02.20.15
Links 20/2/2015: Bloomberg Joins Linux Foundation, ClearOS Community 6.6.0
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GNU/Linux
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Server
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HP Joins Dell, Juniper in Offering Open Network Switches
The vendor is building systems with Accton that will run Cumulus’ network OS as part of an industry push to disaggregate hardware and software.
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HP latest to unbundle switch hardware, software
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HP flicks white box switch: NOT a Facebook wannabe? Stuff our open kit in your cloud
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HP Expands Open Networking Push
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HP Launches New Open Network Switches for Web Scale Cloud Data Centers
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HP to sell Linux switches: Call the box ‘white’ or ‘brite’ — Meg’s in the fight
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Kernel Space
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RAID 5/6 Continues Being Improved For Btrfs With Linux 3.20
Chris Mason has sent in his pull request of the Btrfs file-system changes for the Linux 3.20 (4.0?) kernel.
Btrfs in Linux 3.19 brought RAID 5 / 6 support improvements and for this next kernel release the RAID level 5 and 6 support is still baking. Chris shared that there’s some RAID 5/6 clean-ups to fix some long-standing issues in the code and to improve the work on top of Linux 3.19.
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Bloomberg joins Linux Foundation as Gold member
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Bloomberg and Open Source: Expanding Our Relationship with the Linux Foundation
While we are already a big supporter of open innovation and open source initiatives – including our membership in the Core Infrastructure Initiative – today The Linux Foundation introduced Bloomberg as their newest Gold member.
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Who writes the Linux kernel?
When some folks think about who is responsible for writing Linux, they probably have visions of basement dwelling outcasts from society toiling away on their computers day after day. But the truth is far from that stereotypical delusion. It turns out that most of the people writing Linux are a different breed altogether.
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Linux kernel contributors top 12,000 in the past 10 years
LINUX AFICIONADOS across the world have been flocking to San Rosa for the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, a shadowy, clandestine conference available to the open source elite.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Qt3D 2.0 The FrameGraph
In this post, we have introduced the FrameGraph and the node types that compose it. We then went on to discuss a few examples to illustrate the Framegraph building rules and how the Qt3D engine uses the Framegraph behind the scenes. By now you should have a pretty good overview of the FrameGraph and how it can be used (perhaps to add an early z-fill pass to a forward renderer). Also you should always keep in mind that the FrameGraph is a tool for you to use so that you are not tied down to the provided renderer and materials that Qt3D provides out of the box.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME Photos Has Been Ported to GEGL 0.3
We’ve reported the other day that the GNOME development team is working hard these days on the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, due for release on March 25, 2015. This will be a major update to the controversial desktop, bringing a number of new features, updated components, as well a bugfixes. GNOME Photos will be part of GNOME 3.16 as the default application for viewing and organizing photos, with the ability to upload them to social networks.
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Distributions
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New Releases
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LinHES R8.3 Released
LinHES R8.3 brings updates to the kernel, system libraries, nvidia drivers, the latest MythTV 0.27.4-fixes, and many other parts of LinHES. LinHES R8.3 now includes the option to install Plex Home Theater. Additionally XBMC has been updated to Kodi.
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Red Hat Family
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ClearOS Community 6.6.0 Now Available!
ClearOS Community 6.6.0 Final has arrived! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, this release introduces WPAD, QoS, YouTube School ID support, an upgrade to the Intrusion Detection engine, and ISO-to-USB key support.
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Red Hat bolsters cross-vendor compatibility of ARM datacentre architecture
Red Hat announced this week that its ARM Partner Early Access Programme, launched six months ago with the aim of facilitating partner system designs based on the 64-bit capable ARMv8-A architecture, has completed a critical hardware enablement phase.
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Debian Family
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Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) 3.4 OS Is Based on Debian Wheezy 7.8
Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH proudly announced on February 19, 2015, the immediate availability of version 3.4 of its powerful, open-source, and reliable server virtualization management computer operating system, Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE). The release brings a number of new features and improvements, including NUMA support (non-uniform memory access), ZFS storage plug-in, hotplug support, as well as the latest and greatest ZFS file system.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS Released & Ubuntu 15.04 Now In Feature Freeze
Ubuntu developer Adam Conrad announced the release of Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS. This new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release includes an updated kernel and X stack for better supporting new hardware across all of Ubuntu’s supported architectures. The Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS release also contains various stable bug/security fixes relevant to the platform.
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Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS released
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
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How to Enable Hibernate in Ubuntu Linux
Are you doing multi-tasking on your Linux machine and suddenly there is a power cut? Is you Laptop battery low or have any problem with you PC’s UPS? Then Hibernate is a good option for you! You can save all your work and resume where you left after switching on computer.
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Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) Hits Feature Freeze
Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is getting closer to the official release in April and the developers have announced that feature freeze is now in effect for this distro.
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Flavours and Variants
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Xubuntu 14.04.2 LTS Officially Released with Updated Apps and Bugfixes
Canonical, through Adam Conrad, announced a few hours ago, February 20, the immediate availability of the Ubuntu 14.04.2 maintenance release for its current LTS (Long Term Support) operating system, the Trusty Tahr, which includes Xubuntu 14.04.2 LTS, Kubuntu 14.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu GNOME 14.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu Kylin 14.04.2 LTS, Edubuntu 14.04.2 LTS, Mythbuntu 14.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu Studio 14.04.2 LTS, and Lubuntu 14.04.2 LTS.
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Ubuntu GNOME 14.04.2 LTS Lands with New Kernel and Lots of Fixes – Gallery
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Lubuntu 14.04.2 LTS Brings Better Hardware Support Thanks to Linux Kernel 3.16
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Devices/Embedded
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500,000 Raspberry Pi 2 models sold as total sales hit five million
THE RASPBERRY PI 2 has shifted 500,000 units in just two weeks, as total sales of the pint-sized computer hit the five million mark.
Eben Upton, head of the UK computing success story that is the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has told The INQUIRER that the new Raspberry Pi 2 has sold around half a million units.
The figure means that, within just two week of launching, the new model is already accounting for one in 10 of the five million sales made so far.
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Raspberry Pi: New Raspbian and NOOBS releases
Well, this is starting to look sort of like “Jamie’s Mostly Raspberry Pi Stuff”, but that’s not intentional, there’s just a lot of interesting things going on with the RPi at the moment, so that’s where I seem to be spending a lot of my time right now.
The big news, of course, was the announcement and immediate availability of the Raspberry Pi 2 hardware two weeks ago. The new hardware needs updated software to really make the most of its capabilities, so there was also a new Raspbian and NOOBS release (1.3.12) made at the same time.
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Phones
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So How Accurate Is This Blog? Duelling statistics: IDC releases 2 regional market smartphone stats Top 5 for China and Western Europe (cool)
With that, we have a very VERY accurate estimate of two of the four regions in how I divided the world, China and Western Europe which accounted for 46% (either IDC’s or my math) of the total planet’s smartphone sales. With the US stats we have rather solid Kantar and ComScore numbers and obviously my regional analysis of the US market is totally consistent with those. That means by simple subtraction math, the ‘Rest of the World’ region analysis is also very close to the mark. So for those who want to see those again, from my blog a week ago:
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Android
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Free Software/Open Source
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5 ethical open source hacking tools for business
Many businesses routinely employ “ethical” hackers as a means of testing whether their systems are secure, paying the tech-savvy to break into their computers in what is known as penetration testing, or pen testing.
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ONF launches open source community to bolster SDN software development
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Graylog 1.0 Eliminates Cost Barriers to Unlocking Big Data
HOUSTON — Graylog, Inc., the company behind the popular Graylog open source log analysis platform, today announced that it has released v1.0 of its Open Source Graylog product. This enterprise-grade platform enables organizations to store, search and analyze machine data collected from their IT infrastructures to quickly pinpoint and address the root cause of operational problems. Graylog is providing paid services/support to make it even easier for enterprises to deploy this affordable alternative to expensive log analysis tools such as Splunk.
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Events
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SCALE 13x Day 0: Exceeding expectations
It was a first for the Southern California Linux Expo — a midweek start on Thursday for SCALE 13x, and those of us on the SCALE Team did not know what to expect. The day was composed of a variety of sessions — an all-day Intro to Chef, Puppet Labs held its separate-registration Puppet Camp LA, openSUSE held its mini-summit, PostgreSQL held the first of its two-day PostgreSQL days, Fedora held its Fedora Activity Day, and an all-day Apache session.
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Collaboration Summit 2015 Keynote Speakers
The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2015 took place Feb. 18-20 in Santa Rosa, Calif.
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CMS
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4 tips for how to migrate to Drupal
Well, to jump from your current CMS (or lack thereof) and make the transition to Drupal, you want to know much it costs and exacting what that migration entails. First, there are several factors that have to be taken into an account before any Drupal development company can give you a quote. But, while there isn’t an exact price range for migrating to Drupal, you can do some in-house work to keep your migration costs down and prepare your team for the migration, keeping headaches down too.
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Openness/Sharing
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OnePlus ditches CyanogenMod, Raspberry Pi 2 powered robots, and more
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Open Access/Content
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Why open access matters
Imagine a world where scientists and inventors had no access to the accomplishments of the generations which came before us. The wheel would, quite literally, need to be reinvented by everyone who came along and wanted to move forward.
[....]
To learn more about open access, we’re proud to present a new resource, which helps to answer many of the fundamental questions around open access and scholarly sharing.
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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Facebook Announces The Hack Specification
Last year Facebook launched Hack, a new programming language derived from PHP and powered by their HHVM software. The Hack specification serves as official documentation for those wanting to come out with their own Hack implementation rather than relying upon HHVM. The Hack specification complements the existing Hack programming documentation.
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Standards/Consortia
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Web standard promising faster page loads wins approval
A new version of the HTTP standard that promises to deliver Web pages to browsers faster has been formally approved, the Internet protocol’s first revision in 16 years.
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Wanna cheerlead open internet standards, help out the peeps at IETF? Enter the ISoc Maze
The political arm of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Society, has posted its approved slate of candidates for two board positions – and invited everyone else in the world to parachute into the process.
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Leftovers
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I gave up social media for Lent
Could getting off Twitter be a religious experience?
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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U.S. officials, in blunt language, say Israel is distorting reality of Iran talks
The Obama administration on Wednesday accused the Israeli government of misleading the public over the Iran nuclear negotiations, using unusually blunt and terse language that once again highlighted the rift between the two sides.
In briefings with reporters, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki and White House spokesman Josh Earnest suggested Israeli officials were not being truthful about how the United States is handling the secretive talks.
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Transparency Reporting
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How a Snowdenista Kept the NSA Leaker Hidden in a Moscow Airport
Since spiriting NSA leaker Edward Snowden to safety in Russia two years ago, activist and WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison has lived quietly in Berlin. Sara Corbett meets the woman some regard as a political heroine—others as an accomplice to treason.
Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport is, like so many international airports, a sprawling and bland place. It has six terminals, four Burger Kings, a sweep of shops selling duty-free caviar, and a rivering flow of anonymous travelers—all of them headed out or headed in or, in any event, never planning to stay long. But for nearly six weeks in the summer of 2013, the airport also housed two fugitives: Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who had just off-loaded an explosive trove of top-secret U.S. government documents to journalists, and a 31-year-old British woman named Sarah Harrison, described as a legal researcher who worked for the online organization WikiLeaks.
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A Stronger Freedom of Information Act
Congress came tantalizingly close last year to passing a bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, which allows journalists and the public to access federal government records. The legislation, which would have brought more transparency, was blocked in December when the House speaker, John Boehner, refused to hold a vote on the Senate bill with no explanation. Two months later, lawmakers have a second chance.
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Finance
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NYT Hopes India Can Avoid China’s Plight: a High-Paid, Well-Educated Workforce
There aren’t a lot of numbers in the Times piece, so it’s useful to pause here and note that according to the IMF database, China’s per capita GDP (measured in terms of purchasing power) grew by 8.6 percent last year, vs. 6.0 percent for India. So any stumbling, slowing or faltering seen in China’s economy is based on forecasts of future growth–which are notoriously unreliable, though often given great credence in articles like these.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Op-Ed on Venezuela Slips Past NYT Factcheckers
Krauze begins by claiming that the Venezuelan government, first under President Hugo Chávez and then his successor Nicolás Maduro, has taken control over the media. Chávez “accumulated control over the organs of government and over much of the information media: radio, television and the press,” we are told, and then Maduro “took over the rest of Venezuelan television.”
A simple factcheck shows this to be false. The majority of media outlets in Venezuela–including television–continue to be privately owned; further, the private TV audience dwarfs the number of viewers watching state TV.
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Censorship
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U.K. Jewish leader steps down due to ban on criticizing Israel
Laurence Brass says he had been ‘bursting to criticize the Israeli administration’ for six years and took the board to task for preventing honorary officers from expressing personal opinions.
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Privacy
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Lenovo caught installing adware on new computers
It looks like Lenovo has been installing adware onto new consumer computers from the company that activates when taken out of the box for the first time.
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Law enforcement divided over releasing StingRay docs
State and local law enforcement agencies that use StingRays must weigh their obligations under public records statutes against nondisclosure agreements with the FBI and the device’s manufacturer. While some police departments have ruled that they cannot share any documents whatsoever, a handful of key disclosures in recent weeks — including the cleanest version of the NDA released to date — together shed new light on the FBI’s involvement in cell-site simulator deployments nationwide.
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How to Remove Superfish Adware From Your Lenovo Computer
We recently learned that PC manufacturer Lenovo is selling computers preinstalled with a dangerous piece of software, called Superfish, that uses a man-in-the-middle attack to break Windows’ encrypted Web connections for the sake of advertising. (Here’s a list of affected products.) Research from EFF’s Decentralized SSL Observatory has seen many thousands of Superfish certificates that have all been signed with the same root certificate, showing that HTTPS security for at least Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari for Windows, on all of these Lenovo laptops, is now broken. Firefox users also have the problem, because Superfish also inserts its certificate into the Firefox root store.
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Lenovo In Denial: Insists There’s No Security Problem With Superfish — Which Is Very, Very Wrong.
Late last night, people started buzzing on Twitter about the fact that Lenovo, makers of the famous Thinkpad laptops, had been installing a really nasty form of adware on those machines called Superfish. Many news stories started popping up about this, again, focusing on the adware. But putting adware on a computer, while ethically questionable and a general pain in the ass, is not the real problem here. The problem is that the adware in question, Superfish, has an astoundingly stupid way of working that effectively allows for a very easy man in the middle attack on any computer with the software installed, making it a massive security hole that is insanely dangerous.
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Lenovo accused of compromising user security by installing adware on new PCs
The information extracted by Graham can now be used to break the security on every compromised Lenovo computer. This leaves infected users essentially open to any eavesdropping if they are using the net on a public Wi-Fi account, and also enables future malware authors to convince Lenovo owners that their software is produced by a trusted vendor, such as Microsoft.
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Russian Researchers Uncover Sophisticated NSA Malware
Over the weekend Russian IT security vendor Kaspersky Lab released a report about a new family of malware dubbed “The Equation Family”. The software appears, from Kaspersky’s description, to be some of the most advanced malware ever seen. It is composed of several different pieces of software, which Kaspersky Lab reports work together and have been infecting computer users around the world for over a decade. It appears that specific techniques and exploits developed by the Equation Group were later used by the authors of Stuxnet, Flame, and Regin. The report alleges that the malware has significant commonalities with other programs that have been attributed to Western intelligence agencies; Reuters subsequently released an article about the report in which an anonymous former NSA employee claims that the malware was directly developed by the NSA.
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US and UK accused of hacking Sim card firm to steal codes
US and British intelligence agencies illegally hacked into a major manufacturer of Sim cards to steal codes and facilitate eavesdropping on mobiles, a US news website says.
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Snowden’s Revenge: New Mega-Spying Project Revealed
A giant cellphone surveillance program is just one of the dark NSA secrets being dragged out into the light, thanks to a certain whistleblower and a Russian cybersecurity firm.
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NSA, British spies hack Gemalto to tap mobile calls – Intercept
Digital security company Gemalto NV was hacked by American and British spies to steal encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications, news website Intercept reported, citing documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Sim card database hack gave US and UK spies access to billions of cellphones
International row likely after revelations of breach that could have given NSA and GCHQ the power to monitor a large portion of world’s cellular communications
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Edward Snowden reveals that NSA and GCHQ hacked SIM card manufacturer Gemalto: reports
British and American spies stole the encryption keys from the largest SIM card manufacturer in the world, according to a government document handed to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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How to paint yourself into a corner (Lenovo edition)
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Superfish: A History Of Malware Complaints And International Surveillance
Superfish, a little-known “visual search” and ad tech provider from Palo Alto whose CEO was once part of the surveillance industrial complex, is about to learn what it feels like to face the unwavering wrath of the privacy and security industries. Lenovo will take much of the blame for potentially placing users at risk by contracting Superfish to effectively carry out man-in-the-middle attacks on users to intercept their traffic just to get the firm’s “visual” ads up during customers’ web searches.
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Your Mobile Privacy is Under Threat Because of US and UK Spies
One of the “biggest Snowden stories yet” has arrived today, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Spies from the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and the United Kingdom’s Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) “hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe.” The information was obtained from top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
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Civil Rights
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Proposed Florida Body Camera Law Riddled With Exceptions At Behest Of Police Union
Florida’s legislators are pushing through bills mandating body camera use by the state’s law enforcement officers. So far, so good, except for the fact that law enforcement officers aren’t really looking for greater transparency or accountability, at least not according to Florida Police Benevolent Association chief Gary Bradford.
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Why a Reporter’s ‘Epic Rant’ on Twitter Gets No Argument Here
Mr. Risen, an investigative reporter for The Times, was writing in response to Mr. Holder’s statements in a National Press Club speech Tuesday defending the Obama administration’s record on press rights. Mr. Risen, who narrowly escaped jail time as he insisted on protecting a confidential source, begged to differ – in no uncertain terms.
Referring to the Obama administration as “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation,” Mr. Risen called the attorney general “the nation’s top censorship officer.”
Although the wording of the Risen tweets was outside the tacitly accepted norm for Times reporters on social media, The Times declined to criticize them and issued a statement in his support.
I followed up in a conversation with the standards editor, Philip Corbett, and some email correspondence with Mr. Risen.
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Did the US Prison Boom Lead to the Crime Drop? New Study Says No
Louisiana — a state whose motto is Union, Justice and Confidence — is known for many things. The Bayou State is the birthplace of jazz, Creole, and Cajun food, and New Orleans is the site of the country’s largest annual Mardi Gras Carnival. But as the Times-Picayune found in a major series years ago, Louisiana is also “the world’s prison capital,” with an incarceration rate that is “nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.”
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FBI Flouts Obama Directive to Limit Gag Orders on National Security Letters
Despite the post-Snowden spotlight on mass surveillance, the intelligence community’s easiest end-run around the Fourth Amendment since 2001 has been something called a National Security Letter.
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Yes, Eric Holder Does Do the Intelligence Community’s Bidding in Leak Prosecutions
The second-to-last witness in the government’s case against Jeffrey Sterling, FBI Special Agent Ashley Hunt, introduced a number of things she had collected over the course of her 7.5 year investigation into James Risen’s chapter on Operation Merlin. That included a few things — most notably two lines from Risen’s credit card records from 2004 — that in no conceivable way incriminated Sterling.
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Hacker Claims Feds Hit Him With 44 Felonies When He Refused to Be an FBI Spy
A year ago, the Department of Justice threatened to put Fidel Salinas in prison for the rest of his life for hacking crimes. But before the federal government brought those charges against him, Salinas now says, it tried a different tactic: recruiting him.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Net neutrality: UK Lords call for internet to be reclassified as a utility
THE HOUSE OF LORDS IS BACKING the idea of a free and gloriously open internet that is available to all, and is – rather less exciting sounding – reclassified as a utility.
The plans come on the heels of similar noises from the US where Title II reclassification is a hot and contentious topic.
Here we have the Lords releasing a report advocating that the government takes the internet and makes it a ;utility service’ much like it is in Estonia where it is considered a human right, and much as people like Tim Berners-Lee would appreciate.
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Former FCC Boss Turned Top Cable Lobbyist Michael Powell Blames Everyone But Himself For Current Net Neutrality Mess
You might recall that top cable industry lobbyist Michael Powell, formerly head of the FCC, got much of the current Title II debate rolling back in 2002 when he reclassified cable broadband as an “information service.” This effectively opened the door to a massive era of broadband deregulation Powell and friends at the time insisted would usher forth an immense new wave of broadband competition. If you’ve checked your broadband bill or oh, stepped outside lately, you may have noticed that this utopian broadband landscape never materialized.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Cerf Warns Of A ‘Lost Century’ Caused By Bit Rot; Patents And Copyright Largely To Blame
The main obstacles to creating software that can run old programs, read old file formats, or preserve old webpages, are patents and copyright. Patents stop people creating emulators, because clean-room implementations that avoid legal problems are just too difficult and expensive to carry out for academic archives to contemplate. At least patents expire relatively quickly, freeing up obsolete technology for reimplementation. Copyright, by contrast, keeps getting extended around the world, which means that libraries would probably be unwilling to make backup copies of digital artefacts unless the law was quite clear that they could — and in many countries, it isn’t.
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