08.23.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 9:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Predator drone shoots a Hellfire missile
Summary: How adult males (also known as “militants”) get killed by unmanned Linux-powered aircrafts, covertly flown by the CIA with NSA assistance
ONE of the regrettable uses of Linux is the assassination business of blowback experts at the CIA (those who ensure the terrorists keep hating us more and thus multiply through recruitment, necessitating higher black budget for the CIA and NSA).
Now that the CIA suffers major blowback in the press [1] (hundreds of articles confirming its role in the Iran coup following declassification) there is an attempt to stop further disclosures [2] and more violence [3] which does nothing more than add political enemies [4]. The CIA’s recent propaganda film, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, is getting criticised [5] not for its advocacy of torture (there are now movies in the pipeline to advocate surveillance and assassination, based on links we published in daily links) but for disclosing information selectively, not in order to serve justice but in order to drive agenda (more war, more aggression).
I have always found the use of Linux in predator drones absolutely gross. Before the migration the Linux these drones reportedly used Windows and failed on many levels due to that operating system (the British press had some reports on it half a decade ago). Linux is a lot more reliable, but its reliability in this case helps reliably kill people who are unknown adult males who engage in “suspicious activity” and are hence “imminent threat” in the eyes of the CIA. When you read about dead “militants” bear in mind that militant means adult male (or what appears like it after the body got too badly burned to be recognised). Only 2% of the deaths in drones strikes are confirmed to be deaths of Al-Qaeda leaders, as we’ve shown in recently-accumulated daily links. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The Historical Collections Division is the latest casualty of sequester cuts. The office handling Freedom of Information Act requests will take over the work.
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The drone terrorism perpetrated by the United States does not justify a counter terrorism by local actors. But when I see a child crying from the sound of a hum, or wetting his pants from the sight of an approaching drone, or being pulled out dead from the aftermath of a drone killing; when I hear that I find it hard to resist wondering.
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Sanaullah said that the federal government was trying to develop a consensus on national security issues including drone attacks. He said that the draft of the resolution should at least be amended so that it stated that the house supported the federal government’s efforts to end drone attacks.
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Prosecutors in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunal are pushing the judge to set a September 2014 trial date in the 9/11 case, a decision that could hinge on how deeply the defense is allowed to delve into the defendants’ treatment in secret CIA prisons.
A U.S. military judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, will hear arguments on the issue in a weeklong pretrial hearing that begins on Monday at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba.
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Posted in Europe at 9:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo from BBC Radio 4 Profile (fair use)
Summary: Further details about the crackdown on investigative journalism down in London
FINALLY we have some more facts. Jeremy Heywood, “a senior British civil servant who has been the Cabinet Secretary since 1 January 2012″ according to Wikipedia, was the lapdog of David Cameron in the fight against journalists in the UK. As The Guardian showed in recent articles [2,3], we in Britain fail to antagonise government abuse the same way US citizens do and Annie Machon, an MI5 whistleblower who had to escape the UK following her revelations (showing serious abuses by British intelligence), tries to raise awareness of the seriousness of all this [4]. Please help defend press freedom in the UK. Without it, we are all going to suffer (unless “we” includes plutocrats or people like Jeremy Heywood). Techrights very much depends on defence of journalism in the UK. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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David Cameron asked cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, the country’s most senior civil servant, to contact The Guardian about the classified material handed over by Edward Snowden, it has been reported.
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He was detained for the maximum period allowed under the draconian terms of Schedule 7 of the UK’s Terrorism Act (2000). His apparent “crime”? To be the partner of campaigning journalist Glenn Greenwald who broke the Edward Snowden whistleblowing stories.
Miranda’s detention has caused outrage, rightly, around the world. Diplomatic representations have been made by the Brazilian government to the British, UK MPs are asking questions, and The Guardian newspaper (which is the primary publisher of Greenwald’s stories), has sent in the lawyers.
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Posted in Site News at 9:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of some of the latest quantitative lies from the Espionage Department (also known as NSA)
THERE has been a lot that we accumulated about the NSA (in daily links) since the Snowden/Greenwald-led leaks began in early June. This is fantastic because it helps show what I have been writing about for years. No longer is this ‘paranoid’ or ‘conspiratorial’. No longer need I send people links to the proof, it’s all common knowledge now. The corporate press has got to cover it too in order to maintain credibility.
“They say they monitor just 1.6% of Internet traffic when in fact they go through 75% of the Net traffic routed through the US.”One story that stood out showed just how villainously deceptive the NSA executive branch can be. They like to pretend that there are just thousands of violations [3] per year [4] when in fact they are spying on all Americans (hence millions or billions of violations per year). They speak of “56,000 personal emails by Americans” (BBC [1] and other corporate press [2]) when in fact they’re watching and saving perhaps billions of E-mails per day. They say they monitor just 1.6% of Internet traffic when in fact they go through 75% of the Net traffic routed through the US.
As I’ve said elsewhere, based on the NSA’s record, assume everything the NSA says to be a lie until or unless proven otherwise. They’re even lying to the courts [5]. The estimates we find [6] are underestimates, still, as Bill Binney, former NSA staff and famous whistleblower, says around 20 trillion transactions are retained by the NSA with plans to keep it all for around 100 years. That’s what he said last year, so the numbers are much higher now (a new Utah-based datacentre has vast additional capacity).
The chief liar of the NSA is trying a PR approach [7] as Congresspeople grow impatient [8] and dirty tricks are revealed [9], going a long way into the past [10]. It is worth noting that the White House played along [11,12] with the NSA’s lies [13], which makes it complicit. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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A National Security Agency surveillance system illegally gathered up to 56,000 personal emails by Americans annually, declassified court documents show.
Officials revealed that a judge in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled the programme illegal in 2011.
The communications were between people with no links to terror suspects.
The US government faces mounting criticism over its surveillance operations after the leaks of US whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
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The analysts at the NSA spent years gathering tens of thousands of emails between US citizens in violation of the US constitution, as a component of a single (discontinued) data slurping program, the agency has revealed.
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According to a declassified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as of 2011, the US National Security Agency was “acquiring” more than 250 million “internet communications” each year under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) — the statute that allows the NSA to collect the content of internet communications. The order states that the “vast majority” of these communications were obtained from internet service providers under PRISM, and that only nine percent of of the total internet communications acquired by the NSA were part of its “upstream” collection practices, which pull data directly from telecommunications cables.
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In light of top-secret document leaks that show the U.S. government spied on people, the country’s Director of National Intelligence launches a Tumblr blog for greater transparency.
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Unlike the NSA’s surveillance efforts (zing!), Fitzpatrick’s bill is specifically targeted to problematic wording in the FISA Act, making a few changes to Section 501 subsection (b)(2)(a). Here’s how his proposed changes would alter the current wording. [Additions in bold, strikethru hopefully self-explanatory.]
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These sources confirmed that, “in some cases, [the NSA] retains the written content of e-mails sent between citizens within the US and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology.” Access to this information is granted at “more than a dozen” major Internet junctions on US soil, rather than sucked up exclusively from undersea or foreign cables.
As described by the paper, telecom companies send the NSA large streams of Internet traffic that are believed “most likely to contain foreign intelligence.” Then, it appears that the NSA decides what to keep from that stream based on both metadata and content of the communication, using “selectors” like e-mail addresses or IP addresses. “In making these decisions, the NSA can look at content of communications as well as information about who is sending the data,” the WSJ writes.
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Fresh off of a brand new series of document releases, including several that flat out admit to the NSA violating the US Constitution with its surveillance schemes and collecting broad swathes of data about ordinary Americans’ communications, the White House is quick with another statement.
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The White House on Wednesday denied that the National Security Agency (NSA) has domestic Internet surveillance program, with its reach even broader than U. S. intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed.
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Well, the National Security Agency has been caught lying through its back teeth now (yet again, perhaps, some might hasten to add). The trouble is that the NSA won’t have any teeth left after the people find out that the supposed surveillance of US citizens’ internet traffic being nothing more than a measly 1.6% of the sites that we visited and the communications sent is just a bare faced lie. It apparently turns out now that it is 75% at least of the sites that are visited by everyone in the country.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Ubuntu at 8:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Ubuntu takes the SDK route and why it’s reasonable to support Ubuntu Edge, which raised over ten million dollars so far (a new fund-raising record)
Based on some news from the end of the week [1], Ubuntu, Canonical’s common carrier, is promoting itself using an SDK, just like the tools which Canonical developed to boost development for the Ubuntu Edge smartphone. Despite the disgusting negativism in the press, e.g. [2,3], Edge is doing well and raising a lot of money. Mark Shuttleworth will carry on irrespective of the goal.
Ubuntu is hardly a guardian of software freedom, but we all ought to support Ubuntu Edge even if we don’t put our money in it. There is nothing to be gained by demoting a project that’s well-intentioned, unless it can gain only at the expense of more liberal software (Windows on the desktop and Mac OS on the desktop are as bad as it gets). █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Changes in Ubuntu will speed up the process of building apps and getting them approved for Software Center – but they could leave you more tied into the Linux distro’s software development kit (SDK).
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Within hours the phone had raised millions and is, in a way, the most successful crowdfunding project ever, breaking the $10,266,845 (£6,546,000) record set by the Pebble watch — but the campaign finishes on 22 August and the figure is still nearly $20 million (£12.75 million) shy of its target.
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Trying to raise $32 million via crowdfunding always looked overly ambitious. And indeed it has proved to be so. Canonical’s Ubuntu Edge Indiegogo campaign to build a smartphone designed for converged computing has fallen considerably short of its target, ending with the fixed funding project receiving nothing at all — which, when you’ve got pledges worth around $12 million, has got to hurt. The campaign ran from July 22 to August 21.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Red Hat at 8:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Google’s FOSS systems are starting to creep into the servers and desktops market
SERVERS that run GNU/Linux are typically using Red Hat’s operating system and its clones [1]. My Web sites, of which there are about twelve, all run Red Hat (shared hosting) and Techrights (dedicated) runs CentOS. At work we mostly use Debian, sometimes Ubuntu too.
What I noticed that’s curious this month is that Chrome is rising a lot in terms of usage in my personal site, schestowitz.com, with GNU/Linux also accounting for higher share (see image above, based on non-bot requests from August 1st to August 22nd). Interestingly enough, reveals a new article [2], Google’s ChromeOS is now being used to target the server with GNU/Linux. Could this be the beginning of a new trend? Is Google going to directly challenge Red Hat some time down the road?
For those who think that Red Hat and Fedora are losing the race, Korora 19 shows that there’s still interest in branching off Fedora [3], not just Ubuntu and Debian (the typical routine in recent years). █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Red Hat has dominated in providing “corporate production Linux” because it not only understands Linux, it understands corporate, and it understands production.
What does it mean to understand corporate?
They provide certification training and tests – RHCSA/RHCE/RHCA – and they’re not just guessing when they say that if you learn the material and pass those tests, you’re qualified to work in a particular capacity with RHEL.
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Wired posted an article yesterday profiling the creators of CoreOS, a minimal Linux server OS built from the combination of Docker and Google’s ChromeOS. I have been complaining for a long time that server installs were too bloated, and even though the minimal installs have taken care of much of that, the CoreOS project looks like they strip it down even more. Alex Polvi and his team are building a new, open way to build a datacenter that should have other commercial datacenter vendors worried.
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Today in Open Source: Is Korora 19 a better Fedora? Plus: Juicy facts about Debian Linux, and Football Manager 2014 comes to Linux!
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Novell at 8:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Sebastian Oliva
Summary: Linux is growing too fast, argues former Novell employee Greg Kroah-Hartman
Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, the famous Novell employee (and SUSE leader for about a year), is moving to Red Hat [1] and his former colleague at Novell, Greg Kroah-Hartman, wants to slow Linux development down [2] with some consent from Linus Torvalds [3].
These developments are interesting because they help show what former Novell employees are up to. Nothing nefarious in this case, but it’s worth keeping an eye open. █
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Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier was a regular name in Linux not so long ago. He first appeared on my radar writing for the different websites I visited. It seemed like he wrote for them all, even the ones I eventually began writing for myself. Later, he really solidified his hero status in my book by actually becoming a full-time Novell employee as community manager for openSUSE. But now, after a bit of a sabbatical, he’s traded in all his green t-shirts for red hats.
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There were two updates for a stable Linux kernel yesterday. Is the process too fast? Linux Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has a plan to slow it down.
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After problems with the last kernel, it seems there is a bit of a debate going on that Linux is coming out too fast and is not being properly tested.
The last release had a couple of significant bugs and had to be redone, something which Linux messiah Linus Torvalds agrees is not good enough. There are mutterings on the Linux blogs that versions are coming out too fast and without proper testing.
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Posted in Microsoft, Steve Ballmer at 8:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
So the Mafia don leaves without jail time as Mafia tactics are exposed even further
Summary: Interesting timing for Microsoft to announce the future departure of Ballmer, contributing to burial of massive news about Microsoft bribery in many countries around the world
FOLLOWING overwhelming unrest over Ballmer's decisions as CEO (including fraudulent financial reporting) this CEO — quite expectedly — is leaving, but the timing is interesting. As Simon Phipps, the head of the OSI, put it:
Ballmer to leave Microsoft
Honestly it’s about time and exactly what the company needs if it’s to get fixed. Let’s hope they get someone who will truly embrace open source rather than firewalling it and paying lip-service to it while secretly attacking it. That’s the change I have long said is needed to move beyond stage four of the journey.
The timing makes it sound like a potential decoy. Not only may Microsoft be facing multi-billion-dollar fines, but Ballmer himself may face jail time unless he flees and generates press buzz that hides the real news. What’s the real news? Microsoft’s sheer corruption again.
Ballmer is unlikely to be put in jail for racketeering and bribery because there is no justice, it’s a system that’s friendly to criminals who are allowed to get rich and never face consequences when caught (at worst a slap on their wrist). For a super-corrupt company like Microsoft (with track record to show it) that started its corruption under the leadership of Bill Gates it just makes sense to eliminate the old faces right now. And why? Well, some months ago we wrote about allegations of Microsoft bribery in China (a no-brainer, but this became a formal investigation, perhaps indicating the same is being done in the UK and elsewhere). There are bribes and gentle bribes and they are not unique to the Chinese market. Over the years we have covered many instances of Microsoft bribes, some of which qualify as “soft” or “gentle” bribes (like exchange of favours or deferred payments). Based on this explosive report, Microsoft is in the middle of a massive scandal that could land Ballmer in a jail cell. As one site put it:
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) bribe probe has now been linked to Russia and Pakistan, which indicates that the matter is actually not confined to just a few contracts but has a wider reach than was previously anticipated, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Notice a trend among the Microsoft boosters (or staff), who try to use the groomed villain, Bill Gates, to somehow paint a gentle picture of Microsoft in light of the news, trying to focus on Ballmer leaving. Phipps posted the video to show what a monster this man can be, whereas Slashdot‘s Microsoft Nick (Nick Kolakowski) already did some whitewashing for this criminal, as usual [1, 2, 3, 4].
“The controversial executive will step down within the next 12 months,” says the booster, but where is his coverage of the latest crimes of Microsoft? None at all. Slashdot gave up on news coverage when it hired a Microsoft mole like this. Watch how he adds nonsense like “During Ballmer’s tenure, Microsoft also launched the highly successful Windows 7″ while adding the obligatory grooming of Bill Gates, which Microsoft Nick habitually does.
These boosters are like hyenas hanging around a bigger predator, hoping to get a bite of some prey leftovers (the predators are Gates and Microsoft, the hyenas smell money and stick close to it). Too bad they miss the real news, which is massive criminal activity. One wonders if Ballmer’s mere announcement of prospective departure was timed to distract the press from other, far more massive news. As we wrote 4 years ago, "Steve Ballmer Should Not be Fired, He Should be Arrested".█
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Posted in Microsoft at 8:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Steven Sinofsky joins Silver Lake’s friends at Andreessen Horowitz and OpenLogic, which is run by a man from Microsoft, joins the Rogue Wave
When Microsoft destroyed Nokia we were not shocked because, given Elop’s history before Microsoft, we predicted Elop would be trouble wherever he lands since the moment he left Microsoft (well before joining Nokia, making it a vassal of Microsoft). A lot of those who depart from Microsoft proceed to polluting other organisations (public or private).
Sinofsky, who is no longer at Microsoft, has just joined a venture capital firm which is close to Silver Lake, the Microsoft proxy we have criticised a lot. It helps Microsoft abduct companies.
Speaking of abduction, the company run by a Microsoft veteran to distort FOSS (mostly by twisting facts) has just been taken over by Rogue Wave (aptly named). To quote the press release:
Rogue Wave Software announced today that it has acquired OpenLogic, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based open source software management solutions, support, and consulting. Broomfield, Colorado-based OpenLogic offers a platform, OpenLogic Exchange(OLEX), which enables software development teams to leverage the breadth and innovation of open source software.
Microsoft does not always need to infiltrate entities in order to influence them. When it comes to the NSA, for example, Microsoft just bends over by selling out its customers in exchange for government favours. More on government favours in the next post… █
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