When it comes to stability and performance, nothing can really beat Linux. This is why the U.S. Marine Corps leaders have decided to ask Northrop Grumman Corp. Electronic Systems to change the operating system of the newly delivered Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar (G/ATOR) from Windows XP to Linux.
Seems like a great idea to me. It makes sense to prepare inmates for life outside of prison with useful skills, and the Linux job market is certainly hot right now.
American intelligence agencies announced Friday their plans to develop and build a new superconducting supercomputer that will increase the current computing capacity while simultaneously reducing energy consumption and the physical footprint of the machines.
Besides the many Linux graphics driver changes for Linux 3.19, there’s many other non-graphics features out on the horizon in kernel land — some of which might land in Linux 3.19 but most of the other items are post-3.19 material. Linux 4.0 also isn’t likely far out.
A new version of the Linux kernel, 3.17.5, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman and it’s now the latest and most advanced version that you can get, at least for a few hours. The 3.18 branch is scheduled to make an appearance very soon.
Due out next week is a very significant update to AMD’s Catalyst Linux graphics driver as they continue to work towards the unified AMD Linux driver strategy.
While NVIDIA’s 346 Linux driver series is in beta with a great deal of improvements and new features, for those sticking to the 343.xx stable series there is out this Friday the 343.36 driver.
With Linux 3.18 likely coming out today, we can begin focusing more of our attention and testing on the code that will become the Linux 3.19 kernel over the weeks ahead. Once again, when it comes to the DRM graphics driver changes, there’s lots of exciting improvements.
It’s been a while since last running any open-source vs. closed-source Linux graphics driver benchmarks with AMD Kaveri APUs, but with being busy adding some Kaveri systems to the new Linux test farm, I ran some fresh Linux GPU driver tests on an AMD A10-7800 system. Here’s results on Ubuntu 14.10 — plus with Linux 3.18 and Mesa 10.5-devel — while compared to the latest Catalyst binary blob.
Here’s some more Linux 3.18 kernel benchmarks I did with the final release due out likely today. However, these results seem to be a bit odd.
With an Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system on an ASRock X99 Extreme3 motherboard with 16GB of DDR4 memory, 256GB Corsair Force LX SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 graphics I did some fresh benchmarks using the stable Linux 3.16 and 3.17 kernels. The stable vanilla kernels were compared to Linux 3.18 Git — all kernels obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.
As you may know, CDEmu is a tool to emulate an optical drive(CD/DVD ROMs) in Linux. Using this tool you can mount images like ISO, BIN, IMG, and MNF without the need of a physical drive. Automounting is also possible. This simple and useful was developed by a small group of friends named Robert Penz and Justus Schwartz. Originally, this app was named Virtual CD, and then was renamed to CDEMU back in 2007 due to trademark issues.
Uh, I meant to blog about this a while ago, but somehow, it got lost… Anyway, I was inspired by http://openid.aliz.es and intrigued by OpenID I set out to find an implementation that comes with an acceptable level of required effort to set up and run.
While there’s been signs for months that within Valve’s Dota 2 game that it’s transitioning from the Source Engine to Source Engine 2, it looks like Valve’s next-generation game engine will be fully utilized within this multiplayer online battle arena game in 2015.
Enter the Gungeon was revealed earlier today at the Sony keynote. It is a brand new gunfighting dungeon crawler that is set to come out in 2015 for PS4, PC, Mac and Linux from Devolver Digital and the development studio Dodge Roll. Take on the role of one of several Gungeoneers, each haunted by their past and looking for a brighter tomorrow, as you Enter the Gungeon. Set your sights on the Cult of the Gundead as you blast through hand-designed chambers of the Gungeon’s constantly evolving labyrinth of firepower.
Valve has released a new Beta version of the Steam client, and the developers have fixed a number of problems, especially for the newly added Broadcast feature that is still far from working properly.
Looks like Bad Juju’s acquisition of Desura will pay off for us Linux gamers soon. They tweeted to let people know the Desura client updates are currently in testing!
The platformer from developer Turtle Cream has some very interesting mechanics and a beautiful soundtrack and is a welcome addition to our platform for fans of the genre. It has been available for Linux since 24th November according to the official announcement on Steam, but we would have missed it had it not been for a tip from a reader.
This past week I’ve been carrying out a number of system installations using Antergos as an Arch-based distribution with its quick and easy GUI/CLI installer. In seeking somewhat of a stable/sane base of settings and default packages that’s easy to reproduce by others on independent systems yet still rolling-release with Arch, I’ve been happy with Antergos thus far.
The latest new open-source Linux desktop initiative is Budgie, a desktop focused on simplicity. The Budgie desktop is now undergoing possible review for inclusion into Fedora.
Budgie is the desktop environment designed for the Evolve OS Linux distribution. According to its developers, Budgie is “designed with the modern user in mind, it focuses on simplicity and elegance. A huge advantage for the Budgie desktop is that it is not a fork of another project, but rather one written from scratch with integration in mind.”
Making a quick pit stop to mark this milestone in my professional career: today is my 3-year anniversary at Red Hat! Time has certainly flown by and I really cannot believe that it has been three years since I joined this company.
Fedora 21 is the first release of the Fedora.Next initiative that separates Fedora out into three products: Fedora Cloud, Fedora Server, and Fedora Workstation. These new Fedora “products” are fairly self explanatory and it’s the Fedora 21 Workstation that most users will be after who want Fedora as a desktop operating system.
The last two days have been quite busy for the Fedora infrastructure team. Most of us are indeed meeting up in Raleigh, in the Red Hat tower down-town and together with Matt Domsch, the original developer of MirrorManager, we have been on MirrorManager2.
Not to be confused with the Dyson vacuum cleaners, Dyson OS is an attempt at becoming a general purpose operating system based on Debian while using the Solaris-derived Illumos kernel.
Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses the Enlightenment desktop environment to provide a unique user experience, is now at version 2.4.6 and the developers are getting closer to a stable release.
So the real issue is if the Ubuntu Community wants to tackle it is not leadership or governance because we have brilliant leaders and members of governance but instead it is making contributors feel like they are stakeholders again and kept in the loop. Mind you, the Canonical Community Team has repeatedly promised to help Canonical employees get better at keeping the community in the loop even promising such at UDS-P but my experience has been they never really got better.
Finally, I think an Ubuntu Foundation is still a great idea and could create some harmony between Canonical’s commercial interests and the community interests of the project. Projects that have had companies controlling the project have never had great success at sustaining a community because the commercial interests always win at the end of the day.
The UbuTab has already raised $15,026 of its $36,000 goal at the time of writing, with 20 more days to go. The $245 and $275 early bird tiers are already sold out, but interested backers can still pledge $290 or more. The crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo will close on Dec. 26, and the first UbuTab units are set to start shipping in March 2015. For more details about this tablet, check out the video below.
Canonical has been working on the Mir display server for some time, although most of their efforts have been made towards the mobile platform. They are now looking to optimize it for desktop use and nothing reflects the progress made more than a famous game running on Mir.
The Ubuntu Touch operating system officially supports the Nexus 4 devices and it will be out soon on some Meizu MX 4 hardware, but that’s about it. There are some ports in the works, like the one for Nexus 5, but they are not complete.
Canonical is looking to improve the core apps that are already available for Ubuntu Touch and is organizing a new Core Apps Hack Days event that should galvanize the efforts of more developers towards this platform.
There are three different versions: Trisquel, Trisquel Mini and Trisquel Sugar TOAST. Trisquel is the main version and the ISO weighs in at 1.5 GB, the Trisquel Mini ISO is just 600 MB, and Trisquel Sugar TOAST is a 500 MB educational spin.
Clement Lefebvre, the leader of the Linux Mint project, has announced that the Linux Mint 17.1 OEM ISO images have been made available and they are now ready for download.
Yes, I hope it’s true that Samsung will be giving back to the open source community. But seeing is believing, and I prefer to wait a while…perhaps a good long while…to see if Samsung’s real-world actions match its rhetoric and public relations efforts.
The following video shows Samsung embarking on a journey. The journey is Open Source which was started 18 months ago with a single member, Linux and FOSS advocate Ibrahim Haddad. Fast forward to today and there are over 40 people at the new Open Source Innovation Group, which includes 20 developers, devoted full-time to working on upstream projects and helping the inroads of Open Source into Samsung.
There are many Android users currently running KitKat (Android OS 4.4.4) on their devices, but long for the Lollipop (Android OS 5.0) update. Phone Arena reports that less than 0.1 percent of all Android devices are running Lollipop, and this is on a global scale. There has been a lot of speculation that some devices, such as the HTC One M7, the HTC One M8, the LG G3, and Sony Xperia series, will be the first in line to receive the Lollipop update, but this update has yet to rollout entirely for these devices.
Android: If you’re having trouble figuring out that complicated math problem, AutoMath will solve it for you and even give you step-by-step instructions—all just by pointing your camera at the equation.
Samsung’s flagship smartphone will soon be getting the latest version of Android, which Google has been calling its biggest mobile software update yet.
The OSI Board met in San Francisco, CA USA on November 11th and 12th, 2014 with a focus on strengthening the organization’s current outreach efforts and building new bridges between open source communities. The Board was excited to review five new applications for Affiliate Membership as well as implement several new initiatives to help drive Individual Membership through the recognition of various roles and levels of access among our community. This included new Individual Membership discounts for students, volunteers working on OSI supported activities, those already members of OSI Affiliate organizations, members of Free Software Foundation and complimentary memberships based on need.
Pydio 6.0 an open source file sharing solution that is said to offer “tight control of information” on the scale demanded by enterprises and service providers.
These include LibreOffice and OpenOffice for front-office productivity tools, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Ingres for databases, Pentaho for decision support, SugarCRM and Hipergate for customer relationship management, Apache Lucene, Opentext, Filenet, and Documentum for content management, and RedHat JBoss as an application server.
While open source applications specifically for the core functions of the insurance industry are still few and far between, there are a few options, such as OpenUnderwriter.
The main issue with open source is that while the software provides all the components needed for IT operations, expertise is needed to pull it all together for the business. But there’s always a good case to be made for open source, and often, this comes right from commercial IT vendors themselves. Prashant Parikh of CA Technologies, for instance, recently posted the reasons why open source makes sense.
However, and as paradoxical as it may be, I own a ZTE Open Firefox OS phone, which I use basically to check my email and calendar on the go, quickly browse a web page, and receive messages from family members.
I practically never use the function that gives the device its name (telephone), that, is, making calls. I see my phone as a tiny tablet thingie and use it as such.
But today, I had to take care of my 4-year-old daughter. It was raining and she is recovering from a bad flu, so going out was out of the question. The cable was not working, so no TV for her… which she did not really mind. But she wanted to use her computer to see her favorite videos online and we had no connection.
What to do? I used the phone as a hotspot to share its Internet connection with my laptop.
I also spent some time talking to folks about Firefox in Ubuntu and rebranding Iceweasel to Firefox in Debian (fingers crossed something will happen here in 2015). Also it was great to participate in discussions around making all of the Firefox channels offer more stability and quality to our users.
I used to be a big fan of Firefox, and I still use it for certain things. But it just doesn’t have the mindshare that it used to have back when it’s big claim to fame was being the alternative to Internet Explorer. Mobile has been where the growth is, and many mobile users have gravitated to Safari, Chrome and other browsers on their phones and tablets.
Mozilla has been staunchly opposed to an iOS version of its Firefox browser for a while. It wants to use its own web engine, but Apple will only let companies use its in-house code in the name of security. However, the organization is clearly having a change of heart — VP Jonathan Nightingale has revealed that Mozilla wants to bring Firefox to iOS. He didn’t say how it would happen, but it’s most likely that the company will use Apple’s engine and layer a custom interface on top, like Google does with Chrome. We’ve reached out to Mozilla and will let you know if it can say more.
DevAssistant 0.10.0 is sort of pre-1.0.0, so for next release, we’re planning to go from Beta to Stable. That’s a big promise, but I think at this point DevAssistant can afford that. There will be some backwards incompatible changes between 0.10.0 and 1.0.0, but after that we’ll keep things stable until 2.0.0. In addition to that, we’re planning a major GUI overhaul – basically we’ll rewrite it from scratch, since we want it to look completely different. We’re working with Mo Duffy on the design and while it’s not finished yet, some preliminary sketches can be found at Mo’s fedorapeople page.
Makers and hobbyists that enjoy building electronic projects may be interested in this pocket sized open source CMC 3-axis drawing robot called the Piccolo that can draw pictures up to 50mm square.
According to Bienkowski’s report, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson, Cathy Milbourn, writes that of the seven pesticides examined, “only aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are still registered and in use.” The EPA cancelled the registrations of ethylene dibromide, 2,4,5-T, dieldrin, and parathion, Milbourn said. Aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are undergoing EPA review.
China, the world’s top producer of rice and wheat, is seeking to cap the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that have helped to contaminate large swathes of its arable land and threaten its ability to keep up with domestic food demand.
More than 19 percent of soil samples taken from Chinese farmland have been found to contain excessive levels of heavy metals or chemical waste. In central Hunan province, more than three quarters of the ricefields have been contaminated, government research has shown.
I was disturbed to read in the Guardian that the UK government may be wavering on introducing plain packs for cigarettes. Failing to do so before the General Election would be seen as a huge victory for the tobacco companies, and have knock-on effects around the world.
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As you know, what is particularly interesting about these cases is that they use the highly controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process in order to claim an indirect expropriation of property. Since the company is doing this through subsidiaries – one in Switzerland, the other in Hong Kong – it is not even clear whether those cases can proceed. However, it is evident that one of the main reasons Philip Morris is taking this route is to intimidate other countries thinking about bringing in plain packs measures. Indeed, New Zealand has put its own plans on hold pending the result of the Australian case, which shows that strategy is having its effect.
North Korea on Sunday denied claims that it had hacked into Sony Pictures, calling the allegations a “false rumor” spread by South Korea.
The U.S. film company had come under cyber attack late last month after a series of threats from North Korea for its comedy movie “The Interview,” in which the CIA plots to assassinate the country’s young leader Kim Jong-un.
A soon-to-be-released comedy film about a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will likely be a “blockbuster” thanks to the strong protests Pyongyang has raised about it, the U.S. human rights envoy said Friday.
On Tuesday, it appears that OEN was hacked. An article that was not submitted by an editor, not submitted through the queue and not submitted by a trusted author, was published by someone who signed up the same day. The article reported that a hacker group, Cyberberkut, had hacked the phone of a member of Joe Biden’s diplomatic entourage to Ukraine.
The anomaly– an article published outside the usual routes– led me to investigate and discover that one of the IP addresses the submitter used was associated with malware– SQL insertion, spam, even blackmail.
I checked the name of the purported author and found someone in Ukraine with that name. But the photo used in the author ID did not match. I did a reverse image search using tineye.com and there were no other copies anywhere. I hid the article and checked google Webmaster tools, which is my first go-to place to check for malware on the site. Our webmaster also checked his tracking system. No malware was detected. I had already removed one image from Reuters because it violated copyrights. Vidya removed another image that had been included and a link, because they are higher risk for SQL insertion of malware.
In 2012, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company and Qatar’s RasGas were hit by a virus known as Shamoon that damaged tens of thousands of computers. In 2013, more than 30,000 PCs at South Korean banks and broadcasting companies were hit by a similar attack by a virus dubbed DarkSeoul malware.
In July 2014 Haneen Zoabi, the first Arab Israeli woman to be elected to the Israeli legislative body, the Knesset, was banned by the Knesset Ethics Committee from all Knesset activities. As Lahav Harkov reported in October 2014, this was a direct response to her declaration that the June kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers (later found murdered) was not an act of terrorism.
[...]
They covered Zoabi’s initial suspension and followed her story of failed appeals to the Knesset and the High Court. Corporate news sources such as CNN and the New York Times, on the other hand, have not reported on any aspect of the matter, while Al-Jazeera America briefly mentions Zoabi’s suspension at the end of an article about Hamas’ terms for a ceasefire.
The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with help from classified CIA support as well as cloak-and-dagger cheerleading from distant corners of the world, Milton Friedman in Chicago and Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C.
Lethal aid to Ukraine has been authorized by recently passed United States House Resolution 758, which calls for President Barack Obama to send both lethal and non-lethal aid to the Ukrainian military. If the U.S. Senate passes similar legislation, it’s possible Obama may choose to escalate the confrontation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The American people ought to realize — and critically respond to — the dangers involved in two directions of national-security policy that their government is pursuing:
1) It is escalating the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (while extending its war in Afghanistan), and 2) discarding a previously espoused disarmament agenda in order to push a “massive modernization of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines,” to cost beyond $1 trillion over 30 years.
These are concerns not only of Americans. They also affect the rest of the world’s peoples.
Not only that, Mr. Aftergood found out the National Archives and Records Administration had already offered tentative approval in August of the plan to — as a spy might put it — disappear the email of every worker but the C.I.A.’s top 22 managers, three years after they left the agency.
One of Britain’s oldest oil companies BP could be about to be sold to its biggest rival for a fiver per share.
The rumoured deal, if realised, would complete one of the most ignominious falls for the once great Persian Oil company that powered Britain’s Navy to victory during the First World War.
Methane gas, a main component linked to damaging climate change, is being released in record amounts in the Four Corners region where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. The Four Corners regions is one of the prime location for fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock layers deep within the earth. A joint study by researchers at the University of Michigan and NASA finds that the environmental impacts of fracking are more significant than previously documented. With the help of a new satellite instrument — the European Space Agency’s SCIAMACHY — a team at University of Michigan has been able to get regional methane measurements over the entire United States back in 2009. Using this tool, they were able to identify the hotspot at the Four Corners. The footprint is so large it is visible from space.
Currently the official government measure of poverty under-represents the number of poor in the United States. The seemingly simple formula, created in the 1960s, has set the national poverty threshold for decades. Last year the official poverty threshold was about $23,600 for a family of two adults and two children. Yet our official poverty yardstick fails to recognize the difference in standards of living across the United States. Whether a family lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming or San Francisco, California, where the average housing costs are 225% higher than Cheyenne, the government standard makes no adjustment for regional variations in cost of living.
It has the Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Napa Valley wineries. It has something else, according to the Census Bureau. It’s the poorest state in the world’s largest economy.
Market Watch columnist Brett Arends wrote that China has surpassed America as the number one economy, a move he claims may lead to a collapse of U.S. political and military hegemony. But does China truly have the strongest economy in the world?
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We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A.
The ILO report’s key chart below summarizes the key wage results of global capitalism over the last decade. Economic growth, rising real wages, and rising standards of living are the economic reality of China. Economic crisis, stagnant wages, and deepening inequalities of income and wealth are the economic realities for western Europe, the US, and Japan.
I’ve found that the conspiracy theories spread most widely — and the ones that seem plausible to many, unfortunately — are those based on current headlines and often propagated by public figures such as politicians, celebrities and media figures. They travel by word-of-mouth at light speed and become “a known fact.” These theories are often believed by those who assume there must be a coherence behind world events and occurrences don’t just happen randomly. Using that as our criteria, here are the most insidious conspiracy theories of 2014.
Though this compendium is strangely lacking in frogs or any other animals (perhaps they’re catalogued elsewhere), it is a list of the new pornography restrictions that the UK government—through the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014, something I’d never heard of before today—introduced on 1 December to ‘safeguard children.’ Which is the same reason five major UK Internet service providers (ISPs) gave for blocking my own website, even though it’s more about literature, publishing, and current affairs than it is about pornography. (Most of these ISPs unblocked the site when I told them that there were no words on it that could be ‘deemed sensitive to a young audience.’)
Continuing on its recent censorship-happy path, the U.K. government amended regulations this week to prohibit online porn from depicting a variety of erotic activities. Now-illicit acts range from the very specific (female ejaculation; “spanking, caning, and whipping beyond a gentle level”) to the incredibly broad (“verbal abuse”). But basically, the U.K. has banned BDSM and certain forms of fetish porn—or at least, charging money for that sort of porn.
As you might have already heard, an act of state censorship has been declared against British pornography in the guise of innocuous regulation. But what you might not know is that it has also marked the first stage in a campaign to impose global trade sanctions. Strangely, this proposition has received less coverage.
Let us say that we have not ourselves suffered from the Censorship at all. We have never submitted, and have never been asked to submit, any article to the Press Bureau. Such censorship as has been exercised in our columns has been the purely voluntary censorship which is exercised at all times, whether in war or in peace, by every editor who has any sense of public duty, and that remark, we believe, applies to the whole British Press, daily and weekly. We have, of course, constantly asked ourselves whether it would be wise on general grounds to make this or that comment, or whether we ought to refrain from comment which we thought sound in itself because we knew or believed it to run counter to the Government view, and to be likely to interfere with their action and policy. Our feeling was that, as the Government and not we were responsible for the conduct of the war, it was our business as good citizens to support their action, even when we did not think it wise. There can be only one driver of a coach, and as long as he is on the box he must be trusted, and no effort must be made to jog his elbow or snatch at the reins. For example, there are certain things which we believe it would be to the public interest to say about foreign States, and which it would be practically impossible for the Government to suppress even under the most exaggerated interpretation of the rights of the Censor ; but these comments we have not made on the ground just given—that it is the Government who are responsible for foreign affairs, and we must not do anything which in their opinion, whether right or wrong is no matter, would injure or weaken them in the difficult task before them.
Internet users in Russia and Turkey have been subjected to the greatest increase in web censorship over the past year, according to the latest Freedom on the Net survey.
When state officials seek to censor online speech, they’re going to use the quickest and easiest method available. For many, copyright takedown notices do the trick. After years of lobbying and increasing pressure from content industries on policymakers and tech companies, sending copyright notices to take media offline is easier than ever.
The government crackdown on the media during the anti-government protest and corruption scandals of last year and the two elections this year have led to the growth of a number of independent news portals as an alternative source of information for many in Turkey.
The issue of UK citizens being stripped of their nationality has not been well covered, especially in major US news outlets. For example, since 2003 the New York Times has published only three stories on the topic, while the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today have published just one story each, for a total of just six stories over the course of eleven years in major US newspapers. Instead, significant coverage of this issue comes from the independent sources, such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which maintains an ongoing series of reports under the title, “Citizenship Revoked.”
Secretary of state John Kerry has asked Senator Dianne Feinstein to “consider” the timing of the expected release of a long-awaited report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Dianne Feinstein of California, is soon expected to release its summary of the so-called CIA Torture Report, the committee’s four-year-long investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era torture practices. Release of the summary is the result of months of wrangling and negotiating with the White House on what would be released to the public and when—and it will likely be heavily redacted. During an interview conducted on Friday, November 21, by Esquire writer at large Scott Raab, outgoing senator Mark Udall of Colorado, who lost his reelection race on November 4, once again said that if the report is not released in a way he deems transparent, he would consider all options to make it public. In this excerpt from the interview, Raab asks Udall if he will read the document into the record on the floor of the Senate before he leaves in January, an act for which he cannot be prosecuted.
These are boom times for national security reporters, with government surveillance becoming a major topic after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of NSA documents, but one of the most well-known journalists on the intelligence beat, Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal, has decided to throw in the towel and join the Dark Side—in Gorman’s case, a global communications company called Brunswick, where she will reportedly focus on privacy and data security.
Gorman has done very solid reporting for the Journal and her previous employer, The Baltimore Sun. She has been prolific–and not just on the printed page. It turns out that she has had a lot of correspondence with the Central Intelligency Agency’s public affairs office, 246 pages of which were provided to us under a Freedom of Information Act request. We published the emails without comment earlier this year, as part of a story about reporter Ken Dilanian’s eyebrow-raising interchanges with the CIA, but in the event Gorman or her employers need a copy of her correspondence with our spymasters (perhaps the Journal has already revoked her access to its computers), we are re-upping them.
It’s colorful reading—Gorman shows a lot of interest in learning about the CIA’s gym facilities (“I was just told that the facilities at the black sites were better than the ones at CIA”), and a year to the day after the killing of Osama bin Laden she cheerily began an email to the agency by asking, “So do I wish you a ‘happy anniversary’ today’?” There’s also this mysterious missive she sent the CIA about an apparent meeting she had with an agency official: “What prompted my guest to leave so suddenly? Bat phone rang twice, and then he excused himself?” And a word of warning to her next boss at Brunswick—watch what you say, because Gorman, when asking the agency for guidance on a rumor that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had been killed, explained to the CIA that the info came from the editor of her paper “but his tips aren’t always accurate.”
The US Senate’s intelligence committee should release as planned its report summary on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s detention and interrogation program, Human Rights Watch said today. The White House’s expressed support for the release has been undermined by statements from the State Department raising concerns over the timing of the release and possible foreign policy implications.
The 51-year-old doctor was sent to Washington by voters furious with a system that kept swelling the national debt, and anxious over what Paul sees as government zeal for war and encroachment on American civil liberties.
The full report runs 6,700 pages, covering the committee’s review of 6.2 million pages of documents from the CIA and the Defense Department. Feinstein met fierce resistance from the CIA during the entire investigation, and now with less than a week before she hands the Intelligence Committee gavel to North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, she is battling the White House over its refusal to declassify the report.
The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.
Mass protests in New York were stretching into their third day when a new grand jury was announced on Friday. Not for the case of Eric Garner—a previous grand jury’s decision earlier this week not to indict the officer seen choking him on film before he died sparked the current protests. The latest grand jury will investigate the death of Akai Gurley, another unarmed black man who was killed by a police officer months after Garner’s death, in what the department says was an accidental shooting.
“Black lives matter” is the rallying cry of the burgeoning nationwide movement against police killings. The Associated Press (12/5/14), covering that movement, has produced a perfect example of what journalism looks like when black lives don’t matter.
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Or even to make the basic medical point that being able to talk is a sign that you don’t need the Heimlich maneuver–not that you don’t need a cop to stop administering a notoriously lethal chokehold.
You don’t get any of those points in the article, because AP didn’t feel any need to quote (or, seemingly, talk to) anyone who thought that the life of Eric Garner was more important than the feelings of New York Police Department officers. Because, one has to assume, to AP black lives don’t matter.
Oh, and if you need to you can move your Kindle books over to Marvin via Calibre by removing the DRM. I, of course, do not advise you to do this one way or the other. It’s entirely your choice and may be affected by whatever the relevant laws are for that sort of thing.
Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“That’s why I am president!” –Benoît Battistelli in self-centric mood
Summary: Battistelli’s Nixon moment and the evasive nature of his approach towards external delegations that are troubled by his behaviour
THE EPO is a rotten institution where Željko Topić, Benoît Battistelli and other cronies of theirs basically oust everyone who does not agree with them or is tasked with a process of regulation/oversight. It’s more than an attitude issue. Not to be overly dramatic here, there should be toppling, and the sooner the better. The leadership is the problem, not its many critics. See what we wrote about Battistelli overthepastfew months. We attached sensitive documents to prove or at least strongly support our allegations. Battistelli’s deputy is even worse than Battistelli and he faces many criminal charges which he is eager to hide from his colleagues. What we have currently at the EPO is "Balkan standards" (to borrow a phrase from a respected person who is familiar with the culprits). This phrase alludes to corruption and it mostly relates to Željko Topić’s actions, not just his boss and colleague, the full-of-himself “President” Battistelli (some law/patent blogs sarcastically comment on the capitalisation of the word “President”, which he seemingly deems his new first name).
Battistelli and Topić are out of control. There are numerous complaints and calls for investigation for they reign like tyrants and they are hardly even hiding it. They are wasteful (wasting European tax money) and subservient to interests other than Europe’s. No wonder their staff hates them with a passion, let aside those who have to interact with them.
Techrights is now in possession of recordings where Mr. Battistelli gets grilled by delegations (people representing part of the European Union). Techrights has studied the recordings and produced this Ogg-formatted file, which most Web browsers may automatically embed below (if not, download and playback should be possible).
The audio was recorded at a meeting with delegations of the Administrative Council (which we wrote aboutbefore).
“Those who surround him join in the response squad, suppressing the delegations or preventing them from receiving any real answers.”Apart from the megalomaniac “that’s why I am president” there is a lot of stuff worth listening to, especially the nature of the concerns raised by the delegations and the response (of lack thereof) from Battistelli, EPO President, to these. Those who surround him join in the response squad, suppressing the delegations or preventing them from receiving any real answers. The audio is full of examples of this. Just because there are ‘too many’ issues doesn’t mean that Battistelli is obliged to address none.
“At the beginning,” tells us one who listened to the recording, “one can hear an intervention of the Slovenian delegation. It says that the EPO is not a company on the stock exchange and should focus on quality and careful handling of human resources. Battistelli insults and threatens the delegation. Then, Battistelli says that the career system will make “hundreds of millions for the office” and that “the Office should not care about FR, UK and DE law” but rather think only in terms of “what is good for the office”.”
Yes, this is typical Battistelli. He is very aggressive against critics and where possible he sacks or at the very least threatens them. There is a pattern here. In future parts of this long series (guaranteed to go on well into 2015) we will show more of Battistelli’s abusive behaviour, Topić’s allegedly criminal scandals, and output from the internal uprise (there are very strong sentiments within the EPO against Topić and Battistelli and one of them is internally compared to Vladimir Putin). █
Summary: Putting in context some of the poor reporting (or whitewash) regarding Microsoft’s bribe (disguised as “partnership”) to Barnes & Noble
TECHRIGHTS sincerely regrets to report that the media is letting down the historical record, letting down facts, and ultimately letting down Free software, which has been under a massive patent attack from Microsoft since the Microsoft-Novell deal (November of 2006). While the corporate press would have us believe that Microsoft now “loves” GNU/Linux and is embracing FOSS (like a python embraces sheep maybe), the truth could not be further from that. Day after day this form of propaganda or conditioning would have us believe that white is black and black is white. It’s the same in technology as it is in politics.
Microsoft’s hatred of GNU/Linux and FOSS is best understood, objectively, by looking at Microsoft’s actions, especially backroom deals that it hides from journalists or prevents (through abuse and trolling) journalists from revealing to the public. One cannot judge an action by assessing only what the subject of scrutiny presents. Microsoft is great at media manipulation and today’s example is an excellent one. History is being rewritten before our eyes.
“Several years down the line the press suffers amnesia and something that resembles Nokia revisionism (blaming Nokia rather than Microsoft for Nokia’s demise).”Several years ago we explained why Microsoft’s ‘partnership’ with Barnes & Noble was essentiallyabribeagainst Linux. Groklaw covered this repeatedly in about half a dozen long articles. Several years down the line the press suffers amnesia and something that resembles Nokia revisionism (blaming Nokia rather than Microsoft for Nokia’s demise).
Truthfully, we have already said almost everything that there is to be said about the latest news, but the CBS-owned CNET has just published a peculiar piece with Microsoft’s statement embedded. It’s revisionism from Don Reisinger, who relays the most omissions-filled story we have found so far (no need for an extensive articles roundup here). Absolutely nothing is said about the patent battle that Microsoft tried to end as it put in jeopardy the whole racket operation that Microsoft had been running against many companies. Nothing! It makes it sound like an innocent ‘deal’ where Barnes & Noble is the loser and Microsoft is the supposed ‘rescuer’.
In our assessment, which may seem blunt, Barnes & Noble should take Microsoft to court again, both for extortion and for bribery (intended to hide the extortion and keep it going). Here is Reisinger’s ‘article’ acting as a Microsoft platform with Microsoft taking points:
“As the respective business strategies of each company evolved, we mutually agreed that it made sense to terminate the agreement,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement, providing little insignt into the decision to nix the marriage with Barnes & Noble.
Translation: we no longer needed to suppress our victim, which we had been blackmailing, so we swiftly went away, having left in tatters yet another so-called ‘partner’. We successfully completed a “divide and rule” Mafia routine, accomplishing sustainable of our profitable, fear-inducing racket.
This it was not a “partnership” as Microsoft boosters try to label it; it’s a disguise for a bribe to be passed over and stay in tact while the company dies and is no longer willing to battle Microsoft in court over the blackmail from Microsoft’s Mafia thugs.
News about the end of Microsoft’s software patent extortion schemes is being used to broadcast old talking points. OEMs big and small are ending their “deals” with Microsoft in the wake of recent US court decisions and the complete failure of Apple’s “thermonuclear” patent assault on Android. Now that we start to hear about Barnes and Noble, the Microsoft press is cranking up and people might be tempted to wade through endless chains of Microsoft nonsense. Go straight to your favorite search engine and read through Groklaw or Techrights instead.
Microsoft booster, Peter Bright, reports the end of the Barnes and Noble software patent extortion. The article is relatively fact and history free but the news has stirred up all sorts of misinformation, as is always the case when Microsoft destroys things. That’s a shame because the B&N case taught us a great deal about Microsoft’s extortion tactics and how they ruin companies.
Barnes and Noble was unusual because the company initially refused Microsoft and refused to sign a non disclosure agreement. When they fought Microsoft’s advances, they were free to tell the world what was happening. Groklaw and Techrights followed the case closely. It only ended when Microsoft paid B&N a $300 million dollar bribe to settle.
What we didn’t know was just how much Microsoft profits from its patent deals from any single vendor. Now we do. In 2013 alone, Microsoft made a billion dollars from its Samsung Android patent licensing deal alone.
What B&N really showed us is conveniently hidden behind a cloud of Microsoft press bullshit. They proved it was better to fight Microsoft’s flimsy patents and that licensing deal speculation is pure hogwash. How could anyone believe Microsoft is paid some money per device when it’s obvious that B&N was paid to shut up and no one else is talking? That’s the magic of Microsoft press perception management.
I have a feeling that the only thing keeping Microsoft out of bankruptcy is US government money. Besides the usual flow of government and big dumb company spending, we know that Microsoft got their share of “bail out” in the 2008 mortgage fraud meltdown and wealth transfer. We also know that Microsoft has been getting their share of NSA money which, of course, was carefully obfuscated in annual reports.
To summarise, Barnes & Noble is not just a victim of a Microsoft ‘partnership’. It was first the victim of Microsoft racketeering, whereupon it challenged Microsoft in court and then received a large bribe from Microsoft to allow Microsoft to carry on the racket (against companies other than Barnes & Noble).
And some say (and even insist) that Microsoft has changed…
Microsoft and the Mafia share a lot more than the first letter. █
CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi certainly got the attention of the Docker community on Monday when he announced Rocket, his company’s alternative to the Docker container file format and runtime. But just what is Rocket and what does it offer that Docker doesn’t?
LINUX IS WINNING cloud market share in the enterprise, according to the Enterprise End User Trends Report 2014 just released by the Linux Foundation.
The report was based on a survey of 774 members of the Linux Foundation’s End User Council and others by the Linux Foundation along with Yeoman Technology Group, with more than 75 percent of the large enterprises surveyed using Linux as their primary cloud platform, fewer than 24 percent of organisations primarily using Windows and less than two percent primarily using proprietary Unix.
The Linux 3.18 kernel is expected to be released this weekend and with this major update to the kernel are — as usual — an exciting number of changes and new features.
Libinput 0.7 is now available and this input library used by Wayland and other environments is nearly at feature parity to the current X Server based input stack.
Earlier this week I posted some Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. 14.04 LTS vs. 14.10 benchmarks that focused on the overall system performance aside from the graphics. In this article are the OpenGL results for the three releases of Ubuntu Linux for the Radeon (R600g) Gallium3D driver.
BioShock Infinite, an FPS developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games, might be getting a Linux release very soon. This has been revealed by the entry on the Steam database.
While many Linux gamers are waiting for Civilization: Beyond Earth to premiere for Linux, if you’re an ATI/AMD or Intel Linux graphics driver user you might be out of luck.
Earlier this week I wrote about Aspyr Media running into severe issues with the AMD and Intel Linux GPU drivers in terms of bad rendering with the Civilization: Beyond Earth game they’ve been porting to Linux. The good news is that Intel and AMD are now involved and working to get these issues resolved.
2K Games have officially announced that their much loved Bioshock Infinite will be available on Linux early next year. The first hints were picked up by a redditor, who saw new string updates to the game make multiple references to the Linux platform.
Big telecom companies like AT&T have made it clear to information-technology vendors they want more flexible options for their massive networks to meet demand for new services and lower costs. They’ve vowed to remake their networks using bare-bones computing equipment controlled by open-source software.
The CentOS project is beginning to produce monthly re-spins of CentOS 7 that contain all of the updated packages introduced this month. This new CentOS Linux rolling media approach will make it easier to install a fully-updated EL7 system with having to install just minimal updates after the installation.
As much as I love Debian, whenever I try to do anything complicated with disk partitioning, I run into trouble. Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer is pretty good, too. But considering the bad press that Fedora/RHEL’s Anaconda installer has gotten over the past few years, once you get to know it, you can do installs very quickly and efficiently.
While many Linux users still cringe over hearing Imagination Technologies due to their shoddy Linux graphics driver history with the PowerVR series and lack of open-source friendship, their MIPS Creator CI20 development board just became available for sale and in the months ahead we’ll see how their Linux support evolves.
A Finland-based firm is offering a modular smartphone that’s simpler than Google’s Project Ara. The open-source device is slated to hit the market in the latter half of 2015.
Samsung hasn’t had much luck with the last two versions of its Galaxy phone. The company has lost market share to various competitors including Apple and Xiaomi. Now it looks like Samsung is trying to reboot its Galaxy phone franchise.
Various reports have claimed that Samsung is designing its next-gen top Android handset from scratch in an attempt to reinvent its flagship smartphone, as the previous Galaxy S5 and Galaxy S4 failed to really impress buyers. A new report from Chinese publication cnmo.com suggests that the Galaxy S6 might have already been spotted in AnTuTu, with the benchmark app having possibly revealed the phone’s specs in the process.
Open standards have driven the networking market since the earliest days of the Internet. While the use of open source for networking is a more recent phenomenon, it is no less important. A major industry transition to open source for software-defined networking (SDN) is under way, and users and vendors stand to benefit. Some expectations, however, may need to change.
While the original idea behind SDN — separating the control from the data plane in network switches — has turned out to be just one of many architectural approaches that have emerged, it did catalyze massive interest in software and open source within the networking world. Things like APIs and DevOps tools became relevant to network engineers, and open source movements emerged to fulfill the need for increased automation and flexibility as organizations moved deeper into the cloud.
These 11 machine learning tools provide functionality for individual apps or whole frameworks, such as Hadoop. Some are more polyglot than others: Scikit, for instance, is exclusively for Python, while Shogun sports interfaces to many languages, from general-purpose to domain-specific.
The Linux Foundation’s Linux.com website reports that Samsung’s open source group is now “hiring aggressively” and plans to double the size of the group in the coming years.
All of the software Negrut’s team develops will eventually be made publicly available through a website. “We believe making it all open source is the best way to ensure this transfer of technology from us to industry, where people can take advantage of the techniques and the software that we develop as part of this project, so as to foster innovation here or elsewhere in industry,” Negrut says.
The system that helps Stephen Hawking communicate with the outside world will be made available online from January in a move that could help millions of motor neurone disease sufferers, scientists said Tuesday.
Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) made another significant move within the Big Data market this week with the announcement of Haven OnDemand, which brings the data analytics and app development features of the company’s Vertica and IDOL platforms to the cloud.
The tools, which are hosted on the Helion cloud, provide access to Vertica’s data analytics functionality, as well as the capabilities of IDOL, which is designed to assist developers in building apps that leverage big data.
Mirantis is betting that ease of use and simple documentation will speed OpenStack adoption. That’s the goal behind the new “Developer Edition” of Mirantis OpenStack Express, which the company calls “the fastest and easiest way to get an OpenStack cloud.”
Citus Data, which provides an analytics database that modifies and extends PostgreSQL for scalability, is releasing an open source extension, “pg_shard,” that enables PostgreSQL to scale large datasets and operational workloads.
In October, it was discovered that Adobe had removed the link to download Adobe Reader, its proprietary PDF file viewer, for use with a GNU/Linux operating system.
While it is still possible to install Adobe Reader on GNU/Linux, Adobe’s attempts to hide access to the product for certain users is only one example of its systematic neglect of its GNU/Linux user base, and falls in line with many others as a demonstration of the importance of free software–software that no company or developer can neglect or hide. As the Windows and OSX versions of the software were developed through version 11, the GNU/Linux version was long stuck at version nine. For several years the software has lacked important features, security improvements, and support against malware attacks and other intrusions. Yet, by “locking in” Adobe Reader users and making it difficult for them to migrate to a free software PDF viewer, Adobe has, in effect, degraded the power of the PDF as a free document format, a standard the purpose of which is to be implemented by any potential piece of software and to be compatible with all. The company has abandoned the principle of program-agnostic documents, bringing about a lose-lose situation for all.
By being led to rely on the proprietary software for tasks like sharing documents and filling out forms without the option to use a free software reader in its place, entreprises, the public sector, and institutions of higher learning have also fallen victim to this neglect, all as Adobe insidiously seeks to maintain a hold on its market share. Within institutions such as government–institutions that ought not to rely on any proprietary software, to begin with–it is concerning that Adobe Reader has often been taken to be the only option for interacting with PDF files and for communicating with the electorate.
Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Steam Broadcasting beta, the open source Dolphin emulator, QEMU’s advent calendar, and game releases for Linux.
If the controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) tells us something indisputable, it is this: GMO food products from corporations like Monsanto are suspected to endanger health. On the other hand, an individual’s right to genetically modify and even synthesize entire organisms as part of his dietary or medical regimen could someday be a human right.
This is why Ville Ylläsjärvi thinks Thingsee One, the open source, Internet of Things gadget his company is Kickstarting, will have staying power. Thingsee One isn’t just a sensor-stuffed piece of hardware, it’s a developer kit for other hardware makers. “We’re solving the hardware equation for them,” he says. “Startups can develop their solution using Thingsee One, get on with tests and pilots on the field using Thingsee One, and in many cases get their first customers using Thingsee One.”
Urgent humanitarian aid missions are slowed when cities are largely unmapped. Missing Maps aims to change that with the help of volunteer cartographers and local residents.
The latest addition to Facebook’s PHP-based Hack programming language is an interesting concept of cooperative multitasking for providing threading-like capabilities while only really executing one piece of code at a time.
Fox’s John Stossel claimed that “there is no good data showing secondhand smoke kills people,” ignoring years of studies and a 2014 Surgeon General report that determined millions of Americans have died as a result of exposure to secondhand smoke.
Monsanto has been making headway toward bringing GMOs (genetically modified organisms) into Ukraine. Former Ukraine President, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a proposed $17 billion loan to Ukraine from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in late 2013, because the loan required the introduction of GMO seeds and Ukrainian law bars farmers from growing GM crops. Long considered “the bread basket of Europe,” Ukraine’s rich black soil is ideal for growing grains, and in 2012 Ukrainian farmers harvested more than 20 million tons of corn.
Six years after first being spotted in the wild, Conficker is still making its rounds online, and new research suggests that 31 percent of this year’s top threats involved the worm.
Conficker capitalizes on unpatched machines that are still running Windows XP, as well as systems operating pirated versions of Windows, according to F-Secure’s Threat Report H1 2014, which identifies the top 10 threats of the first half of 2014. The countries most at risk for the worm are Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Malaysia and France.
A new report finds U.S. drone strikes kill 28 unidentified people for every intended target. While the Obama administration has claimed its drone strikes are precise, the group Reprieve found that strikes targeting 41 people in Yemen and Pakistan have killed more than 1,000 other, unnamed people. In its attempts to kill al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri alone, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults; al-Zawahiri remains alive. We are joined by Jennifer Gibson, staff attorney at Reprieve and author of the new report, “You Never Die Twice: Multiple Kills in the U.S. Drone Program.”
The fact that only 25% of airstrikes in Iraq and 5% of airstrikes in Syria are pre-planned, with the vast majority being undertaken by aircraft and drones ‘on the fly’ (i.e. when a ‘target of opportunity’ is spotted) will no doubt impact on the number of civilian casualties killed in this air war.
Locals describe Manasa as a village, but it’s little more than a complex of houses loosely clustered around an earthen courtyard at the end of a bumpy dirt track five hours from Yemen’s capital of Sanaa.
Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (pix) slammed US Vice President Joe Biden for his comment on Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy trial in which he said that the appeal against the conviction was a chance for Malaysia to “promote confidence” in its judiciary.
“The Vice President needs to look at his own country first. In America, citizens are given life sentences and they do not even know about it, the government sentences them and uses drones to kill them.
“This is the country that is advising us about the sanctity of law? It seems that they have an ulterior motive for Anwar to become the Prime Minister,” said Mahathir.
Biden was unusually direct about his remarks on Twitter recently saying that the Malaysian government’s use of legal system & Sedition Act to stifle the opposition raises rule of law concerns.
While saddened by the news out of Ferguson, Missouri this past week, I am not surprised. Once again an unarmed black teen was shot dead by an “other than” black man, and the legal industry was used to exonerate the killer. I say legal industry, because it is no longer a system of due process and equal protection, and no longer seeking justice. It is merely an industry which allows experts and insiders to use the law to further their own agenda.
A suspected US drone strike in Yemen killed nine alleged al-Qaida militants early on Saturday, a security official said, as authorities continue their search for an American photojournalist held by the extremists.
Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?
Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.
The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.
It is estimated that enough electromagnetic radiation will be emitted to melt human eye tissue and cause breast cancer, not to mention the damage to the environment and wildlife on lands ostensibly under federal protection. The Growler planes employ electronic technology to jam enemy radar. Navy officials aim to fly training programs over U.S. lands some 260 days a year. As Jamail writes, “What is at stake is not just whether the military is allowed to use protected public lands in the Pacific Northwest for its war games, but a precedent being set for them to do so across the entire country.”
Typhoon Hagupit began battering the Philippines late Saturday, with strong winds and rain expected to pummel a central belt of the island nation for days as the storm churns westward.
Hundreds of thousands of people had been evacuated from dangerous coastal areas ahead of its landfall. While weaker than the devastating typhoon that killed more than 7,000 people in November last year, Hagupit is the most powerful storm to hit the country in 2014.
Three years ago, thanks to its enterprising president, the Maldives was leading a global climate change response. Now, that president is out of office, living under armed guard, and watching his country wilt under the threat of extremism and rising sea levels
At least two people have been killed after Typhoon Hagupit made landfall in east of the Philippines, authorities in the country say.
The category three storm, which is tracking north-west across the central Philippines, brought intense rain and strong winds, threatening to wreak more destruction in areas still bearing the scars of 2013′s Super Typhoon Haiyan.
George Osborne has sparked the biggest boom in UK fossil fuel investment since the North Sea oil and gas industry was founded in the 1970s. Analysis of new Treasury data also shows investment in clean energy has plummeted this year and is now exceeded by fossil fuels, while road and airport building is soaring.
THE VATICAN’S ACCOUNTS czar said last night that he had stumbled across hundred of millions of euros “tucked away” in various accounts, describing the windfall as a relic of the papacy’s medieval but soon-to-be reformed financial set-up.
“We have discovered that the (Vatican’s financial) situation is much healthier than it seemed,” the Australian cardinal Pell told Britain’s Catholic Herald.
Russia has warned BuzzFeed that it will ban access to the entire site over a post published on Wednesday about a deadly gunfight in the capital of Chechnya.
BuzzFeed received an email on Friday from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal communications agency, saying that the post “contains appeals to mass riots, extremist activities or participation in mass (public) actions held with infringement of the established order.” It cited statutes laid out by the prosecutor general’s office and said access to the site “is restricted by communications service providers in the territory of the Russian Federation.” It has given BuzzFeed 24 hours to remove the post or face a total ban.
A significant portion of British citizens are currently blocked from accessing the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) website. On top of that, Vodafone customers are blocked from accessing the ticket sale to this year’s Chaos Communication Congress (31C3). [1]
Since July 2013, a government-backed so-called opt out list censors the open internet. These internet filters, authorized by Prime Minister David Cameron, are implemented by UK’s major internet service providers (ISPs). Dubbed as the “Great Firewall of Britain”, the lists block adult content as well as material related to alcohol, drugs, smoking, and even opinions deemed “extremist”.
Did you ever wonder what A Christmas Carol might look like if the NSA wrote it during the Cold War? And replaced all the characters with Communist icons? Well wonder no longer!
The Fall/Winter 1987-1988 issue of NSA’s internal magazine Cryptological Quarterly made all your dreams come true. Karl Marx plays the role of Uncle Scrooge, Stalin and Lenin play the Ghosts of Communism Past, and Mikhail Gorbachev stands in for the Ghost of Communism Future.
After the Senate’s failure to pass sweeping National Security Agency reforms last month, the Obama administration could pursue the 90-day renewal of the agency’s bulk phone spying program, which expires Friday.
President Obama has a Friday deadline to decide whether to halt his NSA phone-snooping program or to keep it going, and after Congress failed to stop it last month some lawmakers now say the White House should pull the plug on its own.
The National Security Agency (NSA), a US intelligence agency, has access to all Pakistani mobile phone operators that enables agency to access and monitor voice, SMS, location and data transactions of each and every Pakistani mobile phone user in Pakistan and abroad.
The NSA’s far-reaching powers have been further detailed in an extensive report from The Intercept, which reveals that the agency has conducted an advanced spying operation for years in an effort to spy on mobile operators working on phone encryption. The operation reportedly also targeted bodies that oversee telecom standards, in order to stay updated on new security protocols and identify or even insert vulnerabilities into those communication networks it wanted access to.
GCHQ and the NSA tracked and spied on innocent employees and tapped into regulatory firms into order to break into the world’s most popular mobile phone networks.
The National Security Agency has spied on hundreds of companies and groups around the world, including in countries allied with the US government, as part of an effort designed to allow agents to hack into any cellular network, no matter where it’s located, according to a report published Thursday.
While many upcoming technologies promise to protect privacy and keep sensitive information safe in a world that’s becoming increasingly connected, the National Security Agency (NSA) has ways of bypassing even the most protected systems in order to have constant access to the inner workings of governments, organizations and even people’s lives.
The NSA has worked for years to hack into cellphone networks worldwide, trying to bypass and undermine their security, according to Edward Snowden documents revealed by The Intercept on Thursday.
A German parliamentary inquiry has been told that German intelligence fed America’s NSA filtered data from an Internet hub in Frankfurt, after clearance from Berlin. The “Eikonal” project ended in 2008.
One of the striking features of the responses to Edward Snowden’s leaks about the snooping being carried out by the NSA and GCHQ is the insistence that everything is, of course, quite “legal.” But gradually, it has emerged that this “legality” is achieved through the use of loophole after loophole after loophole after loophole. Now it has been revealed that Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, has also been using this trick to enable it to spy on its own citizens — something that was assumed to be off-limits for it…
The role of investigative journalists remains crucial in holding power to account, even when that power is ‘incompetent’, according to veteran reporter Seymour Hersh.
The National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information if it would help protect the nation against terrorism and other threats, a federal judge says.
The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy.
The UK’s Investigatory Power Tribunal (IPT), has today ruled that authoritative bodies tapping major internet cables in the UK is a legal practice and is not in breach of human rights.
The UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled Friday that GCHQ’s mass surveillance TEMPORA program is legal … in principle.
The IPT said that (again, in principle) British spooks are entitled to carry out mass surveillance of all fibre optic cables entering or leaving the UK under the 2000 RIPA law.
The latest leaks by Edward Snowden has revealed that British intelligence agency General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) hacked into two major undersea cables owned by Reliance Communications compromising millions of users sensitive information, including those from the Indian government. The hack took place sometime between 2009 and 2011 with the help of private company Cable and Wireless, which is now owned by telecom major Vodafone since 2012, Hindustan Times reports.
Two major undersea cables belonging to Reliance Communications were hacked by General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence company, sometime between 2009 and 2011.
Internet freedom suffered this year as a growing number of countries stepped up efforts to spy on users and censor online postings, a global survey showed Thursday.
An NSA encryption box that secures the US military’s global drone network has become the focus for UK officials deciding whether a telecoms contractor should be pulled up under international rules on corporate ethics.
British Telecommunications Plc, which faces a formal investigation of its contract to supply part of the US military network, told UK officials they should disregard the NSA encryptor and drop the case.
It had been cited in evidence by legal charity Reprieve, in a bid to make BT meet an obligation to assess whether it was responsible for human rights atrocities after supplying part of the network the US has used to target a calamitous drone assassination programme against suspected armed opponents of its military offensives in the Middle East.
The news broke quietly in the Danish press the Saturday before the U.S. midterm elections last month: according to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, a spy from Britain’s most secretive intelligence agency, GCHQ, went disguised as a UK delegate to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and another was deployed to the UN’s Cancun climate talks in 2010. This followed news last winter that the NSA also spied on the Copenhagen negotiations.
House lawmakers are attempting to revive a popular bill that would limit the National Security Agency’s ability to spy on Americans’ communications data, a day after the measure was left out from ongoing government funding negotiations.
The only NSA reform amendment to pass either congressional chamber since 2013′s mass spying revelations became public has reportedly been cut from the “Cromnibus” spending bill that is currently under consideration in the final days of Congress’ lame-duck session, according to U.S. News & World Report.
An amendment to prevent “backdoor” surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency was embraced by more than 70 percent of voting House members on June 19.
But the veto-proof 293-123 win for the Lofgren-Massie amendment apparently was not large enough to convince congressional leaders to include it in the so-called “CRomnibus” spending bill that will be considered in the remaining days of Congress’ lame-duck session.
One of the Senate’s biggest critics of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) contentious spying programs wants President Obama to make drastic reforms himself, after a congressional plan was blocked on the Senate floor last month.
An appeals court will hear oral arguments in Smith v. Obama, a case filed by an Idaho nurse against the Nation Security Agency’s controversial telephone data collection program, in Seattle on Monday, Dec. 8.
We all worry about digital spies stealing our data – but now even the things we thought we were happy to share are being used in ways we don’t like. Why aren’t we making more of a fuss?
The paperwork has shown two cases where federal prosecutors have cited the All Writs Act – which was enacted in 1789 as part of the Judiciary Act – to force companies to decrypt information on gadgets.
Grand juries were designed to be a check on prosecutors and law enforcement. Instead, they’ve become a corrupt shield to protect those with power and another sword to strike down those without. And it’s now all too obviously past time the system was overhauled to fix that.
The Royal Navy will set up a permanent base in Bahrain, to the dismay of human rights campaigners who say the base is a “reward” for the British’s government silence over torture, attacks on peaceful protesters and arbitrary detention in the tiny kingdom.
In the six and a half minutes after Peter Liang discharged a single bullet that struck Gurley, 28, he and his partner couldn’t be reached, sources told the Daily News. And instead of calling for help for the dying man, Liang was texting his union representative. What’s more, the sources said, the pair of officers weren’t supposed to be patrolling the stairways of the Pink Houses that night.
Salaita, who was set to begin a tenured position at Illinois this fall, had his job offer retracted after a number of donors, students and faculty at the school contended that he was anti-Semitic.
Nobody’s willing to say it yet. But after Ferguson, and especially after the Eric Garner case that exploded in New York yesterday after yet another non-indictment following a minority death-in-custody, the police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this country.
Ramsey Orta — who recorded the July 17 incident in which Officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold shortly before he died on his cellphone — told the Daily News the grand jury ‘wasn’t fair from the start,’ and claims his testimony only lasted 10 minutes. ‘I think they already had their minds made up,’ he said.
In the words of Motoring Enthusiast Party Senator Ricky Muir, the upper house was faced with a choice between a “bad decision or a worse decision”. He opted for what he decided was the former, and gave the government the final vote it needed for the controversial Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment bill to pass the Senate, 34 votes to 32. The amended legislation was then rushed through the House of Representatives, which was due to have its final sitting day of the year on Thursday, but returned on Friday to pass it into law in just 12 minutes.
A march through central Athens to mark the sixth anniversary of the fatal police shooting of an unarmed teenager quickly turned violent Saturday, as marchers damaged store fronts and bus stations, and set fire to clothes looted from a shop.
Clashes also broke out between police and demonstrators marching through the northern city of Thessaloniki. At night, police fired tear gas and stun grenades after a crowd of marchers beat up two plainclothes policemen there.
For more than 20 days now, 21-year-old anarchist Nikos Romanos has been on hunger strike, demanding prison leave to attend lectures after he passed university entrance exams.
Two members of Theresa May’s panel inquiring into child sex abuse are facing calls to resign after being accused of sending threatening or insulting emails to victims who had criticised the inquiry.
Lawyers for one abuse survivor have written to the home secretary to complain of a string ofunsolicited communications, including an allegedly threatening email sent two days before an official meeting that both panellists and an abuse survivor were due to attend.
Michael Brown’s family, on the night of the Ferguson grand jury decision, called for all police in the United States to wear body cameras.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, in announcing that some of New York’s police officers would begin wearing them, said “body cameras are one of the ways to create a real sense of transparency and accountability.”
And on Monday, President Obama said he would request $75 million in federal funds to distribute 50,000 body cameras to police departments nationwide, saying they would improve police relations with the public.
Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials.
[...]
But those concerns are not new, and Kerry’s 11th-hour effort to secure a delay in the report’s release places Feinstein in a difficult position: She must decide whether to set aside the administration’s concerns and accept the risk, or scuttle the roll-out of the investigation she fought for years to preserve.
Your provider has a monopoly on the wire. You have to use their Internet, their broadband, their cable service vs having a choice of providers. If they don’t want to make a deal so you can watch what you want, since they control your selection, their priority is your loss; their fast lane is, well, your you-can’t-get-what you-want lane.
Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Patent institution of Europe is showing signs of tear as protests intensify and suppression of these protests — as well as suppression of investigation — intensifies as well
THE corrupt EPO is facing backlash and there are several internal protests these days (we will cover these in another post). More insiders are coming to us with evidence, showing quite clearly that even those within the institution recognise the severe problems. Nothing demonstrates this better than Battistelli’s actions as covered the other day by IPKat. Battistelli, who already destroyed someregulatory/oversight structures, has just ousted part of the Investigation Unit. To quote IPKat: “In recent posts here and here Merpel has been spreading the word concerning the increasing disquiet and anxiety felt by her and many others regarding the running of the European Patent Office, its staff relations, finances and other issues. These posts, as well as those that preceded them, have generated a considerable amount of interest among readers, and a large email postbag from users of the Office from across the globe — though to her sadness neither she nor the IPKat have yet received so much as a peep from any of the members of the European Patent Organisation’s Administrative Council [even though she knows that quite a number of them are subscribers to this weblog].
“Merpel’s disquiet is moving up a gear now, since she has since learned that a Board of Appeal member has just been suspended from office and escorted from the building. Apparently the ground of suspension is alleged misconduct and the EPO’s Investigation Unit has been instructed to examine the matter. Merpel’s intelligence reveals that the suspension (technically a “house ban”, she believes, but with the same functionality as a suspension) was ordered by none other than President Battistelli himself. Now there is a structure for dealing with alleged misconduct on the part of Board of Appeal members — but there are also checks and balances in place. One such check is that the power to suspend Board of Appeal members lies in the hands of the Administrative Council and not the President: if this were not the case, we would have the executive branch of the EPO having effective control of the judiciary — a dangerous and undesirable situation.”
Battistelli is trying to scare his staff, but it won’t be long before they topple him. We welcome EPO staff to safely disclose information to us. We have never let a source down or failed to protect a source’s identity. █
Summary: A reminder of the fact that Microsoft actively and even illegally challenges the adoption of GNU/Linux
TECHRIGHTS agrees with Christine Hall (FOSS Force) nearly all the time, except when it comes to DRM and this new piece which downplays Microsoft’s threat to FOSS. A lot of people foolishly choose to believe that Microsoft has changed, but all that has changed is Microsoft’s public face. The lawsuits, the abuses, the sabotage etc. continue to this day and so do the AstroTurfing tactics. We cover a lot of examples and we occasionally show that Microsoft is worse and more abusive than before. It just hides it better from many more people. It’s about visibility.
A lot of people seem to have forgotten (or are not taking for granted) that Microsoft extorts GNU/Linux. It’s not just about Android but also SUSE, which is busy bribing its critics to create positive coverage for itself (we don’t know if Bryan Lunduke too was bribed, but we know about several others). Microsoft is still a powerhouse of media manipulation, owing to PR agencies that it has harassing journalists. Let’s look at a timely example. If you criticise the CBS-owned ZDNet (technology propaganda site) in any of its sites over its propaganda pact with Microsoft, then they will censor (delete) your comments. It’s about visibility; even its pact with Microsoft is hard to come by. As we have shown before, there is a rogue relationship there, with staff that works for ZDNet and Microsoft simultaneously, commenters who anonymously post from Microsoft, commenters whom Microsoft is paying, etc. ZDNet is so utterly determined to spew out Microsoft propaganda that it hires Microsoft staff, publishes ads as “articles”, and even resorts to bullying innocent people (women too) who write negative reviews about Microsoft-branded products (yes, Ed Bott has just done that too). Microsoft Jack is now fudging numbers to make the utterly terrible Vista 8 (worst ever Windows) look like a “success”. Well, that’s ZDNet: Veiled advertising/agenda disguised as “news” from Microsoft boosters like Ed Bott et al. as well as past and present Microsoft staff. But it’s not just ZDNet though. Look who advertises Microsoft in AOL articles. Yes, it’s still Sarah Perez, who does not disclose her past salaries from Microsoft. This is just one aspect among many which remind us of Microsoft’s exceptional evil, witch-hunting critics of its products, firing (or causing the firing) of critics, and injecting propaganda into the media. There has been a big dispute over at Twitter about this. ZDNet is finally receiving some heat.
“This is just one aspect among many which remind us of Microsoft’s exceptional evil, witch-hunting critics of its products, firing (or causing the firing) of critics, and injecting propaganda into the media.”Over at Condé Nast, Microsoft Peter is now covering the Microsoft-Barnes & Noble ‘deal’, which was essentiallyabribeagainst Linux. As Jim Lynch correctly pointed out: “Suspicious minds might think that Microsoft cut the deal just to shut Barnes and Noble up about the patent issues involved. After all, it would have been very tough for a company like Barnes and Noble to say no to $300 million dollars from Microsoft. Who cares about patents when you get handed that kind of cash?”
Yes, it was a bribe. We said it all along. They just don’t call it “bribe”, they rename it. As for Microsoft’s rival to Android, it is pretty much dead. As IDG put it the other day: “The first three Windows Phone versions were pathetically backward compared to iOS and Android, but Windows Phone 8.1 — whose release began this summer in a series of fits and starts based on carriers’ and device makers’ whims — started to make Windows Phone a credible platform. However, buyers don’t seem impressed. Maybe they’ve given up on Windows Phone after four years of ineptitude; maybe they’re waiting for next year’s Windows 10, which Microsoft says this time — we promise! — will be really good (as it always does).
“Whatever the reason — and despite Microsoft making the Windows Phone OS free for smartphone makers last winter, to boost adoption — Windows Phone’s market share is shrinking.
“But Windows Phone’s issues aren’t merely the state of the mobile OS. Jan Dawson, principal analyst at Jackdaw Research, has analyzed Windows Phone and in a report released today has concluded that the platform is unlikely to rebound. Dawson is not a partisan of any platform, so his conclusions carry serious weight.
“Windows Phone is in a downward spiral — without a strong underlying operating system, developers can’t create compelling apps. Without a reasonable market share, developers won’t create reasonable apps, even if the OS supports them. Without a compelling device, OS, and app combination, users won’t buy Windows Phone in any significant quantities, so developers have no incentive.”
The amazing thing is that Microsoft managed to impose this garbage on mobile giant Nokia, this time too using a bribe (to Nokia and to Elop), derailing the company’s huge Linux push. Elop, according to this new analysis from Ahonen, was the worst Nokia CEO of all time and this was part of the plan because “Elop had a personal bonus clause that rewarded him for destroying the Nokia handset business.” Here is an expanded quote from Ahonen:
Elop wiped that all out with a rampage of destroying Nokia. Three years after the new Windows Phone based Lumia smartphones were released, Nokia’s smartphone market share was down to 3%. Yes Elop had managed to wipe out nine out of ten customers for the most loyal dumbphone customer base on the planet and the second highest loyalty smartphone brand (behind only iPhone). It was kterally a world record in market leader destruction. No industry has ever seen this rapid collapse of its market leader, not even under catastrophic conditions like Toyota’s brakes failures in cars, or from sheer management stupdity before like Coca Cola’s launch of New Coke. Never has any company collapsed its global leadership position as fast as Elop demolished Nokia. And note, when Toyota hit its brakes or Coca Cola decided to go New, they were not twice as big as their nearest rival. Nokia’s smartphone unit was more than twice as big as Apple in smartphones, and the unit was four times as big as Samsung’s smartphone business. (PS we found out after he was ousted from Nokia’s CEO job as the shortest-duration biggest failure Nokia CEO of all time, that Elop had a personal bonus clause that rewarded him for destroying the Nokia handset business… yeah, irony of ironies. The Financial Times calculated that Elop was rewarded an extra 1.5 million dollars for every biillion dollars he wiped out of Nokia shareholder value. The FT compared Elop’s heist with the worst of Wall Street criminals like Bernie Madoff)
If you thought the Windows Phone strategy was right but Nokia was just inept at implementing it, nobody should be able to do it better than Microsoft. So now we have six months of Microsoft ownership of Nokia’s handset business. How is the smartphone business? The Lumia business market share under full Microsoft control now is… 3%. And mind you, in four years since Elop announced his Windows strategy the Nokia smartphone business has not managed one quarter of a profit. Yes now its been 18 quarters straight, launching Lumia, launching Windows Phone 8, and switching ownership from Nokia to Microsoft and nothing helped. Not one quarter of profit. The Microsoft handset business dream is utterly dead.
[...]
But what Microsoft did not want, when it spent 7 billion dollars to buy Nokia’s handset business, is to see Nokia compete against it. The exclusive licence to the Nokia brand was a long term thing for dumbphones but only a short-term thing for smartphones (and apparently, tablets). Nokia already pulled a dirty trck on Microsoft when it launched the short-lived X series that ran on Android. Microsoft killed off that project soon after they took over the handset business this year. But that was further confusion to the minds of consumers on what is the ‘Nokia’ (brand) intending to do. Is that Windows Phone -thingy, the whats-it-called-operation-system is it viable or not. If Nokia already launches on Android. So yeah, Microsoft had to kill it.
Now Microsoft has stopped using the Nokia branding on its newest smartphones. They are just branded Microsoft Lumia. And just months later, appears a brand new Nokia branded gadget, a tablet. This.. running Android. Even before we hear any rumors of a Nokia branded smartphone again from Finland, this is bad news for Microsoft’s tablet strategy.
Will the N1 Tablet sell in enough numbers to show any relevance to Nokia’s business? No, of course not. It will be the squeak of a mouse in the noise of a thunderstorm, but it is Nokia’s first salvo. It does signal first of all, that Nokia wants to return. Secondly, it signals the total break from Windows. If any device by Finland’s ‘real’ Nokia made sense to do on Windows, more than a smartphone, that would be a tablet. That Nokia now clearly spits in the eye of its ‘partner’ Microsoft, and does the tablet on Android is clear signal, Nokia is finished with Windows. For good. Forever.
To all those who so hastily claim that Microsoft is no longer against GNU/Linux (and by extension FOSS) or is no longer criminal, well… check the facts more carefully. The worst thing is becoming unable to recognise that who is attacking you in various ways, usually by proxy. █
ONE of our readers sent us some interesting reports about Steve Jobs’ rudeness [1], determination to attack Android/Linux with patents [2], and a lawsuit [3] over DRM [4] where Steve Jobs’ ghost is back to haunt digital freedom.
“He also started a wave of patent abuses, ranging from threats (like those veiled threats against Palm) to lawsuits that would last several years and drain budgets, remove features, etc.”Over the years we have criticised Steve Jobs (before and after his death) because his contribution to DRM — contrary to what Apple fans care to admit — has been great. He also started a wave of patent abuses, ranging from threats (like those veiled threats against Palm) to lawsuits that would last several years and drain budgets, remove features, etc. So much for innovation, eh?
We continue to reject the notion that just because someone is dead it should be impossible to criticise him or her, especially if that person is a public figure (like a politician). Sadly, however, some people disagree and want to treat any criticism of Jobs like blasphemy or “speaking ill of the dead” (inducing censorship). As the reports below serve to show, Jobs does not deserve to be treated as though he was a hero, except perhaps by those who cherish corporate control over people, using digital means (that’s why the corporate press loves to idolise Jobs so much). █
Emails sent by Jobs have surfaced once again in a class action lawsuit brought against Apple (AAPL, Tech30) for making iTunes the exclusive store for iPod music. Jobs’ emails are characteristically frank, which could hurt Apple.
Jobs’ famous candor wasn’t limited to face-to-face encounters. His brusque manner translated to email as well. That’s unusual for modern CEOs, who are trained to exercise restraint in emails. Those words can easily be entered as evidence in a trial.
Either Jobs didn’t get that message — or he didn’t care. These 10 emails from Apple’s co-founder reveal the stern, outspoken and often witty personality that made him one of the most charismatic CEOs of his era.
Anyone who follows the smartphone and tablet market knows that Android has become the No. 1 mobile operating system in the world. They also know that, prior to his death in 2011, Steve Jobs was not very happy about Google’s mobile operating system. In fact, he made a rather bold threat when he talked about his dislike of this competing mobile OS.
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this,” the late CEO famously said.
This morning, Apple will begin a duel over claims that it used copy-protection schemes known as “digital rights management,” or DRM, to illegally manipulate the market for iPods. The lawsuit, filed nearly 10 years ago, puts some legal firepower behind activists’ claims that the copy-protection DRM is “defective by design.”
Just weeks after Northrop Grumman got approval to begin building a new breed of mobile radar systems for the Marine Corps, the Corps has asked the defense contractor in Linthicum to change the operating system.
The Department of Defense announced a $10.2 million contract modification Wednesday to change the operator command and control software on its G/ATOR radar system Microsoft Windows XP to a Defense Information Systems Agency compliant Linux OS.
Ingrid Vaughan, director of the program, said the change would mean greater compatability for laptop computers used to control the system in the future.
In a statement released Friday, she said Microsoft Windows XP is no longer supported by the software developer and the shift to a DOD approved Linux operating system will reduce both the complexity of the operating system and need for future updates.
The launch also included the first of a set of accompanying open APIs aimed at helping ecosystem partners create products and services that align and integrate with the new Docker orchestration offerings. In high demand from developers, the timeline for future APIs is not for several months, which may disappoint some ecosystem partners who have already been waiting for some time for the “plugin APIs” that will enable them to integrate their ecosystem products with the Docker Engine.
The role of system administrator means candidates “need to operate at a somewhat higher level of abstraction,” as Heikki Topi, a professor of computer information systems at Bentley University and a member of the education board at the Association for Computing Machinery, has put it.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the Linux open source computer operating system, added to its Oregon staff this week by hiring Portland’s Steve Westmoreland as chief information officer.
In the beginning, software was free, something you needed to make the hardware run. Then Microsoft (MSFT) and others demonstrated that people would pay for proprietary code, and for a long while software wasn’t free. But proprietary code was often clunky, and what worked on one kind of computer had to be re-created on others. Soon people realized there was a better way, and software became free again, sort of. Open-source software is essentially software that’s open to the public for tinkering, and over time that tinkering makes the code stronger. Linux, the classic example, is an operating system that’s been so extensively customized and built upon, versions of it now run everything from data centers, PCs, TVs, and cars to your Android smartphone. Companies still charge for apps and services, but much of the technology we use today is based on building blocks that are free and open to the imagination.
Over the past couple of years, The Linux Foundation has emerged as a very influential organization overseeing not only directly Linux-related initiatives, but important technology efforts including building out “The Internet of Everything.” This week, the foundation made a series of announcements, including the news that it is expanding its leadership team, and news about events that the foundation will sponsor in 2015. Here is more.
Due out next week is a very significant update to AMD’s Catalyst Linux graphics driver as they continue to work towards the unified AMD Linux driver strategy.
Intel’s Edison Module is a development platform for prototyping wearable computing devices and IoT devices. Here’s some Linux benchmarks with the Intel Edison running on Debian.
When new Linux desktop users arrive, the first thing to be done is locate apps to take the place of the ones they left behind. Most often, the bare installation will contain everything you need to get work done. But there are certain app categories that demand you do a bit of searching to get just the right tool.
One such category is personal finance managers. With the Linux platform, you’ll find applications to meet just about every need to keep track of your finances. So if you don’t want to pay the price of QuickBooks Online, you can take control of those records and keep them on your desktop or laptop.
But which apps to use? Doing a quick search, you’ll find a number of entries in the finance space ─ all of which are not created equal. Instead of going into an in-depth analysis of the cream of the crop, I want to highlight three of the personal finance managers that could, in fact, serve you well as you track your earnings, savings, stocks, etc.
You’ve heard the rap on Google’s Chrome OS plaftorm: Sure, it’s fast and boots up quickly, but there are lots of top-tier applications that won’t run it, because Chrome OS does everything in the cloud. When Google first announced its cloud-centric Chrome OS platform, which primarily eschews applications that reside on the desktop for ones out in the cloud, people came out of the woodwork citing popular applications that wouldn’t run on it. Among these applications, the Windows crowd made a big deal out of the fact that Photoshop wouldn’t run on Chrome OS.
You have a machine someplace, probably in The Cloud, and it has Linux installed, but not to your liking. You want to do a clean reinstall, maybe switching the distribution, or getting rid of the cruft. But this requires running an installer, and it’s too difficult to run d-i on remote machines.
Roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing games. It literally means “a game like Rogue”. Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first released in 1980, standing out for being fiendishly addictive. Its goal was to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, hidden deep in the 26th level, and ascend back to the top.
Perhaps most pleasantly, TROG uses a keypad arrangement for movement, but for laptop users like me, also uses the nine keys between QWE and ZXC as compass directions. TROG also keeps to the popup-menu theme, with character creation and most inventory actions bouncing to the forefront as selection menus.
The first Linux hint on there is “Everybody wants to rule the world”, and it seems like that’s the only Linux hint on the page so far. It’s probably related to their previous hints.
KDE’s third update of its 4.14 series of Applications and Development Platform is now available in Chakra’s stable repositories. With this release kde-workspace has also been updated to version 4.11.14.
About 2 years ago I tried Zorin 6.0 and have used it and upgraded it on one of my computers since. I especially like the Zorin OS desktop experience because I can change it to look like Windows 7 or like Mac. That is flexibility! I also enjoy the Ubuntu type repository system!
Puzzle GNU/Linux is a strange OS distribution that shows the value of open source ingenuity. This Linux distro is built around a hybrid desktop that is highly customizable.
Another Makulu Linux distribution was released today, and that’s always good news! This time it is the KDE desktop for the Makulu 6.x series. The Xfce version of this was just released a couple of weeks ago, so I don’t expect for there to be any major surprises: I hope that means this will not be a very lengthy post.
‘Linux Lite’ is a GNU/Linux distribution based on the Ubuntu’s Long Term Support releases. It includes the lightweight & fully functional XFCE desktop environment, comes with full support for proprietor multimedia playback & a few applications of its own (software updater, additional app installer, a ‘cleaner’…) that should assist a novice user for easily managing the installed operating system.
The new version improve font appearance for GTK2 applications and brings more accurate GTK2 styles in both classical and modern Q4OS themes. Lookswitcher, the tool to switch between Q4OS desktop themes, now works flawlessly, it has been fixed to prevent styles mixing on some rare switch attempts. Shortcuts in non-default Kickoff menu have been updated. More internal improvements has been made and several minor bugs has been closed.
Karanbir Singh today announced the inaugural release of CentOS rolling builds. CentOS will be releasing monthly respins of CentOS to include “all security, bugfix, enhancement and general updates.” In other news, openSUSE 12.3 nears the end of its support and hit game BioShock Infinite looks to be heading to a Linux machine near you.
It has been more than a month since the new structure of opensuse Tumbleweed was announced (see my earlier post), and we have seen it in practice for a month.
openSUSE 12.3 is now very close to reach End of Life and the support cycle will be terminated in a few weeks time, meaning no more updates will be provided for the aging operating system.
The example of how the NSA intentionally inserted weakened string constants into Elliptic Curve Cryptography lay hidden for several years, in fact, and was only exposed by a languishing open Red Hat trouble ticket. What was odd was how given the potential seriousness of the incident, no action was being taken to look at the source code and change it. As more comments appended to the ticket, the level of suspicion grew to the point of where NIST was forced to open up an investigation.
Communication and collaboration between development and operations can be difficult to achieve in many organizations, especially in larger environments. These two areas have traditionally operated within ‘silos’ separate from each other – something that can lead to delays and miscommunication.
As 2014 draws to a close, we’re seeing a lot of action from telecom players and the open source community surrounding Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology. Telecom companies have traditionally had a lot of proprietary tools in the middle and at the basis of their technology stacks. NFV is an effort to combat that, and to help the parallel trends of virtualization and cloud computing stay as open as possible.
Yes, it is fun to use. I really haven’t felt that way in a very long time and I look forward to turning on my PC every day because Fedora 21 Workstation with GNOME Shell 3.14 is just that good. I would add, Red Hat is the largest supporter of The GNOME Foundation and has worked closely in the design of GNOME Shell. Red Hat also provides web infrastructure for The GNOME Project. The relationship is close knit. The end result is what you see and use.
The big news today is that a fifth release candidate for Fedora 21 was needed, but Fedora 21 was given a GO for the December 9 release. Fedora folks are also talking about a ‘”Tick-tock” release cadence’ for future versions, which would alternate feature releases with “release engineering and QA process and tooling.”
Debian is going astray. Unless they wake up, many loyal devotees of Debian will move to other distros that do IT the right way. I’m a little old to be distro-hopping but even I can see the necessity of escaping the entanglement, the single point of failure, and the loss of control that systemd represents.
Meizu is really under the spotlight lately. The company has launched their latest handset just recently, Meizu is doing great as far as sales go and everything seems to be in place. This Chinese OEM has big plans, no doubt about that. They have signed an agreement with Alibaba a while back in order to use parts of Alibaba’s YunOS in their own Flyme OS and basically created a partnership between two companies. That’s not the only agreement Meizu signed in the last couple of month, just last month this company has agreed partnership with Canonical, a UK-based company which is known as the creator and developer of Ubuntu operating system some of us are very familiar with. Ubuntu OS has been available for PCs for a long time now, but this company created a mobile version of this OS (Ubuntu Touch) as well and we’ve seen it in action when Canonical showcased it on one of the Nexus handset a while back, I really don’t recall which one was it. Ubuntu was also shown off on Meizu MX3 a while back and it will be arriving on Meizu handsets officially in Q1 2015 according to the agreement which Canonical and Meizu signed.
Adeneo announced Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) BSPs for the TI Sitara AM335x and Sitara AM437x development platforms and the AM335x-based BeagleBone Black SBC.
Adeneo Embedded is a Platinum Member of the TI Design Network, and has previously released a number of Linux and Android BSPs (board support packages) for Texas Instruments processors and development boards. In Feb. 2013, for example, Adeneo announced an Android BSP for the TI OMAP 5 family of system-on-chips.
Rapberri Pis are all the rage these days, but now there’s a new kid on the micro-computing block. Unveiled by British chip design company Imagination Technologies, the MIPS Creator CI20 is being dubbed as a rival mini-comp to the venerable Pi.
Today, Android is the world’s most pervasive mobile operating system on the planet, powering millions of smartphones, tablets, wearables, and more. But that wasn’t always the case, and Android’s public life started from humble beginnings just about six years ago.
Skully announced a limited public pre-order round for its Android-based head-up display motorcycle helmet, available for $1,499 through Jan. 8.
The “world’s first augmented reality motorcycle helmet,” was a record-breaking $2.8 million Indiegogo success this summer, says Skully. (The frozen Indiegogo page shows a total of $2.44 million, but hey, it’s still a lot of money.) The helmets are now shipping, and beginning Monday, anyone can order the smart helmet, as long as you have $1,499 left in your holiday gift fund.
Is it finally safe to upgrade to Android 5 after the recent release of Android 5.01? Based on my experiences with my pair of 2013 Nexus 7 tablets, the answer is an unqualified yes.
November sure was a busy month for new apps and notable updates; from photo recognition, to launchers, to Biz Stone’s new app for sharing random thoughts.
Univention presents their annual Graduate Prize for dissertations dealing with applicable and in demand open source solutions. The winner of the Univention Graduate Prize will receive $2,500 USD. Univention is a leading supplier of open source products for the operation and management of IT infrastructures.
Last month I wrote about an important development for companies outside the world of computing: collaborating on non-competitive code specific to their sector. That change in business practices is still in the early stages, and will probably take some years to move into the mainstream. Far further along is the transformation of many manufacturing companies into ones where open source plays a central role, not just in their IT infrastructure, but in their product line too. That’s simply a consequence of the fact that more and more products are adding digital elements, and that the cheapest and best way to do that is to use open source.
As a result, analysts and reporters are constantly asking me what I think regarding their chance of success. Companies are also often asking me my thoughts on whether they should open-source a technology and whether to do it as a separate project or within the sphere of an existing open-source project. Overall, this trend toward open source is very encouraging. Unlike closed-source/proprietary code, open-source licenses allow one to look at the code – to understand the inner workings and spot problems but also to be inspired. The real power of open source is the ability for people to build on top of the original source code.
The TYPO3 Association, a non-profit organization founded to ensure the sustained and long-term development of the various TYPO3 software projects–including the highly flexible, scaleable and customizable TYPO3 Web Content Management system–has joined the Open Source Initiative ® (OSI) as an Affiliate Member. TYPO3 supports an international community of users and developers through: internal and external communication, spreading knowledge and competence; organizing informational and training events, and; securing trademark rights in the interest of the TYPO3 community.
Today, Mirantis is unveiling the free version of Mirantis OpenStack Express (the hosted on-demand version of the Mirantis OpenStack distribution) for developers. It’s a push to try and encourage developers to build products on top of OpenStack, as the need for a rich ecosystem of such tools is increasing.
Some open source communities form organically, forged by a common goal of users and developers working together to solve similar problems. But every project could benefit from having a few people dedicated to fostering leadership to make sure that the community around the project is as robust and sustainable as the project itself.
The Department of Defense’s solicitation for a new EHR infrastructure has put $11 billion up for grabs, and the large-scale contract has attracted interest from some of the biggest names in the EHR market. Each team is bringing something a little bit different to the table in regards to expertise and vision for the lengthy, complex project. While interoperability is a top concern for everyone involved in the bidding, there’s more than one way to achieve it.
Jordan Hubbard… should need no introduction but if you don’t know who he is, look him up… anyway, Mr. Hubbard spoke recently at the MeetBSD 2014 conference giving a presentation entitled, “FreeBSD: The next 10 years”.
If we assume everybody is acting on the advice of their dentist and replacing their toothbrush every few months, then there’s likely a lot of frayed bristles laying in landfill right now. But must our dental care devices take on such as short lifespan? The Goodwell open-source toothbrush is a modern take on oral hygiene, built from eco-friendly materials and made to last until you haven’t got any teeth left to brush.
Juniper Networks on Wednesday unveiled a new data center switch based on open source hardware from the Open Compute Project, in a bid to better target the large cloud providers and Web 2.0 companies embracing the “white-box” switching model.
Tony Blair has insisted that his much-criticised business dealings with dubious governments round the world have not been as lucrative as people think – as one of his staff suggested his wealth amounted to about £10m.
In June 2014, Frederick Reese’s Mint Press report highlighted the fact that the advocacy group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a study showing that the three major broadcast newscasts – ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News – featured billionaires almost four times as often as individuals affected by poverty. Poverty is an issue that affects 50 million Americans, a significantly larger number of individuals than the 482 billionaires that these newscasts covered.
And throw away that big, fat styrofoam finger while you’re about it.
There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No. 2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.
It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.
The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.
After spending hundreds of millions of undisclosed funds on state and federal elections, the corporate members of the American Legislative Exchange Council are demanding that state legislators preserve their “right” to anonymously spend money on politics and curry favor with elected officials, and to thwart shareholder efforts to hold the corporations they own accountable.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) gave its judgment today in a major surveillance case brought by Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International. Disappointingly, the IPT ruled against the NGOs and accepted the security services’ position that they may in principle carry out mass surveillance of all fibre optic cables entering or leaving the UK and that vast intelligence sharing with the NSA does not contravene the right to privacy because of the existence of secret policies.
Today EFF is pleased to announce Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority (CA) initiative that we have put together with Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan that aims to clear the remaining roadblocks to transition the Web from HTTP to HTTPS.
RIPA governs the use of covert surveillance powers. In 2012 the Protection of Freedoms Act was introduced, partly to solve some of the issues created by the legislation, such as the use of intrusive surveillance for minor issues. Many problems still remain and the need to enact serious reform is now more pressing than ever.
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)
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is planning to weigh in on a case which will quite likely drive patent trolls out of the Eastern District of Texas, where all the courts that are notoriously friendly towards them reside
The scope of patents in the United States is rapidly tightening (meaning, fewer patents are deemed acceptable by the courts) and Fitbit’s patent case is the latest case to bite the dust
Pretending there is a violent, physical threat that is imminent, Paranoid in Chief Benoît Battistelli is alleged to have pursued weapons on EPO premises
A look at actions taken at a political level against the EPO in spite of the EPO's truly awkward exemption from lawfulness or even minimal accountability
Selective emphasis on very few cases and neglect of various other dimensions help create a parallel reality (or so-called 'fake news') where software patents are on the rebound
Example of abysmal service at the EPO, where high staff turnover and unreasonable pressure from above may be leading to communication issues that harm stakeholders the most
Battistelli's circle (or "Team Battistelli") is starting to disintegrate, perhaps in anticipation of a tough year full of new leaks ("WillyLeaks" as some put it)
In light of Trump's awkward history with judges (e.g. attacking them) one can hope that upcoming patent cases at the highest court won't be affected by his pro-big corporations agenda
Free/Open Source software (FOSS), which encourages sharing, is increasingly becoming infested or subjected to software patents barbwire, courtesy of those who want to monopolise rather than share
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), led by David Ruschke, continues to function as another 'layer' that ensures patent quality by weeding out bad patents and here are some of the latest cases
Nokia's saber-rattling (and now lawsuits) against Apple are a worrying sign of what's to come, impacting Android OEMs as well as Apple, which is why the post-Microsoft Nokia is dangerous
Now is the time for Australian software developers to explain to their government that they don't want any software patents, otherwise their voices will be hijacked by a bunch of law firms that totally misrepresent them