Another day, another two new Chromebooks get unwrapped. Hot on the heals of Lenovo’s announcement of the N20 and N20p Chromebooks, Asus unveils the C200 and C300. The new Chromebooks come in two sizes and promise battery life of 10 hours.
If Chrome OS use is growing rapidly, and continues to do so, I’d expect the picture to be clearer in the months and years to come. But for now, all I know for sure is that both Chrome skeptics and Chrome boosters can point to stats that seem to back up their respective stances. Convenient, isn’t it?
Red Hat and Canonical are doing a lot of the work to get the KVM hypervisor running properly on 64-bit ARM and Citrix Systems is also working to get the Xen hypervisor, which is the preferred virtualizer on Linux-based public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting, and IBM SoftLayer all use a variant of Xen; it is not clear what Google uses and Microsoft clearly uses Hyper-V). Stephano Stabellini, senior principal software engineer at Citrix, explained that Xenon ARM was a “lean and simple architecture” that “removed all of the cruft accumulated over the years” in the X86 implementation of Xen. The ARM variant of Xen has no emulation and does not make use of QEMU, and it only provides one type of guest, which combines the two options available on X86 machinery. (That would be the full virtualization of a Hardware Virtual Machine and the partial virtualization available through Para-Virtualization).
A recent article in Fortune magazine entitled “The Dawn of the Chrome Age” highlights the success of the Linux-based OS in the low-cost laptop market. According to the article, “Over the holidays in 2013, two Chromebook models were the No. 1 and No.3 bestselling laptops on Amazon.com, and they’re being adopted in schools and business around the world.” Simply put, Chrome OS represents Web apps on top of Linux, and given that the Web has become the leading application development platform – this is significant.
The focus of Intel’s DRM Color Manager work is to have a common interface for all color correction / enhancement properties for different hardware, the color manager one be one umbrella DRM property, and DRM drivers can register the color correction properties of its hardware during initialization time.
Back in the middle of April I wrote about the Improv ARM development board not yet shipping and many of the early pre-order customers being frustrated that the open-source-friendly hardware still isn’t shipping months past its original ship date. Since then, there’s still been no official update and it looks like one of their suppliers isn’t even working with them anymore.
Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.1.2.
Mesa 10.1.2 is the next iteration in the series and implements the OpenGL 3.1 API. This means that some drivers might not support the specifications for the latest Mesa. This latest iteration of the Mesa library comes with a large number of changes and fixes, so it’s a good idea to update as soon as possible.
Most of the performance changes to be found between Mesa 10.1 stable and the current Mesa Git code just past the 10.2 branching was around the HD 7850 graphics card that uses the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver while the other three graphics cards used the R600g driver. With R600g and our assortment of Linux gaming and OpenGL benchmark tests run, we didn’t see any better performance in the code beyond where it’s at with Mesa 10.1.
Sysmonitor Indicator is an Ubuntu AppIndicator that can display the CPU, memory, swap, filesystem and network usage as well as various temperature sensors as values on the panel.
The Kingsoft Office suite uses a Qt-based GUI and is known for its high compatibility with modern Microsoft Office document files but it has no support for ODF. According to multiple user reports, Kingsoft Office does deal better with handling some document elements than LibreOffice/OpenOffice. The Kingsoft Office/WPS software for Linux has been under development since 2012 and was released in June of last year while up through today is still considered in an alpha state. There’s also been official communication about Kingsoft Office for FreeBSD, but its state appears even more premature.
Between stable builds, the developers launch a large number of Beta versions that integrate a lot of new features. Some of the updates are pretty large, if we take into account the first one in the new series, but more intermediary releases only feature a small number of changes.
According to the changelog, the performance of the Steam client in some cases with the Big Picture window out-of-focus or in-game has been improved, especially on the Linux platform.
Right out of the gate, Renderdoc isn’t as useful to Linux users as is Valve’s VOGL or other utilities like APITrace. Because, as it stands right now, Renderdoc only targets the Microsoft Direct3D 10/11 graphics API, but support for OpenGL is planned under this open-source Renderdoc. While still targeting D3D11 right now, there is basic build support for Linux of Renderdoc. I imagine in the months ahead it will get much more interesting once there’s OpenGL API support and open-source contributors have had their hand at improving the Renderdoc Linux support.
Oh you might think I’m just rambling, and that this is trivial because I don’t mention any talks? You might be right in some way, I am kind of rambling. If you find that trivial on the other hand, you are very mistaken! KDE is people, conf.kde.in is even more about people: the KDE India crew, the other foreign speakers trying to learn of the Indian culture and failing, the students hungry for knowledge.
Remember Playkot’s Supercity? Game artist Paul Geraskin liked has just started a crowdfunding campaign to support working on a new indie game, inspired by Howard Lovecraft: Road to Providence. As with Supercity, Road to Providence will be created with open source tools: Krita, Blender, and jMonkeyEngine.
I fail to see what everyone is complaining about. gEdit 3.12 looks fabulous! Better than any previous version. It’s useful, minimalistic in design, allows you better focus on what you’re writing (as intended), and it saves vertical screen space which is honestly welcomed on my laptop’s wide-screen.
If you’re looking to add a reliable, popular and free media center app to your computer, then XBMC is one of the best to go for. Want to go even further? You can press an older computer or small form-factor PC into service as a dedicated media server and center using XBMC at its core via a number of specially constructed Linux builds. And if space is tight – or you’d like to run XBMC directly off a USB flash drive or SD card – then OpenELEC is the build to go for.
Advanced Package Tool was launched back in 1998, and 16 years later it finally reached version 1.0. Now we already have version 1.0.3, which means that the developers intend to pick up the pace a little with the new builds.
In conjunction with its Project Skybridge and K2 announcement, AMD said that today it “demonstrated for the first time its 64-bit ARM-based AMD Opteron A-Series processor, codenamed ‘Seattle,’ running a Linux environment derived from the Fedora Project.” The Fedora-based Linux environment is said to enable development — and migration between — applications based on both x86- and ARM-based processors using common tools.
Hey, Linux fans: a high-profile, colossal, global outfit is about to dump a proprietary operating system and replace it with Linux in a very, very, demanding application that literally involves life and death situations.
We’ve known this for a while actually, since 2012 to be precise, as that is when the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River in Maryland first announced it was keen on Linux-powered software to control the Northrop Grumman MQ-8. The “Fire Scout”, as it is also known, is an unmanned helicopter said to offer “unprecedented situation awareness and precision targeting support” and capable of carrying Hellfire and/or laser-guided missiles..
Probably the biggest thing missing from Intel’s announcements today were any Chromebooks that have a larger or higher-quality screen — most Chromebooks remain stuck with 11-inch screens and relatively low resolutions. Samsung’s new Chromebook may run the less powerful Exynos processor, but it also features a 13-inch, 1080p screen — it seems that Chrome consumers will still need to choose between power and a quality screen for the time being. As always, Intel, Google, and its OEM partners said they’ll continue to innovate on the hardware front, even though these Chromebooks are pretty similar design-wise to earlier models. “As users do more with Chrome, they’ll expect more from the hardware that surrounds it,” said Google VP Caesar Sengupta.
Now, the company is opening it up to the public after an apparently successful invite-only phase. Atom is now available for Mac users and is open source, naturally. The company plans on releasing Linux and Windows versions very soon.
When I walked into Carroll Hall, for a moment I felt like I was back in college… and at the World’s Best Slumber Party. There were tables full of salty snacks, stacks of sleeping bags, and the chatter of excited young women. But, unlike the sleepovers of my youth, talk was about Python, HTML, and Ruby. These were young women interested in learning to code.
I do a lot of work on open source, but my most valuable contributions haven’t been code. Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks. Here’s some things I’ve learned along the way.
Today I’m happy to announce the public beta of the Flowhub interface for Flow-Based Programming. This is the latest step in the adventure that started with some UI sketching early last year, went through our successful Kickstarter — and now — thanks to our 1 205 backers, it is available to the public.
Over the past few months, users have seen a change in the way Chrome displays security warnings. Adrienne Porter Felt, one of the people who work on the Chrome security team, did a presentation showing the effect that warnings on Chrome affect people’s browsing experience. In the presentation, she uses data that they have collected to show the CTR (click through rate, or the rate at which users ignore warnings and continue to a webpage). She describes some of the challenges they face, and the solutions they have implemented to prevent users from downloading malicious files, and the effect these solutions have had.
Just as a meaningless addendum, I actually don’t use Firefox itself, but rather Debian Linux’s “Iceweasel”, which is exactly the same, the only difference being the logo. Debian has insanely high standards for what constitutes “free”, which is in fact laudable but leads to things like this renaming because Firefox’s logo isn’t as completely free as it could be. It causes a lot of confusion for Debian neophytes in the help forums, that’s for sure. I kinda like being an Iceweasel user. Cool name. There’s also Icedove (renamed Thunderbird email program) and my favorite, Iceape (renamed SeaMonkey internet suite). Speaking of SeaMonkey, did you know this even existed? Yes, it’s still possible to use a full featured “internet suite” that includes a web browser, email and newsgroups client, and HTML editor all in one package. Pretty cool, and free of course, and maybe even useful for some folks. All of these things are from the aforementioned fine folks at Mozilla, which is what rose out of the ashes of Netscape years ago. I loved Netscape!
David Goldberg is ConteXtream’s lead software engineer and was the first software developer to join the next generation SDN product team. David is also leading ConteXtream’s contribution to the OpenDaylight project and is one of the top commiters to the LISP Flow Mapping project. Prior to Contextream, David was responsible for the development of network analysis tools during his army service in an elite technological group in the IDF Intelligence Corps. David holds a BA in Computer Science and Management (cum laude).
How has the open-source cloud landscape changed in the last two years? There’s certainly been a lot of moving and shaking, but how much traction has there been in terms of corporate deployment?
There’s no question that Big Data is now a huge market, but what may surprise some observers is just how rapidly it continues to expand. That growth is evident in reports such as the announcement this week from MapR, which delivers Big Data solutions based on the open source Apache Hadoop platform, that first-quarter growth has tripled over last year.
Satellite-TV provider Dish Network Corp. turned to open source database software in 2012 when its first foray into Big Data crippled its conventional database. Dish wants to capitalize on data it collects in its interactions with customers to be able to better market new products and services.
So which CMS is better? Again, it’s not that simple. The first thing you need to know is what you want. Once you’ve figured that out, it’s just a matter of seeing which system can give it to you.
Hewlett-Packard Co said it plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next two years to develop and offer cloud-computing products and services.
The company said it will make its OpenStack-based public cloud services available in 20 data centers over the next 18 months.
OpenStack, a cloud computing project that HP co-founded, provides a free and open-source cloud computing platform for public and private cloud services.
There is still healthy venture capital flowing into the OpenStack pool. Metacloud, which offers OpenStack services and support for several large companies, announced it has closed a $15 million Series B round of funding featuring new investors Pelion Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, and UMC Capital, as well as prior investors AME Cloud Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Storm Ventures.
When you have a problem or opportunity, in business or government, it is typical to call on two groups of people to work on it: Your own staff or external consultants. A third group is emerging as a promising source of innovation and improvement: Everyone.
Through this partnership, IDA and Red Hat have also agreed to jointly drive the Red Hat Challenge, a regional technology challenge that provides a platform for students to pit their ideas around and use cases for open source.
With an Arduino-compatible brain, Bluetooth LE connectivity, 3D-printed case, and open-source approach, Jonathan Cook’s BLE smart watch is the winner of our Arduino Challenge, and will be headed to Maker Faire Rome this Fall.
Though still nowhere near as ubiquitous as FOSS, open hardware is gaining ground rapidly with the booming popularity of open source 3D printing. There are now hundreds of thousands of free open source designs for products you can download and print on your own printer. Here are 10 of our favorites.
It’s no secret that open source has shaken up the software world, not least for the savings it’s brought both organizations and consumers. Now it’s starting to look like open source hardware could have a similar, game-changing effect.
David Helkowski stood waiting outside a restaurant in Towson, Maryland, fresh from a visit to the unemployment office. Recently let go from his computer consulting job after engaging in some “freelance hacking” of a client’s network, Helkowski was still insistent on one point: his hack, designed to draw attention to security flaws, had been a noble act.
The traditional antivirus is “dead” and “doomed to failure,” Symantec’s information security chief declares. Quelle surprise, considering Norton is fading into oblivion. But what next?
The media now have a new cartoon figure of hate in the bearded, bobble-hatted leader of Boko Haram, and in truth he is a very bad person. But armed rebellions of thousands of people do not just happen. It is not a simple and spontaneous outbreak of evil, still less a sign that we must wage Tony Blair’s war on Muslims everywhere.
Despite a track record that is stained with the blood of innocent victims, drone technology is quickly becoming the weapon of choice for militaries around the globe, and it’s too late for the United States – presently the leader in UAV technologies – to stop the rush, according to Defense One, a site devoted to security issues.
The man who established the Australian Army’s first drone unit has hit out at former prime minister Malcolm Fraser’s criticism of Australian involvement in US military drone operations.
The story of the CIA-led killer drones which are killing women and children on a daily basis is a tale accorded inexcusably scant attention in media. Indeed it is being ignored.
It remains the most memorable moment of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) young career in Congress: a 13-hour talking filibuster in 2013 to stall the nomination of John Brennan as director of the CIA. But it was more publicity stunt than a principled stand of much purpose; Paul was merely seeking the answer to a narrowly crafted question about the use of drones in the United States, and Brennan easily won confirmation anyway.
Secrecy in a democracy is highly problematic (as is the question of whether the United States remains a democracy). Arguably, there have been a few cases where Washington was right to keep the American public in the dark. The Manhattan Project which built the atomic bomb and the timing and location of the Allied D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe were the two most closely guarded secrets of World War Two. But more frequently, secrecy’s only purpose is to protect the rulers (Pentagon Papers, anyone?).
Pakistan is in a perilous, decapitating state, thanks to US drones. A man who lost his family to a US drone attack begs for President Barack Obama to answer his question, “Why did you ruin my paradise?” The Voice of Russia, in joint cooperation with a local Pakistani journalist, interviewed 35-year-old electrician Haji Gul, whose entire family was wiped out from an American drone strike, revealed that his young daughter and wife died due to the US’ erratic actions and unjust drone practices.
For three years, they’ve watched the sky turn from black to blue — the sun rising over the Sierra Nevada range — as they denounce drones at Beale Air Force Base.
The protesters gather monthly, flashing signs at the airmen driving onto base.
“You can’t bomb the world to peace.”
“Kill the drones, not innocent people.”
Janie Kesselman, a peace activist from North San Juan, said the group’s goal is to end the “remote-controlled murder of innocent people.”
The White House pledged Tuesday to give lawmakers expanded access to memos on the legality of killing American citizens in drone strikes, a concession aimed at heading off Senate opposition to a judicial nominee involved in drafting those secret documents.
Before he authored legal memos related to the Obama administration’s targeted killing program, David Barron joined a group of left-leaning legal scholars and endorsed a statement of principles urging more transparency from the very office now withholding his work from the public.
If Harvard Law Professor David J. Barron fails to win confirmation as a federal appeals court judge, it won’t be because he was “blocked” by Sen. Rand Paul.
If Barron doesn’t make it to the bench, it will likely be because Democrats have unease about the legal justifications for drone strikes. In a post-nuclear-option world, Republicans can send letters talking about blocking or delaying nominees but their practical impact is nil.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Tuesday that the Obama administration will allow senators to access classified materials related to the drone program before voting on the Barron nomination.
“I can confirm that the Administration is working to ensure that any remaining questions members of the Senate have about Barron’s legal work at the Department of Justice are addressed, including making available in a classified setting a copy of the al-Awlaki opinion to any Senator who wishes to review it prior to Barron’s confirmation vote. Last year, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had access to the memo, and I would note that in his Committee vote, Barron received unanimous Democratic support,” Schultz said in a statement. “We are confident Barron will be confirmed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and that he will serve with distinction.”
Barron, back when he worked for Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel, apparently helped author one or two of the memos providing authorization for the September 2011 drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen working with al-Qaeda in Yemen. Those memos are among several documents that the Obama administration has been ordered to release; it has not done so, claiming that it might still appeal the court ruling.
A Milwaukee woman Monday became the second of five protesters convicted at trial of trespassing for walking onto the Volk Field military base at Camp Douglas in 2013.
Joyce E. Ellwanger, 77, told Juneau County Circuit Judge Paul Curran she preferred to serve jail time rather than pay the $232 fine for trespassing during a protest of U.S. drone warfare.
“I can’t in good conscience pay it, judge,” Ellwanger told the court.
Curran sentenced Ellwanger to five days in the Juneau County jail on the trespassing violation but found her not guilty of a charge of disorderly conduct.
At least 37 al Qaeda militants have been killed in southern Yemen. The area is one of the country’s most impenetrable ones, and the army has recently intensified an offensive to root out foreign and local Islamist fighters there. The number of attacks against Yemen’s US-backed army and security forces in the south has risen since the launch of an anti al-Qaeda offensive. The Voice of Russia talked to Dr. Lina Khatib, Director of Carnegie Middle East Center.
The Senate’s high-profile summary of a 6,600-page CIA torture report was supposed to be released by now, at least in a redacted form. It hasn’t been, and no one in the Senate seems sure why.
Despite both the White House and CIA promising a quick declassification review, Politico reported this week that the White House and CIA are now refusing to even answer questions as to when the report will be sent back to the Intelligence Committee for release. Senator Dianne Feinstein said, “I would hope that it would be short and quick. That may be a vain [effort].” Senator Dick Durbin said, “I don’t know what the reason is [for the delay].”
Sadly, it was quite predictable that the White House and CIA would delay the release of a report, which is reportedly devestating in its criticism of the CIA, and will remind the public that the Obama administration refused to hold anyone at the CIA accountable for its crimes. Disturbingly, the CIA itself—the same agency the report accuses of years of prisoner abuse and systematic lying—is in charge of the redaction process for the report, despite the fact that it has already dragged its feet for over a year, has been accused of misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee, and even allegedly spied on its staffers all in an apparent attempt to prevent the report from seeing light.
The US has signed a deal with Djibouti, a tiny nation in the Horn of Africa, extending by decades the presence of America’s largest military base in Eastern Africa. The site serves as a hub for drone strikes in Yemen and is a suspected CIA secret prison.
The Taliban portrays vaccination drives as a western plot to sterilize Muslim children or as a cover for spies. The CIA unfortunately lent credence to the latter claim by using a phony vaccination campaign as a ruse to collect DNA evidence from Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.
Stanford University has announced that it is pulling its endowment out of investments in any of 100 publicly traded companies that are focused on extracting coal. No future investments will be made in any of those companies, and the university will instruct the managers that run its non-endowment investments to avoid these stocks as well.
That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.
The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, — with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama — was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.
The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.
A string of academic reports documenting in detail the impacts of austerity on health care and health outcomes in Greece have recently been released [1]. They show how European authorities, IMF and Greek government policies implemented in response to the economic crisis have led to deaths and attacks on the health of ordinary people. But there was nothing inevitable about those consequences. As the medical journal the Lancet stated: “Experience elsewhere in Europe shows that those countries which prioritise social protection (including health) in the midst of austerity, and favour fiscal stimulation, secure better outcomes for their populations.”
We may as well call it “edu-pay-tion,” as far as many prospective students are concerned. The cost of a college degree has risen 1,120 percent since 1978, but wages have increased a mere 6 percent during that same period. The national collective college debt is more than $1 trillion! We have college grads mired in $29,000 of debt, on average, while they are looking for jobs that do not exist. Parents and grandparents of those grads are also saddled with much of that debt, which is immune to bankruptcy, and they will have to make the payments until they die.
What have we gotten ourselves into? The greed that accompanied those easy-to-obtain, just-sign-here college tuition loans, borders on immoral. Financial institutions were like Black Friday crowds, trampling one another to get in on the act. New lending operations cropped up every day, and new proprietary colleges and universities opened their doors throughout the nation, advertising their degrees and easy to get loans for tuition. What would happen if students and parents just stop paying on that $1 trillion debt? Who would pay then? Bingo! I can see another bailout coming, and this time it will be for student loans.
International credit card companies face a “severe impact” on their operations in Russia following a strict new law Moscow has adopted in response to Visa and Mastercard freezing service to banks under US sanctions.
Hundreds of lobbyists and state legislators gathered in downtown Kansas City last week for ALEC’s Spring 2014 task force summit, where a task force led by a tobacco lobbyist discussed education, corporate interests plotted ways to thwart shareholder activism, and legislators took a trip to a coal-fired power plant.
At least so believes famed political activist and Harvard ethics and law professor Lawrence Lessig and other co-founders of MayOne.US. The KickStarter fundraising campaign aims to ignite fundamental U.S. campaign finance reform by crowdfunding an initial $1 million to create a super PAC (short for political action committee) to rival those created by public figures, big corporate donors, powerful lobbyist and special interest groups.
The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, warned the web is ‘in the balance’ as technology giants against closing parts of the web to new users.
Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.
The idea that Apple, Google, and other tech companies have always distanced themselves from the NSA may not be accurate thanks to emails that recently surfaced. The emails show communication between Google executives and the NSA, plus they mention other companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and HP, undermining the trust companies have been working so hard to maintain after the NSA’s wide spread surveillance tactics were uncovered.
Recently, a NSA lawyer made it clear that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others were fully aware of the levels of data collection that were being performed. This flies in the face of the earlier claims that these firms were completely ignorant of what was happening. You might have thought that such mass surveillance would be illegal, but no, this was absolutely fine according to a federal judge.
These emails showing a very close relationship between Google and the NSA are internal Google emails, which essentially catches Google red-handed. The emails also mention cooperation from Apple and Microsoft, but there is no direct proof of this. There is simply mention that Google, Apple and Microsoft “came to agreement on a set of core security principles” with the NSA.
The recently retired director of the United States National Security Agency says Australia was correct to exclude Chinese telecommunications manufacturer Huawei from helping build the national broadband network because of evidence of Chinese espionage against the nation.
A group representing Facebook Inc. (FB:US), Apple Inc. (AAPL:US) and other technology companies is lobbying Congress today as lawmakers prepare to vote on limits to U.S. National Security Agency spying, said a person familiar with the matter.
The National Security Agency appears to have devised a process to discourage lawsuits challenging NSA surveillance.
NSA Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) director Theresa M. Shea submitted a “top secret” declaration to the court in two lawsuits brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The declaration was in response to concerns that the NSA was about to destroy evidence relevant to their cases.
NSA data is supposed to “age off” and no longer remain in the agency’s system after five years, but that data being “aged off” could help the EFF win its cases, which is what led attorneys to file a motion to prevent destruction of evidence in March.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (shown, R-Va.) announced May 5 that on May 7 the committee will mark up the USA Freedom Act (H.R. 3361). The legislation was introduced last October 29 by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), chairman of Judiciary’s Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations Subcommittee, to reform the federal government’s intelligence-gathering programs — especially those conducted by the National Security Agency, or NSA — operated under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The Center for Investigative Reporting hopes to raise $25,000 to report on surveillance by local authorities, a practice speeded by technological improvements and federal money. Subscribers get benefits on a sliding scale — from a tote bag and a tour of CIR’s newsroom if you donate $350 to email alerts when new stories go up if you pledge $5 per month.
Web users and developers should take new steps to avoid surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency and other spy organizations, a group of privacy and digital rights advocates said Monday.
The 30-plus groups, including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, Reddit, Free Press and the Libertarian Party, have set June 5 as the day to “reset the ‘Net” by deploying new privacy tools. June 5 is the anniversary of the first news stories about NSA surveillance based on leaks by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The NSA’s “collect it all” ethos has led the agency to try to fill in gaps in its vast surveillance dragnet, including e-mails, texts and phone calls made on commercial airplanes. Because the the communications are routed through independent satellite systems, they are hard to track, Glenn Greenwald reveals in “No Place To Hide.”
Privacy and security are on everybody’s minds these days, given the NSA spying scandal. Many people are looking for quick and easy ways to secure their online activities. Enter the oRouter, a tiny computer powered by Linux that protects your privacy and secures your Internet connection by connecting via the Tor network.
“Encryption does work,” Snowden said, via a remote connection at the SXSW tech conference. “It is a defense against the dark arts for the digital realm.”
ProPublica has written about the NSA’s attempts to break encryption, but we don’t know for sure how successful the spy agency has been, and security experts still recommend using these techniques.
And besides, who doesn’t want to defend against the dark arts? But getting started with encryption can be daunting. Here are a few techniques that most people can use.
Encrypt the data you store. This protects your data from being read by people with access to your computer.
The Commons looked set for a game of ping pong with the Lords today, after MPs voted to give Theresa May tthe power to strip Brits of their citizenship.
For years now, every time the net neutrality debate starts getting really confusing, Tim Lee comes along and puts it all into useful perspective. Six years ago, there was his exceptionally useful position paper on net neutrality for the Cato Institute. A couple years ago, he wrote another great piece for National Affairs magazine that deftly explained why the internet wasn’t competitive and why that’s a problem. Now working for Vox, he’s put together a great piece that explains the technical difference between the interconnection fights and the net neutrality battle — but also explains how the end result is basically the same.
The argument over whether or not the raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion back in January 2012 was legal is heading to the highest court in New Zealand. Yesterday the Supreme Court gave Dotcom permission to appeal a February Court of Appeal ruling that overturned an earlier High Court decision that the raid was unlawful.
Summary: The pressure against software freedom and user control over his/her PC a growingly serious issue
FAIR competition is a business risk that Microsoft cannot tolerate. Microsoft wants to mistreat many users by exposing them (for cash) to the NSA. With UEFI and remote updates, the NSA can even remotely brick computers — a serious risk that almost nobody is willing to speak about. It’s all about control (over users) and Microsoft goes out of its way to reduce users’ security. As Richard Stallman put it the other day: “Nonfree [proprietary] software is likely to spy on its users, or mistreat them in other ways. It is software for suckers. Awareness of this is spreading, which helps us make the case for Free software to people who are not computing experts.”
What’s even more troubling right now is that Vista 8 is self-updating (for the latest back doors to be installed) and Ryan tells us that “Microsoft is about to get rid of support for Windows 8.1 without the update pack, and it seems the broken Windows Update problem is still pretty common.” To quote: “Check your Windows Update log, if you’ve got a “Failed” entry next to KB2919355 then your PC will also become orphaned after May 8.” So much for ‘security’.
In order to install Linux from a bootable USB stick I need to be able to get to the Boot Selection menu, but on Acer systems with UEFI firmware, this is a bit tricky. The Boot Menu key (F12) is disabled by default, so I first have to boot to the BIOS Setup Utility, by pressing F2 during the power on or reboot cycle. Then in the Main setup screen there is an option to enable “F12 Boot Menu”.
That’s one trick down, but there’s another one which might be required. Depending on what version of Linux you want to install, and perhaps how you feel about Secure Boot, you might want/need to disable that. In the BIOS Setup Utility, on the Boot menu there is an option to disable Secure Boot – but I can’t get to it: moving the cursor down just skips over it!
I can change boot mode from UEFI to ‘Legacy BIOS’, but that isn’t what I want to do. I learned (the hard way) with my previous Acer Aspire One, that I have to go to the Security menu and set a “Supervisor Password” before it will let me disable Secure Boot mode. I’m sure this makes sense to someone, but whoever that is, it isn’t me.
In this case I am going to start by installing Linux with Secure Boot still enabled, so I don’t really have to do this, but I went ahead and set a supervisor password anyway, because I will eventually want to turn off Secure Boot anyway.
An ordinary computer user would give up at this stage.
It sure seems like control over one’s computer is getting harder, whether it’s due to artificial limitations or imposed back doors. Fighting for software freedom is important right now, more so than ever before. Some companies and government agencies truly dread the idea of people controlling their machines. The International Day Against DRM is a reminder of this [1,2,3] and based on a new report [4] the FBI is now “pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors.” Like CIPAV in Microsoft Windows? █
Today is the Day Against DRM, organized by the Free Software Foundation through their Defective by Design campaign against digital rights management (DRM), which they refer to instead with the more accurate moniker “digital restrictions management.”
CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.
Summary: Further examination of the conclusion of that baseless Apple vs. Samsung case
RUMOURS are abound that Apple might sue Amazon using patents [1], as Amazon sells many devices with Android/Linux on them. If Apple was to embark on such a tactless journey, it would not gain much or anything at all. Recently, the biggest Apple patent case derived/extracted only small amount from the company that sells the lion’s share of Android devices (less than a dollar per device). As Alter Net put it: “Although the weekend’s headlines read that Apple was victorious in its latest patent suit against Samsung, nothing could be further from the truth. The $119.6 million Apple won for having two of its patents infringed upon was less than 10% of the $2.2 billion it was seeking. In addition, Apple had sought a $40 per-unit fee for each Samsung Android phone it said infringed on its patents. Some legal analysts are calling the latest legal showdown between the smartphone giants a victory for Samsung, saying that Apple likely spent close to the amount it won in legal fees.”
We wrote about this Apple case a few days ago, noting more or less the same thing. ‘For its part, Samsung claims the jury verdict is “unsupported by evidence,”‘ says this other report, stressing that the loser here is everyone other than Apple and Samsung:
The jury foreman in the latest round of the Apple v. Samsung patent showdown said Monday that the “consumer” was clearly the biggest loser following the conclusion of the month-long trial.
“Ultimately, the consumer is the loser in all this,” foreman Thomas Dunham, a retired IBM supervisor, told the San Jose Mercury News. “I’d like to see them find a way to settle. I hope this (verdict) in some way helps shape that future.”
Suffice to say, the ruling presents trouble for Free software. “Apple’s patent aggression against Android resulted in a loss for free software,” wrote Richard Stallman, “even though Apple did not get the big money or the injunction it sought.” Any kind of patent payment impedes free distribution. For that — although not exclusively for that — we need to shun Apple. █
Let’s face it, Apple has never been shy about suing other companies that they think have infringed on their intellectual property. The recent legal fights with Samsung are a good example, but there have been others over the years. At one point Steve Jobs even vowed to use Apple’s billions to destroy Android in court because he regarded it as a stolen product.
Earlier this week, various press outlets noted that Hewlett-Packard had put up a video on its website showcasing the Slatebook 14 — a revolutionary new laptop unlike anything Hewlett-Packard has ever released before. In fact, nothing quite like the Slatebook 14 has ever been released by any company.
The Slatebook 14 is a standard, 14-inch laptop, complete with non-detachable keyboard, trackpad, and various ports. But unlike the other 14-inch laptops Hewlett-Packard sells, this one doesn’t run Microsoft’s Windows but rather Google’s Android operating system.
Computer users on the defunct Windows XP do not have to buy costly upgrades to bolster their security but can download an alternative program for free, a computer expert has said.
Microsoft retired the Windows XP operating system last month which made the software unsupported and open to viruses and cyber attacks.
St Luke’s Church Reverend Derek Harding, who has more than 30 years experience working in the IT industry in Europe, said the Linux program was free and proved to be more secure than Windows 7.
However, BP Computers operational manager Brad Clark said Linux was not mainstream and would frustrate computer users that weren’t technically savvy.
Chrome and Chrome OS (the operating system running on Chromebooks) both come with a built in PDF viewer provided by Google. However, it is very simple, and does not allow you to edit documents. If you are on Windows or Mac, there are other PDF viewers and editors you can use, but on Chromebooks you have to search the Chrome Web Store for one (click here for my article on using the Chrome Web Store to enhance your Chrome browser).
While Lenovo is pitching its new Chromebooks at consumers, it’s likely that they’ll be popular in school systems–especially the less expensive N20 model. School systems around the U.S. are purchasing Chromebooks for students, a trend that Google could subsidize and one that is reminiscent of Apple’s strong focus on the education market from years ago. Westwood High School in Massachussetts is buying Chromebooks to issue to students who will return them once they graduate. The Bell-Chatham school board has approved Chromebook purchases for students, as has the Sumner School District.
Ever wish your PC was more portable? Like tuck it in your pocket portable? If you owned a Tango PC, that’s exactly what you’d be able to do with it. There would, however, be a few tradeoffs.
The world’s leading PC maker Lenovo has also joined the Linux band-wagon and launched its first Linux-powered Chromebook for consumers space – earlier Lenovo offered Chromebooks for education. Lenovo has announced two Chromebooks – N20 and N20p. While both Chromebooks are identical, N20p offers a touchscreen display and its keyboard can flex 300° backward to convert from Laptop mode to Stand mode. So users can use the 10-finger touchscreen to consume content. It’s definitely a great device for both content consumption as well as content creation.
Before the Heartland Institute became famous for its leading role in climate change denial, the group spent many years working to defend the tobacco industry. Just as the group is now known for its over the top attacks on climate scientists, Heartland once played a large role in criticizing public health experts and others calling attention to the dangers of cigarette smoking.
It’s taken several weeks but Con Kolivas has put out the latest version of his Brain Fuck Scheduler patch. BFS v447 brings Linux 3.14 kernel compatibility.
The Linux kernel is the culmination of a single vision, modified by the advice and work of the most qualified and intelligent OS people on the planet. The kernel leads and their ancillaries over the years—Alan Cox, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Chris Wright, and a host of others—have succeeded in keeping the project pure, on target, and relatively free of drama.
Linus Torvalds has just released the forth Release Candidate in the new Linux kernel 3.15 branch, has been released and is now ready for testing.
The Linux kernel development seems to be going on without any issues and all the commotion that was present at the begging of the cycle seems to have settled down. The new release follow the normal pattern and it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
The fourth Release Candidate of the Linux kernel 3.15 branch is out now and available for testing. As Linus reflects, there is nothing out of the ordinary in this release – “Nothing particularly unusual going on. 45% drivers (drm, sound, md, pin-control, acpi etc), 40% arch (mainly powerpc/powernv, but x86 and arm too), 15% misc (perf tooling, documentation updates, core code). The appended shortlog gives some kind of overview of the details without being _too_ big.”
On a well-maintained Linux system, months can go by without needing to reboot. Sooner or later, however, a security patch to the Linux kernel will require you to reboot your machine. That’s not a real problem on a desktop, but when you’re talking hundreds of servers it can be a real pain. That’s where CloudLinux’s new program KernelCare comes in.
Chrome OS developers at Google have landed improvements within Coreboot for Bay Trail given Chromebooks starting to ship with this low-power Intel hardware.
Andi Kleen at Intel announced their work on a smaller networking stack to fit on systems like the Quark where there might only be a few megabytes of RAM and flash storage. Andi wrote, “There has been a lot of interest recently to run Linux on very small systems, like Quark systems. These may have only 2-4MB memory. They are also limited by flash space. One problem on these small system is the size of the network stack. Currently enabling IPv4 costs about 400k in text, which is prohibitive on a 2MB system, and very expensive with 4MB.”
The xf86-video-r128 driver supports all of the old ATI Rage 128 graphics cards including the Rage Fury AGP, XPERT 128 AGP, and XPERT 99. The Rage 128 was ATI’s best graphics processor back in 1998 and fabbed on a 250nm processor, supporting 32MB and 64MB video memory configurations, and its core was clocked around 100MHz… Its OpenGL compliance stands at version 1.2. While it’s hard to believe the Rage 128 is still being used in any production capacity, especially with modern Linux environments, the open-source X.Org driver for it has been revived.
Valve has a vested interest in not only getting as many games working under Linux as possible, but also making them look as good and run as fast as their Windows equivalents. In order to do that, Valve has seen fit to fund projects that improve the underlying tech those games run on.
Improvements to Mesa done by LunarG and sponsored by Valve in a new open-source patch-set means that popular Linux games should take significantly less time to load — including titles like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive — by speeding up the shader compilation process.
For those living on the Mesa 10.1 stable release train rather than Mesa 10.2 that is already in pretty great shape and will be released as stable in the coming weeks, the 10.1.2 stop has arrived.
The NVIDIA 337.19 Beta was released today and it features a bug-fix for HDMI at 4K resolutions in certain configurations, nvidia-settings command-line controls for over/under-clocking support, several cosmetic fixes for the NVIDIA Settings GUI for clock controls, support for the GLX_EXT_stereo_tree extension in certain configurations, and Unified Back Buffer (UBB) and 3D Stereo support with the composite extension for Quadro graphics cards.
Telegram is a messaging application similar to WhatsApp and uses the internet to send and receive messages between its clients. We, Linux users, love open source products and Telegram founders claim that they will eventually open source the code. More on this can be read from “Why not open source everything? . Apart from the open source affinity, a few more reasons to use Telegram are :
Vuze is a relatively lightweight BitTorrent client that can be used to download torrents and even acts as a search engine. There are multiple Linux clients in development and the competition is fierce. This is one of the reasons why Vuze receives so many updates.
If you are looking for a low resource, speedy server statistics monitoring script, look no further than linux-dash. Linux Dash’s claim to popular is its slick and responsive web dashboard that works better on large and small screens.
We are pleased to announce that GlusterFS 3.5 is now available. The latest release includes several long-awaited features such as improved logging, file snapshotting, on-wire compression, and at-rest encryption.
Pithos, a Pandora.com Linux client, was updated to version 1.0 recently. With this release, Pithos was ported to Python 3, GTK3 and GStreamer 1.0 but that’s not all that’s new – there are also some new features as well as a new app icon.
“The team has made a huge effort to make this one of our best releases yet. Since the OpenELEC 3.0 and 3.2.x releases, we have worked hard to improve OpenELEC in a number of areas. Some of these are visible changes, others are backend changes that aren’t as visible to every user but are certainly worth mentioning. OpenELEC-4.0 is now the next stable release, which is a feature release and the successor of OpenELEC-3.2 and older.”
FFmpeg 2.2 is the latest major release, and it was launched only a short while ago. 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.
The Steam for Linux platform is now big enough that new titles manage to surprise users all the time and the top selling list of games is changing on a regular basis.
When it comes to supporting the Linux platform, not many of the large studios out there are even considering investing the time and the resources to make this happen. From time to time we get some news about one small studio that is willing to port its games, but there are very few major ones that are openly talking about it.
Codemasters is one of the largest studios that deal exclusively with racing titles. This is a more recent reorientation, but they had great success with games like Dirt 3, F1 2013, and the Grid series.
A user asked around on the Steam forums if the studio had any plans to release Linux ports, and he got lucky. One of the developers said that Codemasters was looking into it and it’s a matter of when, not if.
For search and filter operations various solutions exist in KDE applications. We propose a new guideline for the search pattern to make UX consistent and reliable.
I arrived in the early evening of the first day, happening to reach the door of the Blue Systems office at about the same time as Kai Uwe Broulik. This was after the discussion about what tasks needed completing had happened, so we both were greeted with a board full of post-it notes. I snuck a few more onto the board when Kévin Ottens wasn’t looking, as there were some failing autotests that needed fixing before another release happened, and I felt we needed to have a proper discussion about where we were installing things (having seen that Kubuntu were patching the KDEInstallDirs module of Extra CMake Modules).
The 14.04 release of Unity unfortunately shipped with a few security vulnerabilities in the newly introduced screenlocker. As we will also ship a reworked screenlocker in Plasma Next I started to do another code audit, add more unit tests and try to make the code easier to understand and maintain. Furthermore I think it’s a good reason to explain how screenlockers work in general on X11 (and why it is easy to introduce security vulnerabilities) and the screenlocker in Plasma Next in particular. To make one thing clear: this post is not meant to shame Ubuntu for the issues. Some of these whoopies would have been possible in Plasma, too, and that’s the reason why I looked at the code again in more detail. On the other hand I think that our screenlocker in Plasma Next could be a solution for Unity’s use cases and I would appreciate if Ubuntu would adpot our solution.
Great stuff. The GNOME project is almost 17 years old. When will we see some signs of maturity, some signs of stability? It shows that the people at GNOME just want change. Like the good folks at Microsoft who want to change, change, change, until the software becomes utterly unusable, the GNOME developers want to keep changing things too.
Change for the sake of change has fired up Sam again…“The GNOME project is almost 17 years old. When will we see some signs of maturity, some signs of stability? It shows that the people at GNOME just want change. Like the good folks at Microsoft who want to change, change, change, until the software becomes utterly unusable, the GNOME developers want to keep changing things too.” I disagree with Sam as often as I agree. He must be close to right most of the time… This time, he is right. When an application is good enough to collect a solid following, why jerk users around with random changes of user-interface?
Black Lab Linux 5.0, a distribution that aims to rival Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, has been released and is now available for purchase.
Black Lab Linux is a distribution designed for general desktop and power users and comes with a lot of applications and features. It is based on the Xfce desktop, which is not a surprise considering that the previous Betas in the series also used the same desktop experience.
Today the Black Lab Linux team is pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 5.0, our most exciting and innovative release yet. Black Lab Linux 5.0 reiterates our commitment to a functional, stable and intuitive desktop Linux distribution.
Users can test the operating system even if it’s still in the pre-Alpha stages, but it’s not really usable right now, unless you want to help with the testing on various hardware configurations. The first complete version with a desktop environment and other packages will be ready in a couple of weeks.
It has been a while since I’ve done a review, and I apologize for that. This week isn’t actually getting any less busy for me; last night I finished my undergraduate thesis and submitted it to my thesis advisor, and hopefully there aren’t too many major revisions that I would need to make. Beyond that, though, I still have problem sets, a midterm exam, and final projects to finish. I’m just doing this review now because finishing the thesis was exhausting, and I need a short break before I can get back to work. In that time, I’m reviewing OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0.
Manjaro developers usually launch several update packs for the latest stable release of their distribution, bringing new packages and some new Linux kernels. This is very common for Manjaro operating systems and the developers are careful to keep the distributions up to date.
Just like most of the Linux variants that incorporated OpenSSL into their structure, Manjaro was also exposed to the Heartbleed bug, and its developers had to update it with the latest OpenSSL package.
One of the most talked about new Linux releases in some time was the Tails 1.0 milestone that debuted last week. Tails gained notoriety after being identified as the Linux distribution used by National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden.
Ubuntu 14.04 has now been released. It is one of the biggest milestones for Canonical before it moves towards full-fledged convergence. Being an LTS release, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr focuses on security, stability, and performance. It builds on all the previous Ubuntu releases and makes sure that it makes up for as much technical debt as possible.
Ubuntu fanboys and fangirls are definitely impressed about this release. After all, Trusty Tahr is probably the most trustworthy release coming out of Canonical. We too are excited about the new changes. That’s why, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most compelling reasons that make Trusty Tahr better than previous versions of Ubuntu.
Every now and then, Canonical issues Linux kernel updates for all the operating systems that are being supported at that time. In this case, there are five distributions that have received this new upgrade, but it’s interesting to note that not all the OSes share the same kernel, which means that it was a problem common to all, regardless of the version.
Linux distributions like Ubuntu are release based, which means when a new version rolls out, everyone rushes to upgrade. Many folks do this without a care in the world, believing that if the previous version worked great then the latest version should also be free of bugs.
Pear OS has had a very troubled history and the developer had to change the name of the OS a couple of times, not to mention the logo. For some reason, the guys at Apple and their community didn’t think that someone redoing the entire Mac OS X system based on Linux was actually a compliment.
dEarlier this month Raytheon entered into a $15.8 million contract with the U.S. Navy to upgrade Raytheon’s control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), according to a May 2 Avionics Intelligence report. The overhaul, which involves a switch from Solaris to Linux, is designed to implement more modern controls to help ground-based personnel control UAVs.
The Linux-based Tizen mobile platform gained momentum earlier this year with Samsung’s announcement of the Galaxy Gear and Gear 2 smartwatches. The platform’s expansion beyond mobile phones into wearables won’t stop there, either, with developers now discussing applications for TVs, cars, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
CyanogenMod has announced the release of CyanogenMod 11.06 M6 and with this, the team has also said that the users should not expect a build labelled ‘stable’. They wrote, “The ‘M’ builds have supplanted our need for such a release. This also means you will not being seeing ‘RC’ builds.”
Google has just released very detailed data on Android growth rates by version and which versions are running on which kinds of devices. The data reflects devices running the latest Google Play Store app, which is compatible with Android 2.2 and higher, and the data is captured by measuring the devices that visited the Google Play Store in the prior 7 days. Among other things, it shows that the latest KitKat Android version has grown its market share significantly. Month over month, adoption of KitKat is up by 37 percent.
The Android bashers over at TheStreet.com are at it again. This time they are claiming that Android stinks and that Apple is going to prove it when the iPhone 6 is released. This of course is quite silly, and I’ll point out why in this column.
Best known for its computer monitors, AOC didn’t have to stretch too far for its two mySmart machines, which merely add a lower-power computer to 22-inch and 24-inch displays. Because Android is a mobile OS, after all, it doesn’t require top-end specs to function — and mySmart clearly doesn’t offer them. Instead, you get an Nvidia Tegra T33 quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and 8GB of built-in storage to handle Android 4.2 Ice Cream Sandwich. Either version features 1,920×1,080 (full HD) resolution and is obviously touchscreen-enabled to make use of the OS.
The foundation that runs Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has named a new executive director, Lila Tretikov, a software engineer in Silicon Valley.
Who doesn’t know the challenges in complex project teams and organizations? Multiple projects need to be managed, often with various dependencies to other teams, partners, external suppliers or other parties. Different stakeholders require a different level of information. Questions arise and often cannot be answered satisfactory in many project teams: What is the timeline of our project? What needs to be done to reach the next milestone? How can we track dependencies to other parties in the project plan? Surprisingly, even with the existing OSS tool environment for project management, teams are often still not able to manage complexity.
ZeGo happens to be an opensource multifunctional delta linear robot that relies on magnetic-based attachments to get the job done. In other words, this is a special kind of 3D printer of sorts that arrives at the same destination, albeit taking a slightly different route from what we are more or less used to. The brainchild of a certain Daniel Goncharov (who is one of the co-developer of ZeGo), the ZeGo will be able to transform into a 3D printer, engraver, entry level pick and place machine – and much more, in a twinkling of an eye.
Argentine political scientist Pia Mancini says we’re caught in a “crisis of representation.” Most of these protests have popped up in countries that are at least nominally democratic, but so many people are still unhappy with their elected leaders. The problem, Mancini says, is that elected officials have drifted so far from the people they represent, that it’s too hard for the average person to be heard.
Samsung Electronics is ramping up its contributions to various open source projects as the company depends more on open source software in its products. The company sees open source software as a faster path to innovation.
Difio is a Django based application that keeps track of packages and tells you when they change. It provides multiple change analytics so you can make an informed decision on when or what to upgrade. Difio was created as closed software, then I decided to migrate it to open source to allow for in-house deployments and attract a larger community around the project.
Code-sharing site GitHub has announced that Atom, its highly customizable code editor, has left beta and its full source code is now available to world+dog under the MIT open source license.
Why another text editor? In an interview, GitHub developer Nathan Sobo told The Reg that he and the other developers wanted a powerful editor that was fully customizable using JavaScript, which Sobo argued is now the most popular scripting language in the world.
The Mozilla Foundation today is filing a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to declare that ISPs are common carriers, but there’s a twist.
For as long as the commercial web has been part of our lives, debates over Net neutrality have been with us as well. We got a reminder of this back in January, when a federal Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) order that prevented Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from blocking and discriminating against edge providers, including any website operator, application developer or cloud service provider.
The project borrows a number of features straight from Mozilla Firefox, but some options can be found only in SeaMonkey. For example, the delimiter for forwarded messages can now be configured, an option to not strip signatures on reply has been added to prevent top signatures from deleting the body, and an OK button has been added to the RSS Subscription dialog.
Here is an updated Fedora 20 image for building OpenStack Icehouse and OpenDaylight. ODL is now merged into the upcoming OpenStack Icehouse release so now you can install ODL directly from OpenStack trunk. The updated image comes from Kyle Mestery who was primarily responsible for getting the OpenStack/OpenDaylight merge and navigating the process. Thanks also to Andrew Grimberg from the Linux Foundation with assisting with getting testing setup and all the code contributors from the community.
New data from cloud computing researchers is arriving, and it’s clear that enterprises everywhere are poised to boost their spending in the cloud, even as concerns over security may hamper adoption of open cloud platforms.
When it was released in 2011, Drupal 7 was the most accessible open source content management system (CMS) available. I expect that this will be true until the release of Drupal 8. Web accessibility requires constant vigilance and will be something that will always need attention in any piece of software striving to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 guidelines.
AT&T (NYSE: T) Labs won gold in the 2014 Edison Awards’ research and business optimization category for its nanocube, which provides visualization technology to help users interpret massive datasets in real time.
EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference will take place September 25 to 28 at InterExpo Congress Center in Sofia (see http://iec.bg/en/). Tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday, while the shorter talks and papers program is on Saturday and Sunday.
A few of the questions asked about “open source software” in such a way that, responding to them directly, I’d be classifying programs as “open” or “closed”. That I will not do, because those terms presuppose a different philosophy based on different values.
Rather than give no answer to those questions, I modified them to say “free software” instead, and answered them that way. (Square brackets show these changes.) I hope the answers to these modified questions are of interest to readers. They are rather different from what an open source supporter would say.
Just over 40 per cent of Italy’s public administrations is using open source software solutions, reports the country’s National Statistical Institute, Istat. According to its ‘Public institutions’ 2011 Census’ report, published on 31 March, it is especially state, regional and provincial administrations.
April says cargo bikes are better than cars but they are expensive. Over at Low Tech Magazine, Kris de Decker shows an alternative built out of open source technology, the XYZ Nodule designed by N55. You could build this bike yourself; it is all creative commons licenced. The system is so simple that you don’t need complicated or expensive tools; really, not much more than a drill and a hand saw.
A month ago, Cisco announced a new approach to define network policy with the OpFlex protocol. The OpFlex control protocol was submitted as an Internet Engineering Task Force draft on April 2.
A key promise that Cisco made during its OpFlex release is that the protocol and its associated group policy construct would be contributed to open-source development communities to help foster an open standard.
At The Cable Show 2014 in Los Angeles Cisco (CSCO) announced that it will make its service provider customer premise equipment (CPE) routing software available in open-source format, and highlighted the extension of Cisco’s Service Provider architecture for cable operators to deliver more bandwidth, higher service tiers and greater agility in deploying new applications..
Multiple vendors, including an open source project within Cisco, have had a policy blueprint approved for the OpenStack cloud platform’s Neutron networking component.
The blueprint is intended to allow for an application-centric interface to Neutron that complements its existing network-centric interface. Application awareness will take Neutron beyond basic connectivity to network service enablement, such as service chaining, QoS, access control, path properties, and others.
The Obama Administration needs hundreds and hundreds of pounds of marijuana this year, more than 30 times the amount of pot it originally ordered for 2014.
OpenSSL seems to be the source of numerous problems, especially now that people have started to look a lot more closely at the source. Yet another bug has been discovered in the OpenSSL package and, to make things worse, it’s a four-year-old problem that has remained unsolved until now.
As Ukrainian soldiers from the coup regime in Kiev tighten the noose around anti-coup rebels in eastern Ukraine, the New York Times continues its cheerleading for the coup regime and its contempt for the rebels, raising grave questions about the Times’ credibility
No one’s perfect, least of all UPS. But as far as mistakes go, this is just about as bad—and expensive—as it gets. Thanks to one hell of a mixup, Reddit user Seventy_Seven just got a $400,000 unmanned aerial vehicle delivered straight to his doorstep. Talk about service.
It was sad therefore to see Ed Miliband squirming on television yesterday as he struggled to reassure various neo-con mouthpieces that he did not share the good sense of his backbenchers. The present system was not working, he said, and we needed to explore new forms of ownership model. What these were he did not say, but plainly they did not include taking anything back into public ownership. The most he offered was a tepid concern about the reprivatisation of East Coast, but then he did not exactly not want it to be reprivatized either.
The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing criminal investigations of financial institutions that could result in action in the coming weeks and months, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a video, adding that no company was “too big to jail.”
We can deny it no longer. Even the recruitment industry is now saying it. Offshoring has killed the local ICT jobs market.
Surprisingly, the latest confirmation that Australia is contributing to its own skilled jobs demise comes from a source that has in the past been accused of hyping the fictitious ICT skills shortage.
Listed recruiter Clarius, which owns the Candle ICT recruitment firm, in its latest Skills Indicator report, states that in the March quarter there was an oversupply of 1800 ICT professionals.
Last Thursday, we wrote about Larry Lessig launching the MAYDAY Citizens’ SuperPAC, an attempted “moonshot” to crowdfund a SuperPAC with the long term goal to elect politicians to Congress who will be dedicated to ending the power of money in politics. It is, as we noted, the SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs. The structure of the plan is interesting in that it’s a staged approach explained on the Mayone website. The first two “test” stages happen this year, with the first goal being to raise $1 million by the end of May, at which point Lessig will get someone (who almost certainly is already lined up) to donate another $1 million. Then they launch stage 2 for June, which is an attempt to the same, but at $5 million (with a further matching $5 million). If both of those work out, the SuperPAC will then have $12 million, which it will use in 5 races for the mid-term elections this year. And, with that in place, the goal will be to launch a much bigger crowdfunding effort for 2016. Many people seemed to misunderstand the original plan, thinking that this $12 million part was the moonshot. It’s not. It’s a test flight.
As is usual, if you were looking to employ people, you wouldn’t go the traditional route of CV’s, interviews and recruitment days….no, you’d go straight to Twitter. Apparently there’s some tweets to “crack” if you want a job. You can read more about it here. For those people who find that code breaking “isn’t their thing”, maybe they can walk around their neighbourhood recording people’s phone-calls and snooping in on their private lives. I’m sure the NSA will snap them up. And if you fail there, you can always apply for the British “Intelligence” service who, as in everything these days, are a pale imitation of their American cousins.
It’s no secret that police departments around the country are deploying automated license plate readers to build massive databases to identify the location of vehicles. But one company behind this Orwellian tracking system is determined to stay out of the news.
CLOUD FILE STORAGE users are inadvertently exposing their personal data to all and sundry due to a security flaw in public link URLs.
Enterprise collaboration company Intralinks has gleefully reported the discovery made by its team during a “routine analysis of Google Adwords and Google Analytics data”.
An International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) shareholder withdrew a lawsuit claiming the company’s cooperation with a National Security Agency eavesdropping program caused a drop in its China sales.
You might want to hold off on sending sensitive attachments through your iPhone or iPad if it runs on iOS 7 or higher. 9to5Mac draws our attention to a recent post from German security researcher Andreas Kurtz, who claims that encryption for email attachments has been disabled on iOS versions 7 and higher, even the recently released iOS 7.1.1 that was issued specifically to fix security flaws. Kurtz says that he reported the problem to Apple, which supposedly acknowledged it but didn’t give a timeline for when a fix would be released.
In an effort to get it through committee with its teeth intact a slew of nonprofits and major companies, including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, DropBox, Mozilla and Reddit have signed a letter to its members stating their support. Plus there are 140 co-sponsors in the House and a sister bill working its way through the Senate with the support of Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
That’s the reception he got when he visited Manila’s presidential palace on Monday. Some 800 activists gathered to protest his signing of a new agreement that grants U.S. forces comprehensive access to Filipino military bases.
Montreal police arrested five people and handed out more than 130 fines on Thursday as they clamped down on anti-capitalist protesters during the annual May Day demonstration for workers’ rights.
The demonstrators took to the streets to voice their opposition to the “ravages” of capitalism, with this year’s theme focused on government austerity, environmental damage inflicted by the mining industry and the financial sector that supports it.
But the group barely made it two city blocks before riot police cornered them.
You may not be aware of this, but there is an important and heated debate going on among Indigenous communities right now. The issue at hand is a federal bill designed, ostensibly, to return control of First Nations education to the First Nations themselves.
Cecily McMillan’s guilty verdict in Manhattan district court on Monday delivered a gut punch to the last vestiges of Occupy Wall Street. Above all, the decision highlights the workings of a criminal justice system bent on chilling dissent and defending the status quo.
According to the jury, McMillan, a 25-year-old New School student known in Occupy circles for her moderate views, is guilty of second-degree felony assault on a police officer during an Occupy Wall Street protest on March 17, 2012. Denied bail and taken away in handcuffs, she will await her sentencing in a cell. She faces up to seven years in prison.
Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.
The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, “This debate is going to end.” He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.
Ten years after the first publication of photos from inside the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, we speak to Al Jazeera journalist Salah Hassan about his torture by U.S. forces inside the facility. To date, no high-ranking U.S. official has been held accountable for the torture at Abu Ghraib, but Hassan and other former prisoners are attempting to sue one of the private companies, CACI International, that helped run the prison.
For years, the government has upheld the principle of “Net neutrality,” the belief that everyone should have equal access to the web without preferential treatment.
Today, a coalition of thousands of Internet users, companies and organizations launched a campaign for a day of action to “Reset The Net” on June 5th, 2014, the anniversary of the first NSA surveillance story revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Tens of thousands of internet activists, companies, and organizations committed to preserving free speech and basic rights on the Internet by taking steps to shutting off the government’s mass surveillance capabilities.
Today is the Day Against DRM, organized by the Free Software Foundation through their Defective by Design campaign against digital rights management (DRM), which they refer to instead with the more accurate moniker “digital restrictions management.”
Early this morning I got an email with an ebook I have been waiting for. It was Mytro by John Biggs, which I had backed in the Kickstarter campaign, and the email delivered the DRM-free ebooks I had bought. I’m not one to wait, so i immediately downloaded the ebook and tried to open it in the Kindle app on my PC.
Today a wide variety of community groups, activist organizations and businesses are taking part in the 8th International Day Against DRM (DayAgainstDRM.org). The groups are united in envisioning a world without Digital Restrictions Management, technology that places arbitrary restrictions on what people can do with digital media, often by spying on them. As the largest anti-DRM event in the world, the International Day Against DRM is an important counterpoint to the pro-DRM message broadcast by powerful media and software companies. The Day is coordinated by Defective by Design (DefectiveByDesign.org), the anti-DRM campaign of the Free Software Foundation.
On International Day Against DRM, the Open Rights Group is calling for limits on the use of DRM technologies, which restrict the ways that we access and control digital content.
Asus started selling its first Chrome OS desktop computers in March with the launch of the $179 Asus Chromebox M005U. The tiny desktop is small enough to hold in one hand, packs an Intel Celeron 2955U Haswell processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and Google’s Chrome operating system.
Overall these results aren’t too interesting for the Linux 3.15 kernel when it comes to Haswell graphics, but in a few cases there were some slight performance changes as illustrated above. At least Linux 3.15 betters off the Broadwell support, there’s now per-process address space support for better security, and a variety of fixes and other improvements that landed for this kernel cycle.
qBittorrent, a multi-platform BitTorrent client developed in C++/Qt4 by Christophe Dumez, designed to run on all major platforms, is now at version 3.1.9.2.
On February 5th, 2013, Torque 2D 2.0 was released to the world for the first time under an open source MIT license. Between then and now, over a year has passed with a lot of learning and adjusting to an open source development model. Slowly but surely, feature after feature was added to the engine, bugs were fixed, and documentation was written. Today we can proudly present to everyone Torque 2D 3.0.
We already know Steam’s stats system is a bit odd, sometimes things just don’t add up. It’s clear Steam is hiding plenty of distro’s since the ones they show don’t add up to the full figure they give, not even close to it.
Last week Steam announced that their new Steam In-Home Streaming is now available in open beta, and is available to anyone who opts into the Steam Client Beta and downloads the latest update, which was released last month and is dated April 30th.
I got selected for GSoC 2014. Thanks to my mentor and KDE team for giving me an opportunity to work on Marble Game project. My mentors are Torsten Rahn and Albert Astals Cid.
AppStream is a Freedesktop project to extend metadata about the software projects which is available in distributions, especially regarding applications. Distributions compile a metadata file from data collected from packages, .desktop files and possibly other information sources, and create an AppStream XML file from it, which is then – directly or via a Xapian cache – read by software-center-like applications such as GNOME-Software or KDEs Apper.
In a recent blog post, I have criticized the events around the inclusion of Baloo in KDE 4.13.0. Since then, I have removed the blog post again, since a nice person convinced me it would not bring any good.
I am selected in GSoC 2014 \o/ , and what makes it even better is the organisation, KDE and my mentors Shantanu Tushar and Peter Grasch. My project is “Integrate Plasma Media Center with Simon”. The result of which will allow users to interact with PMC (Plasma Media Center) using voice commands.
With the growth of the cloud market, developers choose PaaS because of its flexibility and speed. Red Hat often paves the way for enterprises to use to create applications and to use an open cloud application platform that best fit their business needs. At this year Red Hat Summit, Red Hat addresses the current DevOps challenges facing the adoption of enterprise and provides a cloud application platform with built-in secure and scalable multi-tenancy, proven enterprise-grade application containers, middleware services and the latest technologies.
Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of open-source software developer Red Hat, is more than the guy who brought a tech giant to downtown Raleigh.
He’s an entrepreneur-advising, cloud-computing evangelist who once aspired to be a pro football player.
Whitehurst, a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education enthusiast, took the time to give us our own education into what makes him tick.
On behalf of the KDE team, Maximiliano Curia has recently called on the Debian contributors for supporting them with integrating KDE into Debian. Citing the main reason behind the request as shortage of enough people to contribute to all the necessary areas, the KDE team points out that they are overloaded with the many packages they maintain and the kinds of bugs they have to deal with. They do have automation tools but that is simply not enough. And hence the pledge to the Debian developers to work in collaboration with KDE and help them shape up KDE for Debian.
Now, the Numix GTK theme has been updated to work with the latest version of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and it seems to integrate very well with the system. As usual, it’s not enough to just download the theme, you will also have to activate it. This means that you also need another application, such as Unity Tweak.
Every now and then a company comes up with a scheme that sounds great at first, but then it dies a slow death once the company realizes that the project just doesn’t make sense. It looks like Ubuntu for Android has become one of those dead products, according to Muktware.
Longtime TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon participants, Kay Anar and Gilad Shai showed off their hardware hack today called the “oRouter” – a Linux-powered, Raspberry Pi-like computer offering secure Wi-Fi access via the Tor network. The idea is to offer an affordable alternative to downloading the Tor software to your computer, as well as a way to more easily connect to Tor over mobile devices like an iPhone.
Raspberry Pi owners who are looking for a more unique case to protect their $35 mini PC, might be interested in this unique Raspberry Pi cassette tape case.
Michele Alessandrini is responsible for the idea to adapt an old cassette tape to fit the Raspberry Pi which provides a very unique casing for the awesome mini PC, and if like me you have plenty of cassettes in the attic allows you to put them to use.
HTC launched their much anticipated flagship HTC One M8, and it has already gained praise from the critics just like its predecessor, for brilliant design, innovative features, beautiful UI and lot of power under the hood. As expected, the ‘mini’ version of the flagship is due for release and @evleaks has revealed a press render of the ‘HTC One Mini 2.’
The first quarter of this year has seen many new top end Android smartphones being launched. Currently, with so many flagship phones in the market consumers are spoilt for choice. We will try to figure out what are the best smartphones that your money can buy right now. We will just not focus on the costliest and carrying the latest hardware, but also consider their performance and value for money.
Mobile technology has made it possible for people to do an amazing amount with tablets and smartphones within the workplace—including hacking the living daylights out of the corporate network and other people’s devices. Pwnie Express is preparing to release a tool that will do just that. Its Pwn Phone aims to help IT departments and security professionals quickly get a handle on how vulnerable their networks are in an instant. All someone needs to do is walk around the office with a smartphone.
Pwnie Express’ Kevin Reilly gave Ars a personal walk-through of the latest Pwn Phone, the second generation of the company’s mobile penetration testing platform. While the 2012 first-generation Pwn Phone was based on the Nokia N900 and its Maemo 5 Linux-based operating system, the new phone is based on LG Nexus 5 phone hardware. However, it doesn’t exactly use Google’s vanilla Android.
More than 1,200 industry influencers took this year’s survey, answering questions about OSS trends, opportunities, key drivers of open source adoption, community engagement and the business problems OSS solves — both now and in the foreseeable future.
JavaScript developers soon will have a way to blend the organizational tools of AngularJS and the cross-platform, animation-rich rendering capabilities of Famo.us.
SMART Communications, Inc. (Smart) has forged an alliance with the Ateneo Java Wireless Competency Center (AJWCC) to enhance and make Secured Health Information Network and Exchange (SHINE) an open-source platform next year, allowing users to contribute modules and plug-ins.
Launched in 2011 in consultation with the Department of Health (DOH) and various stakeholders, SHINE is the first cloud-based electronic medical record and e-referral system in the country, readily deployable in any area with Internet coverage.
The Indian Railways’ online ticketing system has reached a record number of ticket bookings during peak hours with help from open source platforms. Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) – the Railways’ IT arm – was awarded for this project in the Infrastructure category at the Red Hat Innovation Awards last month.
Well, community did, for starters. I realize I’m making a somewhat subjective assertion here, but over the roughly 15 years I’ve been involved in open source, I’ve seen a gradual shift away from tightly-controlled free software projects to more loosely joined open-source communities, often with significant corporate interest.
The detail and scope of reviews decrease and increase, respectively, as they travel up the hierarchy. A famous example is the Linux kernel, where Linus Torvalds delegates to lieutenants for the various sub-systems of the kernel.
As we enter an era of the digital age, the internet helps us in work related to everything from education and travel to healthcare and surveillance. With so much of online human existence at stake and numerous threats to online security and safety, experts and crusaders have been fighting for ‘internet security and cyber safety’.
According to Wikipedia, Internet safety, or online safety, is the knowledge of maximising the user’s personal safety and security risks on private information and property associated with using the internet, and the self-protection from computer crime in general.
Mozilla Firefox has been around for over a decade, providing users with a worthy replacement for the default Internet Explorer, and establishing itself as one of the best browsers both on Linux and on Windows. That being said, the days of desktop exclusivity are long gone. Mozilla Firefox is available as a free download on Android-based devices, through the Play-store. Just how good is this mobile browser, and should you bother with it at all?
Aquilent has unveiled a new Drupal-based architecture to help government organizations manage and deliver online content in a cloud environment.
The Drupal Platform works to help agencies use open-source technology to secure digital communications and engage with the public, Aquilent said Thursday.
Joomla kept its promise to release the latest version of its open source content management system (CMS) in April with yesterday’s launch of Joomla 3.3.
Software provider Pivotal and its open-source PaaS platform the Cloud Foundry announced the addition of eight new members to the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
A division within the Department of Defense is investigating whether the digital currency bitcoin is a possible terrorist threat.
The Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office is spearheading a program that will help the military understand how modern technologies could pose threats to national security, including bitcoin and other virtual currencies, the International Business Times reported.
A memo detailing some of the CTTSO projects states, “The introduction of virtual currency will likely shape threat finance by increasing the opaqueness, transactional velocity, and overall efficiencies of terrorist attacks,” as reported by Bitcoin Magazine, according to IBTimes.
The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) has established the Chris Nicol FLOSS Prize, which recognizes initiatives that are making it easy for people to start using free software. The prize will be awarded to a person or group doing extraordinary work to make free software accessible to ordinary computer users.
I was long plagued GNUstep’s IDE ProjectCenter had problems with parsing the compiler’s output. This made “clicking” on the warning or error often impossible. I never dug into the details, but it happened more and more often and was worse on different systems than others.
One area that new software providers are all too familiar with, and one which legacy organisations are starting to embrace to help accelerate software development, is the use of open source. Indeed, a recent study carried out by IT analyst firm Forrester of 542 developers suggested that as many as 92% of banks have been using open source software (OSS) to develop mobile apps.
It was KB Kookmin Bank that adopted open-source banking for the first time in Korea. It introduced the system in H2, 2011, followed by Woori Bank in April last year.
Last year we wrote about the idea of open-sourcing DNA for use in GMOs that were not subject to patent control — a key problem with the technology, leaving aside other concerns about its application. The newly-launched Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) avoids the controversy surrounding GMOs by using traditional plant breeding, but still makes the results freely available.
If you fancy building your very own robot you might be interested in the PrintBot RHINO which is an educational robot that has been designed to be able to push objects with this 3D printed dozer attachment as well as take part in “sumobots fights”.
A platform collapsed during an aerial hair-hanging stunt at a circus performance Sunday, sending eight acrobats plummeting to the ground. Nine performers were seriously injured in the fall, including a dancer below, while an unknown number of others suffered less serious injuries.
As 21st century reporters become increasingly confronted by issues regarding journalistic ethics, the newest generation of workers in this field will need to establish ways to face obstacles like WikiLeaks, whistleblowers, NSA surveillance and data mining.
Those of us who grew up in the west after WWII believed that supporting anything resembling fascism was unthinkable.
The moral degeneration of the U.S. state and its Nato allies since that time is almost beyond belief. So too is the degeneration of the Washington Post, New York Times, and other corporate media which have helped to delude large numbers of Americans into believing that Russia, which has killed or attacked no one, is somehow the aggressor in Ukraine.
In reality, and on the ground, the U.S. government – with no mandate from the American people – is supporting a fascist/oligarch unelected Ukrainian ‘government’ installed in a coup spear-headed by two openly fascist parties, Svoboda and Right sector.
Two days ago a mob, supported by the fascists Right Sektor, killed over 30 federalist Ukrainians in Odessa by pushing them from their camp into a building and then setting fire to it. Those who escaped the massacre, not the perpetrators, were rounded up by police. Today pro-federalism people besieged the police headquarter in Odessa until the police released those it had earlier arrested.
The mainstream U.S. media likes to talk about Ukraine as an “information war,” meaning that the Russians are making stuff up. But the false narratives are actually being hatched more on the U.S. side, as a new New York Times story acknowledges, writes Robert Parry.
The Ukrainian crisis has not radically changed the international situation but it has precipitated ongoing developments. Western propaganda, which has never been stronger, especially hides the reality of Western decline to the populations of NATO, but has no further effect on political reality. Inexorably, Russia and China, assisted by the other BRICS, occupy their rightful place in international relations.
Serious concerns about spiralling costs and design faults have been voiced by its chief customers — the governments of the US, Canada and Denmark — the company that is still developing the F35, Lockheed Martin, reported a 23% increase for its first quarter profits this year.
For three years, they’ve watched the sky turn from black to blue — the sun rising over the Sierra Nevada range — as they denounce drones at Beale Air Force Base.
The protesters gather monthly, flashing signs at the airmen driving onto base.
“You can’t bomb the world to peace.”
“Kill the drones, not innocent people.”
Janie Kesselman, a peace activist from North San Juan, said the group’s goal is to end the “remote-controlled murder of innocent people.”
Killing American citizens and foreign nationals without procedural and substantive protection runs contrary to our bedrock legal and democratic principles. Worse, the justifications for doing so are shrouded in secrecy, and the intellectual authors of those policies are shielded from accountability. The executive branch has repeatedly proved it cannot be entrusted with unbridled power to secure the nation without violating human and constitutional rights.
Rand Paul has warned Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that he will place a hold on one of President Obama’s appellate court nominees because of his role in crafting the legal basis for Obama’s drone policy.
Paul, the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, has informed Reid he will object to David Barron’s nomination to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals unless the Justice Department makes public the memos he authored justifying the killing of an American citizen in Yemen.
Activists gathered in front of the White House on Sunday to stage a re-enactment of a wedding in Yemen attacked by U.S. drones. Twelve civilians died when U.S. aircraft bombed their wedding procession in December. The killings sparked a ban on U.S. military drone strikes in Yemen, but they continue under the CIA.
Major S., deputy commander of Israel’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, or drone) squadron, began his military career at the Israeli Army Computer Center, but was looking for “action” and transferred to the air force. In 2007 S. joined the training course to operate drones. 99% of course participants are those who dropped out of the air force’s pilot training course.
We’re not normally called upon to justify a decision to travel abroad. Few people would challenge me if I were visiting China, despite that country’s appalling human rights record, repression of free speech, and colonisation of Tibet. If I was travelling to America, even though Predator drones kill thousands of innocent people each year, and even though Guantanamo Bay still holds 154 detainees, nobody would complain.
Thomson, who says he wasn’t privy to information on the depot’s location during his CIA career, says the facility’s history should be examined. “I have worried about the extent to which the US has spread small arms around over the decades to various parties it supported,” he says. “Such weapons are pretty durable and, after the cause du jour passed, where did they go? To be a little dramatic about it, how many of those AK-47s and RPG-7s we see Islamists waving around today passed through the Midwest Depot on their way to freedom fighters in past decades?” His research can be found on the website of the Federation of American Scientists. Unsurprisingly, the CIA and Pentagon declined to comment on the matter but whatever the camp’s true purpose, documents reveal that there have been quite a few new warehouses built at the site in recent years, the NYT notes.
Before Hugo Chavez became president of Venezuela in 1999, the barrios of Caracas, built provisionally on the hills surrounding the capital, did not even appear on the city map.
Officially they did not exist, so neither the city nor the state maintained their infrastructure. The poor inhabitants of these neighbourhoods obtained water and electricity by tapping pipes and cables themselves. They lacked access to services such as garbage collection, health care and education.
Today, residents of the same barrios are organising their communities through directly democratic assemblies known as communal councils ― of which Venezuela has more than 40,000.
Goblin sharks do resemble some prehistoric species, and Carlson said Moore made a “pretty important find.” They’re not seen anywhere all that often, though the coast of Japan boasts the shark’s share of recorded sightings.
“We don’t know a lot about deep water fauna,” Carlson said. “We know little about (goblin sharks), how long they live, how fast they grow.” One thing that’s fairly certain: At their size, goblin sharks have few natural predators, according to Carlson.
Nicholas Ngonyama gazes across the valley and his eye settles on a palatial cluster of sand-coloured buildings whose thatched roofs glow in the autumn sunshine. “I’m not happy,” mutters the homeless, jobless man. “The country is not happy. Too much money was spent on one man’s home. That money could have been spent improving the lives of the people. It feels like he is spitting in our face.”
President Jacob Zuma’s personal Xanadu, complete with stately pleasure-dome, has imposed itself on the landscape of one of South Africa’s poorest areas, Nkandla, in KwaZulu-Natal. It covers the equivalent of eight and a half football pitches and has swallowed 246m rand (£13.7m) of taxpayers’ money. “Nkandlagate” has become the defining scandal of Zuma’s five-year reign and left him fighting for his political life in this week’s elections.
With the children of today’s baby boomers scheduled to inherit $30 trillion in the next several decades, politicians and the press are hard at work flattering plutocrats of all ages by portraying them as paragons of wisdom.
In a recent breathlessly written “we have the inside scoop” article, The New York Times would have you believe that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is finally getting serious about filing criminal charges against a couple of banks.
Technically, the Times may prove to be right, but on a practical level, the actions it is predicting would be more of the same kid-glove treatment of too-big-to-fail banks we’ve seen in the past. As BuzzFlash at Truthout noted in commentaries last year, Attorney General Holder has officially stated his concern that prosecuting the largest banks would have adverse affects on our economy.
Hundreds have attended rallies in Melbourne and Sydney to call on the Abbott government not to cut funding to the public broadcaster ABC.
There are fears that funding cuts will be made to the nation’s public broadcaster in the May budget after the Abbott government announced an efficiency review of the ABC and SBS
It doesn’t matter how much reactionary rhetoric the right-wing press spew about the unemployed, nor how often government ministers and DWP employees call people without jobs “idle” or “scrounger” and complain that they are getting “handouts” – thier bile doesn’t make mandatory labour confiscation schemes any less wrong or any less economically illiterate.
The tendency to vilify the unemployed is a classic example of the “blame the symptom, not the cause” propaganda strategy.
Ed Miliband has come under pressure to bring the rail network back into national ownership if Labour wins the next election, as more than 30 of his party’s parliamentary candidates call for a bold new policy to improve services and control train fares.
The Times is obviously aware of the existence of critics to Clinton’s left. Chozick mentions that some argue that Clinton’s policies “might have exacerbated the current inequality,” and writes that “some policy experts argue that the era of centrist Clinton economics may have expired.” But instead of quoting them, the Times goes back to Bill Clinton, one more time, for a challenge to that argument.
According to US-based watchdog Freedom House global press freedom has fallen to its lowest level in a decade with just one in seven people around the world living in a country which has a free press.
The media in The Gambia, led by the Gambia Press Union in collaboration with UNESCO and TANGO, over the week-end held the annual symposium to mark World Press Freedom Day 2014.
Think about your smartphone for a minute. Imagine all of the information about your life that’s available on that one small device.
Now imagine the police having access to all of that information – without a warrant. It’s a scary thought, considering how intertwined our private lives and our phones have become.
Once you’ve ceded the high ground, it’s very difficult to reclaim it. At this time last year, the Secretary of State could have gotten away with the following remarks, but just barely. The NSA documents had not yet been revealed, but the US government had been giving up chunks of free speech high ground for quite some time.
The Obama White House is seeking immunity for telecommunications companies that have complied with government orders to hand over customers’ data. However, there may be more than meets the eye with the president’s proposed reform.
A new bipartisan bill would prohibit California’s cooperation with warrantless snooping by the National Security Agency.
Senate Bill 828 is by state Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Redondo Beach. Invoking the Bill of Rights’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, SB828 would affect the state, its employees, its governmental subdivisions and even corporations providing services for the state.
The German government plans to limit their level of cooperation with a recently formed parliamentary panel investigating mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency, Der Spiegel reports.
Privacy of the masses is being violated no matter whether there are chances of any suspicious activities or not, says the former contractor of NSA.
The former contractor and the famously known whistleblower Edward Snowden has given a warning to the whole of the masses rather than the individuals that they are under continuous surveillance for no reason.
Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his January 17 speech on NSA surveillance reforms. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the report we’d like to share our thoughts on what we liked, what we didn’t, and what we thought was missing.
Two politicians have launched a legal action to challenge the government’s ability to spy on parliamentarians.
The pair allege that GCHQ is violating a long-established rule that bans intelligence agencies from eavesdropping on MPs and peers. They say their communications are likely to have been intercepted by GCHQ, which gathers and stores data on millions of people “on a blanket basis”.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wants complete control over all Intelligence Community contact with the media, even as he has his own history of “least untruthful” sworn answers to Congress.
Here’s an interesting use of public resources: as part of a decade-long effort to “clean up” Skid Row in Los Angeles (i.e. run the homeless out of the area to ease development), the city of LA has spent at least a quarter of a million dollars arresting, prosecuting and jailing just one homeless woman, 59-year-old Ann Moody, mostly for sitting on a public sidewalk.
Gusmão was also told of a simultaneous raid on the Canberra home of Timor-Leste’s key secret witness in the dispute. This former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) agent had reportedly provided an affidavit alleging that Australian spies bugged the Timor-Leste government’s cabinet room in order to secure a commercial advantage for Australia during treaty negotiations in 2004. His passport had been confiscated in the raid, preventing him from travelling to The Hague, where the Permanent Court of Arbitration was due to hear Timor-Leste’s application to overturn the treaty.
The .01% (the very very rich) keep their place and assert their will through capture of the political process — payments to their retainers in the three branches of government via money and other goods (judges are bribed by “other goods,” as you’ll read below). The NSA and other agencies of the Deep State (FBI, CIA, Homeland Security) spy on your every move in order to “keep order,” a nicely theoretical phrase.
Today, we “disappear” issues.* They are rendered non-issues through a related process of collective sublimation. It does leave traces, physical ones in archives and psychic ones at some level of mind among the few who have motive to maintain conscious awareness. However, so far as public discourse or political action is concerned, they have been reduced to a zombie status that renders them innocuous. This is a subtle process requiring the tacit cooperation of politicos, pundits, media types, and intellectuals whose complicity takes shape despite diverse purposes and diverse professional roles. The permissive factor is a public that prefers to have these matters swept out of sight and out of mind.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Saturday that she is backing out of delivering the 2014 graduation commencement address at Rutgers University after protests by Rutgers faculty and students over her role in the Iraq War and torture. Rice was a leading hawk in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
As a reminder of her central role, this first video is Condoleezza Rice openly defending the torture tactics implemented under George W. Bush, who himself stated to a British newspaper that it was “damn right” that he had authorized them.
A college student who doesn’t believe in the existence of structural racism or white supremacy wrote an essay about why he would “never apologize” for his white privilege, and Time magazine thought it would be a really cool idea to publish it. Probably because Princeton University freshman Tal Fortgang speaks for many white Americans when he says that racism and white privilege aren’t real.
Tired of being told to “check his privilege” by others at his college, Fortgang goes through his family’s history and concludes that he deserves to go to an Ivy League school and live in a wealthy suburb of New York City and share his ridiculous baby tantrum thoughts on a national news site because his family made smarter and better choices than other families.
Mount Everest is known as a place that defies gravity, but it’s also a place for upturning social order. To the climber, it’s the pinnacle of a glorious trekking experience. To the anonymous laborer who supports the Westerners’ ascent, it’s a precarious front in a Global South class struggle.
A fatal disaster on April 18 turned the underlying tensions into a full-blown stand-off: an avalanche near the Base Camp in the perilous Khumbu Ice Fall swallowed sixteen local guides and workers, mostly ethnic sherpas. Since then, the trauma has set off the collapse of the climbing season.
The labor relations of Everest expose the ethical twists of the international adventure industry. Sherpas, who identify as an ethnic group as well as a professional community of guides and porters, do make a relatively good living, pulling in several thousand dollars each season (much more than what they’d earn farming). But the risks tend to be higher than the rewards. Statistically speaking, the fatality rate of sherpas is roughly twelve times higher than that of Iraq war soldiers, and avalanche is a leading cause of sherpas’ deaths.
The 2013 USGLP report includes a caveat that Europe and other areas were surveyed in early 2013, soon after Obama’s reelection and before revelations of NSA wire-tapping, so the improved 2013 figures may reflect a fleeting revival of hope rather than a favorable response to U.S. policy.
A closer look at the U.S.-Global Leadership Project report reveals an erosion of approval for U.S. leadership in countries all over the world since 2009. The specific question Gallup asks is, “Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of the United States?” Large numbers in some countries refuse to answer or express no opinion, masking unvoiced disapproval behind fear, deference or politeness. I don’t believe that 71 percent of Vietnamese really have no opinion of U.S. global leadership. But the approval figures are probably not as flawed as the disapproval ones.
Wondering what happened to the controversial CIA interrogation report that the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify a month ago? So are many Senate Democrats.
A. The U.S. prison system. “The physical, mental, and sexual abuse glimpsed at Abu Ghraib is part of the daily experience for two million people caged in American prisons,” she writes. For example, here in Chicago, where I live, a police commander was convicted in 1991 of presiding over the torture of several hundred criminal suspects.
B. Vietnam. During that disastrous war, the U.S. government “imprisoned those Vietnamese it considered ‘the enemy’ in tiger cages, subjected them to physical abuses, deprived them of food and water, and, as if all that was not bad enough, poured lye on them to burn and scar them,” Power writes.
C. Latin America. Our involvement in our “backyard” over the decades has included collusion with and training of torturers in both military and police forces in many of the countries south of our border. The notorious School of the Americas has long stood as a symbol of such involvement.
D. Slavery. Remember that? It was a way of life in the United States for a long time, and even after it ended, the dehumanization and repression of African-Americans continued. Lynchings were so common in the South they inspired a song, “Strange Fruit,” which Billie Holiday turned into a soul-haunting hit.
More than a year after Palestine was upgraded to become a nonmember observer state of the United Nations, the attributes of statehood exist mainly on official Palestinian letterhead.
Now, with the collapse of the American-brokered Middle East negotiations, the Palestinian leadership is focusing on its diplomatic and legal struggle for international recognition of Palestine as a state under occupation and for Israel to be held accountable as the occupier.
Daniel Strypey Bruce is a writer, performer, activist, GNU/Linux user, permaculturist, Occupier, facilitator, and community developer based in Ōtepoti/ Dunedin. A student of Te Reo Māori and tikanga Māori, he acknowledges the mana whenua of hapū and iwi in Aotearoa. An early advocate of online activism, he was a founder of Aotearoa.Indymedia.org, and CreativeCommons.org.nz, and has been blogging on free culture in all its form at Disintermedia.net.nz for over 5 years. Over the last two years he has served as Co-Director of Circulation Festival, a Council member for Permaculture in NZ, and Communications Offer for the Pirate Party of NZ, for whom he is now Orientation Officer.
To ensure the Internet is open to all on an equal basis we must act now to prevent mega-corporations from destroying Internet Freedom
Update: Actions every day starting on Wednesday, May 7th, at noon and 5 pm. To Save The Internet, we are building a People’s Firewall against the FCC’s proposed rule that will create a ‘pay to play’ Internet by ending net neutrality. The FCC is located at 445 12th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20554.
‘If the president is concerned that people don’t know what’s going on in the negotiations then the president should release the text and remove it from being a state secret.’
In my last column, I explained how the copyright monopoly is fundamentally incompatible with private communications as a concept, and how we must weigh a silly distribution monopoly for one of many entertainment industries against such vital functions of society as whistleblower protection, freedom of the press, and the ability to hold a private conversation in the first place. While this argument is strong, it does require a bit of intelligence and the ability to see how two ideas conflict, so it can be hard to get across to copyright monopoly pundits.
The threat against private communications isn’t the only thing wrong with the copyright monopoly, of course. I have previously argued here on TorrentFreak that there’s really nothing defensible about the monopoly at all. But in order to break the spell of “publishers have always told me that the copyright monopoly is good and I have never had any reason to question their self-interest in the matter”, there are other tricks of honest, effective argumentation.
The Linux 3.15 kernel with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver update brings initial NVIDIA Maxwell GPU support but it’s still an early work-in-progress and the Nouveau Gallium3D support for Maxwell is still in early stages.
David has now posted working patches for his DP MST code on the DRI-devel mailing list. Right now his code has just been tested on a Lenovo Ultrabook boasting Intel “Haswell” graphics and it’s working when connected to external hubs. There’s still code that’s a work in progress but overall it seems to be working fine. Right now this initial “preview code” works for Intel Haswell hardware with certain DP MST hubs.
After months of development, the team behind popular media center software XBMC have released XBMC 13 “Gotham.” The software provides a full-screen experience for navigating media on a Windows, Linux, Mac. or Android system.
Another success story to share with you guys today. The kind folks at bitSmith Games kindly let us know how well Ku: Shroud of the Morrigan is selling on Linux.
There are many cool things happening in the world of Linux gaming, and Warsow 1.5 is one of them. We have taken great care to make our latest release run smoothly on the open source radeon drivers, the input code utilizes XInput2, and our shipped binaries are fully compatible with Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian Wheezy.
Server hosts will be happy to hear that 1.5 features a built-in HTTP server that significantly simplifies map downloads by removing the need to serve downloadable files through mirrors.
Valve have delivered big with the latest Steam beta-client update with enabling in-home streaming for one and all! Masses of fixes everywhere on this one.
It’s been a busy week at Krita development headquarters. And with so much work being done I feel proud to share all the great stuff that’s happening on the main development branch (Future 2.9).
From May 16th to 18th, Málaga is hosting Akademy-es 2014 in Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieria de Telecomunicación of Universidad de Málaga. This event is organized by KDE España, Linux Málaga and Bitvalley, and represents the return of a KDE event to Málaga 9 years after it hosted Akademy 2005.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
For quite a while now the KDE team has been severely understaffed. We maintain a lot of packages, with many different kinds of bugs, but we don’t have enough people to do all the work that needs to be done. We have tools that help us automate the update to new upstream releases, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of our work and so we are writing to invite more people to get involved in the team and help us get KDE software in Debian into better shape.
Mir 0.2.0 is the new, work-in-progress version of this open-source display server for Ubuntu Linux. The version was bumped for reflecting early development of Ubuntu 14.10, the Utopic Unicorn.
Lubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS based on the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). On this release, as the Xubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Lubuntu 14.04 also come with LTS version, it mean will be supported for 3 years.
For those anxious to see some NVIDIA Tegra K1 performance numbers, hopefully this puts the four-plus-one Cortex-A15 performance a bit into perspective… Again, in the coming days will be clean results from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS throughout, power numbers, other GPU/GPGPU benchmarks, and other interesting data from this Jetson TK1 ARM development board. Stay tuned!
Allied Electronics, Fort Worth TX, will provide a Model A Raspberry Pi computer board to each one of the more than 130 high school-age Dean’s List Award finalists who participated in the 2014 FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) season. The Dean’s List Award began in 2010 to recognize the leadership and dedication of the most outstanding FRC students.
The Nexus tablet range is once again in need of an overhaul. Nexus 7 and the now almost obsolete Nexus 10 are about to be replaced by newer models. What Google has in store for us, we don’t know. However, rumors are hinting at a possible new segment of devices called Nexus 8. The 8.9-inch tablet will reportedly replace the popular Nexus 7 series of devices. As to how true the rumors are, it’s too early to tell, but the word on the street is Google has indeed killed off both Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. This will be a huge step forward for Google as it would be directly competing with Apple’s hugely popular iPad.
How does one become a contributor of Open Source development? Some start with the wish to fix that certain annoying bug in their favorite software. Others want to extend it by a new feature. However you arrive, the path to go to get that seemingly easy task done is often not clear. Where’s the source for that button? How do I make my changes take effect in the software that is run? Finding the right path can be a frustrating journey many are not willing to endure. Google Code-In (or GCI for short) aims to help out: Pairing prospective contributors with mentors from established open source organizations builds a path to successful contributions. KDE has participated in GCI as a mentoring organization since its start in 2010, and did so again in the most recent 2013 edition.
There’s a big belief that OpenGL 5 will be about optimizing this cross-platform, widely-used graphics API. All of the major hardware companies are working towards reducing OpenGL driver overhead and making other OpenGL improvements as a result of AMD’s Mantle API. Mantle is still Windows-only and used by just a handful of games for now with AMD’s Catlayst driver on GCN GPUs, but it’s ignited a conversation about increasing the performance potential out of OpenGL. DirectX 12.0 is also going to be optimizing the performance potential of Microsoft’s 3D graphics API.
As press and street art fans were allowed in to take a first look at an exhibition claiming to be “the most expensive collection of Banksy artworks ever assembled”, the artist posted a statement on his website condemning it.
Add together the cities of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Lugansk and you don’t reach the economic output of Dundee. World domination it isn’t. Unfortunately both in the Kremlin and on Capitol Hill they, and their satraps, think it is. Neither side cares at all about the millions of ordinary people in the zone of potential conflict.
Iraqi army helicopters have hit what they believe was a jihadist convoy in eastern Syria, killing at least eight people, in a show of strength days before the country’s first national elections since 2010.
The United States delivered 300,000 meals ready to eat to the Ukranian military, the first delivery of American aid to the former Soviet republic, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
The current Ukraine crisis is serious and threatening, so much so that some commentators even compare it to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
Columnist Thanassis Cambanis summarizes the core issue succinctly in The Boston Globe: “[President Vladimir V.] Putin’s annexation of the Crimea is a break in the order that America and its allies have come to rely on since the end of the Cold War—namely, one in which major powers only intervene militarily when they have an international consensus on their side, or failing that, when they’re not crossing a rival power’s red lines.”
The West has made NATO’s military alliance the heart of its response to Russia’s power grab in Ukraine. But we may be fighting the wrong battle: The weapons President Vladimir Putin has used in Crimea and eastern Ukraine look more like paramilitary “covert action” than conventional military force.
Washington and Brussels are the heroes of the Ukrainian saga, if you believe the Western media. Russian President Vladimir Putin is cast as the Big Bad Russian Bear, US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are the Democratic A-Team. Russia is supposedly using dirty KGB-inspired tactics: secret agitators backed by masked paratroopers. The West makes the same tired claims to back democracy and freedom and denounces Putin’s foul play.
The hyperbole is extraordinary. Is it really appropriate to invoke the memory of Anschluss, or compare Putin to Saddam Hussein? Kerry has called Ukraine an “incredible act of aggression”, conveniently ignoring drone strikes, the Iraq War, and the numerous illegal coups the US has pulled off since World War II.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has decided not to participate as the speaker for Rutgers University’s commencement ceremony after students began protesting the invitation earlier this year based on Rice’s involvement with the Iraq War.
It’s no secret that Americans today tend to be less supportive of the war in Iraq than they were back in 2003, and that decline in support has caused some serious negative backlash for Rice.
The chaos, terror and civil war in Ukraine is the deliberate creation of the Washington war machine, writes Mike Whitney. It is just step one of an offensive aimed at Russia – and that should raise loud alarms among all who care about our Earth’s future.
Between 1941 and 1944, Americans and Canadians trained as secret agents at Camp X in Whitby, Ontario learning from the finest intelligence specialists the arts of espionage, sabotage, subversion, unarmed combat, silent killing, weapons training and various forms of communications. Employing the finest intelligence specialists, Camp X turned highly qualified recruits into covert operatives trained for clandestine Allied missions, and in so doing played an integral role in the development of international and domestic intelligence training.
In what can only be described as a massacre, 38 anti-government activists were killed Friday after fascist-led forces set fire to Odessa’s Trade Unions House, which had been sheltering opponents of the US- and European-backed regime in Ukraine.
According to eye-witnesses, those who jumped from the burning building and survived were surrounded and beaten by thugs from the neo-Nazi Right Sector. Video footage shows bloodied and wounded survivors being attacked.
The atrocity underscores both the brutal character of the right-wing government installed in Kiev by the Western powers and the encouragement by the US and its allies of a bloody crackdown by the regime to suppress popular opposition, centered in the mainly Russian-speaking south and east of Ukraine.
As the Odessa outrage occurred, US President Barack Obama, at a joint White House press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, explicitly endorsed the military offensive being carried out by the unelected Kiev government against protesters occupying official buildings in eastern Ukraine.
Despite Western media attempts to cover up what happened in Odessa—with multiple reports stating that “the exact sequence of events is still unclear”—there is no doubt that the killings in the southern port city were instigated by thugs wearing the insignia of the Right Sector, which holds positions in the Kiev regime, along with the like-minded Svoboda party.
Israeli police on Thursday challenged Washington’s inclusion of Jewish extremist attacks on Palestinians in a global terror report, saying such incidents could not be likened to militant attacks.
For the first time, the State Department’s 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism, published Wednesday, included a reference to a growing wave of racist anti-Palestinian vandalism, euphemistically known as “price tag” attacks.
Blair urges the world to “intervene” more in the Middle East, just as he and Bush “intervened” in Iraq. Trouble is, he admits, public opinion opposes his addiction to war
The next time you’re influenced by a facebook meme or a heart-wrenching youtube video about human rights violations by an “enemy” of the West, think about the atrocities by the pro-Western side that we are not seeing. Study the history of the country to learn what parts of the so-called democratic opposition might draw their lineage to militant groups (such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) that have massacred ethnic, religious, or political minorities in past decades. If the U.S. continues to back these crazies just because they attack the West’s enemies, blowback is again going to be inevitable.
As the latest trial opened, his US lawyer, Joshua Dratel, noted that western governments, including the US, and his client were once on the same side, fighting in defence of Muslims in Afghanistan and in Bosnia against the Serbians. Dratel, who is Jewish, would not be defending Hamza if he was promoting anti-Jewish hatred, which he was accused of during his UK trial. While Hamza’s views were extreme, Dratel said, it was not illegal to hold them. At one point, he likened Hamza to Nelson Mandela, who was “once considered a terrorist. Now he’s an icon.”
Numerous US agents are helping the coup-appointed government in Ukraine to “fight organized crime” in the south east of the country, the German newspaper Bild revealed.
According to the daily, the CIA and FBI are advising the government in Kiev on how to deal with the ‘fight against organized crime’ and stop the violence in the country’s restive eastern regions.
Hadi, recently named a suspect by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in a decade-old tax case, served as the director general for taxation at Indonesia’s Ministry of Finance between 2001 and 2006.
The 2006 diplomatic cable, published by Wikileaks on its website, commented on his replacement as the tax director general by Darmin Nasution.
Campaigners dressed as penguins marked World Penguin Day outside Norway’s parliament. They called on Norway and other nations active in the Antarctic to do more to save the world penguin population from a rapid decline.
A proposal in the UK to destroy ancient woodland to make way for a £40 million motorway service station clearly reveals the flaws of biodiversity offsets.
Coal ash is the waste material left over after coal is burned. It’s often laced with pollutants, but it isn’t covered by any federal rules. In fact, no one paid much attention to coal ash until 1 billion gallons of it poured into the rivers around the Tennessee Valley Authority Kingston Fossil Plant in 2008 and blanketed more than 300 acres of land. The tragic spill ignited a debate over whether to regulate coal ash and how.
Oxfam Australia has released a report showing that the big four Australian banks have financial connections with agri-business interests that are involved in major land grabs and exploitation.
A group supporting the political views of retired billionaire investor Tom Steyer bought a full-page color advertisement Friday in The Wichita Eagle — the Koch brothers’ hometown newspaper — inviting the brothers to a public debate on climate change.
When you become a banker, no one issues you a badge, nor are you fitted for a judicial robe. So why is the Justice Department telling bankers to behave like policemen and judges? Justice’s new probe, known as “Operation Choke Point,” is asking banks to identify customers who may be breaking the law or simply doing something government officials don’t like. Banks must then “choke off” those customers’ access to financial services, shutting down their accounts.
Despite the unemployment rate plummeting, more than 92 million Americans remain out of the labor force.
The unemployment rate dropped to 6.3 percent in April from 6.7 percent in March, the lowest it has been since September 2008 when it was 6.1 percent. The sharp drop, though, occurred because the number of people working or seeking work fell. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count people not looking for a job as unemployed.
City’s watered-down version, embraced by political elites and business class, a ‘testament to how working people can push back against the status quo of poverty, inequality, and injustice’
I went after Jones specifically because almost all of his propaganda plays into the hands of the extreme right wing in the United States. He dismisses feminism and gay rights as part of a New Word Order plot to reduce the population. He dismisses climate change as a hoax, and backs it up by giving weather reports on Mars. He attacks non-existent, nameless, faceless organizations like the Illuminati but ignores the evils being done by right-wing billionaires like the Koch Brothers.
His supporters are certified experts on the Bilderberg Group, but they seem to know nothing about the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that literally writes laws for corporations and passes them into law. Who needs the Illuminati when you have people like that? What if we just do away with the word “Illuminati” and start talking about capitalism and the state?
You will never hear conspiracy theorists talk about class war; they are far more concerned with preserving their own status in this economic system. Like missionaries and populist demagogues of the past, they prey on the young and downtrodden, give them an all-encompassing worldview, call it “truth, and and label everyone who doesn’t believe it a “sheep” who needs to “wake up.”
I attack Infowars because it is not a revolutionary movement. It is chasing a mirage. It imagines the good ol’ days of ‘merica, when white slave-owners wrote a constitution for other property owners, before they pushed west, killed multitudes of Native Americans (historical estimates range between 30-100 million) and stole their land. Those are the glory days of 1776 that the right-wing conspiracy crowd holds up as an ideal that we need to return to.
Two books about computer shenanigans this week. Michael Lewis’ “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt” takes on the high-frequency traders who have made ghost “towns” of stock exchange floors and created a market that is impenetrable to common understanding.
In high-frequency trading, milliseconds count (if you could count that fast) so Wall Street traders now jockey for fiber-optic proximity to exchanges in order to execute trades and change pricing within one/one-thousandth or some such of the blink of an eye, so as to ensure that traders made a profit regardless of what happened to their customers. Nothing new there, right? Except now it’s being done at light-like speeds.
For one thing, Snowden did not have access to any specific ECIs (Extremely Classified Information compartments) that protect specific sources of information, including the identities of companies that partner with the NSA. The larger ones can be inferred, but the details of their cooperation, along with the details of hundreds of other relationships, are ECI-controlled.
Government surveillance no longer targets individuals, but entire populations, former CIA contractor Edward Snowden has said. The whistleblower appeared via video link in a Toronto debate over the NSA intelligence gathering programs.
Commenting on the antics of the National Security Agency, which have been described in the past as “Orwellian in nature,” Snowden said every citizen is affected by intelligence gathering programs
“It’s no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing,” Snowden said in the brief video. “It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love.”
Privacy Badger is a new tool from the Electronic Frontier Foundation designed to stop creepy online tracking.
It’s an extension for Firefox and Chrome that “automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them.”
Its reported that Google Glass advocates are coming to your town and that was the catalyst for writing this article. I am quite happy for Google Glass users to love their devices, however I don’t want them ranting on at me about it and I certainly don’t want their camera’s pointed at me.
There’s something very strange about Google Glass “advocates” and its something akin to Justin Beiber fans.
Hopefully the novelty of Google Glass will wear off, or at-least be limited to their own forums and fan pages.
For the record, I am not a Google “hater” (its one of the ways a Google Glass Advocate rationalizes someone not interested in their toy) infact quite the opposite, I’m currently writing this on a Chromebook and am a very heavy user of many Google services – Doc’s, Drive, Groups, G+, Google, Gmail. I was also an early adopter of the ill fated GoogleWave and certainly no “hater” of Google products and my smartphones are Android, as are the tablets that I use.
On Florida’s Atlantic coast, cyber arms makers working for U.S. spy agencies are bombarding billions of lines of computer code with random data that can expose software flaws the U.S. might exploit.
There’s been much discussion – and derision – of the US supreme court’s recent forays into cellphones and the internet, but as more and more of these cases bubble up to the high chamber, including surveillance reform, we won’t be laughing for long: the future of technology and privacy law will undoubtedly be written over the next few years by nine individuals who haven’t “really ‘gotten to’ email” and find Facebook and Twitter “a challenge” .
A pair of cases that went before the court this week raise the issue of whether police can search someone’s cellphone after an arrest but without a warrant. The court’s decisions will inevitably affect millions. As the New York Times editorial board explained on the eve of the arguments, “There are 12 million arrests in America each year, most for misdemeanors that can be as minor as jaywalking.” Over 90% of Americans have cellphones, and as the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a briefing to the court, our mobile devices “are in effect, our new homes”.
On a day when she spent more than four hours face-to-face with Barack Obama at the White House, Merkel last Friday listened to the US president in his own verdant Rose Garden tell the world how important their relationship is.
You would think North Korea wouldn’t be in any place to lecture the United States about human rights abuses, right? Well, think again, because according to The Washington Post, a North Korean state news agency has responded to accusations leveled against them of human rights abuses by flipping the script by calling the United States a “living hell”, citing the NSA, prison privatization, and, for some reason, George Zimmerman.
In the real world, who are our superheroes? People such as Assange or Edward Snowden seem candidates but actually are more akin to prophets, warning of misfortune but without the authority to stop it. Our elected officials? Some perhaps, but not those now in power. Indeed, it is the Obama administration — the same one that has so greatly stepped up the use of drones — that supports searching smartphones without warrants. We’re left with an improbable bunch: the nine justices of the Supreme Court.
Although the use of facial recognition tools is still relatively new in the consumer sector, that is where much of the visible innovation will take place over the coming years. “The stakes are lower, so companies are free to take more risks,” says Kelly Gates, professor in communication and science studies at UC San Diego and author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. “As a result, there are a lot of experiments in the commercial domain. So what if you identify the wrong person by accident when you’re targeting an ad? It’s not that big a deal. It happens all the time in other forms of advertising.”
After Edward Snowden caught the US government with its pants down, you would think the keepers of this country’s secrets might stand up for a little more transparency, not bend over backwards trying to control the message.
Instead, this week we found out the Most Transparent Administration in American History™ has implemented a new anti-press policy that would make Richard Nixon blush. National intelligence director James Clapper, the man caught lying to Congress from an “unauthorized” leak by Snowden, issued a directive to the employees of all 17 intelligence agencies barring all employees from any “unauthorized” contact with the press.
The Judge Rotenberg Center, a residential school in northern Massachusetts, prides itself on teaching students with disabilities who have the most challenging behavioral issues. The school takes kids with severe intellectual disabilities – autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and a range of psychiatric disabilities – and then its employees attach electrodes to their arms, legs, and stomach, and shock them into submission.
It’s Free Comic Book Day today – the North American comic book industry’s annual push to bring in more readers by distributing popular all-ages comics for free through thousands of retailers. Unfortunately, while comics may be for everyone, the culture around them has a lot of growing up left to do.
Though James Dent could watch Central High School’s homecoming parade from the porch of his faded white bungalow, it had been years since he’d bothered. But last fall, Dent’s oldest granddaughter, D’Leisha, was vying for homecoming queen, and he knew she’d be poking up through the sunroof of her mother’s car, hand cupped in a beauty-pageant wave, looking for him.
Amjad al-Safadi was an East Jerusalem defense attorney whose clients were Palestinian security prisoners. Two months ago, he himself was arrested by the Shabak and detained for 45 days. He was charged with aiding Palestinian militant groups and their detainees. During his detention he was tortured by Shabak interrogator goons. Among his claims were that electric shocks were used against him. He was released from prison and placed under house arrest (the same process used in the case of Majd Kayyal). Yesterday, five days after his release, he hung himself at his home and died.
An Egyptian court sentenced 102 supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi to 10 years in prison on Saturday over protest violence, state television reported.
The army-installed government has rounded up thousands of Morsi supporters and put them on mass trials since overthrowing him in July.
In her heartfelt dissent in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which upheld a Michigan ballot initiative forbidding schools from considering race as one factor in admitting students, Justice Sandra Sotomayor wrote “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.”
For most of US history, torture was something the enemy did, and their doing so was widely regarded as a sure sign of their evil. US troops might be ordered into unjust wars of aggression. They even carried out massacres. But torture of prisoners was something beheld as evil.
American Indians were often massacred, but not tortured, and the claim that some of them tortured was seen as evidence of their barbarism. Mexican civilians were also massacred, but not tortured. Union soldiers did not torture Confederate prisoners. In fact, the Civil War saw the first rules of war, formulated by Lincoln. Confederates did massacre Union troops if they were Black, but even these traitors never tortured. Germans, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese were all killed in great numbers, but never tortured. In fact, the torture of US POWs by North Koreans was held up as a great evil.
Search the internet and there are tons of articles about more efficient ways to board airplanes. Many will point to the work of astrophysicist Jason Steffen who algorithmically tested a variety of boarding methods to come up with his optimized version. The best demonstration of this particular method is in this YouTube video where the Steffen method was tested.
Summary: Steve Jobs and his ‘genius’ plan of starting “thermonuclear” war against Linux/Android turns out to be a colossal failure
Two companies, namely Apple and Samsung, command the lion’s share of the mobile market, so it should come as no surprise that there is fierce rivalry there. But Apple was the company which chose to start with lawsuits, perhaps realising even years ago that it was losing to Android on several fronts, including smartphones and tablets. Apple first sued HTC (which had few patents) and later took on the giant Samsung, which had a huge number of patents and also produced components for Apple. Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung was in many ways a sign of desperation and at the same time arrogance (claiming that the manufacturer and innovator was “copying” Apple). Google is like Apple in the sense that it doesn’t really manufacture anything, but it works on software and has got hardware partners. Samsung is doing a whole load of stuff, with staff that’s like 10 times (an order of magnitude) bigger than Google’s and Apple’s. Production helps make it all happen. Google focuses on server-side development/hosting and Apple does marketing.
When it comes to the mobile market, another non-hardware-producing company exists but hardly counts. That company is Microsoft and unlike Apple and Google, it is a loss leader. It’s an utter failure, subsidised in part by governments for snooping, back doors, etc. Here is a new article about Microsoft:
Microsoft‘s hopes of establishing a sizeable presence in the tablet market continue to be thwarted, new figures reveal.
And it seems as though Microsoft loses money on every Surface it sells, despite the relatively high retail price of the machines.
Notice this towards the end: “Chitika analysed the tablet web usage habits of tens of millions of North Americans found that Surface users generated a slightly greater share of their total online traffic during working hours when compared to iPad or Android tablet users.”
It probably means that those using a Microsoft-branded product are forced by employers to use it. To Microsoft, litigation against Android (often by proxy) is the only resort left, or racketeering tactics which attempt to make Android a cash cow of Microsoft.
What’s noteworthy at the moment is the outcome of this trial, which granted Apple only 5% (i.e. only cents on each Samsung device sold) of the amount of money it wanted to grab from Samsung. As one report put it:
The Cupertino company can notch a second win, but with far less damages than it requested. Apple wanted $2.2 billion, and the jury awarded it $119.6 million, or just over 5 percent of what Apple had requested.
As a side note, Techrights was approached for an interview by the Linux Foundation, so we shall soon have some coverage about the rise of Linux in the embedded/device space. █
Summary: A lot of sites portray Android/Google as anti-competitive, but none seems to notice where this hypocritical accusation originally came from
A LOT OF disappointing ‘news’ coverage (gossip) promotes the notion that Google’s business, and Android in particular, is some kind of illegal activity. It is the tiresome old strategy of casting “free” (even when it means freedom-respecting) as anti-competitive. That’s the very opposite of what should be considered “true”.
So let’s start with the alleged ‘news’. Who’s behind it? The man who “was lead counsel for Microsoft during part of its defense against antitrust claims,” based on Wikipedia. It’s an opportunist and an antitrust actions maximalist.
It wasn’t long ago that we saw other antitrust motions against Android and they have been always tied to Microsoft or Microsoft proxies such as Nokia (there is a collusion there).
Sadly, every journalist whom we have seen covering the “antitrust trolling” missed this important connection between Microsoft and Berman. One example from the British press said: “Google is facing a new antitrust class action lawsuit in the US over its “illegal monopoly” on internet and mobile search.”
It also said: “These deals are hampering the market and keeping the price of devices from manufacturers like Samsung and HTC artificially high, the firm said.”
This is nonsense. It doesn’t even pass the “bullshit test” because the very opposite is true. A high price, if ever, is caused by patents, which are not in Google’s interest. Price is not the issue with Google, so the allegations are bogus. Privacy would be a more legitimite concern, but given how Nokia is trying to shove Microsoft spyware into the OS, there’s room for hypocrisy. Consider this new analysis:
When Nokia delivered its Android-based phones at Mobile World Congress, the big news was that with Microsoft acquiring the company, Microsoft would suddenly be in the Android business. But there was another storyline that accompanied the delivery of the Nokia Android phones, which was that they are based on a forked version of Android. Among other issues that creates, the phones don’t support the Google Play app store and the apps there, all of which ring the cash register for Google.
What we may be dealing with here is more of the "Scroogled" attack ads, this time in litigious form. We have already exposed and chastised other anti-Google lawyers who had shrewdly hidden their Microsoft payments by editing their CV prior to their assaults on Android, which basically used all sorts of distortion and libel.
Looking back at the responses to the article in the British press, there are many good comments, preceded by this: “Instead of having me read through all the stupid why not say “greedy lawyers with no grasp over what they are talking about drool over the potential payments from Google but most likely from people that will pay to be represented in the trial””
Another commenter responds: “Hopefully the courts will see through this ruse and slap down these lawyers. Their only purpose is to collect $Millions at the expense of Google and the people they claim to represent.”
Well, the author, Brid-Aine Parnell, gave coverage to this non-news, using the editor’s trollish headline and the following attempt at balance: “A Google spokesperson told The Reg in an emailed statement that Android had brought more competition into the market.”
Well, unlike Apple. So what’s the basis for singling out Google? It’s nonsense. No matter how the case ends up, it make Google look bad and this was probably the intention of this whole PR blitz.
Over at IDG, Jim Lynch responds to this original IDG report that almost everyone is citing. The Microsoft connection not even named, so no wonder nobody mentions where a lot of it may be coming from. IDG should be shamed of itself for publishing many lobbying/PR paragraphs without mentioning even once the Microsoft ties. It’s not responsible journalism, as it distorts by omission.
Microsoft says “don’t be Scroogled.” We say, don’t be bamboozled by “Scroogled”; it’s a nasty PR campaign (attacks ads) and the people behind it recently got promoted, █
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
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