06.22.15
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 6:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“The email details how, surprise surprise, Microsoft has arranged virtually all of SCO’s financing, hiding behind intermediaries like Baystar Capital.”
–Bruce Perens
Summary: The Microsoft plot to paint its proprietary software ‘open’ is largely successful, as even the Linux Foundation relents on defensive antagonism and gives up on software freedom
SEVERAL weeks ago we wrote about the openwashing of “Edge” (not to be confused with Ubuntu Edge), which is a Microsoft rebrand essentially, pretending that Microsoft embraces “Open Source” on the Web. Microsoft is still openwashing proprietary software by virtually googlebombing [1, 2, 3] “open source edge” etc. When searching for “open source windows” you might expect ReactOS, but that’s no longer the case, surely not after a misleading media blitz. Here is an example from a Microsoft propaganda site. It says: “Microsoft now makes all these feature demos available as open-course on GitHub, so that the developers can get them hands-on to learn more about it. The sole aim of presenting the Test Drive Site is to help developers play around with the new interface and its features and to get hands-on review and endways experience before the official launch of Windows 10 in July 29.”
“Are all these recent hires from Microsoft making the Linux Foundation unable to say “no” to Microsoft?”The kind of openwashing extends from Edge (proprietary) to Vista 10 (also proprietary and definitely not free, no matter how many times Microsoft lies about the cost [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]). How can Microsoft get away with this? If people are passive enough, it might actually pass muster.
We have meanwhile found this new article titled “Install Microsoft Visual Studio Code on 32-bit Ubuntu Systems with Ubuntu Make 0.8.2″. It’s an article from a Linux site (Softpedia’s Linux section) which tactlessly helps Microsoft entrap GNU/Linux users. That’s the second time in about a month and once again, installing proprietary software from Microsoft is described as a reasonable thing to do (or worth doing, like installing Microsoft’s malware Skype on GNU/Linux). Visual Studio Code is proprietary and it may have malicious antifeatures that no audit can yet demonstrate. That’s aside from the fact that helping Microsoft is unwise. The editor promotes .NET and other Microsoft lock-in. GNU/Linux already had plenty of fantastic code editors, most of which are Free software and framework-neutral.
Speaking of helping Microsoft, watch the Linux Foundation’s Open Container Project — like others before it — getting infiltrated by Microsoft upon launch:
Microsoft and a bunch of its biggest competitors, including Google and Amazon, have joined forces for the Open Container Project, a non-profit organization housed under the Linux Foundation – the governing body of the Linux open source operating system, which Microsoft once considered its biggest competitor.
The Linux Foundation needs to watch out as it foolishly opens the lion’s mouth wide open yet again, as if just to look at what’s deep inside the lion’s throat (lots of carcasses of other prior fools like Corel, Yahoo!, Nokia, and Novell). Microsoft still wants to destroy GNU/Linux and its participation in the Open Container Project is about promoting Windows (containers greatly contribute to the obsolescence of Windows, according to a new Red Hat study). What was the Linux Foundation thinking in this case? Are all these recent hires from Microsoft making the Linux Foundation unable to say “no” to Microsoft? █
“We [Microsoft] believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.”
–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 5:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“The purpose of announcing early like this is to freeze the market at the OEM and ISV level. In this respect it is JUST like the original Windows announcement…
–Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft
Summary: In a shameless effort to discourage migrations to the zero-cost BSD and GNU/Linux, Microsoft continues to flood the media with false claims about the cost of Windows and the price of Vista 10 (not even released yet) in particular
READERS have let us know that Microsoft propagandist Ed Bott is spreading the ‘free’ Vista 10 myth (it’s out there again and spreading quickly in corporate media; it’s a myth that is not dead, despite a lot of debunking [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]). It reaches a large audience in the CBS-owned ZDNet, despite being a lie and a nasty form of PR. No matter how it turns out (Microsoft Peter already admits that Microsoft just lies about ‘free’ Vista 10 this time too), a lot of the public may be left with the false impression about the cost of Vista 10. This propaganda or semi-truths (i.e. lies) would target ‘useful idiots’ or people who hardly follow the news. Many still think that Vista 10 will be made available free of charge. There is a war on the minds.
“People choose GNU/Linux not just for cost savings; some people are capable of thinking long term and factor in external transactional aspects.”Freedom, as ever before, is not free, so even if Vista 10 is somehow obtained (legally or illegally) at no cost it is not worth it; the price is people’s control over their own lives.
For those who truly pursue Free software on computers (as well underlying hardware, which assures freedom in other ways) there is now “Purism”. $1,649 will buy you a secure laptop with only Free software. As ZDNet (surprisingly enough) put it the other day:
The company hopes to expand the notebook lineup running its open-source PureOS with a smaller, $1,649 portable that will ship in September if it receives sufficient backing.
$1,649 may sound like a lot of money, but for a machine that can serve a person for many years (almost a decade) and ensure autonomy, privacy etc. in an age of increasingly-oppressive technology it might actually be worth it. People choose GNU/Linux not just for cost savings; some people are capable of thinking long term and factor in external transactional aspects. Windows lock-in is far too expensive even at $0 or negative pricing. Price can change over time and the abuses that come with proprietary software (e.g. espionage) are unforeseeable. █
“Some weeks it looks like Redmond feels entitled to capture not just part of what we save, but all of it. That just isn’t going to fly with corporate America forever. When your margins are more sensitive to Bill Gates’ pricing whims than they are the price of oil, that’s an untenable position for a large company to be in.”
–John Chapman Sr., BP Amoco Technology Executive
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Another opportunity to show Battistelli who’s in charge
![EPO Isar building](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/isar.jpg)
Photo credit: The EPO’s instructions for attending the protest
Summary: The rotting of a lawyers-run patent system in Europe and action against those who facilitate it, using extremely oppressive tactics
Residents of Munich can show their solidarity (defending scientists, not managers and lawyers) later this week, for “SUEPO organises on Wednesday 24 June 2015 a demonstration in Munich in front of the EPO Isar building (Bob-van-Benthem-Platz 1) starting at 12.30h,” according to its Web site. It is probably short enough a notice to prevent Battistelli from effectively threatening organisers.
“With a political system so predominantly lawyers-occupied no wonder the EPO’s management continues to function — without scrutiny, only impunity — quite so abysmally and the only people who lose their job are those who speak out against the EPO’s management.”“The main purpose of the demonstration,” explains SUEPO, “is to make it clear to the Members of the Administration that investigating your “social partner” with the private security firm Control Risks is not the best way to renew “social dialogue”.
“Our claims are still the same: respect for Rule of Law, for Freedom of Association and Honest Negotiation of our work package. But we do not forget the mission of the EPO as a public service created for the benefit of the citizens of Europe. That is why we continue to defend high quality searches and examinations as well as transparency.”
Techrights is also concerned about the EPO‘s role in allowing software patents in Europe, despite fundamental legal issues (the unified patent court and unitary patent get around these). There is so much more to criticise the EPO for, not just gross violations of laws.
Over at Managing IP (MIP) there is a survey right now; Rolf Claessen wrote that there is an “MIP in-house survey on in-house attitudes to unified patent court and unitary patent: can you help?”
The problem is though, Managing IP is a site by patent lawyers for patent lawyers, so we can pretty much guess how the survey will turn out and whose results (or opinions) will be represented. Other blogs of patent lawyers are calling for participation:
This blogger’s friends at Managing Intellectual Property magazine are running a survey, in which PatLit readers who work in-house are invited, indeed urged, to participate.
Whatever comes out of this survey, which also talks about the unified patent court and unitary patent, will be seriously warped and biased in favour of the surveyed population (tiny and self-serving margin of the population) that takes part. With a political system so predominantly lawyers-occupied no wonder the EPO’s management continues to function — without scrutiny, only impunity — quite so abysmally and the only people who lose their job are those who speak out against the EPO’s management. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
-
It’s hard to imagine just how big Google is and what scale it operates, but there is one thing that everyone should know and that it’s not all that surprising. Their servers are running a custom OS based on Linux.
-
It’s generally fairly easy for new Linux administrators to get up and running with the basics of installing, configuring and managing Linux systems at a basic level. Truthfully, though, it takes years to get the in-depth knowledge required in many server environments today. One thing I really recommend learning early on — i.e. from the beginning — is security.
-
The battle between open source and proprietary software-defined networking continues; and of course, Cisco is once again at the heart of the disagreement between the two sides. But this time, instead of Cisco executives taking shots at whitebox solutions, it’s an open source proponent saying Cisco is behind the times.
-
Cisco Systems’ Application Centric Infrastructure software-defined networking technology and its proprietary network switches pose a greater security risk than the open-source, white-box, bare-metal switches now storming the market, said Pica8 co-founder and CEO James Liao.
-
Desktop
-
Purism, the open-source laptop maker behind the Librem 15, is at it again, heading back to the crowd-funding well for an addition to its lineup. As it did with its original notebook, the company is seeking funding via Crowd Supply to create the Librem 13, a smaller, slighter cheaper portable that runs its PureOS and emphasizes user privacy.
-
After the success of the first ever crowdfunding campaign for the Librem 15 portable laptop powered by an open-source Linux kernel-based operating system called PureOS, Purism now announced a new crowdfunding campaign for its upcoming Librem 13 laptop.
-
Given the flexibility of multiple distros, the non-existent asking price and the heightened security, Linux is our overall favourite – assuming you’ve got the patience to adapt to a new system.
-
Entroware has recently forged a partnership with the Ubuntu MATE project to help them ship laptops powered by this operating system and the laptop called Apollo that will definitely turn some heads.
-
Server
-
The development team behind the impressive and dominant Docker open-source Linux container engine have announced recently the release of Docker 1.7.0, a major version that adds new features and addresses some of the most annoying bugs from previous releases of the software.
-
Datawise.io unveiled a new element of the networking and storage products it’s developing for Linux-based containers. Project 6 is software that enables deploying and managing Docker containers across a cluster of hosts; and part of its feature set is a simplified networking system.
-
Linux powers everything from humble, small business servers to Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the London Stock Exchange. Linux servers offer all the flexibility and power you’ll ever need. In this roundup we’ll look at some of the best general-purpose Linux servers for your small business.
All of the Linux small business servers mentioned here run well on modest hardware, plus, they’re reliable, stable and secure. You get a complete range of functionality, including essential services, networking and security. Some cater to less-experienced system and network administrators, and some are designed for more experienced IT staff that prefer greater control.
-
Kernel Space
-
On June 19, Lennart Poettering announced the immediate availability for download of version 221 of his controversial systemd init system software that it’s adopted by more and more GNU/Linux operating systems.
-
-
-
Waiman Long of HP has been spearheading qspinlocks now for the past several months and with Linux 4.2 the queue spinlocks support will be merged.
-
-
Lennart Poettering announced the systemd 221 release this morning as a bug-fix release. In addition, systemd 221 now makes sd-bus.h and sd-event.h public and makes KDBUS support no longer optional. KDBUS support is now always built-in rather than offering a compile-time option. KDBUS support can be disabled at runtime if passing the kdbus=0 option to the kernel command-line.
-
-
The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) has announced a $500,000 investment in three projects designed to improve the open source technology’s security and services.
The project will fund the ReproducibleBuilds, Fuzzing Project and FalsePositiveFree Testing initiatives.
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
Developers at Samsung’s open-source group have been working on a simple unit/integration test framework and test program. This new tool is dubbed “Waycheck” and will hopefully lead to promptly catching functional regressions/bugs.
-
-
-
Applications
-
FFmpeg is an almost perfect solution to record, convert, and stream audio and video. Recently, a new major branch has been released, 2.7, and now the first maintenance version is out and ready for download.
-
The development team behind MKVToolNix, one of the best open-source and cross-platform software for manipulating MKV files under GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, has announced the release of MKVToolNix 8.0.0.
-
PeaZip is a free and open-source application software released under GNU Lesser General Public License. Written mostly in Free Pascal and available for all major platforms including Windows, Mac (under development), Linux and BSD.
-
-
-
digiKam Software Collection, a digital photo management application that is primarily aimed at the KDE desktop, has been upgraded once and is now available for download.
-
As you know, the Activity Manager (if you allow it to) is collecting the data about which documents you work on. The documents get automatically scored based on how often you open them, and how recent was the last time you did (it is a bit more intricate than that, but this is the general gist of it).
This has been used in Kicker to show the improved recent documents, contacts and applications (yes, contacts and applications are treated as documents) as well as in the Tasks applet and Plasma Media Center.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine or Emulation
-
This week, I am at E3, the Super Bowl of computer gaming! Right off the bat, I noticed that game studios have fully embraced this whole team aspect thing. It’s not you vs. the bad guys. It’s you and 15 or 20 of your teammates vs. 15 or 20 people on another team fighting to the death within a certain time limit in a confined area no bigger than a phone booth. Mass carnage with surreal graphics in mind-blowing locations at a frantic pace. And again, it’s your team vs. the world. No team? No problem! These games are more than happy to put you on a randomly created team from a pool of available players just waiting to get a taste of the action.
-
-
-
Russia has named various open-source mobile, desktop, and server operating systems to substitute for vendor lock-in / proprietary software currently in use. Interestingly, besides Linux dominating the list, Russia has been evaluating ReactOS — the project that’s long been seeking to be an open-source implementation of Windows.
-
Games
-
-
On June 21, Guild Software released a new update for their Vendetta Online science fiction massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that brings many interesting features for the Android version of the software.
-
The Monster Steam Summer Sale is coming to an end and only a few hours are left to get games with some important discounts. Here are just a few of the games that you should really try on Linux and that can be bought with big price cuts.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
The Qt Company revealed today their work-in-progress port of Qt to Chrome / Google Native Client.
-
Many pre-university students have participated in Google Code-In (2014) again and for many of them it has been the first opportunity to make contributions to Free Software and Open Source projects. In opposite to Google Summer of Code the GCI program is organized as a worldwide contest where students at the age of 13-17 years take the challenge to complete as many software development tasks from their mentor organizations as possible. These software development tasks are provided by Open Source Projects that are approved as mentor organizations. And at the end of 2014 KDE has participated as a mentor organization for the fifth year.
-
-
New Releases
-
The development team behind the antiX Linux distribution have announced on June 20 the immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming antiX 15 OS.
-
The Solus operating system is still under development, but the first stable version should be out in a couple of months. The developers are working to implement the latest Linux kernel 4.0.5, which the most advanced version available right now.
-
Zbigniew Konojacki, the creator of all the 4MLinux distributions, announced us earlier that the Beta release of the upcoming 4MParted 13.0 Live CD used for disk partitioning operations has been made available for testing.
-
The Solus operating system is not out just yet, but it has the honor of being the first one to get the new Linux kernel that was released today, 4.1.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
-
Rémi Verschelde on behalf of the Mageia project today announced the release of Mageia 5. This release brings installer improvements including full UEFI support as well as a new administration panel and a move to RPM 4.12. Available in Live, Network, or Classic Installer for 32 or 64 bit computers Mageia 5 also supports upgrading from Mageia 4.
-
-
Other than that, I’ve found Mageia 5 to be a fine, easy-to-use distro with plenty of spit and polish, a distro I’d have no trouble recommending to anyone. Indeed, it would be near the top of my list of recommendations for anyone who’s looking for a distro that isn’t derived from Ubuntu/Debian or Fedora/Red Hat. It’s stable and well maintained, with a strong user community.
-
Ballnux/SUSE
-
SUSE® today announced significant enhancements to its container toolset, further embracing Docker as an integral component of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. SUSE now fully supports Docker in production environments and has added an option for customers to build a private on-premise registry to host container images in a controlled and secure environment. These enhancements further strengthen Docker as an application deployment tool, helping customers significantly improve operational efficiency.
-
-
Red Hat Family
-
A new survey conducted by Red Hat suggests that sixty seven percent of people asked said they are planning production roll-out of containers over the next two years. Fifty percent of those asked said they’d use container-based applications in cloud roles. The research did however raise challenges to overcome including container security.
-
Red Hat has announced the general availability of its next generation in-memory data store, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6.5.
It is designed to provide new capabilities and feature enhancements around overall product performance, remote data cache deployments, deeper integration with Red Hat products in their middleware portfolio, abd JCache caching API, JSR-107.
-
-
-
-
-
In a report published Monday, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian J. White maintained a Buy rating on Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT), with a price target of $90, ahead of the Red Hat Summit.
-
A survey of 381 IT decision makers and professionals commissioned by Red Hat, published on June 22, 2015, show that nearly all are planning container development on the Linux operating system.
-
For all the buzz about Linux containers, production deployments remain few and far between, and there’s no shortage of surveys and studies attempting to identify the biggest barriers to adoption.
-
A new survey has revealed that even though deployment of Linux application containers is likely to rise in the next few years, concerns about security and certification remain.
The survey found that two-thirds are planning Linux container production roll outs in the next two years. Of those, 83% said they are planning deployments on top of virtual environments.
-
-
Red Hat (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “outperform” rating reaffirmed by Northland Securities in a research note issued on Friday. They currently have a $85.00 price target on the open-source software company’s stock, up from their previous price target of $80.00. Northland Securities’ price objective indicates a potential upside of 7.19% from the stock’s previous close.
-
Shares of RHT initially traded lower by over -1.5% on earnings reported in the afterhours of June 18, 2015. Since the open of today, Friday June 19th, RHT has recovered the losses from the close of yesterday and currently trading higher by $1.00, or 1.27%.
-
Fedora
-
I started as a package maintainer helping with initscrpits, systemd and other packages. Then I moved up the stack to work on containers which lead me to helping with defining Fedora Docker base image and getting a membership in Base WG and Env&Stacks WG to help with Docker integration. Currently, I am working on a composite multi-container application specification called Nulecule.
-
Fedora 22 MATE-Compiz is an official fedora spins of fedora 22 featuring mate desktop environment version 1.10, using Compiz for desktop effect and Emerald as a window manager.
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Canonical’s Bill Filler and David Planella sent their regular reports to the Ubuntu Touch mailing list informing users about the new features that have been implemented in the mobile operating system for Ubuntu phones.
-
Canonical employee Alejandro J. Cura sent in his weekly report about the progress made in the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used in Ubuntu smartphone devices like BQ Aquaris E5 or Meizu MX4.
-
On June 21, Canonical sent out new Ubuntu Security Notices for users of the Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, informing them about a patch for a regression introduced by the previous kernel updated, which we reported last week.
-
In some amusing news, it would appear that someone is trying to make money from open source by selling a GNU/Linux operating systems on Craigslist for the sum of $30 (€26).
-
Canonical just announced a new, free, and very cool way to provide thousands of IP addresses to each of your VMs on AWS. Check out the fan networking on Ubuntu wiki page to get started, or read Dustin’s excellent fan walkthrough. Carry on here for a simple description of this happy little dose of awesome.
-
Canonical has published details in a security notice about a WPA and WPA2 vulnerability that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
-
There is a privilege-escalation vulnerability in several versions of Ubuntu that results from the fact that the operating system fails to check permissions when users are creating files in some specific circumstances.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
The Ubuntu MATE project is now year old, although it seems a lot more than that if we take a look at what the developers have achieved in such a short amount of time.
-
That was fast! Animesoft International, the developers of the beautiful Mangaka Linux distribution have announced earlier that the final version of the Nyu edition is now available for download for users worldwide.
-
-
Freescale unveiled two Linux-ready, 28nm i.MX7 SoCs with one or two Cortex-A7 cores, Cortex-M4 MCUs, and much lower power consumption than the i.MX6.
The single-core, 800MHz i.MX7 Solo (i.MX7S) and dual-core, 1GHz i.MX7 Dual (i.MX7D) follow last month’s single-core i.MX6 UltraLite as the first i.MX system-on-chips to move to a Cortex-A7 architecture. The i.MX7 Series is also Freescale’s first new i.MX family to move backward in performance, although significantly upward in power efficiency — a testament to how the Internet of Things is changing the semiconductor business. The i.MX7 ships with Linux, and supports Android, and targets IoT, wearables, secure Point-of-Sale equipment, smart home controls, and industrial products.
-
Phones
-
Android
-
Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) software now accommodates Android devices, the project revealed this week. This adds to existing distribution for Windows and Linux.
OSVR is an ecosystem designed to set an open standard for virtual reality input devices, games and output with the goal of providing the best possible game experience in the virtual reality space.
-
Android fans who still desire a physical keyboard might have something to celebrate about later this year. It was reported last week that BlackBerry might be working on an Android phone, and it looks like it’s more than just a rumor. Two devices have leaked so far, and reports disagree on which one will run Android. It’s also possible that neither will. Here’s everything we know so far.
-
Never let it be said that Google gives up on ideas that don’t pan out the first time. Remember when it tried invading our living rooms with clunky, disappointing set-top boxes? And then when that very same software went on to find a life right on smart TVs? Think of all that as a prelude to where we are today — Google TV has given way to Android TV, and now NVIDIA’s cooked up an interesting spin on a formula that’s nearly a year old. The Shield TV’s gaming cred and sleek design make it far and away the most interesting Android TV setup we’ve seen to date, but does that mean it’s worth your hard-earned cash? The short answer is “yes,” but the Shield only shines brightest if you’ve got the right sort of hardware already in place.
-
We first saw Sony’s 2015 range of super thin 4K TVs at CES 2015, where the Android-powered sets impressed us with their super thin screens, almost bezel-less construction, and impressive Ultra HD panels. Now five months after the show, the Japanese company has finally announced pricing for three of its new models, each coming in significantly cheaper than the $7,999 it’s charging for its XBR-75X940C 4K flagship. The 55-inch X900C will retail for $2,499, with the 65-inch version available for $3,999, while the X910C — boasting a bigger 75-inch screen — will cost $5,499. All three TVs will launch in July.
-
In recent years, open source software has become more frequently used by businesses and individuals alike. Why is this, and what makes open source solutions so increasingly popular? Below I list five reasons why open source software can be good for your business.
-
The site is reported to have been ‘inserting’ advertisements and other forms of third-party offers into downloads for projects that are no longer currently actively maintained.
While some would argue that this is fairly inoffensive and comparatively legitimate monetisation of what is still essentially free software, the community has not been happy with the process.
[...]
As wider reaction to this story, SourceForge is said to be generally losing ground to GitHub and other sites that exist to perform code repository and download functions such as FossHub.
-
Events
-
The Second Annual Fossetcon Conference, which is scheduled to be held at the Hilton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando, Florida on November 19-21 has announced its Call for Papers on the conference website. According to the site, the call is officially open until August 17, but might be extended if certain conditions, such as “speaker diversity, relevant content and or lack of submissions” are not met.
-
The UK’s only dedicated Postgres user event has two new speakers, along with a great line up of technology and other experts
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
Google was downloading audio listeners onto computers without consent before the bug was fixed, Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Pirate Party has claimed.
Writing on the website Privacy Online News, Falkvinge alleged that Google listened into the conversations of users of Chromium without consent, through a ‘black box’ of code.
The ‘black box’ code was downloaded to enable a feature that activates a search function when you say “Ok, Google,” however the code appears to have enabled eavesdropping on conversations prior to this – in order to hear the phrase.
-
The Acer Chromebook 13 so impressed me when I reviewed it months ago that I bought one. After using it for months it has replaced the 13-inch MacBook Pro as my daily work system in the office.
-
Mozilla
-
I’ve been with Mozilla, as a volunteer or employee, since 2000. I got involved when I read a Slashdot comment (!) from an existing Mozilla contributor called Matthew Thomas. It said that if Mozilla failed, then Microsoft would get control of the web. I thought that the web was too awesome, even then, to be controlled by a single company, so I decided to help Mozilla out. Sixteen years later, I’m still here. I’ve done many things in my time, but I currently work mainly on Public Policy, which I tend to summarise as “persuading governments not to make unhelpful laws about the Internet”. My current focus is copyright reform in the EU; you can read our policy positions on the Mozilla Policy blog.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
For all the attention it’s been getting, OpenStack is still in its formative years and the future success of the project lies not in how it will change future IT operations but how it will mesh with existing IT.
-
-
Despite the risks of running an OpenStack hardware business, Canadian startup Breqwtr announced Cloud Appliance 2.0. It provides a curated version of OpenStack.
-
The BSI just published a report on the operation and security of ownCloud. The report (in German) provides IT managers and other decision makers with requirements, measures and considerations, and the security assessment and the risks involved with a high-protection deployment of ownCloud in their organisations.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
The first Release Candidate for LibreOffice 5.0 has been made available by The Document Foundation and it comes packed with a ton of changes and improvements. There are still a few weeks left until the stable edition arrives, but we can see what the developers are doing until then.
-
The past few months has seen lots of work on adding GTK3 support to LibreOffice. That work is slowly but surely getting accomplished.
-
Education
-
Driven by the promise of reduced costs, increased pace of innovation, community-driven development and shared services, institutions of higher education are increasingly moving to open source software solutions. In order to help colleges and universities across the globe maximize their opportunities through participation in both the development of open source software as well as the communities of practice which support those projects, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) announced at the 2015 Open Apereo Conference, the extension of the non-profit’s popular Affiliate Member Program.
-
BSD
-
NetBSD 7.0 Release Candidate 1 was made available today with some mighty big improvements.
-
On behalf of the NetBSD project, it is my pleasure to announce the first release candidate of NetBSD 7.0.
-
Project Releases
-
On June 19, Andrew Ziem had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the BleachBit 1.8 open-source and cross-platform system cleaner application for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
-
The digiKam Team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.11.0. This release is the result of huge bugs triage on KDE bugzilla where more than 250 files have been closed as duplicate, invalid, or upstream states. Thanks to Maik Qualmann who maintain KDE4 version while KF5 port and GSoC 2015 projects are in prgress. Both are planed to be completed before end of year.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
This is a challenge for Wikipedia, which has always depended on contributors hunched over keyboards searching references, discussing changes and writing articles using a special markup code. Even before smartphones were widespread, studies consistently showed that these are daunting tasks for newcomers. “Not even our youngest and most computer-savvy participants accomplished these tasks with ease,” a 2009 user test concluded. The difficulty of bringing on new volunteers has resulted in seven straight years of declining editor participation.
-
Open Data
-
Private enterprises began to find ways to boost creativity of their employees and academic research expanded phenomenally on the subject. The government sector was also not oblivious to the obvious. One of the vital developments in the technology sector in the recent past has been the opening up of data. Open data, as it is termed, is available for everyone to use and republish as they wish without any restrictions from the clutches of patents, copyrights, and any other mechanism of control. Open data gives an autonomy to people with ideas to contribute in a significant manner in various areas of development. These initiatives to open up data fortifies the initiatives to enhance creativity.
-
Open Hardware
-
As this project may be of interest for others, I wrote this tutorial explaining the making of CubiKG, a Holter monitor-like device for heart and activity tracking. Also, to fit everyone’s attention span, I provided the highlights, and a more detailed how-to that walks through each step to guide you through the building process.
-
Recently, former Chinese security chief Zhou Yongkang was tried on corruption charges. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
Zhou Yongkang was once one of the most powerful officials in China’s government. In addition to his position as chief of public security, he served as head of the Communist party’s legal and political commission. He was also a member of the politburo standing committee, the party’s most-powerful decision-making agency.
-
Leo Tolstoy wrote that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. However, even he would have been hard-pressed to imagine the family of Svetlana Stalin.
Svetlana’s father, Josef Stalin, drove her mother to suicide, exiled her first love to Siberia and had her aunts and uncles imprisoned or shot — not to mention being responsibile for the massacre of countless millions, including those in the Ukrainian Holodomor.
-
-
The House has unanimously passed a resolution urging Iran to release three Americans jailed in that country and provide information on a fourth who is missing.
-
Instead, he starts at what Winston Churchill would have called the beginning of the end – April 25, 1974 and, in the author’s words, “the military coup that toppled the dictatorship in Portugal and with it, the world’s last colonial empire. This single event would result in 16 years of mounting strife that would wreck much of southern Africa, ruin entire countries, stain it with the blood of hundreds of thousands, create widespread hunger, poverty and anger and leave a legacy of problems that hang still like a hail cloud over the future stability of the sub-continent.”
-
Science
-
Just like bread, hierarchically porous carbons (HPCs), are judged on their texture; so researchers in China have called on their baking know-how to cook up a sustainable method for producing these supercapacitor components.
HPCs could prove useful in energy storage because of their high surface area and short ion transport pathway. But existing synthetic methods for producing HPCs, including nanocasting and soft-templating, are unfeasible for industrial application as they require complex, expensive processes.
-
Security
-
A new study says that 30% of all physical servers in data centers are comatose, or are using energy but delivering no useful information. What’s remarkable is that that percentage hasn’t changed since 2008, when a separate study showed the same thing.
The latest research was reported in a paper by Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University, who has done data center energy research for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Jon Taylor, a partner at the Athensis Group, a consulting firm.
-
I don’t much care if the Chinese know that I’m a former CIA officer. It’s no secret. I published a bestselling book about my years at the CIA. I give interviews in the press and on TV speaking out against torture. I lecture at colleges and universities about ethics in intelligence operations.
But the information the Chinese stole included my original application to the CIA — my Standard Form 86. That form included information on my family members, friends, neighbors and references. That means their information was probably compromised too.
-
The Conficker worm is now nearly seven years old but remains the most detected piece of malware on the internet. Despite a massive effort to squash it, why does it keep popping up again?
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
-
Saudi Arabia sees no obstacles for purchasing Russian weapons and defense systems, the Kingdom’s Foreign Minister told Russian media on Friday.
-
Now that the Obama administration has largely given up its resistance to Iran’s development of some kind of nuclear program, the Middle East is poised to see a change in the balance of power. As the Saudi Ambassador to the United Kingdom recently stated, should Iran acquire a nuclear weapon, “all options” could be on the table when it comes to the Saudi response. That could include an indigenous nuclear program. And although some commentators remain skeptical about the Kingdom’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, I would argue that it actually has the will and the ability to do so.
-
Saudi Arabia and Russia on Friday signed a series of agreements to cooperate on nuclear energy development.
The deal came amid a visit to Russia by Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on Thursday.
-
Since then they have expanded their control to other parts of Sunni-majority Yemen, including Aden in the south, forcing President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and his government to flee to Saudi Arabia.
-
Mark Rossini, a former FBI special agent at the center of an enduring mystery related to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, says he is “appalled” by the newly declassified statements by former CIA Director George Tenet defending the spy agency’s efforts to detect and stop the plot.
Rossini, who was assigned to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) at the time of the attacks, has long maintained that the U.S. government has covered up secret relations between the spy agency and Saudi individuals who may have abetted the plot. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a failed effort to crash into the U.S. Capitol, were Saudis.
A heavily redacted 2005 CIA inspector general’s report, parts of which had previously been released, was further declassified earlier this month. It found that agency investigators “encountered no evidence” that the government of Saudi Arabia “knowingly and willingly supported” Al-Qaeda terrorists. It added that some CIA officers had “speculated” that “dissident sympathizers within the government” may have supported Osama bin Laden but that “the reporting was too sparse to determine with any accuracy such support.”
-
Wikileaks published Friday 61,205 official documents by the Saudi Foreign Ministry, some of them classified as top secret. The documents revealed texts, emails, signed and stamped documents between the ministry and its embassy in Cairo.
-
Reports that the U.S. did not intentionally target Nasir al-Wahishi in a recent drone strike in Yemen highlights a troubling trend in America’s counterterrorism operations, and signals Obama administration policies of limiting U.S. warfighting abroad may now force it into using a controversial and dangerous tactic known as “signature strikes.”
-
-
The CIA drone strike that killed al-Qaeda’s second in command last week was a lucky hit aimed at a random group of militants, say US officials.
-
Obama’s revelations once again prompted myriad questions about the legality of US counter-terrorism operations, the accuracy of intelligence used for drone strikes, the near complete secrecy surrounding them, and the consequences of the program both for US reputation and security. These issues have been raised for years both inside and outside the national security establishment, and by human rights groups, and representatives of victims abroad.
-
-
On Thursday, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller, also relying on information provided by anonymous officials, supplied the second narrative. In this version, al-Wuhayshi was dead not because the CIA had tracked him down but because the Obama administration had “eased” certain drone-strike guidelines in Yemen and permitted the CIA to carry out “signature strikes” — strikes that take place without the agency’s specific knowledge of the identities of the individuals marked for death.
-
The Obama administration is again allowing the CIA to use drone strikes to secretly kill people that the spy agency does not know the identities of in multiple countries – despite repeated statements to the contrary.
That’s what we learned this week, when Nasir al-Wuhayshi, an alleged leader of al-Qaida, died in a strike in Yemen. While this time the CIA seems to have guessed right, apparently the drone operators didn’t even know at the time who they were aiming at – only that they thought the target was possibly a terrorist hideout. It’s what’s known as a “signature” strike, where the CIA is not clear who its drone strikes are killing, only that the targets seem like they are terrorists from the sky.
-
The CIA later called the Bay of Pigs the “perfect failure.”
In Cuba, the battle is referred to as the “invasion de Playa Giron.”
Castro directed a counterattack from a tank that reportedly shot the US vessel Houston with a 100 mm cannon.
Here is a photo of Castro directing his tank during the Bay of Pigs.
-
When Raul Castro, 84, met with U.S. President Barack Obama in a historic encounter at a regional summit in Panama in April, Alejandro Castro Espin was part of the small group in the room. It was unknown what role the son may have played in the 18 months of secret negotiations leading up to the announcement of detente by both presidents last December.
-
The Catholic Church’s beatification of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down at the altar while celebrating mass at a small hospital chapel in El Salvador in 1980, provides a helpful reminder to us of how much the US national-security state warped and perverted the values of the American people, in the name of its anticommunist crusade during the Cold War.
In the eyes of Cold War anti-communists, Romero was guilty of three things: believing in and preaching liberation theology, which they considered to be a communist doctrine, aligning himself with the poor, and opposing the brutal U.S.-supported Salvadoran military dictatorship that came to power in 1979.
-
On Saturday, Correa announced a right-wing opposition coup plot. He urged Ecuadoreans to stay strong against their attacks.
[...]
In Ecuador from 1960 – 1963, it ousted two presidents, infiltrated key political parties and organizations, and caused disruptive actions blamed on leftist groups.
-
The CIA reveals it was asked to help kill the French president in 1965
-
Pakistan has accused the CIA of infiltrating its agents through these NGOs. NGOs such as Save the Children are funded by the CIA and under the garb of humanitarian work they have been sending in their agents.
To make matters worse for the CIA, Afridi who had been tasked with collecting DNA samples of the Bin Laden family in Abottabad told investigators that he was called in by female CIA officers and briefed.
-
Because of his fake program and collusion with the CIA, medical workers have been routinely targeted as spies in Pakistan, some even murdered while doing their job. This program was also blamed for a rise in Polio in Pakistan. Because local communities, especially those in hostile zones, no longer trust those administering the vaccinations, it means that a disease, once almost entirely eradicated, is making a comeback within the nation.
-
-
-
-
The United States admitted Wednesday that it is facing growing difficulties to recruit Syrian rebels for their training program.
“We have enough training sites and so forth. For now, we don’t have enough trainees to fill them,” U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter told a congressional hearing.
-
The Pentagon and the CIA, as well as Britain and France, have been training Syrian rebels in neighboring Jordan since at least October 2012, as reported by The Guardian.
-
Washington Post– Key lawmakers have moved to slash funding of a secret CIA operation to train and arm rebels in Syria, a move that U.S. officials said reflects rising skepticism of the effectiveness of the agency program and the Obama administration’s strategy in the Middle East.
-
Last week, the Department of Defense published a gigantic, boring, and tremendously important book. The “Department of Defense Law of War Manual” is 1204 pages of rules for war. Since World War II, various branches of the military have published service-specific manuals, and a few of the more recent ones mentioned unmanned vehicles. The Navy manual addresses underwater robots, the Air Force manual included drones as military aircraft. The new Pentagon manual–which applies to the whole of America’s military–provides the clearest, most comprehensive vision yet of how the military understands drones within the laws of war.
-
-
-
-
-
-
As for his screenplay for A Brief History…, he says, “It will turn out to be an international story. You can’t tell a story about Jamaica in 1976, without telling the story of Ecuador in 1976, Washington in 1976, London in 1976.” The attempted assassination of the biggest reggae star in the world will still be at its heart, though. “There were seven, eight, nine people involved, but only two or three have names. Nobody talks about the others, but the impact of what they did goes on.”
-
In spite of its avowed commitment to democracy, the role of the US in India during the Emergency had many self-imposed contradictions, reveal WikiLeaks cables between the US Ambassador to India at the time William B Saxbe and the American government. The most powerful country on the planet believed that it was essential to maintain a good relationship with the government even when civil liberties were curtailed between 1975-1977, for fear of the balance tilting heavily towards the Soviets when China was “on the prowl”. Ambassador Saxbe met Indira twice immediately after the Emergency was clamped. The US chose to crawl when it wasn’t even asked to bend by censoring its own correspondents and directing embassy officials to avoid meeting leaders from opposition parties.
-
Visit by Joint Chiefs of Staff Dempsey shows that the U.S. is fully committed to defending Israel, but not to preserving its occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
-
An aircraft crashed near the town of Saghbein in a remote area of Lebanon’s western Bekaa region on Sunday, with Lebanese security sources claiming it might be an Israeli drone.
-
An Israeli war plane struck a remote area in Lebanon’s western Bekaa region on Sunday to destroy a downed Israeli drone, al-Manar television, which is run by Hezbollah, said.
-
In the name of killing Al Qaeda leaders, the Obama administration authorized a further expansion of the CIA and Pentagon’s “kill lists” and targeted assassination operations in February 2013. Previously focused largely on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, the US government’s targeted murder operations have since expanded to include new areas throughout North Africa.
-
Seventeen million people were killed during the Great War. Seventeen million were killed so the multinationals – robber barons – could take control of the oil fields.
Ten million soldiers died. Seven million civilians died. Twenty million people were wounded.
The Gallipoli campaign, the Somme, the campaign in Palestine, and so on, none were about democracy, none were about protecting borders or colonies, none were about any tinderbox of ethnic groups seeking nationhood. It was all about greed.
-
-
-
President Obama was, of course, right to denounce the massacre in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and to call for an end to such violence.
But this begs the question of whether he will stop his own illegal drone strikes in the Middle East that are just as deadly and a hundred times more numerous than the attack in South Carolina.
-
North Korea now has an estimated 10-20 small nuclear devices according to foreign intelligence estimates. Some of them are believed to be fitted to the North’s medium-ranged Rodong missiles pointed at South Korea, Japan and the major US Pacific base on Guam.
-
Amidst European criticism of America’s targeted killing program, U.S. and German government officials downplayed Ramstein’s role in lethal U.S. drone operations, but slides show that the facilities at Ramstein enable lethal drone strikes conducted by the CIA and the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa.
Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a relative of men killed in a drone strike in the Yemen, testified in a German court, alleging that Germany is violating a constitutionally enshrined duty to protect the right to life by allowing the United States to use Ramstein Air Base as part of its lethal drone operations. His case was dismissed at the end of may, but he has leave to appeal.
-
Despite a federal appeals court ruling two years ago ordering the Central Intelligence Agency to be more forthcoming about what records it has related to the use of armed drones to kill terror suspects, a federal judge ruled again Thursday that the spy agency could keep secret nearly all information related to its drone activities and the legal basis for them.
-
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
-
Garry Kasparov, the world-famous chess champion, had conveyed similar comments in 2010 when he said after his matches with the chess machine, known as Big Blue, that he had come away from the series feeling less secure about the future of the human enterprise if machines were to take over from humans. He said the machines would lead to a denial of the human experience that worked on surprises and emotions.
-
Within a few decades, perhaps sooner, robotic weapons will likely be able to pick and attack targets – including humans – with no human controller needed.
-
-
-
-
-
-
After a decade of waging long-distance war through their video screens, America’s drone operators are burning out, and the Air Force is being forced to cut back on the flights even as military and intelligence officials are demanding more of them over intensifying combat zones in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
-
The military is becoming more and more reliant upon drone strikes, which is creating a new problem for the U.S. Air Force: Its pilots are burning out.
-
In a letter released today by KnowDrones.com, 44 former members of the US Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines whose ranks range from private to colonel and whose military service spans 60 years, “urge United States drone pilots, sensor operators and support teams to refuse to play any role in drone surveillance/ assassination missions. These missions profoundly violate domestic and international laws intended to protect individuals’ rights to life, privacy and due process.”
-
A group that helped sponsor commercials urging drone pilots not to fly missions has launched a new effort to persuade drone operators to disobey their orders.
-
A group of 45 US military veterans have signed a letter appealing to pilots responsible for carrying out deadly aerial military drone strikes in countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan to stand down and deliberately refuse to carry out their orders.
The veterans that signed the letter include a retired high-ranking US army colonel, Ann Wright, who resigned in 2003 over the invasion of Iraq, as well as former members of a range of ranks from the US Navy, Air Force, Marines and Army.
-
A group of 45 former American military members have issued a jointly signed letter pushing drone operators to step away from their controls and refuse to fly any more lethal missions.
-
All told, the Air Force employs nearly 11,000 drone operators and can keep 65 Predators and Reapers at a time in the air over Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and other war zones. All at a cost of around $4 billion a year.
-
Stewart remarked how he already heard a reporter on the news say that tragedy has visited the church. “This wasn’t a tornado. This was racist. This was a guy with a Rhodesia badge on his sweater,” Stewart said.
“In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from driving freely on that road. That’s insanity. That’s racial wallpaper. You can’t allow that,” he concluded. “Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them, who wanted to start some civil war. The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina and the roads are named for Confederate generals and the white guy’s the one who feels like his country’s being taken away from him.”
“We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing. Al Qaeda, ISIS – they’re not shit compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis.”
-
People of Battle Creek are being told that having a drone base here will create jobs and improve our local economy. Here are some facts to consider:
•Drones are not precise. Bystanders, including women and children, are killed alongside often misidentified and completely innocent targets.
•Drones are not effective against individuals as they employ high explosives rather than projectiles. These explosives destroy a target and everything and everyone around it.
-
Ralph Nader may have run against George W. Bush twice, but he’s even more down on Bush’s successor. While W. started two protracted wars, Nader says in a new interview that he doesn’t fault Bush’s foreign policies as much as he does President Obama’s.
-
This final proviso has special application today, as governments have extended practices of long-distance killing during wartime (via bombing, shelling, and the use of snipers) into practices of assassination (via electronically-guided missile strikes and the use of drones) that conflate actual combatants with those who are political leaders and activists but not combatants. In this context, it is imperative to re-state the laws of war to clarify that political assassination outside of actual combat is not a tool of war, but a special form of murder, whomever carries it out. Legitimating the murder of one’s political opponents on the basis of realpolitik is an extremely dangerous and destabilizing move, with enormous potential for blowback. It erodes respect for human rights, for the law, and for the rights of civil society, all of which should matter greatly to a 21st century left.
-
Beyond terror attacks, drones are having a broader and more profound impact on Pakistani society in other ways too. A report last year from Dr Wali Aslam (University of Bath) found that drone strikes, whist pursuing some “high value” targets and decreasing the number of fighters in the tribal areas, has caused militants to relocate to other parts of the country, thus displacing rather than eliminating terrorists.
-
The US drone strikes carried out across the world including in Pakistan have left at least 6,000 persons dead without having any justification, said a joint letter issued by 45 former US military personnel.
-
The impact of their deaths on the militant groups they headed will not be known for some time. But judging from the death or capture of dozens of other such prominent leaders in the past two decades, the answer is “probably not very much”.
[...]
3. In Israel, the government barred a UN-appointed official who monitors Palestinian rights from entering the country.
Israel also did this last year because it said its side of the story on Palestinian rights and living conditions was not adequately heard.
-
Mr. Obama, (who happens to be a former CIA employee,) according to RealClearPolitics is “In Thrall to CIA Killing Machine.” Writer Toby Harnden wrote of him on April 16, 2013: “The man who ran as a liberal, anti-war candidate has brushed away concerns about the (drone) attacks. During one meeting he responded to a request for an expansion of America’s drone fleet by saying: ‘The CIA gets what the CIA wants!’”
In his comments about the church murders, Mr. Obama said, “once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.” (Much less directing America’s trillion-dollar-a-year killing machine!)
-
A combat-decorated Green Beret told Congress right now that he fell below criminal investigation by the Army this year immediately after informing Congress about a scuttled deal he tried to cut with the Taliban to no cost Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl along with all of the American and Canadian civilian hostages held by terrorists in Pakistan.
-
Amid the chaos, refugees and economic migrants from across northern Africa are converging on the Libyan coast, where smugglers offer access by boat to Europe. European Union officials say half a million people may try to cross the Mediterranean this summer, and thousands have already died en route.
-
Given the pervasive use of U.S. military force throughout the world, it should not be surprising that a 2013 Gallup poll in 65 countries saw the United States topping the list of greatest threats to world peace.
-
The New York Times’s report on the incident stated that while the attack “initially inspired fears of a terrorist attack” — before the identity of the pilot was known — now “in place of the typical portrait of a terrorist driven by ideology, Mr. Stack was described as generally easygoing, a talented amateur musician with marital troubles and a maddening grudge against the tax authorities.”
As a result, said the Paper of Record, “officials ruled out any connection to terrorist groups or causes.” And “federal officials emphasized the same message, describing the case as a criminal inquiry.” Even when U.S. Muslim groups called for the incident to be declared “terrorism,” the FBI continued to insist it “was handling the case ‘as a criminal matter of an assault on a federal officer’ and that it was not being considered as an act of terror.”
By very stark contrast, consider the October 2014, shooting in Ottawa by a single individual, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, at the Canadian Parliament building. As soon as it was known that the shooter was a convert to Islam, the incident was instantly and universally declared to be “terrorism.” Less than 24 hours afterward, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared it a terror attack and even demanded new “counter-terrorism” powers in its name (which he has now obtained). To bolster the label, the government claimed Zehaf-Bibeau was on his way to Syria to fight with jihadists, and the media trumpeted this “fact.”
-
Remember when George W. Bush was sitting in the White House and almost choked on a pretzel? In the weeks following, the Secret Service did a vast months-long investigation about how to stop something like that from ever happening again. And do you know what their solution was? A small button that looks like a doorbell. They installed a push-button alarm system in the residence of the White House, as well as an alarm that he can knock over on his desk if something goes wrong. If a president feels like he’s getting sick, he pushes the button. But it still doesn’t stop someone from choking on a pretzel.
-
Citing Hersh, who spoke to Corbin about his article published in the London Review of Books last month, the report says the ISI was holding Osama prisoner for nearly six years in the garrison town of Abbottabad and just handed him over to the Americans in a staged raid. Hersh’s article had created a lot of flurry as it, among other things, claimed that the al-Qaeda chief’s body may have been torn to pieces by rifle fire with some parts tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains. He had also said that a former Pakistani intelligence officer disclosed Osama’s hideout to CIA in exchange of USD 25 million bounty on his head.
-
I’m sure that you’ve heard about the three bare-bones “staging outposts” or, in the lingo of the trade, “cooperative security locations” that the U.S. Marines have established in Senegal, Ghana, and Gabon. We’re talking about personnel from Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis Response-Africa, a unit at present garrisoned at Morón, Spain. It would, however, like to have some bases — though that’s not a word in use at U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which oversees all such expansion — ready to receive them in a future in which anything might happen in an Africa exploding with new or expanding terror outfits.
Really? You haven’t noticed anything on the subject? Admittedly, the story wasn’t on the nightly news, nor did it make the front page of your local paper, or undoubtedly its inside pages either, but honestly it was right there in plain sight in Military Times! Of course, three largely unoccupied cooperative security locations in countries that aren’t exactly on the tip of the American tongue would be easy enough to miss under the best of circumstances, but what about the other eight “staging facilities” that AFRICOM now admits to having established across Africa. The command had previously denied that it had any “bases” on the continent other than the ever-expanding one it established in the tiny nation of Djibouti in the horn of Africa and into which it has already sunk three-quarters of a billion dollars with at least $1.2 billion in upgrades still to go. However, AFRICOM’S commander, General David Rodriguez, now proudly insists that the 11 bare-bones outposts will leave U.S. forces “within four hours of all the high-risk, high-threat [diplomatic] posts” on the continent.
-
Former residents of the Chagos Islands who were forcibly removed from their homeland more than 40 years ago will take their long legal battle to the UK’s highest court on Monday.
They are going to the supreme court in London to challenge a decision made six years ago by the House of Lords which dashed their hopes of returning home to their native islands in the Indian Ocean.
-
-
The U.S. military facility on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean represents a horrific example of the human costs of war and imperialism.
First, they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they burned the dogs’ carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder their own fate.
[...]
While the grim saga of Diego Garcia frequently reads like fiction, it has proven all too real for the people involved. It’s the story of a U.S. military base built on a series of real-life fictions told by U.S. and British officials over more than half a century. The central fiction is that the U.S. built its base on an “uninhabited” island. That was “true” only because the indigenous people were secretly exiled from the Chagos Archipelago when the base was built. Although their ancestors had lived there since the time of the American Revolution, Anglo-American officials decided, as one wrote, to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos [were] not a permanent or semi-permanent population,” but just “transient contract workers.” The same official summed up the situation bluntly: “We are able to make up the rules as we go along.”
[...]
During the same period, Diego Garcia became a multi-billion-dollar Navy and Air Force base and a central node in U.S. military efforts to control the Greater Middle East and its oil and natural gas supplies. The base, which few Americans are aware of, is more important strategically and more secretive than the U.S. naval base-cum-prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Unlike Guantánamo, no journalist has gotten more than a glimpse of Diego Garcia in more than 30 years. And yet, it has played a key role in waging the Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, and the current bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Following years of reports that the base was a secret CIA “black site” for holding terrorist suspects and years of denials by U.S. and British officials, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic finally fessed up in 2008. “Contrary to earlier explicit assurances,” said Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs David Miliband, Diego Garcia had indeed played at least some role in the CIA’s secret “rendition” program.
-
In December 2014, Thierry Meyssan announced the fall of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, while almost all other international commentators still persisted in believing that he would win the legislative elections. Mr. Meyssan returns here to examine the career of the Turkish President. In this synthesis, he highlights the links between the AKP and the Muslim Brotherhood and the role played by Mr. Erdoğan in the coordination of international terrorism after the attack on Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan.
-
On Mar. 19, 1970, Nixon’s national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger told a trusted colleague about a brutal telephone conversation he had just held with the president. Kissinger told Nixon that “there wasn’t much we could do militarily” to force North Vietnam to settle or surrender. The president “went through the roof.” He demanded a new set of war plans — a “hard option” — and he wanted it that day. Kissinger became frantic. The nation’s military and intelligence chiefs had no hard options or new ideas.
Then, suddenly, came a coup out of nowhere: a right-wing military junta took power in Cambodia. In reaction, battle-hardened North Vietnamese forces started moving toward the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, 200 miles northwest of U.S. military headquarters in Saigon.
-
The Nixon administration began disintegrating—the president unable to play his role as the leader of the nation and the free world—at 7:55 p.m. on October 11, 1973.
-
Richard Nixon’s presidency has always been one surrounded by questions and controversy: Why did he wiretap his own aides and diplomats? Why did he escalate the war in Vietnam? Why did he lie about his war plans to his secretary of defense and secretary of state? What were the Watergate burglars searching for, and why did Nixon tape conversations that included incriminating evidence?
-
-
It started with a burglary attempt at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate building. Five men wearing business suits and surgical gloves were caught by a security guard and arrested by police. The question became: who were these men and who orchestrated the break-in?
-
The most significant phases of the investigation into the abuses of government power under the umbrella term “Watergate” — the Church Committee, the Rockefeller Commission, and U.S. vs. Gray, Felt, and Miller — did not occur until after Nixon resigned in disgrace. These led to landmark reforms that changed the relationship between the government and the governed, including passage of the Presidential Records and Materials Preservation Act, the Presidential Records Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as well as the creation of standing intelligence oversight committees in Congress.
-
Like all arms races, once a weapon is developed, there is no turning-back.
-
Since launching Operation Inherent Resolve against ISIS militants last August, the United States military and its allies have conducted more than 3,800 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, dropping or firing no fewer than 15,000 bombs and missiles, according to Defense Department statistics from late May.
Predator drones and their larger cousins the Reapers, carrying 100-pound Hellfire missiles and 500-pound precision-guided bombs, have accounted for 875 of those airstrikes, officials at the Air Force’s main drone base in Nevada tell The Daily Beast. And on the raids where manned planes hauled the weapons, the Predators and Reapers have played a vital supporting role.
-
Meanwhile Wednesday, airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition backing Hadi struck a convoy of civilian vehicles in the southern city of Aden, killing at least 31 people, authorities said.
-
Implicit here are three assumptions: first, covert operations are usually successful in neutralising asymmetrical threats from insurgents or terrorists; second, it’s legitimate for states to use extreme/inhuman methods like summary execution in special circumstances; and third, democratic states know where to draw the line; once the moment of crisis has passed, they can return to normal political-social negotiation processes.
All three assumptions are open to question. Take India’s own experience. In the 1950s, India collaborated with the CIA in training and arming Tibetan guerrillas to instigate the so-called Khampa Rebellion against China. The CIA abandoned the operation in 1969 after sacrificing thousands of Tibetans. India earned China’s hostility, with dire consequences, revealed in 1962.
-
The Obama administration is fighting an idea with assassinations. One falls. Another takes his place. Welcome to the long war.
-
Just before leaving office as president over fifty years ago, Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the potential power of the military-industrial complex, a formidable union of defense contractors and the armed forces. In the 1950s, Eisenhower saw retired generals, heroes of WWII, moving into industry board of director slots: for example, Douglas MacArthur went to Remington Rand, Lucius Clay, Continental Can, and Jimmy Doolittle, Shell Oil. Eisenhower saw the potential corrupting influence and the lack of accountability private contracting brought to the military endeavor.
The world was vastly different in early 1961. Shared sacrifice had been common in the 1940s and 1950s, especially during WWII and the Korean War. Almost ten percent of Americans were in military uniform during WWII, rationing was common, weaponry and war materials had supplanted consumer goods, and many worked in war-goods-related factories. Shouldering hardship together for the sake of victory in war was a common theme.
-
Does it seem improbable to most of us that we release up to a hundred from Guantanamo, and then we spend millions on intelligence to relocate bad guys?
Then we spend a million more on remote controlled drones to locate and destroy or kill them, often killing some innocent bystanders. We also spent millions to provide these bad guys at Gitmo all the comforts, then turn them loose to attack us again.
-
Transparency Reporting
-
The document, a letter from Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Awad Asiri to the kingdom’s then-foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal dated March 17, 2012, recounted a meeting between Faisal and a representative sent by Geagea.
-
In an unprecedented disclosure the Central Intelligence Agency has released to the public declassified versions of five internal documents related to the Agency’s performance in the lead-up to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
-
Most attention on the OIG report has focused on the now-declassified finding about allegations of Saudi Arabia’s support for al-Qaeda. Those who believed that the CIA had intentionally hid evidence of Saudi Arabia-al-Qaeda connections were surely disappointed by this key passage…
-
-
It concludes that the IG’s 9/11 Review Team “encountered no evidence that the Saudi Government knowingly and willingly supported al-Qa’ida terrorists,” however it stated that it “defers consideration” of any alleged ties to the Department of Justice and the FBI.
“Many of the points of this finding relate to the investigative efforts on the Saudi intelligence presence in the United States and of Saudi officials’ contacts with terrorists in the country . . . The Team lacks access to the full range of investigative materials in FBI possession and is therefore unable to either concur or dissent on those points,” it stated.
-
Saudi Arabia tried to stoke unrest in Iran and undermine its interests in the region, according to a trove of documents purportedly obtained from the kingdom’s foreign ministry and published by WikiLeaks.
-
The dead included five women and two children in attacks on Saada and Marib provinces, the agency said.
-
More than 2,800 people have been killed since 26 March. The United Nations says more than 21 million people, or 80% of the population, need some form of humanitarian aid, protection or both.
-
Saudi Arabia’s meddling in Bahrain’s internal affairs has been revealed in top secret documents released by whistle blowing site WikiLeaks from June 20.
Wikileaks published the Saudi Cables which contain about half a million confidential documents and correspondence between the Saudi government and its embassies worldwide.
-
Saudi officials have not explicitly challenged the authenticity of the documents and Saudi Foreign Ministry has not returned repeated messages seeking comment. The only public response has been a Twitter message warning its citizens away from “leaked information that could be untrue and aims to harm the nation.”
-
Matthew Cole, one of the most intrepid reporters on the national security beat, is joining The Intercept. With his deep knowledge, sources and storytelling talents, Cole will be a powerful addition to our reporting team as we continue to trace the tentacles of the national security state.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
The planet is entering a new period of extinction with top scientists warning that species all over the world are “essentially the walking dead” – including our own.
The report, authored by scientists at Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities, found that vertebrates were vanishing at a rate 114 times faster than normal.
-
Not content with the blow it’s dealt to U.S. oil drillers, Saudi Arabia is set to escalate the battle for market share by raising production to maximum levels.
The world’s largest oil exporter has already increased output to a 30-year high of 10.3 million barrels a day in a bid to check growth from nations including the U.S., Canada and Brazil. It will add even more to the global glut, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Citigroup Inc. predicts the kingdom will push toward its maximum daily capacity, which the bank estimates at about 11 million barrels, in the second half of 2015.
-
The world’s largest oil exporter has already increased output to a 30-year high of 10.3 million barrels a day in a bid to check growth from nations including the U.S., Canada and Brazil. It will add even more to the global glut, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Citigroup Inc. predicts the kingdom will push toward its maximum daily capacity, which the bank estimates at about 11 million barrels, in the second half of 2015.
-
Of the 12 declared Republican presidential candidates, only two have acknowledged climate-related problems.
-
Climate change is “one of the principal challenges now facing humanity,” Pope Francis will say in his highly anticipated climate change encyclical this week.
In the encyclical, Francis will blame human activity for increasing temperatures around the globe and ask readers to change their “styles of life, of production and consumption” to reduce its impact.
-
The city of Ottawa is looking for some new ways to manage the Canada goose population along the Rideau River. One possible solution: shaking the eggs to sterilize them.
-
Finance
-
Bankers cash bonus checks while sending others to unemployment. Selfishness and deregulation made the rich richer
-
The Queen faces no cuts to the royal finances for the next two years, despite an 11 per cent rise in her income, according to The Telegraph.
The Queen’s income has increased in recent years from £36.1 million to more than £40 million, according to The Telegraph, but the royal finances appear set to be untouched by the Conservatives’ austerity plans.
-
Welfare cuts worth £12bn a year will be announced in next month’s Budget, after the Government agreed “significant” spending reductions in the last few days.
-
George Osborne is to press ahead with £12bn of welfare cuts despite disquiet among some of his colleagues about the scale of the proposed reductions and anti-austerity protests in a number of UK cities.
-
Officials have apologised after a man who cannot walk, talk or feed himself was told he had to attend a Job Centre interview to discuss his benefit payments as well as “training to up date his skills.”
-
Many people like me live off these supermarket bargains, so the ugly scenes at Northampton Tesco are hardly surprising
-
Lack of hope turns young people all over the world into outsiders, prey to extremism. The EU and Greece may come to regret their brinkmanship
-
SINCE the 1980s, the rich have become ever richer and they are giving a lot of money to right-wing political parties to ensure the system continues.
Greed has been made into a virtue and if a bank fails the state will bail it out — with our money.
-
The two most significant icons in American progressive politics are fighting. Over the past few months, President Obama has lobbied Congress and the public to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in increasingly strident terms, while Senator Elizabeth Warren has taken to making alarming speeches on the Senate floor about how the TPP will destroy America. Along the way, each has amassed some strange allies: President Obama’s strongest ally in the House of Representatives is Ways and Means Chair Paul Ryan, and Senator Warren is in agreement with the Koch-funded Cato Institute.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
On June 20, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, gave an address to the Conference on the European/Russian Crisis in Delphi, Greece. During his assessment of U.S. foreign policy and interactions between Russia, Europe, and the Far East, Dr. Roberts stated that Washington’s primary objectives are complete U.S. hegemony over world affairs, and in accomplishing this they will demonize, usurp, and even overthrow any nation that stands in opposition, using the post Cold War strategy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
-
Jeb Bush launched his campaign on Monday with a sharp jab at the Washington establishment. “We don’t need another president who merely holds the top spot among the pampered elites of Washington,” huffed this member of a political dynasty that has often held power in DC. “We need a president willing to challenge and disrupt the whole culture in our nation’s capital.” Yet, as Bush embarks on his presidential bid, he has surrounded himself with Beltway insiders who have long been part of what he calls the “mess in Washington.” Many of his advisers served in the presidential administrations of his father and brother. Others were senators and representatives. Of course, several are lobbyists.
-
Censorship
-
Nevertheless, I believe it would be wrong to amend the Constitution to ban burning the flag or insulting it. Not only would it damage the right of free expression and private property, but also it might start a trend toward destroying other constitutional rights, including the right to act the fool occasionally. For most of us, that is a right worth protecting.
-
Google’s decision to scrub revenge-porn from their searches marks a rare instance in which the company censors the internet content that appears on the search engine. However, “We’ve heard many troubling stories of ‘revenge-porn’: an ex-partner seeking to publicly humiliate a person by posting private images of them, or hackers stealing and distributing images from victims’ accounts. Some images even end up on ‘sextortion’ sites that force people to pay to have their images removed,” Singhal wrote.
-
Privacy
-
Wolfe, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, was trying to explain the intelligence agency’s interest in a hot technology for data-processing called Spark that’s the current rage for big data nerds. It lets businesses sift and analyze data much quicker than they could just a decade ago. It should be noted that the new CIA cloud is built on Amazon Web Services, which also just announced that it’s supporting Spark.
-
The ACLU has received another document dump from the government as a result of its FOIA lawsuits, with this bundle dealing with the CIA’s activities. This isn’t directly related to the late Friday evening doc dump announced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which dealt more with the CIA’s counterterrorism activities leading up to the 9/11 attacks, but there is some overlap.
Most of what the ACLU is highlighting from this pile of documents is the CIA’s domestic surveillance activities. Ideally — and according to the agency’s own directives — the amount of domestic surveillance it should be performing is almost none at all. It is charged with collecting and disseminating foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. It is allowed to track certain activities of Americans abroad, but for the most part, it is not supposed to be a domestic surveillance agency.
-
What can be gleaned from the documents is that the agency has a secret definition of “monitoring” as it relates to surveillance of US persons that the public is not allowed to know…
-
Q. What remains the same?
A. Pretty much everything. The NSA is still able to collect data and conduct surveillance on all the numbers and people that contact anybody on their list of suspected bad guys. And collect data on the numbers that contact those numbers and the numbers contacting those numbers, etc.
-
Nearly all economists from across the political spectrum agree: free trade is good. Yet free trade agreements are not always the same thing as free trade. Whether we’re talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the European Union’s Digital Single Market (DSM) initiative, the question is always whether the agreement in question is reducing barriers to trade, or actually enacting barriers to trade into law.
-
Defence groups call for a fair fight in race to land expected contract to replace Nimrod jets that were controversially scrapped
Defence companies are lining up to offer a replacement for the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft, with the Government expected to announce a deal for a new fleet of jets by the end of the year.
-
A new social network, backed by Anonymous, hopes to take on Facebook and the other social media giants with a commitment to privacy, security and transparency about how posts are promoted.
-
-
Let’s Encrypt, the first free and open certification authority, will launch to the general public in September, with its first digital certificates issued over the next month.
The project is funded by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), a new Californian public-benefit group backed by leading tech firms including Mozilla, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Cisco.
The platform was announced by the consortium last year with the goal of offering SSL certificates free of charge, promoting the importance of encryption and HTTPS for a secure cyberspace.
-
Google released another legal disclosure notice related to the United States government’s ongoing grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks. It informed journalist and technologist Jacob Appelbaum, who previously worked with WikiLeaks, that Google was ordered to provide data from his account.
The disclosure suggests the grand jury investigation may have sought Appelbaum’s data because the US government believed data would contain details on WikiLeaks’ publication of State Department cables.
-
The attorney for the anonymous commenter on a Freeport (Ill.) Journal Standard article said he was mulling an appeal to the US Supreme Court. But it would be a tough sell. Most of the nation’s state courts have ruled that when it comes to defamation, online anonymity is out the door. (Comcast had refused to release the IP address account information, demanding a court order. Litigation ensued.)
The anonymous defendant claimed that there were insufficient facts to support a claim of defamation to begin with, so the identity shouldn’t be unmasked over the 2011 comment. When trying to unmask an anonymous online commenter for defamation, there must be enough evidence to justify that whatever was said online was defamatory, the court said.
-
In an annual report evaluating how well Internet companies safeguard their users’ data against government snooping, the Electronic Frontier Foundation blasted WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app bought by Facebook last year, for not requiring a warrant from governments seeking user information, for not disclosing its policies on turning over data, and for other issues.
-
Civil Rights
-
A Cleveland police officer fatally shot a family’s one-year-old yellow labrador dog while it was tied to a leash.
On June 12, Tyler Muzzi returned home after lunch to discover a stranger walking back and forth outside his neighbor’s home. Muzzi saw the man walk up the neighbor’s driveway twice before disappearing around the opposite side of the home. Muzzi alerted the homeowner, Bryant Steele, who then called the Cleveland police.
The police arrived at Steele’s home within minutes and arrested the man, who had entered his house but exited to give himself up to police.
Assuming that police were finished with the scene, Muzzi said he was surprised to hear gunshots later. Unsure of where the shots were fired, Muzzi opened his front door to see what had happened. “At first, I thought I had heard only two shots, but there were actually three that had been fired,” said Muzzi. “I thought they had shot the man in custody or something.”
-
-
The Quebec government has officially given Raif Badawi an immigration certificate to come to Canada — a first step in fast-tracking the jailed Saudi blogger’s immigration process.
-
Live and let live. Put yourself in the shoes of others. Think whatever you want.
These are the prevailing themes in a newly published collection of essays and articles by Raif Badawi, a celebrated Saudi Arabian blogger sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes and a $270,000 fine for the crime of insulting Islam.
In isolation, his words are simple. It is the environment in which they are written that makes them profound and even revolutionary.
-
A day after receiving an immigration certificate from the Quebec government, blogger Raïf Badawi was again spared flogging Friday at the hands of Saudi Arabia.
-
A cane slammed against Raif Badawi for the fiftieth and final time of the day while a lively crowd cheered, “Allahu Akbar”(God is greatest). 31-year-old Badawi’s shackled, motionless body mirrored his expressionless face as he restrained from exhibiting pain. Five months later, Saudi Arabia’s supreme court confirmed Badawi’s punishment for insulting Muslim religious figures and disobeying Saudi Arabia’s technology laws.
-
A British minister’s recent claim that the sentencing of blogger Raif Badawi to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison has the support of the vast majority of the population in Saudi Arabia was “very disappointing,” a spokesperson for the Badawi family says.
-
This week, activists and human rights organisations in London organised events on Wednesday (17 June) to mark the third anniversary since Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes after being charged with insulting Islam.
-
It is exactly three years ago today that the pro-democracy blogger Raif Badawi was arrested and imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. Earlier this month, the Saudi Supreme Court upheld the draconian sentence handed down for his ‘crime’ of setting up a liberal website: ten years jail and 1,000 lashes.
-
The Saudis are on a beheading spree, executing 100 ‘criminals’ in the first half of the year. Blame a new king, a failed war, and a double jihadi threat for the gruesome upswing.
-
-
Authorities in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom were accused of waging a “campaign of death” as the number killed in the first half of this year surpassed that for the whole of 2014.
Beheading is the most popular form of execution amongst Saudi Arabia’s rulers, with many carried out in public.
Just over half of those executed this year have been Saudi citizens, with many of the harshest sentences handed down to drug smugglers.
-
-
According to reports, the first tranche of documents contains no major revelations, but illustrates Saudi Arabia’s willingness to use its financial and religious resources in its diplomatic affairs. This includes clandestine discussions with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to pay for the release of ousted President Hosni Mubarak, requests from foreign politicians for patronage, and dispensations of thousands of pilgrimage visas to friendly politicians for distribution. The cables also demonstrate Saudi Arabia’s interest in Iran, tracking issues like the early stages of the international nuclear negotiations closely.
-
Saudi Arabia feels threatened by media.
-
-
At the turn of the last calendar year, in what we called “a watershed moment in contemporary publishing,” Brooklyn-based independent publisher Melville House, working tirelessly (and sometimes without sleep) over a period of several weeks, published the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report. It was a groundbreaking feat for an independent press because (as we said at the time) the sheer size and complexity of such a publishing project typically precludes them from pursuing the release of such government reports.
-
Independent publisher Melville House will send five copies of the US Senate’s report on torture to every White House hopeful – ‘even Donald Trump’
-
A former covert officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, Sterling sat down in a federal courtroom with a lawyer on either side, looking up at a judge who would announce in a few moments whether he would go to prison for the next 20 years. A few feet away, three prosecutors waited expectantly, hoping that more than a decade of investigation by the FBI would conclude with a severe sentence for a man who committed an “unconscionable” crime, as one of them told the judge.
In Sterling’s blind spot, behind his left shoulder, his wife tried not to sob so loudly that the judge would hear. A social worker, she had been interrogated by FBI agents, her modest home was searched, she had been made to testify before a grand jury, and she had given up her hopes for an ordinary life — a child or two rather than the miscarriages she had, a husband who could hold a job, a life that was not under surveillance, and friends who were free of harassment from government agents asking for information about her and her husband.
One of Sterling’s lawyers stood up to ask for leniency. Sterling was a good person, the lawyer said, not a traitor. He was the first in his family to graduate from college. After leaving the CIA, he worked as a healthcare investigator and won awards for uncovering millions of dollars in fraud. He loved his wife. He did not cause any harm and did not deserve to be locked up until he was an old man for talking to a New York Times reporter about a classified program that he believed had gone awry. Please let the sentence be fair, the lawyer said.
-
-
The CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks may have constituted a violation of the government’s rules against “human experimentation,” according to a report by the Guardian. A previously classified CIA document released Monday outlined the CIA director’s ability to “approve, modify or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research,” despite the fact that such practices were prohibited without the subject’s consent.
“The CIA shall not sponsor, contract for, or conduct research on human subjects except in accordance with guidelines issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The subject’s informed consent shall be documented as required by those guidelines,” the newly released, 41-page CIA document said, according to the Guardian.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The Agency’s AR 2-2 regulatory document governing its intelligence activities was never released until now. It covers a wide range of activities – including:
domestic spying;
human experimentation;
contracts with academic institutions;
relations with journalists and media officials; and
relations with clergy and missionaries.
-
-
-
-
At Guantanamo, the CIA gave huge doses of the terror-inducing drug mefloquine to prisoners without their consent, as well as the supposed truth serum scopolamine. Former Guantanamo guard Joseph Hickman has documented the CIA’s torturing people, sometimes to death, and can find no explanation other than research:
-
In her office recently, she described how she broke with the C.I.A. over the detention and interrogation program that began in the days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. From the first time Feinstein was briefed about the program, she opposed it. On September 6, 2006, Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and described a network of “black sites”: secret facilities where C.I.A. interrogators subjected detainees to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” seeking information about possible terrorist attacks. Hayden, self-assured and pugnacious, insisted that the interrogations were carefully run and unassailably effective. Afterward, Feinstein wrote to him that his testimony was “extraordinarily problematic,” and that she was “unable to understand why the C.I.A. needs to maintain this program.” In November, when Hayden appeared before the committee again, Feinstein peppered him with questions. She wanted to know how the agency guarded against abuse, whether detainees were stripped of their clothes, whether they were fed during periods of sleep deprivation. Although she and several colleagues raised objections, Hayden, not long afterward, told a meeting of foreign diplomats, “This is not C.I.A.’s program. This is not the President’s program. This is America’s program.”
-
Americans should be appalled at the notion that medical doctors, sworn to the Hippocratic Oath, would violate that oath, which the original says, in part, “Nor shall any man’s entreaty prevail upon me to administer poison to anyone; neither will I counsel any man to do so.” There are many versions of the Hippocratic Oath, but however you cut it, there is no doubt the CIA’s doctors violated it. They, along with the masterminds of the post-9/11 security state, should be held accountable.
-
A controversial inquiry into allegations of wrongdoing by the UK’s security services is being scrapped.
Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said the inquiry into the treatment of detainees could not continue because of a new Metropolitan Police investigation.
These follow fresh allegations that officials assisted the rendition of men to Libya, where they were tortured.
Mr Clarke said the government was committed to holding a judge-led inquiry once these were investigated.
-
If elements of the British state were involved they must be held accountable.
-
The Polish investigators were interested in a report by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [official website] summarizing CIA prison locations and practices. In particular there were facts in the report that suggested a secret CIA prison existed in Poland from 2002-2003 where terrorist suspects were treated very harshly. Kosmaty said that the Poland has asked the US for the full non-redacted version of the report but have received no response. Previous requests for other documents and opportunities to question the alleged victims, who are currently being held in Guantanamo Bay [JURIST backgrounder], were also ignored. The US claims that releasing such documents would be against national interest. In addition to the Polish prison, there have been reports of other CIA “black sites” in other parts of Poland, Romania and Lithuania.
-
In November 2002, a team of federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) employees traveled to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan known interchangeably by its nickname, “The Salt Pit,” and its code name, “COBALT,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released last year.
The report describes in detail a visit in which BOP officials saw detainees shackled to walls and stripped naked. The cells holding detainees were kept in total darkness, and there was no interaction between the correction guards and inmates, who were given buckets to dispose of their own waste.
-
Veteran appellate lawyer Lawrence Robbins will represent former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling as he appeals his espionage conviction for providing classified information to a New York Times reporter.
-
A cohort of faculty at Fordham University dedicated to opposing torture have vehemently denounced CIA Director John Brennan for defending enhanced interrogation techniques used in the wake of Sept. 11 and have pledged to continue their criticisms of Brennan in the coming school year.
Brennan, an alumnus of Fordham who in 1977 earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at the private Jesuit university in New York, was also given an honorary degree by the college in 2012 when he was commencement speaker there.
-
..FBI had attempted to infiltrate the legal defense team of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner.
-
What I know for sure, however, is that information coerced by using torture can lead to wasted resources and bad foreign policy decisions as well as tragic consequences, including the loss of life among men and women serving in uniform.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Recently, Bill C-24 , the “Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act,” went into effect. How it actually strengthens Canadian citizenship remains unclear. What it appears to do is substitute Canadian citizenship with a wedge of Swiss cheese: something soft and full of holes and uncomfortably pungent.
Under Bill C-24, immigrants to Canada who have earned their full citizenship but carry dual citizenship with another country can have their Canadian citizenship stripped from them if they are convicted of crimes related to terrorism or espionage. It also requires newcomers to make “statements of intent” to remain in Canada, and increases the residency requirement for permanent residents seeking full citizenship. This has been framed as “adding value” to Canadian citizenship by making it more difficult to obtain.
-
To be sure, much more needs to be done. Entrenched patterns of impunity will take decades to overcome. There is little sign, for example, that the US government is planning to prosecute those responsible for the CIA’s rendition and torture of suspected terrorists in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, DC.
-
Together with her husband of 44 years, New York attorney William Schaap, Ellen published Lies Of Our Times, a magazine that detailed the inaccuracies of articles published by the New York Times and other mainstream press. William Schaap and Ellen Ray worked closely with former CIA operative Phil Agee, publishing his revealing book, Dirty Work, which detailed CIA covert operations worldwide. With Michael Ratner, Ellen co-authored Guantánamo: What the World Should Know, the first book to expose torture in the Guantánamo prison.
-
When he arrived at MDC, corrections officers dragged him from the van and threw him into several walls. His left hand was broken in the altercation and the guards threatened to kill him if he asked any questions, the suit alleges.
-
Last week’s death sentence for former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is an example of history repeating itself. But still we were caught unaware. While most commentators were aware that it was highly likely a death penalty would be handed down, the actual deliverance of it caused outrage and anger in many parts of the world. However, the Western world displayed a milder version of this outrage. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that the U.S. “was deeply troubled by the politically motivated sentences that have been handed down against former President Morsi …” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “deeply concerned” and the EU said this was a worrying development. None of these are blasts against the inhumanity and unspeakable horror of an elected president being sentenced to death by the courts of his own country.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
High court ruling highlights inconsistencies between UK copyright law on physical and digital content – and how consumers might foot the bill
[...]
It took until 2014 for the UK to have a private copying exception, legalising what everyone assumed to be possible: making copies of content you have legally bought for purposes such as backups, cloud storage and format-shifting.
But even then, the UK exception is ridiculously narrow. You must have acquired the content lawfully and on a permanent basis (even though the world is moving to rental and streaming). Your use must be private, personal and exclusive. You cannot share the content with anyone else and you must not use it for any commercial purpose.
-
The copyright monopoly is based on the idea of an exchange. In exchange for exclusive rights, the copyright industry supplies culture and knowledge to the public. It turns out that the entire premise is a lie, as untethered creators are racing to provide culture and knowledge anyway.
-
On 9 July 2015, the European Parliament will vote on whether to abolish our right to freely take and share photographs, videos and drawings of buildings and works of public art.
-
Unknown attackers are sabotaging popular TV and movie torrents by flooding swarms with IPv6 peers. The vulnerability, which affects the popular uTorrent client, makes it nearly impossible for torrent users to download files. It’s unclear who’s orchestrating the attacks but it could be a guerrilla anti-piracy move.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.20.15
Posted in Microsoft, Patents at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“People that use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us.”
–Steve Ballmer
![Satya Ballmer](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Satya_Ballmer.jpg)
Satya Ballmer
Summary: Satya Nadella continues Steve Ballmer’s tradition of just attacking the competition rather than outperform or fairly compete against it
MICROSOFT not only invests in patent aggressors (e.g. Finjan) but is also feeding some patent trolls with patents (e.g. MOSAID, a.k.a. “Conversant” following a rename), creating new patent trolls (like the world’s biggest, Intellectual Ventures), and turning real companies into trolls (case of point being Nokia, which we wrote about yesterday in light of royalty stacking against Android).
We cannot emphasise this strongly enough: Microsoft is not a troll. It is a super troll. It is one giant troll (not the stereotypical kind), masquerading or hiding behind its brand and some products that nobody really wants to buy (OEMs force their customers to pay for these and in areas like phones or tablets even OEMs currently refuse to pay).
Nokia keeps pretending to be anything but a Microsoft stooge, but this revealing new interview with the post-Elop chief speaks volumes. “Microsoft makes mobile phones,” Rajeev Suri (Nokia chief) said. “We would simply design them and then make the brand name available to license.”
Make no mistake here; Nokia isn’t separated or even separable from Microsoft. The staff has been genetically engineered/modified/selected based on loyalty to Microsoft since 2011. The ‘original’ Nokia still has a lot of patents and it now officially uses them to tax Android, as we first reported last night. Nadella (not the real boss but the tactless and latest public face) continues Microsoft’s racketeering strategy against Linux and Android (we repeatedly wrote about this with accompanying examples) while having the audacity/nerve to say that “Microsoft loves Linux” (it very clearly hates GNU/Linux). Nokia as a troll and Microsoft as a troll is not dramatic labelling; just look at what they’re doing. They are selling almost nothing while taxing almost everything, including Apple’s line of ‘i’ devices.
“The ‘original’ Nokia still has a lot of patents and it now officially uses them to tax Android, as we first reported last night.”Microsoft is of course not the only company that behaves like this. Jawbone, for example, sues Fitbit again [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] (seems like litigation is Jawbone’s busines plan) and some companies like Cardiac Science are making patents their revenue source. Then there is the patent trap which is Blu-ray Disc™ (a big pile of patents) and Juristat, a new service, aims to untangle some of the patent web/backlog. There is a patent thicket in many areas right now and it’s only getting worse, hence harder for examiners to properly assess for duplicates/merit. Juristat tries to help patent lawyers increase their ‘output’. As this new article put it: “The Software as a Service (SaaS) company allows users to plot their chance of success in all aspects of the patent application process. Among the many features, Juristat can tell an attorney the number of allowed (approved), pending and abandoned patent applications in front of a current examiner, the likelihood of your application getting allowed and your chances of success in an appeals.”
In this world that had increasingly become patent-obsessed and then saw a bubble burst (Microsoft's patenting numbers dropped sharply this year) we are bound to see desperate/dying companies using patents in their last battle against competition that truly wins (like Android). Software patents may still have some years of lifetime in the US (they are a ticking time bomb waiting to implode, not explode). This is why Microsoft has been so focused (especially since the Novell deal) on attacking GNU/Linux with patents. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in America, Patents at 5:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Wonderland may be on the horizon now
Summary: Courts in the United States are rapidly eliminating many software patents, but the media, (mis)informed by patent lawyers and other patent practitioners, is slow to report it if it ever reports this at all
PatentBuddy says that “ABA [American Bar Association] Alice Task Force found that Dist. Ct. judges invalidated patents wholesale, citing Alice, without any evidence, 66% of time.” Separately it claims that “ABA Post Alice Task Force Found that USPTO Rejections of Claims under 101/Alice Relied upon Boilerplate only, no evidence, 64% of time.”
Whichever figure is taken (with a grain of salt of course), it is clear that a lot of software patents are being invalidated and patent lawyers (and by extension barristers or judges) are expectedly worried. Lawyers are trying to discredit courts’ decisions to invalidate software patents because it’s basically their livelihood — preying on programmers who are actually creating something, not just printing lots of pages and fighting in courts or sending threatening letters at the rate of approximately $300 per hour.
“Whichever figure is taken (with a grain of salt of course), it is clear that a lot of software patents are being invalidated and patent lawyers are expectedly worried.”PatentBuddy also shares this PDF and writes that this is “Amicus Brief in Support of Ultramercial’s Petition to S.Ct. Seeking 101 Clarity Post Alice” (for the uninitiated, 101/Alice alludes to invalidation based on how abstract a patent is).
Techrights is of course delighted to see some software patents diminishing in the US, for their demise in the US might, in turn, lead to their global demise (even in Japan and maybe China).
Scott Graham, a writer for The Recorder, says that the “Federal Circuit Tightens Squeeze on Software Patents”. He writes (behind a paywall of some esoteric kind): “En banc ruling Tuesday in ‘Williamson v. Citrix’ means more patents will be subject to statutory requirements for means-plus-function claims.”
This is again good news, especially coming from the Federal Circuit despite its notorious biases.
Obviously, software patents are still celebrated in the corporate media. Even the so-called ‘Guardian’ does it. Language of lawyers can be found in Science Magazine (behind paywall), saying that “IBN has generated more than 300 patents, 80 licenses” (as if patents are “generated” and licences are “generated”), but we have come to expect that from media that large corporations are controlling, irrespective of what courts are ruling. Here is a prominent blog of patent lawyers speaking about patents being sold like a commodity, sometimes to trolls (at the behest of corporations even). It says: “The chart above shows the percentage of U.S. patents issued to Inventors and not (reportedly) assigned to any organization or government. The data comes from the PTO. While this chart shows a dramatic drop, the actual number of inventor-owned patents has stayed relatively stable over the past decade — the dropping percentage is due more to a rise in the number of patents granted to corporate owners. The drop here does not necessarily mean that independent inventors are being squeezed-out — just that the rise in patent grants is not due to independent inventors.”
The term “independent inventors” is in itself a form of propaganda. It seeks to promote the old myth that patents exist to protect the “small guys” rather than massive corporations with a gigantic library — perhaps weighing at millions of pages — of patent monopolies (to be wielded like a weapon).
All in all, things appear to be improving with each ruling on software patents in the US. Don’t expect patent lawyers to acknowledge that. It would be like Microsoft publicly stating that proprietary software is doomed. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 4:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The lobbyists are evidently and demonstrably working behind the scenes
![Unitary Patent](http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/unipat-banner1-60.png)
Picture from FFII
Summary: The growing risk of an ‘export’ of patent trolling through increasingly corporations-leaning globalisation (e.g. trade agreements) in Europe
IN THE UNITES STATES there is plenty of talk about patent reform (it’s everywhere in the media), but the existing reform is pretty weak if not altogether bogus as it’s designed to discourage participation by small patent aggressors for large corporations’ sake [1, 2, 3, 4]. It’s already weakened by lobbyists of these large corporations, as always.
IAM’s patent maximalists, as we last mentioned a day ago in light of glorification of patent aggressors, is all for it. “There is a reason US patent owners with infringement issues like the German system,” it wrote, “look forward to the UPC” (see what we previously wrote about the UPC in relation to Europe; it is helping patent trolls expand to Europe). Rather than a reform it’s a revolution, exploiting the merger of European member states to launder some laws on behalf of large corporations. We should definitely keep an eye on this. As Richard Stallman warned some years ago (well before the Benoît Battistelli era), EPO staff “went on strike accusing the organization of corruption: specifically, stretching the standards for patents in order to make more money. One of the ways that the EPO has done this is by issuing software patents in defiance of the treaty that set it up.”
“Rather than a reform it’s a revolution, exploiting the merger of European member states to launder some laws on behalf of large corporations.”The capital of patent trolls, Texas, where software patents run like water, must be licking its lips in anticipation for this long-promised European expansion (taking their racket to another wealthy continent). As the EFF’s article “Judges in Texas Unfairly Impose New Requirements on Patent Defendants” serves to show, Texas has high hopes for patent trolls. It’s all about profit (a hoard at programmers’ expense) for some opportunistic lawyers. Engadget, for example, wrote: “Federal courts might have made it harder for patent trolls to sue over vague ideas, but the Eastern District of Texas (the trolls’ preferred venue) just put the ball back in their court. Some judges in the region now demand that the targets of these lawsuits get permission before they file motions to dismiss cases based on abstract concepts. If the defendants don’t show “good cause” for needing those motions, the lawsuits go ahead — and historically, that means that the trolls either win their cases or extract settlements from companies unwilling to endure the costs of a prolonged legal battle.”
These parasitic creatures — patent trolls — are already causing huge financial damage in the United States. Financial organisations are reportedly taking action. To quote one new report: “Financial services organizations are continuing to urge Congress to pass legislation that combats patent abuse. They’re claiming demand letters from so-called “patent trolls” signify a great and growing threat to financial service organizations.
“NAFCU, CUNA, the Independent Community Bankers of America, the American Bankers Association, the American Insurance Association, The Clearing House, Financial Services Roundtable, NACHA and The National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies have asked Congress to adopt needed legislation to stop abusive practices from law firms representing patent assertion entities.”
“These parasitic creatures — patent trolls — are already causing huge financial damage in the United States.”On the other hand, a venture capital trade group defends the trolls. As Fortune put it: “The latest attempt by Congress to curb the problem of “patent trolls” is on the ropes yet again, and this time the opposition is coming from an unlikely source: The National Venture Capital Association, a trade group which is taking steps to water down patent reform legislation, even though many of its members are vocal advocates for it.”
Andy Updegrove, a lawyer for the Linux Foundation, has meanwhile spoken to a European trade group (OFE), discussing the US patent ‘reform’ and software patents here in Europe. Below are some of the relevant parts of this interview:
MB: I would like to talk about patent reform. I know you have done quite a lot of work on this and so I was wondering if you could give our readers – particularly those in the EU who might not have been following the debates so closely – a top-level view of the current state of patent regulation in the US.
AU: Patent reform suffers from several challenges. One of which is the concept of the patent as a one size fits all, legally speaking. In software there is little doubt that the engineer would create an invention with or without patents and indeed in the US until the late 1990s, software was not even recognised as being patentable. And yet there was an enormous amount of software written in the golden age of software. You could even say that the first golden age of Operating System development occurred when patents were not available for them at all. And indeed in Europe the ability to patent software is very limited and yet innovation continues. So my personal belief is that there would be just as much innovation in software if patents were to become unavailable today….
MB: And what has the US Government and US Congress done to address this? Can you talk a little bit about the policy and legal rather initiatives that have been put forward to address concerns around “patent trolls”.
AU: There is a lot of lobbying in the US on this, especially from large patent holders. But you have to understand that these companies are both patent owners and patent consumers. So they have a very schizophrenic relationship as well. In fact, many of the companies with the most patents comparatively rarely actually sue anyone for infringement. They worry as much about being sued by other owners of patents, so at the same time as they invest enormous amounts of money in patents they also want to have a patent system where they can defend themselves successfully when they think that they are being sued unfairly. So there is something of a check and balance and it would be wrong to assume that most high-tech companies necessarily campaign against reform. They in fact are in favour of legislation that would curtail trolls….
These fragments of text about software patents and the so-called ‘reform’ ought to remind us of the great dangers posed by the corrupt EPO, where expansion of patent scope has been a strategic focus. We have written about this for nearly a decade now.
Expect the secretive trans-Atlantic ‘agreements’ (between rich people on both sides of the ocean) to deal more and more with patents, blurring the continental gaps that currently guard many European businesses from an abundance of patent trolls in north America. Actors who do this are usually lobbyists or front groups that also paved the way to software patents in Europe. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
-
Every once in a while, I find myself in a situation where I’m being asked by someone who wants to migrate from a Microsoft Windows operating system if Linux is indeed a new home for Windows refugees.
-
Robolinux, a Linux distribution based on Debian featuring various flavors that let users run any Windows application, has been upgraded to version 7.9.2 and is now available for download.
-
Desktop
-
When I was in film school, I had been told by my professors that I needed a certain set of tools in order to get through my classes, but none of them told me how I was supposed to afford those tools. I figured that film was, after all, an infamously expensive medium, so that was just part of the curse. Sure we don’t use celluloid any more, but if you want to make moving pictures, you have to buy fancy computers, and then you have to buy fancy software (often as expensive as the hardware you just bought).
[...]
And then on my way to work one day, I was riding the N line, reading a trade magazine, and I flipped to an article about how someone at Pixar or ILM was really enamoured by all of the Unix software that was being used there, and how you could render things without actually opening the application that had created the thing itself. It sounded amazing. You mean I can render stuff out and not have my computer crash because the image was too large to fit into RAM?
-
Kernel Space
-
There’s a Linux clothes detergent out there, and it’s a real one, from a company that has a trademark on it and that’s selling it today. Welcome to the bizarre world of trademark rules.
-
Graphics Stack
-
The Linux Foundation has announced fourteen scholarships to those who don’t have the ability to attend Linux Foundation courses, the Linux Foundation will fund fourteen individuals to take the training courses.
-
Applications
-
It’s been a while since we made a new build of Krita… So, here’s Krita 2.9.5.1! In all the hectics surrounding the Kickstarter campaign, we worked our tails off to add new features, improvements and fixes, and that caused considerable churn in the code.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
NightSky is described as an ambient action-puzzle and it’s developed and published by a small studio called Nicalis. The developer have just released the native Linux version along with their latest patch.
-
Just four more days are left until the Steam Summer Sale ends, and Linux users had plenty of opportunities to get a ton of games. It looks like the eighth day is also a good day for Linux gaming.
-
Today Crytek released version 3.8.1 of CryEngine, which brings support for a new OpenGL renderer so developers can publish CryEngine games on Linux and Android; it also adds Oculus Rift support.
-
Crytek has just patched CRYENGINE, and the famous engine finally supports the Linux platform. The changes have been made for the CRYENGINE Steam subscribers, but it’s likely that they will land for other users as well.
-
Shadow Warrior 2 was quite a surprise to be confirmed for Linux, especially after we only gained the first instalment recently. Thanks to E3, some gameplay videos have surfaced that makes it looks crazy good.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
A few libraries have been split off from Calligra into own repos (more on that in another post), and one is around report generation. This week Calliga Plan, the project management application, could be made working with it again, here a preview (reports not yet added to build in the “frameworks” branch, still waiting for API of the now external library to become stable).
-
Implemented effects:
Window show/hide animation
Dim inactive windows (though it dims too many windows)
Shadows
-
As I have mentioned in earlier blog entries, Kolab Enteprise has gained data loss prevention (DLP) functionality this year that goes above and beyond what one tends to find in other groupware products. Kolab’s DLP is not just a back-up system that copies mails and other objects to disk for later restore, it actually creates a history of every groupware object in real-time that can later be examined and restored from. This will eventually lead to some very interesting business intelligent features.
-
-
New Releases
-
It’s been quite a while since we got a substantial update for the Solus project, but the developers have kindly obliged, and they have shared the progress they made with the community.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
-
FOSS Force has learned that Mageia will soon officially announce the release of the stable version of Mageia 5, most likely later today. According to a source within the organization, the ISO images were pushed to the distro’s main mirror at about 7 P.M. EST yesterday. According to our source, the developers are now just waiting for the images to be available on all mirrors before making the official announcement.
-
After more than one year of development, the Mageia community is very proud to finally deliver this long-awaited release, Mageia 5. This release announcement is a big sigh of relief, an “At last!” that comes straight from the heart of the weary – tired as one can be after long days of hard but rewarding work.
And still, we chose to take our time to fix major issues and have a high quality release, without rushing it. Maybe our best release so far, taking into account the impressive work that was done on the installer, both to add new features and to get rid of old bugs.
-
After more than a year of hard work, the Mageia development team has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final version of the highly anticipated Mageia 5 Linux operating system.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Red Hat Inc. today released their quarterly earnings report saying revenue increased 14% and profits rose 28%. All Things Linux has an article out highlighting some distributions without systemd and Jack Germain reviews Arch-based Antergos Linux. Phoronix reported today on the disappearing Assembly code in Linux and Mark Gibbs looked at some commandline monitoring tools.
-
At the recent OpenStack Summit, I took the opportunity to talk to a number of different players in the OpenStack ecosystem. It was particularly interesting to spend time talking with Alessandro Perilli, former Gartner analyst and now with Red Hat. I’ve not had much chance to engage with Red Hat over the years and have found their approach somewhat confusing. Perilli reached out to take me through where Red Hat stands today, and what its vision for the future is.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Fedora
-
The Fedora Project keeps three versions of the OS active at any given time — the current release, the release before that, and a new one in development. With last month’s release of Fedora 22 and Fedora 23 development underway, it’s time to bid a fond farewell to Fedora 20.
-
Fedora used to be a major contender in the operating system war, but the number of users for this Linux distribution has declined significantly in the past few years. One of the reasons might just be the fact that Fedora is still trapped in the past, and it’s in no way, shape, or form a user-friendly Linux OS.
-
Debian Family
-
The Debian project has undergone some major changes in the past couple of years, and it looks like more are on their way. Developers have announced that Libav will no longer ship as default on Debian, and it will be replaced by FFmpeg.
-
Controversy has stirred in the Linux community since a bug report about Google’s Chromium browser was logged on Tuesday at Debian. Yoshino Yoshihito said in the report ‘After upgrading chromium to 43, I noticed that when it is running and immediately after the machine is on-line it silently starts downloading “Chrome Hotword Shared Module” extension, which contains a binary without source code,’
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Canonical has revealed some information in a security notice about a devscripts vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems that has been found and corrected.
-
Sebastien Bacher has sent in his usual interesting report on what’s new for the upcoming Desktop edition of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, Wily Werewolf a.k.a. Ubuntu 15.10.
-
Michael Zanetti has had the great pleasure of informing us earlier about the latest features that have been implemented in the Ubuntu’s Unity 8 user interface for Desktop and Ubuntu Touch.
-
The BQ Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition is now available for purchase, just in time for Father’s Day.
Previously, the BQ Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition was only available for pre-order. Starting June 18, the official Ubuntu Twitter account announced the availability of the latest smartphone running on Ubuntu OS.
-
-
Phones
-
Android
-
-
Gosh all my Christmasses and Birthdays are arriving on one week. First Elop is fired. Then Trump joins the Clown Circus to give the funniest election season ever. Then Nokia confirms it returns to smartphones next year. Now comes the rumor of ‘Venice’ the Blackberry Slider, apparently scheduled for November release. Wow this is awesome news (what is next for this astonishing week, will Kimi win in Austria?)
So Blackberry Venice. Its a rumor but Ubergizmo reports today that the device was shown as prototype to carriers and has a launch date of November. Want the specs? Drool over this: 5.4 inch touch-screen with Quad HD resolution. Very nice. Camera? 18mp on back, 5mp for selfies? This too is best-ever for the BeeBee. What about that keyboard. Yes, finally yes, a SLIDER QWERTY. This is the phone I have to have and will go buy immediately it is out. Cool beans, thank you gods of mobile, thank you all at Waterloo, I take back every nasty thing I’ve written about you in recent years. This is a killer smartphone for Christmas 2015. I miss the keyboard of my old BB Bold, this is a must-have smartphone for anyone who longs for a physical keyboard in a modern phone with also large screen (and good camera).
-
-
-
-
-
Bethesda announced and released Fallout Shelter during its first-ever E3 press conference, and so far, it’s been absolutely killing the App Store top-grossing games chart. Unfortunately, Android owners have been sitting idly by while iOS owners have been merrily playing the role of a Vault Overseer. But Bethesda has revealed it is working on an Android version of the game.
-
-
-
-
Zettaly’s portable, $200 “Avy” wireless speaker runs Android 4.4 and features a 7-inch touchscreen, 10W speakers, a web cam, and up to 40GB of storage.
Zettaly, which makes PowerX battery packs, went to Kickstarter in January to launch its Avy multimedia system, then pulled the plug on the crowdfunding campaign once it had received over $30,000 of its $50,000 in pledges. On the Kickstarter comments page, the company said it had canceled the project due to a realization it couldn’t fulfill $50K worth of orders on time.
-
Open source software and code is becoming more and more commonplace. From consumer-level programs like LibreOffice and GIMP all the way up to enterprise-grade server and content management solutions, an increasing number of people in Britain are living and working with open source products on a daily basis.
-
Code Climate is pulling a gutsy move today. The startup is open-sourcing key parts of its proprietary software for performing tests on source code to determine its quality.
-
SourceForge is in trouble.
The download-hosting site retreated after public outcry, removing the junkware it inserted into downloads of the popular GIMP image editing tool without the developers’ permission. But SourceForge has still lost the trust of the open-source community after the junkware-wrapping scandal—and now more open-source projects are leaving SourceForge for greener pastures like GitHub and FossHub.
-
Licensing
-
As you all know Blue Jimp has joined Atlassian. With this new partnership, we are making changes, due to expected growth – thanks to more eyes than ever on the Jitsi Community.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Programming
-
The Kernel Address Sanitizer is Google’s AddressSanitizer (ASan) fast memory error detector modified for the Linux kernel. ASan finds use-after-frees, heap/stack/global buffer overflow bugs, and other memory issues within C and C++ code-bases. Clang has already supported ASan but now it has support for the Linux kernel ASan.
-
A man is in hospital recovering after clinging onto a flight from South Africa for 11 hours while another has died after he landed in south west London
-
Science
-
The United States and Russia are competing for a strategic role in Brazil’s plan to launch commercial satellites from its base near the equator, opening up a new theatre in their rivalry for allies and influence.
-
Security
-
-
Puppet Labs said Friday (June 19) that NSA is releasing to the open source community a set of tools based on Puppet Labs’ technologies called Systems Integrity Management Platform, or SIMP. The framework is intended to automatically enforce compliance with various profiles called the Security Content Automation Program.
-
All signs point to China being responsible for one of the worst hacks in U.S. history, exposing sensitive records of millions of federal employees.
But the U.S. is an awkward position in deciding how to respond to the humiliating blow. That’s partially because in the two years since Edward Snowden’s leaks about U.S. surveillance, the Obama administration has repeatedly argued that hacking into computer networks to spy on foreigners is completely acceptable behavior.
-
-
By exposing the names and addresses of foreign relatives, the cybertheft of private information on U.S. security clearance holders by hackers linked to China will complicate the deployment and promotion of American intelligence professionals with special language skills and diverse backgrounds, current and former U.S. officials say.
-
When a retired 51-year-old military man disclosed in a U.S. security clearance application that he had a 20-year affair with his former college roommate’s wife, it was supposed to remain a secret between him and the government.
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
Hezbollah’s television station, al-Manar, is reporting that their forces launched two separate attacks on ISIS forces along the Lebanon-Syria border, killing nine fighters including two who they identified as ISIS commanders.
-
“Al Qaida and the U.S. are on the same side in Yemen, just as they are in Syria.”
-
Transparency Reporting
-
Disclosing a trade secret on public interest grounds would not be an offence under new laws backed by a committee of MEPs.
-
On Monday, Saudi Arabia celebrated the beheading of its 100th prisoner this year. The story was nowhere to be seen on Arab media despite the story’s circulation on wire services. Even international media was relatively mute about this milestone compared to what it might have been if it had concerned a different country. How does a story like this go unnoticed?
Today’s release of the WikiLeaks “Saudi Cables” from the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs show how it’s done.
-
WikiLeaks has revealed secret Saudi Arabian influence in Arabic media and Islamic religious groups in Australia as well as covert monitoring of Saudi students studying at Australian universities.
More than 61,000 leaked Saudi diplomatic documents have been released by WikiLeaks in what the international transparency group says will be the first instalment of the publication of more than half a million secret papers in batches over coming weeks.
“The Saudi Cables lift the lid on an increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year, but which has also become a menace to its neighbours and itself,” WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange said in a statement released on Saturday.
-
Julian Assange, founder and editor of WikiLeaks, has now been a refugee in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for three years. The key issue in his extraordinary incarceration is justice. He has been charged with no crime. The first Swedish prosecutor dismissed the misconduct allegations regarding two women in Stockholm in 2010. The second Swedish prosecutor’s actions were and are demonstrably political. Until recently, she refused to come to London to interview Assange. Finally, when the British government almost pleaded with her to come, she agreed. She has now cancelled her trip. It is a farce, but one with grim consequences for Assange should he dare step outside the Ecuadorean embassy.
-
Julian Assange has accused Swedish prosecutors of being “reckless” by cancelling plans to interview him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London this week.
-
Welcome!…and many thanks to supporters old and new for being here today, to stand up for justice for Australian journalist Julian Assange, and his work as Editor in Chief of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.
Although uncharged with any crime, anywhere in the world, at the request of the US , the UK Govt has detained Julian for nearly 5 years now, under constant 24 hour surveillance and house arrest.
Today marks 3 yrs of his refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Ecuador granted Julian political asylum due to threats on his life and liberty by the US Govt and its agencies.
-
The Swedish prosecutor has cancelled an appointment to interview Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, according to the WikiLeaks founder.
Speaking on the third anniversary of his entering the embassy to avoid extradition over allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, Mr Assange said that the move by Marianne Ny was “reckless”.
-
The Australian activist said a long-awaited interview with the prosecutors fell through in what he labelled a “public relations exercise”, although the prosecutor’s office declined to comment.
-
Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have gathered outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, to mark the third anniversary of the 43-year-old Australian seeking refuge there.
Assange has been in the building since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual assault against two women in 2010. He denies the accusations.
-
Ecuador will reply in the coming weeks to the Swedish prosecutors’ request to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who today marked his third year in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the country’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, said Friday.
-
Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa said Assange hadn’t overstayed his welcome, but that the situation could easily be resolved if Assange was granted immunity. Correa was scathing about the police guard that is keeping Assange inside the London embassy’s grounds.
-
WikiLeaks has published more than half a million secret documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry to mark Julian Assange’s third year of asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy on 19 June.
-
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will on Friday mark three years stuck in Ecuador’s London embassy where he took refuge to avoid extradition to Sweden over alleged sex crimes and what he believes would be his eventual handover to U.S. authorities.
-
A new cache of documents reportedly leaked from Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry appears to reveal the extent of the Gulf giant’s funding of regional media outlets. The documents also disclose information about Saudi Arabia’s external affairs and could prove embarrassing to the kingdom and its allies.
WikiLeaks, the transparency advocacy website responsible for publishing leaked documents from various world powers, said on Friday that the 61,000-plus documents published on Friday were the first of around half a million to be released over the coming weeks.
-
One of the most inflammatory memos carries the claim that Gulf countries were prepared to pay $10 billion to secure the freedom of Egypt’s deposed strongman, Hosni Mubarak. The memo, written on a letterhead bearing only a single palm tree and crossed scimitars above the words “top secret,” quotes an unnamed Egyptian official as saying that the Muslim Brotherhood would agree to release Mubarak in exchange for the cash “since the Egyptian people will not benefit from his imprisonment.”
-
Another top secret memo says Gulf countries were prepared to pay $10 billion to secure freedom of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak.
-
-
The son of the late al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden sent a letter to the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia to ask for his father’s death certificate – a request that was refused by the diplomatic mission.
-
Osama Bin Laden’s son reportedly asked the US for his death certificate and was refused, it has been reported.
A letter addressed to Abdullah bin Laden, claiming to be from a US embassy official in Saudi Arabia, was published online by Wikileaks.
-
WikiLeaks has released a letter revealing how one of Osama bin Laden’s sons had asked Washington for a death certificate after US Navy SEALS said they had taken him out.
-
A son of Osama Bin Laden reportedly asked the US for a death certificate for his father, according to the whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks.
-
“The Saudi Cables lift the lid on an increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year, but which has also become a menace to its neighbours and itself,” WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange said in a statement.
-
Saudi Arabia was one of the countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, which came under recent scrutiny amid Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.
The documents published Friday include reports from Saudi Arabia’s interior and intelligence arms, as well as emails between the diplomatic branch and other foreign entities.
-
-
More than 60,000 diplomatic messages from Saudi Arabia have been published by WikiLeaks. It said it would release half a million more in the coming weeks. The group also released additional Sony Pictures documents.
-
WikiLeaks is in the process of publishing more than 500,000 Saudi diplomatic documents to the internet, the transparency website says.
In a move that echoes its famous release of US State Department cables in 2010, WikiLeaks said it had already posted about 60,000 files. Most of them appear to be in Arabic.
-
And another document from the same year, sent from the Saudi embassy in Abu Dhabi, said the United Arab Emirates was putting ‘heavy pressure’ on the Egyptian government not to try former president Hosni Mubarak.
-
The Saudi embassy in Washington did not immediately return repeated messages seeking comment.
-
WikiLeaks is in the process of putting more than 500,000 Saudi diplomatic documents online, in a move that echoes its infamous release of US State Department cables in 2010.
WikiLeaks said in a statement that it had already posted roughly 60,000 files. Most are in Arabic and they are now being examined by The Associated Press.
-
Saudi Arabia on Saturday urged its citizens not to distribute “documents that might be faked” in an apparent response to WikiLeaks’ publication on Friday of more than 60,000 documents it says are secret Saudi diplomatic communications.
The statement, made by the Foreign Ministry on its Twitter account, did not directly deny the documents’ authenticity.
The released documents, which WikiLeaks said were embassy communications, emails between diplomats and reports from other state bodies, include discussions of Saudi Arabia’s position regarding regional issues and efforts to influence media.
-
In new leaked emails released on June 19, it seems Sony executives were worried about the spread of herpes.
-
-
Following the Sony hack last winter, Wikileaks has uploaded a second batch of files containing 276,000 more documents obtained from the incident this week. Although most of the documents are related to legal and financial affairs, Radar Online uncovered a set of unusual questionnaires asking whether or not stars have had oral herpes.
-
Sony is yet to comment on the latest revelations, and it’s likely to take some time before details from the huge stack of digitized documents begin to make headlines.
-
WikiLeaks has published a second giant cache of documents — 276,394 in all — that it claims hackers stole from the studio in one of the most devastating corporate computer breaches in history.
-
-
-
-
A SUPREME Court judge has revoked a suppression order made to protect Australia’s national security and international relations after it was published by WikiLeaks.
But Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth today granted a temporary stay on lifting the orders until next month to give the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade time to consider whether it will appeal the decision.
-
Newly unsealed court documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Justice Department won an order forcing Google to turn over more than one year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above), a developer for the Tor online anonymity project who has worked with WikiLeaks as a volunteer. The order also gagged Google, preventing it from notifying Appelbaum that his records had been provided to the government.
-
Anyone stupid enough to think Assange has actually committed a crime should hang his head in shame. You are a dog, a slave, a puppet, a fool. You are utterly, deplorably, insane.
Yes, more interesting than the details of any charges accusations against Assange, is the fact that they were invented for the sole purpose of arresting a dissident. It is a story that has been heard so many times that I don’t know why everyone can’t recognize this farce immediately. Dissident criticizes government, dissident suddenly has some strange and elusive criminal charges like embezzlement or sexual assault to answer for.
Should we, even for a brief moment, overlook our scumbag politicians – who consorted with pedophiles and tried to cover up their crimes – and instead look at the supposed moral deviations of one dissident who tried to subject them to greater scrutiny? If someone accuses a top politician of being the pedophile he is, the result will be libel charges being brought against the accuser. If some liar accuses of Assange of rape, the result is a case being brought against Assange.
In reality, the only ones who deserve to be on trial are not Assange but his accusers and, ultimately, the regime that has fabricated this case against an innocent man. They are, each and every one of them, liars, fabricators, and vicious enemies of democracy who deserve to suffocate in their own filth and hypocrisy just for consenting to be part of this offensive spectacle.
-
Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño says someone in Sweden must be held responsible for human rights violations.
-
In a 18-page report posted by WikiLeaks earlier this month, William McNeilly, a 25-year-old former engineer employed at the Trident facility in Scotland, described the nuclear deterrent’s safety procedures and general state as a “disaster waiting to happen.”
-
Greens Co-Deputy Larissa Waters slams the secrecy surrounding the Trade In Services agreement, and says important details have only been made public because of Wikileaks.
-
Greens senator Scott Ludlam says Julian Assange’s work needs support, three years after the WikiLeaks founder sought asylum in a London embassy.
-
-
Assange has been unable to leave Britain, living in the Ecuadorean embassy’s quarters in central London over fear of extradition to Sweden or the United States, where authorities are investigating his disclosures of secret information.
Sarah Tisdall, a former Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) clerical officer, was jailed after she leaked classified British government documents to The Guardian.
WikiLeaks also posted the link to an article written by Assange titled “How The Guardian Milked Edward Snowden’s Story”. The website did not immediately respond to Hindustan Times’ request for a comment on its tweets.
The Guardian newspaper has appointed Katharine Viner, currently editor of Guardian US, its 12th editor-in-chief after Rusbridger.
-
On Wednesday, WikiLeaks added more than half a million U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 to its Public Library of US Diplomacy database. The documents include diplomatic cables and other diplomatic communications from and to U.S. embassies and missions in nearly every country. “1978 actually set in progress many of the geopolitical elements that are playing out today,” Assange said. “1978 was the beginning of the Iranian revolution … the Sandinista movement started in its popular form … the war period in Afghanistan began in 1978 and hasn’t stopped since.”
-
Wikileaks released 500,000 US diplomatic cables from during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, more than 7,000 of which are related to Colombia.
[...]
In Colombia, the US at the time was concerned about the 1978 presidential election race, kidnapping and drug trafficking.
-
Ecuador granted him political asylum, but the United Kingdom refuses to grant him safe passage to leave the country. Instead, the U.K. wants to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions about allegations of sexual misconduct, although charges have never been filed.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
-
The Spanish government wants to impose new fees on consumers that use batteries to store electric power produced by their own solar panels.
In early June, the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism released a draft of proposed legislation designed to discourage the use of solar charged batteries by people who produce their own electricity.
-
Humans will be extinct in 100 years because the planet will be uninhabitable, according to Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, one of the leaders of the effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. He blames overcrowding, denuded resources and climate change.
Fenner’s prediction is not a sure bet, but he is correct that there is no way emissions reductions will be enough to save us from our trend toward doom. And there doesn’t seem to be any big global rush to reduce emissions, anyway. When the G7 called on Monday for all countries to reduce carbon emissions to zero in the next 85 years, the scientific reaction was unanimous: That’s far too late.
-
Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard the initial cannon volleys from the parapets of the GOP hurled in the direction of Pope Francis. But as of yesterday, when the Pope delivered a major encyclical on the climate crisis, there was a thermonuclear freakout, from not just Fox News and AM talk radio, but nearly every Republican with internet access. Already, Greg Gutfeld from Fox News Channel’s The Five referred to the Pope as the “most dangerous man in the world.”
-
Derailments and explosions have occurred around North America since the oil boom began, including a 2013 catastrophe that killed 47 people in rural Quebec.
-
Finance
-
Police arrested several activists Friday evening, letting them out on bail on the condition that they not attend Saturday’s march.
Thousands of people marched through the streets of London Saturday, in a major demonstration against austerity measures. Organizers expected 65,000 people to attend, while those currently at the march are estimating an attendence of 250,000.
-
Pro tempore president of Celac – the Community of Latin American and Carribean States – Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa was in Brussels to take part in the EU-Celac summit.
-
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Misleading headline alert: Carly Fiorina is not going to be the GOP presidential candidate. She’s polling at 1.8 percent in the most recent Fox News poll. That puts her in a solid 13th place. It would take every Sherpa in Nepal to guide her to the top against those odds.
But she will win, in one sense, because she’s positioned herself perfectly for the right side of the slash. As in, Rubio/Fiorina, Walker/Fiorina or Bush/Fiorina.
-
In several countries in the region, there are groups that control most of the local press and attack governments when these undertake social programs. There, digital media and networks have become the only hope of countering the propaganda of the Right.
-
Censorship
-
THE revelations contained in RTÉ’s Collusion documentary aired on Monday – which highlighted yet more widespread and systemic collusion between British military and RUC forces with unionist death squads – will not have come as a surprise to most An Phoblacht readers or Sinn Féin activists.
-
Does freedom of religion and freedom of speech come as a package or can you pick and choose? Do those suggesting freedom of expression should be “civilised” and that we should be wary of causing offence to people’s religious sensibilities have a point? Or are there too many people who are easily offended? Are our attempts to be polite actually significant obstructions to the discussion of important issues? These were just some of the questions tackled at “The new civility: are religious freedom and freedom of speech intertwined?” the 10 June event organised as part of the Leeds Big Bookend festival.
-
If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.
-
Accused of publishing government propaganda against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times is using copyright to hit back at its strongest critic.
-
The Sunday Times has apparently sent a copyright complaint to critics of its article that claimed British and American overseas spies have had their covers blown by Edward Snowden.
The London-based newspaper unquestioningly parroted the UK government’s spin at the weekend, claiming that classified files obtained by the NSA whistleblower and leaked to journalists had somehow made their way into the hands of China and Russia. The piece quoted anonymous government sources in Blighty.
-
The UK newspaper Sunday Times is accusing US journalist Glenn Greenwald of copyright violations after he debunked the paper’s report on Russian and Chinese spies allegedly accessing Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks.
-
It is one of the great allegorical paintings celebrating the French revolution: Liberty Leading the People, by Eugène Delacroix, shows a barefoot, bare-breasted woman – representing Marianne, the female symbol of the republic – brandishing a tricolour in one hand and a bayonetted musket in the other, leading the people over the bodies of the fallen.
-
The French data privacy regulator CNIL wants Google to somehow identify French citizens wherever they are in the world and block them from seeing material removed under the Right To Be Forgotten.
-
Scarcely a week after the release of a legislative committee report on Australia’s copyright censorship bill, the bill is gathering speed on its roll through Parliament. Although reports that the law has already passed are premature—it has only passed the lower house so far, and is scheduled to be debated in the Senate on Thursday, Australian time—it is clear that the bill is being rushed through, in an effort to get it out of the way ahead of the Parliament’s mid-winter break.
We addressed some of the serious shortcomings of the bill, which would allow courts to block overseas websites that either infringe copyright, or are merely judged to be “facilitating” infringement…
-
But the real problem, of course, lies with the courts’ attempt to control, by application of its view of the law, the content that appears on websites operated by a US corporation outside the boundaries of the court’s lawful jurisdiction. [Google actually offered to remove offending sites from searches that were viewable at Google.ca, but the plaintiffs were not satisfied with that outcome].
-
It all began a year ago where a lower court ruled that Google needed to block access to a website globally in a troublesome lawsuit filed against them. The case involved one company charging another of selling copied equipment or counterfeit, and even though Google was not even a party to the case, was directed by the court to make sure no one could find the site in question via Google anywhere in the world.
-
A dangerous precedent has been set in Canada where a court rejected Google’s appeal in a case the company has been fighting for years, and now it has to remove links to particular pages from its worldwide search results.
-
In response to the school’s meddling, Atrium’s editors took down all of Atrium’s online content, initiating a yea-long standoff. The controversy remained in the shadows until recently, when another censorship controversy erupted at Northwestern. Prof. Laura Kipnis faced a formal Title IX investigation over an essay she wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the sexual politics of American universities. Following this incident, Dreger threatened to go public, and Northwestern allowed all of Atrium’s content to go back online. According to Dreger, though, the school says future issues of Atrium will have to be approved by a group of administrators and public relations staff to make sure they are acceptable.
-
-
-
As Fidler indicates politely, this has created a terrible mess. There is very little transparency around government requests for censorship (by coincidence, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has just published a short piece complaining that Facebook does not provide any information on U.S. government censorship requests). In addition, different private actors, with different codes and standards, engage in private forms of censorship on their own behalf that generate confusion and inconsistency. Companies have to make complicated judgment calls. For example, I’m aware from my own conversations that YouTube initially censored footage from pro-democracy protests in Iran in 2009 showing the violence perpetrated against the protesters, on the grounds that this violated its code of conduct. After thinking through the political implications of this censorship, YouTube changed its mind — but it could (with different leadership) have opted for the opposite choice.
-
Signatories of the petition said the government’s actions in withdrawing funding from the school play A Parallel Of Time, by the al-Midan Theatre, are anti-democratic. The play tells the story of the Palestinian Walid Daka’s time in prison for torturing and murdering the Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984.
-
Pledging to fight for artistic freedom, cultural figures defiantly offer their names for a government ‘blacklist’
[...]
It concludes with the hope that Israel will not stoop to becoming a state that blacklists artists who express their opinions. “But should that happen,” the petition defiantly states, “here is the list.”
-
Its screening had been due to take place at the Odeon Swiss Cottage. But the director, Rechy Elias, insisted that only women could attend. Elias is from the ultra-conservative Haredi sect of Judaism, which, like extreme movements in all the world’s major religions, is flourishing with a depressing vigour. As with so many other fundamentalist creeds and cults, sex is an obsessive source of interest to the Haredis. A Haredi school in Stamford Hill recently announced that, Saudi–style, it would not allow women to drive children to its gates. With similar reasoning, Ms Elias said her film was controversial because it contained scenes of women dancing. No man could see them, for lord knows what they would do if they did.
-
A high-ranking official from the world’s largest free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has criticized Turkey over increasing censorship that its Turkish version — Vikipedi – has been exposed to, vowing to take legal action to stop this censorship.
-
Wikipedia has warned its users that Turkey “blocks” a number of its articles and is also monitoring contributors to the site.
“Did you know that some articles on Turkish Vikipedi have been blocked to users in Turkey?” Wikipedia’s Turkish homepage warns, giving a list of censored articles.
As of June 19, Turkey blocks a total of five Wikipedia articles: “Human penis,” “Female reproduction organs,” “Scrotum,” “Vagina” and “Opinion polling for the Turkish general election, 2015.”
-
If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.
-
-
Facebook vows to be transparent, and yet the Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered that the company is hiding all the ways that it blocks access in the United States, on behalf of law enforcement.
-
Almost every major digital platform, including Google and Twitter, publishes a so-called “transparency report,” in which the company in question lists the number of requests it has gotten from government authorities and legal entities to take down information. Facebook does this too, except that its version isn’t nearly as forthcoming on what exactly it has been asked to remove, and by whom.
-
It is interesting to note the reasons for the termination of the contract. There is no mention of illegal content, just content which has been deemed politically incorrect. This is clearly a very subjective matter, and Atko says that the hosting provider shut down the server “without issuing a warning or trying to talk to us”. It is something of a blow for freedom of speech if webhosts start to police the content of the sites they power not because they are breaking the law, but because they just don’t like the content.
-
The Reddit-clone Voat announced Friday that its hosting provider shut off its servers and terminated its contract.
-
Switzerland-based Reddit clone Voat says its servers have been closed down and contracts terminated by its hosting provider, which comes less than two weeks after it saw a surge in signups following a clampdown in online harassment by Reddit.
-
European hosting service hosteurope.de recently terminated its contract with Voat, a Reddit clone that promises not to censor users. Voat managed to move its database to an unnamed cloud platform hours ahead of the shutdown to avoid service interruption.
-
Privacy
-
Even the most casual observer must see that the Sunday Times anonymous leak is an effort to distract attention from the utter failure of the US government, as a government, to act responsibly in the task of protecting it’s citizens and the citizens of its allies. It is an attempt to shift blame – pure and simple.
Is Snowden a good man or a bad man? I have no clue and even less interest. Are we as citizens of this new cyber age, ever going to get a clue? That is the real question.
-
When asked if Snowden was working for a foreign power, Hayden replied that, thinking inductively as intelligence operatives are supposed to do, there was “no evidence” Snowden had defected.
-
Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden on Monday marveled at the puny nature of the surveillance reforms put in place two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a vast expansion of intrusive U.S. government surveillance at home and abroad.
-
At The Wall Street Journal’s CFO conference, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden disparaged the idea that the leaking of data collection documents by Edward Snowden was a two-year “nightmare” for the agency.
-
-
The former director of the National Security Agency isn’t particularly concerned about the loss of the government’s bulk metadata collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
-
“We kill people based on metadata” said General Michael Hayden, former director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA.
A government commissioned report says that UK intelligence agencies should be allowed to keep their powers to gather bulk communications data on a massive scale – records of emails, phone calls and social media (metadata).
This is in addition to eavesdropping and reading of the content of communications.
David Anderson QC, the report’s author, has, however, argued that the power to authorise surveillance warrants should be removed from government ministers and given to a new judicial body. The government is resisting this proposal.
-
The secretive federal court that oversees the nation’s spies is laying the groundwork for temporarily reauthorizing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) sweeping collection of U.S. phone records.
In an order released on Friday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said that a brief lapse in some Patriot Act provisions would not bar the court from renewing the NSA’s powers. Although the court asserted its ability to renew the controversial NSA program, it has yet to issue an order giving a green light to the spy agency.
-
The secretive court that oversees U.S. spying programs selected to not consult a panel of privacy advocates in its first decision made since the enactment earlier this month of major surveillance reform, according to an opinion declassified Friday.
-
The secretive court that oversees US government spying requests has indicated that it will temporarily renew the National Security Agency’s bulk phone records collection authority despite a new reform law that ended the dragnet.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) – often seen as a compliant “rubber stamp” for US government spying requests – released an order on Friday positing that lapsed spying powers vested in the Patriot Act – which expired without renewal on June 1 — would not restrict the court from reauthorizing for six months the phone metadata collection program. The FISC order, though, is not yet an official revival of the NSA’s surveillance program.
-
In a campaign that’s received nearly as much effort and funding as presidential elections themselves, the U.S. federal government is trying to steer people toward visiting sites that give step-by-step instructions on how to encrypt digital communications.
The passage of the USA Freedom Act, the declassified documentation about the NSA’s secret sister agency NSAC, and the passage of “net neutrality” have all been cleverly orchestrated to deliver one resounding message: “Just a friendly reminder, citizen: it’s time to protect yourself from our fascist predations.”
-
An exposé claiming that the top-secret files leaked by Edward Snowden have been obtained by Russia and China has come under fire.
The story in ‘The Sunday Times’ claimed Western intelligence agencies were “forced into rescue operations” to mitigate the damage, and one UK government source claimed that Mr Snowden had “blood on his hands”.
But Snowden confidante Glenn Greenwald has attacked the report as “journalism at its worst”.
-
-
Describing the report as “the very opposite of journalism” Miranda’s partner and the man who was central to the publication of the Snowden documents, Glenn Greenwald, has written a scathing review of the Sunday Times report.
-
Tom Harper wrote the ridiculous cover story in the Sunday Times in which anonymous government sources claimed that the Russians and Chinese had somehow gained the power to decrypt copies of the files Edward Snowden took from the NSA, depite the fact that these files were never in Russia and despite the fact that the UK government claims that when criminals use crypto on their communications, the state is powerless to decrypt them.
-
There has been a fair amount of criticism of last weekend’s Sunday Times story claiming that sensitive NSA files taken by Edward Snowden have ended up in the hands of the Russian and Chinese governments – and that British intelligence staff have been put at risk as a result.
-
If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to watch this video. It’s CNN’s George Howell interviewing Sunday Times buffoon Tom Harper about his now-discredited report that said the governments of Russia and China have decrypted files leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
-
-
Harper made that statement during a CNN interview during which he was pressed on why British authorities believe that their Chinese and Russian counterparts have accessed the files. It was an ugly defense for what was always going to be a thinly-sourced story. Since the Snowden story first broke two years ago, press reporting about his revelations have been riddled with claims by various officials — both named and not — claiming that the leak had undermined vital intelligence powers and cost lives. These reports share a common characteristic: a lack of hard evidence.
-
In case you missed it, a front page story in the UK-based Sunday Times magazine generated a furor this weekend. It covered the purported repercussions of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks for western intelligence agencies. The report—which relied heavily on unnamed “senior officials” and “senior government sources”—parroted a number of unsubstantiated claims, according to its critics, hammering home a single point of view: that of the British government.
-
CNN’s George Howell speaks with Sunday Times correspondent Tom Harper about reports that Russia and China have decrypted files stolen by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Harper explains the process of how he and his paper source news stories based on what the British government tells them, without independently checking facts; they even submitted the final draft of the story to the Home Office for approval.
-
The story is based on sources including “senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services”. The BBC said it had also also been briefed anonymously by a senior government official.
Anonymous sources are an unavoidable part of reporting, but neither Downing Street nor the Home Office should be allowed to hide behind anonymity in this case.
-
China and Russia have copies of Edward Snowden’s leaked documents by hacking the NSA itself before the whistleblower even arrived in Russia, according to security expert Bruce Schneier.
He believes lax security controls at the US spy agency, rather than Snowden residing in Russia, being responsible for allowing foreign countries to get their hands on top secret documents.
-
-
-
Bruce Schneier has claimed that China and Russia have laid hands on the intelligence documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in a further twist to a controversial story run by the Sunday Times last weekend.
-
British surveillance functionaries placed a story over the weekend in the Sunday Times (London) claiming that the Russians and Chinese had gotten hold of the documents that Edward Snowden sneaked out of the NSA computers and had broken their encryption. As my colleague Scott Shackford points out the Sunday Times offered nothing more than the assertions of unnamed British spy agency sources as evidence. He noted that one of the Sunday Times’ reporters actually admitted on CNN: “We just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government at the moment.”
-
The Edward Snowden documents were in China and Russia’s possession before he even took them and went on the run, believes renowned security specialist Bruce Schneier.
Writing in Wired, the cryptographer, entrepreneur and former chief technology officer of BT Counterpane, part of telecoms giant BT, added that the documents were already “certainly” in the possession of China and Russia – but not due to Snowden, who has become a convenient scapegoat for security services’ failings.
-
A journalist who published the first reports from Edward Snowden’s leaked documents offered a detailed rebuttal Monday to allegations that Russian and Chinese spies accessed the former intelligence contractor’s files.
Glenn Greenwald, writing on the online news website The Intercept, said the reports by the Sunday Times and BBC were based on the false premise that Snowden kept possession of the files he took from the US National Security Agency.
-
Robert Tibbo could not be more straightforward. “There was no possibility of interception. Zero,” says the Canadian lawyer from Montreal who has represented Edward Snowden in Hong Kong since June of 2013. That was when the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor leaked classified documents on America’s mass surveillance programs to members of the press. Mr. Tibbo’s client came under pressure after British sources revealed last weekend that spies were pulled out of operations because China and Russia have cracked Mr. Snowden’s files.
“He left this place [Hong Kong] with no data on him”, Mr. Tibbo claimed in a telephone interview from Hong Kong on Monday. He was one of the only two people, along with solicitor Jonathan Man, who had any knowledge of Mr. Snowden’s whereabouts in the city at the time. In an interview Mr. Tibbo was with Mr. Snowden when the whistleblower left Hong Kong for Russia.
-
The American journalist said the Sunday Times had “quietly deleted” from its online report the claim that Mr Miranda had met with Snowden in Moscow before being detained.
Greenwald also said the Sunday Times “mindlessly” repeated a claim that Snowden downloaded 1.7 million documents, when there was no evidence to support the number.
-
Norway’s government has refused to allow the NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden to cross over the border from Russia to to collect a freedom of speech prize, warning that he may be at risk of arrest.
-
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) clearly hates being on the end of a losing vote. He is now working overtime to reverse his most recent policy and legislative loss.
[...]
Clapper also claimed that the ban on mandating that American tech companies build in encryption “back doors” to their products would prevent the FBI and the Intelligence Community from working with tech companies “even with their consent”. Also false. The amendment simply prohibits the government from forcing companies to make defective products. Nowhere does the amendment prohibit voluntary cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies.
-
Around the world repressive governments are trying to stop Internet users from either posting anonymously or using encryption to communicate securely. Russia requires bloggers with more than 3,000 visitors to register with the state and identify themselves; pseudonyms are outlawed in Vietnam; Ecuador requires commenters on websites to use their real name; Pakistan’s government must grant approval for the use of encryption; and Ethiopia convicted members of the dissident blogging collective Zone 9 on terrorism charges based in part on participation in an online encryption workshop.
-
Cyber-threats ‘one of the biggest challenges’ in the coming years, according to Germany’s defence minister, as Bundestag reportedly hacked
-
The head of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service is reportedly aiming to bring more oversight to the agency and hire external advisers, in an effort to prevent a repeat of the NSA spying scandal that engulfed it this year.
-
German intelligence is reportedly facing a major overhaul in response to a damaging scandal after it emerged it had spied on European partners at the request of the US.
Gerhard Schindler, the head of the BND intelligence service, wants to bring all 6,500 of its field officers back under central control, according to Süddeustche Zeitung newspaper.
-
The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has decided to reorganize the agency to stop a repeat of the US National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal that has engulfed it this year.
-
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency BND spied on its own branch, gathering information at the US request, the German Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported Sunday.
-
Moreover, as Techdirt noted back in 2013, the refusal by the US authorities to address these and other allegations of surveillance is contributing to the German public’s jaundiced view of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, which are increasingly in trouble. That skepticism is reflected by the fact that among the 2 million signatures gathered so far by the pan-European Stop TTIP online petition, fully one half come from Germany. The decision to drop the investigation into claims that the NSA listened in on Merkel’s phone calls is unlikely to make things better.
-
-
-
German member of the European Parliament Udo Voigt claims that the reform of the German intelligence service BND should make the body less dependent from NSA.
-
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has proposed that a third-party investigator be appointed to inspect a list of targets that German intelligence tracked on behalf of the US National Security Agency.
-
President Obama wants to share U.S. secrets with a German parliamentary committee investigating the National Security Agency’s spying in Germany. The move is in direct opposition to Congressional restrictions, which were added to the fiscal 2016 intelligence authorization bill that would block intelligence sharing.
In a notice sent to Congress Tuesday, the Office of Management and Budget outlined a series of objections to the current House intelligence bill, including a section of the bill that would prevent sharing classified U.S. intelligence in response to requests by foreign governments.
-
A new notice from the Office of Management and Budget is objecting strongly to language in the newest intelligence funding bill which would ban any intelligence sharing with foreign countries, saying the language imperils foreign relations on several fronts.
-
The federal government has refused to recognise a decision by a US appeals court which ruled that mass collection of telecommunications metadata.
Parliament today rejected a motion by Greens communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam that the senate take note the ruling and recognise that “Australians and the global community have legitimate and ongoing concerns about the erosion of privacy caused by the unchecked growth of government electronic surveillance programs”.
-
A bipartisan Oregon bill that would prohibit law enforcement from obtaining information from electronic devices without a warrant in most cases overwhelmingly passed the state House last week. The proposed bill would not only protect privacy in Oregon, but would also address a practical effect of NSA spying.
Sen. Chip Shields (D-Portland), Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland), Sen. Tim Knopp (R – Bend) and Rep. John Huffman (R-The Dalles) introduced Senate Bill 641 (SB641) in February. The bill prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from using forensic imaging to obtain information contained in a portable electronic device except with a warrant, or by consent. “Forensic imaging” means “using an electronic device to download or transfer raw data from a portable electronic device onto another medium of digital storage,” but does not include photographing or transcribing information “observable from the portable electronic device by normal unaided human senses.”
-
The government agencies that defend America are in the midst of a charm offensive — trying to win the hearts and minds of Silicon Valley’s tech workers.
The move is evoking considerable skepticism from the U.S. tech community.
In recent months, the U.S. Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security have announced the opening of Silicon Valley offices as part of an effort to mend fences.
-
While ensconced in safety and security in Russia, the likelihood of Snowden being the spark that lights the fuse for real change in governments’ accountability around the globe dims with each passing day. Still, Snowden’s role in exposing the villainous plot in charge of Washington was a pivotal decision; on his part, a real personal sacrifice; but for the rest of the West, a good starting point.
-
The USA Freedom Act is literally as much an oxymoron as its parallel predecessor — the Patriot Act.
-
To sum it up, be it a real move or a temporary fix to keep up appearances, the fact is that monitoring and tracking activities by US intelligence services are continuing at full speed. Furthermore, these laws pertain only to the intelligence activities regarding US citizens and do not include any articles on restricting intelligence activities regarding non-US citizens or US citizens abroad.
-
The cost to the tech industry as a result of NSA spying is estimated to reach $200 billion by 2016…
-
The recent showdown over renewal of certain provisions of the USA Patriot Act (often called simply the Patriot Act) and the subsequent enactment of the USA Freedom Act have raised a number of questions about the ongoing impact of these laws on data traversing or being stored in the United States. While the new law takes the NSA out of the direct business of maintaining metadata (which includes phone number called, the time and duration of the call, and location information) on all phone calls originating or terminating in the US (with a declared intent of transitioning instead to a program that will allow court-moderated access to phone company data) and reinstates provisions that enable so-called “roving wiretaps” and monitoring of “lone wolves,” it essentially leaves unchanged the underlying laws that govern the US authorities access to data stored in the cloud.
-
Libertarians and constitutionalists feel betrayed by the long hated extreme surveillance measures implemented in the misnamed Patriot Act (should be named Surveillance of Americans Act) of October 2001, six weeks after 9/11. Authors of the bill knew at the time such measures meant an unprecedented expansion of government and loss of privacy for most Americans — hence the five year renewal provisions of the more Draculan parts. Both recent presidents have requested its continuance in 2005 and again in 2010.
Sen.Rand Paul’s heroic June 1 Senate filibuster helped prevent the Senate from extending the Patriot Act, as wanted by most Republicans, and as had happened twice before. Thank God, Paul and the Democrats for its defeat. The five-year renewal of the Patriot Act did not have the votes. Instead, we got virtually the same thing in the so-called USA Freedom Act, again misnamed. How can freedom be enhanced by the government’s enhanced surveillance of its own citizens? Thanks to President Barack Obama and the Republicans, government’s unwarranted and indefinite storage of private records and communications continues.
-
A former U.S. Justice Department attorney predicts some Republicans seeking the White House would continue the controversial collection of Americans’ information.
-
Both privacy advocates and the NSA are celebrating the USA Freedom Act that passed the Senate on June 2. The act legalized and simplified the collecting of phone metadata for the NSA. Meanwhile Skype continues to collect voice, chat, video and other data, and deliver it to the Five Eyes international spy coalition.
The passage of the USA Freedom Act — penned by General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA — was followed by general celebration over what is considered a small victory for privacy advocates, and the biggest surveillance reform since the 1970s.
-
-
The Commission Mixte Paritaire — a joint parliamentary committee responsible for reaching a compromise between the lower and upper house — met on 16th June to reach an agreement on the final version on the Surveillance Bill, between the version approved by the National Assembly on 5th May, and the one approved by the Senate on 9th June. However, a last minute change modified deeply the spirit of the Bill and its application on French territory. La Quadrature du Net regrets this umpteenth anti-democratic procedure and renews its call to French representatives to reject this text during the final vote on the 23rd and 24th June.
-
Assange: In some ways the higher echelons of Google always seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. When my colleague told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his entourage had gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.
-
Now finally, Western civilization has produced a god, the god of mass surveillance. How is it like a god? It’s a little bit Abrahamic. If you look at most definitions, a god is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. In particular, god knows when you are doing something that you shouldn’t be doing and whether you are playing according to god’s rules. The conception of national security agencies and mass surveillance is that the overwhelming majority of communications are surveilled upon. Even conversations happening in person may be recorded through an Android phone, or through other electronic gadgets that are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Maybe your friend, although you just talked to them in person, can gossip over electronic media about what you said.
-
It’s the oldest trick in the book—when Dad tells you no, ask Mom if you can do it. Now President Barack Obama is playing that game with the surveillance of Americans’ phone records.
The Obama administration, on the same day the USA Freedom Act became law on June 2, went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) with a request (pdf) to continue sweeping up phone records during a six-month “transition” period before the Freedom Act provisions take effect.
The USA Freedom Act specifies that call records be maintained by the phone companies, and the government may access them only with a warrant from the FISA court. That’s evidently not good enough for the Obama administration.
-
NSA isn’t commenting on its plans for retaining these phone call records.
But with nothing forcing the Corporate Store to close for business, ACLU attorney Patrick Toomey said, “This NSA database may grow even more quickly than ever before.”
-
Most of the Snowden disclosures have shed light on the NSA’s basic mission of gathering foreign “signals intelligence”, but the way the agency does its job in the Internet age by necessity involves exploiting weaknesses in the same technology the rest of United States use. He also cited laws in Europe and in South America protecting citizens from mass surveillance. Until now, this program was never disclosed to the public. What gives this protocol another layer of security is the fact that Apple has no access to all the encryption keys which means that the company can’t produce any data stored on their own devices even if issued by a warrant from a government agency. In the wake of 9/11, the government dismantled this protection, arguing that it would impede the investigation of terrorists.
-
Taken together, those measures could amount to a new backdoor for government surveillance, according to some experts. The revelation earlier this month that the NSA monitors Americans’ Internet traffic in its hunt for foreign cybersecurity threats has only heightened those fears, according to Jennifer Granick of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society.
-
The hyperbole that followed yesterday’s story was astonishing – Professor Anthony Glees reportedly branded Snowden “a villain of the first order” – Darth Vader eat your heart out.
So let me be completely clear: Edward Snowden is a hero. Saying so does not make me an apologist for terror – it makes me a firm believer in democracy and the rule of law. Whether you are with or against Liberty in the debate about proportionate surveillance, Anderson must be right to say that the people and our representatives should know about capabilities and practices built and conducted in our name.
For years, UK and US governments broke the law. For years, they hid the sheer scale of their spying practices not just from the British public, but from parliament. Without Snowden – and the legal challenges by Liberty and other campaigners that followed – we wouldn’t have a clue what they were up to.
-
Protonmail, the easy-to-use encrypted mail service that launched in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA spying and was built in part by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, opened to the general public Sunday evening.
The founders of the Switzerland-based service announced the news on its website and released a link for easy sign-up. They also said Protonmail now has 500,000 users. Financial contributors have been able to get accounts for about a year.
-
-
The hacker collective Anonymous is taking credit for a massive cyber-attack on the federal government that made multiple government websites go dark this afternoon — apparently in protest against the Harper government’s controversial security legislation, C-51.
-
Civil Rights
-
-
There was only any public enthusiasm for Blair in 97 – and to put that in perspective, it was less than the public enthusiasm for John Major in 1992.
-
Radack was not part of the original criminal defense team that represented Drake during 2010 and 2011, and she has said that she found out about the alleged destruction of records relating to Drake’s case via the OSC. The information she has comes from secret complaints that were filed by officials from the Pentagon inspector general’s office, some of whom still work there. It is not known who they are as they formally requested the OSC respect their anonymity for fear of retaliation.
It is understood that the Justice Department claimed prior to Drake’s impending 2011 trial that some documents had been destroyed, but that this has been done according to “a standard document destruction policy.” Radack maintains that there is no such policy, and that rather the inspector general’s office has a Records Management Program that demands documents are kept on file.
Drake has been quoted as saying these allegations are his last chance to hold the NSA accountable for “illegal retaliation” against whistleblowers.
-
Two government watchdog agencies are investigating whether the Pentagon inspector general destroyed evidence improperly during the high-profile leak investigation of former National Security Agency senior official Thomas Drake.
The Justice Department acknowledged the probes in a letter last week to a federal magistrate judge who recently received the allegations from Drake’s lawyers. The judge is determining whether she should take further action in a case that ended in 2011 when Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge.
-
Government watchdog agencies are looking into whether officials at the Pentagon improperly destroyed evidence documenting whistleblower cases, McClatchy reported Monday. The documents in question involve the 2011 prosecution of Thomas Drake, who was charged under the espionage act with leaking documents about National Security Agency surveillance to the media.
The investigation centers on whether Pentagon officials were right to destroy documents related to Drake’s case in 2011. At the time, officials said they were destroyed “pursuant to a standard document destruction policy.” Most federal agencies are required to keep schedules that detail which documents should be retained and which can be destroyed.
-
For instance, a draft Inspector General report found that CIA Director Leon Panetta disclosed such information about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Similarly, former CIA director David Petraeus provided classified information to his biographer. Panetta was never charged, and Petraeus was let off with a misdemeanor.
-
Snowden, meanwhile, sits in exile — a fugitive for exposing his own government’s unprecedented system of surveillance. While Snowden’s critics say he should come back to the United States to air out his grievances in open court, journalist Glenn Greenwald notes: “He’s barred under the Espionage Act even from arguing that his leaks were justified; he wouldn’t be permitted to utter a word about that.”
-
CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling was notified at the end of last week that he will serve his prison sentence of three and a half years at Federal Correctional Institution Englewood, a medium-security facility in Littleton, Colorado, that is around 900 miles away from where his wife and family live in St. Louis. That is at least a 12-hour drive.
-
In addition, agencies “are motivated to continue retaliation indefinitely because it creates a chilling effect that silences others,” testimony said.
-
In the wake of mass violence, a nation struggling to understand turns to its news outlets to see how they frame events. The language journalists use in the immediate aftermath of a bloodbath helps form public attitudes and has a major impact on official reactions.
When two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, killing three and injuring hundreds, it was inevitably a huge story: A search of the Nexis news database for US newspapers on the next day turns up 2,593 stories mentioning the marathon, virtually all of them about the bombing. Of these, 887, or 34 percent, used the word “terrorism” or a variant (“terrorist,” “terroristic” etc.)–even though the bombers, let alone the bombers’ motivations, would not be known until days later.
-
If someone told you that there is less coverage of women’s sports on televised news programs today than there was in 1989, would you believe them? It would be reasonable if your response was “no.”
Certainly, girls and women’s participation in sport has dramatically increased over the past 25+ years, and there are a number of professional women’s leagues today that did not exist in 1989. There’s also been a tremendous growing interest in and fan base for women’s sports over the last quarter century.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
The UK’s music industry has successfully landed a significant judgement from the UK’s High Court, countering a copyright exception that was brought in by the UK government last year. Since last October, there was a law that allowed you to make private copies of your own music; now the future of that law is uncertain.
The exception finally legalised what everyone has been doing for decades: making copies for personal, private use of copyright works they had bought, including format-shifted versions. Despite the marginal nature of the exception—it did not extend to making copies for family and friends, for example—the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, the Musicians’ Union, and UK Music successfully applied to the High Court for a judicial review of the change to UK law.
-
Several music industry organizations in the UK have won a judicial review which renders the Government’s decision to allow copying for personal use unlawful. According to the High Court, there’s insufficient evidence to prove that the legislation doesn’t hurt musicians and the industry at large.
-
What may happen now is that a reference to the CJEU is made, seeking further clarification about questions yet to be determined.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »