Posted in Microsoft at 3:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: There should be more to come from the whole PRISM/NSA-gate, but the ball is in the court of one activist/lawyer/blogger, Glenn Greenwald
Daily links are still flooded with stories about PRISM, which was also related to our regular scope of coverage [1, 2, 3]. PRISM is not exactly news to those who watched the NSA closely (as I did for several years). What’s new, for the most part, is concrete proof finally existing and being accessible to the public. Cablegate has been the bloodline of some valuable posts of ours, showing the importance of secret policy being made public. The Guardian did decent work, but it didn’t publish all the documents as the leaker had hoped based on some reports. This permits some companies to deny what they are doing. This means that people will carry on with their addiction to Web search and proprietary chat facilities from Microsoft and Google. It is already clear that Microsoft gives governments easy access to Skype (we wrote about it months ago, citing Microsoft's own admission) and the ‘guardian’ reminds us of that:
UK intelligence agencies made thousands of requests for information on private communications via Microsoft products last year, with demands for Skype call information outnumbering those made by US agencies.
In 2012, the UK made 1,268 requests to Skype for information such as the names of callers, their address, email account details and telephone numbers dialled. This was a quarter of all requests received by the Microsoft-owned internet call service from governments around the world. The requests could have come from British police and intelligence agencies, such as GCHQ.
As Satipera put it in identi.ca the other day, “Microsoft for security, like fencing with a baguette.” There is more to the numbers above, which is why Glenn Greenwald should pass the leaked documents to Wikileaks, making a copy of the whole lot of documents, thus permitting full publication of public policy (the ‘guardian’ won’t do it). Unless this happens, many companies will carry on evading/lying to restore public acceptance of a mass surveillance state where dissidents are the real target. █
There were many striking details in the Washington Post’s scoop about PRISM and its capabilities, but one part in particular stood out to me. The Post, citing a top-secret NSA PowerPoint slide, wrote that the agency has a specific “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection” that outlines how it can eavesdrop on Skype “when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of ‘audio, video, chat, and file transfers’ when Skype users connect by computer alone.” (Emphasis added.)
This piece of information is significant for a number of reasons. Last year, speculation arose in the hacker community that Skype, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2011 and had been difficult to wiretap, had become compliant with law enforcement demands. I pressured Skype to disclose its eavesdropping capabilities, but the company refused to discuss the matter. After a range of advocacy groups published an open letter calling for more clarity on the issue, Microsoft eventually released a transparency report detailing information about law enforcement requests for user data. The report devoted an entire section to Skype and claimed that in 2012, it hadn’t handed any communications content over to authorities anywhere in the world. Microsoft also said in notes accompanying the transparency report that calls made between Skype-Skype users were encrypted peer-to-peer, implying that they did not pass through Microsoft’s central servers and could not be eavesdropped on—except maybe if the government deployed a spy Trojan on a targeted computer to bypass encryption.
But the NSA “PRISM Skype Collection” guide casts doubt on whether any Skype communications are beyond the NSA’s reach. That the NSA claims to be able to grab all Skype users’ communications also calls into question the credibility of Microsoft’s transparency report—particularly the claim that in 2012 it did not once hand over the content of any user communications. Moreover, according to a leaked NSA slide published by the Post, Skype first became part of the NSA’s PRISM program in February 2011—three months before Microsoft purchased the service from U.S. private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz.
The devil some of us have most sold our souls to isn’t Apple or Google or Amazon but Adobe. How can we be creative without our “Creative Suite”? If we’re actually creative, though, I bet we can. Besides, there are more-or-less functional people-powered alternatives to a lot of those programs, which are a bit less forgiving and a lot more customizable for the clever. It’s a better way to go in the long run anyway. Shiny new equipment tends to breed shiny fake art.
Then there’s the steampunk thrill of the UNIX terminal at the heart of your new OS. The terminal means going back in time to a text-only screen — now with customizable colors in transparent windows! — and telling the computer what you want with magic spells on a command line. Slow tech is addictive. This article is being written in a terminal program that’s almost 40 years old, and thanks to a devoted community of hackers it works better than ever.
That’s the open-source ethic: If it still works, build on it — don’t design for obsolescence. And when a new improvement comes along, everyone can benefit. When there’s an error, the community (eventually) corrects it.
For example, ghost-of-Steve Jobs: It’s “think differently.”
Two weeks ago the Tandy Supercomputing Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma launched as the home to one of the country’s first shared, publicly available supercomputers.
The project — born of a collaboration between The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma State University, The University of Oklahoma, Tulsa Community College, the city of Tulsa, business owners and nonprofit foundations — gives community members equal access to a $3.5 million, 100-node supercomputing system at a fraction of the cost to build their own.
Last week, security vendor BeyondTrust combined its “context-aware” approach to vulnerability assessment with user-privilege management on Windows. Today, it has taken another step in the same direction with new software that delivers similar features for systems reporting, analytics and password security on Linux and Unix servers. Read on for the details, and what the emphasis on context-awareness means for the channel.
Members of NVIDIA’s Registered Developer Programs can now start testing out the CUDA 5.5 release candidate. According to the announcement, the features in the next release of the platform and architecture for parallel programming include multi-process MPI debugging and profiling, step-by-step guided performance analysis and a static CUDA runtime library.
It’s been a while since the last Nouveau DDX driver update, but xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.8 was released this morning. This updated Nouveau X.Org driver comes with nearly two dozen changes.
While many are super excited about Wayland and the thought of X11 finally going away in the coming years, some who have been enthusiastic about Wayland/Weston are starting to lose interest. Here’s the reasons by one Wayland enthusiast for losing motivation in the project.
Darxus, a Wayland enthusiast and Phoronix Forums moderator, shared on the mailing list what killed his motivation to play with Wayland. He was once very involved with the upstream Wayland community, but that’s not so much the case anymore. Here’s a synopsis of his reasons:
Building upon last month’s eight-way Linux vs. BSD operating system comparison, out today is an expanded 11-way OS showdown. The new OS test results available are for the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, Debian GNU/Linux, and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The other competitors include PC-BSD, DragonFlyBSD, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mageia, and openSUSE.
To complement the Intel Haswell Linux OpenGL benchmarks that we have been publishing on Phoronix for the past week, up today are some Intel Linux 2D performance benchmarks of Haswell with the Intel Core i7 4770K CPU. The 2D performance is comparing Intel’s default UXA accelerated code-paths against the experimental SNA acceleration back-end.
Why should you try GLRP? Well, it offers a fast and simple way to play streaming radio with a barely there interface. Also, having 400 radio stations available from worldwide locations is pretty cool. Remember, all of these are free. You do not even have to sign up for a free subscription. There’s no limit to how many additional stations you can add, either.
With the rising popularity of speech recognition in cars and mobile devices it’s not hard to see that we’re on the cusp of making speech recognition a first-class input method across our devices.
Fish is the Friendly, Interactive SHell, a shell that takes a modern look at the command line. Fish includes syntax highlighting, tab completion, and auto-suggestions by default, making your time in the terminal faster and more efficient. But beyond those features, which are available in other shells, Fish is a philosophy on application development and design. Fish is a command line interface built to be easy to use.
It is true that almost all the major desktop environments come with a terminal emulator of their own. Yet, in terms of features (especially), they all look pretty much the same and there is always room for improvements too, is it not ?
The recreation of Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee named Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty is coming to Linux, pretty awesome news as it’s probably one of the best platformers around.
Another big contribution to KDE came last year when basysKom sponsored me and other developers to rewrite Ark (KDE’s archive program). All the changes we did are in basyskom branch in Ark’s repository. I will talk about the changes we implemented in another post.
Good news is that I received several comments and emails from people who would like to work on Choqok and keep it up. And I asked kde sysadmins to give us a choqok-devel mailing list, to use it for communication between Choqok developers. will announce it when it become ready.
The Calligra team announces the third beta release of version 2.7 of the Calligra Suite. This release is a bugfix release in preparation for the final release of Calligra 2.7 in June.
We conducted a large study about strength and weakness of file managers in may 2013. In this article we present the first part of the statistical analysis.
The Mageia project has released new ISO images for the Mageia 3 edition using the distribution’s classical installer. A configuration fault with the images meant that users who specified the use of online repositories inadvertently switched their distribution updates to receive development packages. The developers fixed this problem on the server infrastructure, but that caused problems for users actually wanting to use the development repositories.
Red Hat launched an enterprise Linux-based OpenStack platform today that provides a way to build out cloud services from either inside the data center or from a services provider.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux will integrate a vanilla version of OpenStack to create the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. It will mean that Red Hat applications can run in an IaaS platform and provide support for web and mobile oriented applications that are more cloud aware. It will serve as the main platform for Red Hat’s cloud strategy.
The news is significant as it positions Red Hat as a clear leader for building out OpenStack clouds. The company is also using OpenStack to offer an alternative to the virtualized environments long dominated by VMware.
In the lead-up to this year’s Red Hat Summit, Red Hat has released version 6.1 of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP). Like its predecessor, the platform is based on version 7 of the Java application server JBoss; it supports the Java EE 6 platform as well as frameworks such as Spring and Struts. JBoss EAP also works with tools including the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Maven, Eclipse Hudson and Red Hat-sponsored technologies such as Hibernate and Arquillian.
Red Hat has announced the commercial launch of its public Platform-as-a-Service cloud, OpenShift Online. The new service has been in preview or beta since May 2011 and has been developed alongside an on-premises enterprise version, OpenShift Enterprise, released in November 2012, and drawn its technology from open source basis for the platform, OpenShift Origin, released in May 2012.
Red Hat is a company that generates over $1 billion a year in revenues from open source software.
It should come as no surprise then, that the CEO of Red Hat sees being open as the key to innovation. Speaking at the opening keynote for the Red Hat Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst stressed that open isn’t just a marketing slogan, it’s the only way that modern IT companies can survive.
Red Hat has teamed with CommVault, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Supermicro to develop reference architectures for data backup, content clouds, Big Data storage and other industry-specific storage solutions.
The engineering director for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Denise Dumas, has said that the upcoming version of the company’s enterprise Linux distribution will use GNOME 3′s Classic Mode by default. Dumas was talking to TechTarget ahead of the 2013 Red Hat Summit that is currently ongoing in Boston. RHEL 7 is scheduled to be released in the second half of this year and Dumas says the decision to use Classic Mode instead of GNOME’s default interface, which she calls “modern mode”, was made to not inconvenience RHEL’s enterprise user base – “the last thing we want to do is disrupt our customers’ workflows.”
While it was announced fairly quietly, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog recenlty confirmed that the AWS Free Usage Tier, which lets users run applications and operating systems in the cloud, now includes 750 hours of Red Hat Enterprise Linux usage.
Systemd has been taking it on the chin lately because a lot of users just don’t like it. There are varying reasons and Debian developer Michael Stapelberg has identified several through a recent user systemd survey. Developers hope the data will help them minimize the difficulty when the transition from SysVinit to Systemd begins.
My mother is the ultimate bargain hunter. Her cellular contract decisions are not based on device, data bundle or minutes, but rather on what she gets for free… an extra phone, perhaps a TV, maybe a gaming console. As long as it’s free, it doesn’t really matter if she already has five phones; you never know when a sixth will come in handy.
A few weeks ago, she produced a netbook she had received with her most recent contract. “I don’t know how to use it,” she said, as she handed over the gadget. The reason she couldn’t figure it out was because her limited computing skills meant she was familiar with Microsoft, and only Microsoft. When I pointed out that the netbook ran on Ubuntu, I got a blank stare in return. “Okay, well, you can have it then.”
Ubuntu developers are still likely to be switching from Mozilla Firefox as the Linux distribution’s default web-browser to now using Google’s open-source Chromium platform.
For weeks now developers have been talking of making the transition in Ubuntu 13.10 of going from Firefox to Chromium. Among the reasons this is being considered is that Chromium is being used on the Ubuntu mobile front, Chromium has become just as fast (or faster) than Firefox, and the features are also very competitive. Firefox will continued to be offered through the Ubuntu package archives, but it wouldn’t be installed by default.
What hasn’t been revealed is a surprise. Stormcloud, a desktop-based weather app, remains the top-selling app on Ubuntu for the 5th consecutive month in a row, selling 78 copies between May 1st and May 31st.
Variscite announced what it calls “the world’s tiniest Cortex-A9 system-on-module,” measuring 52 x 17mm. The Linux- and Android-compatible DART-4460 module is based on a 1.5GHz dual-core TI OMAP4460 SoC, is available with up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM and 8GB eMMC flash, and can run at 400MHz on only 44mA, says the company.
Real Time Logic announced an Linux-compatible embeddable webserver designed for supporting server-side web applications. Based on the Lua scripting language, Mako Server integrates technologies such as Apache, SQLite, and SMTP and HTTPS clients, and is said to be compact enough to host web services on a Raspberry Pi.
Lego Mindstorms has been used to build robots since its introduction, but a small company by the name of Dexter Industries is now set to add a far more advanced brain to those robots, by installing a Raspberry Pi at the core, in a project called BrickPi. The project launched a Kickstarter campaign in May to raise just under $2000; with four days to go, the campaign has so far raised $96,000. Dexter Industries specialises in creating sensors and other enhancements for Lego Mindstorms equipment.
Nokia may be struggling as Microsoft’s hardware delivery boy, where the only USP its flagship devices seem to have are cameras, Samsung has updated its Android powered cameraphones.
Catering to customers who want a point-and-shoot camera built into their smartphones, Samsung offers an Android device with a 16-megapixel camera and 10x zoom lens.
The revelation NSA survillance has encouraged developers to safeguard people’s personal data. While companies like Canonical are working on pushing users towards sending more and more personal ‘meta’ data to their servers via features like Dash Search, CyanogenMod developers are working in opposite direction. They are working towards protecting user’s personal data.
CyanogenMod founder Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik has taken to Google+ to announce that the developers of the popular open source third-party firmware for Android phones are working to implement a privacy sandbox for applications. The planned feature will be unique to CyanogenMod and will enable users to isolate the private, personal data stored in their Android phone from applications on an app-by-app basis. Kondik has not given a date for when the feature will be included in CyanogenMod, but he is hopeful that it is “coming soon”.
The Paranoid Android team has announced that its new HALO project will become open source, and this will bring an array of new features, we have included a demo video of Halo in motion on a smartphone.
Some people think Apple’s forthcoming iPhone and iPad operating system iOS 7 is awesome. Others think it’s awful. I think it’s a derivative copycat not only of Android but of almost every other major mobile operating system out there.
If you want to keep your photos safe when travelling, you don’t need to schlep a notebook or netbook around: an Android device can be used to pull photos from the camera’s storage card and back them up on an external hard disk or upload them to a cloud storage. The easiest solution is to use a USB On-The-Go (OTG) cable to connect an external storage device like a portable hard disk or a high-capacity USB stick and use them for storing backup copies of the photos. However, this approach requires an Android device which supports the USB OTG functionality, and not all smartphones and tables do that. This also means that you have to remember to pack yet another piece of hardware. An alternative solution is to set up a wireless backup system which enables you to seamlessly back up photos on a remote storage device or service using your Android device. Here is how this can be done.
Are you planning to attend this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, taking place on October 2-5 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US?
Created by the Anita Borg Institute, this annual conference is named for Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer in computing who worked on the first large-scale commercial computer—UNIVAC—and led the team that created the COBOL programming language.
Google today launched Cube Slam, an open source pong clone that you can play against the computer or a friend in the browser. That by itself wouldn’t be all that exciting, but Google created this game to show off the power of WebRTC, Web Audio and WebGL.
For most people (or at least for developers), WebRTC is now synonymous with plugin-free video conferences in the browser and Cube Slam uses this to show you a live video and audio stream of your friend on a virtual screen while you’re playing.
The Apache OpenOffice project should be gratified that their efforts have paid off, and awareness of the product is increasing, as well as market share. This goes contrary to some loudly expressed concerns that the OpenOffice brand would languish at Apache. Clearly this is not so. The brand is growing, as well as the market share.
Even as the open source LibreOffice productivity suite readies its next major release, the competing Apache OpenOffice project says not to expect it to ship a new version until it’s good and ready.
With the Java Community Process (JCP) committee responsible for Java EE 7 having signed off Java EE 7 in April, Oracle has now added a reference implementation for the specification in the form of GlassFish 4.0. Following 89 “promoted builds” and a good 20 months of development, the next major version of the Java application server is therefore now finished. By its nature, the open source GlassFish is the first server compatible with the enterprise Java standard. In contrast, the number of application servers compatible with the previous version of the standard – Java EE 6 – now exceeds ten.
With the relevant members within the Java Community Process (JCP) having already approved Java Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE) back in April, Oracle has now announced the availability of the associated documentation, tools and other resources.
Pledging “more motion and more outputs” of its own VistA developments, acting Veterans Affairs CIO Stephen Warren offered a glimpse of what the department is planning to turn over to the open source community.
If doctors can’t be as accessible and transparent as the tablet or smartphone that lay in the hands of their patients, they can’t expect to gain the respect of those they try to heal.
Today, technology has empowered many a consumer, and patients are quickly following suit. For they too, are consuming healthcare as they begin to incur more of its cost. So, what does this more scrupulous and savvy patient mean for healthcare providers? It means change is coming—it’s time to embrace it—or face extinction from the rise of the e-patient.
Atlassian has announced that the company will be rebranding a number of its add-on applications to “make it easy for customers to distinguish stand-alone products from Atlassian add-ons” and to simplify its product list. The software products themselves will not change; Atlassian is only changing their names and logos to make it clearer how they work with its core life-cycle management applications JIRA and Confluence.
Responding to the overwhelmingly popular demand on our Ideas page for FSF polo shirts, the shop is now selling these stylish maroon polos for $35! It has two white buttons, and features the Free Software Foundation logo embroidered in white stitching over the left chest. This polo shirt is perfect for a free software sysadmin to wear at the office.
In their first release since 2007, the Xiph.Org Foundation has updated its Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) with several improvements in version 1.3.0 and the developers have also moved the code to a new Git repository. The release also includes a number of bug fixes and minor interface changes. FLAC is a royalty-free, lossless compression codec that is used by music enthusiasts to store music collections without compromising quality and by recording artists and broadcasters to transfer their work over the internet.
Yesterday, June 10, the development team behind the Evolution groupware suite has announced the immediate availability for download of Evolution 3.8.3.
he German city-state of Berlin won’t migrate to open source software. Instead, its parliament decided in principle to choose workplace IT based on open standards.
Berlin’s Green party had proposed to have 25% of its standardized IT workplaces running open source software by 2018, according to the proposal that was voted down by the state parliament on Monday.
The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has announced the formation of the new Global Open Data Initiative (GODI). Joining the OKF in forming the new initiative are the Open Institute, Mexico’s Fundar, the Sunlight Foundation and the World Wide Web Foundation. The initiative is intended to act as a global voice for open government data and to support open data initiatives across the world. It will develop a research agenda and evidence base in support of open data and aggregate resources from across the world. It hopes to become a “central point of reference for governments and CSOs (civil society organizations) interested in open government data.”
As is traditional in the run up to its yearly release, the Eclipse Foundation has now published statistics related to the projects included in the Eclipse 4.3 release train, code-named Kepler, which is expected to be released on 27 June. Wayne Beaton, Director of Open Source Projects at the Eclipse Foundation, writes that he expects 72 projects to make the release train this year, which mirrors the Eclipse Juno release, which also included 72 projects.
How secure is your sensitive data online? That question has been making headlines lately with the NSA scandal, but big technology companies have long acknowledged that world government bodies make requests for data that many users would never expect to be disclosed. In fact, as we’ve reported, according to Google’s regularly issued transparency reports, in the last six months of 2012 Google received over 21,000 requests for data on over 33,000 users.
Shortly after the disclosure of several security holes in QNAP’s NAS and network video recording systems that enabled potential attackers to gain full control, the company has started to release updated versions of its software; however, the security updates are only being released bit by bit.
Edward Snowden, the self-confessed leaker of secret surveillance documents, claimed Wednesday that the United States has mounted massive hacking operations against hundreds of Chinese targets since 2009.
The China Daily, the Chinese government’s English-language mouthpiece, couldn’t have been handed a better story. On June 13, Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency who exposed a vast American electronic surveillance program before fleeing to Hong Kong, told the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language daily, that the U.S. has for years hacked into Chinese computer systems. After days of silence about the presence of a U.S. whistle-blower on Chinese soil — albeit in a territory governed separately from the rest of the country — the Chinese state media swung into action. “This is not the first time that U.S. government agencies’ wrongdoings have aroused widespread public concern,” opined the China Daily in an editorial. In a separate news article, the official state newspaper wrote that “analysts” believed the bombshells dropped in the Snowden affair are “certain to stain Washington’s overseas image and test developing Sino-U.S. ties.”
The rounding up, arresting and beating of groups of protestors before they had even begun to protest is so taken for granted in London now that I can find no reflection in the media of the outrage I feel. If an old duffer like me feels completely alienated from the authoritarian state in which I find I now live, how do younger, more radical people feel? There seems a terrible divide between the corporate-political elite surrounded by their massive Praetorian guard at Bilderberg, and everybody else. Society is not stable.
INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM. FOR YEARS FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY TO UNLEASH HELL.
Turkey’s prime minister defied a growing wave of international criticism on Wednesday and issued a chilling warning to the protesters who have captured central Istanbul for a fortnight, declaring that the demonstrations against his rule would be over within 24 hours.
On Monday, The New York Times wrote about an “unlikely resistance” building in “energy-friendly” Greeley, CO. “As [oil and gas] companies here and across the energy-rich West look for new places to drill,” reported the Times’s Jack Healy, “they are increasingly looking toward more densely populated areas, and bumping into environmentalists and homeowners.”
Forty-five minutes northwest of Greeley, in Fort Collins, people once thought that oil and gas extraction and the questions it raises about environmental hazards were concerns for elsewhere, according to Fort Collins Coloradoan reporter Bobby Magill. While oil drilling has been going on in this part of the state for decades, in recent years oil rigs have started showing up near residential areas and, in February, an area well blew out, sending a gusher of oil and hydraulic fracturing chemicals into the sky near homes and families.
The wettest autumn since records began, followed by the coldest spring in 50 years, has devastated British wheat, forcing food manufacturers to import nearly 2.5m tonnes of the crop.
“Normally we export around 2.5m tonnes of wheat but this year we expect to have to import 2.5m tonnes,” said Charlotte Garbutt, a senior analyst at the industry-financed Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. “The crop that came through the winter has struggled and is patchy and variable. The area of wheat grown this year has been much smaller.”
With the latest Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia index ranking Wisconsin 49th out of 50 in economic outlook, high unemployment in Wisconsin is a problem that is not likely to go away any time soon. But, instead of trying to fix the economy in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker’s Department of Workforce Development (DWD) is finding new ways to disqualify the unemployed from collecting benefits. This is unlikely to do anything but compound Wisconsin’s economic woes.
Moderating blog comments is a very sensitive task. It is not easy to strike a balance between chaos and censorship.
[...]
What I do not accept, though, is a comment which, to me, seems to be aimed solely at ticking me off. Starting a comment with “I think KDE applications in general looks like crap” is not setting the mood for constructive criticism. Continuing by listing things one does not like about KDE applications (but most of which are simply not part of the HIG yet) is not helping either. And then concluding your main point with “I think the user interface KDE brings up stinks. As such I don’t want people to follow whatever guides suggest to do applications that way.” will get your comment deleted by me.
[...]
So here is the rule: Criticize me all you want, but do it in a polite and constructive manner. And please actually look at things before criticizing them. This helps a lot in turning a troll post into constructive criticism.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (6/11/13) wrote about Edward Snowden yesterday in a way that helped make it clear why so many in the press seem upset that the former NSA consultant revealed the extent of U.S. spying programs aimed at the American public.
Independent privacy advocate and ex-Microsoft employee Caspar Bowden gives the crucial legal context to PRISM and FISAAA. Bowden explains how the 4th Amendment does not apply to non-US citizens leaving the US government able to conduct mass surveillance of the cloud. This timely ORGCon2013 talk is essential viewing!
Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford has proposed an amendment to the Data Protection Regulation that would mean your data could be transferred to the USA without you being informed.
The federal surveillance programs revealed in media reports are just “the tip of the iceberg,” a House Democrat said Wednesday.
Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) said lawmakers learned “significantly more” about the spy programs at the National Security Agency (NSA) during a briefing on Tuesday with counterterrorism officials.
“What we learned in there,” Sanchez said, “is significantly more than what is out in the media today.”
Lawmakers are barred from revealing the classified information they receive in intelligence briefings, and Sanchez was careful not to specify what members might have learned about the NSA’s work.
Read more: http://thehill.com/video/house/305047-dem-rep-lawmakers-learned-significantly-more-about-surveillance-programs-in-nsa-briefing#ixzz2W6SkR9ps
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Richard Satran at US News has a scary little piece out about how The Internal Revenue Service collects more than your taxes: “It’s also acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers’ digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records, as it expands its search for tax cheats to places it’s never gone before.”
The US NSA’s PRISM program appears to be a set of specialized deep-packet inspection filters combined with pre-existing wiretapping points at high-level Internet carriers in the United States. Since the program’s revelation the day before yesterday, speculations have ranged far and wide about who does what to make this surveillance state nightmare possible. Adding it all together, it would appear that the social tech companies did not, repeat not, supply bulk data about their users at the US Government’s will – but that the situation for you as an end user remains just as if they had.
Sergey Aleynikov is set to go back to court. Aleynikov was previously a programmer for Goldman Sachs who was tried and convicted of theft of trade secrets in federal court – a conviction that was overturned on appeal. Now Aleynikov is facing charges under New York State law for the same actions that were ruled legal by the appeals court.
Following the high-profile raid on his New Zealand mansion in 2012, Kim Dotcom released dramatic film of the event taken from police helicopters. Now the Megaupload founder is back with new footage captured by his own in-house CCTV system. Among other events, the new material shows police carrying machine guns fitted with silencers, arrests of staff and the towing of his cars. Dotcom’s sense of humor still shines through though, with an ending fit for a Hollywood blockbuster.
After reading all about the scandal, without any real surprises, I learned the usual suspects were of course guilty of playing along with screwing their customers over all for the dangling dollar bill. The current list, which I’m sure is much longer is, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Paltalk and all those companies services that they offer are all subject to the same prism program. Yes that includes YouTube, Gmail, Google Voice, etc.
This follows almost immediately after we learn that Verizon, and god knows how many other telcos, are handing over all phone conversations. You read that right, conversations, not records, they claim its just “meta data” so-called “non-content” but lets be realistic. If bush did illegal wiretapping, this is no different. So not only are your messages and computer use being monitored but also your phone calls, gee thats just awesome.
But what is the most telling about these recent scandals are who is NOT on the list. I dare someone to show me one, “truly” free and opensource project that is on the government spy list. Go ahead I’m waiting. You can’t count Google or Apple, both are trying to rein in opensource projects and make them their own.
Apple chose BSD for their guts instead of Linux simply so they could steal without getting sued and they don’t have to share. Google is trying to do the same with Linux by “borrowing” lots of code and ideas, tweaking it enough to call it there own and will eventually make it essentially proprietary. Have you seen any Android apps running on your Linux box natively? Didn’t think so.
Embedded Linux can claim at least two great achievements in standardization in the past few years, according to Wolfgang Denk, managing director of DENX Software Engineering and creator of U-Boot, the open source universal boot loader for embedded devices. First, developers were not completely disrupted with the introduction of ARM systems.
I currently use Debian GNU/Linux, Stable, on my main workstation, as well as on my laptop, and all my servers (I also do web development and design on the side, and hosting, and have my own webserver in my office, on which www.baldwinlinguas.com, the site for my translation business, is hosted, as well as www.tonybaldwin.me, and others). I started out using GNU/Linux back in c. 2000 with RedHat 7.0, and stuck with it until it became Fedora, and then used Fedora until FC4, at which point I left Fedora, tried Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, and a few others for while before moving to Debian, at which time Lenny was the Stable release.
That’s probably a good way for HP to look at XP, but there is great danger to the Wintel treadmill. It could go off the rails as HP’s customers switch from XP/2003 to */Linux thin clients and web/cloud applications. There’s much less need for client computing power, hard drives and licences from M$… HP estimates ~45% of businesses still use XP. It’s doubtful that many could switch to “7″ or “8″ in one year. It’s very likely a huge share will switch to */Linux on the clients. Southeast Asia which has been gearing up for years shipping */Linux on ARM could bump shipments for a few months and do it.
Open source software provider Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) has announced immediate commercial availability it’s open source-based public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud offering OpenShift Online. Moving from beta to commercial availability gives OpenShift Online’s users and developers access to Red Hat’s global support services. What else will available to users and developers through this offering? We’ll reveal the details.
It seems that many of us are living under the spectre of massive state surveillance. So, dear readers/listeners, what to you think of this? Let us know in the comments and we’ll read them out in our upcoming podcast.
IBM announced at the Red Hat Summit in Boston this Tuesday that it will support the KVM hypervisor on its PowerLinux machines to help boost its competitive position against x86 iron.
In addition, since Big Blue wants and needs to sell more Power Systems rack and tower iron as well as their brethren in the PureFlex modular system lineup, at its Edge customer and partner conference in Las Vegas – down the street from HP’s Discover shindig – IBM got out the Q2 marketing playbook as well as rejiggering some of the Power-based server lineup.
While the Linux 3.10 kernel hasn’t even been released yet and won’t be out for a couple weeks — and it boasts a great number of new features and functionality — the Linux 3.11 kernel will be even better. Here’s what we know so far.
Building upon the enriched capabilities of the Linux 3.10 kernel is new drivers, hardware support, and other features that will be found in Linux 3.11 when released later in 2013. From the Phoronix point of view with our bent on Linux graphics and other hardware topics, some of the exciting stuff we know at this point that’s likely to be merged include:
Two days ago I tried Raspberry PI (Model B) as desktop box and it was a total failure. To make a handy comparison; an average 10+ years old laptop will do much better than Pi in performance ..by far. The purpose of that article was to aware people to don’t make the same mistake as me, and buy and PI as a cheap desktop replacement-it won’t work.
Unigine Corp, the creators of the visually-amazing Unigine Engine and is supported by all major desktop and mobile platforms, has released a trailer for a new technology demo.
Three different Linux disk caching methods for the Linux kernel were compared: EnhanceIO, Bcache, and DM-Cache. But which of these disk caching methods is the fastest when mixing SSDs and HDDs? Here’s some results.
A Linux engineer at STEC Inc compared the performance of EnhanceIO, BCache, and DM-Cache. A 100GB HDD was used with a 20GB SSD providing write-through / write-back cache. For those out of the look on these different caching methods:
Up this morning are benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7.0, the version of the Debian operating system that ships the GNU user-land but replaces the Linux kernel from that of FreeBSD 9.0.
It’s time to announce the latest release. Due to one major change you will lose all your settings (The settings file will be stored in a different place). With this version we start to collect data about the usage of the program. This is opt-in, so no need to worry. @All: Thanks for your help translating, which is very important for the usability.
Long ago, I wrote an article about the tools to check hardware specs ( and another article about inxi ). But these tools are to be used in the terminal only. So if you need some GUI tool to check the hardware info in Linux, here are my 2 favorite GUI tools you can use:
Emerging artists take note; we’re listing some really useful free multitrack recording software, so you’re able to make brilliant creations without feeling the money crunch. Utilities like Adobe Audition and others offer incredible features, but they’re also heavy on the wallets, and at times unaffordable to rookies. That’s where these tools come into the picture with their advanced functionalities, which though not as efficient as the premium ones, are enough for sufficing the needs of amateurs. All of them are available to be downloaded on PC, while some can even be snapped up by Mac and Linux users. And they all kick in distinct features that are aimed at suiting the needs of certain people. So, read along and find out which one is apt for you.
It seems, lately, that Linux is starting to gain a ton of momentum on the desktop. Although the kick off for this seems to point to Ubuntu Linux, it’s only been recently that a serious shift has occurred. Most would agree that shift is thanks to Steam. Nothing has managed to bring out the thrill and excitement from the world of Linux like a good blast of Steam. And deservedly so. For the first time in the history of Linux (though I do tip my hat to Loki Games and their brave attempt at bringing native game ports to the platform), games are getting serious attention.
Application Systems and Bumblebee are proud to announce the launch of our Kickstarter campaign to help bring to market the most exciting paranormal simulation game yet. We’ve developed a really cool game, which requires a little extra help to bring to market and to help us learn from your feedback whilst fine tuning the game.
It contains 8 games regarding the Serious Sam series, but only one of them is available for Linux also (and it’s redeemable on Steam for Linux too!)… It is Serious Sam 3 BFE Edition, and it’s available if you pay more than the average (at the moment $4.38).
After the announcement of Football Manager 2014 coming to Linux, the first signs of the the upcoming Linux versions of Garry’s Mod and Painkiller Hell & Damnation appeared in the Steam database.
Virtual workspaces have been a feature of Linux desktops since their earliest days. Not only are they easier to set up than extra monitors, but they allow basic apps like web browsers and terminals to stay open full-screen while leaving plenty of working room. With these advantages, virtual desktops have become an indispensable daily tool for many users.
Unfortunately, there isn’t quite the breadth of options, based on the Qt toolkit. I believe part of this historically has to do with the original licensing terms of Qt, with trolltech, which did turn off many FOSS developers. I have always found Qt to be easier to develop with, and more sane than GTK, but that is a personal feeling, I know there’s plenty of you that can probably pipe up with every attribution on the planet as to why GTK is a superior toolkit, and easier to develop for than Qt.
Wayland is a new graphical server that is well positioned to replace the aging X Server currently in use on most Linux desktop systems. KDE spokesmen have said that they will not be supporting Mir, Canonical’s answer to Wayland and X; but have demonstrated interest in Wayland. Well, today Martin Gräßlin said he’s got KWin working on Wayland.
With this week’s release of KDE 4.11 Beta 1, the KWin window manager now has an experimental Wayland back-end.
Martin Gräßlin, the KWin maintainer, announced the experimental KDE Wayland support on his blog. Martin has been talking about KDE Wayland support for a while now… Originally he was waiting for a stable release of Wayland to come, while 1.0 was out last year, it’s not out until after Wayland 1.1 and then Canonical’s Mir announcements that we’re now seeing actual KDE-Wayland progress.
The third maintenance release of the Glib 2.36 library for the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment was made available for download last evening, June 10, 2013, fixing seven annoying bugs.
On Monday, Christine Hall stirred-up the mud a little with her article Since When Was Ubuntu A Community Distro? The article was written as a tongue in cheek response to a post on another site, in which a writer had feigned surprise while lamenting the fact that Ubuntu was “no longer a community distro.”
I get many searches related to BackTrack 5 that makes me wonder if netizens responsible for those searches are aware that the distribution known as BackTrack is old news. If you didn’t and you got here by searching for “backtrack 5,” this article will direct you to the right distribution to use.
The developers say that users of Desktop Fresh R1 can now install Valve’s Steam distribution platform on it, giving them access to over a hundred commercial games. The default desktop environment in ROSA Fresh R1 is KDE and the distribution includes version 4.10.3 of the desktop environment. The developers promise that GNOME and LXDE editions of the distribution will follow. They have also introduced a new font rasteriser, making the display of fonts throughout the distribution more readable, and have updated a number of the distribution’s own tools. Other software shipped with the release includes version 3.8.12 of the Linux kernel, LibreOffice 3.6.6 and Firefox 21.
“For me it was a means of exploring and learning about Linux and open source technology. I used a few other Linux distros prior to working on Gentoo: I used an early version of Debian; I did a little bit of development on a distro that has now disappeared called Stampede Linux. I got to the point where I wanted to do some things in Linux that I really didn’t see in other Linux distributions.”
Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced that it is an official member of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network and that it will be exhibiting at this week’s Red Hat Summit 2013, the premier open source technology event to showcase the latest in cloud computing, platform, virtualization, middleware, storage and systems management technologies.
OpenShift is an open-source PaaS cloud. It’s based on the OpenShift Origin open-source project which was released in May 2012. This, in turn, uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) sub-system for its foundation.
With over one million apps already running on it, Red Hat is now finally ready to declare its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) online offering to be officially released and generally available.
Red Hat first announced OpenShift back in May of 2011. With OpenShift Online, users can build server applications on the platform that can then be deployed on Red Hat’s online service. Red Hat has also since expanded the effort with an on-premises OpenShift Enterprise edition.
4.10 is not a radical upgrade to 4.8 available in Wheezy. XFCE is not in the business of overhauling the desktop paradigm like Gnome 3. It’s not so much of a work in progress, more of a finished item, getting a few minor improvements.
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth‘s bid to have South Africa’s exchange control system declared unconstitutional could have a devastating effect on the country, the SA Reserve Bank (SARB) said on Tuesday.
Linux Mint has thrived on giving users what they want. Linux Mint 15, codenamed Olivia, is no exception.
Although billed in the release announcement as “the most ambitious release since the start of the project,” it breaks little new ground. Instead, it is more concerned with polishing and minor extensions of functionality.
This orientation is very much in the tradition of past Mint releases. Linux Mint has always opted for convenience over principle, shipping with proprietary software and including both Debian and Ubuntu versions. Maybe a few users can tell Debian from Ubuntu, but what matters is that many have demanded the choice.
I’ve changed the GNU/Linux distribution of my home computer from Xubuntu to Mint (XFCE edition) 2 releases ago, and from that date I’ve never regret it, so while I wait for the release of the XFCE edition of Olivia (the code name of Mint 15), I’m glad to publish an interesting article of Manuel and it’s experiences with the Cinnamon edition of Mint 15.
Don’t have time to configure Linux onto your old Windows PC? Still struggling with device drivers and module compilations? Are you seeking an affordable, small and ready to use computer but not sure what is great for your browsing and email needs? Well Linux Mint might have an answer for you in the form of a mini computer, called MintBox.
Linux Mint is one of the few Linux distros that I normally recommend to any newbie. It just works! This is possibly the most amazing thing about Mint. Whereas with rest of the Linux distros, I get to hear a lot of complains (even I have experienced for some). But, not a single one for Linux Mint. Any system you throw at it, it will always work! Perhaps this is what separates Mint from rest of the Linux distros that it is numero uno in Distrowatch ranking for quite sometime!
CompuLab announced a tiny Linux- and Android-ready Cortex-A8 computer-on-module (COM) starting at $27 in volume. The industrial-focused, SODIMM-style CM-T335 COM extends the Texas Instruments 600MHz Sitara AM335x SoC with up to 512MB RAM and 1GB flash, WiFi and Bluetooth wireless, plus interfaces like CAN-bus, gigabit Ethernet, and USB expressed via its 204-pin edgecard connector.
What strange synergies there are between the diminutive, Linux-based Raspberry Pi devices and LEGO. Late last year, I reported on news that came from the University of Southampton about how Professor Simon Cox and his team of researchers had lashed together an actual supercomputer made of 64 credit card-sized Raspberry Pis using Lego pieces as the glue for the cluster. Now, there is a new project called BrickPi, going into its final week of fund-seeking over on Kickstarter, which is a mashup of the Raspberry Pi with LEGO Mindstorms sensors, bricks and motors for building robots.
Intel is planning its own UI overlay, codenamed “Obsidian,” that it will bring to the mobile operating system Tizen and possibly Android. A source working at Intel has tipped Ars with several early screenshots and some video of Intel’s Obsidian project, which includes a handful of unique UI touches.
Intel demonstrated a prototype UI (user interface) called Obsidian, designed for Tizen and, possibly, Android devices. The news follows a week of Android-on-x86 developments, which include an announcement that AMD is ready to jump on Android and Chrome OS, and the appearance of Intel’s Android tablet reference platform running on a Intel Silvermont “Bay Trail” SoC.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a free tier for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The company also announced last night that it is dropping prices for its relational database service.
Currently, the bulk of Amazon EC2 instances run on Ubuntu Linux. Now, just in time for the the Red Hat Summit, it appears Red Hat would like change that and is partnering with Amazon to offer a free tier of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Web Services.
Intrigued by HALO but not exactly interested in moving over to the Paranoid Android ROM to try it? We have good news for you. Taking to Google+, the folks behind Halo and the Paranoid ROM have announced that they are going open source with the HALO project. This means that Android developers can now poke through the HALO code and incorporate it into their own builds.
SpiderOak, a maker of software for secure file syncing, has released an open source application for Android.
We’ve dubbed SpiderOak “Dropbox for the security obsessive” for several reasons, including the fact that the company promises that it never knows a user’s password or encryption keys. This should make it nearly impossible for company employees to access your data, but the downside is that losing your password means losing access to your account.
Android is open and customizable. iOS is closed, designed for ease. But iPhone users are maturing, demanding more personalization, and Apple might give it to them at WWDC. At D11, Tim Cook said “I think you will see us open up more in the future, but not to the degree that we put the customer at risk of having a bad experience.” Here we’ll look at some Android options Apple could unlock for iOS.
With devices like Ouya drumming up interest in open-source gaming platforms, Mad Catz is jumping into the fray with a system of its own — Project M.O.J.O. Like its Kickstarter-backed peers, Project M.O.J.O. is based on Android, but instead of requiring games to be custom-tailored to its hardware, it works with existing digital storefronts like Amazon’s Appstore and Google Play. Unbound by a proprietary platform, Project M.O.J.O. enables users to access a library of thousands of titles, including those already purchased for their Android tablet or smartphone.
Open source software is not only about programming code. There exist a vast amount of different organizational structures that facilitate the development and diffusion of open source software. In this article, I explain the main types of organizations within the open source community.
The stage is set for HP Discover 2013 at the Venetian|Palazzo meeting center and Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas which will kick off tomorrow, June 11, 2013, and will run through the 13th. We’ll be broadcasting live from theCUBE for the entire event, so be sure to tune into SiliconANGLE.tv for all-day coverage, featuring exclusive interviews and analysis.
Continuuity announced today the public availability of its new Apache Hadoop data processing framework Weave product, a next-gen Apache Hadoop data processing framework.
Weave is a framework designed to ease the process of writing distributed applications by providing developers with a set of interfaces that allow them to manage resources, nodes and jobs within those apps through an abstraction layer built on YARN.
In recent years, the synergies between community-developed, traditional, free open source software and commercially developed open source projects have become very complex. There are purists who argue that true open source projects rely exclusively on volunteer efforts from distributed community members, but companies with commercial interests have done very powerful things with everything from Linux to Hadoop.
Under the banner Stopwatching.us, the Mozilla Foundation, the EFF and 86 other civil liberties organisations have launched a campaign that calls for “a full accounting of the extent to which our online data, communications and interactions are being monitored”. In a blog posting, Alex Fowler, the leader of Mozilla’s privacy and public policy team, explains the campaign is a response to the reports of the US government “requiring vast amounts of data from Internet and phone companies via top secret surveillance programs”.
Last week, media reports emerged that the US government is requiring vast amounts of data from Internet and phone companies via top secret surveillance programs. The revelations, which confirm many of our worst fears, raise serious questions about individual privacy protections, checks on government power and court orders impacting some of the most popular Web services.
Hoping to tap into the wave of anti-SOPA Internet activism that flooded Congress last year, Mozilla has joined with a variety of activist groups to found an anti-spying coalition called StopWatching.Us.
Over at Mozilla, there are huge sea changes underway. The company is aligning itself agressively around its new mobile focus as smartphones and other devices are poised to arrive running the company’s Firefox OS platform. And, there are giant leadership changes afoot. Mozilla has detailed significant changes to its executive management. CEO Gary Kovacs, who has been running Mozilla for three years, will step down later this year.
In late October, we reported that It’s been six months since Citrix contributed its CloudStack open source cloud computing platform to the Apache Software Foundation. Then, Apache advanced Cloudstack with an incubator version. And sure enough, in keeping with Apache’s dependable care and feeding of open source projects, project leaders announced the arrival of Apache CloudStack 4.1.0 just a few days ago. The news arrived via mailing list from Joe Brockmeier, who used to write here on OStatic.
Securing Big Data is complex, and few enterprises are doing it correctly. That was the central message of a recent chat with Brian Christian, CTO of Zettaset, which sells a Hadoop orchestration platform. But Christian offered more than criticism of Big Data security practices. He also explained how his company aims to address the issues, and why security for the open source Hadoop cluster infrastructure could become a new driving force in the channel.
The battle to decide which database technology will define the future of Big Data continues to rage, but the NoSQL camp scored a victory today with the announcement of a new partnership between Talend and Couchbase. The agreement will connect Talend’s open source Big Data platforms to the enterprise NoSQL software developed by Couchbase.
Of course, working with a Linux desktop eventually requires you to work with an office suite. Although I have used alternatives like AbiWord and Calligra in the past, and although I do think that Google Docs might eventually become powerful enough to use instead, I’m currently using LibreOffice.
I arrived a few minutes early to the main hall of the Oregon Convention Center in preparation for Drupalcon’s opening keynote by Dries Buytaert. A random mix of music chosen by the community via Twitter using the #DrupalRadio hashtag played through the hall as people filed in with anticipation.
[...]
Dries took the stage to roaring applause. He started off by reiterating an ongoing theme he’s placed on the community: “Do well, do good.” It is pretty powerful to make a living by contributing to a product that has far reaching effects in government and other organizations. Focusing on the good in the world, and doing it well, is a motto that anyone could (and maybe should) live by.
The problem of creating funding in a new software business is a major one, and doubly so for open source based companies. Michael Widenius recently described his solution to the problem, “Business Source”, claiming it delivers “most of the benefits of open source”. The H took a look to see how that held up.
Fourteen months since the release of FreeBSD 8.3, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced the availability of FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.3 whilst also introducing some new features.
The FLAC lossless audio codec has experienced its first major update in the better part of a decade. FLAC 1.3.0 is also the first release under Xiph.Org maintainership and comes with many new features.
In a case of a Slovak company protesting against being forced to use non-free software to file taxes, a court has failed to rule on the substance of the case.
Slovak textile importer EURA Slovakia, s.r.o. is facing EUR 5600 in fines because it refused to use the Microsoft Windows operating system to submit its electronic tax reports. Since May 2012, EURA is appealing against the fines in court.
How can you apply the concepts of open source to a living, breathing city? An open source city is a blend of open culture, open government policies, and economic development.
S.H.O.V.E.L. is yet another multitool, but it has a distinct advantage. It sports a spork for eating, a serrated edge for cutting things, a bottle opener for opening god knows what, and six feet of paracord for whatever your heart desires. Also, it’s open source and you can make it however you like.
Among the first programs to run on the OpenEdX platform will be Stanford’s popular “Three Books” summer reading program for incoming Stanford freshmen, along with two public courses now open for registration – one using contemporary health topics to teach statistics and another helping K-12 teachers and parents change the way students approach math. Courses from Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering are among those that will run on the platform beginning this fall.
Maker culture is being remade in China. Along with pioneers like Bunnie Huang and David Li, of Shanghai hackerspace Xinchejian, Eric Pan and his open hardware facilitator, Seeed Studio are accelerating the global maker movement by helping people source, design, produce, and commercialize their maker projects. And just as importantly, they are fueling a Chinese maker movement that is starting to take full advantage of both Shenzhen’s awesome manufacturing capacities and China’s shanzhai superpowers.
A three-judge panel at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled yesterday that a group of organic and otherwise non-genetically modified organism (GMO) farmer and seed company plaintiffs are not entitled to bring a lawsuit to protect themselves from Monsanto‘s transgenic seed patents “because Monsanto has made binding assurances that it will not ‘take legal action against growers whose crops might inadvertently contain traces of Monsanto biotech genes (because, for example, some transgenic seed or pollen blew onto the grower’s land).’”
The European Parliament’s home affairs committee, on June 6, voted to endorse a legislative agreement reached with the member states on new European Union criminal law rules governing cyber-attacks; attacks against information systems, also known as hacker attacks. We opposed the new law due to the failure to properly deal with security concerns or to differentiate between different types of system breaches and hackers.
A teenage boy from the Syrian city of Aleppo is reported to have been executed in front of his family by an Islamist rebel group, which accused him of blasphemy.
Graphic images of 15 year-old Mohammad Kattaa, a coffee seller in the war torn city, appeared on the internet yesterday. They appeared to show that the boy had been shot in the mouth and through the neck.
After more than two years of a full-fledged Pentagon- and NATO-led war against the North African state of Libya, the installed General National Congress (GNC) regime is now requesting assistance from their neocolonial masters. In a press release issued June 4 by Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen, he indicated that the Western-backed government in Tripoli had requested assistance on security matters.
A team of so-called “experts” is expected to leave as soon as possible and report back to NATO by the end of June “so we can decide on the way ahead,” Rasmussen said.
Americans hate terrorists and love our kids, right? So you might be shocked to know that preschoolers with guns have taken more lives so far this year than the single U.S. terrorist attack, which claimed four lives in Boston.
This is admittedly tongue-in-cheek, but one has to wonder if the NSA’s PRISM program would have saved more lives had it been monitoring toddlers – or gun owners – rather than suspected terrorists.
Polish prosecutors have extended until early October the five-year-old criminal investigation into allegations that the CIA ran secret jails on Polish soil, a case human rights campaigners say the authorities are deliberately dragging out.
U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum today will propose cutting off funding for the Central Intelligence Agency’s program that kills targets with unmanned drones.
The St. Paul Democrat, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said in a press release she will propose an amendment to the 2014 defense appropriations bill that would give sole responsibility for any lethal military action using unmanned aerial vehicles to the Department of Defense.
A five-year investigation into Poland’s involvement in the US-led rendition and secret detention programmes must be completed immediately, with those responsible for human rights violations brought to justice in fair trials, Amnesty International said in a report published today.
Allegations that GCHQ (the UK government communications headquarters) used a US programme to circumvent the law and spy on British citizens have led to renewed calls for the agency to disclose what its policy is on providing intelligence to support CIA drone strikes.
Russia may grant political asylum to a former CIA whistleblower who has revealed Washington’s highly classified global surveillance programs, the Kremlin said Tuesday.
“If we receive such a request, we’ll consider it,” local business daily Kommersant quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.
Government and security officials in Asia are growing concerned that emails they’ve sent from Yahoo and Google email addresses have been monitored by the National Security Agency, Reuters reports.
President Obama has demonstrated two things. First, he is better at winning elections than conducting foreign policy. Second, he can’t tell the difference between the two.
The second question that poses itself in relation to drone attacks is: can these endless attacks go on endlessly? How much bloodshed is enough? In a recent speech by Mr Obama limiting the use of drone attacks was welcome news. As he noted: “By the end of 2014, we will no longer have the same need for force protection, and the progress we’ve made against core al-Qaeda will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.” Reduce. Not end. What does limiting the strikes mean in quantifiable terms? Is limiting the strikes adequate a step to negate the cascading effects of the drone policy?
The US has said that drones are useful and that it will continue drone strikes in Pakistan. If drone attacks really are useful, why didn’t the US use drones to win the war in Afghanistan? After spending more than a decade – and trillions of dollars – in Afghanistan, the US is still looking for a safe way out of the Afghanistan quagmire.
An increasing number of people living in the tribal areas are suffering from mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, phobia and panic attacks in the aftermath of drone attacks. Mental health professionals fear that people distressed by drone terror may develop long-term ramifications of psychological trauma that could cause malfunction in their lives. The fear induced by the knowledge that a drone attack could be looming in the sky creates an atmosphere of entrapment among inhabitants of remote areas. Many of these victims develop psychiatric figures such as post-traumatic stress disorder, emotional breakdowns, anticipatory anxiety, insomnia, high levels of stress and a profound sense of powerlessness, which are all manifestations of the poor quality of life.
Two civil liberties organizations suing the U.S. government for killing three Americans in drone strikes slammed the Obama administration Tuesday for trying to cut federal courts out of the debate. The government argued in a court filing last week that drone strikes against American citizens were constitutional, in part, because President Barack Obama said they are.
Former GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul insisted on Tuesday that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is not a traitor, but he fears the U.S. government may send drones or a cruise missile to kill the 29-year-old, who has fled the United States.
U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., has introduced legislation restricting domestic drone strikes and requiring the U.S. government to publicly report American citizens being held in military detention centers such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The legislation comes in the form of amendments attached to Pentagon spending bills. They come as more light is shed on domestic surveillance and spying programs via data mining of cell phone, e-mail and Internet data.
The convention brought together representatives from academia, industry, federal and state agencies, the private sector, and engineers who are working to expand the use of drones in the US and internationally.
After more than three years in custody, Pfc. Bradley Manning’s trial finally began on June 3. The 25-year old Oklahoma native has already pled guilty to ten charges, but faces prosecution on 12 more relating to the 2010 release of restricted government documents to Wikileaks.
The military trial of Bradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that detail the crimes, torture and killing Manning revealed, because they are classified, have been barred from discussion in court, effectively removing the fundamental issue of war crimes from the trial. Manning is forbidden by the court to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that he harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.” And this is what has happened.
The military trial of Bradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that detail the crimes, torture and killing Manning revealed, because they are classified, have been barred from discussion in court, effectively removing the fundamental issue of war crimes from the trial. Manning is forbidden by the court to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that he harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.” And this is what has happened.
The International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was “bungled”. Well, yes. If it hadn’t been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived happily ever after.
Capitalism has stopped “delivering the goods” for quite a while now, especially in its older bases (Europe, North America and Japan). Real wage stagnation, deepening wealth and income inequalities, unsustainable debt levels and export of jobs have been prevailing trends in those areas. The global crisis since 2007 only accelerated those trends. In response, more has happened than Keynesianism returning to challenge neoliberalism and critiques returning to challenge uncritical celebrations of capitalism. Capitalism’s development has raised a basic question again: What alternative economic system might be necessary and preferable for societies determined to do better than capitalism? That old mole, socialism, has thus returned for interrogation about its past to draw the lessons about its present and future.
The move, which brought immediate protests outside the broadcaster’s headquarters, is the latest austerity measure imposed because of the demands of international lenders.
“With one page of this unconstitutional decree, one act of legislation in one night, they are destroying or trying to destroy the national TV,” said employment lawyer Dimitris Perpataris, among the protesters.
If the AIVD lists an American address as suspicious, it is supplied all the information within five minutes, a source told the paper. The source worked for the department which monitored potential Dutch Muslim extremists, the paper said. – See more at: http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2013/06/justice_minister_wont_comment.php#sthash.AP9wEGlh.dpuf
While it’s tempting to believe a large number of Americans simply haven’t been paying attention for the last 11 years, the more probable explanation for the consistent support of government monitoring is the hypocrisy of partisan politics. Republicans and Democrats have shown their support of government surveillance is directly tied to whoever’s currently in the White House.
We’ve already covered how Director of National Intelligence James Clapper not only lied to Congress, but has now admitted he lied by claiming he told the “least untruthful answer” he could think of, which was extremely untruthful, in that it was untruthful. He was asked whether or not the NSA collects any type of data on millions of Americans and he said no. The full collection of records on every phone call for the past seven years (at least) proves that statement was categorically false. Derek Khanna has an excellent and detailed opinion piece up on how this clearly constitutes an impeachable offense in the form of lying to Congress.
A group of nearly 100 civil liberties, public interest groups and internet companies have asked Congress to put an end to the abusive NSA surveillance that we’ve been writing about over the past week (full disclosure: our company, Floor64, is a part of the coalition, along with the EFF, ACLU, reddit, Mozilla, the American Library Assocation, the Internet Archive and many, many more). Along with this effort, a new website has been launched, called Stop Watching Us, which is collecting more signatures for the letter, while also asking for some specific reforms from Congress.
Even though we know governments do all kinds of things I was shocked by the information about the US surveillance operation, Prism. To me, it’s abusively using government powers to interfere in individuals’ privacy. This is an important moment for international society to reconsider and protect individual rights.
My guess is that Google and the others have agreed to receive FISA requests in an automated way, process them in an automated way, and fire off the data in an automated way. That whole process could take a very small amount of time. Milliseconds for small sets of data, easy. Anything beyond that is from any human intervention at Google to read the order and decide whether to accept it. From what I’ve seen, it’s extremely rare for companies to push back on orders, since the secret FISA court always, without exception, tells them to settle down and get that data over to the NSA, pronto.
So he’s not just CBS’s security analyst; Zarate worked, in the previous administration, in the policy areas where the controversial programs were developed
In disclosing classified details about some of the US government’s most secret surveillance programs, NSA leaker Edward Snowden said his greatest fear “regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.”
[...]
In the wake of Snowden’s disclosures, critics on the left and the right have turned angrily on Clapper for his exchange with Wyden. Some have suggested he be prosecuted for lying to Congress, or at the very least, hauled before it again to answer more questions. Wyden, whose statement today says his office originally gave Clapper “a chance to amend his answer” after the Senate hearing, is now calling for public hearings. Americans, Wyden said, “have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives.”
[...]
Still, any public debates on secrecy will be hamstrung by secrecy itself. Wyden would not comment further on the matter; a staffer at his office would only say that Wyden is frustrated that he can’t say more about the issue, because so much of what he knows—about Clapper’s comments and the surveillance programs—is classified. NSA and DNI officials had no immediate comment either.
The latest leaks about United States intelligence services’ broad access to telephone and cloud data[1] confirm what had been suspected for a while, based on a legal analysis of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendment Act of 2008. The act for the first time introduced the term “remote computing service” in the definition of electronic communication service providers which are subject to secret surveillance orders by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[2] It also allows this kind of digital espionage for purely political reasons[3] and on entities including NGOs in other countries.[4] The Greens/EFA group and the whole European Parliament had addressed the issue in the past on several occasions[5], and a study produced for the European Parliament in 2012[6] finally started a robust debate.
A cynic might say worldwide intelligence services are only doing to our data what countless Big Data Corporations have done for well over a decade now.
That cynic might say government security services, even with the types of data syphons revealed in the Guardian over the last few days, generally know far less about our lives than our supermarket or bank.
But for some reason, and despite the power large corporations hold over our lives (the power to deny: deny credit, deny access to a service, or erase an online identity…), exposure of a government tap into this data has, finally, causes a shit storm big enough to seriously damage a whole industry.
Because the President has said he welcomes discussion about the recent NSA surveillance revelations, I thought you’d want to know about a motion EFF brought in FISA court, which is being opposed by the government in a rare public document [PDF] — relevant, EFF says, to the latest news. And there is also an ACLU motion [PDF] as well, requesting “that this Court unseal its opinions evaluating the meaning, scope, and constitutionality of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.”
The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Obama administration on Tuesday over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed last week by a former National Security Agency contractor — is illegal and asking a judge to stop it and order the records purged.
On Friday, the world found out about PRISM: a secret tool developed by the United States’ National Security Agency that has been used, since 2007, to directly tap into the servers of companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple without the permission of the corporations themselves. From what has been described by the Guardian and their source Edward Snowden, a former employee of the private security contractor Booz Allen, the NSA has been recording anything and everything they can through the capabilities of a massive surveillance net that is growing exponentially in size.
Originally published on June 8, 1949, the book tells the story of a dystopian society led by Big Brother that is rife with war and government surveillance. Ironically, the 64th anniversary of the book’s release came just a couple of days after the NSA scandal became public knowledge.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed Thursday that the U.S. government has been secretly collecting information since 2007, exploiting backdoor access to the systems and data of major Internet and tech companies in search of national security threats. That NSA dragnet, revealed by The Washington Post and The Guardian and code-named PRISM, reportedly taps into user data from Facebook, Google, Apple and other U.S.-based companies. (Those providers have mostly denied that the NSA has such backdoor access.)
As we noted last week, one of the key claims following the revelations about the Prism program was that it was aimed at those outside the US, and that US citizens were caught up in it only incidentally. A further leak concerned the Boundless Informant analysis tool, one of whose maps showed which regions of the world were subject to most surveillance. Along with obvious hotspots like Iran and Pakistan, Germany too was among those of particular interest, as was the US (whoops.) A story on reason.com offers a clue as to why that might be.
[...]
Given that the NSA is gathering information on a large scale — even though we don’t know exactly how large — it’s inevitable that some of that data will include sensitive information about business activities in foreign countries. That could be very handy for US companies seeking to gain a competitive advantage, and it’s not hard to imagine the NSA passing it on in a suitably discreet way.
Germany is known as the industrial and economic powerhouse of Europe, so it would make sense to keep a particularly close eye on what people are doing there — especially if those people happen to work in companies that compete with US firms. In other words, just as as the CIA was looking to obtain “secret banking information” in Switzerland, it seems quite likely that the NSA also comes into the possession of similarly sensitive commercial data during its German trawls.
The primary complaint against China’s outift of military hackers has been dual pronged: the U.S. private sector is losing expensive proprietary information, and the public sector is having its sensitive weapons systems compromised.
China’s response has been, simply: yeah but the U.S. did it to us first, and worse.
It turns out, China might just be telling it like it is this time.
Google is continuing to open up about the supposed “secret” program by which it hands data over to the NSA that has been subject to so much attention over the last week. And, once again, the story seems to be less than what was originally reported. Google’s now said that when it receives a valid FISA order for information, the “secret” computer system it uses to get the required info to the NSA isn’t some crazy server setup or dropbox… but secure FTP.
The ACLU, Senator Rand Paul and the parents of deceased Navy SEAL Michael Strange are seeking legal action against the White House over revelations of an internet spy program they say infringed on their constitutional rights.
In order to limit the power of the federal government and protect individual liberty, the founders appended the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution, explicitly specifying some activities that the federal government may not do. But more important than restrictions on what the government may do are limitations on what the government can do. The government of the founding era was unjust in all kinds of ways, but it had very limited ability to impose any sort of centralized will upon an area as large as the Atlantic seaboard, bordered by a continent-sized wilderness. The tools available—muskets, cannons, horses, and wooden ships—were simply not up to the task of controlling the minutiae of the entire population’s everyday lives from Washington.
Ex-CIA contractor speaks to reporter from secret location in Hong Kong, revealing fresh details of US surveillance, pressure on Hong Kong, snooping and cyber attacks on China.
Anger was mounting in Congress on Tuesday night as politicians, briefed for the first time after revelations about the government’s surveillance dragnet, vowed to rein in a system that one said amounted to “spying on Americans”.
Intelligence chiefs and FBI officials had hoped that the closed-door briefing with a full meeting of the House of Representatives would help reassure members about the widespread collection of US phone records revealed by the Guardian.
A glance at the “Movers and Shakers” page of Amazon shows there’s been an unusual reaction to the current NSA spying scandal: sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are up 9,538 per cent.
It was somewhat ironic that the news of the NSA’s systematic slurping of phone records and the subsequent revelations about the PRISM spying system were revealed in the same week as the 64th anniversary of the publication of Orwell’s dark masterpiece. Now it seems people are buying it up either to learn about what could be, or simply because recent events reminded them to read the classic.
AN Icelandic member of parliament has offered the whistleblower behind the largest leak of classified information in the history of the US National Security Agency (NSA) asylum assistance.
Edward Snowden says he wants to ask the people of Hong Kong to decide his fate after choosing the city because of his faith in its rule of law.
The 29-year-old former CIA employee behind what might be the biggest intelligence leak in US history revealed his identity to the world in Hong Kong on Sunday. His decision to use a city under Chinese sovereignty as his haven has been widely questioned – including by some rights activists in Hong Kong.
Snowden said last night that he had no doubts about his choice of Hong Kong.
If Edward Snowden is ever brought back for trial in the US, he would almost certainly be prosecuted under a law dating back to the first world war and which lawyers say is so broadly worded it would leave the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower with little room for a defence.
The 1917 Espionage Act has gone through some amendments over the years but its language still reflects the security concerns of a century ago, with references to railroads, forts and telegraphs. But its all-encompassing character has stood the test of time. Section 793 of the law makes it an offence to take, retain or transfer knowledge “with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation”.
Apparently, the brilliant minds at the NSA are completely bewildered as to how Ed Snowden had access to everything he had access to. They don’t think it’s possible.
The European Commission today outlined its concerns regarding the widely reported Prism surveillance programme run by the NSA. The Commission plans to raise the Prism matter with US authorities “at the earliest possible opportunity” and will “request clarifications as to whether access to personal data within the framework of the Prism program is limited to individual cases and based on concrete suspicions, or if it allows bulk transfer of data.” The next opportunity will be this Friday at a meeting Dublin.
Arguing “too many people in our society have lost the respect they need to have for a police officer” – and we can’t imagine why – the New York State Senate has passed a bill creating the felony crime of aggravated harassment if anyone makes physical contact with a police officer with the intent to “harass, annoy, threaten or alarm” – a term so impossibly nebulous it could apply to virtually anyone, anytime, doing pretty much anything in the vicinity of said officer. And yes, he or she gets to decide just what is annoying, and obviously he or she will be totally honest and accurate about what went down in any given encounter.
Of course, you can also do this directly through the NSA or FBI if you are worried about providing personal information to an independent site.
While an appropriate level of cynicism may be warranted concerning the level of transparency one should expect from such a request – should your file be substantial – it is the law that your complete file be provided to you upon request.
Demand that the law be followed, for it is your right as a citizen to know this information.
New Jersey legislators propose allowing police to examine your cell phone without a warrant in the event of being stopped. This is in response to texting and driving incidents.
Five years after Obama passionately talked about health as a “right for every American”, KEI has been informed that the United States is seeking to call for a vote on resolution tabled by Brazil and co-sponsored by the African Group, India, Indonesia, Thailand on “Access to medicines in the context of the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health”. The resolution is expected to be adopted by the Human Rights Council on Thursday, 13 June 2013. The US’s decision to put the resolution to a vote, thus guaranteeing it will not receive consensus support, has been perceived in the human rights committee as a slap in the face of the countries backing the proposal.
According to informed sources, “the draft resolution on access to medicines will be adopted tomorrow morning
at the current session of the Human Rights Council… The EU is willing to join consensus over the text. But the US has indicated that it will call for a vote…The US joined consensus on the same topic in 2011 and 2009 at the Human Rights Council. The language is basically the same. It is difficult to understand their position”.
Several UK Internet providers have quietly added a list of new sites to their secretive anti-piracy blocklists. Following in the footsteps of Sky, the first ISP to initiate a proxy blockade, Virgin, BT and several other providers now restrict access to several torrent site proxies. The surprise isn’t really that proxies have been added to the blocklist, but that the music industry and ISPs are failing to disclose which sites are being banned.
The operator of a website that sold more than US$100 million worth of pirated software to customers worldwide was sentenced Tuesday to 12 years in a U.S. federal prison.
Summary: Corporate propaganda channel is being used by a Microsoft lobbyist to demonise Android — not companies that attack Android — by essentially twisting reality
CNN, a supposedly “liberal” or “leftist” channel, has been exceptionally instrumental in demonising the NSA leaker and the messengers (some examples covered elsewhere, I would rather than link to them), but recently we also saw this propaganda outlet letting Microsoft Florian, a lobbyist, spread lies there. Now that patent armaments from Google and Apple are being used to determine who inherits the void left by Microsoft’s fall, the lobbyist keeps trying to distort the facts about Android, which never sought to pick up an axe (not a single Android player). It was attacked by Apple’s embargo attempts (see justsome of the latest); it’s Apple which wanted a "thermonuclear" war. Apple and Samsung are battling in court now while the lobbyist is mass-mailing journalists, groomed by Microsoft which pays him for his services (lobbying). Here is the CNN nonsense which starts with this disclosure: “His clients include Microsoft, Oracle, financial services companies and law firms.”
That being the case, why let the man write against Microsoft’s and Oracle’s rival? That is an error of judgment at CNN unless it was intentional and thus malicious. Pamela Jones already found factual errors and pointed some of them out in News Picks, summarising as follows:
I’m sorry, but this is incorrect information, or you could describe it as propaganda. No one can say getting injunctions for FRAND patents is universally outlawed, because that’s not true. And Apple did *not* say that to the ITC. In fact the article goes on to ask Congress to outlaw them, as you can see with your own eyes, proving my point.
And the ITC itself submitted a brief [PDF] in the case, stating that an exclusion order is perfectly appropriate in cases involving standards-essential patents, or SEPs.
Mueller has been pushing the idea that there should be no injunctions on FRAND patents. Microsoft pays him, and Microsoft would like FRAND patents to be unable to be used for injunctions, and so would Apple, but that’s because companies like Samsung and Motorola built the mobile world before Microsoft or Apple entered it, and so they want to defang the weapons the ones who created the standards can use to protect themselves from the patent jihad against Linux and Android (and because Microsoft and Apple don’t want to pay the traditional price), while keeping their utility patents to use as weapons against Samsung and Motorola. It’s that simple, to me. So take this opinion piece as propaganda, if you like. Here’s an article with more details, if you are curious as to what Apple really told the ITC, and with a link to the Apple filing, by an attorney, Matt Rizzolo on the Essential Patent Blog. What they really said was they hoped FRAND patents couldn’t be used for injunctions. It was their public interest
argument. Or as Rizzolo puts it, “Apple, on the other hand, argues that competitive conditions in the U.S. weigh in favor of no exclusion order issuing in this case.”
See what I mean? It’s misleading what Mueller wrote, and since he didn’t provide a link, you have no way to check what he wrote as to its accuracy.
Further, since the bio on Mueller says “His clients include Microsoft, Oracle, financial services companies and law firms,” I think he should tell the world what financial services companies and law firms he also does work for. If any of them are involved in the patent smartphone litigation wars, for example, either directly or indirectly via betting on the outcome, so to speak, or because they have an interest in the share price, he really should reveal his clients more fully.
Perhaps patent trolls and respective backers of theirs are the ‘other’ clients, perhaps Microsoft proxies also. One news site (Muktware) said that Apple was paying him.
The point of this whole matter is that corporate news sites like CNN are more interested in agenda than in facts. CNN coverage of PRISM has proven this marvellously well. One can find better information in today’s blogs than in the corporate media. Watch the following video with Greenwald, the journalist behind the latest NSA coverage (he is to Snowden what Assange is to Manning, The Guardian being analogous to Wikileaks).
There was another such shameful report from CNN’s Jessica Yellin, where she distorted the facts about Wikileaks and annoyed a great deal of people.
Here is the latest video CNN did of him:
CNN is delivering government talking points, defending the collective of corporations — everyone except actual citizens. █
Posted in Patents at 10:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Perpetual siege: Only the large corporations always get their way
Summary: Failing to see how patents themselves actually distort the market for everyone (not just some large corporations), Obama wants to wash his hands with legislation that will resolve nothing and legitimise the notoriously unsupervised patent regime
The debate about privacy notwithstanding (it’s not quite a partisan/political issue, as the policy was actually put in place by Bush/Republicans, then expanded by Obama/Democrats), we must focus on the ongoing progress when it comes to patent monopolies. Just before the whole press got flooded by PRISM coverage the White House said it would target patent trolls [1, 2, 3].
Patent trolls are a bit of a phantom enemy, or an enemy to large corporations. Well, this is why they are being tackled by the government which is funded and run by large corporations, directly or by proxy (lobbyists).
According to this recent post, a troll is targeting some large corporations again — the hallmark of a true troll. To quote:
On June 4, a patent holding company named PatentMarks Communications LLC filed patent infringement lawsuits in the District of Delaware against a slew of electronics companies. The companies accused of infringement include at least Dell, Futurewei, HTC, Kyocera, LG, Motorola Mobility, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and ZTE. (The complaint against HTC [LINK here] is exemplary). PatentMarks — who is the assignee of six U.S. patents, according the USPTO — accuses these companies of infringing U.S. Patent No. 8,400,926, which is titled “Multi-Protocol Telecommunications Routing Optimization” — and which just issued as a patent on March 19, 2013. The ’926 patent generally claims an optimized method and system for transferring files over a telecommunications network.
A lot of the companies above are Android vendors. It’s hard to miss that. Pamela Jones asked: “Now do you see why the President wants to retrain patent examiners on the topic of making sure claims are specific to the invention and not as broad as a Nebraska sky? This patent just issued in March.”
At the same time we find lawyers bickering over sales of patents as if that’s a good idea when we see companies like Microsoft arming trolls like Vringo and MOSAID. One lawyers’ site reveals this:
New Patent Exchange Hopes to Be Nasdaq for IP
Are companies ready to buy and sell patent rights the way investors buy shares of stock?
That’s the idea behind a new financial exchange, Intellectual Property Exchange International Inc., that launched Wednesday with the aim of creating a standard marketplace for patent licenses.
The Chicago-based IPXI is structuring the licensing process like a public equity offering, bringing familiar financial principles and standards to the murkier world of patent licensing by assigning values that are market-driven and transparent.
This is what we find in Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft’s biggest patent troll. Will Obama tackle the real issues based on market realities rather than broad generalisations and simplified classifications? Trolls are a symptom, not the problem. The President of the OSI agrees on this and I might be meeting him tomorrow. █
Spring is in the air. Trees all around are full of flowers: apricot, lilac, apple… all preparing to give forth sweet, nutritious fruit. The same is happening with GNU/Linux. According to StatCounter, GNU/Linux has seen 100% per annum growth worldwide since Christmas:
There are 10 camps in the world, those for Linux and those against it. However, now that quantum computing is here that logic is getting fuzzy. Not to put a spintronic on things but in real life there are a lot of people who take pride in the fact that windows is king of the desktop and sneer at the very low take up of Linux in a home computing scenario.
When discussion of the “end of the PC-era” broke out recently there were lots of opinions but little data. Sure, there were niches discovered like Japan where ~10% of Internet users used smart thingies and did not own a legacy PC. There seemed to be two large camps:
* those claiming the legacy PC was the anchor to all IT with those gadgets just being accessories, and
* those claiming the legacy PC was dying and the new smart thingies were the new “personal computer”.
BeyondTrust, the global leader in privilege delegation and access control for physical, virtual and cloud computing environments, today announced PowerBroker Servers – Linux Edition. This new offering brings industry- leading PowerBroker capabilities to customers standardizing on a Linux server infrastructure at an attractive price-point. As Linux based computing environments scale, PowerBroker Servers – Linux Edition offers granular privilege delegation and centralized keystroke logging for enhanced security and compliance for regulations like SOX, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, COBIT and ISO 27001.
Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.10-rc5 and the changes merged last week aren’t impressing him and he is definitely not happy with way things are progressing.
The rc5 is bigger than the rc4 and in the release announcement Torvalds noted, “I wish I could say that things are calming down, but I’d be lying. rc5 is noticeably bigger than rc4, both in number of commits and in files changed (although rc4 actually had more lines changed, so there’s that).”
The Linux 3.10 kernel is slowly getting ready for release in the coming weeks. If you haven’t been closely following Phoronix in the past few months of Linux 3.10 feature development, here’s a brief overview of some of the best and most interesting features to be found in the next version of the Linux kernel.
Last evening, June 8, 2013, Linus Torvalds announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the fifth Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.10.
The Linux 3.10 kernel is slowly getting ready for release in the coming weeks. If you haven’t been closely following Phoronix in the past few months of Linux 3.10 feature development, here’s a brief overview of some of the best and most interesting features to be found in the next version of the Linux kernel.
Shuah Khan is a Senior Linux Kernel Developer at Samsung’s Open Source Group. She has contributed to various kernel sub-systems including the Android mainlining project, LED class drivers, IOMMU, DMA, and more. Her current focus areas are Power Management and PCIe ASPM. She also helps with stable kernel release maintenance testing and bug fixes. In this Q&A she describes her work space and the hardware she uses for kernel development.
This is the third article in a series on kernel developer work spaces — a new take on the popular 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks series. Previous posts featured kernel developers Steve Rostedt and Greg Kroah-Hartman.
Freedreno, the reverse-engineered community-based open-source driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware, now has support for the newer A300 series of graphics cores as found in the Google Nexus 4.
For the past week on Phoronix since the public debut of Intel’s Haswell processors there has been a lot of coverage. The CPU performance is generally great but the Haswell Linux graphics support is still a work-in-progress even though its performance has already evolved a lot. This Sunday are some extra Core i7 4770K benchmarks.
Unlike software in OS X and Windows that usually comes with everything it needs to install and run, software packages in Linux generally require the system to already have specific software installed. Yum is the Terminal-based tool that lets the users of Linux distributions like Fedora and Red Hat automatically install such software dependencies, and Yum Extender, or Yumex, expands the utility of Yum by adding a graphical user interface.
The title may make you think so, but this is not one of those ridiculous articles where the author claims GIMP is better than Photoshop even on technical grounds. No, let me make it straight from the intro: from a technical point of view there are areas where Photoshop is much better than GIMP (speed, color depth, CMYK, etc.), there are areas where the two are comparable, as there are areas where they are on par and areas where GIMP does better. And of course from a licensing point of view, GIMP being Free software, released under GPL is vastly superior (and thus my only recommendation) and also from the two it is the only running on my Linux machine.
Apple’s much awaited and equally hyped flagship developers’ event, WWDC, concluded a few hours ago. Apart from usual updates on iOS, Mac OS X and Mac Pro, an interesting new project was demostrated at the event. Called Anki Drive, it is an iOS app that allows users to play car racing games using real cars (miniature-size, of course). Anki Drive converts your Apple iDevice into a handheld remote control for your little bot car, which frequently sends location data back to the app.
Despite the care we take to test isos for new versions of Mageia, we missed a potentially huge bug… It concerned the isos using the classical installer. If the user chose to add online media at the beginning of the installation, it would result in the system being updated to Cauldron, the development version of Mageia. This was due to the initial isos including a partial misidentification, referring to the development version (and not the Official one). The update media added pointed to Mageia Cauldron and not to the Mageia 3 repositories. Please note that users who chose to add online media only at the end of the installation would not be affected by this problem.
This summer, the Slackware Linux distribution will celebrate its twentieth anniversary. Patrick Volkerding’s official release announcement for Slackware 1.0 on July16th 1993 is still online. Read it here.
Shuttleworth blames the existing system of exchange control in South Africa for forcing him to emigrate from South Africa in 2001. He says in court papers the system made it impossible to conduct his entrepreneurial and philanthropic ventures.
He had assets worth over R4.27-billion in South Africa when he emigrated, but transferred the assets out of the country in 2008 and 2009, each time paying a 10% levy.
Shuttleworth currently lives on the Isle of Man and holds dual South African and United Kingdom citizenship.
Getting a new laptop is always fun, no matter which OS you prefer. However, getting Ubuntu installed on a new notebook can be a hit or miss process. Despite those who downplay the compatibility issue, installing Ubuntu on a laptop designed for Windows doesn’t always go as planned.
My confession is simple: Linux has been a part of my life for over 10 years. Granted, Linux never was a cup of tea for everyone but the curious. Once you got it to work right, it was the closest thing you got to perfection.
The Linux Mint distribution has gained a reputation over the years as a powerful and user friendly desktop operating system. The project takes packages from the Ubuntu repositories and adds its own utilities, themes and customizations to create a distribution which is designed to perform most tasks out of the box. The Mint team has also pleased many people by adjusting their distribution to fix perceived problems with the underlying Ubuntu packages. Where Ubuntu tends to be experimental — switching from using the GNOME desktop to introducing Unity and adding advertisements to the desktop — Mint tends to walk a more conservative line. The Mint distribution maintains a classic style of desktop and tends to avoid revolutionary changes or eye-catching effects. The latest offering from the Mint team, version 15, was released in May and is based on the Ubuntu 13.04 repositories. Mint is offered in two basic flavours, one which comes with the Cinnamon desktop environment and the other ships with the MATE desktop. Both flavours can be downloaded either with or without third-party software which may be subject to non-free software licenses or patent laws. Each edition of Mint is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds and the download images are approximately 1GB in size. I decided to take the 32-bit MATE edition of Mint for a spin.
We usually only find out about cool Raspberry Pi projects after they’ve already been built. This time, we get to watch hacker extraordinaire Ben Heckendorn of The Ben Heck Show take us through the trials and tribulations of building a portable gaming console powered by the mini-computer.
Some of the coolest custom Android development to happen lately has come from the folks that make Paranoid Android. Since the launch of Facebook and their cool Chat Heads feature, PA has launched their own HALO code that allows for similar floating notifications in their ROM. Up until today it has been a PA exclusive, but they have decided to go open source with the project.
Tim Willoughby: “We didn’t have the money we used to have and saw open-source packages could do the job of proprietary software at a fraction of the cost.”
It was interesting to hear last week that Mirantis scored $10 million in financing from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP Ventures. But it was Red Hat, and the Linux connection to OpenStack, that started to jog my memory.
As a former Oracle employee, Benioff famously split off to start up Salesforce from a rented apartment in San Francisco with the intention of breaking many of the traditional perceptions of not only enterprise software but also, crucially, its delivery via a Software-as-a-Service delivery mechanism.
My experience in schools was similar. It is foolish to throw tons of money at M$ for an office suite when one can use LibreOffice for little more than the effort of installation. In knowledge businesses like education, an office suite may be one of the basic tools of communication, collaboration and presentation. So many organizations are locked into M$’s web-browser or office suite when there are plenty of good alternatives. Without that lock-in there is no need for M$’s OS so the savings resulting from migration are compounded. Governments can more easily migrate to GNU/Linux when there’s no use of M$’s office suite or browser. Then there is proper support of open standards which M$ lacked for many years creating a backlog of garbage that burdens governments with being slaves of M$ forever. That’s not silly. That’s wrong.
Over 36,000 students, teachers, and staffers at more than 20 schools in the Swiss capital of Basel are using Kolab, an open source email and collaboration suite.
Using no more than just three ordinary servers, the system last year managed the sending of 4.25 million emails and received 5.2 million emails, said Torsten Grote, promoting the Kolab software at Linux Tag in Berlin, last week Wednesday.
I doubt that many users here will like the idea to “rent” their Office and pay monthly, especially now that it is well known that you can produce documents for free with LibreOffice or other options.
So, the argument of business productivity might not work for Microsoft now as it used to. I guess that this company’s greatest hope to remain relevant will be to appeal to the sector where, sadly, the most technology-ignorant people are found: education. It’s already happening.
It’s sad to say it but, unfortunately, teachers are the easiest prey for companies like Microsoft because educators normally lack information about free software and they are brainwashed to accept blindly that technology enhances learning. In addition, most teachers are the product of a monoculture in which “technology” is equivalent to “Windows”.
The new office in Covent Garden, which will formally begin operations in July, will be managed by Celia McMillan, who is highly experienced in CRM project management.
The office will provide SugarCRM Community Edition users with specialist consultancy services for planning, design and execution of SugarCRM Community Edition implementations in the South East of England.
Metaswitch Networks is hoping its free, cloud-based, open-source IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) core will help more telecom service providers embrace IMS and, in turn, adopt other products from the company’s portfolio.
So, yeah, Guile 100. This was a documentation project where I though I’d come up with little programs to write in Guile, and, with the help of some honorarium money, coerce people into writing sections of the doc. It was off to a rocky start. But, unfortunately I have to declare the project dead now.
The Free Lossless Audio Codec, FLAC, loved by audiophiles for it’s lossless fidelity has been updated to version 1.3.0. FLAC is an audio format similar to MP3, but “lossless”, meaning that audio compressed in FLAC doesn’t suffer any loss in quality. Technically, MP3 is lower quality, since it’s lost data from its original format. FLAC v1.3.0 is the first update in almost 6 years and it is also the first release from the new Xiph.Org maintainer team.
New York City Comptroller John Liu recently published the source code for the city’s financial transparency website called Checkbook NYC, as part of on-going efforts to promote openness and transparency.
It’s been over one year of waiting for Xonotic 1.0. The popular open-source game’s 1.0 release still isn’t here, but Xonotic 0.7 has been released this weekend. Xonotic 0.7 brings forward a lot of in-game updates, including a new QuakeC compiler.
Posted under “things I hope get traction and thrive”, OpenSXCE is the latest iteration of the once popular OpenSolaris Community Edition. OpenSXCE is based on Illumos, the operating system descendent from OpenSolaris, and as such inherits some of the great stuff that originated at Sun, like DTrace, ZFS, and zones virtualization. OpenSXCEs main claim to fame seems to be that it supports standard Intel x86 architecture as well as the all Sun Sparc architectures.
If you think it’s tough sorting truth from industry propaganda and lies, get ready for even tougher times ahead. More than 50 front groups, working on behalf of food and biotechnology trade groups―Monsanto being the most prominent―have formed a new coalition called Alliance to Feed the Future.
The alliance, which is being coordinated by the International Food Information Council (IFIC), was created to “balance the public dialogue” on modern agriculture and large-scale food production and technology, i.e. this group will aim to become the go-to source for “real” information about the junk being sold as “food.”
American wheat farmers and a food safety advocacy group filed a lawsuit Thursday against biotech seed developer Monsanto Co, accusing the company of failing to protect the U.S. wheat market from contamination by its unauthorized wheat.
The petition, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, seeks class-action status to represent other farmers it says were harmed by lower wheat prices as some foreign buyers have shied away from U.S. wheat.
A 26-year-old corporate cybersecurity consultant, Lostutter lives on a farm with his pit bull, Thor, and hunts turkeys, goes fishing, and rides motorcycles in his free time. He considers himself to be a patriotic American; he flies an American flag and enjoys Bud Light. He’s also a rapper with the stage name Shadow, and recently released a solo album under the aegis of his own label, Nightshade Records. The name dovetails with that of his Anonymous faction, KnightSec.
Lostutter first got involved in Anonymous about a year ago, after watching the documentary We Are Legion. “This is me,” he thought as he learned about the group’s commitment to government accountability and transparency. “It was everything that I’d ever preached, and now there’s this group of people getting off the couch and doing something about it. I wanted to be part of the movement.”
Of the 14 months worth of classified documents reviewed, 26 out of 114 attacks designate fatalities as “other militants,” while in four other attacks those killed are only described as “foreign fighters.”
Perhaps the big moments that will define the Scottish independence referendum debate have still to occur. Certainly, the SNP’s referendum white paper, expected at the end of the year, ought to be one of them. Will it be the blueprint for a modern and inclusive Scotland, containing ideas that are genuinely radical and visionary? Or will the nationalists fall into the Better Together trap and reduce it merely to a number-crunching exercise about the extent of North Sea oil revenues and our share of the UK debt?
The 29-year-old former NSA/CIA employee who leaked documents about several invasive government spying programs, Edward Snowden has had growing doubts about the government for a long time, according to a bombshell interview in the Guardian.
Officials in Washington are looking at Thursday’s leak of National Security Agency information as a possible case of Chinese espionage, says a former CIA agent.
Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old NSA contractor who admitted on Sunday he was the leaker of top secret information on the U.S. government’s program to cull information from Internet sources such as Facebook and Google, was unwise to flee to Hong Kong, former CIA agent Robert Baer told CNN on Sunday.
[...]
“We’ll never get him from China. There’s not a chance. He’ll disappear there,” he said.
I am listening to news right now about the military trial of Bradley Manning, which is taking place in my homeland, the USA. Bradley Manning is on trial for “aiding the enemy”–an incredibly broad statute that can be abused–and has been misused historically by horrible regimes to put people–including soldiers–in prison.
In the two and a half weeks since President Barack Obama’s speech at the National Defense University justifying his policy of drone assassination, as many as 25 people have been killed and as many as 12 others injured in four US drone missile attacks in Pakistan and Yemen. The attacks demonstrate that the Obama administration intends to continue indefinitely its illegal assassination campaign.
Mohammad Nazir, whose son was killed in a US drone strike in June 2006 in North Waziristan tribal district, a haven for insurgents, endorsed the demand and said he wanted revenge for his son’s death.
“My son was 25 years old, he was a labourer and was working in a house with other labourers in the night when the drone strike took place,” he told AFP.
“According to tribal law, you kill the son of that person who kills your son, so I will take revenge of my son’s killing whenever I have the opportunity.”
According to the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism, since 2004 up to 3,587 people have been killed in Pakistan by drone attacks, which Washington says are an effective weapon in the fight against Islamist militancy.
Obama National Security Council adviser Samantha Power has been named the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. That news prompted a piece in the New York Times (6/9/13) headlined “A Golden Age for Intervention?” by Neil MacFarquhar. The article raises some of the usual issues surrounding Power’s work– most prominently the notion that the United States should use military intervention in the name of humanitarianism.
[...]
At that time, bonafide critics of the Iraq War were much clearer than that, and it’s hard to find much else that would suggest that Power had a particularly clear anti-war case she made publicly–though she did, like many others, come around to articulating a more forceful critique of the Bush administration by the time that administration was almost over.
Ana Alban, Ecuador’s ambassador to Britain, is being recalled to Quito over her failure to bring an end to the Julian Assange asylum saga, in which the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up in her west London embassy for nearly a year.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the US justice system was suffering from a “calamitous collapse in the rule of law”, as Washington reeled from the sensational exposure of vast spy agency surveillance programmes.
The court martial trial of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is charged with handing over thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks, resumes Monday in Maryland. Prosecutors at the Justice Department are reportedly trying to link Manning to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and possibly to indict Assange himself — for publishing classified material.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange suggested that the National Security Agency leaker might face the same fate as Pfc. Bradley Manning, adding that he expects more documents to come.
In the wake of the Woolwich murder, the press has been very receptive to arguments in favour of banning “hate preachers” from universities, arguments espoused by, among others, a group called Student Rights. Despite this pressure group’s non-transparency, shoddy research methods, and lack of legitimacy among actual students, the press continues to take it seriously and it has featured on the front pages of the Times, the Guardian and in a number of other media outlets.
Argentina’s Supreme Court revoked a US$19 billion embargo on the assets and future income of Chevron Corp.’s Argentina subsidiary, giving the US oil giant a victory in a decades-old battle with indigenous groups in Ecuador.
The court’s decision is also a victory for Argentina’s government, which has been encouraging Chevron to invest in its vast but almost entirely untapped unconventional oil and gas reserves.
If European commissioners attend the Bilderberg ‘shadow world government’ events at the taxpayers’ expense, doesn’t the public have a right to know what goes on behind the closed doors? PublicServiceEurope.com dissects the commissioners’ latest expenses claims, including first-class flights
Standing on the edge of Albany’s Empire Plaza Saturday afternoon, Lakeland teacher Michael Lillis surveyed a crowd of thousands that included students, parents and fellow teachers from school districts across New York protesting what they say is excessive state testing and insufficient funding.
Hedge funds and asset managers won relief from Dodd-Frank Act collateral requirements for credit-default swaps under a policy shift disclosed today in letters posted on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s website.
The letters to banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) revised a measure released in March that called for some clients to put up double the collateral dealers post for portfolio margin accounts at Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange Inc. (ICE) The banks instead will be able collect collateral from clients according to clearinghouse rules for six months.
Goldman Sachs wants you to believe that Too Big To Fail banks do not actually enjoy a funding advantage.
The Wall Street firm recently put out a paper with the mild title of “Measuring the TBTF effect on bond pricing.” It argues that the commonly-held view that TBTF banks can borrow cheaply because bond investors expect the government will support them used to be a little bit correct. Then it became very correct during the financial crisis. But now is totally incorrect.
The study argues that that six banks with more than $500 billion in assets paid interest rates on their bonds that were an average six basis-points lower than smaller banks from 1999 to mid-2007. When the financial crisis struck, the funding advantage grew far wider. But beginning in 2011, the funding difference reversed, with the biggest banks now paying an average of 10 basis points more than smaller banks.
Republican lawmakers have squeezed a provision into the Wisconsin budget to reintroduce bail bondsmen (and bounty hunters) to the state, a corruptive practice that has been banned since 1979, faces nearly universal opposition from the state’s criminal justice system, and is promoted heavily by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Last week I was in Egypt – meeting a lot of bloggers and activists working for reform. Online tools played a big part in Egypt’s fight for freedom; and they are still hard at work.
The director of national intelligence on Saturday stepped up his public defense of a top-secret government data surveillance program as technology companies began privately explaining the mechanics of its use.
The program, code-named PRISM, has enabled national security officials to collect e-mail, videos, documents and other material from at least nine U.S. companies over six years, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
A new batch of classified NSA docs leaked to the media reveals the details of a comprehensive piece of software used by NSA to analyze and evaluate intelligence gathered across the globe as well as data extraction methods.
The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows
Oh dear! The webpage devoted to the wisdom of James R. Clapper, the US director of National Intelligence, is down.
But that didn’t stop him from issuing a statement claiming reports about the NSA monitoring Americans’ Internet and phone communications are inaccurate.
The fact his webpage is off-line also means his statement can no longer be accessed.
Google is close to completing a $1.3 billion deal to acquire social mapping firm Waze — finally ending months of speculation about the startup — according to media reports out of its native Israel.
Globes, a leading online newspaper in the country, reports that Google is currently tying up final deals and ‘will soon’ announce that it has captured the much sought after startup — which both Apple and Facebook have been linked with in recent times.
Human rights activists say revelations that the US regime has expanded its domestic surveillance program to private phone carriers is more evidence of the North American country’s pivot toward authoritarianism.
The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported this week that a wing of the country’s feared intelligence and security apparatus ordered major telecommunications companies to hand over data on phone calls made by private citizens.
“The US leadership in Washington continues to erode basic human rights,” said one activist, who asked to remain anonymous, fearing that speaking out publicly could endanger his organization. “If the US government is unwilling to change course, it’s time the international community considered economic sanctions.”
Over the last decade, the United States has passed a series of emergency laws that give security forces sweeping powers to combat “terrorism.” But foreign observers say the authorities abuse those laws, using them instead to monitor ordinary Americans.
While the so-called Patriot Act passed in 2001 is perhaps the most dramatic legislation to date curbing freedoms here, numerous lesser-known laws have expanded monitoring of news outlets, email, social media platforms and even opposition groups — like the Occupy and Tea Party movements — that are critical of the regime.
A key senator responsible for the oversight US intelligence programs has questioned the Obama administration’s truthfulness about its widespread spying on Americans’ communications, as the White House continued to insist it “welcomed” debate on the issue.
So, America’s National Security Agency has been tapping up US internet giants to gather information about foreigners online, allegedly sharing that data with Britain’s GCHQ – and gobbling up details about US citizens’ phone calls.
When I was a kid my world was full of pro-America propaganda; I never once questioned American exceptionalism and I cheered for the “good guys” in red, white and blue.
It’s either a cruel joke or the world’s worst timing: An internship listing for a ‘Digital Network Exploitation Analyst’ appeared Thursday on the National Security Agency’s job-opening Twitter feed, just as the cyber spy directorate was caught up in an international scandal involving snooping on millions of telephone, email and social networking accounts.
In-Q-Tel (IQT) is a not-for-profit venture capital group that helps the NSA and other agencies hunt for startup and young companies that develop core technology for the U.S. intelligence community.
These young companies are often outside the reach of the intelligence community — about 70 percent of them have never worked with the government before. IQT often co-invests with venture capital groups, giving the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies access to the most new and innovative technologies on the market.
Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.
“They could pay off the Triads,” says Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower interviewed by the Guardian in his Hong Kong hideout. Meaning: the CIA could use a proxy to kill him for revealing that Barack Obama has presided over an unimaginable – to the ordinary citizen – expansion of the Federal government’s powers of surveillance over anyone.
Hong Kong politicians and lawyers questioned why the man behind the National Security Administration surveillance leak picked the former British colony as a refuge, noting the territory’s longstanding cooperation with the U.S. on legal and economic matters.
According to an interview with The Guardian, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, whose revelations have created a political uproar, has stashed himself in an unidentified luxury hotel in Hong Kong, a city he said he chose as the best place to hunker down given its “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent.”
When WikiLeaks burst onto the international stage in 2010, the small Nordic nation of Iceland offered it a safe haven. Now American whistleblower Edward Snowden may be seeking that country’s protection, and at least one member of its parliament says she’s ready to help.
On Sunday evening Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir and Smari McCarthy, executive director of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, issued a statement of support for Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton staffer who identified himself to the Guardian newspaper as the source of a series of top secret documents outlining the NSA’s massive surveillance of foreigners and Americans.
There’s plenty more in both the article and the interview that’s worth reading. I’m sure there will be much more on this, but this truly does seem like a classic whistleblower case, though I doubt that’s how Snowden will be portrayed by many in power.
Snowden joined the US army in 2003. He said he joined the army because he was driven by the same principle which drove him to leak the surveillance documents – to help free people from oppression. In 2003 he wanted to fight the Iraq war because he wanted to free Iraqi people from oppression. But when he trained for the war in 2003 he was devastated as the people training him were not driven by the same principle as he was, “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone.”
Once again we have a whistle-blower to thank for making us aware of the sort of monitoring and surveillance we are subject to, bringing to light evidence of something that has so far only been guessed at. United States officials have been shamed into acknowledging the existence of PRISM, an in-depth surveillance programme snooping on live communications and stored information held by many of the worlds largest internet companies – including data that belongs to European citizens and organisations.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the laissez-faire-philosopher-turned-statist Jeremy Bentham devised a scheme for the design of a prison he called the Panopticon: a circular building at the center of which is a watchtower made of glass from which it is possible to observe the inmates at all times. If we look at America as one vast prison, with ourselves as the inmates, we can get some idea of what the national security bureaucracy was envisioning when they conceived PRISM, “Boundless Informant,” and the program that records the details (minus content) of every phone call made in the US (which, as far as I know, doesn’t have a name). Derived from documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper columnist Glenn Greenwald, these revelations throw back the curtain on a modern day, hi tech Panopticon, with the high priests of the National Security State sitting at the center of it, relentlessly observing us, the prisoners—who don’t even know we’re prisoners – 24/7.
Palantir and HBGary Federal worked together to develop a strategy for Bank of America to deal with the threatened exposure of secret documents from the bank. HBGary Federal proposed a smear campaign against journalist Glenn Greenwald as part of these proposals, a move Palantir repudiated and said was solely HBGary’s idea. They severed their links with HBGary Federal in February 2011, soon after the infamous LulzSec pwnage of HBGary Federal and its chief exec, Aaron Barr.
A hero walks among us, and his name is Edward Snowden. He exposed a widespread wiretapping of ordinary people’s lives by the United States NSA that goes far, far beyond anything the East German Stasi ever did. While we cannot and should not control agencies in the United States, we can stop being complicit in their crimes against European citizens.
It has now come to light that the United States NSA – National Security Agency – wiretaps the social life of pretty much every European citizen as they use Facebook, Google, Gmail, Skype, phonecalls, video conferences, and a number of other services. This is a crime under European legislation. It’s not just “bad guys” and “rogue states” that are wiretapped; detailed leaked maps reveal that they have wiretapped people in Germany as much as they have wiretapped people in, say, Iraq. This is more than cause for concern; this is an outrage.
As a sort of prerequisite to play on one’s home console, the Xbox One will need to be connected to the Internet at least once every 24 hours if one wishes to game offline. If a user tries to access a game library on a friend’s Xbox One, then the system will require a network connection at least once per hour.
I’ve spent literally my entire adult life (and even before) working on Internet technologies and policies, one way or another, reaching back to early ARPANET days at UCLA — a project rooted in Department of Defense funding, it’s worthwhile to remember.
Over that time, there have been many related high points and low points, events joyful or upsetting, but never — not even close — have I felt so completely, utterly disgusted with a situation associated with the Net as I am today.
The apparently true facts we’re learning about our own government’s spying abuses against its own citizens are bad enough. But we also are faced with stomaching the incredibly hypocritical and disingenuous pronouncements of intelligence agencies, administration officials, and Congressional leaders, as they point fingers back and forth about who knew what when, who approved which program, and why we citizens shouldn’t be at all concerned.
I wish I believed that all the internet companies were as innocent as Lauren believes. History has shown this is not always the truth. (remember ATT and the massive tap etc.). Seems in practice the Government, many companies, and others forgot about the Bill of Rights. It leaves it up to individuals, EPIC, EFF, ACLU and many other organizations to remember the Constitution and Ben Franklins comments — “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The Director of National Intelligence issued a statement late last night about the NSA collection flap. It’s the smartest thing the government has released so far, and its justification for the program in question seems to confirm my speculation in Foreign Policy yesterday.
First, large-scale collections give the government a way to screen for patterns in communications that will bring to light terrorists who are unknown to the government. As the DNI puts it, ”The collection is broad in scope because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism-related communications. Acquiring this information allows us to make connections related to terrorist activities over time.”
The US NSA’s PRISM program appears to be a set of specialized deep-packet inspection filters combined with pre-existing wiretapping points at high-level Internet carriers in the United States. Since the program’s revelation the day before yesterday, speculations have ranged far and wide about who does what to make this surveillance state nightmare possible. Adding it all together, it would appear that the social tech companies did not, repeat not, supply bulk data about their users at the US Government’s will – but that the situation for you as an end user remains just as if they had.
The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals.
Let’s assume that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, their staffers, and every member of Congress for the last dozen years has always acted with pure motives in the realm of national security. Say they’ve used the power they’ve claimed, the technology they’ve developed, and the precedents they’ve established exclusively to fight al-Qaeda terrorists intent on killing us, that they’ve succeeded in disrupting what would’ve been successful attacks, and that Americans are lucky to have had men and women so moral, prudent, and incorruptible in charge.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founding director of the World Wide Web Foundation said:
“Today’s revelations are deeply concerning. Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society.
“I call on all Web users to demand better legal protection and due process safeguards for the privacy of their online communications, including their right to be informed when someone requests or stores their data. Over the last two decades, the Web has become an integral part of our lives. A trace of our use of it can reveal very intimate personal things. A store of this information about each person is a huge liability: Whom would you trust to decide when to access it, or even to keep it secure?”
And the place is in an uproar. Because the reality of what we’ve allowed and approved, even if tacitly, for decades has come to light? Grow up.
Congress enacted FISA in 1978. The riff raff, like us, didn’t know about its existence until sometime in the 1980s, at which point we pulled our hair out, yelled and screamed, over this outrageous violation of basic principles of freedom, privacy, liberty. And it was news for a few hours until everybody went back to watching TV and the stock market.
And all was forgotten, because the truth is that we don’t care all that much, our attention span is brief and shiny things are more fascinating to the American public. They always have been.
It’s been extended and expanded since then, including a paradigm shift in how it worked back in 2004, during the mid-second-Bush years. The New York Times wrote about it. The few who were interested knew about it. The rest were busy scrambling to get their new iToys. Remember that? No, I didn’t think so.
Sorry, your phone records—oops, “so-called metadata”—can reveal a lot more about the content of your calls than the government is implying. Metadata provides enough context to know some of the most intimate details of your lives. And the government has given no assurances that this data will never be correlated with other easily obtained data. They may start out with just a phone number, but a reverse telephone directory is not hard to find. Given the public positions the government has taken on location information, it would be no surprise if they include location information demands in Section 215 orders for metadata.
In a rare public filing in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Justice Department today urged continued secrecy for a 2011 FISC opinion that found the National Security Agency’s surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional. Significantly, the surveillance at issue was carried out under the same controversial legal authority that underlies the NSA’s recently-revealed PRISM program.
Although the revelation doesn’t surprise privacy advocates, the fact that Greenwald obtained a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems is the first concrete piece of evidence exposing dragnet domestic surveillance.
But, unfortunately for U.S. citizens who don’t want their government routinely spying on them, that’s just the beginning.
By now, just about everybody has heard about the PRISM surveillance program, and many are beginning to speculate on its impact on Tor.
Unfortunately, there still are a lot of gaps to fill in terms of understanding what is really going on, especially in the face of conflicting information between the primary source material and Google, Facebook, and Apple’s claims of non-involvement.
This apparent conflict means that it is still hard to pin down exactly how the program impacts Tor, and is leading many to assume worst-case scenarios.
Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That’s everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted — for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners. This “metadata” allows the government to track the movements of everyone during that period, and a build a detailed picture of who talks to whom. It’s exactly the same data the Justice Department collected about AP journalists.
[...]
The leaker for at least some of this is Edward Snowden. I consider him an American hero.
While admiration for Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing grows in the USA and abroad, in the UK we are listening to Sir Malcolm Rifkind and William Hague with increasing scepticism.
[...]
The government cannot simply insist that US-based surveillance, wich is both secret and pervasive, is just a US problem. PRISM in particular seems to be targeted at non-US citizens, for very broad ‘foreign policy’ considerations. Additionally, the legal position in the US is that there are no constitutional protections for non-US citizens. Caspar Bowden outlined these points in detail (PDF) at ORGCon on Saturday.
As details of the U.S. government’s PRISM program continue to emerge, much of the debate in the United States has focused on the constitutionality of the program. This is only right for people within those borders, but it’s a debate that sounds a lot less relevant to many of us in the outside world.
Many internet users will be feeling slightly bemused by the worldwide reaction to the revelations about US surveillance technology. As President Obama, the UK foreign secretary, William Hague, and many other senior politicians have said, what do the innocent have to fear? Why would the National Security Agency (NSA), or anyone else, care about your search history, Facebook updates, Skype calls, emails, instant messages, and so on?
Data mining tools have developed quickly over the past decade, and a detailed picture can now be painted of people’s lives with even small amounts of such information. This picture can ultimately have real-world consequences. Ever had problems getting an electronic visa to travel to countries such as the US and Australia, who pre-screen foreign visitors, or had to go through lengthy additional security at the airport? Thought about getting a job with a government agency or contractor that will do background checks first? Or perhaps you’ve had difficulty getting medical insurance or credit despite a healthy lifestyle and prompt payment of your bills?
So-called “big data” approaches are revolutionising the way these processes work, in government and the private sector. By crunching through large quantities of data, all sorts of interesting patterns can be found inside people’s everyday activities. You might already realise that fatty and sugary foods showing up on your supermarket loyalty card could be interesting to insurers, financial service providers, and even employers concerned about sick days – but did you know significant time spent commuting and watching television are also good predictors of a shorter lifespan?
In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the US constitution.
Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.
The extraordinary revelations about the NSA’s global spying programme Prism have only just started – was it really just last Thursday that things began? So it would be extremely rash to attempt any kind of definitive statement about what is going on. But that doesn’t preclude a few preliminary comments, as well as initial thoughts on what action those of us in Europe might take in response.
The top-secret ‘Q Group’ has been chasing Edward Snowden since he disappeared in May. Eli Lake on the intel community’s internal police—and why the agency is in ‘complete freakout mode.’
The US National Security Agency circumvents UK law by offering, rather than being asked for, intelligence from global websites to their British counterparts, according to David Blunkett, who was home secretary at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Dave asks some great questions about why the people who had power over these networks didn’t blow the whistle instead of some anonymous insider having to do it. Here’s one possible answer.
Last week technology giants Facebook and Google were accused of participating in US government’s PRISM project that collects emails, documents, photos and other material for US spy agencies to review.
The Prism system allows agents at the NSA to send queries “directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations”, rather than directly to company servers (Guardian).
The response on social media to the unveiling of NSA’s biggest intelligence leak source, Edward Snowden, has been divided with some calling him a traitor, however the response to his coming out has been overwhelmingly positive, with the majority calling him a hero.
Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs.
The implications of having one person lead both Cyber Command and the National Security Agency would be explored under the fiscal 2014 national defense authorization act that the House Armed Services Committee approved June 6.
The bill (H.R. 1960), which the committee passed by a 59-2 vote, would have the Defense Science Board complete the assessment within 300 days of its enactment into law.
Read more: Cyber Command, NSA leadership may be reassessed under fiscal 2014 NDAA – FierceGovernmentIT http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/cyber-command-nsa-leadership-may-be-reassessed-under-fiscal-2014-ndaa/2013-06-10#ixzz2VtfxGEa1
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So three people — Glenn Greenwald, a civil-liberties writer who recently moved his blog to The Guardian; Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who specializes in surveillance; and Ewen MacAskill, a Guardian reporter — flew from New York to Hong Kong about 12 days ago. They followed the directions. A man with a Rubik’s Cube appeared.
It was Edward J. Snowden, who looked even younger than his 29 years — an appearance, Mr. Greenwald recalled in an interview from Hong Kong on Monday, that shocked him because he had been expecting, given the classified surveillance programs the man had access to, someone far more senior. Mr. Snowden has now turned over archives of “thousands” of documents, according to Mr. Greenwald, and “dozens” are newsworthy.
[...]
Mr. Snowden, Mr. Greenwald said, had first reached out to Ms. Poitras in January. Her work has focused on national-security issues like surveillance, including a short documentary she made for The New York Times Op-Ed page in August. She and Mr. Greenwald, along with Mr. Ellsberg, are also helping with a new organization devoted to whistle-blowers and transparency, the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
The next month, Mr. Greenwald said, Mr. Snowden contacted him with an enigmatic e-mail identifying himself as a reader and saying he wanted to communicate about a potential story using encryption. Mr. Greenwald wrote back that he did not have such software. Mr. Snowden later sent him a homemade video with step-by-step instructions for installing it, which Mr. Greenwald watched but never completed.
Frustrated, Mr. Snowden is said to have told Ms. Poitras that he had a major story about the National Security Agency that required both technical and legal expertise, proposing that they work together with Mr. Greenwald. Ms. Poitras, who did not respond to an interview request, told Salon on Monday that she had contacted Barton Gellman, a former Washington Post reporter, around that time for his opinion of the whether the purported source seemed legitimate.
So far, the Central Intelligence Agency largely has remained out of the spotlight of snooping scandals that have touched agencies such at the National Security Agency and the Justice Department.
He called me BRASSBANNER, a code name in the double-barrelled style of the National Security Agency, where he worked in the signals intelligence directorate.
Snowden says, I and I agree, that we have a short window of time to dismantle the government’s surveillance machine. If we wait too long it’ll be too late, and nothing the people of the world can do will be able to stop it.
Ahead of a U.S.-EU summit this coming Friday, the European Parliament had a brief debate about the PRISM surveillance scandal on Tuesday morning. With near unanimity, the speakers raised strong concerns with the program’s mass collection of Europeans’ personal data.
News of PRISM is spreading rapidly, and with realization of just how serious this is. This isn’t the first time that there’s been the revelation of government spying, but more than ever we’re seeing clearly how broad and wide government and corporate surveillance are growing over our lives.
This is satire. Although the news is real, very little actual reporting was done for this story and the quotes are imagined. It is the first installment of an ongoing series that examines the language journalists use to cover foreign countries. What if we wrote that way about the United States?
What should Europeans expect from the European Commission in response to the PRISM scandal? Not a lot, unfortunately, because it’s mostly a matter for individual countries.
In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protestors accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism. Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US.
A day after Chinese military killed at least hundreds, if not thousands of demonstrators in Beijing in 1989, a wiry man in a white shirt stepped in front of a line of moving tanks near Tiananmen Square and become one of the most famous protesters of the 20th century.
With the nation already alarmed over revelations of massive National Security Agency data collection, Congress is set to act next week on two other contentious issues — the power to indefinitely detain Americans and keeping open the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects.
With very little notice early Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee passed the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, overshadowed by news that the NSA has gathered up phone records for millions of Americans and data-mined the nation’s largest Internet sites.
In 2008, candidate Obama promised to close Guantanamo. Straightaway as president, he issued Executive Order titled “Review and Disposition of Individuals Detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Closure of Detention Facilities.”
Government phone, Internet snooping demands immediate, dramatic downsizing of all spy agencies, repeal of Patriot Act, FISA, NDAA. Taking its cue from George Orwell’s famous novel 1984, the Obama administration is mining customer data from major Internet vendors and collecting telephone records of millions of U.S. [and Canadian] citizens indiscriminately — regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime.
Gar A: The concentration of wealth in this country is astonishing. 400 individuals—you could seat them all on a single airplane—own as much wealth as 60 percent of the rest of the country taken together. I was describing this distribution as “medieval” until a medieval historian set me straight: wealth was far more evenly distributed in the Middle Ages. When you ask where power lies in our system, you are asking who owns the productive assets. And that’s the top 1 percent—in fact, the top 1 percent of the 1 percent. It is a feudalistic structure of extreme power. It is anathema to a democracy to have that kind of concentration of wealth. More and more people are beginning to realize the extent and reach of corporate power and the power of those who own the corporations. The Koch brothers get a lot of publicity, but it’s a much wider phenomenon.
One reason DRM is dangerous is that it can hide all manner of spyware and malware from users. Another is that most people don’t even know what it is, or if they do, how to recognize it. While governments have allowed large corporations and media conglomerates to cripple digital products with DRM, there is no requirement anywhere in the world to to inform customers or computer users of such application.
Terming the recent revelations about the US government “spying” on Internet users as “deeply concerning,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the World Wide Web – has warned that the founding principles of the web are being undermined by the attempts which are being made by governments and companies “to take control of the Internet.”
The UK’s aggressive stance towards online piracy was taken to new heights this week through a combination of police threats and backroom deals between industry groups. One of the main targets identified were Pirate Bay proxy sites and TorrentFreak has been informed that the police and FACT recently turned up on the doorstep of one called PirateSniper in the UK. According to a report from the site’s owner he was handed a letter and ordered to shutter the site or face criminal action.
Prenda Law has become the most-recognized and most controversial of several “porn-trolling” operations filing lawsuits against thousands of John Does over alleged illegal downloads. Lawyers linked to the company were slapped with sanctions last month; while it’s appealing those sanctions, Prenda is losing cases left and right.
Posted in Bill Gates at 3:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Pinky and the Brain
Summary: A surveillance scheme for juniors and how it is being used to program the young generation to support patent monopolies of Bill Gates, such as GMO
PRISM, as exposed by an EFF and Tor (perhaps also FOSS by extension) enthusiast, gives governments across the world access to profiles (personal dossiers trained from data) for all individuals, enabling them to classify members of the population and highlight those deviating from the norm. Any instrument of power through control requires one-way surveillance, meaning secrecy for the government and none for the rest of us. How about if you wanted to highlight children who are not properly indoctrinated, i.e. people whose minds are not absorbing the propaganda decided on by plutocrats in ‘education’ boards? Well, here too they try to exploit technology for mass control. Who’s they? Those with money, power, and no morality. It is a no-brainer. Technology is a wonderful thing, but under the guise of advancement those at the top of the food chain try to introduce more user-hostile facilities by which to conduct en masse surveillance in the classroom, using cameras too (one of Gates’ latest adventures).
There are some bad things happening other than PRISM (which we had alluded to before someone leaked the documents for confirmation), including this trend of removing privacy from one’s own device, even if it is not connected to the Internet.
The Dept. of Homeland Security has finally coughed up its Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Impact Assessment of its suspicionless electronic device searches performed at border crossings by ICE and CBP agents. It’s been a long time coming.
Right now the US is also attacking people’s right to encrypt their hard drive/s. The tablet I am using to write this post on will, by default, upload all its content to Google servers for ‘backup’ (and access by governments). The point to be made here is, personal computing is under attack and we oughtn’t assume that letting kids be used by proprietary software is a good idea.
Earlier this month we showed Gates Foundation PR like this and keynote speeches from the female Gates, who is now lobbying in education (not just women’s issues as before) despite having no qualifications in this area. She is a powerful lobbyist now and on her agenda is her husband’s attempt to privatise schools.
Our recent posts explained PRISM and how it relates to freedom, emphasising why Microsoft is a vital part of PRISM, probably more so than Google (Microsoft controls Windows, i.e. many people’s computers, not to mention the partly Microsoft-owned Facebook). One thing we noted once before is that Gates found partners like Murdoch to share spying ambitions with. As Seattle-based teachers put it last week:
Gates and others have begun to collect information about our children from New York to LA and it is about to happen in Seattle thanks to the efforts of the Road Map project, et al, falling all over themselves to receive a pittance of educational funding, $40 M to be split between 7 districts in our state. That’s $5.7M if it were to be divided equally.
[...]
The Gates Foundation is building a national “data store” of such information, and intends to hand all this information to a new, separate corporation, which in turn plans to make it available to commercial vendors to help them develop and market their “learning products.”[1][1] The operating system of this “data store” is being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of the News Corporation, which has been investigated for violating the privacy of individuals both here in the United States and in Great Britain.[2][2]
[...]
The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18 months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it.
As we showed before, indoctrinating children in favour of Gates investments like GMO is part of the agenda. The corporate press in the area, some of it having been bribed by Gates, is already doing that. Watch this coverage for example:
The Seattle group gathered at Westlake Park and marched to the Gates Foundation in the Seattle Center area for a rally.
The author ‘forgets’ to point out the significance of this. Gates is a Monsanto lobbyist and investor. The protest organisers almost definitely know this.
It should be noted that Gates’ latest exposed lobby, Common Core, is still at it. They are actually intervening with the curriculum itself:
In case you missed it, about two weeks ago the Pearson Foundation announced that it was receiving funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create a national K-12 curriculum. Gates ponied up $3 million to have Pearson develop 24 courses, 11 in math and 13 in English-Language Arts. At the announcement, both foundations positioned it as the next logical step in the adoption of Common Core State Standards.
The announcement seemed to go over with a bit of a thud. First, it met some people’s fears that a Common Core would undoubtedly lead to a common curriculum. And for the growing chorus that believes in local control and local decisionmaking, having bureaucrats in Washington (or even with a non-partisan foundation) determine what fifth grade math needed to look like on the third Tuesday of March just reeked of the nationalism folks have pushed back on for decades (or even since the creation of public education in the United States itself).
The word school has nothing to do with education. The word is derived from Greek. What we increasingly see in the United States is that schools are used for social programming (for somebody’s gain), not for genuine education. Since 400 people in the United States (people including Gates and Murdoch) have more in combined wealth than 60% of the population (with this gap increasing over time), this is only to be expected.
Surveillance is about control and facilities like the NSA or schools boards are taxpayers-funded means of controlling the taxpayers (the rich don’t pay tax; in fact, they hardly pay anything back). This is class war, not a brands war. █
Summary: Why the stance of the White House is misguided and short-sighted in an age when trolls are like mercenaries for players in conspiracies and pyramid schemes of patents
Patent trolls have stolen all public attention from issues associated with software parents. Since large corporations lobbied their elected Congress on this matter, Change We Can Believe in was inevitable. Now that patent trolls are a big deal in the news (this issue has become very prevalent) we are at least reassured that one single aspect of the problem, for instance the patent proxies Microsoft uses, will get addressed. But it’s only the start. How big does a troll have to be to get exempted? If Microsoft uses Nokia to feed patent trolls like MOSAID, does that mean that Nokia and Microsoft too will come under the hammer or the gavel? If Bill Gates’ and Microsoft allies like Intellectual Ventures (IV) litigate through small proxies (potentially thousands of them), how will those two giant racketeering operations be handled? Well, it depends on the proposals put forth and accepted. Some proposals only go after trolls at the litigation level, leaving racketeers at the top more or less immune to federal action. As pointed out the other day, shell entities are at it again, serving Microsoft, Gates, and IV. To quote:
Intellectual Ventures Responds To This American Life & President Obama By… Filing More Patent Lawsuits
Ah, Intellectual Ventures. Over the weekend, This American Life ran their report updating a critical look at Intellectual Ventures from two years ago by showing that the shell company, whose patent IV had insisted was a perfect example of IV helping small inventors get their due was (a) completely bunk and invalidated in court, and (b) despite IV “selling it off,” 90% of the profits from the approximate $100+ million that was raised via shakedown threats with that patent… went back to IV. On Tuesday, President Obama came out strongly against patent trolling, and part of his proposal would require revealing who was really behind various shell companies.
The many articles regarding this reform don’t delve into the subject of trolls as proxies. Moreover, as pointed out here, opportunities to actually tackle the problem and not just allude to it were previously missed. About Rader, TechDirt writes:
Also, you’d think that, as the chief judge on the court that handles all patent appeals, Judge Rader would have had a chance to not just do what he suggests judges should do… but to create a precedent for district courts to adhere to on that point, rather than just writing about it in the NY Times.
Here is the latest from the New York Times and Red Hat’s take on it. They both seem not to concentrate on proxy strategies. Dan Mitchel, writing for CNN, says “There are parallels between today’s trolls and the so-called sharks of the 19th century.”
He closes with the following remarks: “In fact, that’s already occurring. It could be that the panic we’re seeing among champions of innovation is actually the beginning of the end of patent trolls, at least in the current era.”
When corporations and lobbyists (not developers) call the shots it is hardly surprising that only small patent aggressors but never the large ones get chased by the government. Pamela Jones, a paralegal, wrote about the abundance of lawyers (many lobbyists too are lawyers by training and trade) when she said:
The President is a lawyer, after all. So it’s not a total surprise that he understands what Lemley wrote. Here’s the paper [PDF], if you’d like to read it for yourself. And here’s Professor Lemley tweeting that he noticed that the President’s suggestions included one about functional claiming.
Buyers are becoming more and more aware of the risks and potential liabilities associated with open source code—and the increasing use of open source code as developers “cut and paste” code from various projects.
These are some of the talking points emanating from Microsoft friends like Black Duck and OpenLogic. █
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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