wrongdoing and corruption. Dotcom told TorrentFreak how it will work.
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The domain of a large streaming TV show site was hijacked yesterday and began diverting to an imposter site. That’s the claim from WatchSeries-Online.ch, a site that in its previous form had been riding up towards the Alexa 1000. But is the real story as straightforward as that? Typically of these sites, absolutely not.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.07.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We all know that Linux has changed the world….in small ways and large One of the ways it’s changed the world is by changing the way work gets done in corporations, big and small, around the world. As with the computer itself, the effects of ever-advancing Linux seem evolutionary and “slow & steady” from day to day. But in the 20 years since its introduction, the impact Linux has made in macro is truly staggering!
Today everything from cars and jets to every supercomputer and most servers in datacenters have Linux somewhere…doing something important. Linux is, indeed everywhere! How’d that happen? And more importantly, what will happen next?
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And I think that’s why many people prefer OS-X over Windows or Ubuntu/Fedora. For everyday tasks as email, picture stuff, booking flights, doing taxes etc. OS-X definitely offers a good solution. And being UNIX-y enough to be used in a Linux delpoyment context, you get a good compromise.
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Desktop
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When Google launched Chrome OS, it touted it as a nearly entirely cloud-centric operating system. In fact, it wasn’t designed to store data or applications locally at all, or do anything local, really.
Since then, Google has wisely hedged that bet, and it is doing so in a big way as it finally gives Chromebook users a way to watch Google Play Movies and TV offline. Google announced offline viewing last month and new Chromebooks are indeed pulling the feat off via a new app for Chrome OS.
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Server
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Oracle and Extreme Networks are the latest companies to join the vendor-driven OpenDaylight Project, which is developing an open-source platform for software-defined network and network-functions virtualization.
Also joining the group June 5 was supply-chain services firm Flextronics, bringing the total number of members in the consortium to 39. The numbers have more than doubled since April 2013, when Cisco Systems, IBM and 16 others announced the formation of OpenDaylight.
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There’s no doubt that Linux professionals are in high demand. But how much are they getting paid? I took a peek at the average Linux salaries page on SimplyHired and it was quite interesting to see how much various Linux jobs paid. See for yourself in the image below. You can also compare Linux salaries on that page, and you can search SimplyHired for Linux jobs in your area.
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Kernel Space
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The “ARM64″ pull request pertaining to EFI was sent on Thursday. This newest 64-bit ARM EFI patch-set enables EFI stub support similar to the x86 EFI stub support. The Linux EFI stub kernel support on (U)EFI systems to let the firmware function as the bootloader and to boot directly into the kernel without having to deal with a separate bootloader such as GRUB2 or Gummiboot.
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Most of the sound driver updates for Linux 3.16 revolve around ASOC (ALSA System-on-Chip) changes but there’s also a number of other noteworthy commits. HD Audio changes include Tegra HDMI support, a ThinkPad T440 dock fix, Realtek codec updates for several chips, Firewire audio support improvements, and various other changes.
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Rafael Wysocki has sent in his ACPI and power management pull that will target the next Linux kernel release cycle.
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For many months now Intel has been working on RAPL support within the Linux kernel as part of their power-capping framework as a power feature for Intel hardware on Linux.
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Graft is the SUSE-developed approach to live-patching the Linux kernel as another reboot-less option similar to Ksplice.
Besides kGraft and Ksplice, Red Hat coincidentally shortly after the release of Ksplice had announced Kpatch as their means of live patching a running kernel. Both Red Hat and SUSE have open-sourced their live patching mechanisms and both hope to have their solution mainlined, or some unified form of both. While no solution has been queued up for merging in the Linux 3.16 kernel, there still is a lot of interest by Linux developers in these solutions.
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The amount of changes and enhancements for this branch of the Linux kernel is rather large and the developers have added numerous drivers and other improvements. This is an LTS release and it’s likely that it will be updated for a long time.
“I’m announcing the release of the 3.10.41 kernel. All users of the 3.10 kernel series must upgrade.”
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Graphics Stack
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For those interested in DisplayPort MST support on Linux to support the specification’s multi-stream transport ability, there is now a revised patch-set providing this support.
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Applications
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FFmpeg 2.2.x is the latest major release and this current build is just a maintenance version. It comes with a lot of new features, such as HNM version 4 demuxer and video decoder, Live HDS muxer, a complete Voxware MetaSound decoder, WebP encoding via libwebp, VP8 in Ogg demuxing, libx265 encoder, and more.
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Proprietary
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Migrating to the Linux platform is not an either/or proposition. Linux as a computing platform is so flexible that it offers users a have-it-your-way menu of software options.
One option is the Linux desktop. Individual users in home computing, SOHO and SMB operations can choose from a variety of enterprise-class Linux distributions. The Linux desktop OS offers a no-cost or low-cost alternative to the frustrations of Microsoft Windows or the limitations of Apple’s Unix-based OS X platform for its relatively costly Mac hardware.
Another migration path is to forgo acclimating office staff to the Linux desktop. Instead, enterprises can opt to run their back-office and server operations on a Linux server. Linux servers have a rigorous giant footprint in the networking and cloud computing worlds. Linux servers are commonplace in many other enterprise settings.
A third migration choice is to run a full Linux shop. Standard office computing software is readily available in open source packages for office suites, Web browsing and graphic production tasks. Open source database applications connect famously with back-end software and servers. Plus, Linux does not need hardware-specific buy-in requirements.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It just so happens on the tenth birthday of Phoronix that 500 games are now available for Linux via SteamOS.
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id Software has a long history of making games that stems back as far as 1991. Most gamers will only remember the hugely popular releases in the Doom and Quake series, but there were many more, and much older titles that were released before they hit the big time.
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LIMBO caused quite a stir when it was released for Linux being wrapped in a custom wine wrapper by Codeweavers, but that saga looks like it’s coming to and end.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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You might know that Okular has a plugin system, for adding support for more document formats. And you might know that Calligra since years also provides a plugin to Okular, which adds support to view slides from files in the OpenDocument Presentation (ODP) format. And not only for the ODP format: by simply using the Calligra import filters for PPT and PPTX you can also view the slides locked away in those formats.
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Just a little video showing a gimpse of our progress on the port of GCompris in Qt Quick. So far we already have 44 activities on the 144. We now have a configuration dialog box and a menu similar to the old version.
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I am glad that I accomplished my first task to integrate political map with marble.
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A new development build of KDE Frameworks 5 is now out and the developers are making great progress. If things continue to evolve according to the plan KDE has laid out, we should see this new desktop environment pretty soon.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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A year and a half after the previous release, the beautiful Faience GTK / GNOME Shell theme pack was finally updated and it now supports GTK / GNOME Shell 3.10.
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Over the past several GNOME releases, we have been aiming to stabilise GNOME Shell as much as possible. We have been largely successful in this: the last major UI change was in 3.10, when we introduced the combined system status area, and the main improvements in the recent 3.12 release were for performance and bug fixing. This is a good thing. At the same time, there is one area where a number of us still feel that bigger changes are needed. This is notifications, particularly the Message Tray.
In this post, I’m going to present a new set of designs for notifications and the Message Tray, which we’re hoping to implement for the next GNOME release. As ever, these aren’t set in stone and are in a state of evolution. The aim of publicising the designs is to get feedback so we can improve them.
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RoboLinux is a robust Linux desktop solution for a home office, as well as for SOHO and enterprise users looking for a well-protected migration path away from other operating systems. Its modified traditional desktop design and built-in virtual machine packages for running windows XP and Windows 7 from within the Linux desktop make it an easy and reliable option.
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In today’s Linux news, LinuxInsider has a review of RoboLinux saying it “smooths the Linux migration path.” Makulu Linux 6.1 is said to be “big, beautiful, and fun.” A new flaw has been patched and Shawn Powers discusses the new Linux professional.
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New Releases
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Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 5.0.1. With this release we bring some much needed overhaul and advancements to our Linux desktop to make it the most stable, and easiest to use yet.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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I’ve added to the Steam package repository for Fedora an alternative kernel module for xpad, the X-Box gamepad driver. This variant contains patches created by Valve to improve the driver and its behaviour.
The module is available in both akmod (RPMFusion) and dkms package formats.
This made my 3rd party X-Box controller work without any issue in Steam games and in the Big Picture Mode interface!
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This new design allows for a greater amount of detail when glancing at your notifications, rather than just an icon, and the number of unread notifications. The upstream developers seem to be targeting getting this new design implemented for GNOME 3.14, so hopefully we should see this in Fedora 21 Workstation.
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Debian Family
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With it having been since late last year when trying out the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD variant that pairs Debian’s GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel in place of Linux, I ran some fresh trials on one of our test-beds this week.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to Alan Pope, one of the Ubuntu developers, The Calendar, Calculator and Music applications, part of the Ubuntu Touch Core Apps have received support for the Click Store, meaning that this apps can be easily kept up to date via the Click Store update manager, without needing a second developer to authorize the process.
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As you may know, Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn was temporary scheduled for release on the 16th of October 2014, but now the official date has been decided, Ubuntu 14.10 will be released on the 23rd of October, 2014.
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OpenProducts is prepping an Ubuntu-based private file and email server called OPI with LUKS-based microSD encryption, and optional USB or cloud backup.
Like Sher.ly’s recently announced Sherlybox, the OpenProducts OPI device runs Linux, and is intended to enable a private cloud controlled solely by the user. While the Sherlybox is more of a network attached storage (NAS) device with optional onboard storage, OPI is a multifaceted, secure server that offers NAS-like access to external storage. Unlike the Lima device, which depends on USB storage, OPI instead uses encrypted microSD storage.
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Taking place next week from 10 to 12 June is the next Ubuntu Developer Summit where plans about Ubuntu 14.10 with regard to Mir, Unity 8, Ubuntu Phone, and other topics will be discussed by developers.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Ubuntu distribution features numerous flavors, like KDE, Xfce, and LXDE, but not all the major desktop environments are used. It looks like a new one is brewing, based on MATE.
Ever since the introduction of Unity, some of the Ubuntu users have been pining after GNOME 2, the desktop environment in use until Ubuntu 11.04 arrives. It looks like it had a lot of fans and a part of the Linux community is still hoping that the good days will return.
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Qnap unveiled a Linux-based, SOHO-focused “TS-X51 Turbo NAS” device with 2-8 HDD bays, plus private cloud sharing, video transcoding, and virtualization.
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The AllJoyn open source project is the core interoperability framework hosted by the AllSeen Alliance and works on Linux, Android, iOS and many other operating systems and platforms. This ability to discover, connect and interoperate regardless of the OS or manufacturer will enable a simple, seamless and universal experience for consumers and businesses.
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SoftBank and Aldeberan have teamed up on a Linux-based, $1,930 personal robot named Pepper that can read emotions and respond autonomously.
As we gradually approach the “singularity” when robots overtake human intelligence, we often comfort ourselves in believing robots will never duplicate our often troublesome capacity for emotion. Yet such James Kirkian sentiments may prove suspect as roboticists make robots more sensitive to emotions while using emotional expression to communicate.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung and Barnes & Noble announced on Thursday a co-branded device called the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, a 7-inch reading-focused tablet designed to compete with the Kindle Fire HDX and the Nexus 7. It’s the first sign of life in some time for the Nook brand, the lineup of ebook readers and tablets that have been consistently great but never popular enough to unseat Amazon as king of the reading device. Now, however, with the combined retail and marketing weight of Samsung and Barnes & Noble, the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook may have the might to find a place once again. (And there’s only the slightest irony in the fact that Microsoft owns part of the Nook brand, meaning it now owns yet another Android device.)
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At the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, Samsung unveiled the first smartphone to run the Linux-based Tizen mobile operating system. In this video, CNET reporter Jessica Dolcourt walks through the phone’s features and demonstrates its camera capabilities.
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Some time ago, I read Jos’ “meta” blog post. Jos argues that contributors to free software projects should blog more regularly. In my own “meta blog” post, I will confirm everything that Jos writes and share a few of my own thoughts on why blogging is important for everyone who is part of a free software community.
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Many individuals may want to contribute to Linux or some open-source software project. However, many people may not be sure where to start or how to help. Others may not know computer programming and feel that there is no way they can contribute. Well, guess what? There are many ways anyone can contribute to Linux directly or some open-source software (OSS).
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LinkedIn has overhauled its search engine infrastructure in favor of a new system dubbed Galene, a homegrown engine designed to improve search results and problems with maintenance, the company plans to announce Thursday.
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They’re routine activities for people, but this was a Willow Garage PR2 alpha robot. By navigating through eight doors and using nine outlets, it notched an important milestone—using the Robot Operating System (ROS) to accomplish its complex mission.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has just received another update for the 36 Beta branch of the software.
The Google developers have launched a new version of their Chrome browser, but this is not the stable branch, which means that you shouldn’t rush to replace your current one. There still are a number of stability problems, but the development is progressing quite nicely.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Mirantis announced version 5.0 of its OpenStack distribution. This version is based upon OpenStack Icehouse and is designed to play well in VMware vCenter environments. I’ve spoken with company executives from time to time and have always come away impressed with their understanding of the market and OpenStack technology.
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The Hadoop Summit went on this week in San Jose, California, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, sponsored by Hortonworks and Yahoo. There were some interesting keynotes, including one from Microsoft on “Transforming data into action using Hadoop, Excel, and the Cloud,” and Red Hat officials delved into “Enterprise Hadoop and the open hybrid Cloud.” At the Summit, it was clear that Hadoop has become a true open source success story. It’s also driving down enterprise storage costs.
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During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.
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During the course of the last twelve months, the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open source cloud technology have been reporting their progress—with the help of their partners—towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives.
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With Hewlett-Packard’s recent announcement of HP Helion, there are questions lingering about how the company can compete in the public cloud market, while using OpenStack as a way to get into the enterprise.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers from The Document Foundation have released a new build in the LibreOffice 4.3 Beta branch, bringing even more changes than the latest update in the series. It looks like 4.3 will be quite interesting, but it’s going to take a while until it’s released.
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Education
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Two years ago, when the Raspberry Pi launched, it was with the intention of improving IT education in the UK. Since then more powerful, better connected or cheaper boards have come onto the market, but the Pi retains its position as the white knight of ICT teaching.
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BSD
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According to the developers, the distribution is based on FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE, but it looks like that there is still room for improvements. The developers have made a few important changes and it’s recommended to update.
“In preparation for the next release we have been fine tuning some of the new features and making sure the loose ends are tied up. We were also able to close out a good amount of trac tickets this week and commit the fixes for 10.0.2,” reads the official announcement.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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One year ago today, an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden went public with his history-changing revelations about the NSA’s massive system of indiscriminate surveillance. Today the FSF is releasing Email Self-Defense, a guide to personal email encryption to help everyone, including beginners, make the NSA’s job a little harder. We’re releasing it as part of Reset the Net, a global day of action to push back against the surveillance-industrial complex.
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Today we’re joining our allies at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in kicking off the Tor Challenge, an effort to strengthen the global Tor network that protects Internet traffic from surveillance.
Tor is a publicly accessible, free software-based system for anonymizing Internet traffic. Tor relies on thousands of computers around the world called relays, which route traffic in tricky ways to dodge spying. The more relays, the stronger and faster the network.
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Public Services/Government
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How did Australia scale up to cope with all of its public research agencies at the same time? FutureGov spoke with Allan Williams, Associate Director, Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) to find out how they did this.
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Long-time readers of this column may remember the great Digital Economy Bill saga back in 2010, which culminated in one of the most disgusting episodes in recent Parliamentary history, with the Bill being approved by a near-empty House of Commons in the dying hours of the last government, and with no substantive debate whatsoever. The result was an appalling piece of legislation, whose putrefying corpse is still polluting the UK’s digital landscape, acting as an ever-present reminder of just how badly the Labour treated the online world when it was in power.
Labour is now out of power, and trying to get back into power. I leave readers to decide for themselves whether it would be better or worse than the present incumbents. Instead, I want to concentrate on two initiatives that the Labour Party is taking to help it come up with some decent policies for the digital world.
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Openness/Sharing
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People from around the open source community will share with us, starting on Monday, how open source is being used to better and improve the world of science—in areas of academia, research, access, software, and more.
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Comics legend leading Electricomics project that aims to revolutionise comics on mobiles and tablets with new app
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Standards/Consortia
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The project is a free (Mozillla Public License v2) node-based compositor that relies on OpenColorIO for color management, OpenImageIO for file formats support, and Qt for user interface. It also works with 32bit float per channel precision and supports OFX plugins, both free and commercial.
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The adopter program lets potential adoptees run the OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance test for possible certification as their driver’s implementation being conformant to the official specification. The ES 3.1 test is obviously built atop the existing OpenGL ES 3.0 test.
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Hardware
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This is a quick unboxing video of the Intel NUC device that was given out to attendees of the Tizen Developer Conference 2014, and represents reference hardware that developers can use Tizen Common to test and develop their applications with.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The language is the language of intelligence service tasking memoranda, which Obama is consciously or unconsciously reproducing.
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Transparency Reporting
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I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage.
Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Fox News hosts or guests cited a discredited report by the Chamber of Commerce seven times, even though it studied a scenario far stricter than the actual rule from the EPA. According to the executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is “dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries.”
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Finance
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The New York Times (6/4/14) took a look at one of the economic puzzles of the last few decades: If growth has been strong, why aren’t we seeing a greater reduction in poverty? Interestingly, the research the Times is relying on offers some explanations–ones the paper doesn’t see fit to mention.
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It’s not often that anti-corporate activists are heard from in the corporate media. Do they really need to be called “party poopers”?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The prisoner swap that freed US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has attracted an enormous amount of controversy. Much of it is silly partisanship; Republican Sen. John McCain–remember him, the media’s beloved “straight talker”–endorsed a prisoner swap with the Taliban until he was against it.
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A growing number of mainstream media outlets are holding Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) accountable for flip-flopping on his support of a deal to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from Taliban capitivity.
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Censorship
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In other words, the Guardian, a UK newspaper, is admitting that it simply doesn’t feel safe locating its SecureDrop implementation inside the UK. For people who believe in press freedom in the UK, this is a pretty scary statement — just the latest in the past few years that have really called into question the UK’s support for a free and open press.
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Privacy
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A year ago I stumbled across a story about a worrying new surveillance programme developed by the NSA: Prism. While nobody was identified as the source of the disclosure, I was awestruck by the bravery of this unknown person.
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It’s a year since The Guardian published the first of many news stories about the scale of GCHQ and the NSA’s intrusion into our private lives. Based on the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the stories had global implications, exposing the insecurity of the Internet, straining relationships between the US and its allies and raising questions about who has control over the agencies that purport to protect our freedoms.
And as my conversation in Germany showed, surveillance has damaged global freedom of expression, affecting the way we think when we use the Internet. There have been other consequences to free speech in the UK as well. We have fallen five places in the Freedom House world ranking of countries’ press freedom. This was as a result of legal threats made by the Government against The Guardian, the destruction of hard drives in the newspaper’s offices and the detainment of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald – one of the journalists who broke the Snowden story.
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We get this a lot. There are a million answers (our favorite short one is “Nothing to hide? Really?”) but here’s something thoughtful and comprehensive to share with a friend the next time it comes up. The short version? None of the freedom and progress we’ve won over the past century would have been possible without the freedom to change things (starting with our own lives first) that privacy gives us.
Imagine a world where you were constantly being judged by everyone around you, suffering immediately, or years down the road, for anything you did or said that was unusual, unpopular, or against the rules. In that kind of world, social and economic progress grinds to a halt, because everyone’s afraid to rock the boat!
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The Free Software Foundation has released a guide to encrypting email to mark one year since the disclosures of NSA blanket surveillance by analyst Edward Snowden.
The British newspaper, The Guardian, carried the first story on the topic on June 6, which also happens to be the anniversary of the Normandy landings. Since then, there have been a slew of stories on the topic in newspapers all over the world.
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Vodafone, the world’s largest wireless operator outside China, says governments in some countries have installed permanent listening “pipes” into mobile networks, allowing authorities to monitor all communications and data without alerting or getting cooperation from network operators.
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Pirate Party spokespeople are always ready to give a lively, informed, and often provocative view on the issues of the day. Whether it’s tech politics, civil liberties, the EU, local issues or anything else we’ll have something to say.
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One of the important results of Snowden’s leaks over the last year is that the companies involved are not only becoming more open about how their services have been used by the NSA and GCHQ to spy on people,
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Wires allow agencies to listen to or record live conversations, in what privacy campaigners are calling a ‘nightmare scenario’
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2) As if #1 wasn’t bad enough, Google has chosen to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Namely, the long-standing, mature, fully-debugged gpg2 open source OpenPGP standard codebase is being rejected out of hand, again because they want to do things ‘their’ way by creating a duplicate, immature, bug-laden codebase port of gpg2 as an incomplete subset into slow, interpretive Javascript. That’s right. Javascript. gpg2 is fully compiled C/C++ code.
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A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.
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Civil Rights
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A local New Hampshire police department agreed Thursday to pay a woman who was arrested and charged with wiretapping $57,000 to settle her civil rights lawsuit. The deal comes a week after a federal appeals court ruled that the public has a “First Amendment” right to film cops.
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New York Times reporter James Risen might be headed to jail soon for refusing to reveal the source of his critical reporting on the CIA.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.05.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There’s no such thing as “just a Linux sysadmin,” which is what makes Linux professionals so incredibly valuable. We’ve all been hearing that the demand for Linux professionals is “at its highest ever!!!” for years. In recent years, though, it hasn’t just been Linux nuts like me saying it. You may reference the 2014 Linux Jobs Report by The Linux Foundation and assume they’re biased, but a quick search over at Monster.com shows that the demand for Linux professionals is a real thing.
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Server
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Cavium is aiming be a force of nature in the ARM chips market with its new ThunderX lineup of system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs announced today. Alongside the ThunderX announcement, Cavium is also partnering with multiple Linux distributions, including Fedora and openSUSE.
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The devices support a variety of Linux distros, with KVM and Xen virtualisation support, Java and GCC development support.
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Kernel Space
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The HID/input pull request for the Linux 3.16 merge window has been sent in with some useful additions.
First up for the HID Linux 3.16 pull is an RMI driver, which is for supporting Synaptics RMI4 devices over USB or I2C. The RMI driver right now uses its own RMI4 implementation but will ultimately become a transport driver for the RMI4 library once it’s been merged upstream. This driver was developed by Synaptics along with Red Hat and other independent kernel contributors.
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After a period when Linux kernel updates were smaller than usual, the developers have started once again to send patches and fixes, even for slightly older kernels, like 3.12.x. This is the most advanced Long Term Support kernel version and it’s expected to see more changes than the rest of them.
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The KVM virtualization update for Linux 3.16 brings improvements mostly for less common CPU architectures. With the Linux 3.17 kernel should come more interesting work for x86 fans but KVM on IA64 is likely to get the boot.
Paolo Bonzini sent in the Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes this morning for the Linux 3.16 kernel. This pull request brings a lot of changes for IBM’s S390 architecture with regard to optimizations, support for migration, GDB support, and other improvements. Within the ARM space the only noteworthy change was support for the PSCI 0.2 hyper-call interface.
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There are so many Linux distributions out in the wild, but there is only one de facto thing that they have in common: the Linux kernel. But while it’s often talked about, a lot of people don’t really know exactly what it does.
Let’s take a look at what the Linux kernel really does and why it’s needed, with as few geeky terms as possible.
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This is a short and vague glimpse to the interfaces that the Linux kernel offers to user space for display and graphics management, from the history to what is hot and new, to what might perhaps be coming after. The topic came current for me when I started preparing Weston for global thermonuclear war.
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Graphics Stack
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The Nouveau DRM graphics driver for open-source NVIDIA support hasn’t seen any fundamental re-clocking support breakthroughs for the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel but the support can be easily enabled for select GeForce GPU models.
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In continuation of the Phoronix article from a few days ago about AMD Adds Gallium3D H.264 Profile Encoding Support, that work has now landed within Mesa’s Git code-base.
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X.Org Server 1.16 is expected to be officially released in early July. This major X.Org Server update clears over one thousand compiler warnings, lands in-server GLAMOR support and many GLAMOR-related improvements, works better without root privileges, improves Ultra HD 4K monitor support, and has many other changes.
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Besides being able to try out re-clocking with Linux 3.16, there’s also several other changes lined up for this next kernel release cycle when it comes to the Nouveau driver providing open-source NVIDIA graphics support.
Here’s the key changes currently living within the Nouveau DRM repository that should be pulled into DRM-next and land within the Linux 3.16 merge window:
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Benchmarks
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To complement the initial results yesterday of trying 60+ graphics cards on the open-source Linux GPU drivers — with today being the ten year birthday of Phoronix — here’s the second round of our mass open-source graphics driver testing. While in Wednesday’s article were the raw OpenGL results for the wide-range of graphics processors on the open-source Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau articles, in today’s article are complementary results providing a brief look at the system power consumption, performance-per-Watt, CPU usage, and GPU thermal information when testing the hardware in the same configuration.
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Applications
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I suppose it’s not the fault of todo.txt that lifehacker.com left its greasy fingerprints on it. And perhaps I’m not being fair by immediately assuming that lifehacker.com is just glomming onto an otherwise useful script in hopes of pulling a little traffic its own way.
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Syncthing is a cross-platform peer-to-peer file synchronization client/server application written in Go. Similar to BitTorrent Sync, the tool can be used to synchronize files between computers however, unlike BitTorrent Sync, Syncthing is open source.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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That’s quite a big barrier to break-down, which means it should be easier than ever to use VOGL and that’s impressive work especially as it’s open source.
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Half-Life 2′s VR mode is now out of beta for Linux, so all of you with your fancy-pants head-gear can get swalled up by Half-Life 2′s visuals like you are really there! This update includes Lost Coast, Episode 1, Episode 2, and Half-Life: Source as well.
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A new technology is coming to open source that promises an integrated, high-quality and consistent streaming analytics application framework. The technology, codenamed “jetStream,” will allow original equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors, system integrators, service providers and developers to create Big Data analytics and streaming apps that address business use cases such as real-time analysis for spam filtering, network intrusion detection and analytics, location analytics, and social media market analysis.
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The UNIGINE Engine is built by Unigine Corp., the company behind the Heaven DX11 Benchmark software. The technology they develop is getting better all the time and the updates for the engine always bring numerous improvements.
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The Russian developers responsible for the Unigine Engine have begun to share details on the next iteration of their visually impressive, Linux-friendly game and visualization engine.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Enlightenment 0.19 Alpha was just tagged as the very latest desktop / window manager work that includes improved Wayland support for E19.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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From January 18th to 25th, Kate, KDevelop and Skanlite developers met in Barcelona. The sprint was focused on the work of the upcoming few months, and covered a wide range of aspects of these projects.
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I am Bhaskar Kandiyal a student pursuing masters in Computer Applications and I have been accepted as a student to work for KDE as a part of GSoC this year! My mentors are Jonathan Marten and Kevin Krammer and I would like to thank them for giving me an opportunity to work on this project.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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In the time off over Christmas and the New Year I decided to investigate & learn about the creation of GNOME Shell extensions. As an amateur astronomer, I have an interest in knowing what the “seeing conditions” will be like in the forthcoming nights. There are a number of different websites which provide forecasts, as well as apps for Android and iPhone. I use the Android AstroPanel application quite frequently, but most of the day I’m sitting in front of my laptop and would rather have the data presented there, alongside the regular weather forecast, rather than on my phone. So after finding that extensions are quite simple to create, I decided to create an extension for displaying an astronomical weather forecast for GNOME Shell.
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GNOME Classic is a GNOME 3 desktop designed to offer the look-and-feel of a GNOME 2/MATE desktop, that is, of a traditional or classic GNOME desktop.
It’s for people who are not fond of the default GNOME Shell. It comes with every installation of GNOME 3, offered as an option in the login screen’s Session menu.
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GNOME developers are making some very important changes that will come into effect with the release of the 3.14 branch, and it looks like the notification system will also get an overhaul.
The current notification system that is being used in GNOME is not all that bad, but it could be better. In fact, there are quite a few extensions that change the way notifications are handled in GNOME, so it stands to reason that the developers can make some improvements.
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The GNOME developers have finally decided that the time to upgrade the icon theme has arrived, and it looks like the 3.14 release will see some changes in this department.
One of the first things a user sees when starting a distribution powered by GNOME is the icon set used. You would imagine that developers paid more attention to something that is responsible with first impressions, but you would be wrong.
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Canonical provides a minimal Ubuntu install CD. It’s smaller than the regular installation ISO and it installs a minimal version of the distribution. At its most basic, it gives the user a command line, network connectivity and not much else. From this bare-bones beginning, it’s possible to selectively add components while leaving out most of the cruft that tends to come with a standard distribution.
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There are a lot of tools and applications available to security researchers to conduct penetration testing. Many of those tools run on the open-source Linux operating system, though not every distribution is properly configured to be a proper platform for security research. That’s where the Kali Linux distribution comes into play as an optimized Linux distribution built for security researchers. The Kali Linux 1.0.7 distribution was officially released on May 27, providing users with a number of new features. Kali Linux was originally known as Backtrack Linux, before being renamed and rebuilt in March 2013. One of the primary new features in Version 1.0.7 is the introduction of encrypted USB persistence for Live images. With that feature, Kali Linux can be installed onto a USB storage key, with user storage that can be updated and fully encrypted. One of the key benefits of Kali Linux is that it assembles in one place many tools that security researchers need. Tools for information gathering, vulnerability analysis, Web applications, password attacks, stress testing and even hardware hacking are all included. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features of the Kali Linux 1.0.7 release.
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New Releases
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The Clonezilla team released a new development version for their Linux distro with just a small update for the Debian base and a couple of changes.
“The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository, as of June 2, 2014,” reads the official announcement.
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We are pleased to announce Alpine Linux 3.0.0, the first release in v3.0 stable series.
This is the first release with musl libc instead of uClibc and is not ABI compatible with earlier versions, so special care needs to be taken when upgrading. See http://alpinelinux.org/edge-musl on how to upgrade.
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This has been a rocky couple of weeks for the Makulu Linux distribution, but with the release this week of Makulu 6.1 Xfce, things are looking good again.
With the initial 6.0 Xfce release they switched to the LMDE installer, and that seemed to lead to a plethora of problems. The lead developer, Jacque Raymer, spent what must surely have been a week in Hell fixing the problems, improving the integration of the Mint Installer with the Makulu distributions, and rewriting the post-installation setup scripts. The result of that massive effort is the Makulu Linux Xfce 6.1 release.
The release announcement mentions some of the problems and explains some of the work that went into solving them. The release notes, which are actually the original 6.0 notes with some additional 6.1 information on the end, give a much more complete overview of the 6.x Xfce releases.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Lennart Poettering has added two new service sandboxing features to systemd.
For improving the security of Linux services, Lennart added ReadOnlySystem and ProtectedHome settings for services. ReadOnlySystem will mount /usr and /boot as read-only for the specific service. The ProtectedHome setting mounts /home and /run/user as read-only or replaces it with an empty, inaccessible directory.
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Red Hat, Inc., (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cerner Corporation, a global health care information technology company, has successfully leveraged Red Hat Enterprise Linux to enhance the stability and performance of its world-class application hosting services. Combined with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and improved scalability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped Cerner meet the healthcare industry’s growing demand for IT solutions and services.
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Fedora
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Being a research student is really tough. I mean tough! The most difficult part is keeping up the self discipline, day after day, week after week. As a research student, you make your own schedule, you even make your own syllabus pretty much. I handle the syllabus part just fine, but I struggle with maintaining a disciplined schedule. It takes a while to get into a stable rhythm where you work according to plan and remain focussed on the task at hand, for however long it takes. On the other hand, it’s really easy to upset said rhythm: a late night coding spree, a night out with friends, an unexpected task that makes you diverge from your plan for the day etc. are often sufficient to make me sleep late and mess up the next day. Self discipline requires commitment, and a lot of hard work. Luckily, I’m not alone in this struggle. Here’s a helpful post on improving self discipline: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/self-discipline/. Since I spend most of my day at a computer, I went around and looked for tools that would help me keep focussed on my work; keep me away from distractions (yes, Facebook is a distraction); and help me work according to the plans I make.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mirantis and Canonical today announced a joint collaboration to offer private cloud solutions based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu. The two companies plan to invest in continuously testing compatibility between Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu to ensure that the Mirantis OpenStack distribution works seamlessly with Ubuntu. The companies will also collaborate to offer an OpenStack solution that is fully supported.
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The development of Ubuntu 14.10 is underway for a couple of months already, but things are just starting to shape up for the operating systems from Canonical and it looks like the devs have decided what kernel version they will be pursuing.
It’s difficult to say what Linux kernel will be integrated in Ubuntu 14.10, but some estimates can be done. The Ubuntu developers are looking to settle with Linux kernel 3.16 as their target, but that is not set in stone and things ca still change until the launch.
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Canonical has finally settled on a release date for the Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and the previous, temporary date announced has been changed by a week.
Shortly after the launch of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Canonical started to work on the next version of Ubuntu, 14.10. This is quite normal and the development cycle for Ubuntu is about six months. Also, the version number of Ubuntu says that it has to arrive in October.
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A touch-friendly version of Ubuntu Linux debuts on Dell tablets and laptop hybrid devices at Computex 2014 trade show in Taipei, Taiwan
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The development of Ubuntu Touch is separated on a number of branches, only one being stable. Also, the developers are considering building a separate branch of Ubuntu Touch that will get RTM (release-to-manufacturer) status and will be focused on bug-fixes and stability improvements. So, the developers may use the “derived distribution” feature of Launchpad, which branches the entire distribution or some parts only, into a new distribution.
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The Ubuntu Touch development has been powering on for the last year and a half, and Canonical has made great progress. The Ubuntu for phones operating system has been separated in a number of branches, and one of them is considered stable.
From time to time, the Ubuntu devs promote an image that passes all the internal tests to the stable branch but, for a mass release of the system, the OS will have to be much better.
That is the reason why the technical lead for the Foundations Team, Colin Watson, made a very interesting proposition regarding a new Ubuntu Touch version that will be designated RTM (release-to-manufacture).
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Flavours and Variants
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LINUX MINT 17 has been released, marking a significant milestone because it’s a long term support (LTS) release that will be updated for five years.
Distrowatch reported the news, quoting Clement Lefebvre, who said, “The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.”
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Reviews of Linux Mint 17 dominated the news feeds today. Our round-up includes five reviews, video tour, and a screenshot slideshow. It’s probably not much of a surprise, but consensus is two thumbs up for Linux Mint 17.
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Linux Mint 17 qiana is the latest version of linux mint that based on ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it was released and announced by Linux Mint Developer a few days ago. Linux Mint 17 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2019. In addition, The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016.
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A $149 “Sherlybox” NAS debuted on Kickstarter today, based on a Raspberry Pi core, and offering a secure VPN that creates an invite-only cloud service.
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Over the past couple of years we’ve been able to bring our readers an amazing array of Raspberry Pi projects that we are genuinely proud of. From big projects such as building your own robot and quadcopters down to the little stuff like making melodies with Sonic Pi or making Pong.
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Arynga, Inc. , an innovator and leader in the delivery of intelligent vehicle software management solutions, announced its recent partnership with the Embedded Software Division of Mentor Graphics® , a leader in Linux-based infotainment, automotive software and network design. The two companies publicized this partnership today at the 2014 Telematics Update Conference in Detroit, where Mentor debuted the integration of CarSync™ , Arynga’s software update management platform, with the Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) .
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Enea (NASDAQ OMX Nordic: ENEA), a leading operating system solution vendor for telecom infrastructure equipment, today announced its partnership with the Linux Foundation concerning embedded Linux training courses. Enea is one of four announced training partners to date, and can thereby offer Linux professionals the full range of Linux Foundation courses, in addition to its own training curriculum.
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Embedded Linux development and commercial support for the AMD G-Series family is available through Mentor Embedded Linux and Sourcery CodeBench, as well as no-cost Mentor Embedded Linux Lite.
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The talks cover a wide range of challenges and issues associated with porting Linux or Android to new embedded hardware platforms and SoCs. Topics include overviews of Buildroot, Yocto, and the Device Tree; discussions of issues such as SMP support and boot-time reduction; and an example of supporting a new ARM-based SoC from Allwinner.
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If you’re anything like us – and dear Lord we hope you are not – you sometimes sit staring at your Raspberry Pi, willing it to do more. Unfortunately our mental prowess is not powerful enough to materialise extra features or tweak the performance of the ARM chip, so we instead turned to the internet and looked for ways to upgrade our Pi.
We came away with ten items that can help make your Raspberry Pi usage just that little bit better; from the simplest of USB cable switches to full-on touch screen LCD displays for the Pi. We then wrote a feature about it which you can read all about in the latest issue of Linux User & Developer.
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Phones
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In mobile we are losing the free world called the Web and the Net. How do we save it?
Already most of us spend more time on mobile devices than we do on desktops and laptops, put together. We also can do a lot more stuff, in a lot more places, on mobile devices than on computers. There were more than a million iOS apps on the shelves of Apple’s store in October 2013, and I’m guessing there are at least that many Android apps on Google’s shelves by now.
Meanwhile, app development on computers is slacking off—so is Web development, except as required to accessorize mobile apps. And on mobile devices, use of the Web is fading as well. According to Flurry Analytics, the Web’s share of mobile use dropped from 20% in 2013 to 14% in 2014. In “The Decline of the Mobile Web”, Chris Dixon writes.
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Android TV “certainly shows Google’s character as an organization,” said Brett Sappington, director of research for Parks Associates. “I don’t know of any other organization that would take three tries to get it right. Google embraces risk more than other organizations do.” The challenge is getting the mix of user interaction and ease of use right, he added.
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Ballnux
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The first smartphone running the Linux-based Tizen OS is here, even if it will likely be a long time before most of us can get our hands on it. But forget about phones – Tizen is also about cars, TVs, home automation, wearables, and more.
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Hey developers, do you want another good reason to join the Tizen Store and sell your applications? During the Tizen Developer Conference the Tizen store has launched a great revenue share promotion in which you receive 100% of the sales revenue for applications and In App Purchase sold during the promotion period. You get all the money for a full year. Check below for additional information
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Upstream is a new podcast featuring interviews and conversations with people who are moving open source forward. The podcast is produced by Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards team. In their first episode, Joe Brockmeier talks with Leslie Hawthorn of Elasticsearch about her Sunday morning keynote at the Twelfth Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 12x) in February this year. In Why Checking Your Privilege is Good For You, Leslie asks how we can use our level of privilege—whether in our field, in our community, or in our job—to help others, with lower levels of privilege in said field, community, or workplace, to get involved and succeed.
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Red Hat has announced the general availability of Software Collections 1.1, their update of common web development tools, dynamic languages, and open-source databases. Red Hat Software Collections provide newer versions of these key open-source packages than what is offered by default in RHEL while being backed by three years of Red Hat support.
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A common challenge to the security of open-source software is the ability of teams to focus on writing and testing the code. Counter this with organizations that dedicate entire teams solely to testing and improving the quality of the product.
As James pointed out in our discussion, the difference is often the passion. OSS projects appeal to the craft of solving a problem. It provides an opportunity to contribute, to collaborate, to improve.
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OSSEC is a cross-platform host intrusion detection system. Hence it’s also known as OSSEC HIDS. It is Free software released under the GNU General Public License, and features log analysis, file integrity monitoring, rootkit detection and real-time active responses. If you intend to run a server anywhere, this is one of the first applications you want to install on it.
OSSEC is a much better security application than Fail2ban, another popular host intrusion prevention application. OSSEC offers a centralized management server with support for agent and agentless monitoring. A complete description of its features are available here.
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Events
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Kaltura Connect is all about online video. From June 13-18 in New York City, 1,000+ attendees including developers, experts, thoughts leaders and executives from small businesses to global enterprises, universities, and educational organizations will gather to join insightful sessions, workshops, round-tables, and parties about new products and a wide range of topics. Topics include OTT TV, video-based sales and marketing, video-powered learning and training, creating social and personalized experiences with video, the use of video by large cloud vendors, air droids and more.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome, the world’s most loved web browser has come a long way. Once touted as a faster alternative to Firefox has turned itself into a significant player in the OS marketplace. With the launch of Chromebooks, Google has ensured that pretty much everything you do on your desktop can be done in your web browser. Taking this vision further, the search behemoth turned the web browser into a full-fledged operating system. Running on top of Linux, Google Chrome OS has become a crowd favorite. Its ability to sync seamlessly across all devices has made the initial naysayers give Chrome OS a second chance.
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Mozilla
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Video game creators will be pleased to hear that the WebGL PlayCanvas Engine has been open-sourced. Mozilla announced the move today on its developer blog and you can access the entire engine sourcebase right now over on GitHub.
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I am a hipster Flash hater. I hated Flash before Steve Jobs told it was bad. I hate Flash before Adobe said there would be no Flash 7 for Linux. I don’t have Flash on my machine. I even coined “fc;dw”.
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Mozilla is starting a new research project targeted to usher in better security on the Internet. The Cyber Security Dephi initiative, announced in a blog post from advocacy director Dave Steer, will leverage resources from experts in academia and computer security companies to develop new online security strategies.
The announcement comes alongside Mozilla’s Reset the Net initiative, which calls for a day of action to improve security against widespread surveillance.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Open source Big Data vendor Talend has rolled out version 5.5 of its data integration platform. And speed is the headlining feature of this new release, which promises Hadoop performance increases of 45 percent.
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Earlier this week, Mirantis and Canonical announced a joint collaboration to offer private cloud solutions based on Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu. The two companies plan to invest in continuously testing compatibility between Mirantis OpenStack and Ubuntu to ensure that the Mirantis OpenStack distribution works seamlessly with Ubuntu.
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CMS
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The founder of open-source Drupal content management system details how the 100-year evolution of photography can inform open-source development and the upcoming Drupal 8 release.
It took more than 100 years of evolution for the modern photography industry to reach its current state, and there are lessons from that century that apply to the modern world of cloud and Web development too. That’s the message delivered by Dries Buytaert, founder of the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS), during his keynote address at the Drupalcon conference June 3 in Austin, Texas.
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BSD
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FreeBSD developers haven’t forgotten about the 9.x branch of their operating system, even if they have already released 10.0. This is a strange and not very common situation, where a development branch is actually lower in version than the latest stable.
This only shows the commitment of the developers to the people who are still using 9.x and who want to continue employing it. This means that several updates are needed and 9.3 Beta 1 is quite a big release.
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Binary dports packages for 3.8 have been built; they are available for download. (link goes to release versions of the packages.
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As expected, DragonFlyBSD 3.8 has been released. This release brings several new features to the popular BSD operating system but the 3.8 series will be the last to support 32-bit releases.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The guide recommends free software tools like GnuPG and Enigmail to protect email communications from prying eyes.To accompany the guide, the FSF also released a shareable infographic.
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Public Services/Government
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Australia’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), John Sheridan, today clarified the government’s plans to release all code from its proposed new content management system (CMS) to the open source community.
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Open Enterprise has been charting the continuing rise of open source software for many years. In numerous areas, its dominance is evident, but there’s one – local government – where its success has been more limited. The most famous example of a city moving to open source is Munich, but even that has been a huge struggle to complete:
More than ten years ago the city of Munich took a decision that was bound to put its IT administrators in the spotlight. At that time it was clear that Microsoft would soon stop supporting Windows NT 4.0, the operating system that ran most of the more than 10,000 desktop machines in the Bavarian capital. The IT specialists and politicians in Munich had to decide: a migration was inevitable, but to where?
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Openness/Sharing
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Tesla held its annual shareholder meeting in northern California yesterday, and there were a few important messages for anyone interested in the entrepreneur’s vision for the future.
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Security
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A new study from Netskope and Ponemon Institute has revealed that IT and security professionals are expecting cloud services to increase the likelihood and economic impact of data breaches.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s long quest to make key rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) public is nearing its end.
EFF lawyer Mark Rumold faced off with Department of Justice attorney Steven Bressler yesterday in the same courtroom they had sparred in 14 months ago. They were overseen by the same judge, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers.
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One year ago day by day, a courageous young man named Edward Snowden sacrificed most of his life and his freedoms to show us the crude reality of the world we are living in. His ongoing revelations make us learn and understand how our relationship to technology has changed forever, and how the trust we place in machines shall never be the same. Edward Snowden also shows us a path for taking back control of the machines, an urgent task that no one today can ignore.
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It’s been almost a year since the June 5, 2013 revelation that the US government was collecting, in bulk, the telephone metadata of every telephone call to and from the United States. The National Security Agency leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden would eventually expose surveillance programs, including Prism, XKeyscore, Tempora, and Muscular.
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A year ago today, June 5 2013, The Guardian, a UK newspaper, published the first of its exclusives based on documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Leaving aside the incendiary debate over whether Mr Snowden is a traitor and enemy of the state or a brave citizen who liberated millions of people from illegal surveillance activities, there is no argument over just how significant his activities were in the context of data security. That the phrase “post-Snowden” has passed into common parlance among security professionals is evidence enough.
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OpenSSL 1.0.0m and OpenSSL 0.9.8za also contain a fix for CVE-2014-0076: Fix for the attack described in the paper “Recovering OpenSSL ECDSA Nonces Using the FLUSH+RELOAD Cache Side-channel Attack” Reported by Yuval Yarom and Naomi Benger. This issue was previously fixed in OpenSSL 1.0.1g.
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The good news is that these attacks need man-in-the-middle position against the victim and that non-OpenSSL clients (IE, Firefox, Chrome on Desktop and iOS, Safari etc) aren’t affected. None the less, all OpenSSL users should be updating.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Kiev’s Junta “anti-terrorist op” has aimed principally to retake administrative or symbolic buildings held occupied by disaffected people in the Donbass region, which strongly reject the idea of being ruled by a government instrumented by fascists and Nazis. These buildings are meant to be retaken by force, as the Ukraine government refuses talks with the political representatives of the people of Donetsk, Luhansk, etc, and which have established autonomous administrations after their respective referendums on sovereignty.
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Translation – ”Thanks for sending so many young Scots to die in Iraq and Afghanistan for us. Look forward to seeing them die in Syria or Iran soon. Keep the cannon fodder coming. Sorry have to nip off now to approve some teenagers on a drone kill list. Keep storing those nuclear warheads for us.”
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Israel launched air attacks against Egypt’s airfields at 7.45am on 5th June 1967. Within a couple of hours most of the Egyptian air forces was destroyed on the ground. At the same time, Israeli tanks scythed across the Sinai Desert heading for the Suez Canal and its troops initiated fighting on the borders with Syria and Jordan. False reports, meanwhile, claimed that Egypt had launched a major attack on Israel, which was fighting back in self-defence, a familiar refrain ever since. By mid-morning, Foreign Minister Abba Eban was telling the US ambassador in Tel Aviv “an ever larger curtain of lies” and claimed that Israel had “no intention of taking advantage of the situation to enlarge its territory.” Another lie.
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In a nice li’l tweet, King railed against the incredibly controversial swap of five Gitmo prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier kept prisoner-of-war by a Taliban-aligned group in Afghanistan for the past five years. Upon his return, details have emerged that seemingly indicate Bergdahl defected from his troop before his capture, while the official narrative has always been that he was “taken in battle.”
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The fact that finding yourself on a police watchlist can lead to a death penalty meted out on the other side of the world should worry our attorney-general. Why doesn’t it?
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The Prime Minister’s claim that Kiwis are being converted to radical Islam and joining al-Qaida lacks credibility…
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A Christchurch academic and lawyer has accused the Prime Minister of washing his hands of the killing of a New Zealander (Muslim bin John) and an Australian (Salma al Russi) in a US drone strike in Yemen.
Speaking at a public lecture in Christchurch, David Small said that the moment New Zealand intelligence agencies hand over information to a country with an active kill-first-ask-questions-later drone campaign, the New Zealand government has a responsibility to ensure that the subject of that intelligence is not subject to extra-judicial killing.
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The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has ordered the police to register a First Information Report (FIR) against former Central Investigation Agency’s (CIA) station chief Jonathan Banks for his involvement in 2009 drone strike that killed family members of a tribesman.
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Campaigners say court decision could open floodgates to more criminal cases against controversial strikes and call for international arrest warrant against American spy
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Islamabad’s High Court on Thursday ordered police to press charges against the CIA’s former station chief for murder, conspiracy and waging war against Pakistan.
Judge Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui issued the orders following a 2010 court petition by drone activist Kareem Khan, whose brother and teenage son were killed in a US drone strike in North Waziristan tribal district.
The former top spy left Pakistan in December 2010 after his identity was disclosed through the court case, and there is little expectation Islamabad will seek his return to face charges.
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There is, in fact, an easy way for the Department of Defense to fulfill the president’s wishes. It could release redacted investigations of incidents in which civilians were killed during combat engagements involving the U.S. military. Although this is not well known, the DoD has conducted thousands of these investigations, generally in a thorough and professional manner. More important, most of them are already releasable by request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
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The commander, identified as Jafaar al-Shabwani, was believed to be one of the four people killed in the strike, though the identities of the other three are completely unknown beyond being labeled “suspects.”
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Having lost faith in the ability of U.S. courts to provide justice and accountability for their relatives’ deaths, the family members of three U.S. citizens killed by drone strikes in Yemen in 2011 have decided not to appeal a court decision dismissing their lawsuit challenging the killings.
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The Taliban warned the U.S. during prisoner-exchange negotiations that led to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl that U.S. drone strikes had come close on several occasions to killing the soldier while he was in captivity, U.S. officials said.
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An attack by a suicide bomber on the home of the CIA-linked General Hifter who is leading a campaign against the government and Islamic militias called Operation Dignity killed three people.
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His two decades in exile in United States gave rise to accusations he was linked to the CIA first from the Gaddafi regime, and then from rival rebels.
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But he remains a figure of suspicion for many veterans of the uprising, with his U.S. exile leading some of them to accuse him of links to the CIA, something also claimed by Gadhafi regime.
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Al-Masry Al-Youm asked about his long period of exile in Virginia, where the CIA’s headquarters are located. He maintained a steady tone, confirming that [claims he collaborated with the Americans] were lies launched by his opponents in the Muslim Brotherhood. He explained that if he was going to spy for anyone, it would have been [former President] Moammar Gadhafi when he was at his peak.
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The 117 Irish soldiers based in Syria as part of the UN Disengagement Observer Force – the thin blue line separating Syrian and Israeli forces on the Golan Heights since 1974 – are coming under attack from Syrian rebels armed, trained and paid by the US, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Government needs to protest loudly to these countries to protect the lives of its soldiers and the aims of the UNDOF mission.
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The right-wing media is denouncing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl as a “deserter” who wasn’t worth ransoming from the Taliban, but the real villains are the architects of the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars who frivolously put the many Bergdahls in harm’s way, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
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Transparency Reporting
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What separates a democracy from a dictatorship? Government transparency, among other things. Here’s a new way to help get the important stories told.
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NSA whistleblowers William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe will speak at the news conference along with EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, a member of the ExposeFacts editorial board.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Palm oil is everywhere. This globally traded vegetable oil is found in thousands of products you buy off the shelf, like ice cream, chocolate, biscuits, toothpaste, soap, cosmetics. Palm oil is in hundreds of products we routinely buy yet, environmentally, it’s incredibly destructive. Although palm oil is relatively cheaper to produce, animals and indigenous communities suffer tremendously due to the cultivation. Studies have proven that while palm oil is a very successful ingredient it has proven to be detrimental to the well being of the orangutans, causing a decrease of at least 90% along with other species
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The Keystone XL oil pipeline would be vulnerable to attacks threatening water supplies for millions of homeowners and farmers, according to a report by NextGen Climate, a political group led by billionaire activist Tom Steyer.
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Censorship
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Obama’s first job after college in 1983 was with the CIA front company Business International Corp.
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We all know that China and their “Great Firewall” of censorship exist and we have a general idea of just how deep the censorship goes. We’re also aware of the justifications that the Chinese government use for this censorship, including the notions that they’re just protecting their innocent citizens from all the evil on the internet, as well as censorship committed by some of their antagonists (including the USA). But if you thought that this censorship was chiefly about pornography or current events, you’re quite mistaken.
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We should begin to expect more transparency as more information is revealed in the wake of the revelations that the NSA has been spying on citizens, by recording their telecommunications and digital transmissions.
At the moment, the ruling is directed at Europeans, and Google is reported to be receiving more than 10,000 daily requests. However, globally, other citizens can also expect the effect to be assimilated throughout the virtual ecosystem, as the discussion about online privacy is ignited.
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Shares in Russian internet search engine Yandex will begin trading in Moscow on Wednesday in a move that will please the Kremlin and could shield the Nasdaq-listed company from any tightening of Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia.
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Privacy
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End-to-end encryption offers another layer of security by encrypting data leaving a user’s browser until it is decrypted by the recipient. The service has been available for some time via tools including Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG), but such tools have failed to become mainstream as they require a higher level of technological know-how.
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When you are on-line, act consciously, and think before you do. Guard your privacy and respect that of others. No, Edward Snowden is not a traitor. He sacrificed a lot in order to get the truth out there, and we should have respect for that, too.
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A federal judge raised privacy questions while dismissing a lawsuit filed by an Idaho woman against President Barack Obama regarding the collection of cellphone information by the National Security Agency.
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We’ve written plenty about the case Smith v. Maryland, which established the dangerous Supreme Court precedent that there is no 4th Amendment expectation of privacy to be found in any data or information you give to a third party. Judge Richard Leon, back in December, ruled that the NSA surveillance efforts were so different from the situation in Smith (involving police getting dialing information on a single person from the phone company) that it wasn’t an applicable precedent in the case in front of him, brought by Larry Klayman. That case is now being appealed.
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A run-of-the-mill public records request about cell phone surveillance submitted to a local police department in Florida has unearthed blatant violations of open government laws, including an incredible seizure of state records by the U.S. Marshals Service, which is part of the Justice Department. Today the ACLU and the ACLU of Florida filed an emergency motion in state court to preserve the public’s right of access to government records.
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In terms of collecting images, no one stated anything to the contrary. The collection is likely operating like many other NSA collections — on a large scale that increases the likelihood that incidental collection of American data and content will occur. The “appropriate legal steps” are the same ones that have been used as talking points over the last year.
Likewise, no one suggested in the article that the NSA targeted US citizens. In fact, one of the biggest complaints about the NSA’s programs is the fact that they’re clearly untargeted. The NSA doesn’t select a person and start the surveillance from that point. The surveillance is pervasive and ongoing and any selection tends to occur long after tons of data/communications have been collected. It’s the after-the-fact nature of the programs that makes them so dangerous. Further, the lack of solid minimization rules means tons of data from bulk collections sits around in NSA servers just waiting for someone to find a reason to look through it. So, while the NSA may not “unilaterally target American citizens,” it has the mechanisms in place to do so.
As for Roger’s last non-denial, it was clearly stated in the New York Times article that there was no indication that the NSA had access to US drivers license databases. Rogers’ last denial addresses “some people” (whoever they are) that have a clearly wrong interpretation of the leaked documents, but doesn’t address what was actually written. And it completely avoids the undeniable fact that, with as many “input” channels as the NSA has, collecting the sort of information a drivers license database holds would be simple enough, even without direct access.
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The volume of email cloaked in encryption technology is rapidly rising as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major Internet companies try to shield their users’ online communications from government spies and other snoops.
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Edward Snowden’s recent revelation that the NSA can bug cell phones even when they are turned off left some experts split on whether it is true or not. But a group of hackers claim that at least there is a way to protect your phone from spies’ ears.
Snowden, who exposed the American government’s secret mass surveillance program, has been making headlines in the media for almost a year with shocking details about the scale of snooping by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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It was last October that the Washington Post mentioned about leaked slides from the NSA’s top secret MUSCULAR data interception program, sharing details on how the NSA was able to step in and intercept data from Google’s cloud servers through an exploitation in an SSL gap. That particular slide has proven to raise a fair amount of controversy, especially so where Google employees are concerned. The comment read, “SSL added and removed here :)”, and did not go endear itself to Google employees. Of course, revenge is a dish best served cold, and Google has not forgotten about that, having hit back in a latest Easter Egg in their latest email encryption plug-in.
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US Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday he was reconstituting a task force to coordinate the work of several Department of Justice agencies on thwarting homegrown terrorism within the US.
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Cheers and laughter could be heard late last night through the walls of a small Hamburg office as staff celebrated an unlikely win; their punt to build a NSA-subverting server that encrypts everything a small business might do in the office had made bank with a record-breaking $US1 million in crowdfunding sourced in 89 mins.
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Security technologist Bruce Schneier tells DW why he finds it curious that the German BND is getting a free pass on surveillance and why Europe should take the lead on protecting privacy in the digital age.
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Last week, leaked secret documents revealed that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German equivalent to the NSA, has asked the German Parliament for an additional 300 million Euros to extend its surveillance program in an effort to rival that of the U.S. and U.K.
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The government’s secret surveillance program becomes an issue in the Portland case
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The purported plot was actually an FBI sting and the bomb was a fake.
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The purported plot was actually an FBI sting and the bomb was a fake.
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A year has passed since Edward Snowden started telling us what really was going on in the world. Since that date, various holders of power have been struggling – without success – to reclaim the control of the narrative, the control of the news flow.
But in the age of the net, the power of narrative rests squarely with the many, rather than with the elite. People have become aware of mass surveillance, even if they haven’t become aware of its full consequences yet. But the story is out. The proverbial cat isn’t just out of the bag, but has left the entire city and is halfway across the continent. This hasn’t prevented an ivory tower establishment from playing “no see, no hear, no speak” monkey games, pretending Snowden does not exist and that people don’t already know what we know.
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It’s the day we began to learn just how incredibly intrusive government spying on average Americans had become in this technological age. June 5, 2013 – the day we began to understand what was at stake – our freedom, our privacy, our personal lives. The day the first of many news stories – courtesy of Edward Snowden – began to paint a picture of a shocking new world.
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US companies such as Yahoo Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Microsoft Corp and Facebook Inc threaten the cyber-security of China and its Internet users, said the People’s Daily on its microblog, in comments echoed on the front page of the English-language China Daily.
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As you read this, the United States will be waking up to the one-year anniversary of Edward Snowden’s first leaks on his country’s surveillance programs to the world’s newspapers.
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A year after Edward Snowden revealed the vast scope of the US data dragnet, America is still reeling from the fallout, which damaged ties abroad and triggered fears of “Big Brother” government.
In the latest twist since Snowden handed over thousands of US intelligence secrets last June, Germany has launched a criminal probe into snooping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
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The National Security Agency’s digital face book may or may not include images scraped from Facebook. An agency spokeswoman declined to divulge that information to The New York Times.
The agency has managed to intercept millions of images, “including about 55,000 ‘facial recognition quality images,’” according to documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Those documents describe the trove of data as presenting “tremendous untapped potential,” the Times reported.
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Thomas Drake: Well it generated a worldwide discussion and debate about surveillance and what is at stake in terms of individual sovereignty and privacy and how far the US in particular in partnership with others, including other countries and other security services as well as major telecommunication concerns and internet service providers in gathering data, collecting data and finding out everything there is to know about us. And much of it has been conducted in secret, and he was able are able to bring out significant documentation, prime evidence to actually prove it.
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Reports began to surface in early April that the IBM’s sale of its x86 server business to Lenovo—which is based in Beijing, China—was getting close scrutiny from U.S. agencies around issues of national security. Government agencies, including the Department of Defense and the FBI, buy x86 servers from IBM, as do the largest telecommunications companies, such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless. – See more at: http://www.eweek.com/servers/ibm-lenovo-server-deal-may-take-longer-than-expected.html#sthash.m6Wan9Dl.dpuf
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The opinion of Edward Snowden is wide ranging. Some call him a traitor, others call him a patriot. The truth sits firmly in the latter. Edward Snowden is a red, white and blue patriot whose act of civil disobedience came at a price everyone should revere.
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The NSA document leaker joins Google, Mozilla, Reddit, and many others in a campaign and day of action that aims to help Internet users “take back” their privacy.
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It was eight years ago that we first learned of a man named Mark Klein. He didn’t work for the government; he worked for the phone company. When he started asking questions about a secret room in the building where he worked, there was no turning back.
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Yesterday, advocates for government transparency argued for the release of more documents that could reveal how the Federal Intelligence Act Surveillance (FISA) Court has provided oversight of the US intelligence community and confirm which telecom companies cooperated with the government. It’s the latest step in an uphill battle that’s been waged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2011 for records they say may reveal disputes between the FISA court and the intelligence community, confirm the existence additional surveillance programs, and provide official acknowledgment of some essential details of known programs that have been already revealed in the media.
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Earth to Glenn Greenwald: If you write a book slamming the New York Times, it’s naïve to expect favorable treatment in the New York Times Book Review. Been there, done that. Twice as a matter of fact.
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Australia ”pleaded” with the US security agency to extend their partnership and subject Australian citizens to greater surveillance, a new book on whistleblower Edward Snowden claims.
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Things seem to have gone downhill since then. One NSA slide details a program called BLARNEY by which the agency pressures such U.S. corporate vassals as AT&T into assisting with the illicit surveillance of their customers. Seeing this for the first time, I had a flash of inspiration. The reader may recall how the ACLU kept trying to sue the NSA for the bulk warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, including presumably those American citizens who work for the ACLU, but the courts wouldn’t grant them standing to launch the suit since all of that was classified and thus couldn’t be revealed in court. What the ACLU needs to do now is track down whoever it is whose homemade St. Patrick’s Day block party invitations the NSA ripped off to get this BLARNEY logo and have them sue for copyright infringement.
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Prof Kevin P.Clements calls for a New Zealand commission of inquiry to re-evaluate the value of the Five Eyes security arrangement.
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As reported earlier this week, the National Security Agency is now collecting photos from online to create a massive facial recognition database. Americans shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads about that, says new National Security Agency director Admiral Michael Rogers, according to Washington Post article today headlined, “New NSA chief seeks to reassure public on surveillance.”
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The new head of the National Security Agency has distanced himself from previous government suggestions that whistleblower Edward Snowden is a foreign spy. Officials including former NSA director Keith Alexander have contended that Snowden may have worked with Russian or other foreign intelligence agencies. But at a public forum with Bloomberg News, new NSA chief Michael Rogers shot down that theory.
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The American Civil Liberties Union is celebrating nearly a year after journalist Glenn Greenwald initiated a deluge of reporting on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, including a cache of NSA documents stolen by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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CCR President Emeritus Michael Ratner and NSA whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney examine the relationship between the NSA and U.S. global dominance, the stance of Democrats and Republicans towards surveillance, and mainstream media coverage of these issues
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A tool to target dissidents
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Google and other companies are using encryption on emails, but they are still not completely private. One thing that many people fail to realize is that the encryption is from the server side. It does not stop those at the email providers from reading the content of emails.
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A pledge for developers and site operators: Here are best-practices for people who make mobile apps, host sites, and write code to make the Internet more secure against mass surveillance. For example, mobile developers can use cert pinning and end-to-end encryption to keep their users safe and private. And websites can use SSL to protect their users’ privacy when they use the net.
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As June 5 approaches — and with it the one year anniversary of the first reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks — the privacy community is calling supporters to redouble efforts to improve the NSA “reform bill,” which I call the USA Freedumber Act, in the Senate.
I explained here why the Senate is unlikely to improve USA Freedumber in any meaningful way. The votes just aren’t there — not even in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Benjamin Franklin said it all: “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.”
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More than 12 years after 9/11, the United States continues to have a foreign policy mindset that demands zero tolerance on terrorism and treats even minor threats like existential challenges. In the pursuit of perfect security and in meeting the demands of a hugely expansive view of American power, the U.S. has failed to consider the ultimate consequences and potential political fallout — both at home and abroad — of what achieving that goal means. And that’s a challenge that goes far beyond the NSA.
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Recent revelations that the government can remotely turn on a phone and listen to conversations come without press examination if this historic spying capability is being misused
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Civil Rights
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Ashley Smith, a nineteen year old, mentally ill, inmate committed suicide while under suicide watch at a Correctional Institute in Canada. Ms. Smith was imprisoned at fifteen for throwing apples at a postal worker. During her imprisonment she suffered multiple cases of emotional and physical abuse. The first and mildest abuse she suffered was being denied sanitary products and adequate toilet paper during her menstrual cycle. The worst abuse she suffered was a combination of emotional and physical, and occurred when Ms. Smith was transferred between nine different institutions seventeen times. When she was transferred between institutes she was restrained by officers so she could be hooded and duct taped to her seat while she pleaded with them to stop hurting her.
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But in a groundbreaking ruling in January, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman granted Daoud’s attorney Thomas Durkin the right to examine secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act records, which Durkin hopes could provide grounds for having the case against Daoud thrown out.
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Daoud was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in September 2012 at the age of 18 after allegedly trying to detonate a device given to him by an undercover agent. He later pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and trying to damage or destroy a building with an explosive.
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Over the weekend the government of Qatar brokered a dramatic deal between the US and the Taliban to swap five Guantánamo prisoners for Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier held as a prisoner of war for almost five years. Flexing his political clout, President Obama demonstrated his ability to navigate with ease through the Congressional obstacles in the way of releasing prisoners from Guantánamo. Some House Republicans accused the President of breaking the law to get his way. But the Obama administration made it clear that the President had added a “signing statement” to the bill restricting the transfer of Guantánamo detainees, saying that the restrictions violated his Constitutional prerogative.
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He’s Venezuela’s democratically elected president. It doesn’t matter. Washington’s dirty war continues.
It’s done so since Chavez’s December 1998 election. He became president in February 1999. He served until his March 5, 2013 death.
He survived Washington’s April 2002 coup attempt. A 64-day 2002 – 03 general strike and oil management lockout.
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President Harry Truman established the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.
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New Labour were the chief culprits in moving Britain away from a liberal democracy and into an authoritarian state.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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I am writing in response to NPRM 14-28 — your request for comments regarding the “Open Internet”.
I am a trained computer scientist and I work in the technology industry. (I’m a software developer and software freedom activist.) I have subscribed to home network services since 1989, starting with the Prodigy service, and switching to Internet service in 1991. Initially, I used a PSTN single-pair modem and eventually upgraded to DSL in 1999. I still have a DSL line, but it’s sadly not much faster than the one I had in 1999, and I explain below why.
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On June 6, during the next Council meeting, ministers will be invited to share their position regarding the proposal for a Regulation on Net Neutrality. After the rise of eurosceptical forces in the recent European elections, will the European governments be ready to support the European Parliament’s vote and defend our freedoms?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Three years ago, we wrote about how Disney applied for a trademark on “SEAL Team 6″ just two days after the Navy SEAL’s Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden. While public outcry resulted in Disney dropping the trademark application a few weeks later, the situation apparently woke up some trademark lawyers at the Pentagon to get busy trademarking.
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Copyrights
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Things have been getting more interesting on the Malibu Media front lately. The company, which is responsible for 40% of all copyright cases, has certainly faced claims of abusive and seriously questionable practices. But some new information suggests it goes much further down the rabbit hole of questionableness. Like Righthaven and Prenda before it, new accusations are coming out about some highly questionable shell games to try to hide what’s really going on.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.04.14
Posted in News Roundup at 10:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Massive open online courses offer IT professionals the opportunity to learn about some of the tech industry’s most in-demand and current topics for free. Available to anyone with a Web connection, MOOCs cover a range of hot tech topics including software defined networking, cloud computing, security, drone development, artificial intelligence and mobile programming.s
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I did a full review of an earlier version of North Korea Linux on Desktop Linux Reviews a while back. There are some interesting and scary videos in the review of what life is like inside of North Korea. I’ll certainly take a pass on running North Korea Linux as my primary distro, but I’m sure it will appeal to somebody out there.
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Desktop
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In a blog post constructed as rhythmic verse, Google has confirmed that Chromebooks–portable computers running the Chrome OS platform–are coming to nine new global regions: Norway, Denmark, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Belgium, New Zealand, and the Philippines. As we’ve reported,
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Server
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The NUCs run Ubuntu server and are storage hosts and the primary interface to the external world. The system has 8x Parallella boards and a shared gigabit Ethernet switch, giving a peak performance of around 208 GFLOPs.
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Kernel Space
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Linux has already transformed data center economics on the server side, and Cumulus Networks is set to do it again – this time through the network. The company behind Cumulus Linux, the first distribution for data center switches and other networking hardware, is part of a broader enterprise movement toward open networking.
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Intel will begin shipping the Core i7 4790K “Devil’s Canyon” processor this month and thanks to Computex now getting underway we’re able to publicly talk about this high-performance chip.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has sent out his various pull requests for the Linux 3.16 kernel. Of the subsystems maintained by Greg KH, the staging area again represents a bulk of the user-interesting changes.
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The way Linux development has worked for the last several years has been relatively straight forward.
Every six to 10 weeks there is a new Linux kernel, with each kernel requiring six to eight release candidates. At the end of the release cycle, Linus Torvalds opens up the ‘merge’ window during which new code is pulled in from the various sub-system maintainer developer trees.
For the Linux 3.16 kernel cycle, that tried and true system will change somewhat.
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Among other pull requests in the past day like the new staging work and the plethora of ARM enhancements, Ingo Molnar sent in his scheduler changes for the Linux 3.16 kernel.
Of the highlights for the scheduler tree with the Linux 3.16 merge window are NUMA scheduling updates for better performance, CPU idle changes to improve the high level idle scheduling logic, standardized idle polling across architectures, and continued work on preparing better power/energy-aware scheduling. Another change to point out is for using the deepest C-state always when in the “freeze” sleep state.
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With the Linux 3.15 kernel expected for release within the next few days, here is a rundown of the top features that are introduced as part of this big kernel release.
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Benchmarks
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I’ve tested over 60 GPUs from the Intel HD Graphics, AMD Radeon, AMD FirePro, and NVIDIA GeForce series to see how their performance is when using the very latest open-source Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.
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Applications
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0.27.1 is more than your traditional point release: 0.27.1 is our best release ever. While it doesn’t have major new user features, it has received over 340 improvements.
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Samba 4.1.8, an app that seamlessly integrates Linux/Unix servers and desktops into Active Directory environments using the winbind daemon, is now available for download.
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Psensor, a hardware temperature monitoring tool, was updated recently with an option to display the temperature on the panel (next to its AppIndicator icon), along with other improvements and bug fixes.
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Proprietary
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Intel has published a new Linux kernel patch-set that adds Quick Assist Technology support to Linux along with a driver to handle their DH895xxC hardware accelerator. This is a new chip for trying to accelerate cryptography and data compression tasks.
Quick Assist Technology is a new Intel technology for better accelerating cryptography and data compression operations. The Linux implementation consists of a kernel driver to connect to the Linux kernel crypto framework and a Linux user-space library with a QuickAssist API for application porting. Intel Linux developers have already patched OpenSSL’s libcrypto and Zlib for taking advantage of this Intel technology.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE Applications 4.13 announcement highlighted the delightful new capabilities of Palapeli, the KDE jigsaw puzzle application. What the announcement did not mention is that the Palapeli maintainer, Ian Wadham, is celebrating 50 years of software experience. He’s ready to hand off Palapeli and his other KDE software development responsibilities. Albert Astals Cid called attention to Ian’s achievements and suggested a Dot interview.
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Amarok is the default application installed with openSUSE but I would certainly recommend using Clementine instead.
Clementine feels lighter, has a nicer interface, the online options work better and there is better support for external audio devices.
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This year, it is besides the recurring multimedia topics, a lot about improving the new KDE Frameworks, the related documentation and the development experience with IDE’s and such.
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The KDE4 series is still actively developed (in August we will see the release of KDE SC 4.14) but the KDE developers have been working long and hard at the next generation desktop. I wrote some generic phrases in the past about KDE Frameworks 5 (the successor to the KDE Platform aka kdelibs) and Plasma Next (the Qt5 based successor of the Plasma Workspaces of KDE4 which uses Qt4 for its graphical splendor).
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Though the Krita team was one of the first to start the tradition of having sprints, with the first Krita Sprint in Deventer, in 2005, Krita sprints are rather infrequent! But, of course, we also meet each other during the more regular Calligra sprints.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.12 was released on March 26 (2014), but it didn’t start shipping on many distributions until very recently. In this post, I’ll let you in on what I think about it; the cool (good) features and those features I think the developers need to take a closer look at and try to make it better and more user-friendly.
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Initially we were thinking to go with libical ( an open source reference implementation of the icalendar data type and serialization format .) But GTG is not a calender, that’s why we dropped the idea.
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There a few reasons why you might want to build your own distribution. You might want to build a custom install CD to match the policy of your organisation. For example, a GNOME desktop with Chrome as the web browser might be the standard desktop where you work. That touches on another motivation for wanting to create a customised installer: sometimes the creator of the distribution makes a decision that you simply don’t like. Canonical’s decision to switch to its own UI, Unity, ranks amongst its most controversial decisions. However, by using some of the methods that we explore here, you could create a distribution that is standard Ubuntu, but with a traditional desktop that you are more comfortable with.
There are other, niche reasons for wanting to build your own distribution. You might need to put something small and lightweight together for an older computer. You might need to build a live media ISO that you are able to carry around with you and to bring your favourite set of tools to bear when you need them.
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New Releases
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SparkyLinux 3.4 “Annagerman” LXDE, Razor-Qt and Enlightenment 18 is out.
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Screenshots
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Slackware Family
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The latest update to Slackware-current brought us a new kernel (3.14.5) and a new gcc compiler (4.8.3).
This warranted a build of new multilib gcc packages. Get them from your nearest mirror. I also refreshed the “compat32″ layer of packages – this is the set of converted 32-bit Slackware packages which you’ll need at a minimum, so that you will be able to run most of the 32-bit software that is out there.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has expanded the company’s strategic alliance with SAP AG to make it easier for customers to adopt and run the SAP Data Management portfolio, including the SAP HANA platform, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE), SAP IQ software, and the SAP SQL Anywhere suite on Red Hat’s open source solutions.
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Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat’s announcement that it will support SAP’s HANA is good news for SAP and Red Hat hardware partners like Dell and IBM.
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Fedora
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Matthew Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron to lead the next Red Hat community Linux distribution.
Red Hat today announced Matthew Miller as the new leader of its Fedora community Linux project. Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron, who announced on May 19 that she was stepping down as Fedora Project Leader.
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Last month Robyn Bergeron stepped down as the Fedora Project Leader while now Red Hat has found her replacement.
The Fedora Project team has selected Matthew Miller to be the new Fedora Project Leader, a long-time Fedora community member, member of Red Hat since 2012, and was the founder of Boston University’s BU Linux distribution.
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I’m proud to have been part of the Fedora community since the early days. I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to work on Fedora as my full-time job for the past year and a half. And now, I’m excited to be stepping into a new place within the community as Fedora Project Leader. These are incredible times in computing and in free and open source software, and we have incredible things going on in Fedora to match — the next years are full of opportunity and growth for the whole project and community, and I’m thrilled to be in a position to help.
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Debian Family
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Six months after the release of the first version, we are pleased to announce the updated of ISOs Tango Studio to version 2.2. This new version has been updated to Wheezy 7.5, contains some new features and bugfixes, as well as an update of the best open-source applications available for sound creation.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The next Ubuntu Linux release, Ubuntu 14.10 “Utopic Unicorn” will likely be powered by the 3.16 kernel.
Given that Linux 3.15 is being released this week and Linux 3.16 should be christened around the end of July or early August, it makes sense that Canonical developers are focused on shipping the 3.16 kernel for Ubuntu 14.10. Ubuntu 14.10 has a feature freeze on 21 August, the final kernel freeze on 9 October, and the official release on 23 October.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is strengthening its ties to system-on-a-chip (SoC) manufacturer Cavium through expanded support for the ThunderX family, which could open new doors for Ubuntu and open source on ARM64 devices, OpenStack cloud servers and other enterprise hardware.
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It is not a coincidence that Cavium, a maker of MIPS processors aimed at networking equipment and other embedded uses chose the Computex 2014 conference in Taipei, Taiwan to announce its entry into the ARM server chip space. Many of Cavium’s customers for its ThunderX processors will come from Taiwan, where a large percentage of the world’s servers are designed and manufactured these days – and usually for the hyperscale datacenter operators who will be on the cutting edge of the ARM adoption curve for servers.
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Canonical, Microsoft, and Apple want the same thing from their operating systems, but they go about it in different ways. It’s only possible to estimate for Canonical how long it will take them to achieve their goal because their product is open source, but it’s much harder to do this for the other companies.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint is among the most popular Linux desktop distributions in use today, thanks in large part to its core focus on improving the desktop experience for users. It’s a focus that has been in place for Linux Mint since day one. When Clement Lefebvre developed Linux Mint in 2006, he did so with the goal of creating a user-friendly desktop version of Linux. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu Linux, adding new desktop, setting and configuration elements. The latest version of Linux Mint, version 17 (code-named Qiana), is based on the recent Ubuntu 14.04 “Trusty Tahr” release, which is what is known as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Lefebvre has pledged that Linux Mint 17 will also be an LTS release and will continue to receive security updates for five years, until 2019. Lefebvre has also pledged that until 2016, the core package base will remain the same, which is intended to make it easier for users to upgrade to new versions of Linux Mint. As is the case with other Linux distributions, there are multiple desktop user interfaces that are available to users. With Linux Mint, however, there is a particular focus on the Cinnamon desktop, which was created by the Linux Mint distribution itself. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key features of the Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon release.
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The $130 Linux-based Crock-Pot WeMo Smart Slow Cooker was unveiled at CES earlier this year, and will be available in stores soon. I got to spend some time with one this week and thought I’d share some early impressions ahead of the full review. Belkin and Jarden Home Brands’ app-controlled slow cooker struck me as an unlikely smart home contender at first. Slow cookers are about as low maintenance as possible, so how much value could WeMo integration add to something already so straightforward?
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Phones
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There are a lot of headlines being generated about open phone platforms this week. Apple CEO took a shot at Android at the company’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, even as he announced that many APIs and platform-level features in iOS are going to be opened up for developers for the first time.
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Ballnux
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Dell has added two new Android-based models to its Venue lineup of tablets. Both the Venue 7 and the Venue 8 tablets now run Android 4.4 KitKat and come with budget specifications.
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Two releases from Samsung are making the headlines this week. And the headlines are centered around the Samsung Z Tizen OS smartphone and the Samsung Tizen OS TV SDK (Software Development Kit).
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The Korean electronics company, which earlier this week unveiled a new smartphone running the open-source operating system, on Tuesday showed off Tizen-based TVs, cameras, and wearables — some of these devices for the first time. The gadgets, displayed at the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco, all are part of Samsung’s efforts to create a broad ecosystem for Tizen, its alternative to Android.
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Zettaset has expanded its Big Data security offerings with the announcement of support for Hortonworks and other open source Hadoop 2.x distributions in its Orchestrator management and security platform.
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With fewer defects being found in major open source projects than in large proprietary software packages, what are the security strengths and weaknesses of open source development?
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It was HP Networking’s Senior Vice President Bethany Mayer who said seven months ago that she couldn’t see why anyone would use an OpenDaylight controller in their SDN. But it was also Bethany Mayer, now senior vice president and general manager of HP’s Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) business, who drove HP to raise its membership investment and participation in OpenDaylight just two weeks ago.
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In today’s Linux news, a new project manager is named for Fedora. Nick Heath says Open Source is more secure because of a “heightened focus on quality controls.” And a team of developers are trying to save TrueCrypt one way or another.
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Perforce Software todayannounced it has released open source versions of P4CLI, its core command line interface to the company’s powerful versioning engine, and P4Web, its popular web-based versioning client. The newly released source code will allow developers to further customize these popular clients for their specific needs, giving them the power to adapt the clients to their evolving environments. All open source projects are available immediately on Perforce Workshop, an open source community built and hosted by Perforce.
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Events
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Kaltura Connect is a conference all about open source video. From June 13-18 in New York City, 1,000+ attendees including developers, experts, thoughts leaders and executives from small businesses to global enterprises, universities and educational organizations, healthcare, media broadcasters and new-media publishers.
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Web Browsers
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In 2013 the browser wars sprouted a new rendering engine: Blink. When Blink forked in April 2013, Webkit had a total of 1.8 million lines of C++, 2,500 commits per month and was the most popular browser engine. On mobile, Webkit backed the top 3 browsers (Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Android Browser), accounting for the majority of mobile eyeballs. This post is a look at the Blink/Webkit fork one year later: how have the projects diverged, who is driving them, and what are they up to?
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SaaS/Big Data
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Want a fully open source Platform-as-a-Service cloud framework? Apache’s just made Stratos a top-level project.
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Education
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At Opensource.com, we love sharing stories about the ways open source tools and principles are changing the nature of teaching and learning today. Over and over, we’ve seen how approaching education the open source way can transform classrooms all over the world.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This year’s GNU Tools Cauldron is taking place next month at the University of Cambridge where some very interesting compiler-related discussions will be taking place.
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His talk was quite how I expected it to be. He was idealist – Aditya and I discussed that he had to be it, as the face and primary driver of Free software. Richard spoke of the advantages of Free software, where he pointed out the numerous back doors that have been found in proprietary software to spy on users. He spoke of the GNU time line, how he had started it, how Emacs and other things came about. At some point of time, he expressed his annoyance to the fact that people confuse GNU and Linux, and free software and open source software. He spoke of how people think Linus is the father of free software etc. I quite enjoyed his talk. At some points, though, I couldn’t help but think that he didn’t really need to use negativeness to put his point across. He didn’t just differentiate between free and open source software, and he didn’t just say how free software is better than the open source philosophy, he went on to stress on why open source wasn’t good enough. If you’ve seen his sessions, you’ll probably understand what I mean.
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Openness/Sharing
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When one thinks of Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technology, they probably think of the large industrial level printers by 3D Systems, that cost in the $XXX,XXX range. These certainly are not 3D printers that an ordinary person would have in their home or garage. They aren’t even printers that the ordinary person has direct access to.
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Hardware
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Given this ASUS ultrabook is only a few months old, hopefully the ultrabook will be able to work out fine until the mobile Broadwell processors hit the market when I decide on my next laptop/ultrabook or end up back with a MacBook Pro.
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Health/Nutrition
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Security
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Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows XP in April was met with a collective gulp by the IT community. For good reason: Approximately 30 percent of all desktop systems continue to run XP despite Microsoft’s decision to stop offering security updates. Furthermore, a critical security flaw in Internet Explorer 8 disclosed recently by HP’s TippingPoint Division opens the door to remote attacks on XP systems that use IE8.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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There is a tendency to believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin is orchestrating the unrest in eastern Ukraine, sending in irregular Russian forces to stir up pro-Russian separatist sentiment.
As guesses go, this might not be a bad one–but journalism is supposed to be about presenting evidence to confirm such speculation. The New York Times clearly has a hunch about deep Russian involvement in Ukraine. The ways it tries to confirm this hunch are curious.
[...]
What you’re left with from the Times is the suggestion that the lack of direct evidence is probably proof that Russia is up to something– i.e., “leaving no fingerprints.”
During the days of the Soviet Union, Kremlinologists spent their time poring over state propaganda in an attempt to understand what was really going on in the USSR. It bears some resemblance to what one might be seeing in the New York Times now.
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The multi-decade, trillion dollar waste that we call the drug war has become increasingly unpopular, with everyone from Nobel Prize winning economists to leaders from the religious and civil rights communities calling for its end. Those who defend arresting, incarcerating and militarizing our way into even more disaster, often claim that it’s all in the name of protecting children. Yet, the war on drugs is waged with a shocking disregard for human rights, and even babies and children are not spared.
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The California State Senator, Leland Yee, has been charged with the conspiracy to deal firearms, as well as wire fraud. Yee was arrested for promising shoulder-fired automatic weapons and missiles from a Muslim separatist group to an undercover FBI-agent in exchange for donations towards his campaign. The allegations towards Yee outlined in an affidavit from an FBI agent were not only pointed towards the Senator, but to twenty-five other people as well. According to the court documents, the allegations against Yee included a number of favors that he had requested in exchange for campaign donations. He also performed “official acts” in exchange for donations to get himself out of a $70,000 debt that he acquired during a failed San Francisco mayoral bid.
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The Country Ratings Poll asked more than 24,500 people from 24 nations whether they felt positive or negative about 16 countries and the EU. The UK finished third, with 56 per cent of those surveyed saying they thought it was having a good influence internationally.
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On Saturday, Donald Trump took a break from retweeting delusional sycophants begging him to run for president to comment on the successful rescue of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the United States’ last (and only) prisoner of war in Afghanistan.
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The Fierce Take: There is no doubt that Skype Translate could be an invaluable business tool, though the skeptic can’t help but wonder if the NSA would also utilize this to bolster its various wiretapping efforts.
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In that sense, we as a country are paying another price as a consequence of the Republican clown show. Blind trust in government is never a good thing for a civilized and free society. But when the opposition is so blinded by its own ideology that it is deaf to the facts and mute to a constructive discussion to prevent mishaps from occurring again, it means they cannot be trusted to hold the government accountable.
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Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, Sting of the Drone. We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”
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Richard Clarke, the nation’s former top counterterrorism official, tells Democracy Now! he believes President George W. Bush is guilty of war crimes for launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Clarke served as national coordinator for security and counterterrorism during Bush’s first year in office. He resigned in 2003 following the Iraq invasion and later made headlines by accusing Bush officials of ignoring pre-9/11 warnings about an imminent attack by al-Qaeda. “I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes,” Clarke says. “Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It’s clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least — were war crimes.”
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The relatives of three United States citizens killed in American drone strikes without trial, including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, have decided not to appeal a federal judge’s dismissal of a lawsuit they filed against Obama administration officials.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has quite rightly called on the Obama administration to publicly disclose its legal justifications for the claimed power to order the killing, without trial or hearing, of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of being terrorist leaders planning attacks against the United States. The dispute came up, most recently, in the context of David Barron’s successful nomination to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. As a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel, Barron reportedly co-authored at least two memos providing the legal rationale for the administration’s decision to order the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and propagandist for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
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Wherever there is the threat of war there are always people banging the drum—and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) is among the worst.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Alberta artist, Peter von Tiesenhausen, has effectively stopped oil corporations from putting a pipeline through his 800 acre property by covering it with artwork and copyrighting the top six inches of his land as an artwork.
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The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.
Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.
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Charity calls on EU to end reliance on imported and domestic fossil fuels and increase energy efficiency and boost renewables
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Emergency action is needed on carbon emissions, but Obama’s plan announced Monday is not a move to action, but more talk about potentially taking action. Critical time continues to be lost as the Earth heats up and the oceans acidify. As critical time is lost, if the proposal is even adopted, it could be overturned by any president who follows Obama within a little over a year of being adopted. To say this appears to be far too little too late is an understatement. Had Obama been serious about climate change he would have taken action as soon as he took power.
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Finance
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Class and ethnicity, rather than ability, will probably determine the adult lives of Channel 4′s 11-year-old dinner guests
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I found I had the brain imaging pattern and genetic make up of a full-blown psychopath while conducting research – and yet, I turned out to be a successful scientist and family man
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It’s well-established by now (Extra!, 7/06) that political reporters prefer to talk and write about Democrats who stay close to the “center” instead of placating the left-wing party base. This is simply smart politics, these observers note, since it’s always better to be in the middle, because that’s where most people are.
The problem is that pundits’ idea of the “middle” doesn’t seem to correspond to reality.
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How opposing a minimum wage increase and keeping taxes low for corporations and the wealthy centrist? These are not popular policies in general, and certainly not among Democrats in the state Cuomo governs. Nonetheless, Bruni is keenly worried that Cuomo may be promising too much to other Democrats, who might tug him away from this “middle” and “hijack his legacy.”
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Yesterday afternoon, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed legislation enacting a phased-in $15 minimum wage in Seattle, the highest minimum wage in the country. Mayor Ed Murray is expected to sign the bill into law this afternoon, just after 1 p.m. in Cal Anderson Park. The first phase of the wage raise is scheduled to start April 1, 2015, and headlines around the country seem to be asking if Seattle, the progressive urban utopia, is just the beginning of a nationwide trend.
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Censorship
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Given the many porn stars on Twitter, it’s unclear why Pakistan went with Knox; perhaps the fairly widespread national dislike of Duke* is international. “Dear Twitter Team,” writes Abdul Batin of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority in his request, which was posted on Chilling Effects by Twitter. “Please block the following unethical links.” In the list that follows is the “videos and photos” portion of Knox’s account: https://twitter.com/belle_knox/media, which is thoroughly NSFW (not safe for work) as well as NSFP (not safe for Pakistan). Apparently, Batin doesn’t mind her tweets; he just doesn’t want his country to see her photos and videos. The same request asks for the removal of a url that would perform a search on Twitter for “Burn Quran” photos, calling it blasphemous.
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Google and other internet companies find themselves in a quandary over how to strike a balance between privacy and freedom of information as the top world search engine took a first step towards upholding an EU privacy ruling.
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State claims Mordechai Vanunu is still a threat to security a decade after his release from prison.
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Privacy
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The move came just hours after Google called out email providers, including Comcast, for not using encryption. Google Tuesday publicized for the first time the share of its email traffic with other providers that remains encrypted. According to Google, fewer than 1% of Gmail messages sent to Comcast.net addresses remained encrypted on a sample day last month.
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The new director of the National Security Agency says he believes whistleblower Edward Snowden was “probably not” working for a foreign intelligence agency, despite frequent speculation and assertion by the NSA’s allies to the contrary.
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Says lying does more harm than good
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The National Security Agency hasn’t exactly stopped spying on Americans en masse just yet, but a new court filing accuses the NSA of unlawfully destroying the evidence it collected against United States citizens for years.
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With the tap of a finger, iPhone users will soon be able to lock their doors, turn off appliances and even use a baby monitor, all thanks to Apple’s new software “Homekit.” However, not everyone is convinced creating a smartphone with your smartphone is entirely secure.
“What I would really be concerned about is that data. The secure data that is opening your doors and turning your lights on and watching your baby, where is that being stored?” said Christian Argie, owner of Top Notch Computers in Charlottesville.
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Edward Snowden’s latest revelation about the NSA’s snooping inspired an extra dose of shock and disbelief when he said the agency’s hackers can use a mobile phone as a bug even after it’s been turned off. The whistleblower made that eye-opening claim when Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News, holding his iPhone aloft during last Wednesday’s interview, asked, “What can the NSA do with this device if they want to get into my life? Can anyone turn it on remotely if it’s off? Can they turn on apps?
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A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit an Idaho woman filed against President Barack Obama and other federal officials over the National Security Agency’s collection of cellphone information.
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A federal judge in Idaho urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to rule against the National Security Agency’s surveillance program of telephone records while saying his own hands are tied by legal precedent.
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However, Rogers insisted the agency was not collecting such images of U.S. citizens, unless they were linked with an investigation of a foreign subject, and then only after taking the appropriate legal steps.
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The Snowden revelations hit like a bomb, sending out shrapnel which risked severing US ties with friendly and not-so-friendly states alike. Here are the top eight bilateral debacles sparked by NSA spying, whose fallout could be felt for years to come.
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Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General Harald Range has decided to launch a criminal investigation into alleged hacking of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone by the US National Security Agency (NSA), a German daily reported Tuesday.
The mass spying on German citizens by the NSA, however, will at least provisionally not be placed under formal investigations, Xinhua reported citing German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
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Foreign technology services providers such as Google and Apple can become cybersecurity threats to Chinese users, security analysts said, one week after China announced that it will put in place a security review on imported technology equipment.
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A Bahamas foreign service team will travel to Paraguay this week to address the Organization of American States (OAS) on the controversial allegations that the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States is recording and storing audio from every cell phone conversation in The Bahamas.
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A new organization for whistleblowing will launch on Wednesday morning when the ExposeFacts.org website goes live and the group begins its first day with a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.
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Over the past year, as the Snowden revelations have rolled out, the government and its apologists have developed a set of talking points about mass spying that the public has now heard over and over again. From the President, to Hilary Clinton to Rep. Mike Rogers, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and many others, the arguments are often eerily similar.
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Australia “pleaded” with the US security agency to extend their partnership and subject Australian citizens to greater surveillance, a new book on whistleblower Edward Snowden claims.
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Most Australians want their government to spy on other countries, including allies like the United States and New Zealand, the 2014 Lowy Institute poll has found.
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In the near future, companies, hell even the NSA could be mining our brainwaves for data. It’s bad enough that private details about our lives revealed in hoovered up in emails and phone calls; imagine if Big Brother was literally reading our minds? That’s some dystopian shit.
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On June 4, 2014, one day before the anniversary of the Snowden revelations, Poland celebrates 25 years since the fall of an authoritarian regime. On this occasion, President Obama is visiting Poland and meeting with many heads of states—including officials who were affected by the mass surveillance scandal carried out by the NSA. The United States and Poland have a long tradition of official visits between their leaders. These visits symbolize a close, allied relationship between the two countries and “help advance many political and economic issues.” Since October 2013, the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish NGO, has tried to understand the relationship between the Polish and United States’ secret service organizations. Panoptykon believes that the Polish government, by accepting mass and pre-emptive surveillance, is reverting back to the much contested practices of the former, authoritarian regime—practices that triggered the revolution 25 years ago. Thus, the NGO has organized a user-generated campaign for June 4, urging people to welcome President Obama to Poland by vocalizing their thoughts on mass surveillance.
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The U.S. National Security Agency has accredited Lockheed Martin for its Cyber Incident Response Assistance program to help users of national security systems respond to cyber attacks.
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Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed something called the USA Freedom Act. The bill was intended by its authors to end the National Security Agency’s broad and privacy-shredding bulk data collection program, but the final version that passed is so weak that bulk data collection will still be permitted.
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A year ago tonight, the world confirmed what most people already suspected. Privacy is dead and the Big Brother of George Orwell’s 1984 is alive. An obscure technician, Edward Snowden, began releasing documents stolen during his work on behalf of America’s most shadowy intelligence group. He proved the US National Security Agency (NSA) routinely spies on hundreds of millions of people.
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Almost a year after Edward Snowden revealed himself as the man who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency, some people are still wondering how he had access to so many classified intelligence documents.
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Posted at 7am on Tuesday on the website Change.org by French daily L’Express, the petition had garnered over 33,000 signatures and counting by 5:30pm.
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Back in December of 2012, we wrote about (and agreed with) Julian Sanchez’s suggestion that Google should do end-to-end encryption of emails, even if it (only slightly) mucked with its advertising business model. The impact on overall security would be great (and this was before the Snowden revelations had even come out). As Sanchez pointed out, not only would this (finally) drive more widespread adoption for email encryption, it would create enormous goodwill among privacy advocates. About six weeks ago, we mentioned this again, when it was rumored that Google was trying to make encrypted email easier, though it was said that it wouldn’t go “site-wide” on end-to-end encryption.
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In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.
The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, ” No Place to Hide.”
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Apparently, the UK government worked very hard to get the Guardian and others not to publish certain details about how GCHQ (and NSA) tap certain underwater cables that connect the internet around the globe, as it turns out that they get lots of help from BT and Vodafone Cable (via its purchase of Cable & Wireless). Those two companies apparently get paid handsomely for helping the government tap into these undersea cables.
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Greenwald responded with a column that included a statement from Snowden saying he had not worked with Campbell and speculating the documents were actually by the British government as part of an attempt to make the case his leaks were “harmful.”
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Above-top-secret details of Britain’s covert surveillance programme – including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East – have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined to reveal them. Today, however, the Register publishes them in full.
The secret British spy base is part of a programme codenamed “CIRCUIT” and also referred to as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1). It is located at Seeb, on the northern coast of Oman, where it taps in to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Seeb is one of a three site GCHQ network in Oman, at locations codenamed “TIMPANI”, “GUITAR” and “CLARINET”. TIMPANI, near the Strait of Hormuz, can monitor Iraqi communications. CLARINET, in the south of Oman, is strategically close to Yemen.
British national telco BT, referred to within GCHQ and the American NSA under the ultra-classified codename “REMEDY”, and Vodafone Cable (which owns the former Cable & Wireless company, aka “GERONTIC”) are the two top earners of secret GCHQ payments running into tens of millions of pounds annually.
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Last month, ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy.
Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.
In a letter sent Thursday to the bankruptcy judge in the case, Jessica L. Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice.
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We followed the back and forth situation earlier this year, in which there were some legal questions over whether or not the NSA needed to hang onto surveillance data at issue in various lawsuits, or destroy it as per the laws concerning retention of data. Unfortunately, in the process, it became clear that the DOJ misled FISA court Judge Reggie Walton, withholding key information. In response, the DOJ apologized, insisting that it didn’t think the data was relevant — but also very strongly hinting that it used that opportunity to destroy a ton of evidence. However, this appeared to be just the latest in a long history of the NSA/DOJ willfully destroying evidence that was under a preservation order.
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Civil Rights
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Hundreds of Amazon chiefs clashed with police in Brazil last week as the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which begins on June 12, draws closer.
According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s copy1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.
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The government may not mean to kill people with mental disabilities but it’s deeds, not motives, that matter, and when the coalition subtracted political cost from economic gain, it found those with disabilities were the easiest people in Britain to dispose of.
Mental health is the NHS’s Cinderella service, even in good times. In recession, it’s hammered. Simon Stevens, the new chief executive as NHS England, has given us his priorities. He gabbles that he wants to “future proof” the NHS “against challenges ahead”.
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Weinstock, who reportedly felt pressure from the judge to convince his client into waiving his right to a speedy trial, snapped back in defense. Then Murphy challenged Weinstock to a fist fight outside.
“You know, if I had a rock, I would throw it at you right now,” Murphy says in the video above. “Stop pissing me off … If you want to fight, let’s go out back and I’ll just beat your ass.”
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He blew the whistle on CIA waterboarding, but the government keeps trying to sweep the issue, and him, out of sight. From prison, John Kiriakou says it’s time for a special prosecutor.
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Maybe if schools stop handing misbehaving students over to police officers, aggrieved parents won’t be nearly as aggrieved… or so likely to sue. Schools are publicly funded already, but that’s no reason to keep dipping into homeowners’ wallets to pay out settlements for schools’ bad decisions.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Rep. Bob Latta achieved an impressive feat last week in introducing some legislation, which he claims is to make sure the internet remains “open and free.” While we’re big supporters of an “open and free” internet, what’s most amazing here is that almost everything that Latta claims about the bill is not true — including the whole “open and free” bits.
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If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the whole net neutrality fight, you’d know that the key issue is whether or not broadband services should be reclassified under Title II of the Telecom Act. In the early to mid-2000s, the FCC declared both cable and DSL broadband to be information services under Title I, rather than telecommunications services under Title II. This basically means they are not subject to common carrier rules, including non-discriminatory rules that are the key issue around net neutrality. And, of course, the telcos are putting up a big fight over this, listing out a supposed parade of horribles that would happen if they were reclassified under Title II.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Possibly one of the last bits of cultural detritus from the extremely bizarre Flappy Bird story makes its way to us via chiptune artist Ben Landis, who spotted a rather audacious claim from an entity calling itself “Samuel David Entertainment.”
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Over the past few days, an IP battle has erupted at print-on-demand service Zazzle over a 3,000-year-old Greek letter. New York artist Paul Ingrisano was granted a trademark for the following symbol, apparently in reference to his initials.
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This may be the biggest legal controversy to engulf the mathematical constant pi since that time in 1897 when the Indiana legislature tried to declare it equal to 3.2: A Brooklyn artist is claiming a broad trademark in T-shirts, jackets, caps, and other apparel featuring the Greek letter, resulting in the mass, temporary removal of thousands of products from the custom t-shirt printing site Zazzle.
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Copyrights
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A coalition of advocacy groups wrote to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), urging the Senate to push back on an amendment to the House’s recently-passed defense funding bill that would keep the Obama administration from going forward with its plans to shift Internet oversight.
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We’ve written a few times about Spanish company Ares Rights, which presents itself as an “anti-piracy” firm, but rather than searching the internet for unauthorized movies and music, has a long history of working for Latin American governments, using questionable copyright claims to censor the internet and take down content those governments don’t like. The latest example may be the most extreme, as Ares Rights used a DMCA claim in the US to block the website of Ecuadorian newspaper La Republica for a period of four hours last week.
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As the discussion over the EU’s decision to force Google to uphold a “right to be forgotten” continues, various industry heads have begun to weigh in on the subject, pointing to this as evidence that Google could do more to combat piracy.
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Send this to a friend
06.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 9:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Want a brand new desktop, media centre, gaming machine or server? Build it yourself! You’ll save money and have complete control over what components go into the PC. We show you what you need to consider, and what software, distros and tools you need to build your very own Linux PC.
We show you how to install Linux on a Chromebook.
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Server
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Linux server demand is rising due to demand from cloud infrastructure deployments, according to IDC, and is expected to continue to grow in the future. In the first quarter of 2014, Linux server revenue accounted for 30 percent of overall server revenue, an increase of 15.4 percent, IDC said.[1] IBM has supported development of Linux on System z for more than a decade, and today there are over 3,000 certified applications for Linux on System z. In addition, IBM is supporting the development of skills to take advantage of these applications through the IBM Academic Initiative.
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Kernel Space
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It’s always a great show of solidarity when two organizations with similar values figure out a way to support each other, and that’s exactly what the Linux Foundation and Code.org are doing.
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Olof Johansson sent in a bulk of the new ARM work on Monday that’s targeting Linux 3.16. Among the highlights of this Linux ARM work include:
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The eighth release candidate for the Linux 3.15 kernel has been released. The official release of Linux 3.15 should happen next week, but meanwhile Linus has decided to open the merge window for Linux 3.16 one week early.
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The first pull request for the Xen virtualization updates for the Linux 3.16 kernel have now been submitted.
David Vrabel sent in the early Xen features and fixes this morning for the Linux 3.16 merge window. Most prominently to Xen in Linux 3.16 are ARM architecture improvements. In particular, there’s now ARM suspend/resume support and ARM multi-call support.
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Merged for the Linux 3.13 kernel was the multi-queue block layer allows for better SSD performance with reduced latency and by balancing I/O workload across multiple CPU cores and supporting multiple hardware queues. With the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel, the “blk-mq” code is expected to be feature complete and deliver great performance.
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Graphics Stack
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After sharing the views of another developer this weekend about OpenGL being broken compared to Mantle and Direct3D, another game developer has come forward with his own “rant” that also says OpenGL has problems but it also has potential.
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Support for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 and the Present Extension are finally supported by the mainline Intel X.Org graphics driver.
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Similar to functionality offered by other drivers, Mesa might finally have a shader compiler cache to save compiled GLSL shaders to the disk in an effort to reduce the start-up time for modern Linux games.
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Benchmarks
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Before moving to the raw number, lets first clarify the terminology.
A lossless compression algorithms is a mathematical algorithms that define how to reduce (compress) a specific dataset in a smaller one, without losing information. In other word, it involves encoding information using fewer bit that the original version, with no information loss. To be useful, a compression algorithms must be reversible – it should enable us to re-expand the compressed dataset, obtaining an exact copy of the original source. It’s easy to see how the fundamental capabilities (compression and ratio and speed) are rooted in the algorithm itself, and different algorithms can strongly differ in results and applicable scopes.
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To complement the recent ACPI CPUfreq vs. Intel P-State Scaling With Linux 3.15 testing that was done using an Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition system, here’s some similar tests done using a low-power Intel Celeron N2820 “Bay Trail” SoC within the Intel NUC.
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While yesterday’s Linux testing at Phoronix revealed Intel Bay Trail graphics are slower than Windows when running in comparison the updated open-source Intel Linux graphics stack, at least the Bay Trail performance for Intel’s N2820 NUC has improved in the past few months under Linux.
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Applications
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Maybe you already heard of the cwrap project. A set of tools to create a fully isolated network environment to test client/server components on a single host. socket_wrapper is a part of cwrap and I released version 1.1.0 today. In this release I worked together with Michael Adam and we implemented some nice new features like support for IP_PKTINFO for binding on UDP sockets, bindresvport() and more socket options via getsockopt(). This was mostly needed to be able to create a test environment for MIT Kerberos.
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Nuvola Player, a web interface for cloud music services that runs in its own window and provides integration with a Linux desktop, has advanced to version 2.4.0.
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ASCII art is a graphic design technique that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures put together from characters defined by the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard. These characters are letters, numbers and special characters such as # / and \. ASCII art is as much a constituent element of the Internet as emoticons, cats, or acronyms such as ROTFL.
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Proprietary
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If it hasn’t happened already, there will come a time when you’ll wish your computer was running a different operating system. Whether you’re a competent software developer or simply a user desiring an application exclusive to an OS other than your own, there are plenty of valid reasons for why you’d want to use another OS. Despite what you might think, however, you don’t necessarily have to adhere to your supposed monetary and spatial restraints given the amount of available virtual machines.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Nuclear Throne the excellent 2D procedural death labyrinth that becomes quite the bullet hell has been updated with alpha #29 with more weapons!
I don’t say “bullet hell” lightly either as it gets increasingly frantic as you reach higher level enemies and I’ve not made it very far at all due to the game being so unforgiving at times.
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Steam Skin Manager is a tool developed by +Martin Kozub for changing the Steam for Linux appearance. The app comes with 4 skins by default: Ambiance, Radiance, Light and Blue and it also lets you easily add more themes.
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The latest monthly update to the popular Unvanquished open-source game is now available.
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Crytek has just announced Homefront: The Revolution as a new first-person shooter game that will feature native Linux support with the CryENGINE and launch on the same-day as for other platforms.
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After Homefront developer Kaos Studios was shut down the property was passed on to Crytek, who quickly got to work on a sequel and acquired the franchise rights after THQ filed for bankruptcy. Crytek and Deep Silver have now announced that Homefront: The Revolution is coming in 2015, and have revealed the first cinematic trailer. The game is exclusively new-gen, and is set for release on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 and Xbox One.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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You like to have a polished and nice KDE Frameworks 5 release?
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We are pleased to announce Plasma Media Center 1.3 beta release!
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The previous week i was working on the Activity Switcher (it is the sliding button on right of your screen), which is written in QML2. The activity Switcher is reusing the activities component for managing the activities. So the only real difference between the Activity Switcher and the desktop Activity Manager, is its layout which has been created with QML2.
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The most famous and loved will always be the balad of the Active lands of Plasma where the society became so enlightened they managed to expel the Royal Society for Putting Things on top of other things.
What the future (KF5) brings?
Ok, stopping with the story now.
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Almost two weeks have passed since we returned from the sprint, but we are now only beginning to sort out and formalize all the data and notes we did during the meeting. The point is, this time (as well as during the last sprint in 2011) we had three painters with us who gave us immeasurable amount of input about how they use Krita and what can be improved. This is the case when criticizing and complaining was exactly what we needed
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Apple has just announced OS X Yosemite, the new and improved Mac OS, but it turns out that at least one of the design decisions from the new operating system is not “original.”
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A candidate vying to become one of the directors of the GNOME Foundation has raised the issue of Red Hat’s “domination” of development of the GNOME Desktop Project, claiming that “for the last several years, Red Hat’s wants/needs have trumped what anyone else wants/needs, including the larger user base of GNOME.”
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New Releases
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Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. I am pleased to announce the release of Finnix 110, which includes Linux kernel 3.13, updated Debian upstream software, bug fixes and feature enhancements.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Summary: The companies expect the effort to enable customers to take their existing SAP license to the cloud and add Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA to their service mix on the SAP Marketplace.
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Here’s a list of activities and bugs fixed the KDE team has been working on the past month.
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Fedora
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SnowBird Linux 20.1 has been dubbed Misha and is based on Fedora 20. This distribution is considered to be a respin of Fedora, which means that it shares most of the features, but there are also a few major differences.
“Run any of the Windows Flavours (XP, Vista, 7 or 8) and want to give SnowBird a try but don’t know where to start? Run SnowBird Linux directly from the disc. Download the latest version and burn it to a dvd using your favourite burning tool. In case you need a free disc burner, download CDBurnerXP. Keep the disc in the drive and restart your computer to boot from SnowBird Linux without modifying your computer,” reads the website.
The distribution uses the same GNOME 3 desktop environment like Fedora, but the developers have also integrated a number of GNOME extensions that should make users’ lives much easier. On the other hand, GNOME 3 is pretty far from anything done in Windows operating systems, so the potential Windows users will have to be pretty open to new things…
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Debian Family
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Overclockix, like KNOPPIX STD (remember that one?), is one of those rare use specialist distributions that will always prevent it from widespread adoption, but that’s not the point. It was discontinued in 2005 and has recently been revived by several enthusiasts on the Overclockers forum. Read the full announcement here. Back then it was built around the KDE 3 desktop, but the new development team have held a poll where Gnome Shell came out top as preferred environment.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Linux-based Ubuntu OS is finding its way into tablets with Dell’s latest Inspiron hybrids, which can function as tablets and laptops.
The PC maker is offering Ubuntu as an OS option alongside Windows 8 on its new hybrids, the Inspiron 11 3000, which has an 11.6-inch screen, and Inspiron 13 7000, which has a 13-inch screen.
The hybrids turn from laptops into tablets when the screen is rotated 360 degrees, much like Lenovo’s Yoga, which pioneered the design. Dell announced the 19.4-millimeter thick hybrids at the Computex trade show in Taipei on Monday.
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The Ubuntu Software Center has been around for quite some time and it changed a lot since its launch. The project hasn’t been improved in a while and it looks like things are stagnating a little. This is where the App Grid comes into play, an application that is fully capable of replacing Ubuntu Software Center right now.
There is no doubt that some of Ubuntu’s success as an operating system can be attributed to the Software Center.
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Although most people think of Windows-based PCs when they think of Dell Computer, Dell has actually been more friendly to Linux over the years than any of the other major hardware makers. The company has delivered computers running Ubuntu in both India and China, and the company’s “Project Sputnik” effort involved customizing a Linux-based laptop for developers. Now, Ubuntu has found its way onto tablets from Dell, under the Inspiron hybrid product line.
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The Linux ecosystem is full of Ubuntu-based distributions, but building such a Linux OS is not as hard as you might think, especially if you have the proper tools – in this case Ubuntu Mini Remix. Users don’t need to be programmers (although it’s useful) in order to build a custom Ubuntu OS.
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OpenStack has been in the news a lot… well, we have just had the OpenStack summit in Atlanta after all.
Many say that the “problem” with OpenStack is that it is still regarded as a “moving target” and work in progress, augmenting and updating as it does twice a year.
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Flavours and Variants
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1. Mint (3546 average number of hits per day) / 2. Ubuntu (2028) / 3. Debian (1851) / 4. Mageia (1401) / 5. Fedora (1353) / Source: DistroWatch
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Minimalist distros are an important option for many Linux users. Not everyone wants tons of desktop glitz and zillions of bells and whistles. Lubuntu has always been a terrific option for minimalists who prefer to stay within the Ubuntu family. Now Lubuntu 14.04 LTS is available and it follows in the footsteps of previous releases by providing a high-quality desktop distro that is light-weight and fast.
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Linux Mint has long been one of the most popular desktop distributions, so it’s always a big deal when a version is released. This time around it’s Linux Mint 17. This review covers the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint 17, but much of it also applies to the MATE version with the exception of changes to the MATE 1.8 desktop.
As to which desktop environment you should use, I think it just gets down to your own personal preference. MATE is a more traditional desktop while Cinnamon has a more modern feel to it. If you aren’t sure which one you might like better, my advice is to try both of them and then make your decision.
Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release. It will receive security updates until 2019. The Linux Mint developers plan to use this package base until 2016, so upgrading should be a piece of cake once you start using Linux Mint 17.
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Ah Linux, we meet again. I am on a perpetual journey to find the perfect Linux distro. Sadly, I am finding it not to be elusive, but downright non-existent. You see, operating systems based on the open-source kernel are very fragmented in experience. It is hard for the stars to align and have everything you want be represented. Maybe you like the available environments for a distro, but hate the package manager. Or maybe you love the community support, but find the release schedule too slow.
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Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” MATE is now available for download and it looks like this flavor is gaining more popularity with the community. Let’s take a closer look at this MATE-powered version and see some of its features in this screenshot tour.
Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” MATE is in the first tier of flavors that usually ships and it’s one of the most used versions from the entire Mint family. It all has to do with the MATE desktop environment, which is much appreciated by the fans of the former GNOME 2.
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The good news is that Mint 17 isn’t just another update to an increasingly popular Linux distro – some would claim the most popular distro.
The really good news is that Mint 17 is a great release on which Mint can build a solid base. Of course it remains to be seen whether Mint can get the software updates and backports that users might want and need while remaining with the LTS base. In the mean time though, Mint 17 is off to a great start.
You’ll get Mint 17 in two different flavours, both of which feature the project’s homegrown desktop environments – MATE and Cinnamon.
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When most people think of Ubuntu derivatives, they usually categorize them into an “Ubuntu with a different desktop environment than Unity” category. However, according to Ubuntu, they refer to Ubuntu-based distros with different desktop environments as a derivative as well as distros using their own tools/apps/goals as customizations.
In this article, I’ll be exploring the upside and downside to Ubuntu-based customized distros.
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The OpenPandora is a handheld, Linux-based game system with the guts of a low-power PC and the ability to emulate classic video game consoles. It’s based on open source software… and now the hardware designs are also open source.
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The autonomous Raspberry Pi-powered robot yacht built by British students that competes worldwide
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Anyone looking for an extraordinarily small Linux mini PC might be interested in the new AsiaRF Linux mini PC which has this week launched over on the Indiegogo crowd funding website looking to raise $6,000 to make the jump from concept into production.
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Aaeon announced a compact, wireless IoT gateway that runs Linux on an Intel Quark X1000 Series SoC, and works in conjunction with an Asus Cloud Service.
The Aaeon “AIOT-X1000″ IoT gateway supports the Gateway Solutions for IoT architecture (aka “Moon Island”) unveiled by Intel in April. Aaeon’s product joins other “Moon Island capable” gateway systems previously announced by ADI, Adlink, Advantech, Eurotech, and Portwell, not to mention Intel’s own Gateway Solutions for IoT reference design. Although Intel’s reference design supports a choice of either Atom or Quark processors, Aaeon’s device, introduced this week at Computex in Taipei, casts its lot squarely with Quark.
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Company executives announce the new center at Computex, and say it will be established in Taiwan.
ARM is ramping up its efforts in the increasingly competitive markets of the Internet of things and wearable devices with the creation of a new chip design center in Taiwan.
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LG is today congratulating itself on selling one million of its webOS smart TVs. After announcing the new Smart+ TVs at CES in January, the Korean manufacturer released a range of models in March, and took just under four months to hit today’s milestone. It’s now predicting it will sell 10 million by “the first half of 2015.”
“Rather than continuing to add more and more functions into our smart TVs that few people will ever use,” says LG’s head of TV In-kyu Lee, “we’ve decided to focus on simplicity … consumers seem to share our view that this is the right direction for the evolution of smart TVs going forward.” The new models are still in the process of being rolled out globally, and LG says webOS TVs will be in over 150 markets by the end of June. It’s also planning to bring more “LG Smart+ TV Experience Zones” to retail outlets in order to better promote the range.
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Phones
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The Nokia N900 smartphone launched in 2009 and for a time was quite popular with Linux enthusiasts, now has a modem driver within the mainline Linux kernel.
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Ballnux
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With Computex Taipei happening this week and the Tizen Developer Conference starting tomorrow in San Francisco, Samsung has finally announced their first Tizen smartphone. The Samsung Z is this forthcoming Tizen phone.
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After years of rumoured launch dates, Samsung has unveiled its first smartphone powered by the “open source” Tizen operating system, the Z
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Android
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Officials in China have pushed for domestic operating systems on both PC and mobile for some time now, but they’ve never been able to unseat the foreign standard bearers on either platform.
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It looks like major computer makers are finally warming up to operating systems other than Microsoft Windows, and they are also experimenting with open source operating systems. Not onlly is Dell out with new tablet hybrid devices that run Ubuntu, but Hewlett-Packard has announced a new Android-only laptop. The 14-inch, Tegra-driven Android system is called the HP SlateBook 14, and will be available on August 6 for $399.
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While Samsung is trying to create an early-bird monopoly in the smartwatch market, Apple and Google are busy working on a smartwatch of their own. Though both the smartphone giants haven’t announced anything yet, it’s only natural to assume that they’re not going to overlook such a huge market. Samsung, with their Galaxy Gear smart watches was the first big company to make a foray into wearables. Serving as a mere companion to Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones, these smart watches haven’t been met with glowing reviews. Many find the Gear smartwatch clunky, lacking features, and overall, an unbaked product. Though Samsung made the first Gear watch based on Android, it has quickly realized its mistake and switched to Tizen instead. Thus, we don’t have any major Android-based smartwatch available yet. Given that the smartwatch competition has just commenced, we, as tech fans, have some seriously high expectations from Google. If Android were to make its face shown on a watch, it better be good. That’s why we’ve listed some of the things we want from an ideal Android smartwatch.
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Dell also is adding a new entry-level all-in-one (AIO) system, the Inspiron 20 3000 Series, which offers a 19.5-inch high-definition display and is powered by quad-core Pentium chips. In addition, Dell rolled out new Venue 7 and 8 tablets that run Google’s Android mobile operating system.
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Google has quietly begun rolling out a new version of Android to its flagship Nexus devices, but so far it has remained shtum on just what has changed.
Support pages from US wireless player T-Mobile reveal that the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 handsets and the 2013 version of the Nexus 7 tablet all began receiving over-the-air updates to Android 4.4.3 on Monday.
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The FreeXperia team of contributors help maintain CyanogenMod support for Xperia devices, and they’ve done such a great job that Sony has decided to hire one of the group’s developers. Alin Jerpelea was one of FreeXperia’s founders in 2010, and he is now the newest member of Sony’s Developer Program. Having already built up a reputation for his work bringing the freshest CyanogenMod ROMs to Sony devices, he will now help the company with its open source initiatives.
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What’s the point of releasing open-source code when nobody knows about it? In “Release Notes” I give a round-up of recent open-source activities.
angular-rt-popup (New, github)
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Skymind is providing commercial support and services for an open source project called deeplearning.4j. It’s a collection of of approaches to deep learning that mimic those developed by leading researchers, but tuned for enterprise adoption.
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Badgers spend a lot of time underground, which make it difficult for biologists and zoologists to track their whereabouts and activities. GPS, for example, doesn’t work well underground or in enclosed areas. But about five years ago, University of Oxford researchers Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni solved that problem by inventing a wireless tracking system that can work underground. Their system is clever, but they didn’t do it alone. Like many other scientists, they turned to open source to avoid having to rebuild fundamental components from scratch. One building block they used is an open source operating system called Contiki.
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Telecom service providers may acknowledge the value of open source technology, particularly as they adopt virtualization, but they are not entirely ready to embrace it warmly, a panel discussion here revealed.
Five large service providers — AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA), Orange (NYSE: FTE), Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S), and Telecom Italia SpA (NYSE: TI) — were represented on a single panel as part of a pre-conference NFV workshop, and while they agreed on a lot, open source technology didn’t get a consensus vote.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Do you trust the National Security Agency or the Internal Revenue Service more than Google or Facebook? If so, you’re not alone. A recent Reason-Rupe poll found that most Americans do not trust big tech companies.
Mozilla’s Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs, Denelle Dixon-Thayer, says “data hygiene” should be something every new or established tech company should be thinking about. Dixon-Thayer sat down with Reason TV at the 2014 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas this year.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is now in the development phase for its next major release code-named Juno, set to debut in October. Among the major new features in development is a technology known as “Ironic,” which provides bare metal server provisioning capabilities.
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Another Big Data analytics company has entered the open source realm. Guavus has become an official sponsor of the AMPLab, a research initiative hosted at the University of California at Berkeley to drive open source Big Data innovation.
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In historical terms, NASA worked with Rackspace to develop OpenStack back in 2010.
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ownCloud announced in their blog that Claudine Bianchi has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). The move aims to secure a stronger position in File Sync and Share for the most popular open source software in this category.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers from The Document Foundation have launched the first Release Candidate for 4.2.5 branch and it comes with numerous changes and improvements.
According to the changelog, the text rotation has been fixed, the upper margin of multi-page floating table has been fixed, the set-all language menu has been added, output file extension is now adjusted when exporting, accepting and rejecting changes in a selection is now allowed, the strange brightness and contrast adjustment from Microsoft Office has been corrected, and the mapping between ATK and UNO roles has been improved.
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CMS
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Who has time to handle post-CMS deployment needs when there’s so much to do developing the platform? That’s the thinking of the creators of Tendenci, an open source content management system (CMS) project for associations and other nonprofits (NPOs).
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Funding
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Trifacta, which specializes in data transformation to help companies prepare data for analysis and interpretation, has secured $25 million in series C funding.
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BSD
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Those interested in downloading FreeBSD 9.3 Beta or upgrading to it from an existing release can find all of the information via this mailing list announcement. FreeBSD 9.3 has many driver improvements, the hardware random number generators are disabled by default, the ZFS file-system support has been updated, and there’s support for Xen hardware-assisted virtualization (XENHVM). FreeBSD 9.3 also supports Apple’s MacBook trackpads and adds Radeon KMS, after the kernel mode-setting support was first found in FreeBSD 10.0.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This month, we welcome: Mohammed Isam Mohammed, author and maintainer of the new package GnuDOS. Edscott Wilson, author and maintainer of the new GNU package libdb. Vaibhaw Pandey, new maintainer of GNU groff. Sebastien Diaz, new maintainer of gnukart, along with his work on many other GNU packages. * Amadeusz Slawinski, new co-maintainer of GNU screen. Thanks to all.
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Public Services/Government
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Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works—it’s arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information’s release.
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The OSS Watch blog has been on our radar for a while now as a great resource for open source commentary. We’ve looked to their team, including development manager Mark Johnson, for thought leadership on how open source software is being used and to gauge the pulse of the open source movement. I wanted to find out more about what Mark does day-to-day to promote better understanding of open source. He’s got a knack for communication: concise with impact.
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IT strategists working for the French Gendarmerie and the Dutch municipality of Ede will participate in a conference organised by South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and the National IT Promotion Agency, to be held on 3 June in the capital Seoul.
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The press has taken a near-sighted view of the crisis, spinning in ways that only create a partial picture.
The New York Review of Books is a leading intellectual publication in the United States, and it (like all of the major U.S. “news” media) has “reported” on the Ukrainian civil war as having been incited by Russia’s Vladimir Putin — a simple-minded explanation, which also happens to be deeply false. The reality is that the residents of southern Ukraine, the part of Ukraine adjoining Russia, were overwhelmingly opposed to the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, though they are portrayed in NYRB (and other “news” media) as being mere stooges of Russian propaganda for their opposing the coup that overthrew the President for whom they had voted overwhelmingly. (The only thing that America’s “news” media had previously reported about Yanukovych is that he was corrupt; but so were all of his predecessors, and U.S. media ignored this crucial fact. Selective reporting is basic to propaganda, and the U.S. major media are trained masters at it. Without a person’s knowing that Ukraine is by far the most corrupt country in the former Soviet Union, and the one with the worst economic performance of them all, Ukraine’s politics just can’t be understood at all: it has long been an extreme kleptocracy, ruled by psychopathic politicians, for the benefit of psychopathic oligarchs, who have robbed the country blind. That’s the deeper truth — and it’s key to understanding the current situation there.)
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Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, highlighted at the conference that an open and transparent government is not enough if it lacks civic participation. “In my view, openness and transparency should stimulate their sense of ownership in open government.”
Dr Alanna Simpson, Senior Disaster Risk Management Specialist, World Bank-Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, told me that the Indonesian Government is a leader in making open data and open source available.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) was established in May 2012, by a group of public plant breeders, small seed company plant breeders, farmer-breeders, and advocates for seed sovereignty. OSSI was formed in order to enhance vigorous innovation in plant breeding by the creation of a licensing framework for germplasm exchange that would preserve the right to unencumbered use of shared seeds and their progeny in subsequent use. We had hoped that we could develop a legally defensible license for germplasm in the way that the free and open source software movement developed its licenses.
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The highly publicized journey of HealthCare.gov has major implications for the relationship between open source standards and government technology.
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Programming
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But playing the game—a sendup to traditional adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, which place players on quests that involve battling monsters, collecting artifacts, and solving puzzles—requires no programming knowledge whatsoever. Nor does it demand familiarity with coding tools. Instead, Hack ‘n’ Slash makes manipulating the game’s source code part of the game itself. To play it is to hack it.
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Family members said one of the other victims was the wife of a New Jersey borough commissioner. James P Leeds Sr told the Associated Press that his 74-year-old wife, Anne, died Saturday night in the Massachusetts crash. Leeds said he got a text from his wife from the plane at 9.36 p.m, four minutes before the crash.
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The island’s appeal is simple: couples of mixed religion can have a civil ceremony that, though not allowed back home, will still be recognised in law
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In 1980, 61 Lebanese brides and 78 Lebanese grooms were married there, as well as 98 Israeli grooms and 99 Israeli brides. In 2013, there were 2,131 Israeli weddings, 581 Lebanese ones, and 35 Syrian unions. Some municipalities, such as tourist-friendly Livadia, report even more startling figures; last year, of the 1,000 or so weddings it recorded, 350 were Lebanese, 425 were Israeli, and 20 were Syrian.
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Science
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Soviet cosmonaut and first spacewalker in the world, Aleksei Leonov, celebrated his 80th birthday on Friday. In March 1965 he was outside his spaceship for 12 minutes, connected to the craft by a 5.35 meter tether. Later, Leonov commanded the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the first joint space mission between the Soviet Union and the United States. Leonov is also an accomplished artist, whose works are displayed in many art galleries in Russia and abroad, and an author of several popular books about space. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev have congratulated the legendary cosmonaut, who was twice awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union title, on his anniversary and wished him good health, happiness and success. “Your professional biography, rich in significant and truly historical events, and all your life is a worthy example of unblinking devotion to the cause and of enormous personal courage,” Putin said in a telegramme, published on the Kremlin website on Friday.
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“It’s interesting that 4.2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago, the early Earth experienced a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment where there were a lot of impacts, including large impacts, and this period also overlaps with the evidence of the earliest life on Earth,” said Haley Sapers, an astrobiologist at the Canadian Astrobiology Training Program at McGill University in Montreal. “One might ask why life arose during such an inhospitable part of Earth’s history. Maybe impact cratering had a role in the origin of life.”
Impacts on a water-rich planet like Earth or even Mars can generate hydrothermal activity — that is, underwater areas boiling with heat. Seafloor hot springs known as hydrothermal vents more than a mile beneath the ocean’s surface can be home to thriving ecosystems on Earth, including giant tube worms 6 feet (2 meters) tall. The impact that created the Ries crater may have generated hydrothermal activity lasting as long as 10,000 years, given microbes time enough to colonize the area.
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Health/Nutrition
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An unholy alliance of pro and anti- GMO countries have struck a deal that will sweep away the obstacles to genetically engineered crops in the EU. By allowing – under limited circumstance – individual member states to prohibit the growing of GMO crops on their territory, the European Commission expects to boost GMO cropping in the EU overall.
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Belinda worked as a model, lived in a nightclub and often went to noisy parties. There was loud music wherever she went. Then she went to art school, where she listened to music through headphones while she painted. Now, with a quieter job in finance, she lives with the legacy of irreversible damage to her inner ear.
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Security
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Both prosecution and defense lawyers have begun to present their closing arguments as the trial against several News Corp. employees for compromising the privacy of crime victims, royalty, celebrities, and politicians.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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It’s not surprising then, that, picking up on one of the latest technology trends, the United Arab Emirates’ Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum would launch a “Drones for Good” competition, offering $1 million for the best positive drone design. The UAE will be taking international entries for drone ideas in categories like disaster relief, humanitarian aid, economic development until August.
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The American government has killed four Americans with drone strikes since 2009, all of which were completely detached from any notion of due process. At best, the DOJ builds a case against the foreign-located citizen and, if the target resides in a nation where the US can get away with utilizing weaponized drones, the American citizen is sentenced to death via push-button operator.
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A four-year-old girl whose face was blown off during a US drone strike in Afghanistan was kidnapped by American troops and hidden by an international organization, her family says.
The child, named Aisha Rashid, was travelling with her parents, a sibling and several other relatives from Kabul to their home in the village of Gamber in Kunar province on a hot September day, when the drone exploded, Expressen.se reported. An uncle, Meya Jan, is at home on his farm in that village when he receives a phone call about the strike from the neighboring village. He and others rush to the strike.
Suddenly they hear a voice. “Water, water…”
It is Aisha. She is missing a hand, her leg is bleeding, and there is nothing left of her eyes or nose.
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Richard Clarke served as the nation’s top counterterrorism official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before resigning in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission. Then Sept. 11 happened. Two months later, on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef, the head of al-Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person killed by a Predator drone. According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones have since killed at least 2,600 people in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare called, “Sting of the Drone.” We talk to Clarke about the book and his concerns about President Obama’s escalation of the drone war. “I think the [drone] program got out of hand,” Clarke says. “The excessive secrecy is as counterproductive as some of the strikes are.”
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A few days ago, Phil reported on Yousef Munayyer’s take on the nauseating Wolf Blitzer interview with “CNN analyst” (and former Israeli Ambassador to the US) Michael Oren on the recent IDF sniping murders of two Palestinian teenage boys.
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Every time the working class and poor of Latin America try to take a step forward and write their own history they confront the power of U.S. imperialism. It uses whatever is in fashion at the time — coups, blockades, manufactured protest movements, referendums or trade sanctions — to turn back the clock.
When longstanding polarization in Venezuela erupted into street protests in February and March, the United States, true to form, played its usual role in the unrest. Using money, tough talk and lobbying among Latin American countries, the U.S. tried to shore up opposition to the elected government of Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s successor.
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Not wavering from his foreign policy mission of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood to restore an Islamic Caliphate under their control, Mr. Obama has ordered the training and arming of Syrian jihadists to overthrow Assad. Current reports indicate that the forces loyal to Assad are gaining ground against the Muslim Brotherhood–supported rebels.
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The release of U.S. government contractor Alan Gross from a Cuban prison depends solely on the “political will” of President Barack Obama, a Havana spy who spent more than 15 years behind bars in the United States said on Monday.
To support that assertion, Fernando Gonzalez cited Obama’s decision to trade five senior Taliban members being held at Guantanamo for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American POW in Afghanistan.
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Through constant use of false flags deceptively blaming the designated enemy of the United States, starting with the dual threat of the Soviet Union and China’s spreading Communism in the early 1950’s, then in this century fabricating the al Qaeda enemy’s spreading terrorism and now back to a revitalized cold war stopping the expansionist spread of Russia and China again, the US has been busily justifying its aggressive interventionist policy throughout the world.
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Last weekend, a White House press report distributed to 6,000 journalists, included the name of the CIA’s station chief in Afghanistan, alongside said title.
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A night-time car chase in Cleveland that ended on a schoolyard where more than 100 shots were fired at the suspect’s vehicle appeared to be over when an officer opened fire again, a prosecutor said in announcing charges against the patrolman and five police supervisors.
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President Barack Obama’s decision to keep American troops in Afghanistan until 2016 is likely to mean two more years behind bars for America’s most secret detainee population, according to Pentagon officials.
On the outskirts of the massive Bagram airfield, about an hour’s drive from the capital of Kabul and in what the military calls the Detention Facility in Parwan, the US holds about 50 prisoners. The government has publicly disclosed nearly nothing about them, not even their names, save for acknowledging that they are not Afghans.
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Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, believes that captured weaponry appears to be the most important fuel of the armed rebellion, followed by self-made arms and materiel, and then foreign-supplied items.
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The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation mandating sanctions against Venezuela as officials there presented evidence of US involvement in a plot to bring down the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
The bill, passed in a voice vote by the House with only 14 members in opposition, demands that the Obama administration draw up a list of Venezuelan officials allegedly responsible for repression during violent protests that have been organized across the South American country since last February. They would be sanctioned with the freezing of any assets in the US and the denial or revocation of visas.
Washington’s step closer toward another blatant imperialist intervention against Venezuela came on the same day that government officials in Caracas publicly presented what they described as evidence of US involvement in a plot by the far-right in Venezuela to overthrow the government and assassinate President Maduro.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched into a full-throated attack on the evils of communism at a fundraiser on Friday for a monument to its victims.
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A group of people, including religious leaders in Berrien County, are taking to the road from Chicago to Battle Creek to protest what they see as a menace from the sky.
The participants will walk from Chicago to Battle Creek on June 3-14 to protest the use of armed drones in the “War on Terror,” that they say kill innocent civilians, create more enemies and undermine America’s standing in the world.
“The use of armed drones pose many legal, strategic, tactical, and ethical problems,” said the Rev. Dan Scheid of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Benton Harbor, who will walk and host discussions on the issue. “As a citizen of the United States and of the world, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is bad public policy. As a follower of Jesus, I am convinced that the use of armed drones is immoral, and my baptismal and ordination vows compel me to witness against them.”
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According to local officials in the eastern province of Kunar, the US-launched drone was on a targeted attack which killed and injured unknown people, some of them civilians.
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San Salvador – Sanchez Sanchez Ceren, 69, a former leader of the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front(FMLN) was sworn in as the president of El Salvador. He had won the presidency in a close March runoff vote against his conservative opponent.
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Bay Area officials in Oakland are reviewing seven years of police disability retirements after learning last month that one of their former officers was collecting a disability pension even while he was working for the FBI.
Former Oakland police officer Aaron McFarlane received more than $52,000 in disability benefits each year while he was working as an FBI special agent in Boston.
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His parting shot was a call for a European FBI to tackle cross-border crime gangs and the call for UKIP to follow in the footsteps of Sinn Fein ex-MPs Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who did not take up the seats they won in the Commons.
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In the words of Charles Krauthammer, a strong critic of Obama and supporter of the George W. Bush administration who has neoconservative tendencies: “And you didn’t hear much of anything in the West Point speech. It was a somber parade of straw men, as the president applauded himself for steering the nation on a nervy middle course between extreme isolationism and madcap interventionism. It was the rhetorical equivalent of that classic national security joke in which the presidential aide, devoted to policy option X, submits the following decision memo…
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The difference between Bush and Obama is that the latter is much more selective in his interventions. Such a correction was what the American people wanted when they elected Obama in 2008 — and inevitable after the two unsuccessful wars of Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson characterized the naysaying surrounding climate change as par for the course in footage aired on Monday from his interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes,
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Friends of the Earth claims chancellor handed out £2.7bn of incentives to North Sea oil and gas firms
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Even as it faces increased regulatory scrutiny at home, America’s dirty and unwanted coal is being embraced in one of the world’s cleanest energy markets: the European Union.
At the biggest power plant in the U.K., operated by Drax Group PLC, a small black mountain of a million tons of coal sits at the base of a dozen 374-foot cooling towers.
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A fierce debate has been raging between climatologists and Superfreakonomics authors Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt, culminating in an impassioned New York Times blogpost yesterday by Dubner. From RealClimate, part of the Guardian Environment Network
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Green capitalism is destined to fail: You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. We can’t shop our way out of global warming nor are there technological magic wands that will save us. There is no alternative to a dramatic change in the organization of the global economy and consumption patterns.
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Many anthropologists think this egalitarian lifestyle was an essential feature of hunting and gathering societies. In contrast with both today’s titans of Wall Street and the alpha males of the great apes, people in these societies “had an ethic of sharing that was central to their way of life,” Lee says. “No one takes precedence over anyone else.”
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Illegally logged timber in Brazil is being laundered on a massive and growing scale and then sold on to unwitting buyers in the UK, US, Europe and China, Greenpeace claimed on Thursday.
After a two-year investigation, the environmental campaign group says it has uncovered evidence of systematic abuse and a flawed monitoring system that contradicts the Brazilian government’s claims to be coping with the problem of deforestation in the Amazon.
In a report released on Thursday, Greenpeace cited five case studies of the fraudulent techniques used by the log launderers, including over-reporting the number and size of rare trees, logging trees protected by law, and over-extraction. It notes how forest management officials are implicated in the wrongdoing and several have previously been fined or detained for similar crimes in the past.
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During his speech at West Point Military Academy earlier this week, President Barack Obama described climate change as a “creeping national security crisis” that will require the armed forces to “respond to refugee flows, natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food.”
The speech emphasised that US foreign policy in the 21st century is increasingly being honed in recognition of heightened risks of social, political and economic upheaval around the world due the impacts of global warming.
A more detailed insight into US military planning could be seen in the report published a couple of weeks earlier by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board, written and endorsed by a dozen or so senior retired US generals. Describing climate change as a not just a “threat multiplier,” but now – even worse – a “catalyst for conflict”, the study concluded that environmental impacts from climate change in coming decades…
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Finance
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With poverty at 15 percent, inequality rising and Republican politicians talking about addressing the problem by cutting federal programs that help the poor, one might expect poverty to occupy a solid spot on media agendas.
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As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives — including their Social Security numbers — in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies.
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We are joined by Aviva Chomsky, whose new book, “Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal” details how systemic prejudice against Mexicans and many other migrant workers has been woven into U.S. immigration policies that deny them the same path to citizenship that have long been granted to European immigrants. She also draws parallels between the immigration laws now in place that criminalize migrants, and the caste system that has oppressed African Americans, as described by Prof. Michelle Alexander in her book, “The New Jim Crow.” Chomsky’s previous book on this topic is “They Take Our Jobs! and 20 Other Myths about Immigration.” She is a professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.
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Seattle has voted unanimously to raise the city’s minimum wage to the highest level of any major US city – $15 (£9) per hour, twice the national minimum.
Wages would begin to rise next year, ultimately reaching $15 from Washington state’s minimum of $9.32 over three to seven years, depending on the business.
A councillor who supported the push said the vote “sends a message heard around the world”.
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Well, this ought to cause a stir at this summer’s garden parties among Canada’s elites.
Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada Governor (now the Governor of the Bank of England) has come forward to condemn what he calls “unchecked market fundamentalism.”
He delivered the remarks last week at the Conference for Inclusive Capitalism, an annual gathering of global political and financial elites that featured keynotes by Carney along with Prince Charles and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
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Residential and commercial buildings are seen in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Home prices in major Chinese cities registered their first monthly decline in 23 months in May.
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Amid the upheavals in Thailand, Ukraine and Egypt, wealthy elites have used popular movements and elections to ratify decisions in their favor.
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Except for one big difference. By early 2016, the era of record-low interest rates is over. Borrowing is getting steadily more expensive. And the result is starting to destabilise our entire economic model.
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A few weeks ago, an official from the Cabinet Office gushed on his blog about a jolly exciting trip, a kind of pilgrimage, to Amazon and Google in Seattle and San Francisco. Francis Maude, the unofficial government minister for paperclips and parsimony, led the expedition. It was mindblowing, the official reported afterwards.
They looked at the IT, were given a sneak preview of the cutting edge innovations. It seemed they had unlimited time to talk about all manner of things. But there was no indication that anyone raised the fact with these multinational behemoths, that on any right-thinking estimation, they owe us billions of pounds in tax. Amazon’s UK subsidiary paid £2.4m in corporate taxes in 2012, despite sales of £4.3bn. Google paid £11.6m in the same period despite sales of £506m.
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Senior football officials in Africa received over $5 million in bribes to make sure Qatar won the bid for the 2022 World Cup, the Sunday Times reports citing leaked documents.
According to the paper, the money came from former FIFA vice-president and infamous Qatari businessman, Mohamed Bin Hammam.
Bin Hammam reportedly used 10 slush funds controlled by his private company – as well as cash handouts – to make dozens of payments of up to $200,000 to the heads of the 30 African football associations.
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The front page of USA Today (5/23/14) blew the whistle on federal workers: They are tax deadbeats who owe billions in back taxes.
The story also revealed that they owe less than most people.
Confused?
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A new progressive tax code would end the assault on shared prosperity, create jobs, and help save the planet, says Nobel Joseph Stiglitz
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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Serbia’s prime minister accused Europe’s chief security and rights watchdog of lying on Monday after it alleged his government tried to smother online criticism of its handling of devastating floods last month.
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Google has had one demand every seven seconds to suppress information about people’s pasts, it was revealed on Sunday.
The rush of censorship requests follows the internet giant’s move to provide forms allowing people to ask that certain information about them be hidden when their name is searched online.
The figures indicate that large amounts of material could disappear from public reach as a direct result of an EU court decision that search engines must enforce a “right to be forgotten”.
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Egypt’s internationally renowned satirist, Bassem Youssef, has announced the end of his popular television show, citing pressure from the authorities.
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I’ve avoided talking about this story until it progressed further. Historically Google has had many take-down requests, many to do with “piracy” and there’s also court order’s for ISP blocks on domains – we already have an increasing trend towards censorship. But is some censorship good? Whilst the copyright take-down’s and ISP blocks are mostly useless, with the recent ruling involving Google removing search results for you and me, requires further examination.
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Bold initiatives characterize India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, who famously lives in a 27-story building in Mumbai, a city where most people languish in slums. Last month, his company, Reliance Industries Ltd., sought to prevent circulation of a new book which claims that Reliance successfully pressured the previous Indian government to double the price of natural gas. Amazon received a cease and desist notice, as did even an individual who had merely forwarded an e-mail invitation to the book’s launch. And Thursday, Ambani moved to buy a whole swath of the Indian media: Bloomberg News reports that Reliance, which has already invested $11 billion in a high-speed cellular network, will now spend $678 million for majority stakes in two major media companies, Network18 Media & Investments Ltd. and TV18 Broadcast Ltd.
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Since the surprise Arab uprisings of 2011, the Saudi government has worked assiduously to ensure it has all the tools of censorship it needs to control dissent. These tools–a combination of special courts, laws, and regulatory authorities–are starting to fire on all cylinders. The result has been a string of arrests and prosecutions in recent months of independent and dissident voices.
The first step came in January 2011 with new regulations for online media that could be used to restrict coverage, including applying the kingdom’s already highly repressive press law to online media. Shortly after, the Ministry of Culture and Information began blocking local news websites that failed to register, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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At a meeting with journalists last week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. was questioned about the prolonged quest to compel James Risen, a reporter for The Times, to testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency official. Prosecutors say Mr. Sterling was a source for restricted information in Mr. Risen’s 2006 book on the C.I.A. “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” Mr. Holder said.
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Privacy
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But as documents released by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden revealed last year, the hijacking of our civil liberties has continued, albeit surreptitiously and sleazily by functionaries at NSA. Snowden’s revelations showed the agency had been secretly harvesting millions of emails and instant-messaging contact lists of everyday Americans. Judges have challenged the practice’s constitutionality with one calling it “almost Orwellian.” – See more at: http://www.vindy.com/news/2014/jun/02/dont-let-us-freedoms-tumble-in-balancing/#sthash.V2lRraKK.dpuf
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On Sep. 1, 2013, U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed that in 2012 the NSA had spied on the email of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in the latter case during his presidential campaign.
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Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, wanted by US authorities and currently living in Russia, said in a TV interview Sunday that he has applied for asylum in Brazil.
“I would love to live in Brazil,” Snowden told Brazil’s Globo TV.
Snowden’s temporary asylum in Russia expires in August. Washington has revoked his US passport, so his travel options are limited.
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Average citizens are subject to ever-expanding surveillance and data collection by the government-corporate complex.
Halfway across the ornate sitting room, Julian Assange stands with his back to the door, drinking a bottle of beer. It is early on a summer evening, June 22, 2013, and the Embassy of Ecuador in London is hosting a small party to acknowledge the one-year anniversary of his arrival in need of asylum. While Assange stands chatting calmly about the future of his anti-secrecy enterprise, Wikileaks, few people in the room know that he is worried. Sarah Harrison, his principal researcher and confidant, is only hours away from slipping out of Hong Kong with Edward Snowden, who, at that moment, is fast becoming the most hunted man in the world.
Close friends and supporters of Assange mill around the room, helping themselves to the buffet and arguing about software and the state of the world – in that order. Assange himself, with his longish white hair and black jeans, looks slightly out of place in the scene, bordered as it is by stiff-legged, gilt-painted settees. After a year, however, he’s completely at home here, laughing and joking with the security guys, lawyers, and hacker guests, talking thoughtfully about the escalating struggle for control of electronic information.
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Facebook just announced a new feature to its app, which will let it listen to our conversations and surroundings through our own phones’ microphone. Talk about a Big Brother move.
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A new email service being developed by a group from MIT and European research center CERN promises to bring secure, encrypted email to the masses and keep sensitive information away from prying eyes.
“We guarantee only the sender and receiver can read the messages,” said Andy Yen, a co-founder of ProtonMail. “We have zero access to user data.”
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This will be the occasion for us to brief colleague ministers on the most recent developments here in The Bahamas with regard to the recent allegations of the recording of Bahamian mobile phone calls by the United States.
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Nearly one year on from the first revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, it is still business as usual. The NSA continues to scoop up all the data it wants, while the technology companies which have co-operated with it all along continue to try and convince the public that they are doing what they can to curtail such activity.
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Canada’s next privacy Commissioner is a federal Justice Department lawyer who counsels the government agencies that impact privacy in Canada the most—agencies such as the NSA’s Five Eyes cyber surveillance partner Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which operates an extensive, secretive metadata collection program that the country’s citizens know very little about.
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In an interview last week with NBC’s Brian Williams, NSA secret-leaker Edward Snowden set himself a low bar and claimed success: His leaks, he said, have gotten us talking about these important issues. Mission accomplished? Let’s think about that…
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Ben Wizner, attorney for NSA leaker Edward Snowden, got into it with Up host Steve Kornacki Sunday morning over whether Snowden had sacrificed his moral authority as a whistleblower by fleeing the United States (and eventually ending up in Russia) rather than accepting the legal consequences of leaking classified information. To this Wizner posed: “Do you think people who used the Underground Railroad should have stayed and faced the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act?”
“So you’re likening them?” Kornacki asked. “That’s quite a comparison.”
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The late 1960’s and early 1970’s was the heyday of legal privacy as we came to know it in the 20th century. From the Supreme Court first came the family planning cases that made contraception legal in 1965, and which continued up to abortion rights and most recently the decriminalization of sodomy law almost always used against same sex relationships. Next came a decision that required law enforcement to obtain a warrant for tapping a phone line for content and the subsequent Congressional action to instantiate that decision; those laws are the foundation for the current Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Consumer protection privacy laws were continuing apace with rules that required companies that kept “scores” on individual’s credit to allow the individual access and the right to correct the record in the event of misidentifications or mistake. Another flavor of this era is the law that produced one of our better known sectoral laws, FERPA, or the one that protects education records. Often overlooked is the plainly named Privacy Act of 1974.
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USA Freedom Act hides behind ‘fog of legalese’ to give NSA more spying power
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Want real surveillance reform? Well, we almost had it. The USA Freedom Act started off with a roar before being slightly weakened (compromised is the word being used) by the House Security and Judiciary Committees. Still, it had wide ranging support across the floor. It was a sufficient start to a bill set to curtail the surveillance programs in the United States considerably and the civil liberties community in Congress rallied behind it.
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Early this week, the FBI announced that five Chinese hackers had been indicted for spying on American companies. That’s right, economic espionage.
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Major websites such as Reddit, Imgur and DuckDuckGo are to take part in the June 5 “Reset The Net” anti-NSA spying online campaign.
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The Reset the Net campaign aims to encourage direct action, urging visitors to install privacy and encryption tools
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Edward SnowdenEdward Snowden. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.
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Oliver Stone will write and direct a film about Edward Snowden, one of two high-profile films in the works about the National Security Agency leaker.
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Acclaimed director Oliver Stone, who has made iconic films like “Wall Street” and “Platoon,” will be directing a film based on the story of Edward Snowden that will be adapted from a book written by Luke Harding, a journalist at British newspaper, The Guardian.
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Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone will be adapting the story of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for the big screen.
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Former intelligence service provider Edward Snowden, currently residing in Russia and sought after by the US authorities, said in an interview that he has applied for asylum in Brazil.
Agence France-Presse cited Snowden as stating in an interview given to Brazilian TV channel Globo that if Brazil gives him asylum, then he would gladly accept the offer and would very much like to live in Brazil. However, the foreign ministry of Brazil has said that it has not yet received any formal asylum appeal from Snowden.
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The Brazilian foreign ministry Monday denied that US intelligence contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden has formally requested Brazil for asylum.
In an interview aired by local TV station Globo Sunday evening, Snowden, whose temporary asylum in Russia expires in August, said that he had requested asylum from Brazilian government, and he would be happy to live in Brazil if the government approves his request, Xinhua reported.
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When journalist Glenn Greenwald spoke via Skype to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago last June, it was just three weeks after he had begun reporting on the leaks provided by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the massive scope of government surveillance.
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is expected to announce on Tuesday a deal with DEF CON to hold the final round of DARPA’s two-year Cyber Grand Challenge at the organization’s 2016 Las Vegas conference.
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Every year, the government makes thousands of requests for court-ordered electronic surveillance, often without a warrant. The vast majority of these legal proceedings are sealed indefinitely from public view, even after the investigations are over. The secrecy surrounding these matters is the subject of a page-one article in The Wall Street Journal.
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In one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades, the Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from James Risen of The New York Times. Risen is refusing to testify in the trial of an ex-CIA analyst accused of being his confidential source. He has vowed to continue his fight and face imprisonment rather than reveal his source’s identity. Tune in to Democracy Now! on Tuesday when we get reaction to the latest developments from Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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NBC News didn’t broadcast the full interview with former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, but only aired a quarter of it Russia Today reported. Unaired excerpts now online show that the network neglected to air critical statements about the 9/11 attacks,
The four-hour interview of Snowden by journalist Brian Williams was condensed into a 60-minute programme by NBC.
In one of the portions, Snowden questioned the US intelligence agencies’ inability to stop the 11 September, 2001 attacks in New York, despite having massive amount of surveillance.
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A Downtown attorney filed a federal lawsuit Monday against the president, the heads of the FBI and NSA, and others alleging the government is illegally monitoring his Internet communications, including email.
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Recently e-commerce giant Amazon unveiled a microphone-enabled barcode reader, the Amazon Dash, giving a helping hand to add items to your shopping list. The device was given away free of charge to a select number of Amazon’s Prime Fresh loyalty program users, who can now order their groceries either vocally or through a quick scan of a product’s container (for example a milk bottle). Just say it and get it delivered to your home. “Never forget an item again — Dash remembers so you don’t have to,” says AmazonFresh’s website.
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AFTER more than a week with no answers from Americans or “hard facts” over spying claims, Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell said he plans to raise concerns over allegations at a regional meeting this week.
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Sunde was also involved in numerous tech startups in recent years, including the short messaging service Heml.is (“secret” in Swedish) – reportedly a NSA-proof service – for which he raised more than $150,000 through a crowd-funding campaign.
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A civil liberties coalition wants to nullify the NSA, one lightbulb at a time.
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The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has refused to confirm or deny if it has been eavesdropping on Barbadian cellphone calls.
Agency spokesperson Vanee Vines would say neither “yes” nor “no” to questions from the DAILY NATION on if it had been doing so.
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Mr. Green, why not try making art that calls into question, rather than exploits, our growing lack of privacy?
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For the first time, the founder of an encrypted email startup that was supposed to insure privacy for all reveals how the FBI and the US legal system made sure we don’t have the right to much privacy in the first place
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As that indicates, this is an extremely thoughtful and wide-ranging paper that draws together a number of big issues — surveillance, privacy, governance, geopolitics etc. It’s an important contribution to the debate initiated by the release of NSA and GCHQ documents by Edward Snowden, and anyone interested in what the longer-term implications of those revelations will be really ought to read it.
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On June 1, NBC’s Meet the Press unveiled new polling numbers about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. They weren’t very revealing. What was more instructive was how the show presented its debate over Snowden’s actions.
The main participants in the discussion were right-wing Crossfire host Newt Gingrich and hawkish former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman.
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Civil Rights
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Indigeneity is an unusual way to think about International Relations (IR). Most studies of world politics ignore Indigenous perspectives, which are rarely treated as relevant to thinking about the international (Shaw 2008; Beier 2009). Yet Indigenous peoples are engaging in world politics with a dynamism and creativity that defies the silences of our discipline (Morgan 2011). In Latin America, Indigenous politics has gained international legitimacy, influencing policy for over two decades (Cott 2008; Madrid 2012). Now, Indigenous political movements are focused on resisting extractive projects on autonomous territory from the Arctic to the Amazon (Banerjee 2012; Sawyer and Gómez 2012). Resistance has led to large mobilized protests, invoked international law, and enabled alternative mechanisms of authority. In response, governments have been busy criminalizing Indigenous claims to consultation that challenge extractive models of development. Indigenous opposition to extractivism ultimately promotes self-determination rights, questioning the states’ authority over land by placing its sovereignty into historical context. In that sense, Indigeneity is a valuable approach to understanding world politics as much as it is a critical concept to move beyond state-centrism in the study of IR.
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Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), has announced that his rebel persona no longer exists. He had gone from being a “spokesman to a distraction,” he said last week. His persona, he said, fed an easy and cheap media narrative. It turned a social revolution into a cartoon for the mass media. It allowed the commercial press and the outside world to ignore traditional community leaders and indigenous commanders and wrap a movement around a fictitious personality. His persona, he said, trivialized a movement. And so this persona is no more.
“The entire system, but above all its media, plays the game of creating celebrities who it later destroys if they don’t yield to its designs,” Marcos declared.
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Coming through passport control is an ordeal, I am followed on the street and hassled by security services. Not all citizens enjoy the same rights
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What is Firedoglake? How does it work? How does the site make money? Are there any other websites you could write for? What do you think you plan to do next?
Sometimes describing what I do at Firedoglake to family, friends and people I encounter after speaking at events is a bit perplexing to people. This is not a more prominent news media organization like New York Times, Rolling Stone or Huffington Post. But I have found not being more prominent uniquely positions Firedoglake to pursue specific projects.
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A reporter who has been ordered to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of disclosing classified information lost his bid Monday to get the Supreme Court to clarify whether journalists have a right to protect their confidential sources.
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The case had been closely watched as possibly setting an important precedent about the First Amendment, news reporters and confidential sources. Instead, Risen will now face a decision about officially naming his source for a book he wrote about Iran or refusing to answer questions under a Justice Department subpoena. (The source’s name has been widely reported as part of an official legal action.)
Last Thursday, the Justices met behind closed doors to consider accepting Risen’s case for the Court’s next term, which starts in October 2014.
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As the world focuses on the World Cup, which opens in Brazil in less than a fortnight, many Brazilians are wrestling with painful discoveries about the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. The BBC has found evidence that the UK actively collaborated with the generals – and trained them in sophisticated interrogation techniques.
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As the World Cup nears, the Brazilian press has reported that the American company Academi, formerly Blackwater, carried out training of Brazilian military personnel and federal police in April.
The training is a facet of the military cooperation agreement between Brazil and the United States signed in 2010 during the second term of the Lula de Silva administration in preparation for containing terrorist acts during this year’s World Cup. Academi is a private security company based in the United States, and has used mercenary soldiers in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Bill Gertz reported this week on a memo outlining Obama’s plan to use the military against citizens – a memo from 2010. Remember how the blogs and many of us out here were ringing the alarm bells on Obama’s stance that he could use the military and drones against American citizens? Remember how we were marginalized and called crazy for it? Turns out, ‘crazy’ is relative.
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The ICE undercover operation played out in the first decade of the 2000s (roughly 2004 until sometime in 2008) and involved the use of US government front companies to sell aircraft to suspected Latin American drug-trafficking organizations.
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In an effort to increase job opportunities for Saudi Arabian citizens, the Saudi government is detaining and deporting thousands of undocumented foreign migrant workers. Part of the deportation process includes detaining large populations in what has been described as “appalling” conditions. These detention centers have had reports of guard brutality, overcrowding, lack of food, and poor hygiene. Furthermore, most of these migrant workers are Somali, and are deported back to one of the most unstable, dangerous areas in the world.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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So there’s every reason to believe that YouTube is, indeed, bullying the independents into accepting a deal that dramatically undervalues the investment indies make in new emerging artists. Unlike the lack of support songwriters had when PRS experienced the same tactic, the indies can surely count on songwriters to support them in standing up to the bully. But when will the competition commissions around the world do something about it? It’s not only artists that will be worse off if the indies give in – so will music fans all over the world.
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Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay co-founder was arrested in Southern Sweden. TPB co-founder was wanted by Interpol and apprehended in a police raid. Peter did not serve prison time for his role in Pirate Bay operations. TorrentFreak noted that he was arrested exactly eight years after police conducted the raid.
Peter was wanted by Interpol for more than two years and he was arrested in a place near Malmö, Sweden. Interpol had been looking after his role in The Pirate Bay case.
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Peter Sunde was arrested today in a police raid in southern Sweden. The Pirate Bay co-founder was wanted by Interpol as he had yet to serve prison time for his involvement with the site. Sunde’s arrest comes exactly eight years after the police raided the Pirate Bay servers, which marked the start of the criminal prosecution against the site’s founders.
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