05.03.15
Posted in America, Law, Patents at 7:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Chuck Grassley’s 1979 congressional photo
Summary: Big corporations, including some of the biggest patent aggressors out there, successfully lobbied for what has essentially become a bipartisan bill to eliminate the thorn in their side
“TROLLS” has become the dominant term in today’s news about patents. It has been like this for at least a couple of years. It’s all about trolls, trolls, trolls. The EFF, which sometimes speaks about software patents (especially this year), is still obsessing over “patent trolls”. In one of its recent articles it said: “Suppose you get sued by a patent troll. You then learn that the troll has been sitting on its patent for years without giving you any warning. If you’d known about the risk, you might have been able to design your product differently to avoid infringement. Even worse, when you try to prove that the patent covers an obvious invention, all of the best evidence (such as websites or code repositories) has disappeared because of the passage of time. Instead of winning the case, you must pay years worth of damages to the troll.”
To rephrase the above text, suppose you get sued by a large corporation. You then learn that the corporation has been sitting on its patent for years without giving you any warning. If you’d known about the risk, you might have been able to design your product differently to avoid infringement. Even worse, when you try to prove that the patent covers an obvious invention, all of the best evidence (such as websites or code repositories) has disappeared because of the passage of time. Instead of winning the case, you must pay years worth of damages to the corporation.
“Busting one patent at a time is not a practical approach to solving the overall issue.”The point here is simple; it makes no difference if the plaintiff is some corporation or a troll, but large corporations want to only eliminate the trolls, not themselves. Watch the ongoing AP obsession with trolls, this time too courtesy of Anne Flaherty. The Associated Press has almost literally flooded news houses and newspapers with articles that only focus on trolls, as we showed last week (dozens if not hundreds of large papers reposted/reprinted AP). This looks like propaganda. It’s a form of lobbying through media. AP’s obsession with trolls is exceptional mostly in the sense of impact, it’s not necessarily unique. AP is embedded or put in hundreds of Web sites around the world, shifting all focus to one misdirected ‘reform’ effort [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. The headlines vary a little, but the storyline is always the same.
Here is a better article from the EFF, focusing on a patent it squashed quite recently. The site says “EFF recently won our challenge to invalidate claims of the “podcasting patent” using a procedure at the Patent Office called inter partes review. This procedure allowed us to challenge a patent that was being used to demand licenses from individual podcasters, even though EFF itself had never been threatened by the patent owner. EFF’s ability to file this petition was important because many of those targeted by the patent owner—small podcasters—would be unable to afford the $22,000 filing fees to challenge the patent, let alone the attorneys’ fees that would come along with it. Also, if an individual podcaster had filed an inter partes review it would have faced a risk of retaliation in the form of a district court lawsuit from Personal Audio. Instead, EFF was able to defend the public interest on behalf of the community as a whole.”
The word “troll” is not even mentioned. Compare that to related coverage from “IP Troll Tracker”, which wrote: “Let’s just come right out with my point…the “podcasting patent” is no more. I’m not quite sure how to feel about it because I never really saw Personal Audio as a troll (as evidenced here and here). Why? Well, chiefly because the company’s owner actually patented something himself rather than buying a patent on the open market for the sole purposes of extorting payments from (alleged) infringers, or, worse, purporting to be “inventor friendly” and convincing people to “innovate” for him and then monetizing whatever crap he can manage to patent out of the process. You know, like Intellectual Ventures does. Further, Mr. Logan spent his own money trying to commercialize the idea, something a troll would never do because the idea isn’t to add value of any kind, it’s to add volume to their wallets.”
Busting one patent at a time is not a practical approach to solving the overall issue. It is impractical and expensive to do this a million times. The only proper solution is to eliminate software patents, which obviously would invalidate this “podcasting patent” (along with hundreds of thousands — if not over a million — other US patents).
So, now there’s this relatively new talk about some ‘reform’ with a new name. It’s not really reform for the people but reform for the nation’s largest corporations (to better suit large corporations’ interests). The New York Times used a misleading headline: “With Patent Litigation Surging, Creators Turn to Washington for Help” (by “Creators” they don’t mean individuals). We quickly found a lot more coverage of this (usually following trend-setting media) and it kept mentioning this thing called “PATENT Act”, which is fairly new. Lawyers’ sites covered it [1, 2, 3] and so did a lot of corporate news sites [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23]. Mike Masnick wrote about this thing called “PATENT Act” a few days ago, highlighting early signs that this is just another “act” with gimmicks and branding rather than substance, just like “Freedom” Act and “Patriot” Act. He said that the “Patent Reform Bill [is] A Good Step, But Still Falls Way Short Of Fixing A Broken System”, explaining that: “As was widely expected, earlier this week, a bunch of high-profile Senators introduced a big patent reform bill, known as the Protecting American Talent and Entrepreneurship (PATENT) Act. It’s backed by Senators Chuck Grassley, Patrick Leahy, Chuck Schumer and John Cornyn, and has a decent chance of becoming law. From a quick look at the bill itself, it looks an awful lot like what we expected to show up last year, right before Senator Harry Reid stepped in and killed the bill. With the Republicans taking over in Congress, however, Reid no longer has the power to do that. Meanwhile, Schumer, who has long been supportive of patent reform and is basically taking over Reid’s leadership position as Reid prepares to retire, has declared that this time the bill is getting done.”
It looks like it will really become law (based on dozens of articles we saw), but what will this achieve? “2015 could be the year Congress takes action on patent trolls,” wrote Timothy B. Lee, noting that it’s all about trolls.
“There’s a growing problem with patent trolls,” he wrote, “the companies that create no products of their own but earn money threatening other companies with patent lawsuits. The problem has become so widespread that even low-tech companies like restaurants and grocery stores have begun lobbying Congress to do something about it.
“It’s not really reform for the people but reform for corporations (to better suit large corporations’ interests).”“Now Congress could be on the verge of taking action. On Friday, a Senate aide close to the negotiations told me that a bipartisan group of senators is “very close” to introducing legislation with broad support in the Senate.
“Supporters of the legislation have good reason to be optimistic, as the coalition supporting the legislation is broader and more unified than in the past. But given Congress’s penchant for gridlock, it’s far from a sure thing.”
We wrote about Grassley before (in relation to Microsoft) and mentioned some of the other supporters of this bill. They are not necessarily corrupt, they are probably just misled by the lobbying. Our conjecture is that to make the bill passable they don’t really want a proper and complete reform, they just amend it based on input from corporations (lobbying). A slightly later (and very good compared to the rest) article from Timothy B. Lee explains “how big companies are stopping Congress from fixing the patent system”. He hits the nail on the head when he says that “the problem of large companies exploiting the patent system hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s gotten worse as the courts made it easier to get broad, vague patents in the 1990s and early 2000s.
“A modern example is Microsoft, which has more than 40,000 patents and reportedly earns billions of dollars per year in patent licensing revenues from companies selling Android phones. That’s not because Google was caught copying Microsoft’s Windows Phone software (which has never been very popular with consumers). Rather, it’s because low standards for patents — especially in software — have allowed Microsoft to amass a huge number of patents on routine characteristics of mobile operating systems. Microsoft’s patent arsenal has become so huge that it’s effectively impossible to create a mobile operating system without infringing some of them. And so Microsoft can demand that smaller, more innovative companies pay them off.
“The proliferation of software patents has triggered an arms race. Google, for example, spent $12.5 billion for Motorola, largely for access to its large patent portfolio. A consortium of technology companies including Microsoft and Apple spent another $4.5 billion on patents from the defunct technology company Nortel. Their vast patent libraries help protect them from each other — but they could also help them crush potential future competitors.”
Grassley, we venture to guess, is not trying to tackle abuse by large corporations, he is just listening to some abusive large corporations (and the corporate media). As The Hill put it not so long ago: “Bipartisan senators on the Judiciary Committee are close to unveiling legislation to fight so-called patent trolls.
“Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told reporters at the National Press Club that negotiators are “close to getting a final agreement,” with his office later saying it could come as soon as this week. Another aide familiar with the talks said senators are close to a bill.
“The proposal is not expected to look like the House’s Innovation Act but will include some of the same provisions. It will have provisions on discovery and pleading requirements that are less strict than the House version, according to Grassley.”
Call it “PATENT Act” or “Innovation Act”, these are just labels. What it’s really about is tackling trolls, but not promoting innovation or even improving patents. The bill targets the plaintiff type, not the patent type. These are just an opportunist’s methods for promoting oneself without really serving the public. Recall the patent 'reform' from the GOP and watch this latest publicity stunt for Rick Santorum (disgraced GOP candidate who never gained traction).
As with many giant corporations that support Linux (IBM or Google), there's no chance of them tackling software patents as a whole. They are not Free software communities. Their problems are different. “Google collects patents while lobbying against them,” wrote one vocal proponent of software patents. It is a correct observation actually, exploited by proponents of overly broad patents in this case. Here are the British lawyers from IP Kat taunting Google as well in their article “Google says ‘We want your patent. Maybe.’”
Never expect large corporations to do the right thing unless their interests somehow coincide with the interests of people (which is rare). Patent reform will require popular action and pressure from the public, not from the likes of IBM and Google, not even Red Hat. This is why the effort to stop software patents must regain some momentum (lost several years ago). █
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 5:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
‘Gifts’ from Microsoft
Summary: Media which is either willfully ignorant or complicit has successfully, based on volume of coverage, framed Microsoft’s proprietary software as openness and nicety
THERE is a truly disturbing thing going on in the media right now. News that Microsoft announced last year resurfaces again and it only serves to mislead the public.
The Microsoft BUILD event would be better off named BLOB. There’s no build process (for the public at least) when the end product is only binary, like Visual Studio Code or blobs for open/free/modular/hacker-friendly computer boards (Arduino and Raspberry Pi). The latest moves which Microsoft tries to paint as “open” are actually Microsoft injecting proprietary software into open platforms that aren’t Microsoft’s. It’s a form of abduction and ‘bastardisation’. Linux is replaced by Windows. Some “openness”, eh? Why does the media cover it so poorly and what’s with all the promotional language? The ‘newsflash’ here is that Microsoft gives a proprietary code editor to developers. Why would they need that? Because there aren’t any good code editors that are FOSS? There are plenty of them, including versatile ones like Eclipse, which also function as complete IDEs and support many hardware architectures.
According to this article from Phoronix (which has been helping Microsoft’s PR efforts a little too much as of late), “Ubuntu Make Adds Support For Visual Studio Code”. The original and the links to it (Softpedia covered this too) remind tell that “Ubuntu Make 0.7 is available via a PPA for users of Ubuntu 14.04, 14.10, and 15.04.”
So what’s the big deal? Do they really want us to download this? It’s proprietary software. It’s serves Microsoft, just like Skype, a malicious surveillance program. It is understandable that people like Adrian Bridgwater cover it because of their history of Microsoft apologetics (also see this new article from him), but why do FOSS- or GNU/Linux-leaning sites give Microsoft a platform/space? Here is Linux Veda treating as ‘news’ (from last year) proprietary software for several platforms (to help promote Microsoft APIs). This proprietary software story is receiving more publicity than Free software equivalents, even in GNU/Linux-focused sites. Why is that? Are they just parroting what they see on corporate media, which is actively being manipulated by Microsoft PR agencies? This is not important news and it’s not FOSS news.
Softpedia went further by reviewing this proprietary software in the GNU/Linux section. The author wrote: “After extracting the ZIP package, you’ll see a new folder that has the same name as the archive. To start Visual Studio Code on your Linux box, open the extracted folder and double-click the “Code” executable file.”
Microsoft’s Trojan horse for .NET is distributed as a binary blob and given Microsoft’s track record on back doors, surveillance, DRM and so forth it’s not a good idea to encourage others to run such programs. Here is OMG! Ubuntu doing the same thing, telling people how to install this blob in Ubuntu.
What was probably must frustrating would have to be this post from the body representing Linux. The Linux Foundation should know that Microsoft releasing a proprietary software binary (blob) is not “Microsoft Opens Up” (as the headline puts it, referring to just two links about proprietary software from Microsoft).
Our article about this was mentioned in Soylent News the other day, countering Microsoft’s self-serving (and misleading) narrative. This is what openwashing looks like: calling Microsoft “open source” because it released a binary blob. See the headline “Say goodbye to Micro$oft – the new Microsoft is all about openness”. Yes, blobs are “all about openness”. White is the new black.
Microsoft is also trying to make FOSS compilers more Windows-oriented, i.e. tied to proprietary platforms, based on Phoronix and Linux Veda [1, 2]. If this is “opening up”, then proprietary software is the new “Open Source” and ultimately, it’s all about Windows.
Phoronix, incidentally, also published this article about Mono, Microsoft’s Trojan horse for .NET promotion and dependency on Microsoft’s software patents. Why focus on such bits of software? They are part of the proprietary software stack which is actively attacking GNU/Linux in all sorts of ways, e.g. ‘secure’ boot (preventing people from using kernels of their choice or modifying and then executing them). This is an attack on Free software. Why help Microsoft’s agenda? Stockholm syndrome?
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols believes that “Windows embracing Android and iOS is a bad idea”. Well, if it’s an "embrace, extend, extinguish" approach, then it’s not such a bad idea. It’s evil and potentially effective (Microsoft destroyed competition this way many times before). Vaughan-Nichols asks: “How can there be a future for Windows on smartphones and tablets when Microsoft is encouraging developers to bring its apps from Apple and Google’s ecosystem?”
The basic idea is, take away all the applications and make them Windows applications while at the same time replacing applications from Apple or Google with Microsoft applications. Microsoft's booster Tim Anderson explained how it’s supposed to work and several other sites covered it [1, 2] as though it’s a nice gesture rather than an aggressive coup. Microsoft must be salivating at the sight of many who actually believe Microsoft wants peace. █
“I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense — I deserve it.”
–Be’s CEO Jean-Louis Gassée
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 4:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Book burning time
Summary: Microsoft’s embarrassing crimes against Netscape — the ones that put Bill Gates on trial and nearly split Microsoft — virtually forgotten as Netscape itself is made to ‘disappear’
THE grooming of Microsoft has gotten pretty bad, but it’s not nearly as bad as gross distortion of facts. The ToryGraph, an oftentimes pro-Microsoft paper, does some professional revisionism in the “Microsoft” section today, disguised quite shrewdly as “a brief history” of “Web browsers”. It’s really just a Microsoft ad, as one can instantaneously see.
“If often seems like Microsoft’s PR campaigns know no boundaries; they make what is perhaps the most famous Web browser in history just vanish, and not just once.”“Somehow they manage to leave out Netscape,” iophk wrote to us. Watch the comments and especially those commenters who allude to Netscape. One comment says: “Bloody rubbish. Internet Explorer was based on Mosiac and where is Netscape in the list?!”
This is disgusting. Microsoft propaganda that distorts history like this is something we have become accustomed to and have seen in the British media before. Having committed crimes against Netscape (see this petition text), Microsoft is yet again deleting it from history, like the Microsoft-connected BBC did for Microsoft half a decade ago in a TV programme. If often seems like Microsoft’s PR campaigns know no boundaries; they make what is perhaps the most famous Web browser in history just vanish, and not just once. We have shown more examples of this over the years. It’s not accidental. It’s extremely likely to be deliberate and conscious because only a fool or a self-deceiving journalist can make gross omissions like that. █
“Microsoft is, I think, fundamentally an evil company.”
–Former Netscape Chairman James H. Clark
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Posted in Asia, Microsoft at 4:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Disinformation system of Microsoft
Summary: Infosys, which is best known for its promotion of Microsoft in India, is distorting the meaning of ‘Open Source’ and joins a non-profit that is supposed to promote programming, not binary blobs
Open Source software, which is basically another label for Free/libre software (but with a different agenda), is essential for distinguishing not between brands but between development and distribution philosophies. Attacking the meaning of “Open Source” is means for confusing and impeding rational judgment. It is quickly becoming essential for proprietary software players in India. The government is increasingly stubborn on issues like software freedom and this government sometimes makes it imperative to share code.
Infosys is generally loathed here for all the dirty work it did for Microsoft in India over the years. It’s like Accenture in the UK. They may both seem like independent and local companies, but they are de facto salespeople or distributors of Microsoft. They are like channel partners. They are middlemen.
Yesterday we saw that “Infosys partners with Microsoft to offer Finacle on Azure”. Well, Infosys does not need to “partner with Microsoft”, it is already an integral part of Microsoft in many ways (Microsoft even outsources some of its jobs to Infosys). Finacle is therefore a horrible trap that not only makes people dependent on proprietary software but also spies on the users all across in India (Microsoft works with the NSA, so it is foreign surveillance via Microsoft/PRISM). In the midst of many articles about it — basically a load of promotional rubbish with minimal variation in wording [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] — we found ourselves distracted by a non-Indian news site going with the headline “Infosys turns to open source to drive data innovation”. So many buzzwords must mean it’s more like promotional rubbish and it most likely is. To quote the opening: “Infosys has released details of its Infosys Information Platform (IIP), which includes new pre-packaged solutions from Infosys Finacle and Infosys BPO.”
“Infosys is about code and non-profit to the same degree that BP is about ecology and charity.”Why does the headline say “open source”? It’s nothing of that kind. There is nothing at all that is Open Source about it. Infosys is doing something disgusting by even trying to exploit that angle. Claiming to make an “Open Source” platform when in fact using proprietary software with spying is beyond shameless, it is not just false marketing. Alas, being a Microsoft proxy in India, Infosys’ openwashing of proprietary software is only to be expected, especially because of new government policies in India (favouring Free/Open Source software, as we noted here before and above).
Watch another appalling move from Infosys, mimicking the likes of Facebook. Yet another Microsoft pusher, Infosys (also see what its Web site runs), makes code.org (Computer Science education push) a proprietary software plot. Infosys is about code and non-profit to the same degree that BP is about ecology and charity.
In order for Microsoft to fail in India it is probably very important that activists take action against Infosys. It’s a parasite and a leech. It harms India’s interests, not just the interests of Free/Open Source communities. █
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Posted in Europe, GNU/Linux, Vista 8, Windows at 4:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kicking a dead horse no more
Summary: Time for the Establishment in the UK to abandon the out-of-support Windows XP (from 2001) and join the next generation of computing, which increasingly revolves around GNU/Linux and Free/libre software, supported by truly British companies
“Windows 8 market share grows just 2.5 percent in year since Windows XP’s demise,” says this new report from the British media, which bases its claim on Microsoft-friendly or Windows-centric sites (these are the sites that relinquish their logs and betray visitors’ privacy). Windows “XP use takes the biggest dip to 15.93, down just over one percent,” it says, showing that Vista 8 is not being adopted despite being the latest version of Windows.
“Pirate Party UK (PPUK) is probably the only political party that would actively promote GNU/Linux if it got elected or at least earned some seats.”Microsoft is clearly in a state of crisis as governments refuse to adopt Vista 8. Some parts of the British government are still clinging on to Windows XP (as foolish and irresponsible as that is); we recently wrote about the Met and about the NHS. Now it turns out that “Windows XP support deal [is] not renewed by [the British] government, which is an important step. They should migrate to GNU/Linux because currently they waste about ~$10,000 per Windows desktop per year, according to some estimates. Surely GNU/Linux can be both cheaper and more secure than that, but the cited article spins that in an alarmist fashion to make it sound as though the British government has no choice but to pay Microsoft some more. “The government has not renewed its £5.5m Windows XP support deal with Microsoft,” it says, “despite thousands of computers across Whitehall still running the ancient software, leaving them wide open to cyber attacks.”
“No. Use of Windows itself leaves PCs open to attack,” iophk remarked about it. Right now they should move to GNU/Linux, which is becoming a standard not just in the server room but also in devices such as phones and tablets. Large OEMs in the UK now distribute laptops with GNU/Linux preinstalled and supported.
Ignore the Microsoft propaganda which seeks to make the only choice a choice between versions of Windows. See this kind of propaganda from Mark Hachman again (one of the most recent Microsoft boosters in IDG), who probably played along with some kind of a PR campaign, based on our humble assessment. We see the same kind of marketing spam (disguised as ‘articles’) in other corporate media sites, grooming Microsoft and promoting Windows as though it’s still loved, despite Vista 8 marking the end of Windows monoculture (people are gradually moving elsewhere — other form factors and operating systems).
There is an election coming very soon and a new government will take form/shape, maybe a coalition government. Taxpayers’ money will hopefully not be wasted supporting a criminal company like Microsoft anymore; it’s time to end this heist, which depended on back room deals, lobbying, and various abuses that we have shown here before. Technically speaking, Windows in the government makes no sense at all. From a financial point of view, it’s more like suicide. Pirate Party UK (PPUK) is probably the only political party that would actively promote GNU/Linux if it got elected or at least earned some seats. █
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Posted in IRC Logs at 1:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
IRC Proceedings: April 5th – April 12th, 2015
IRC Proceedings: April 13th – April 18th, 2015
IRC Proceedings: April 19th – April 25th, 2015
IRC Proceedings: April 26th – May 2nd, 2015
Enter the IRC channels now
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The specialised lab is focussed on extracting information from Apple devices using forensic softwares from devices such as iMAc, Mac book pro, iPad, iPhone and iPods as well as from Linux devices which are basically Android-based devices
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The CBI says that training is being imparted in cracking these devices. We are also giving emphasis to Linux based systems as well.
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CBI today got a new specialised forensic lab to decipher and recover data from Apple devices seized from suspects during investigation of cases.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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We’ve known since March that Mir 0.13 would be a very large release and it’s certainly panning out that way.
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For anyone still using the ATI Rage 128 graphics card, there’s been a rare update to the xf86-video-r128 X.Org driver.
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Bryce Harrington has delayed the Wayland/Weston 1.8 Alpha release by a few days.
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Applications
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Junio Hamano has ended out the month by releasing Git 2.4.0, the latest feature update to the popular distributed version control system.
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GNOME 3.18 is shaping up to be another super exciting GNOME 3 update. Aside from GTK+ improvements, better Wayland support, and various other additions being worked on for GNOME 3.18, there’s also significant improvements planned for the Nautilus file manager.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine 1.7.42 was released this morning as the latest bi-weekly Wine development release.
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Games
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One month after Godot 1.1 went into public beta, the release candidate of this open-source game engine is now available.
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Valve Software today released the OpenVR SDK, an API and runtime that allows accessing virtual reality hardware from multiple vendors without requiring the applications be specifically targeting that platform.
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Canabalt was originally released as a Flash game on developer Adam Saltsman’s website in 2009, and is the game that popularized the endless runner platformer genre. The game is now available on Steam for the first time, with a new engine and 8 new game modes.
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Hero Siege is a good looking 2D hack ‘n’ slash RPG that recently released for Linux, I took a quick look so you know what to expect.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Now that KDE Plasma 5.3 was released this week, KDE developers are starting to plan out and work on the new material intended for KDE Plasma 5.4.
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My name is Wolthera, I am 25, studied Game Design and currently studying Humanities, because I want to become a better game designer, and I hope to make games in the future as a job. I also draw comics, though nothing has been published yet.
[...]
After I played a lot with MyPaint, I heard from people that Krita 2.4 was the shit. When I went to the website at the time (which is the one before the one before the current) it just looked alien and strange, and worse: there was no Windows version, so I couldn’t even try it out. So I spent a few more years having fun with MyPaint alone, but eventually I got tired of its brush engine and wanted to try something more rough. When I checked Krita again, it had two things: a new, considerably more coherent website (the one before this one) and a Windows build. Around that time it was still super unstable and it didn’t work with my tablet. But MyPaint also had tablet problems, so I had no qualms about dual booting to Linux and trying it out there.
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So, my project is titled: Better Tooling for Baloo. Let me begin by explaining what Baloo is. According to its wiki page it is “Baloo is a metadata and search framework by KDE.” What exactly does it mean? Baloo is responsible for providing full text search capabilities to KDE applications. It doesn’t end there it also provides searching on basis of metadata of various types of files. To acomplish this it indexes file contents and metadata using various plugins ,called extractors, to handle different types of files. It then exposes the data it has indexed with the help of various API’s. So thats a very high level view of how it works. Now, my project, as the title states will provide better tools for Baloo. These tools will mainly be:
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME Project is about to release the first development version towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on October 23, 2015, and various package managers have started to update their projects with new features and improvements.
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New Releases
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Roberto J. Dohnert, the lead developer of Black Lab Linux and owner of Black Lab Software, announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the second and last Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming Black Lab Enterprise Desktop 6.5 computer operating system based on Ubuntu.
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Entroware introduced today, May 2, their first mini-PC called Aura and powered by Canonical’s recently released Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) computer operating system, or the popular Ubuntu MATE 15.04 flavor.
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Robolinux is an open-source, Debian based operating system that permits the users to run Windows software inside a virtual machine, being among the first Windows compatible Linux systems (without having to use compatibility layers as Wine).
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Last week Fedora 22 beta was released for the primary architectures while out now are the spins for the alternative architectures: 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and POWER.
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Events
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OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) is the first annual international tech conference in Albania organized by the open source community in Albania to promote software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge, a global movement that originally started more than 25 years ago.
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Today, the Kolab Summit began. Georg Greve kicked things off by sharing the vision for Kolab this year (slides here).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today we take a closer look at the number one feature of the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 38.0 web browser, due for release on May 12, 2015, an all-new tab-based Preferences page that many other modern browsers already have for some time now.
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Earlier this month I wrote about plans being drafted for Mozilla to deprecate non-secure HTTP support moving forward. Those plans have been firmed up and they announced their intent to phase out non-secure HTTP support.
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BSD
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The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the availability of RC1 images for the upcoming quarterly 10.1.2 release.
Please test these images out and report any issues found on our bug tracker.
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PC-BSD developers have worked out some May Day releases of the first release candidate to PC-BSD 10.1.2 and they’ve also released a new version of their custom Lumina Desktop.
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While not a Linux kernel-based operating system, PC-BSD is one of the coolest and user-friendly BSD distributions around. The latest version, 10.1.2, is in the works, and PC-BSD development team just announced that the first Release Candidate (RC) version is now available for download and testing.
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OpenBSD developers are celebrating May Day by releasing OpenBSD 5.7, as previously planned.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU Guix got 3 slots for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), as part of GNU, which participates as an organization.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Arduino makers, developers and hobbyists that have been searching for a development board that is smaller than the Arduino Zero, are sure to be interested in the Neutrino that has been created by Rabid Prototypes.
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Jon Wilson, Kevin Mackett, Bruno Freitas have created a new open source of retro gaming device called the KADE miniConsole+ that is open source and capable of allowing you to play retro games on a wide variety of platforms using your preferred game controller.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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“I would not have it in the CIA. I would have it located in the Pentagon,” Kasich, a second-term Republican, said Friday during a moderated interview at the New America conference in Washington. “They’re not the target experts. The experts in targeting is the Pentagon, the Air Force. The CIA’s supposed to give us the intelligence to figure out whether the targeting makes sense.”
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The New York Times reported across the top of Sunday’s front page that Congress is doing little to oversee the CIA’s targeted killing program. In the process, the paper identified three high-ranking CIA officials with key roles in secret drone operations.
The CIA asked the Times to withhold the names in its report, a request that executive editor Dean Baquet told The Huffington Post on Monday that he took seriously, but decided not to honor.
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A wide-sweeping story on the CIA’s drone programme and its deep congressional support in Washington has made waves, after the New York Times named top officials linked with the operation – despite requests the agency that it not do so.
At the centre of the story was former counter-terrorism chief Michael D’Andrea. Mr D’Andrea, in addition to overseeing the growth of the drone programme, was also heavily influential in the creation of the agency’s detention and interrogation operations.
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Vietnam unfurled a massive celebration on Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of its long war with the United States. Thousands of soldiers, sailors, police, firefighters and students marched through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, brandishing flags and flowers. On the steps of Reunification Palace, once the grandiose home of South Vietnam’s U.S.-backed president, honors were bestowed on aging “heroes of the revolution.”
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It was all a lie. North Vietnam never attacked the rights and freedoms of the American people. Its military actions were limited to their own country in an attempt to unify their country. And no, North Vietnam never had any interest — or even the financial or military means — in crossing the Pacific and invading, conquering, and occupying the United States.
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In a new memoir Jamie Smith claims to have worked for the CIA and help found Blackwater. Even as CIA veterans question his tale, his publisher is doubling down.
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With the United States struggling to find capable “moderate” rebel forces that it can support in Syria, Washington has secretly started backing brigades that fight alongside al-Qaeda groups against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
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Hardline Islamists fighting side-by-side with groups backed by the United States have made gains in northern Syria in recent weeks while showing rare unity, which some fear may be short-lived.
An Islamist alliance calling itself Army of Fatah, a reference to the conquests that spread Islam across the Middle East from the seventh century, has seized northwestern towns including the provincial capital Idlib from government forces.
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In 2013, President Obama tightened rules for drone strikes in order to reduce civilian casualties. NPR’s Audie Cornish talks to Wall Street Journal correspondent Adam Entous who learned that the president secretly waived the new rules for CIA operations in Pakistan.
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Dolgov, the Foreign Ministry’s Special Representative on Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law, tweeted Tuesday about Polish MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke’s remarks that the Maidan snipers were trained in Poland:
“A Polish Member of European Parliament has acknowledged that the Maidan snipers were trained in Poland, and not in Russia. The truth is finding its way!”
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Adam Entous has an important story in the Wall Street Journal tonight, one that I suspect will get a lot of attention Monday morning. It certainly should. He reports that a much-discussed May 2013 Presidential Policy Directive adopting various policy constraints for the use of lethal force outside areas of “active combat operations” also included a classified annex exempting CIA drone operations in Pakistan from at least one of those constraints. Specifically, it exempted CIA from the requirement that force be used in such places “only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.”
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Transparency Reporting
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A former CIA officer is disputing the U.S. government’s claims that a fellow CIA spy’s leak of an agency operation targeting Iran’s nuclear program did grave damage to U.S. national security.
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Why should you be grateful to lying liar David Petraeus? The barely-there slap on the wrist he received for leaking classified information to his his mistress Paula Broadwell reveals how extreme the double standard of justice is for the handling of classified information.
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On Friday, April 23, General David Petraeus, former Director of the CIA was fined $100,000 and given two years probation for leaking several ‘black books,’ containing important military information, to his biographer, Paula Broadwell with whom he was also having a relationship. The books included code word information, intelligence capabilities, war strategy and details of classified White House meetings.
Civil liberties organisations say his sentence is too lenient and amounts to a double standard when compared to the fate of whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, Jeffery Sterling, John Kiriakou and Chelsea Manning.
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The Obama administration is notoriously hardline on whistleblowers. CIA officer John Kiriakou revealed the CIA’s use of torture, and served two years’ jail, having been released in February. He remains the only person in the US government to be punished for the CIA’s illegal use of torture.
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Former CIA Director David Petraeus was sentenced Thursday to two years probation for leaking highly classified information to a biographer with whom he was having a sexual relationship – exposing what attorneys for whistleblowers prosecuted by the Obama administration say is a glaring double standard.
The U.S. “clearly has a two-tiered justice system when it comes to classified information,” says Jesselyn Radack, a Government Accountability Project lawyer who has represented several people prosecuted during the administration’s crackdown on leaks by low-level officials. “If you’re a person in a position of power or you’re politically well connected, you can leak with impunity.”
Petraeus acknowledged last month in plea deal documents that he gave mistress Paula Broadwell – author of his biography, “All In” – access to eight “black books” that contained classified information from his time leading military efforts in Afghanistan, and that he then lied about it to the FBI.
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It’s obvious that Petraeus only got this deal because of his position. If he had simply been a lower-ranking soldier – as evident by the prosecution of Manning, he would be facing decades in jail too. At least the whistleblowers were disclosing information for public interest, not just sharing secrets with their mistresses.
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What makes the light sentence even more striking is that President Barack Obama’s Justice Department is notorious for hunting down leakers and whistleblowers and sending them to prison. Despite a fervent campaign from some quarters to equate them, Petraeus’ actions don’t rise to those of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning or Edward Snowden. Manning, an army soldier who released material about the Iraq War, is serving 35 years in prison. Snowden, a system administrator who revealed how the National Security Agency was constantly collecting private data from cellphones and the Internet, fled America and is now living in Russia.
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The McClatchy Washington Bureau’s coverage of the CIA interrogation program and ensuing Senate investigation earned accolades Monday, with three bureau reporters getting the nod as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
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The CIA Information Act of 1984 authorizes the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency to designate certain Agency records as “operational files.” Doing so makes them exempt not only from disclosure, but even from search and review under the Freedom of Information Act.
The 1984 Act also requires the Agency to perform a “decennial review” at least every ten years in order to determine whether any of the designated operational files exemptions can be rescinded, so that the affected files would become subject to a regular FOIA search and review.
The third such decennial review is now underway.
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Finance
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Like many other countries in the world, Thailand has been treated by the US as a market rather than as a sovereign country.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Rupert Murdoch berated journalists on his tabloid papers for not doing enough to stop Labour winning the general election and warned them that the future of the company depended on stopping Ed Miliband entering No 10.
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United States documents show that the CIA paid a Chilean media mogul to smear President Salvador Allende in the run-up to the September 11, 1973, military coup in which Allende died, the country’s journalist union alleges.
On Tuesday, Chile’s National Journalists Association cited the documents in kicking out Agustín Edwards Eastman, the 87-year-old owner and columnist of El Mercurio, the country’s largest newspaper. His family’s media group owns dozens of papers, magazines and other outlets, making him one of the richest people in Chile.
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After a whistleblower stepped forward, DHS’s inspector general looked into whether Mayorkas, former director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, gave special treatment to politically-connected applicants and exerted improper influence in the adjudication of the EB-5 program. A core part of the investigation looked into Mayorkas’ order reversing a decision denying funding of Sony movie projects. He’s also said to have handpicked a review board to review a separate series of Time Warner movie projects.
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Censorship
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There were a lot of bad days during the Cold War, but 54 years ago this weekend was one of the worst, at least for the United States. President John F. Kennedy sent an army of anti-Castro exiles backed by the CIA onto the beach at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs to suffer bloody, catastrophic defeat. It was “the beating of our lives,” the despondent Kennedy would say a few days later as he wondered aloud why nobody had talked him out of it.
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Privacy
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On a dark night in 1972, a special helicopter operated by the Central Intelligence Agency slipped into North Vietnam. The crew’s mission was to tap phones lines to key government buildings.
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Merkel’s take on Ukraine and Russia is so completely at odds with reality and against the national interests of her own people, the question of just who is she serving comes to the fore. The recent industrial spying scandal on German companies carried out by the US — with German federal collusion — and the long-time surveillance of the chancellor’s personal life points to Merkel being a compromised leader. Or, in a word: bought.
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Considering Facebook’s record regarding users’ privacy, the social network giant’s claims ring a little hollow.
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The revelation, which was made by the Bosnadev-Code Factory, is reported to have come about accidentally. According to a Bosnadev blog post, a group of developers were attempting to test a new application that was being developed when they sent a link for the app via Facebook chat and noticed that the IP address was unusual, Sputnik News reported.
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Most of the noise in the press and social media about the lenient sentencing of disgraced former four-star U.S. Army general and CIA director David Petraeus for revealing classified information to his biographer (and lover) has focused on the inequality of it all.
That issue is worthy of some noise. But there ought to be a lot more noise about how this case and others are evidence that government power, combined with our modern digital world, is eliminating personal privacy. That is going to have a much more profound effect on everybody in America than whether Petraeus spends time in prison.
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Civil Rights
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“Social media functioned as a sort of virtual riot gear,” Carpenter wrote—“manufacturing the narrative of violence in the digital realm as the police were escalating it on the ground.”
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The defense for former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who was convicted of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, has asked a court in Alexandria, Virginia, to “see” Sterling “not as a spy or a communist who committed espionage” but as someone who leaked information to a reporter.
Sterling’s defense requests that he be treated similarly to other leakers, who have been prosecuted like Stephen Kim, John Kiriakou and, most recently, David Petraeus. How the government has exaggerated the harm done by the leak he was convicted of committing is rebutted by a twenty-year CIA veteran as well.
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A few years ago, David Petraeus, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, spoke out after a CIA officer was charged with disclosing sensitive government information.
“Oaths do matter,” he said, “and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.”
At the time, Petraeus was fully aware that he was under investigation for providing classified information to his biographer, with whom he was having an affair. Evidently, the retired four-star Army general realized that people at his level don’t need to worry much about “consequences.”
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The problem with the lenient treatment of former CIA Director, David Petraeus, isn’t that he was lightly punished for his leaks. It is that other whistleblowers are punished at all.
It’s a tale of two CIA employees. The first, Jeffrey Sterling, has just been convicted of leaking information about a bungled agency sortie to James Risen, a reporter. The operation took place almost 20 years ago, around the time everyone was doing the Macarena and Tom Cruise’s first Mission Impossible movie was released. Federal prosecutors are calling for a 24-year prison sentence for Sterling.
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The problem with the lenient treatment of former CIA Director, David Petraeus, isn’t that he was lightly punished for his leaks. It is that other whistleblowers are punished at all.
It’s a tale of two CIA employees. The first, Jeffrey Sterling, has just been convicted of leaking information about a bungled agency sortie to James Risen, a reporter. The operation took place almost 20 years ago, around the time everyone was doing the Macarena and Tom Cruise’s first Mission Impossible movie was released. Federal prosecutors are calling for a 24-year prison sentence for Sterling.
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A top manager at the Central Intelligence Agency who had been removed from his position for abusive behavior has been relocated to a senior position in the drone strike program, the Associated Press reports.
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A top CIA manager who had been removed from his job last year for abusive management has been named to a senior role in the agency department that conducts drone strikes.
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Former Romanian President Ion Iliescu allowed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to operate torture sites within his country because he was the leader of a puppet state whose marching orders came from Washington, former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern told Sputnik.
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A former Romanian president has acknowledged approving the CIA’s request for a site in Romania, but said he would have refused had he known how it would be used.
Ion Iliescu, president from 2000 to 2004, wrote on his blog on Monday that he believed Romania had hosted CIA “black sites” where prisoners were held and subjected to torture.
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Ion Iliescu, president from 2000 to 2004, suggested he believed Romania had hosted CIA “black sites” – prisons outside the U.S. where suspected terrorists were held and subjected to harsh interrogation.
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A former Romanian president has acknowledged approving the CIA’s request for a site in Romania, but said he would have refused had he known how it would be used.
Ion Iliescu, president from 2000 to 2004, suggested he believed Romania had hosted CIA “black sites” — prisons outside the U.S. where suspected terrorists were held and subjected to harsh interrogation.
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Romania’s former President Ion Iliescu on Monday firmly denied that he had confirmed the existence of a CIA secret prison in his country in his recent interview given to a German magazine.
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Romania’s former President Ion Iliescu on Monday said he has in no way confirmed the existence of an illegal CIA prison in Romania in an interview he has recently given to the German publication Der Spiegel.”I am unpleasantly surprised by the way in which my statements in a recent interview to German publication Der Spiegel are being reflected and especially commented on. I want to be as clear as possible: in no way have I confirmed the existence of an illegal CIA prison in Romania, a prison where illegal interrogation techniques such as torture would have been used. I was equally clear when I said that had I known the destination of the facility asked of us by the US I would have certainly taken a different decision. Knowing what I had approved, namely headquarters for a CIA representation office in Romania, justifies that fact that all these years I have denied the existence of any CIA prison in Romania. I am firmly rejecting the interpretation of my gesture, which is a natural one among partners and allies, would have been my bribing the US into NATO welcoming Romania in. So far as I remember, the approval was issued AFTER the November 2002 NATO Summit meeting in Prague decided to let Romania in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” Iliescu says in a post on his blog.
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Pakistani police dropped a case that was recently registered against a former CIA station chief and a former agency lawyer over a 2009 drone strike that killed two people in a tribal region, police said Thursday.
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The capital police on Thursday registered a murder case against former CIA station chief Jonathan Banks, who is currently heading the US agency’s counter terrorism programme in Langley, Virginia.
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Newly released emails show a close relationship between the American Psychological Association and the psychologists who helped create the architecture of the CIA’s torture program.
One email between CIA psychologist Kirk Hubbard and an executive from the American Psychology Association, or APA, makes a thinly cloaked reference to the role in interrogations of the now-infamous CIA contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.
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The leading American professional group for psychologists secretly worked with the Bush administration to help justify the post-9/11 US detainee torture program, according to a watchdog analysis released on Thursday.
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The American Psychologists Association, the largest professional scientific organization of its kind, was secretly complicit in the adoption of torturous interrogation tactics used by the United States against detainees, a new report suggests.
A study released this week by noteable anti-torture critics reveals that an analysis of emails from the inbox of a deceased US government contractor demonstrates compliance on behalf of the APA with regards to the drafting of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs, developed under President George W. Bush.
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The American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror, according to a new report by a group of dissident health professionals and human rights activists.
The report is the first to examine the association’s role in the interrogation program. It contends, using newly disclosed emails, that the group’s actions to keep psychologists involved in the interrogation program coincided closely with efforts by senior Bush administration officials to salvage the program after the public disclosure in 2004 of graphic photos of prisoner abuse by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
“The A.P.A. secretly coordinated with officials from the C.I.A., White House and the Department of Defense to create an A.P.A. ethics policy on national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the C.I.A. torture program,” the report’s authors conclude.
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The primary Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) of federal capital, Islamabad Police on Thursday dismissed the high profile case as discarding the First Information Report (FIR) registered Against Jonathan Banks was Central Investigation Agency (CIA) station chief in Islamabad.
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Complying with the court orders, Islamabad police on Wednesday registered a case against former CIA station chief Islamabad Jonathan Banks over the death of three Pakistanis in a US drone strike in North Waziristan Agency (NWA) back in 2009 but immediately referred the matter to the concerned police station in NWA for registration of the same case and subsequent investigation over there, arguing the incident in question did not occur in its jurisdiction.
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Police subsequently transferred the case to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) Secretariat.
The case against Banks was registered at the Secretariat police station upon directions of the Islamabad High Court (IHC) last night.
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The United States Congress continues to support the White House’s lethal drone program, Defense One reports. Despite the repeated killing of innocent civilians, including recently an American citizen, the controversial counterterrorism tactic is facing little public criticism or scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers.
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When President Barack Obama created a new set of rules for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drone strikes in an effort to reduce the killing of innocent people, he exempted the agency’s operations in Pakistan from the new restrictions.
The Wall Street Journal has reported Obama “secretly approved a waiver” that gave the CIA “more flexibility in Pakistan than anywhere else to strike suspected militants.”
Under the 2013 rules the president created, the CIA was required to show that the proposed target of a drone strike represented “an imminent threat to the U.S.” This standard, however, was not imposed when it came to Pakistan.
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If it looks like a terrorist from thousands of feet above, FIRE! Last year, of 41 people targeted by drones, 1,147 were killed. A ratio like that is not going to go a long way in winning over hearts and minds. With drones on the rise, it’s time to investigate if this sort of warfare actually works or is beneficial in the long run— a decidedly difficult task with so much of the US drone program shrouded in secrecy. Enjoy your Commander in Drone, like, share and check out the links behind the cartoon!
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Last week, President Obama expressed regret for two western hostages held by Al Qaeda and accidentally killed in an “anti-terrorist operation.”
The deaths of these two men — American consultant Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, both of whom had been held by Al Qaeda for several years — were indeed tragic.
It would be bad enough if they were the only innocent victims killed by the US in the war on terror. But they aren’t.
Over a thousand civilians – including dozens of Westerners – are among the thousands of people who have died in US drone strikes conducted outside its declared war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to independent estimates.
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Amnesty International on Tuesday accused President Barack Obama’s administration of granting “de facto amnesty” to people involved in a CIA program that detained and tortured militants captured after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
The human rights group said that since the release in December of a Senate report on the use of what the Central Intelligence Agency called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the administration had done nothing to end impunity for those who mistreated prisoners.
Amnesty researcher Naureen Shah said the administration was effectively granting immunity from prosecution by failing to thoroughly investigate conduct that came to light in the five-year investigation.
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Amnesty International has strongly criticised the Obama administration’s silence in the wake of last year’s Senate torture report and has called on the US Department of Justice to reopen and expand its investigation into CIA interrogations.
In a 140-page report – Crimes and Impunity: full Senate Committee report on CIA secret detentions must be released – the organisation calls for the full version of the Senate Committee’s report to be published. The full version – some 13 times longer than the 500 page summary version published (with redactions) in December – remains unpublished and is instead still marked “Top Secret”.
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Amnesty International released a report on April 21 (see PDF) criticizing the Obama administration’s silence in the wake of the Senate torture report, calling it de facto amnesty for those responsible for CIA torture. The government inaction following the December publication of the summary report on the CIA’s secret detention program is outlined in detail in the new report, Crimes and Impunity. The document also highlights the lack of accountability for enforced disappearance and the failure to recompense victims of the CIA’s programs.
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More than four months after publication of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s summary report on the secret detention program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US administration has done nothing to end impunity for the torture and enforced disappearances committed in the program. Indeed, it has failed to meaningfully respond to the report in any way whatsoever.
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The Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) cites these incidents in its campaign against tortures.
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Amnesty International blasted the Obama administration on Tuesday for failing to act months after receiving a Senate report on the CIA’s secret interrogation techniques, saying that the silence constitutes de facto amnesty for torture.
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“Rather than another reason to refight old arguments, I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong—in the past.” That was President Obama, last December, after the release of a Senate panel report on the CIA’s use of torture against terrorism detainees. Obama’s statement encapsulated both his confidence that the brutal interrogation techniques of the Bush era had been brought to an end by the executive order he issued banning them upon taking office, and his reluctance to probe more deeply into abuses that occurred or prosecute any of the offenders.
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It has been more than four months since the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) published the summary of its report on the secret detention program operated by the CIA after the 9/11 attacks. Yet today, the official record of what happened in the CIA’s “black sites” is still under wraps. The Committee’s full report sits gathering dust in secure facilities, with even the Justice Department failing apparently to read it, let alone act upon it.
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Amnesty International has accused the Obama administration of continuing a policy of shielding people who tortured detainees at secret CIA sites from prosecution.
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“Failure to end the impunity and ensure redress not only leaves the USA in serious violation of its international legal obligations, it increases the risk that history will repeat itself when a different president again deems the circumstances warrant resort to torture, enforced disappearance, abductions or other human rights violations,” the authors concluded.
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DR SAM RAPHAEL wants to know if the flights which landed at Prestwick and Glasgow Airports violated Scottish law and if Holyrood or Westminster was aware of what was going on on board.
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The investigation appears to have been very unorthodox and the details are still murky. The sheriff and his chief deputy’s testimony seemed to describe it as an attempt to expose alleged bank fraud, computer tampering and surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency and DOJ.
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In the long debate over torture, there remains only one instance when a CIA interrogator ever faced trial for torture – and he was convicted. That CIA contractor, David Passaro, is now speaking out in a new Retro Report documentary.
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The analysis, which is summarised in our first quarterly report, reveals 101 of the detainees were held by the CIA for more than a month, and 47 of these for more than a year. All detainees were held without access to lawyers, their families or the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the treatment of al Qaeda suspects held in secret prisons, told the Bureau today it was now down to journalists to “tell the full story” about the intelligence agency’s torture programme because politicians did not have the will.
In a video interview on the last day of his house arrest recorded for the Bureau by film-maker Tarquin Ramsay, the former CIA counter-terrorism analyst called on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to release more details from its 6,000-page report on CIA torture completed last December.
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A public lecture by Mark Fallon, expert in security and counterterrorism investigations and Chair of the US Government’s High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) Research Committee
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It’s official, at least according to Chinese authorities: Officers for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) did not kill several CIA agents sent to Macau and Hong Kong to assassinate NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Wait, what?
Over the last year or so — it’s difficult to date the rumor’s exact beginning — a segment of the Chinese Internet has been trying to figure out why in March 2014 China’s military bestowed a top honor on a group of special forces soldiers stationed in Macau in peacetime. And so one of the more popular explanations is that this group of soldiers earned the honor by dispatching a group of CIA operatives sent to kill the world’s most famous whistleblower.
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Since the US is clearly not pursuing prosecutions for the torture perpetrated by its citizens in Afghanistan, in detention centers such as Bagram or the CIA black site known as the “Salt Pit”, the US will face difficulties in demonstrating otherwise before the ICC. The Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC has already initiated the preliminary examination stage, using its proprio motu powers, with a view to opening a full formal investigation in the future. The examination phase includes allegations of crimes under the jurisdiction of the ICC committed by all parties to the conflict, including the Taliban and Afghan government forces as well as international forces. Regarding the US, the Office of the Prosecutor is currently focusing on torture and ill-treatment of conflict-related detainees by US armed forces between 2003 and 2008.
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Oh, good. As if there was ever any doubt that the exposure of CIA torture was never going to result in anyone involved being held responsible, the current push to knock a former Senate staffer off her career path further confirms the government’s preference for shooting messengers.
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Five months after the Senate Intelligence Committee released its gruesome report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, someone is finally paying steep professional consequences. Except it’s not the former torturers. Or their superiors. Or even the CIA officials who improperly searched the computers that Senate investigators used to construct the study.
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Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.) is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the CIA. He is also that agency’s most devoted lapdog in Congress. Since he failed to prevent the 2014 release of the Senate report on the CIA’s torture program, he’s been looking for some way to punish the people responsible for embarrassing his beloved cabal of incompetent torturers. And he seems to have found his victim.
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Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declined on Wednesday to discuss whether during a closed-door hearing he called for a suspected terrorist to be killed.
But Burr, who took over the committee in January, said it was better to capture terrorists when possible.
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According to the April 28 news story “N.C.’s Burr chided after terror report,” in 2013 Sen. Richard Burr wanted the CIA to find and kill a U.S. citizen, Muhanad Al Farekh.
One would think that a U.S. senator would believe in the rule of law and recognize that extrajudicial killing is illegal. He must know it is unlawful to target for killing persons who have not been accused and convicted of a crime. It violates International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law. For a U.S. citizen, it also violates the U.S. Constitution, Amendment V.
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China is being purged. An aggressive anti-corruption campaign that began after Xi Jinping became chief of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 and the nation’s president the following year has shaken institutions from the army to the state television broadcaster. Hundreds of thousands of officials have already been detained. Unlike similar crackdowns of the past, the effort shows no signs of slowing.
“China’s anti-graft campaign has moved beyond setting warning examples to deter others,” said a 2014 year-end report from state press agency Xinhua. “The scale of the investigations, as well as new initiatives and legal reform, indicate that the country intends to fight a protracted war.”
Xi’s promise to eliminate both “tigers and flies” — the high-ranking officials who have stolen billions and the petty corruption that plagues everyday life — is genuinely popular among ordinary Chinese who saw graft worsen over the past decade. The president and his allies fear that corruption could lead to the overthrow of the Party itself if left unchecked. But while cleaning up, Xi also seems to be cleaning house, eliminating the power networks of former or potential rivals while preserving his own power bases.
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