02.14.15
Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day and a lot of Open Source is feeling mushy. The Free Software Foundation began a campaign to show all the hard-working developers, managers, and support staff appreciate and has dubbed February 14 I love Free Software Day. openSUSE and the Document Foundation are in the act as well. Elsewhere, the Mageia project has announced their Valentine’s gift – Mageia 5 Beta 3.
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Desktop
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Google is planning to push 2-in-1 devices in 2015, according Digitimes Research’s inquiries within the upstream supply chain. Google’s 2-in-1 Chromebook designed by Quanta Computer is expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter.
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So I think it a good idea for Linux gamers and gamers in general to try to be patient while Valve does its work. The worst thing that could happen is for Valve to prematurely release SteamOS or the Steam Machines before they are ready for prime time. A buggy, slow version of SteamOS would cause many gamers to think twice about using it. And a badly designed controller or other hardware screw up would also damage the entire SteamOS platform.
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Cutegram is one of those new apps that you fall in love with them instantly, especially if they provide overwhelming features. It is a Telegram client for GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X systems, written in Qt5/QML and designed to blend perfectly into the KDE Plasma graphical desktop environment and dubbed by its developers “Best Telegram Client Ever.”
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Server
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… is the new hype these days. Everyone seems to want to be part of it; even Microsoft wants to allow Docker to run on its platform. How they visualise that is slightly beyond me, seen as how Docker is mostly a case of “run a bunch of LXC instances”, which by their definition can’t happen on Windows. Presumably they’ll just run a lot more VMs, then, which is a possible workaround.
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Kernel Space
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Nearly one year after the release of PulseAudio 5.0, the release of PulseAudio 6.0 is finally here with many changes.
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F2FS remains a very promising open-source file-system for targeting flash-based storage on Linux, though for Linux 3.20 the changes aren’t too exciting.
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Back in 2013 Torvalds talked of renaming Linux 3.20 to Linux 4.0 when the time came, but as talked about in several articles since then, there hasn’t been much communication whether the in-development Linux 3.20 will be re-branded as Linux 4.0. Like with the move from Linux 2.6.x to Linux 3.0, Torvalds wanted to move to v4.0 simply since the minor point release numbers were getting high.
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Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM pull request for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some interesting changes and features for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
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Beyond the big set of AMD Radeon changes for Linux 3.20, Alex Deucher of AMD mailed in some important Radeon DRM driver fixes today that are a big deal for some R9 290 “Hawaii” users of the open-source driver.
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Graphics Stack
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While we’re only in the middle of the Linux 3.20 kernel, for what might still be called Linux 4.0, Intel already has updated DRM driver code for testing that will not be merged until Linux 3.21 (or what might also be known as Linux 4.1).
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While Intel’s official Mesa DRI driver has supported “Gen8″ Broadwell graphics for many months, today the support for these latest-generation HD/Iris Graphics processors landed within the unofficial ILO Gallium3D driver.
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While the X.Org Foundation is voting on joining SPI and the SPI already represents a range of open-source projects from PostgreSQL to Debian, this organization is being criticized this week over how they negatively interacted with the Elementary OS project.
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Wayland 1.7.0 along with the reference Weston 1.7 compositor were released in the early hours of the morning as a great Valentine’s Day gift to open-source users wishing to run the next-generation Linux display stack. The Wayland/Weston 1.7 release continues polishing up the stack as an alternative to the security-ridden X.Org Server.
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Applications
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It’s been almost two and a half years since the last official release to the open-source OpenShot video editing software. OpenShot 2.0 has been talked about for much of this time but this major update to the once very promising non-linear video editor has yet to materialize.
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Jonathan Thomas posted an update on OpenShot and the new features its gained recently in the lead-up to OpenShot 2.0. Among the progress shared in the “OpenShot Valentines Weekend Update” is read/write animated GIF support, major video playback improvements, cross-platform improvements, a new icon and branding, and libOpenShot 0.0.4 has been released. Jonathan has also made good progress on the Qt user-interface to OpenShot.
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Frederik Gladhorn created the QtTextToSpeech module a while ago as a test to see how feasible it would be to wrap all the platforms Qt is supported on’s TTS APIs in one easy to use Qt API. This turned out to be a great idea in my opinion. The predecessor to QtSpeech in KDE applications was Jovie, formerly known as kttsd. While it worked for the most part it required a daemon to be running which spoke with different synthesizers (originally) then was modified to use speech-dispatcher directly instead (when it was renamed to Jovie). QtSpeech on the other hand is a library. If you want to use it, you link to it in your application, create a QTextToSpeech object, and pass any text to speak to it’s “say” method. No D-Bus connection required, no daemon required, just a small, light library that wraps the native platform TTS API directly.
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Tonido is a cross platform, free application that allows you to access all files on your computer from a web browser, smartphone, tablet or even DLNA enabled devices. You can access your files from anywhere, and ofcourse you can share them to your friends, family, and colleagues as well. Additionally, you can create a secure private share that only authorized people are allowed to access them. As you’re the only person to access or share your files to others, you have a private and secure Cloud on your hand.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Alright, so Colossal Order thinks they can mend our broken city builder hearts with Cities: Skylines next month, March 10th. What demands are they going to make of our Mayoral PCs to achieve this?
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Artifex Mundi has had a strong presence on Steam for Linux since they got through Steam Greenlight last year. Last month they published their 14th game on the digital store, and as usual it was a same-day release for Linux on Steam.
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I know some of you are wanting this badly, so the good news is that Age Of Wonders III will be officially released on Linux in beta form soon.
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The developers working on the Linux versions of Metro Last Light Redux and Metro 2033 Redux have released a long-awaited new patch release.
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Linux gamers still seem to be unable to play co-up, the motion blur when running is still there when turned off (not as bad as it was), and performance is still utterly abysmal. I have relayed my feedback to Techland as usual in the hopes they fix it up.
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New Releases
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The Parsix GNU/Linux Project proudly announced a few minutes ago, February 14, that the first maintenance release of the Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 (codename Nestor) computer operating system based on the Debian 7 Wheezy distribution has been officially released and is now available for download from its website or as an upgrade to existing Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 users.
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Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 (code name Nestor) brings the latest stable GNOME desktop environment, a brand new kernel built using or modernized kernel build system, updated installer and support for UEFI based systems. This version has been synchronized with Debian Wheezy repositories as of February 6, 2015. Parsix Nestor ships with GNOME 3.12 and LibreOffice productivity suit by default. Highlights: GNOME Shell 3.12.2, X.Org 1.14.7, GRUB 2, GNU Iceweasel (Firefox) 35.0.1, GParted 0.12.1, Empathy 3.12.7, LibreOffice 3.5.4, VirtualBox 4.3.18 and a brand new kernel based on Linux 3.14.32 with TuxOnIce 3.3, BFS and other extra patches. Live DVD has been compressed using SquashFS and XZ.
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We’re proud to announce the release of Rebellin Linux v2.5! Plenty of great news from the Rebellin Project!
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Arne Exton, the creator of numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, including the untroublesome and fast Exton|OS, had the pleasure of informing us today, February 14, about a new build for its MeX Linux computer operating system based on Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Debian 8 Jessie, and Linux Mint 17.1 (Rebecca).
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The third Beta of the forthcoming Mageia 5 Linux kernel-based operating system has been officially announced via Mageia’s blog on February 13, as a gift for Valentine’s Day “The release date was a close call between Friday, the 13th and Valentine’s day… but finally, Mageia 5 beta 3 is available for tests.”
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The release date was a close call between Friday, the 13th and Valentine’s day… but finally, Mageia 5 beta 3 is available for tests. You will find more information about it on the Release Notes page.
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The third beta to the much delayed Mageia 5 is now available for some Valentine’s weekend testing.
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Red Hat Family
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There’s a new trend called “devops” that is sweeping the enterprise IT world and its become a life-or-death career situation for many IT departments.
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Fedora
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At the DevConf.cz conference last weekend, I was given the okay to let it slip that Remy DeCausemaker will be joining Red Hat to work full-time on Fedora Community Action and Impact. Remy has been around Fedora a long time, and from his previous position at the Rochester Institute of Technology, was instrumental in launching the first minor in Free and Open Source Software. Remy will join the Fedora Council and lead initiatives for even greater Fedora community success and growth.
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DevConf.cz 2015 took place last week in Brno, Czech Republic as the annual Red Hat / Fedora focused open-source Linux event. For those interested, the videos of the sessions are up online.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The sale of the first ever Ubuntu phone through a European flash sale was evidently a success. Of course, we wouldn’t know as the phone isn’t available yet to those of us who live on this side of the pond, so it hasn’t been getting much press over here. However, EU sites are all atwitter with headlines like “Ubuntu Sells Out!”
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Version 0.11 of the Mir Display Server was released this week for Ubuntu.
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Flavours and Variants
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A recent post on the elementary blog about how they ask for payment on download created a bit of a stir this week. One particular sentence struck a nerve (it has since been removed from the post): “We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software.”
No, they aren’t. I understand that people want to get paid for their work. It’s only natural. Especially when you’d really like that work to be what puts food on the table and not something you do after you work a full week for someone else. I certainly don’t begrudge developers asking for money. I don’t even begrudge requiring payment before being able to download the software. The developers are absolutely right when they say “elementary is under no obligation to release our compiled operating system for free download.”
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Phones
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Android
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Taking a look back at the week’s news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit highlights a number of stories including all of Samsung’s leaks around the Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge, the Sony Xperia Z4, phablets fight it out, Android’s crash rate beating iOS, Microsoft and Samsung team up, who’s using Android Wear, the dates for I/O 2015, and OnePlus loves Tuesdays.
Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android over the last seven days (and you can read the weekly Apple news digest here).
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Yesterday, I linked to a page on Amazon that offered $140 of free Android apps for a limited time. But I goofed because there’s also another page that includes an ongoing list of the one hundred top free Android apps in Amazon’s store, and I forgot to include it. The list includes free games as well as free apps, and it’s updated hourly.
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Paul Ford, once again, has written up something fascinating. He discusses something I had no idea happened: when an iPhone user texts with another iPhone user using iMessage, the outgoing texts appear in calm blue bubbles. When an iPhone user texts with a non-iPhone user (or an iPhone user using something other than iMessage — meaning mainly Android users, obviously), those outgoing texts are in a harsh green. Here are the two examples Paul shows, starting with the iPhone to iPhone:
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Google is testing a way to make its super-cheap Android One smartphones more useful and accessible to people in emerging markets.
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Google’s latest ad spot centered around their new motto — “Be Together, Not the Same” — hit the net late last night. The video doesn’t feature a slew of Canadian Androids or thousands of Android devices singing in unison. None of that. It’s rather simple, showing a variety of videos from around the net in which people are engaged in their own, unique, sometimes complex handshakes. That’s about it.
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The popular Xposed Framework, which adds tons of customization options to Android, is now available as an alpha build for Android 5.0 Lollipop. Just the other day, developer rovo89 posted a teaser on XDA hinting that Xposed for Android 5.0 would be available ‘soon’. That day has finally come, so if you’re rooted and running Lollipop, get to it!
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Samsung’s products include the Galaxy S4/S5, Galaxy S5 with KNOX, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition, Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition with KNOX 2, Galaxy Note Edge with KNOX 2, Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and 10.5 LTE with KNOX 2, and the Galaxy Alpha with KNOX 2. For Samsung, Knox provides the added security features key to making the grade in the CSfC program.
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However, never say never: Xiaomi revealed last year that it plans to invest $1 billion in online video content, which could eventually pave the way to target Chinese expats, or even wider audiences, outside of China as well. With that in mind, it’s worth taking a closer look at Xiaomi’s Mi TV, the company’s 47-inch smart TV, which was on display at the press event as well.
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With many organizations incorporating open source code into their software, business managers should have a basic understanding of what open source is all about. After all, Gartner and Accenture report open source adoption rates nearing 100% so it’s likely that your development team is already incorporating open source code into their projects.
So, what is open source? When a developer chooses to make his or her project open source, it gives third party developers the right to tinker and innovate with it. Check out this comprehensive video for an in depth explanation.
Developers incorporate open source into their projects to accelerate development time, thus reducing costs for the organization overall. Most of the time, the code is open to the public; but it is imperative that collaborators refer to a set of chief regulations and terms involved in open source software license management and dispersal.
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Google has announced the launch of PerfKit, an open source cloud benchmarking tool aimed at aiding developers evaluating performance features.
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Events
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In less than a week, SCALE13x kicks off in Los Angeles! The hotel it takes place in is full so it promises to be busy – of course, there are more hotels around.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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My blog post on the Oracle/Sun merger got quite a bit of attention, and a few folks from Oracle took exception to my portrayal of Sparc dying on the vine and a thin roadmap. After a few conversations, I have a better picture of things, and I was wrong.
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CMS
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But before Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, was on the path to being a billion-dollar company, Mullenweg was simply an eager coder with a healthy attitude for self-experimentation.
In conversation with author Tim Ferriss this week, Mullenweg elaborated on some of his productivity hacks, including his now-famous stint with the “Uberman” polyphasic sleep schedule. Polyphasic sleep simply means more than one sleep period per day; many of our friends in Spain are on a polyphasic sleep cycle with their luxurious afternoon siestas.
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Healthcare
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The OpenEMR community has released version 4.2.0. This new version will be 2014 ONC Certified as a Modular EHR.
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Funding
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What’s big data analytics worth in monetary terms? Hitachi gave a clue this week with news that it intends to acquire business intelligence company Pentaho for a sum rumored to range between $500 million and $600 million.
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BSD
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We hope to continue rolling these –CURRENT images as a way for testers and developers to tryout both FreeBSD and PC-BSD bleeding edge features, often months before a planned release. These images include a full PKG repository compiled for that months image. Users of this system will also be able to “upgrade” when the next monthly image is published.
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The PC-BSD camp has started spinning development images of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0 in the present 11.0-CURRENT state that is still far out from being officially released.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Valentine’s Day traditionally is a day to show and celebrate love. So why do not take this as a chance to show your love for Free Software this year?
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Every year on 14th February, the Free Software Foundation Europe asks all Free Software users to think about the hard-working people in the Free Software community and to show them their appreciation individually on this “I love Free Software”-Day.
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Today the Free Software Foundation Europe reminds us to thank and celebrate all those in Free Software we love and whose work we enjoy and built upon. In KDE, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Everything we do in some way depends on Free Software written by many other people – the huge ecosystem around us.
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A picture is worth thousand words and describing love with letters is much more harder than with images. On this page we collect some examples of people from all over the world expressing their enthusiasm for freedom in both software and society with photos.
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Openness/Sharing
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Last night I had a crazy realization: I could probably replace the majority of what my team hopes to accomplish with standup meetings, design documents, project management apps, and social code sharing features with a single tool.
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Health/Nutrition
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Jennifer White’s painful family story is convincing hundreds of vaccine-hesitant parents around the world to rethink their actions.
On Tuesday, White wrote a Facebook post about her newborn baby’s possible exposure to measles in a Markham doctor’s office waiting room in late January. In it, she slammed anti-vaxxers and their refusal to protect their children, and hers.
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Virginia could keep the suppliers of the drugs used in executions secret, as well as all the components they mix to make the drug cocktail used in lethal injections under a bill the state Senate approved Tuesday.
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Security
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The internet has connected millions across the globe, rooting itself into the day-to-day activities. If something happens to it, it’s not just the end of kitty pictures – the whole world’s economy would collapse. What would the fallout be? How much harm can be done online? What does it mean to be a hacker these days? We ask professor at the University of Sussex and author of a book about hacking communities, Tim Jordan, on Sophie&Co.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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President Obama says he has not yet decided whether to send arms to the Ukrainian military to fight Russian-backed rebels. Obama criticized Russia’s role in the conflict during a joint news conference at the White House with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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The emotional weight a photojournalist endures in covering conflict can be suppressed, but it can never be understated. And the commitment to highlighting the spirit of survival in the victims of the conflict can never be overstated. For American photojournalist Heidi Levine, that emotional toll has been severely challenged over her nearly 30 years documenting the Palestinian-Israel conflict. In the past year, she has done her work while also facing the almost simultaneous passing of two family members–her grandmother and father–while on assignment nearly 8,000 miles away from home.
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The news that President Obama has formally asked US Congress to authorize military force against ISIS is not surprising. What may come as a shock to Americans oblivious to these developments is that the administration has de facto declared war on Syria.
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The U.N. envoy to Yemen has returned to Sanaa and resumed contacts with major political players to find a way out of a deepening crisis caused by a Shiite rebel takeover, participants in the talks said Sunday.
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‘The devastating and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us that when we give military authority to the executive, it should not be a blank check,’ says Congressional Progressive Caucus
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What is not silly is that we still have local employees at Embassy Sana’a. They, typically, are not evacuated when post suspends operations. In 2003, Ghulam Sakhi Ahmadzai, the building maintenance supervisor at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was the Foreign Service National Employee of the Year. He was recognized for his exceptional efforts in Afghanistan during the 13-year absence of American employees and following the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001. His loyalty to the U.S. government and to maintaining the integrity of the embassy during that absence, despite personal risk, could not be repaid by that one award. No doubt there are other Ghulams in Tripoli and Sana’a and in other posts where we have suspended operations in the past. Please keep them in your thoughts.
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The arson attack was the third incident of Islamaphobic violence this week.
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An early morning fire Friday at an Islamic center in southeast Houston left the facility’s faithful wondering if what appears to be an intentionally set fire was tied to their religion.
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Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday criticized President Obama for his silence following the killings of three young Muslims in North Carolina this week, the latest sign relations between the two leaders have become strained.
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Mohammad Na’us was one of the most respected men in al Bab. He was the undertaker who washed the bodies of the dead prior to burial, a pious Quranic scholar who issued the sundown call to prayer in the Syrian town near the Turkish border, and for the past year, a seller of bread in his neighborhood.
But on Dec. 28, the bakery’s delivery was late and he missed the prayers at sundown. Religious police arrested Na’us, a father of five in his 50s, and ordered him to spend one night in prison.
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If American mass media seemed reluctant to cover the murder of three Muslims students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill as a hate crime, the same was not true in the Middle East, where strong opinions were aroused.
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan criticized President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for not speaking out on the issue (which is under investigation by local police and the FBI).
Erdogan said, “If you stay silent when faced with an incident like this, and don’t make a statement, the world will stay silent towards you . . . As politicians, we are responsible for everything that happens in our countries and we have to show our positions.”
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The good folks at NBC send over a partisan breakdown. Fifty two percent of Republicans support Obama’s authorization request, as do 51 percent of independents and 60 percent of Democrats.
A few points about this. First, Republican voters appear at odds with GOP lawmakers on this topic. The latter have been arguing that, if anything, Obama’s request is too limiting. As Marco Rubio put it so felicitously, Congress should give Obama an authorization that says nothing more than we “authorize the president to take whatever steps are necessary to defeat ISIS. Period.” But a bare majority of Republicans supports the limits in the authorization Obama proposed, such as they are.
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President François Hollande of France on Thursday announced the sale of nearly $6 billion worth of military hardware to Egypt, including two dozen Rafale fighter jets and a naval frigate.
The contract represents the first foreign sale of the Rafale for its manufacturer, Dassault Aviation, which has been under intense pressure to find export customers for the warplane as France scales back its orders as part of government spending cuts.
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The four-star general in charge of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan told senators today that he has given the Pentagon different options for slowing the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
There are now roughly 13,000 international troops in Afghanistan, 9,800 of them Americans, Campbell said. President Obama’s current plan would have reduced that to 5,500 soldiers, mostly centered in Kabul, by the end of this year. Army Gen. Cambell said that the Afghan government under its new president, Ashraf Ghani, did not want the U.S. to pull back so quickly.
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FBI Director James Comey repeatedly defended the police in a speech intended to address race relations after a series of high-profile killings by law enforcement officers.
Speaking at Georgetown University this morning, Comey said citizens need to have more empathy for police, that police response time is not influenced by race, and that “law enforcement is not the root cause of problems in our hardest-hit neighborhoods.”
Comey also cited and quoted from the song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from the Broadway play “Avenue Q,” adding that while everyone has a duty to try and overcome bias, “racial bias isn’t epidemic in those who join law enforcement any more than it is epidemic in academia or the arts.” And yet “after years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel” and begin viewing black citizens differently.
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Dr. Suzanne Barakat, sister of one of the Chapel Hill shooting victims, appeared on Morning Joe Friday morning to strongly dispute the early police theory that her brother, his wife, and sister-in-law were shot by Craig Stephens Hicks over a “parking dispute.” That all three victims were Muslim, and that Hicks had loudly proclaimed anti-religious sentiment, has led many to label the triple murder a hate crime.
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Three years before 9/11, Ash Carter was already talking catastrophe.
Carter, confirmed Thursday as Obama’s new Secretary of Defense, vividly predicted in 1998 a near-future terrorist attack that would have long-lasting consequences beyond the immediate loss of thousands of lives.
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Mohammed Saleh Tauiman was just 13 years old in 2014 when the Guardian newspaper gave him a camera so he could record life under the drones that flew over Marib province, Yemen.
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One of more than 150 religious leaders who drafted a statement opposing the use of lethal drones by the United States military said Feb. 11 it’s an issue that more Baptists should care about.
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After readings from the Bible and the Qur’an the worshippers dedicated themselves to peace and shouted out “Stop the drones!” and “Drones kill”. Most of the protestors were men and women training for ordained ministry in the Church of England and the Methodist Church. Bishop Edward Musonda from the Anglican Church in Zambia said: “It is a pleasure to take part in this act of Christian witness against this savage military weaponry.”
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A US drone strike which killed a senior al-Shabaab leader in Somalia a week ago appears to have been part of a change of tactics by the Americans since they started targeting the militant group in 2007. It was the fifth consecutive such strike against al-Shabaab’s leadership, with drones now appearing to have superseded other, manned aircraft and cruise missiles in the seven years since attacks began in Somalia.
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Morality is missing in action as innocent people die in the strikes, fueling anger around the globe.
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For years, the US has relied on drones to prevent Yemen from collapsing. The strategy hasn’t worked.
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Sen. Rand Paul is joining three Democrats in urging a federal court to release secret documents about the government’s use of drones to kill three Americans.
Along with Sens. Ron Wyden (Ore.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (N.M.), the Kentucky Republican filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Wednesday supporting a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and The New York Times.
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Saying the government cites “national security” too often to shield information from scrutiny, four U.S. senators urged a federal appeals court Wednesday to divulge more about rules it follows when it makes U.S. citizens the target of anti-terror drone strikes.
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While deployed, I concluded our drone strikes disproportionately kill innocent people. As a military chaplain, I preached a sermon questioning the morality of such warfare. After my commander read it, he said “the message does not support the mission” and had me investigated, officially reprimanded and released from active duty for “retraining.”
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No military technology is perhaps more viscerally upsetting than the idea of a machine, armed with a gun, making the decision on its own to kill people. It’s a theme throughout dystopian fiction and films, and it animates protests against drones, despite the fact that military drones still have humans at the controls. Autonomy for weapons–where a gun turret or future machine will be programmed to press the trigger on its own–is a definite possibility in future wars. A new report from the Center for New American Security, a Washington D.C. think tank, wants to guide us calmly into understanding this future of armed thinking machines.
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The peace movement is dead, the media are mute, and, in all likelihood, we will soon be engulfed in an electoral season in which the plain fact that Democrats and Republicans know not what they do will hardly even come up.
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Well, not exactly. New James Bond novels and movies pop up all the time, but Gérard de Villiers (who died in 2013) wrote either 100 or 200 novels about an Austrian (and freelance CIA operative), named Malko Linge, that have sold millions of copies in France and made him “the most popular writer of spy thrillers in French history.” The discrepancy with the numbers (100 or 200) hardly matters, though those figures are cited in the biographical information about the writer at the beginning of the two novels discussed here: Chaos in Kabul and The Madmen of Benghazi, both originally published in France in 2013. Clearly, the guy was prolific—much more than Ian Fleming. His expertise was the Middle East, which made his stories not only current but, often, prescient.
[...]
At the beginning of Chaos in Kabul, Linge is hired to eliminate Hamid Karzai. Yes, you read that correctly. So Linge is flown into Afghanistan after responding to his CIA agent, “This mission is impossible. The Agency has everything it needs in Afghanistan. You operate a fleet of drones that can hit anything. What can you expect from one man against the Karzai machine? Besides, you know I’m not a killer.” And the answer to his response? It can’t be obvious that Americans caused Karzai’s death. So, Linge agrees, but first he’s got to find an accomplice who will do the actual killing. That guy is a South African thug, and the plan is that Karzai will be shot when he’s riding in his motorcade.
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Even Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, the author of numerous books and a legal expert for Fox News, in an otherwise excellent history of the usurpation of unique American civil liberties at the expense of ever expanding executive power (see Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty) focuses too much on President Barack Obama’s killing of American citizens without due process – for example, Anwar al Alawki in Yemen in 2011. Napolitano correctly argues that an American president is essentially claiming the right to murder his own citizens without prior legal niceties, but he focuses too much on the use of exotic drone technology to do so and not enough on a larger and more important problem. If anyone – U.S. citizen or not – is attempting to attack the United States, the president should have a right to take them out, provided the Congress has authorized military action or declared war. Even then, according to the founders’ original constitutional vision, if the country is under imminent threat of attack, the president can take appropriate action and get congressional authorization at the earliest possible time. If the president doesn’t have such legislative approval or a legitimate “imminent attack” rationale, he is essentially murdering people – U.S. citizens or not.
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In light of the threat posed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, President Obama wants Congress to authorize military force against the Islamist group in the Middle East. Although the president believes a 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) gives him the legal grounds to go to war on his own, he has sent Congress a draft authorization for their approval.
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If you already understand U.S. imperialism’s crimes in Iraq, that’s what you might take away from the movie, “American Sniper.” But many viewers, unaware of the truth behind the war, receive a distorted message. Directed by Clint Eastwood, the film looks at the events only through U.S. eyes. It twists the truth, falsifying historical context while adding poisonous anti-Arab bigotry.
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I didn’t think much of this until hours ago when I read a banner story of the Manila Times written by its chairman emeritus Dr. Dante Ang. The burden of the piece is that in the Mamasapano raid, codenamed Operation Wolverine, the main protagonists were American agents out to get the Malaysian terrorist Marwan and the BIFF leader Abdulbasit Usman. The PNP-SAF commandos were only security escorts to the agents.
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This was revealed by its commander then, now relieved Police Director Getulio Napeñas, during a hearing Monday, February 9, on the operation in Mamasapano, Maguindanao, that claimed the lives of at least 68 individuals, including 44 elite SAF troopers.
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Lives: A total of 66 lives, not including Marwan’s, were lost – 44 SAF, 18 MILF and four civilians. The SAF casualties were nine of the 42 members of the 84th SAF Company dispatched to Pidsandawan to get Marwan and 35 of the 36 members of the 55th deployed in Tukanalipao – the lone survivor PO3 Robert Lalang.
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Like many children, 13-year-old Mohammed Tuaiman suffered from nightmares. In his dreams, he would see flying “death machines” that turned family and friends into burning charcoal. No one could stop them, and they struck any place, at any time.
Unlike most children, Mohammed’s nightmares killed him.
Three weeks ago, a CIA drone operating over Yemen fired a missile at a car carrying the teenager, and two others. They were all incinerated. Nor was Mohammed the first in his family to be targeted: drones had already killed his father and brother.
Since president Barack Obama took office in 2009, the US has killed at least 2,464 people through drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones. The figure is courtesy of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which says that at least 314 of the dead, one in seven, were civilians.
Recall that for Obama, as The New York Times reported in May 2012, “all military-age males in a strike zone” are counted “as combatants” – unless “there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent”.
It sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
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Transparency Reporting
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Far too many politicians and legislators aren’t happy with the fact that their emails are subject to public records requests. Some attempt to dodge this layer of accountability by using personal email accounts to handle official business. Oregon governor John Kitzhaber is one such politician.
Unfortunately for Kitzhaber and many others just like him, public records laws anticipate this endaround. In many states, personal email accounts are also FOIA-able if the emails discuss official (read: public) business. Kitzhaber, however, believed he could outbludgeon the system.
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At the end of an hour-long panel discussion on the film Citizenfour on Thursday night that he was moderating, David Carr sat back in his chair and in his distinctive, weather-worn voice asked Edward Snowden, the NSA exile, a final question via video link. “I’ve got to channel all the moms in the audience for just a sec,” he said. “You’re in Russia. So are you getting enough to eat? Is the food good?” It was classic David Carr. Unexpected, empathetic, funny. It raised a robust laugh from the packed crowd.
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On Twitter Thursday night, I tried to fight the rumor that beloved New York Times media columnist David Carr died the same evening. I’d seen him less than three hours earlier, interviewing Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden (via satellite) at a sold out “Times Talk.” He was sharp and funny; he seemed happy; he had a bad cough. But he could not possibly be dead.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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We still haven’t reached peak oil. But peak milk happened in 2004, peak soybeans in 2009, and peak chicken in 2006. Rice peaked in 1988.
A new study published in Ecology and Society explains that 21 key resources that humans rely on—mostly food—have already passed their peak rate of production.
“Peak,” in this case, doesn’t mean that we’re actually producing fewer chickens or less milk yet. Instead, the researchers looked at the fact that the rate of production has plateaued, at the same time that population is increasing.
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So it turns out that building your own regional water system is costly, time-consuming and difficult. Who knew?
Apparently not officials in Genesee, Lapeer and Sanilac counties, which unhooked from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to build their own system, the unpronounceable Karegnondi Water Authority, helmed by Genesee County Drain Commissioner Jeff Wright.
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Since the turn of this century, the US south-west has spent more than a decade in drought. Last year was the warmest on record in California, which is in the middle of its driest spell for more than 400 years. But according to a new scientific study, that’s nothing compared to what comes next.
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Finance
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But Alderman got the primary surplus back to front. The definition should actually be before interest payments–the primary surplus being a measure of whether a government would be spending more than it takes in if it weren’t paying back past borrowing. Could it be the Times reporter does not understand the magnitude of Greece’s financial challenges?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The prosecutor leading the probe into possible coordination between Governor Scott Walker’s campaign and outside groups has asked some Wisconsin Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from hearing a challenge to the investigation.
A notation in court records titled “Motion for Recusal and Notice of Ethical Concerns” indicates that on February 12, Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz filed a sealed motion for one or more of the Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from the case. Schmitz was previously on George W. Bush’s shortlist for U.S. Attorney and said that he voted for Walker.
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Scott WalkerAlso on the show: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it was just a “drafting error” that led to his proposed budget calling for the evisceration of the central philosophy guiding the state’s university system, along with $300 million in cuts. Reporters and activists showed that to be a falsehood, and Walker’s proposed changes look like a revealing peak at the agenda of the man who wants to be the next president. We’ll hear from a key player in that story, Mary Bottari from the Center for Media and Democracy.
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Sun News Network, the right-wing Canadian news network described as “Fox News North,” is shutting down.
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It was the NYPD’s very own “Hot Coffee” case–a sign of a supposedly hyper-litigious system spiraling out of control. A “machete-wielding mad man” attacks the cops, gets shot in the leg, and then sues the NYPD for damages.
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We first spotted a version of this quote in a Bloomberg column by David Weigel, and then checked the quotes with our colleague Jose DelReal, who had attended the conference.
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Hillary Clinton has everything she needs to run for president: money, name recognition, staff, organization. Everything except ideas.
The 2016 presidential campaign will begin in earnest in late summer. This hasn’t snuck up on her; she has known this was coming since at least 2008. Yet here she is, six months before the unofficial start of her run, starting to figure out what she’ll do if she wins.
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Censorship
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François Zimeray, the French ambassador to Denmark who was also at the event, tweeted that he was “still alive.”
Vilks, a 68-year-old Swedish artist, has faced several attempted attacks and death threats after he depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a dog in 2007.
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Privacy
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The BBC could be given new powers to access to people’s private and public data as part of a raft of new measures to tackle licence-fee evasion.
An independent consultation suggested that the corporation could be given access to “new data sources” to help make collection of the charge more efficient.
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It is also striking that the codes of conduct were released on the same day that the UK’s secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that British intelligence services had broken the law, but that they were now in compliance because previously unknown policies had been made public. As Nyst speculates, it could be that the UK government is releasing more details of its spying in the form of these consultation documents in an attempt to head off future losses in the courts.
Whether or not that is the case, it certainly seems that the attempts by civil liberties groups to end or at least limit mass surveillance are already having an effect on the UK government, and forcing it to provide basic details of its hitherto completely-secret activities. That success is a strong incentive to continue fighting for more proportionality and meaningful oversight here.
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You might not think Canada’s digital spies are on par with those in the US and UK—but rest assured, America’s northern neighbour is just as capable of perpetuating mass surveillance on a global scale. Case in point: at over 200 locations around the world, spies from Canada’s cyberintelligence agency have been monitoring huge volumes of global internet traffic travelling across the internet’s core.
From these locations, Communications Security Establishment (CSE) can track who is accessing websites and files of interest. Its analysts can also log email addresses, phone numbers and even the content of unencrypted communications—and retain encrypted communication for later study, too—as well as intercept passwords and login details for later access to remote servers and websites.
But perhaps more importantly, tapping into global internet traffic is a means for CSE to monitor, and also exploit, an ever growing list of digital threats, such as vulnerabilities in networks and computers and the spread of malware as well as botnets and the computers under their control. In the process, analysts can keep tabs on both friendly and foreign governments conducting covert cyber attacks and infiltration of their own.
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The National Security Agency, still reeling from massive leaks caused by Edward Snowden, is preparing to be hit with another major loss of secrets, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
The leaks are expected to be published in the near future by a news outlet that was not further identified by the officials familiar with details of the compromise. The NSA is aware of the news outlet’s forthcoming disclosures and is taking steps to try and minimize any damage they will cause.
According to the officials, the latest NSA disclosure of secrets is not the result of an insider stealing documents, as occurred in the case of fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Instead, the leaks will reveal certain NSA technical cyber intelligence gathering capabilities. The officials did not provide details about the leaks.
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For most Oscar nominees, the weeks before the February 22 ceremony are a whirlpool of stress.
But Laura Poitras, up for best documentary for “Citizenfour,” insists it is like going for a healthy walk — compared to what she went through to get here.
When former National Security Agency (NSA) consultant Edward Snowden, who revealed the massive scope of US intelligence surveillance, contacted the filmmaker, she found her life turned into a spy novel.
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The top executives of Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Facebook Inc. won’t attend President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity summit on Friday, at a time when relations between the White House and Silicon Valley have frayed over privacy issues.
Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt all were invited but won’t attend the public conference at Stanford University, according to the companies. Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook is planning to be at the event, where Obama is scheduled to give the keynote speech and have a private lunch with a select group of attendees.
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President Obama has signed an executive order that will attempt to protect America’s crucial computer networks by sharing knowhow between g-men and techies.
The new order instructs federal agencies to set up a clearing house of real-time, up-to-the-minute information on what’s menacing US infrastructure. Companies running those networks and systems will be able to look into the intelligence stream, get an idea of what’s about to hit them, and beef up their defenses accordingly. This is assuming the system works as described.
This sharing of information is supposed to go two ways: businesses can use the clearing house to tip off the Feds about threats that everyone ought to know about, we’re told.
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President Obama called for companies to voluntarily share more cyber attack information with federal agencies during a first-ever White House summit on cyber security issues, signing an executive action to help pave the way for such sharing.
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The Obama administration is expected to take executive action Friday, sweeping aside two years of congressional negotiations and bickering in an effort to bolster the country’s cyber-defenses.
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A California court has once again upheld the legality of the US National Security Agency’s Bush-era mass telephone surveillance program, but has withheld its reasoning on grounds of national security.
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A US JUDGE HAS ruled in favour of the National Security Agency (NSA) in a personal privacy case, despite the protests of rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Jewel vs the NSA was ruled on by judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California, who told plaintiffs that they had failed to prove that the government violated a long established hope that ‘a man’s home is his castle’, or rather the Fourth Amendment.
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An entire ballroom of more than 1,000 stood to applaud Edward Snowden as he was introduced at the Students for Liberty convention in Washington, and again after Snowden challenged them to “win” against the government’s attempt to expand its own power.
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An NSA document newly published today suggests two interesting facts that haven’t previously been reported.
The Intercept, which published the document, highlighted that in it the NSA expresses fear that it may be teaching Iran how to hack, but there are two other points in the document that merit attention.
One concerns the spy tool known as Flame; the other refers to concerns the NSA had about partnering with the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters and Israeli intelligence in surveillance operations.
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The document suggests that such attacks don’t just invite counterattacks but also school adversaries on new techniques and tools to use in their counterattacks, allowing them to increase the sophistication of these assaults. Iran, the document states, ‘has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others.’”
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A federal judge ruled in favor of the National Security Agency in a key surveillance case on Tuesday, dismissing a challenge which claimed the government’s spying operations were groundless and unconstitutional.
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This week, a US District Court judge ruled in favor of the NSA in a case challenging its tactics of intercepting messages on the internet without a warrant. California District Judge Jeffrey White said that the plaintiffs in Jewel vs. NSA didn’t establish the legal standing needed to pursue claims that the US government violated their Fourth Amendment rights. White ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence presented by the plaintiffs, and that the risk of revealing of state secrets would prevent the case from going forward even if they had. The group, who are all AT&T customers being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), still has a case against the wider telephone record collection and other forms of mass surveillance employed by the National Security Agency. Jewel vs. NSA was filed in 2008 and is one of the earliest lawsuits brought against the federal government over its monitoring practices, preceding the whistleblowing work of Edward Snowden.
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On Wednesday, Tennessee legislators filed bills to directly take on NSA spying by withholding vital state resources and material support from any federal agency engaged in warrantless surveillance.
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The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruling that GCHQ’s access to information intercepted by the NSA breached human rights laws is feeding a growing and increasingly heated global debate regarding the whole issue of digital privacy.
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U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday that revelations of U.S. surveillance on German Chancellor Angela Merkel “damaged impressions” Germans hold of the U.S. government.
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Though Snowden beamed in remotely, conversation hosted by New York Times brings together trio that revealed vast secretive surveillance network to global public.
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President Barack Obama has called for the German people, and by extension Europe, to trust that the US is not infringing on their privacy, despite the Snowden leaks.
Obama issued the call for “trust” about the PRISM leaks during a joint press conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel when asked how the leaks have affected the two nations’ relationship.
“There’s no doubt that the Snowden revelations damaged the impressions of Germans with respect to the US government and our intelligence cooperation,” he said.
“What I would ask would be that the German people recognise that the US has always been at the forefront of trying to promote civil liberties, and that we have traditions of due process that we respect.
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Talks in Washington on Monday focused on the conflict in Ukraine, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Barack Obama also touched on issues including NSA espionage and nuclear negotiations with Iran.
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President Barack Obama is asking Germans to give the United States “the benefit of the doubt” on National Security Agency surveillance, given U.S. history.
Obama says “there’s no doubt” that NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations about the U.S. spying programs damaged the impression of U.S. intelligence operations among Germans. He says that’s understandable, given Germany’s history.
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It’s been a lousy week so far for opponents of U.S. spy tactics: a federal judge shut down a long-running challenge to the NSA’s mass collection of customer internet data, while President Obama brushed off a call to do something about the sprawl of government surveillance.
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One year ago, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) reviewed the National Security Agency’s bulk telephony metadata program and concluded the program was both illegal and imprudent as a policy matter. Under this program conducted pursuant to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the NSA on a daily basis indiscriminately collects Americans’ calling records from telephone companies, including each call’s date and time, duration, and participating telephone numbers. This “metadata” does not include the contents of telephone conversations. The program is intended to enable the government to identify communications among known and unknown terrorism suspects. PCLOB recommended that the program be discontinued and that the government instead seek telephone call records directly from phone companies on a case-by-case basis where there is evidence of potential terrorist activity.
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A bill filed in Montana yesterday would not only support efforts to turn off NSA’s water in Utah, but would have practical effects on federal surveillance programs if passed.
Montana Rep. Daniel Zolnikov (R-45) introduced HB443, a bill that would ban “material support or resources” from the state to warrantless federal spy programs, making it the 10th state to introduce legislation similar to a bill up for consideration in Utah this year.
“The best thing about privacy is that it is not a partisan issue,” said Zolnikov. “Groups like the ACLU and the Tea Party can work together to protect the rights of Montanans.”
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ORG’s Executive Director Jim Killock will talk about mass surveillance, liberty and activism. He’ll say why mass surveillance is a danger to democracy and how we can work together to curb it.
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MPs wants guarantees from the government that the decision to give the security services wider powers to tap phones and internet traffic will not be abused, website nu.nl reports on Tuesday. Home affairs minister Ronald Plasterk and defence minister Jeanine Hennis are due to present their draft legislation for expanding the security services’ intelligence-gathering powers shortly. Nu.nl questioned various party representatives about their position.
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VVD Parliamentarian Klaas Dijkhoff denounced the phantom images raised by opponents that large scale data trawls will soon be conducted in the Netherlands, just like the NSA does in the United states, NU. reports. “The fear exists and people like to call up that feeling, but there is not country in the world where information is dealt with more carefully.” he said. But the Tweede Kamer (lower house of parliament) still wants guarantees that the expansion of the intelligence services’ surveillance capabilities will not lead to NSA practices.
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President Obama won’t end the government’s controversial collection of data about millions of Americans on his own, because he’d rather the matter be dealt with by Congress.
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Oklahoma HB1738 would deny much-needed material support or resources to warrantless federal spying programs. And SB444 would ban the state from participating in an unconstitutional federal-state information program. HB1738 must pass out of the House State and Federal Relations Committee while SB444 must pass out of the Senate Judiciary Committee before the bills can receive full votes in their respective chambers.
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As we continue to read through documents released on February 3 that collectively detail the intelligence community’s efforts to implement Presidential Policy Directive-28, (PPD-28), we thought it would be helpful to overview briefly, and to compare. implementing documents issued by three agencies in particular: NSA, CIA, and FBI.
Overall, there is a great deal of overlap between the three agencies’ implementation policies. But they differ from each other in interesting ways, both with regard to retention and dissemination of information, and with regard to permitted departures from general rules contemplated by the policies themselves.
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To drive the point home, he signed an executive order to this effect, in the hopes of inspiring collaboration between companies and government security agencies.
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Twitter said today that the U.S. government has filed a highly redacted version of the company’s draft national security transparency report, a step that shows for the first time information about data requests Twitter has gotten from the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
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Mass surveillance of the internet by GCHQ prior to December was unlawful, according to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
It said that the “intelligence sharing” process did not comply with human rights law, and there was a lack of transparency.
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In the end – and maybe this is the biggest change of all – we all have to accept that perfect safety is illusory. Doing so would make society will be a little more open, a little more liberal, a little more scary, and perhaps a little more dangerous. But I think any democracy worthy of the name can live with that, because it’s the price of freedom.
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A new US government “cyber threat” agency will take information on computer security breaches at private companies, pair it with classified intelligence – and put it back out to businesses so they can learn how to beef up their defences.
That’s the dream, anyway, according to President Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism advisor Lisa Monaco, who launched the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC) on Tuesday in Washington DC.
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Next time Brian Williams or his carefully-coiffed successor assigns blame to some foreign actor for a cyberoutrage, I expect the “Cyber Threats Intelligence Integration Center” to figure prominently in the coverage.
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We live in privacy obsessed times, which is rather ironic. After all, many of those who complained most vociferously about the alleged snooping of the NSA on our personal emails failed to realise that by posting every conceivable piece of personal information on social media, the average spook merely needs to follow you on Twitter to find out everything they need to know.
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It’s a bad week for Samsung. After the firm addressed privacy concerns, some of its Smart TVs began displaying annoying pop-up ads. Meanwhile, the White House plans to form a cybersecurity agency, and smartphone thefts decline thanks to kill switches.
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Our smartphones and computers, of course, listen to us when we’re making audio and video calls. But the microphones are always there, and there are ways a hacker, government, or clever company can turn those microphones on without our knowledge. Sometimes we turn them on ourselves. If we have an iPhone, the voice-processing system Siri listens to us, but only when we push the iPhone’s button. Like Samsung, iPhones with the “Hey Siri” feature enabled listen all the time. So do Android devices with the “OK Google” feature enabled, and so does an Amazon voice-activated system called Echo. Facebook has the ability to turn your smartphone’s microphone on when you’re using the app.
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If there’s one thing we can thank this whole Samsung privacy brouhaha for, it’s casting data retention debates in a whole new light.
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The head of a federal privacy board is reiterating his call to end the government’s bulk collection and storage of Americans’ phone records.
David Medine, the chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, called for either President Obama or Congress to shut down the National Security Agency program. Obama has deferred to Congress to make the change.
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While some citizens fight back against more encroachments on privacy, the NSA and its backers in the White House, Congress and the Courts are expanding their own reach, now monitoring literally trillions of messages. While legislators have been unable to restrain the NSA, corporations and enterprising journalists are using encryption. Even as intelligence agencies in the US and abroad are escalating their cyber war capacities, private companies are commercializing their technology. All of these issues concern whistleblowers, who say they fear the emergence of a police state if the mass surveillance is not curtailed or stopped.
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Those days of calling your bank to let them know that, yes, you really are in Thailand, and yes, you really did use your credit card to buy $200 in sarongs, may be coming to an end.
The payment processing company Visa will roll out a new feature this spring that will allow its cardholders to inform their banks where they are automatically, using the location function found in nearly every smartphone.
Having your bank and Visa know where you are at all times may sound a little like “Big Brother.” But privacy experts are actually applauding the feature, saying that, if used correctly, it could protect cardholders and cut down on credit card fraud.
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Look, his net neutrality proposal was great. It’s clear that Obama has a deeper understanding of how the internet works than at least a shitload of other politicians. But this cybersecurity order looks potentially milquetoast on the threat-prevention front and straight-up worrisome on the government-slurping-all-our-data horizon.
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Not only were Yahoo, Facebook, and Google among the original “PRISM” companies revealed by Edward Snowden to have been forced into turning over information about their customers to the NSA, but France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Germany were among nations the NSA is accused of spying on as part of related programs. Perhaps today is a bit late to ask for a more open policy of sharing information.
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What we’re witnessing is Reform Theater. A sort of kabuki act which is intended to provide the impression that, in the wake of Ed blundenSnowden’s revelations, something is being done. Officials create the perception of action by occupying themselves with narrow aspects of mass interception and this is intentional. They wouldn’t dare do anything substantial that would threaten the gears of the surveillance state. Instead they’ll leave Big Brother’s infrastructure in place and dither around the edges.
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The Sun was an unlikely advocate for privacy in its special investigation piece early this week on the snooping Samsung telly. Forget phone hacking, it’s the technology companies you need to watch out for. The Sun’s outrage was not confined to Samsung: a neighbouring article reminded us of recent privacy complaints against Facebook and Google.
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After the bruising recriminations between the White House and the technology industry over the National Security Agency, Barack Obama will travel to the Bay Area on Friday to enlist Silicon Valley’s support for his post-Snowden push for cyber security legislation.
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Facebook is teaming up with other big names on the interwebs to create a security information sharing portal, dubbed ThreatExchange*, which went live on Wednesday.
ThreatExchange is billed as a platform that enables security professionals to “share threat information more easily, learn from each other’s discoveries, and make their own systems safer”.
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If we are to end our post-9/11 national security state, the congressional leadership must come to believe that blocking efforts to restore the Bill of Rights will result in real political consequences. If, however, they continue to see no political consequences, Americans’ rights to privacy and due process will continue to diminish into artifacts of a bygone era.
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President announces executive order ahead of summit to spur development of go-between for technology sector and government to share information
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The top executives of Google Inc, Yahoo! Inc and Facebook Inc won’t attend President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity summit on Friday, at a time when relations between the White House and Silicon Valley have frayed over privacy issues.
Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt were all invited but won’t attend the public conference at Stanford University, according to the companies. Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook is planning to show to the event, where Obama is scheduled to give the keynote speech and have a private lunch with a select group of attendees.
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President Obama will meet here on Friday with the nation’s top technologists on a host of cybersecurity issues and the threats posed by increasingly sophisticated hackers. But nowhere on the agenda is the real issue for the chief executives and tech company officials who will gather on the Stanford campus: the deepening estrangement between Silicon Valley and the government.
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President Obama will announce a new executive order on the sharing of cybersecurity threats and information at Friday’s cybersecurity summit at Stanford University, the White House said.
Most importantly to Silicon Valley, the president’s proposal is expected to cement the role of the Department of Homeland Security, rather than the National Security Agency, as the government lead for information-sharing with the private sector.
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President Obama will announce a new executive order on the sharing of cybersecurity threats and information at Friday’s cybersecurity summit at Stanford University, the White House said.
Most importantly to Silicon Valley, the president’s proposal is expected to cement the role of the Department of Homeland Security, rather than the National Security Agency, as the government lead for information-sharing with the private sector.
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On Friday, the White House convened a “cyber summit” at Stanford’s campus in Palo Alto so that business and government leaders could get together and talk, essentially, about how scary hackers are.
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President Barack Obama took the hot seat with Re/code’s Kara Swisher Friday as the two talked about a range of tech-focused topics, including cyber warfare, the White House’s relationship with Silicon Valley tech giants and the Apple Watch.
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President Barack Obama said Friday that he probably leans more toward strong computer data encryption than many in law enforcement, but added that he understands investigators’ concerns over the matter because of their need to protect people from attacks.
He suggested having a “public conversation” about the issue because “the first time that attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn’t follow up on it, the public’s going to demand answers.”
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In fact, it seems noteworthy that this whole issue of increasing encryption by the tech companies to keep everyone out has been left off the official summit schedule. As the NY Times notes (in the link above), Silicon Valley seems to be pretty much completely fed up with the intelligence community after multiple Snowden revelations revealed just how far the NSA had gone in trying to “collect it all” — including hacking into the foreign data centers of Google and Yahoo.
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Last week, the Obama Administration released a report and documents cataloging progress toward signals intelligence (SIGINT) reform goals set a year ago by the President in a document known as PPD-28. PPD-28 promises foreigners some of the same privacy protections given to US citizens and residents. But it turns out that those protections, even for citizens, are fairly meager, in ways that have not yet fully entered the public conversation about surveillance. US citizens and residents have been — and remain — exposed to suspicionless electronic surveillance. Implementation of PPD-28 will do little to change that.
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This week the Obama administration is releasing its second Executive Order in as many years on computer (“cyber”) security, which reports are saying will create a new department in the intelligence community to handle computer security threat information sharing. Officials are hailing the center as “new” and unprecedented.
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Civil Rights
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Larry Harvey, 71, thought he was doing everything right growing medical marijuana for his personal use. His home state of Washington legalized medical cannabis in 1998, and Harvey says his cultivation of plants with his wife, other family members and a close friend complied with the law.
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Why was it again that, as President Obama said, “we tortured some folks” after the 9/11 attacks? Oh, right, because we were terrified. Because everyone knows that being afraid gives you moral license to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe. That’s why we don’t shame or punish those who were too scared to imagine doing anything else. We honor and revere them.
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The US Senate Committee on Intelligence has issued a significant correction to an appendix to its report on CIA torture after mistakes were highlighted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
A “notice of errata” was published earlier this month showing amendments for almost half of the 119 prisoners held in the CIA’s rendition and enhanced interrogation programme.
The mistakes, which have been put down to a “technical error”, relate to the number of days the detainees were held by the CIA during the programme.
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Random American Citizen Roger Vanderklok (aka “Josef K.“) had the misfortune of going through TSA Supervisor Charles Kieser’s security-screening area. Vanderklok, 57, pictured with his wife, is a Philadelphia architect who runs half-marathons. He flies around the country for weekend races.
The TSA said it was concerned about the gear in his carry-on bag, and pulled him out of line. The items of concern turned out to be only a running watch and some Power Bars, wrapped in a small PVC pipe for protection against crushing. Nonetheless, for the next 30 minutes, screeners checked and rechecked the bag. They found nothing dangerous. Vanderklok protested that he was no threat, and that the items were of no danger to anyone, and insisted on making a complaint.
Electronics and “organic mass” can be used to make bombs, TSA Supervisor Charles Kieser said in response to Vanderlok’s complaint. “The passenger made a bomb threat to me,” Kieser testified later according to a court transcript. “He said ‘I’ll bring a bomb through here any day that I want… and you’ll never find it.’”
- See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2015/02/13/man-held-20-hours-for-asking-to-file-tsa-complaint/#sthash.3S4vcvuH.dpuf
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The world needs its whistleblowers. They are indispensable to a healthy society. The employee who, in the public interest, has the independence of judgment and the personal courage to challenge malpractice or illegality is a kind of public hero. Yet, as Sir Robert Francis reported on Wednesday , in the NHS as in any large and bureaucratic organisation, whistleblowers are far more likely to be resented than respected, as Helene Donnelly, the nurse who protested about the failings in care at Mid Staffs, found out. Far from having their names embossed on a roll of honour, Francis found that the doctors and nurses and other NHS staff who reported their anxieties about failings in patient care had been shunned, suspended or even sacked by hospital bosses. Many were left struggling to find a new job. Some have been driven to contemplate suicide.
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Reporters Without Borders released its annual World Press Freedom Index Thursday and revealed the U.S. has received its lowest score since 2006.
The U.S. is ranked 49th in the world — dropping from 46th — right behind Malta, Niger, Burkina Faso and El Salvador.
In comparison, our northern neighbor Canada was ranked eighth this year. Mexico, on the other hand, is 148th.
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Imprisoned former Chicago-area police sergeant Drew Peterson was charged today with hiring a hitman to kill the prosecutor who sent him to prison for 38 years.
Dressed in his prison uniform, Peterson asked for a public defender after hearing the charges against him. Peterson has been in jail since 2012, when he was found guilty of the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio.
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We fire missiles from the sky that incinerate families huddled in their houses. They incinerate a pilot cowering in a cage. We torture hostages in our black sites and choke them to death by stuffing rags down their throats. They torture hostages in squalid hovels and behead them. We organize Shiite death squads to kill Sunnis. They organize Sunni death squads to kill Shiites. We produce high-budget films such as “American Sniper” to glorify our war crimes. They produce inspirational videos to glorify their twisted version of jihad.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Twenty-five years on from the web’s inception, its creator has urged the public to re-engage with its original design: a decentralised internet that at its very core, remains open to all.
Speaking with Wired editor David Rowan at an event launching the magazine’s March issue, Tim Berners-Lee said that although part of this is about keeping an eye on for-profit internet monopolies such as search engines and social networks, the greatest danger is the emergence of a balkanised web.
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Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete – just like what happens in a museum – but in digital form, in servers in the cloud.
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I’ve written before about the GOP’s peculiarly uncompromising stance on net neutrality. At its core, net neutrality has always been a battle between two huge industry groups and therefore never really presented an obvious reason for Republicans to feel strongly about one side or the other. But they’ve taken sides anyway, energetically supporting the anti-neutrality broadband industry against the pro-neutrality tech industry. Today an LA Times article dives more deeply into the problems this is causing:
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In May 2013 I engaged in an hour long web chat with Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, a think tank that describes itself as “dedicated to understanding global challenges by applying technological solutions.”
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DRM
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New submitter Dharkfiber sends an article about the Hardened Anti-Reverse Engineering System (HARES), which is an encryption tool for software that doesn’t allow the code to be decrypted until the last possible moment before it’s executed. The purpose is to make applications as opaque as possible to malicious hackers trying to find vulnerabilities to exploit. It’s likely to find work as an anti-piracy tool as well.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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So the saga of the Left Shark and Katy Perry’s lawyers keeps getting more and more strange. We’ve already covered the legal threat from Perry’s lawyers to the guy who was offering a 3D printed figurine of the Left Shark, followed by the response explaining to Perry’s lawyers that there is no copyright in left shark, leading to Perry’s lawyers to issue a uh huh there is… while also using the figurine maker’s own photo of his 3D printed shark in their (now abandoned) trademark application.
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Andrus Nomm, one of the Megaupload employees indicted by the United States, has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to a year in prison. Nomm signed a plea deal and admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from Mega’s sites.
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A few days ago, it came out that programmer Andrus Nomm had flown to Virginia to be arrested. Nomm had worked for Megaupload in Europe and had been listed in the criminal case against Megaupload and its various employees. His name had mostly fallen off the radar, since he wasn’t down in New Zealand with most of the rest of them. It was obvious in his move to come to the US and be arrested that he must have worked out a plea deal with the feds, and that’s confirmed today with him pleading “guilty” to criminal copyright infringement with prosecutors asking for a year and a day in prison, which the court granted. Kim Dotcom noted that he has “nothing but compassion and understanding for Andrus Nomm.”
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States’ excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. It contains DRM anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own. The TPP will encourage ISPs to monitor and police their users, likely leading to more censorship measures such as the blockage and filtering of content online in the name of copyright enforcement. And in the most recent leak of the TPP’s Intellectual Property chapter, we found an even more alarming provision on trade secrets that could be used to crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers who report on corporate wrongdoing.
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The text from the TPP reads “penalties that include sentences of imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement, consistently with the level of penalties applied for crimes of corresponding gravity.” The EFF suggest that countries who do not have “sufficiently high” fines could be subject to pressure from the US Trade Representative to impose fines the US deems suitable.
It doesn’t stop there though, TPP’s current copyright provisions enable judges to order the seizure, destruction or forfeiture of anything that can be “traceable to infringing activity”, used in the “creation of pirated copyright goods” or is “documentary evidence relevant to the alleged offence”. I find the last quote the most troubling, ‘documentary evidence’ could include the machine on which the content was created, servers it’s hosted on and could, at a stretch, include seizure of another persons machine based on chat logs if the activity was being discussed with a friend.
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02.13.15
Posted in News Roundup at 6:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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A new version of Dell’s Kace K1000 Systems Management Appliance adds support for a wider array of devices, including Chromebooks, so enterprises and other organizations can better control these Chrome OS computers.
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Chromebooks are laptops running Chrome OS that are good fits for many situations. The light OS doesn’t require heavy hardware, and that makes them cheaper than many laptops. Those on a tight budget can find a couple of good Chromebooks from Acer for just $199.
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Server
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To learn more about Rocket, and the Application Container spec which underlies is, we caught up with Jonathan Boulle. Boulle is an engineer at CoreOS who is leading the development of Rocket and doing a lot of the coordination work around the App Container spec. Before working at CoreOS, Boulle worked on a similar project at Twitter that never quite saw the light of day, but was able to apply some of the ideas and experiences to his current work on Rocket.
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The company’s new tool is itself a Docker container. Using Docker’s Stats API, the software collects and logs data on the Docker environment, as well as specific containers. It can keep track of things like how much CPU time, memory and network bandwidth a Docker app is using.
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There has been a lot of action on the container front recently. Version 1.5 of Docker rolled out with new features and upgrades. Survey results from StackEngine also arrived, shown in a detailed infographic, that describe some of the major trends going on in the container space, including Docker trends. And Rocket, a competitor to Docker that we’ve covered, reached new milestones.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds, the father of the Linux kernel, posted a message on Google+ asking users to vote if they want the version numbering scheme of Linux kernel to change from 3.xx to 4.x. This is a very good opportunity for those of you who want the Linux kernel 4.0 to happen sooner to speak your mind.
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While Coreboot has been ported to a number of older ThinkPads and other outdated Intel motherboards and laptops, you don’t see many modern Intel systems supporting Coreboot. The reason for the lack of Coreboot support is due to a “feature” introduced with Haswell.
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OverlayFS was added to the Linux 3.18 kernel and for Linux 3.19 this file-system popular to live Linux distributions gained multi-layer support. For Linux 3.20 this file-system is now having support for multiple read-only layers.
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PulseAudio, the powerful and controversial sound system used in numerous GNU/Linux and UNIX-like computer and mobile operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD), reached version 6.0, a release that introduces several new features and fixes numerous annoying bugs reported by users from previous versions.
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Live patching is the hottest trend when we’re talking about Linux kernel-based operating systems. It was created by SUSE, based on KGraft, and distributed in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distribution at the end of 2014. Everyone knows that Linux systems don’t require a reboot every time some packages have been updated, except for the kernel. Well, this is not the case anymore with live patching.
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When Microsoft launched Windows 10 Technical Preview, the name came as something of a surprise; everyone had been, understandably, expecting Windows 9. Over in the world of Linux, as we know, things work a little differently.
The world of Linux-based operating systems is a fragmented one, but Linus Torvalds — whose loins were partly responsible for giving birth to Linux — is asking the community how version numbering should be handled moving forward. Should things be kept simple, or should version numbers just keep getting longer, and longer, and longer, and longer?
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Paolo Bonzini has sent in the KVM pull request for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some interesting changes and features for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
Highlights of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates for Linux 3.20 include:
- A new optional feature to add a small amount of polling on each executed HLT instruction in the guest, for improving latency by up to 50% for some scenarios. Right now this is a feature that needs to be manually toggled but in the future could be auto-tuned.
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Graphics Stack
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With Wayland’s Weston compositor having the presentation feedback support, Pekka Paalanen of Collabora has written about Weston’s repaint scheduling.
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Back in 2012 there was a call for deprecating FBDEV within the Linux kernel considering that DRM and V4L2 drivers are much better options. Sadly there hasn’t been any formal deprecation of FBDEV in the mainline kernel yet, but its still receiving a few changes each kernel cycle.
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Benchmarks
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While I don’t yet have my hands on a quad-core Cortex-A7 Raspberry Pi 2 board, there’s already many running benchmarks with it using our open-source automated testing software. Some of the shared RPi2 benchmarks done by the community include:
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Applications
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As of today my ePad source is nearing a 1.0.0 release and the goal of this post is to let folks outside of Bodhi know it exists and that it is ready for them to give it a try. ePad in its current form supports most all of the features you would expect from a text editor: Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, Find, Replace, and displaying Line Numbers. On top of these it also supports opening multiple files in the same application window.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Data is the crucial bit in our personal and professional existence. Without data we would be lost in a vast expanse of nothingness. Spreadsheets, email, documents, contacts, databases, files, folders … the list goes on and on. In a perfect world, every byte of local storage would be backed up to an external hard drive or cloud storage service.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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We’re getting so close to the release now! (Check the count-down counter on krita.org!) Sure, there are still a bunch of bugs to fix, but we’re down to very nearly no release blockers now. And we fixed an awful lot of bugs since the last beta release, too!
The 2.9.0 release is scheduled for February 26th, with monthly bug fix releases planned until we release Krita 3.1.
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We’re pleased to announce the last Calligra 2.9 beta release for you to test. We are as good at fixing issues as your reports are so please keep up the good work.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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New APIs must be fully documented
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With GNOME 3.16 the developers are working hard at making their native Wayland support be rock-solid and reliable for day-to-day use for those wishing to abandon running their GNOME desktop on an X.Org Server. An important feature has finally landed for GTK+ applications in the Wayland world: the ability to minimize windows.
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…and while I was playing with GNOME’s new Bugzilla instance trying to get rid of some upstream feature bloat, I looked at upstream’s Bugzilla front page and spend the next hours wondering where to add eight more Search buttons/links/forms so it’ll become a full dozen.
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Utkarsh Sevekar has announced today, February 13, that his Debian-based Rebellin Linux 2.5 computer operating system is available for download for free. The distribution was previously only available for purchase for the sum of $9.99 (€8.8).
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Arch Family
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Manjaro Linux Cinnamon 0.8.12 is the second Community Edition of Manjaro that gets a new stable release after the announcement of the Arch Linux-based Manjaro Linux 0.8.12, a point release that introduced out-of-the-box support for Microsoft’s exFAT file system, as well as the Pacman 4.2 package manager.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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February 14 is a day to express your love for others and in keeping with that theme, openSUSE extends its gratitude toward the organizations and people who make Free and Open Source Software a reality.
Every year, the Free Software Foundation Europe asks all FOSS users to think about the hard-working people in the Free Software community and to show them their appreciation individually on this “I love Free Software”-Day.
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Red Hat Family
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It took a long time after Red Hat’s IPO in 1999 to see other significant open source exits. But things have been accelerating lately, with large funding rounds, acquisitions, and an IPO. Open source vendors are maturing, and making a deeper and deeper impact
[...]
The good news is that both options — industrial exit or IPO — open new possibilities for open source vendors. Gone are the days where the only possible outcome would be to get picked up by a proprietary competitor, annoyed by the market shares lost to this alternative. Competitors don’t spend hundreds of millions to remove an option from the market — but they do so to acquire a mature technology, a large installed base, and a synergy with their existing product portfolio. Jaspersoft’s acquisition by TIBCO is a great example — there was little overlap between Jaspersoft’s products and TIBCO Spotfire, and their successful cloud innovations and expertise have been beneficial to TIBCO’s entire BI offerings. We will have to see how Pentaho gets rolled into Hitachi’s “Social Innovation” group once the acquisition is completed but I am pretty sure this will be a tremendous value creator.
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Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 delivers standardised services for mission critical workloads, and offers IT organisations greater visibility into provisioning, configuring and monitoring of their virtualisation infrastructure, all based on open standards.
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Debian Family
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The first Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming Tails 1.3 amnesic incognito live system has been officially released for testing, bringing three major new features and four minor improvements that are described for your reading pleasure in the next paragraphs.
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VLANd is a simple (hah!) python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together.
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After the OpenTAC session at Linaro Connect, we do now have a mailing list to support any and all discussions related to OpenTAC. Thanks to Daniel Silverstone for the list.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical seems to be set to release a smartphone that is based on Ubuntu OS platform in partnership with BQ of Spain, which is renowned for making tablets, smartphones and ebook readers in Europe. The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition was launched in Europe on Feb 9.
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Ubuntu 15.04 is using the Linux 3.18 kernel right now but with Linux 3.19 having just been released and it bringing new features and improvements, the Vivid Vervet archive will soon land Linux 3.19. As Ubuntu 15.04 is shipping in April, it will almost definitely finalize on Linux 3.19 given that Linux 3.20 would be too close of a call for shipping in time.
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Erle Robotics, a Spanish company that creates all sorts of Linux-powered robots, such as Erle-brain, an open hardware Linux kernel-based autopilot for drones, Erle-plane, a Linux-based plane, and Erle-rover, a Linux-based rover, has announced Erle-copter, the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone, which can be used to capture amazing scenes (if you have a great camera).
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On Kickstarter, Zyro is pitching a “DroneBall” quadcopter that runs Linux on Gumstix COMs and acts like a smart aerial ball for multi-player games.
The Zyro DroneBall doesn’t look like a ball — nor does it act like any ball you’ve ever seen that isn’t made of Flubber. The quadcopter can hover, zig, and zag within a virtual aerial arena, mimicking a hockey puck, soccer ball, or an Ultimate Frisbee disc, says Zyro. It can even take the role of an extra player on the field interacting with another DroneBall.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Samsung Z1 was the first Tizen phone to be released with Spreadtrum’s SC7727S WCDMA chipsets running with the Tizen 2.3 Operating System. Today Spreadtrum Communications, a fabless semiconductor company based in China, have announced the successfully completion of the integration of the Tizen operating system (OS) with their WCDMA power-efficient chipsets.
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Android
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Obsessed with mobile growth? Join us February 23-24 when we reveal the best technologies and strategies to help your company grow on mobile. It all takes place at our 5th annual Mobile Summit at the scenic Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, CA. See if you qualify here.
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Using an Android device comes with a number of quirks and feelings that only Android users can understand. iPhone users lead a boring existence where everything is sliver and has perfectly rounded corners. Our world is full of color and unique shapes and sizes, but it’s not without #AndroidProblems. That’s exactly what makes Android users different, and why we can safely say no one else understands what it’s like.
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“Be Together. Not the Same.” Android’s new motto is pretty much perfect. It describes the dual nature of Android and it’s a great reminder that, at the end of the day, we’re all just tech fans no matter the brands or models we prefer.
Google’s last Android ad had cute animals, lots of them. But for this newest project, Google’s getting back to the funky Androidified characters first introduced in the days before Lollipop’s arrival.
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Google today launched the Android WebView beta channel. To participate, developers are asked to join the Google+ community and sign up for the testing program before they can download the beta from Google Play.
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Are you a techie but also have a soft spot for classical music? Then you’ll probably love this video we’re about to share with you.
Google Japan has just posted a video showing an Android orchestra made up of 300 phones and tablets that sync together to play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” sonata.
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OnePlus will launch its custom Android ROM OxygenOS next month – with a little help from the developers of Paranoid Android.
OnePlus is saying goodbye to CyanogenMod, the Android ROM that it had previously using for its OnePlus One devices globally, and is preparing to release a new alternative, OxygenOS, that it’s developed in-house.
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iOS 8 and Lollipop are the best versions to date of Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems, yet that doesn’t mean either one is free of flaws. Both iOS 8 and Android 5.0 crash, and a new study from Crittercism reveals that it’s Google’s OS that is more stable than Apple’s.
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Google’s new Android 5.0 Lollipop update is slowly but surely making its way to more and more devices from the Moto X and Moto E, to the Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8, and now today we have more good news for Motorola smartphone owners.
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OnePlus One will receive a major CyanogenMod 11S system update (O5Q release) for Android 4.4.4 KitKat. The latest over-the-air (OTA) update is designed to offer a number of major fixes for the “Flagship Killer” smartphone.
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With the arrival of products such as Motorola’s hotly anticipated Moto 360, the smartwatch market was expected to take off. But the data from market research company Canalys shows that consumers are still far from convinced that they need buy one.
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Tourists who visit my home country of Croatia soon notice that a hallmark (besides beautiful beaches, fortified cities and wondrous sites of ancient Roman architecture) is how widespread smartphone use is. According to the Legatum Prosperity Index data for 2013, there were 114.5 mobile phones for every 100 Croatians — that’s a lot of phones!
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One of the tasks of a digital team in any major news organisation is to make the newsroom more efficient. We leverage new technologies in ways that haven’t been done before, and at a pace that’s challenging to keep up with. At The Times and Sunday Times, our team is constantly on the lookout for ways of improving our editorial workflow, and ensuring we get the very best from our great quality journalism.
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A foundation can do a lot for an open source project. Just look at The OpenStack Foundation or The Linux Foundation. This week, Node.js, the very popular server-side JavaScript framework that is used for building and running websites and online applications, got its own foundation. Among other things, that means that Joyent will no longer solely govern Node.js. The foundation should help the project gain more contributions and develop more quickly.
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The economy is looking up mean that business budgets will likely see healthy growth in the new year. Forrester is predicting 4 to 6 percent growth for 2015 global IT budgets, reaching $620 billion. Much of the growth in spending will go towards technology like analytics, mobile, as-a-service, and enterprise applications like ERP and CRM. The US will lead IT spending, followed by India and the UK.
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Free software is particularly well-suite to Greece because it is a small market compared to those for the anglophone or francophone worlds, say. That means software is unlikely to be produced in regional versions as a priority. Open source, of course, can be modified by anyone, allowing localised versions of existing free software to be produced easily. All of these considerations apply elsewhere, especially among smaller countries, and it has always been something of a mystery to me why they don’t embrace open source more readily.
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What he means is that companies will no longer have to run Hadoop on one set of resources, while running the web servers, Spark and any other number of workloads on other resources managed by Mesos. Essentially, all of these things will now be available as data center services residing on the same set of machines. Mesos has always supported Hadoop as a workload type — and companies including Twitter and Airbnb have taken advantage of this — but YARN has appeal as the default resource manager for newer distributions of Hadoop because it’s designed specifically for that platform and, well, is one of the foundations of those newer distributions.
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MapR and Mesosphere are announcing a new open source big data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacentres.
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The Open Networking Forum (ONF), a non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), has announced the appointment of Saurav Das as principal system architect, and the establishment of a new project to build upon the OpenFlow Configuration and Management Protocol (OF-CONFIG) to support Open vSwitch (OVS). Saurav’s contributions to ONF and the announcement of this project build on the organisation’s open-source software efforts that began with the OpenFlow Driver competition, followed by ONF SampleTap and the Segment Routing project SPRING-OPEN, all of which were completed in 2014. Open-source software is a key route to developing de factor standards and fostering interoperability, both of which are ONF goals.
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This week Google announced it would provide a cloud computing performance evaluator called PerKit Benchmarker. The evaluation tool is hosted on the open-source collaboration site Github, and will allow users of the Google Cloud Platform, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure to measure their current provider’s performance against industry-established benchmarks.
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Node.js, the popular open-source, server-side JavaScript runtime project, will soon be governed by an independent foundation, its chief commercial sponsor announced this week.
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SaaS/Big Data
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HDS will offer open-source data muncher Hadoop to the enterprise after doing a deal with Hortonworks.
Hadoop distributor Hortonworks has signed an agreement with HDS to jointly promote and support the software. HDS can now deliver Hortonworks’ Data Platform (HDP), Hadoop in other words, to its enterprise customers.
Hortonworks strategic marketing veep John Kreisa offered this canned quote: “The strategic agreement also provides a joint engineering commitment for the two companies on current and future projects that will help make Hadoop enterprise-ready.”
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Databases
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Hadoop has made lots of big data headlines by now. But in a reminder that it is only part of the open source big data story, Sisense and Simba partnered this week to deliver data analytics via MongoDB, the open source NoSQL platform, which is increasingly importance in production big data use.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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That was pretty fast! It looks like Oracle knows what it is doing and just updated its awesome VirtualBox virtualization software, which we have to admit that we use every day here on Softpedia to test all sorts of distributions of GNU/Linux and many other Linux-related applications, to version 4.3.22, bringing initial support for the recently released Linux kernel 3.19.
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Funding
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Hitachi is making a major play for the big data and Internet of Things markets with the acquisition, which is expected to close in June
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Public Services/Government
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Amid the well-deserved hype around the impact of cloud technology and big data analytics, it is possible that casual industry watchers may have missed the real story behind the recent wave of IT re-architecting.
Enabling many of these recent, powerful trends is a newly validated embrace of open source software technology. The movement to OSS solutions is empowering system designers and solution architects to re-examine methodologies that evolved out of the legacy proprietary, closed source software license model. Put simply, OSS allows developers of IT systems to create better results and cut costs.
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Licensing
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The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licenses are now on our list of free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.
We have updated our list of Various Licenses and Comments about Them to include the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Both of these licenses are free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.
CC BY 4.0 is a noncopyleft license that is compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3), meaning you can combine a CC BY 4.0 licensed work with a GPLv3 licensed work a larger work that is then released under the terms of GPLv3.
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Openness/Sharing
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Facebook isn’t likely making many new friends among the big established networking vendors with its announcement today of the new 6-pack open hardware modular switch. The new 6-pack modular switch builds on Facebook’s existing top-of-rack Wedge switch and its Linux-based network operating system FBOSS.
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Open Hardware
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OSVR announced its creation at CES this year, and as a direct result 12 members have signed up their support, which includes Jaunt, a pioneering company in cinematic VR.
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An open source virtual reality platform reports 13 new partners. This is the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem, envisioned as the platform that can bring together companies doing work in a number of areas of virtual reality. OSVR aims to set an open standard for virtual reality input devices, games and output. Its framework offers the potential to unite developers and gamers under a single platform.
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The white Fiat drove on to the line at Baguley this afternoon, causing delays to services between Cornbrook and Manchester Airport.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In response to Matthews’ call for “bombing the hell out of them,” Sheehan does make an important point about ISIS’s well-publicized display of violence, which is “they did this for a purpose.” The purpose he proposes–”They’re doing this to try to intimidate us so that we go home”–is implausible, since ISIS surely knows that the United States, like most countries, generally responds to violence with more violence. It’s much more likely that ISIS, like the Al-Qaeda movement it springs from, believes spectacular acts of terror will draw a military response from the United States that will help it to build its movement (Extra!, 7/11). But at least Sheehan is thinking of violence as being part of a political strategy rather than as a form of emotional release, as Matthews seems to see it:
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Questions persist over the true role of the United States in the events leading up to the deadly encounter in Mamasapano and in the immediate aftermath.
Did the US provide all or part of the intelligence that formed the basis for the ill-fated Special Action Force operation?
Were its operatives involved in the planning of the mission and in its execution?
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“The blood debt of the US which include the genocide of 1.5 million Filipinos in the Filipino-American war remain unpaid and their atrocities continue to spiral up. They’re even using Filipino troops as pawns in their interventionist terror war such as what happened the covert SAF operation Mamasapano,” said Charisse Bañez, national spokesperson of the League of Filipino Students.
Vencer Crisostomo, Anakbayan National Chair, said that Aquino “sacrificed his own troops in the name of the US war on terror.”
“This disastrous collaboration between Aquino and the US is a disrespect to all the victims of the Filipino genocide during Filipino-American War,” said Crisostomo.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Common sense tells you, of course, that when people say someone is “in another world,” they don’t generally mean that they are actually psychotic. For what it’s worth, Merkel’s office said she hadn’t meant to imply any such thing, clarifying that her point was that “Putin has a different perception on Crimea.”
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Rush Limbaugh: If Young People Listen To Liberal Professors “It Stands To Reason People Are Going To Sign Up With ISIS”
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Privacy
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Recent Paris attacks have triggered a wave of securitarian discourse and dangerous upcoming legislative measures that are spreading way beyond France. Increased control of communications online, surveillance, attacks against anonymous speech and encryption are already on the table, under the pretence of fighting an invisible enemy in a perpetual war.
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Fahwad Al-Khadoumi (nsnbc) : Facebook teamed up with several corporate “friends” to adapt Facebook’s in-house software to identify cyber threats and their source with other corporations. Countering cyber threats sounds positive while there are serious questions about transparency when smaller, independent media fall victim to major corporation’s unwillingness to reveal the source of attacks resulted in websites being closed for hours or days. Transparency, yes, but for whom?
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The challenge against the controversial Upstream program was tossed out because additional defense from the government would have required “impermissible disclosure of state secret information,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his decision.
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David Carr, the 58-year-old media columnist for the New York Times, collapsed suddenly at the newspaper’s office this evening and died after being rushed to the hospital.
Carr was previously the editor-in-chief of Washington City Paper and the author of a memoir, Year of the Gun, about his recovery from drug addiction and cancer while raising two young daughters.
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Technology companies can enact all sorts of political agendas, and right now the dominant agendas enforce neoliberalism and austerity, using centralized data to identify immigrants to be deported, or poor people likely to default on their debts. Yet I believe there is a huge positive potential in the accumulation of more data, in a good institutional—and by that I mean political—setup. Once you monitor one part of my activity and offer me some proposals or predictions about it, it’s reasonable to suppose your service would be better if you also monitored my other activities. The fact that Google monitors my Web searches, my email, my location, makes its predictions in each of these categories much more accurate than if it were to monitor only one of them. If you take this logic to its ultimate conclusion, it becomes clear you don’t want two hundred different providers of information services—you want just one, because the scale-effects make things much easier for users. The big question, of course, is whether that player has to be a private capitalist corporation, or some federated, publicly-run set of services that could reach a data-sharing agreement free of monitoring by intelligence agencies.
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New York Times columnist David Carr, one of the most incisive and influential writers on the media business, died Thursday night after collapsing in the paper’s midtown Manhattan newsroom. He was 58.
Times executive editor Dean Baquet informed staff of the death of their “wonderful, esteemed colleague” in a newsroom memo.
[...]
Earlier Thursday, Carr moderated a TimesTalk on the National Security Agency leaks with Edward Snowden, and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Within hours, he was dead.
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Civil Rights
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This is the second article (Part 1) in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how public ambivalence toward an expansion of the legal system has been capitalized upon by the prison industrial complex.
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Rush: “It Seems Like Any Man That Goes To College Could Randomly Be Accused Of Committing Rape”
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DRM
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Who would’ve thought it possible that digital rights management (DRM) would come to the coffee business? Well, it has. Believe it or not, Keurig now includes DRM on their coffee makers. Why? To keep users from using anything but Keurig coffee pods on their machines, of course. You know, just like the DRM used by some printer manufacturers to keep you coming back (and coming back) for their branded replacement ink cartridges instead of opting for the much cheaper store brand.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Despite its extensive implications, TTIP has generated relatively little coverage, not least because negotiations are shrouded in secrecy and conducted primarily with corporate lobbyists, who have minimal obligations to the public interest. So clandestine are the talks that the few MEPs that are granted access can only view the plans in their original documentation, in a secure location, with the threat of espionage charges if they try to make copies or share the details with the public.
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02.12.15
Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I’ve looked at specialty distributions that were created for engineers and biologists in previous articles, but these aren’t the only scientific disciplines that have their own distributions. So in this article, I introduce a distribution created specifically for astronomers, called Distro Astro. This distribution bundles together astronomy software to help users with tasks like running observatories or planetariums, doing professional research or outreach.
From the very first moment of booting up Distro Astro, you will notice that this distribution is aimed at astronomers. The look and feel of items, from the boot splash screen to wallpapers and screensavers, have all been given an astronomical theme. Even the default
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Desktop
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Dell’s education-focused Chromebook 11 was surprisingly one of the best Chromebooks we’ve ever used, even though it was notoriously difficult to actually purchase for much of last year. Now, Dell is taking what it learned from last year’s launch and releasing a new, upgraded Chromebook 11 that feels just as solid as last year’s model at first glance. The first Chromebook Dell produced was a well-built, well-rounded machine with no glaring defects — and it appears the new model offers the same solid combo.
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Server
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The open-source Docker application virtualization container project has become a defacto standard for applications containers over the course of the last year. But it’s a defacto standard that isn’t a real specification and is one that is being challenged by Linux distribution vendor CoreOS.
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The first major milestone release from the open-source Docker project in 2015 debuts with new features that will pave the way for the year ahead.
The open-source Docker project rolled out its 1.5 release on Feb. 10, providing users of the application virtualization container technology with new networking and visibility capabilities.
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Kernel Space
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Linux Kernel 3.18 is still used in numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, despite that fact that Linus Torvalds announced the final release of Linux 3.19 kernel on February 8, 2015, so it is time to update it to version 3.18.7, which was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman a few hours ago, on February 11.
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The PowerPC architecture updates for the Linux 3.20 kernel, including some improvements for the Sony PlayStation 3 game console.
While Sony long ago removed the “Other OS” functionality from the PlayStation 3, it seems some open-source developers are still working on the PS3 support for Linux.
Geoff Levand landed a few PS3 kernel patches for mainline Linux kernel integration via the 3.20 POWER pull request.
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Over the last year SUSE and Red Hat have released live kernel patching solutions named kGraft and Kpatch respectively. Although the two companies didn’t realise it, they were actually developing the software at the same time, after they were both released they decided to work together to bring a combined system to the upstream Linux Kernel, now it’s foundations will be released in the Linux 3.20 kernel.
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Linux 3.19 was just released and my usual overview of what the next merge window will bring is more than overdue. The big thing overall is certainly all the work around atomic display updates, but read on for what else all has been done.
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Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car, today announced that Eureka Inc., Mcloudware, Microchip, Moscow Design Bureau and Wind River are joining The Linux Foundation and AGL to advance the creation of an open source reference platform to help the industry rapidly innovate and build the cars of the future.
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Following yesterday’s release of the Linux 3.19 kernel is the newest version of the GNU Linux-libre kernel that strips out kernel functionality dependent on binary-only microcode/firmware images.
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Originally, there was kSplice as a standalone project that implemented stop_machine()-based patching for the linux kernel. This project got later acquired, and the current owner is providing live patching as a proprietary service, without any intentions to have their implementation merged.
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The XFS changes targeting the Linux 3.20 kernel have been published, but this time around the file-system work isn’t particularly exciting.
The changes queued by Dave Chinner for the XFS file-system in Linux 3.20 include…
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Last month IBM announced the z13 micro-processor for their z13 mainframe computers. IBM claims the z13 is the “world’s fastest microprocessor” and now with Linux 3.20 there’s full support.
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There’s new input drivers for Linux 3.20 and improvements to the existing input drivers with this next kernel version.
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As usual, the next version of the Linux kernel will bring a number of prominent changes to Intel’s open-source DRM graphics driver.
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Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) is to be supported by the Linux 3.20 kernel.
While many Linux users and free software advocates are opposed to TPM, TPM 2.0 is going to be supported by the next version of the mainline Linux kernel. Trusted Platform Module technology has already been supported by the mainline Linux kernel but TPM 2.0 breaks backward compatibility with TPM 1.2. TPM 2.0 supports many more alogirhtms, crypto primitives, root keys, and authorization differences. For those learning about TPM for the first time or are just unfamiliar with the differences to TPM 2.0, see the Wikipedia page for a basic overview and the Trusted Computing Group’s TPM 2.0 FAQs.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa Git master was branched into Mesa 10.5 this weekend and the latest Git code then bumped to Mesa 10.6-devel. While Mesa 10.5 is a step closer to being released, officially it still only supports OpenGL 3.3.
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X.Org and Mesa developers have begun thinking about interesting projects for student developers to get involved in for this year’s Google Summer of Code while prospective students should also begin to think about getting involved with X.Org/Mesa development.
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Days after branching Mesa 10.5, Emil Velikov went ahead today and put out the first release candidate for the upcoming Mesa 10.5.
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NVIDIA today finally mainlined their Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) support for handling video decode of H.265 / HEVC.
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X.Org members will soon be voting on whether the X.Org Foundation should dissolve its 501(c)3 state and become a project of SPI.
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Applications
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A couple of days ago, we found some detailed information regarding the new features and improvements that will be implemented into the forthcoming VLC Media Player 3.0.0 release while we were digging through the Internet, and decided to share it with you on this space, so that you have an idea on what to expect from the upcoming release of VLC.
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For those not closely following the development of the VLC open-source, cross-platform media player, the VLC 2.2.0 release is coming soon while further out is VLC 3.0 and it will be even more magical.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Containers are the hottest topic in the data center. Here are the essentials that every well-informed IT pro should know and be able to explain.
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I’m not too fond of terminals. This guide is for new GNOME contributors like me whose brain capacity for terminal commands is only so-so big. I will introduce you to 8 git commands worth remembering. I assume only vague familiarity with git: pulling, pushing and committing.
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Games
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Albino Lullaby is a really freaky looking horror adventure that should be coming to Linux, and it’s using Unreal Engine 4.
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Nightside is a recent discovery on Steam Greenlight that immediately attracted my attention, and the developers replies to me have been very encouraging.
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Apotheon is a heroic action game set within the vibrant world of Ancient Greek Mythology. Ascend Mount Olympus, wrestle the divine powers from the Pantheon of Gods, and save mankind.
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Feral Interactive have been great for Linux with their ports, and it’s time we took a proper look at XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This has been played through with the expansion Enemy Within which I feel is an essential extra.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDAB has been working very hard on Qt3D after it fell apart for Qt 5.0 back in the day during Nokia’s Qt shafting. The new version of the Qt3D module is nearly ready but not fully-baked, which is why Sean Harmer of KDAB proposed today that this be a “tech preview” feature of the next Qt tool-kit update.
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Last night was a sleepless night in all the good ways; I’m excited for the upcoming Plasma Sprint, and knowing I’ll be packing myself into a cigar tube and flinging myself across the North Atlantic Ocean is too much for me to sleep over. I had promised a commenter (too long ago) I would make green cursors, so I decided to make good on my word. After it took 5 minutes I needed more; and the wafting smell of my bread maker inspired me to make a Bread cursor theme. Once that was done, sufficiently delirious, I sent my weird bready message to the VDG. They appear to have ignored it – a wise decision. They’re busy people doing actual work.
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The Akonadi-Qt5 release isn’t quite ready now. So we’re directly creating our own IMAP connection. This is not ideal, as writing an IMAP client is not trivial, but as a starting point, this seems to work well.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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We can bet that many of you are eagerly awaiting for the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 open-source graphical desktop environment, which is used with great success on numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems, including Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu GNOME.
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After finding plenty of top 5 to top 50 distro lists, one name really stuck out. Just the name. Zorin OS. Its was a freaky cool name. I installed it quick and… Updates. I was dealing done with Windows updates so I won’t lie that I was erked. Then I found out what the 500MB of downloads were for. All of the preloaded software and I flipped.
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After releasing the first GNU/Linux distribution with Linux 3.18 kernel a couple of days after its launch back in December 2014, Arne Exton did it again, as he just announced today on Twitter that the his Exton|OS with MATE has been updated to version 150211 and includes a custom 3.19.0-5-exton kernel package based on the upstream Linux kernel 3.19.
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The Robolinux developers had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of a brand-new edition of their open-source computer operating system, this time built around the modern and beautiful KDE Software Compilation graphical desktop environment. It is a distro where the main emphasis is on running Windows applications natively.
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Dejan Petrovic, the developer of the recently introduced ChaletOS computer operating system informed us today, February 12, that he just pushed a February 2015 release on his servers, urging users to update to it as soon as possible. The new ISO images are available for download right now (see link at the end of the article) for 32 and 64-bit PCs, bringing assorted bugfixes and improvements.
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Screenshots
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Slackware Family
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Rather than writing blog articles and helping people, I decided to wind down during the evenings by baking bread. The kneading process relaxes the mind while it exercises the muscles (and relieves back pains). My son does not mind… he eats all I bake anyway. Sourdough in the weekend and regular yeasted breads during the working week. The aromas coming from the oven right now are making me feel hungry again at 10:30 PM.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers the ideal platform for both traditional and cloud-enabled workloads
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Red Hat Inc. continues to form partnerships to position its OpenStack cloud platform as a leading contender in the new era of software-defined networking and network functions virtualization.
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Fedora
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One of the planned Changes in Fedora 22 is to make DNF the default console package manager, instead of yum. As part of this, we have been converting Anaconda, the Fedora installer, to use DNF rather than yum. At present, in Fedora 22 images, anaconda will use DNF by default but the yum code is still present and switchable with a kernel parameter (inst.nodnf).
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I met Matthew at LinuxCon 2013 and have been hounding him for an interview ever since then. He’s worth the wait, though. He really gets under the hood of his GNOME setup and he has some great things to say about the power of open source software. Also, I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating: Fedora has been great for me lately. I know there have always been Fedora fans, but my experience with it was always that there were one or two annoyingly broken things in each release. But 21 is solid. Like Ubuntu solid. And that’s thanks to the work of people like Matthew.
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Fedora 22 will ship with GCC 5, which brings a whole host of enhancements, among which is a new default C++ ABI. In this article, we’ll cover how that ABI transition will work in Fedora.
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While Fedora 21 has been officially released on December 9, 2014, and users worldwide still enjoy the powerful operating system on their desktop or server computers, the time has come to look at the future and see what the forthcoming Fedora 22 release has prepared for its dedicated users.
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While Fedora 22 isn’t being released for several more months, so far it’s running quite well.
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For something about 15 years I was using Debian distribution and ones which derived from it (like Ubuntu). Basically whole time I used development versions of them and amount of issues was nearly not existing. Now I run Rawhide…
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Debian Family
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I recently acquired a vServer hosted by Server4You and decided to install a Debian Wheezy image. Usually I boot any device in backup mode and first install a fresh Debian copy using debootstrap over the provided image, to have a clean system. In this case I did not and I came across a few glitches I want to talk about. So hopefully, if you are running the same system image, it saves you some time to figure out, why the h*ll some things don’t work as expected 
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The best software, whether it’s operating systems or anything else, is predictable. You read the documentation, or explore the interface, and you can make a logical prediction that “when I do action X, the result will be Y.” grep and cat are perfect examples of this.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We’ve been hearing rumors about a Meizu MX4 handset with Ubuntu Phone for quite a while now, yet there’s been no official word on the matter yet – not for the MX4, nor for the MX4 Pro.
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Carbonado Intermedia and are two digital media companies owned by Nestle Snipes (typically referred to as Nes Snipes). Carbonado produces animated sitcoms such as Budz, while Auteuristic is a traditional digital video production company focused on live series, including the Times Square Chronicles’ video version of their newspaper, Times Square Beat. Budz and the Time Square Beat are being leveraged by properties such as Verizon and Dish Network.
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Linux 3.20 To Fully Support The IBM z13 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-3.20-s390-IBM-z13
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96Boards, the open hardware specification for ARM boards out of the Linaro Community Board Group, has out their first ARM board certified against their consumer edition standard.
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Aaeon’s “EPIC-BDU7″ SBC uses Intel’s 5th Gen Core processors, and offers multiple graphics, GbE, USB, and SATA ports, plus mini-PCIe and PCI-104 expansion.
Aaeon’s EPIC-BDU7 single board computer uses the same old-school EPIC form factor adopted by its Atom-based EPC-CV1 board, but instead loads up with Intel’s brand new 5th Generation Core processors using the 14nm “Broadwell” architecture. Aaeon typically supports Linux on its SBCs, and although no OS support was listed, Linux should run on this board with no problem.
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Phones
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Android
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Google’s team in Japan connected 300 smartphones and tablets with different animated characters “singing” through the devices’ speakers for your listening pleasure.
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Android 5.0 Lollipop may not feel like the most stable operating system Google has ever put out, though a new report seems to claim otherwise. According to data from mobile application performance management solution Crittercism, application crash rates are .2% lower on devices running Lollipop than devices running iOS 8.
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While Apple may have beaten Android when it comes to sales, when it comes to stability the new Android 5.0 Lollipop beats Apple’s iOS 8.
According to data from mobile application performance management specialists Crittercism, app crash rates for the Lollipop are 0.2 percentage points lower than for iOS 8.
Android Lollipop: 2.0% crash rate
iOS 8: 2.2% crash rate
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AOpen’s rugged “MEP320″ media player and signage device runs Android 4.2.2 on a 1GHz Freescale i.MX Quad, and offers a thin profile and dual HDMI ports.
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This week the LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update finally arrived for users in the United States. A few weeks ago LG started teasing that it was “coming soon” for all users, and as of February 10th the LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update is officially rolling out in the U.S. starting with AT&T.
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The LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update is finally here and delivering tons of new features and changes to LG’s flagship smartphone, but the Android 5.0 Lollipop update is also causing problems for many. The update initially started outside of the US, and then this week the AT&T LG G3 finally received Android 5.0 Lollipop, and we’re hearing Sprint is up next.
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Quantified-self enthusiasts – those who are somewhat obsessed with using technology to better understand themselves, their daily habits and personal trends – have been fortunate to have a wide variety of niche apps to choose from for measuring everything from athletic activity, to travel time, and even time you’ve spent using your smartphone on a given day. But for the most part, you would have to download a handful of apps in order to log this data. Newly launched Instant 2.0, now available on Android, instead is offering a single destination for tracking nearly everything you want to record, including phone usage, app usage, fitness activity and traveling.
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OnePlus kind of let us believe it would show us at least a preview of its new OxygenOS today, but instead we’ve got news on who is going to develop the new OS – some of the leading figures behind Paranoid Android.
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You might have heard OnePlus has formed a dev team to build its OxygenOS ROM. They even did an AMA on the /r/Android subreddit today. Among the bits of info revealed by the team is the fact that OxygenOS won’t be open source. Instead it will be a “real OS.” Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik couldn’t resist poking fun at that.
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One Plus has been teasing their OxygenOS (replacing CyanogenMod) and fans have been waiting for an announcement as to when they would see this custom Android ROM on their One devices. Today One Plus made an OxygenOS announcement – but not about the ROM itself. Instead they introduced the team that is developing the ROM, and that very team includes developers from the popular ROM Paranoid Android.
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Most Moto G devices around the world have already received Android 5.0 Lollipop, but while Android One devices are already running on Android 5.1 Lollipop, we are expecting the new software update to roll out to other devices, too. A Moto G was spotted running Android 5.1 Lollipop, which leads us to believe that a soak test might have begun for the new OTA update.
According to Tech Droider, one of their readers sent in a photo of a Moto G 2014 running on Android 5.1 Lollipop, build number LXY22E, supposedly received on February 2. It’s a bit odd that the image hasn’t surfaced online if the update had rolled out to this particular user more than a week ago, so take this rumor with a grain of salt. Even though a soak test for the Moto G Android 5.1 Lollipop update is the most likely scenario, we can’t be sure that the photo wasn’t faked or manipulated.
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Traditionally thought of as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), or kinetic action platforms, unmanned systems are now filling roles such as command and control communications, meteorological survey, and resupply, and explosive ordnance disposal platforms. Historically, these platforms have been developed and fielded as standalone systems built by different vendors with unique and often proprietary payloads, control mechanisms and data formats. But this process has created limitations on interoperability and increased costs, leading the DoD to look at other, more viable options, including commercially supported open source middleware.
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The shockwaves generated by Edward Snowden’s revelations of the close collaboration between US tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple and the NSA are still reverberating through the industry. Those disclosures, together with related ones such as the involvement of the NSA in industrial espionage, as well as the asymmetric nature of US law when it comes to gathering data from foreign individuals, present something of an open goal for non-US technology companies – or so one might have thought.
On the face of it, then, it is surprising that non-US technology firms and others that can distance themselves from the US law are not proclaiming this fact more loudly. After all, there must be a considerable number of organisations that would dearly love to locate their data as far away from the attentions of the NSA as possible.
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When you choose not to work in the open, what are your reasons? Are they Good, Bad or Ugly? What are your suggestions for how those of us who want to work more in the open can all do better?
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The popular, open source Node.js JavaScript runtime engine is getting a new foundation to manage its development, in a move that could help mend the recent schism in the project’s community.
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Google’s latest foray into the open-source realm is a framework it’s calling “PerfKit,” which is designed to measure application performance in the cloud, the company announced Wednesday.
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The Apache Software Foundation has, since those early days, been at the forefront of challenging problems. Within the context of this article, the ASF has both fostered, and continues to host keynote scientific projects such as Apache OODT (a Top Level Project at the ASF which originally came from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory), to recently incubating projects such as Singa (an efficient, scalable and easy-to-use distributed platform for training deep learning models used currently within Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Deep Belief Network as examples).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Corporations that seek to control the Web, massive government and corporate surveillance, chilling effects on free expression — all of these issues will be harder to address if the next billions coming online think that the Internet exists solely within the walled gardens of platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. The greatest danger is people relinquishing their control to gatekeepers that get to decide the rules about what we see and what we create.
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When I first heard of Mozilla Open Badges, my heart skipped a beat. Wisely implemented, digital badges can help individuals and communities focus their energies on worthy goals.
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SaaS/Big Data
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“Warehouse-grade” automation is the key to the future of big data and distributed computing. So says infrastructure provider StackIQ, which today has rebranded its products and unveiled new automation features for Docker and other technologies that it believes will be crucial to next-generation enterprise data centers.
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The open-source OpenStack Foundation grew its’ revenue based by 52 percent in 2014 over 2013. OpenStack Foundation 2014 revenue came in at $17.5 million.
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As 2015 began, Blue Box, which offers private cloud services based on OpenStack to big companies including Viacom, announced a new round of $4 million in funding on top of the $10 million the company raised late last year. The fruits of that funding appear to thriving, as the company has now, with Alliance Technology Group, announced a joint development program that will deliver an on-premise version of Blue Box Cloud in the second quarter of 2015.
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MapR and Mesosphere are announcing a new open source big data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacentres.
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Databases
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The open source cross-platform document-oriented database company MongoDB has reached version 3.0 this month.
The new iteration sees significant changes in its storage layer performance and scalability.
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Healthcare
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Creating an artificial pancreas is now open source, reported Boing Boing.
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Funding
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You’d be forgiven for thinking that the tech world is a loathsome hotbed of rapacious venture capitalists, airheaded trend-riders, and publicity hounds. That’s the image presented by much of the tech press, which prizes stories about the Montgomery Burnses of the tech world over ones about its more idealistic denizens.
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With the new website, we’ve decided to revise how we promote and handle payments. We understand that this has rubbed some people the wrong way, and in the spirit of addressing concerns, we’ve decided to write this post. Keep in mind that this was a really difficult post to right. It covers sensitive territory, and it becomes difficult to choose the right words without offending anyone. That said, here’s our best explanation:
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Elementary OS has attracted a lot of attention lately. But a controversy is brewing over how the distro developers are setting up their new site for payments by users. The Elementary OS site is being redesigned to encourage users to pay for the distro. But should the Elementary OS developers expect a payment in the first place?
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Jahia is getting a $22.5 million cash infusion from Invus, a New York City-based investment firm, the Geneva, Switzerland-based open source content management system (CMS) vendor announced today.
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BSD
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EdgeBSD remains one of the newer BSD distributions that is a fork of NetBSD but switches from CVS to Git for source code management.
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Everybody’s favourite audio hacker Alexandre Ratchov (ratchov@) is inviting you to a concert in Grenoble (France).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Valentine’s day is this Saturday and, if you’re like us, you’re either trying to pick the right gift or wishing you had someone to exchange gifts with. We wish you luck with that. But there’s something important that you can do regardless of your relationship status:
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Project Releases
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Now that Cutelyst is allowing me to write web applications with the tools I like, I can use it to build the kind of web applications I need but am not fine with using the existing ones…
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Cutelyst, the Qt/C++ web framework just got another step into API stabilization.
Since 0.3.0 I’ve been trying to take the most request per second out of it, and because of that I decided to replace most QStrings with QByteArrays, the allocation call is indeed simpler in QByteArray but since most of Qt use QString for strings it started to create a problem rather than solving one. Grantlee didn’t play nice with QByteArray breaking ifequal and in the end some implicit conversions from UTF-8 were triggered.
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Public Services/Government
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The Defense Information Systems Agency is launching a web-based, open source collaboration tool for the Defense Department that provides webconferencing, chat and instant messaging functions for employees based in the U.S. and abroad.
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Licensing
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This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.
In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Rainey Reitman, Activism Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about their new EFF Alerts mobile app.
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Openness/Sharing
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Running communities around projects is all about getting the job done, and getting it done well. If you don’t nurture a community, it won’t grow and produce. Then, if you get that right but fail to maintain and organize things so that the people involved, your community, can continue to succeed and feel happy doing it, your project’s growth and success won’t last long.
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Facebook is taking its crusade for open networking to a broader battlefield, using its 16-port “Wedge” switch design as the basis of a new modular platform that can link together racks of servers across a data center.
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Part of it has to do with most farmers being, at a fundamental level, DIY enthusiasts. The prospect of a tractor that can automatically collect data to track crop growth and offer suggestions on how to make growth more efficient sounds useful to most farmers—and it is. Of course, as most farmers are DIY and handymen types to begin with, they tend to tinker with any device, whether it’s making a knife sharper, or trying to expand the capabilities of a complex high-tech machine.
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Open Access/Content
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It’s good to see more government agencies moving in this direction. It would be even nicer to see shorter time frames for the embargo, and even further commitment to releasing the data beyond just “exploring,” but this is good for science, data, learning and innovation.
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Open Hardware
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That sentence was taken directly from Open Source Hardware Statement of Principles 1.0, a preamble of sorts located in the definition section of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) website. Part blog, part doctrine, the site serves as a hub for this ever-growing community of creators.
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One thing that’s been endlessly fascinating about the fledgling virtual reality industry is the amount of collaboration and cooperation going on between disparate companies. First you had Valve providing its research to Oculus, then Oculus and Samsung partnered up for GearVR.
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Razer today announced that support for the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem has grown to 38 members with the recent addition of 13 new partner companies. OSVR claims to be building from the ground up “the best Virtual Reality gaming experience,” and offers a unified – but innovative – approach to input devices, games, and output.
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Programming
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Joining in on the heated discussion that originated over Richard Stallman voicing concerns over adding LLVM’s LLDB debugger support to Emacs, Eric S Raymond has come out to once again voice his support in favor of LLVM/Clang and express his feelings that GCC’s leading days are over.
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Despite criticisms such as it having a “cryptic syntax,” the Perl language has remained prominent in language popularity assessments, even if popularity has declined and a planned upgrade has been slow to appear. Designed by Larry Wall, the scripting language is suited for tasks ranging from quick prototyping to Web programming and system management tasks, and it’s part of the prominent LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/PHP/Python) open source stack. At the recent FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Wall revealed intentions to have the long-awaited Perl 6 release out in a beta version in September and generally available by December. Wall answered some questions from InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill via email about what’s planned for the language and responded to criticisms.
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Get started using the open source R programming language to do statistical computing and graphics on large data sets
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Your daughter comes home from school with a report card studded with A’s. You (1) give her a hug and raise her allowance or (2) ground her and tell her you know she’ll never do this well again.
Perversely enough, too many pundits and academics have chosen option No. 2 since Apple CEO Tim Cook presented investors the company’s most recent financial report card — a fourth-quarter earnings story that featured record sales at Apple, rapid growth, and (most important) a quarterly profit that is the largest ever recorded by a publicly traded company.
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A young Russian woman has died after her charging iPhone fell into the bathtub in her Moscow flat.
Yevgenia Sviridenko, 24, who was originally from Omsk, more than 2,000 miles from the Russian capital, was discovered by her flatmate in the bath on Monday evening, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported according to The Moscow Times.
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Security
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The Apache Software Foundation is out this week with patches for its Tomcat Java middleware server. What interested me most about the update was that it was for flaws first reported in 2014.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The US destruction of Fallujah in 2004 was a prime motivation for the growth of ISIS.
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The Senate on Thursday confirmed Ashton Carter as President Obama’s new secretary of Defense in a 93-5 vote.
Carter, 60, will be the 25th secretary of Defense and Obama’s fourth. He is expected to be sworn into office next week
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As the U.S. continues to bomb the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, President Obama asked Congress today to approve a new legal framework for the ongoing military campaign.
The administration’s draft law “would not authorize long-term, large-scale ground combat operations” like Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama wrote in a letter accompanying the proposal. The draft’s actual language is vague, allowing for ground troops in what Obama described as “limited circumstances,” like special operations and rescue missions.
The authorization would have no geographic limitations and allow action against “associated persons or forces” of the Islamic State. It would expire in three years.
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Ukraine’s security service arrested a journalist on treason charges Sunday after he posted a video online urging people to dodge the country’s new military draft, his wife and officials said.
Ruslan Kotsaba — a television journalist from the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk — was ordered held in custody for 60 days pending investigations, his wife, Uliana, wrote on Facebook.
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Just weeks after a coup that ousted Yemen’s Western-backed government, the capital of Yemen is a city painted in green, mostly with spray paint.
Green tree trunks, green sidewalks, green walls and even a green Ford F-350 bearing the Houthi slogan, which includes the words “Death to America,” on each side of the iconic American truck, about 340 of which the Pentagon shipped to Yemen over the past few years.
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President Obama has sent Congress a formal request to authorize military force against the Islamic State six months after the U.S. began bombing Iraq and Syria. The resolution imposes a three-year limit on U.S. operations, but does not put any geographic constraints. It also opens the door for ground combat operations in limited circumstances. The resolution’s broad language covers military action against the Islamic State as well as “individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside [ISIS] or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” The resolution also leaves in place the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force Congress enacted one week after the Sept. 11, 2001, which has been used to justify U.S. action in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and beyond, and which Obama had previously called for repealing. We speak with Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of many books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”
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PRESIDENT OBAMA is going before Congress to request authorization for the limited use of military force in a battle of up to three years against the Islamic State. On the surface, this looks like a welcome recognition of Congress’s ultimate authority in matters of war and peace. But unless the resolution put forward by the White House is amended, it will have the opposite effect. Congressional support will amount to the ringing endorsement of unlimited presidential war making.
Whatever else they decide, the House and Senate should revise the White House initiative to guarantee that it won’t have this tragic result. First do no harm; before proceeding with a debate over the limits of our continuing military engagement, Congress should make it impossible for future presidents to evade its final decision.
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He is a liar of course, someone who did not tell the truth no matter the reason or excuse, a bad trait for a journalist. Williams lied about being RPG’ed in a helicopter over Iraq; he did not see any variant of what you can see in the photo above. And that’s not a hard thing to “misremember.”
But if there is any reason to forgive Williams, it was that he was seduced by both his own conflation of his sad little life as a talking head and the “brave troops,” and, more clearly, by the process of embedding with the military. I know. I saw it.
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As Washington is not a partner to the Minsk peace deal, how can there be peace when Washington has made policy decisions to escalate the conflict and to use the conflict as a proxy war between the US and Russia?
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A New York City police officer was indicted Tuesday in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in a Brooklyn public housing complex stairwell in November, several people familiar with the grand jury’s decision said.
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The Obama administration has informed lawmakers that the president will seek a formal authorization to fight the Islamic State that would prohibit the use of “enduring offensive ground forces” and limit engagement to three years. The approach offers what the White House hopes is a middle way on Capitol Hill for those on the right and left who remain deeply skeptical of its plans to thwart extremist groups.
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Transparency Reporting
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Public docketing and confirmations to the clerks in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia by the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, who was responsible for filing all three search warrants for WikiLeaks staffer’s email content in March 2012, reveal that Google waited six months to disclose the existence of the search warrants by the U.S. Department of Justice, despite a May 15, 2014 ruling by Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson to unseal the search warrants for the limited purpose of informing the three WikiLeaks staffers.
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Google is facing renewed questions about its handling of subscribers’ private information following the revelation that it waited six months after the lifting of a gagging order to alert WikiLeaks that emails and other data belonging to its employees had been passed to the FBI.
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U.K. taxpayers have now forked out US$15 million on a two-year-old siege of the Ecuadorean embassy.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It turns out that oil companies in California didn’t inject wastewater into of usable aquifers, with the state’s permission, hundreds of times — it was more like thousands.
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Privacy
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Samsung has been doing a great job this week illustrating why consumers should want their televisions to be as dumb as technologically possible. The company took heat for much of the week after its privacy policy revealed Samsung smart TVs have been collecting and analyzing user living room conversations in order to improve voice recognition technology. While that’s fairly common for voice recognition tech, the idea of living room gear that spies on you has been something cable operators have been patenting for years. And while Samsung has changed its privacy policy language to more clearly illustrate what it’s doing, the fact that smart TV security is relatively awful has many people quite justly concerned about smart TVs becoming another poorly-guarded repository for consumer data.
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About 20 minutes into this electrifying, often terrifying documentary, the film-maker shows for the first time the man we have come to know as Edward Snowden. The ex-NSA employee who blew the whistle on the US Government’s spying on its citizens is a familiar face only because of 24 hours of interviews this film’s maker compiled over eight days in a Hong Kong hotel room. But when he first appears, he’s talking to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald about how they will deal with what Greenwald calls “the ‘you’ story”.
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A federal court in San Francisco sided with the U.S. Department of Justice, ruling that the plaintiffs could not win a significant portion of the case—a Fourth Amendment challenge to the NSA’s tapping of the Internet backbone—without disclosure of classified information that would harm national security. In other words, Judge Jeffrey White found that “state secrets” can trump the judicial process and held that EFF’s clients could not prove they have standing.
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Advocates for less government snooping suffered a blow Tuesday when a federal judge in California ruled that a group of citizens can not sue the National Security Agency to stop the “upstream” collection of their data.
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Civil Rights
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The most half-baked “weapon” in any policeman’s arsenal should never be raised to the level of a felony. “Resisting arrest” is the charge brought when bad cops run out of better ideas. This truism runs through nearly every law enforcement agency in the country. When you take a look at videographers and photographers who have been arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights (and backed by a DOJ statement), you’ll see plenty of “resisting arrest” charges.
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A 37-year-old woman has died after deputies in northern Virginia used a Taser stun gun on her while she was in custody.
Natasha McKenna of Alexandria was taken off life support Sunday, five days after she was stunned at the Fairfax County jail, the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.
McKenna was in the process of being transported from the Fairfax County jail to the Alexandria city jail Tuesday when deputies say she failed to comply with their commands and resisted them. A deputy then used a Taser to restrain her, sheriff’s Lt. Steve Elbert said Monday.
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In the South Carolina prison system, accessing Facebook is an offense on par with murder, rape, rioting, escape and hostage-taking.
Back in 2012, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) made “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site” a Level 1 offense [PDF], a category reserved for the most violent violations of prison conduct policies. It’s one of the most common Level 1 offense charges brought against inmates, many of whom, like most social network users, want to remain in contact with friends and family in the outside world and keep up on current events. Some inmates ask their families to access their online accounts for them, while many access the Internet themselves through a contraband cell phone (possession of which is yet another Level 1 offense).
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With just 59,000 residents, the Pasco police department in Washington state have shot and killed four people in the past six months—more than police in the entire United Kingdom, which has over 80,000,000 citizens, in the past three years combined. In fact, Pasco police are on pace to have more police shootings than Germany, also with 80,000,000 citizens, over the current 12 month period.
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Each year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group’s 2015 ranking was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th.
That is the lowest ranking ever during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S. was ranked 53rd). The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Salvador, Tonga, Chile and Botswana.
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Media freedom has suffered a ‘drastic decline’ worldwide last year in part because of extremist groups such as Islamic State and Boko Haram, the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders says. – See more at: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/europe/2015/02/12/-drastic-decline–in-world-media-freedom.html#sthash.dLBZAYMJ.dpuf
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I didn’t know Yusor Mohammad, Deah Shaddy Barakat or Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha — the victims of Craig Stephen Hicks’ shooting spree in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – but I recognize them. Anyone who has spent time in American Muslim communities would, and that’s partly why this horrible crime is so painful. I realize I’m making assumptions and maybe getting sentimental in the process, but I can’t help it. The personalities that come through from the testimonies of friends and family, the record of the efforts and achievements of these young people, and the photographs that radiate such joy and life are all too familiar to miss.
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Not all conservatives used the death of American hostage Kayla Mueller to highlight the brutality of the Islamic State — some decided to focus their disgust on the 26-year-old’s humanitarian work for Palestinians.
“No tears for the newly-departed Kayla Mueller, the ISIS hostage whose parents confirmed today that she is dead,” conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote on Tuesday, under the headline, “Kayla Mueller: Dead ISIS Hostage Was Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel Bitch.”
“Mueller was a Jew-hating, anti-Israel piece of crap who worked with HAMAS and helped Palestinians harass Israeli soldiers and block them from doing their job of keeping Islamic terrorists out of Israel,” she wrote.
Schlussel condemned Mueller’s humanitarian work in the “so-called ‘West Bank’” to prevent the demolition of “terrorists’ ‘houses.’”
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A press freedom advocate — and husband of an American servicewoman — went to the U.S. embassy in Azerbaijan, fearing for his life. But he was turned away.
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Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hikmet Hajiyev said in this regard that the investigation carried out under the court verdict discovered that chairman of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety Emin Huseynov has engaged in illegal business over unregistered grant contracts, making a great deal of money – AZN 1,575,956 – but evading from taxes AZN 247,551 tax to be paid to the state budget.
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Caracas, February 11th, 2015. (Venezuelanalysis)- The German Embassy in Caracas has alarmed political observers in Venezuela by publishing what the press has described as an “alarming” official declaration to its citizens in the South American country.
Published on February 5th, the declaration is written and signed by the Chargé d’Affaires at the German Embassy, Dr. Jörg Polster. It began to make the rounds on social media networks over the last two days.
In the statement, German diplomat Polster informs readers that the embassy is extremely “worried” about the current situation in the country and advises German residents to take a number of “precautions in the face of the crisis”.
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Bipartisan lawmakers aim to make renunciation of Israel boycott efforts in Europe a key negotiating point in largest free trade deal in history
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President George W. Bush was fond of saying that “9/11 changed everything.” He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts.
During his presidency, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This legislation permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when those warrants are served on custodians of records — like doctors, lawyers, telecoms, computer servers, banks and even the Post Office.
Such purported statutory authority directly violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to privacy in our “persons, houses, papers and effects.” That includes just about everything held by the custodians of our records. Privacy is not only a constitutional right protected by the document; it is also a natural right. We possess the right to privacy by virtue of our humanity. Our rights come from within us — whether you believe we are the highest progression of biological forces or the intended creations of an Almighty God — they do not come from the government.
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Nationalists and anti-imperialists marched to commemorate the 116th year of the Philippine-American War on Feb. 4, with a call to make President Aquino, suspended Police chief Alan Purisima, and the US government accountable for the recent Mamasapano deaths.
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An Egyptian court on Thursday ordered the release of two journalists jailed for more than a year on charges of broadcasting false news in a conspiracy with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The release followed the publication this week of a previously undisclosed opinion by Egypt’s highest appeals court condemning the journalists’ conviction as baseless when it ordered a retrial at the beginning of this year. The release also comes at a time when the Egyptian government appears to be trying to allay some of the international criticism it has received after a series of harsh and hasty criminal convictions issued during a crackdown on dissent after the military takeover in July 2013.
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On Monday, February 9th, Matt DeHart’s parents, Paul and Leann, received notice by mail from the Refugee Protection Division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board that the family’s claim for Refugee Protection had been denied. The family fled the United States after Matt was interrogated and tortured during an FBI espionage investigation in which child pornography charges were hastily filed after Matt was detained at the Canadian border, an action which was triggered by an espionage alert.
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Matt DeHart claims that all his troubles stem from a file uploaded, twice, to a Tor server he ran out of a closet in his parent’s home. An FBI investigation into something the CIA might have done.
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Mr. DeHart testified the pornography charges are a ruse to investigate an espionage and national security probe tied to his involvement in Anonymous and his operation of a “hidden” Internet server used to leak a classified U.S. government document, likely destined to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing organization.
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Jails across the country have become vast warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to post bail or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves, according to a report issued Wednesday.
The study, “Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America,” found that the majority of those incarcerated in local and county jails are there for minor violations, including driving with suspended licenses, shoplifting or evading subway fares, and have been jailed for longer periods of time over the past 30 years because they are unable to pay court-imposed costs.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Google has long been behind the SPDY networking protocol as a faster alternative to HTTP 1.1. With the HTTP/2 draft standard being based on SPDY, Google is preparing to sunset the SPDY protocol support within the Chrome/Chromium web-browser.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups keep hammering on Canada for its lacking anti-piracy enforcement. The groups label Canada a “safe haven” for both file-sharers and online pirate sites, and ask the U.S. Government to intervene.
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In a fuming blog article, David Newhoff claims that non-infringing, legal uses of copyrighted works – that is, of people’s own property – are like “aggravated rape” when made without unneeded consent of the monopoly holder. Newhoff tries to scold the crucial concept of “fair use” in copyright monopoly doctrine, the concept which explicitly says that some usages are not covered by the monopoly and therefore not up to the monopoly holder, and ends saying that if you don’t grant permission and can’t set limits, it’s “aggravated rape”. Just when you think copyright monopoly zealots can’t sink any lower, they surprise you with one of the few creativities they’ve ever shown.
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YouTube’s automated takedown tool is known for its flaws, but this week it crossed a line by attacking a purring cat. According to YouTube’s Content-ID system both EMI Publishing and PRS own the rights to a 12 second purring loop. The cat in question, Phantom, has filed a dispute and hopes to reclaim his rights.
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Mocking the ridiculous “Special 301 report” from the US Trade Representative has become something of an annual sport around these parts. As we’ve explained, the whole concept of the report is something of a joke: copyright, patent and trademark maximalists send in reports to the USTR, claiming which countries don’t do enough to respect US intellectual property, and the USTR — via no systematic or objective process — rewrites those complaints into a report that declares certain countries “naughty” for their practices. The whole thing is such a joke that even those in the government will openly mock it. As I’ve said in the past, I once saw the head of the US Copyright Office openly joke about the purely arbitrary nature of the 301 report at a conference. Countries like Canada — which are regularly named to the report, despite having copyright laws that are, in many areas, more stringent than the US’s — have openly declared that they do not find the Special 301 process to be legitimate, and thus do not pay any attention to it. A couple of years ago, Chile also made it clear that it felt the 301 process was illegitimate.
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Empornium, one of the leading private torrent trackers for adult content, says it believes a copyright troll gained access to a staff moderation account and is now using obtained data to threaten its users. The revelations may shine light on why some Empornium users have received settlement threats with no lawsuit filed and no notice from their ISPs.
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The move might be an effort to appear more legitimate to advertisers and others within entertainment content distribution circles. The BitTorrent file-sharing protocol is often linked with users of the downloading software exchanging content in violation of intellectual property laws. The first project under this original video distribution agreement is the movie Children of the Machine.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A Debian developer, who faced issues with some minor tasks on his own machines, has now raised the question whether the distribution being built is too complex to understand and debug.
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Server
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What’s the next step for Docker, one of Silicon’s Valley’s hottest startups?
It’s not an initial public offering — at least not this year, apparently. The well-funded, lean company says that it’s in no rush to go public.
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Kernel Space
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Linux kernel 3.19 has been officially announced by none other than its father, Linus Torvalds, on February 8, 2015. It is a great release that brings some very interesting features. Because we didn’t have access to a complete list of its features at the moment of writing the news article about its availability, we have decided to drop another one that highlights Linux 3.19 kernel’s prominent features.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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GNOME 3 has improved by leaps and bounds since its original release and it’s my daily driver window manager on my Linux laptop. Even with all of these improvements, there’s still no built-in way to rotate wallpaper (that I’ve found).
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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As per our Release Schedule, the freeze for KDE Applications 15.04 is in two weeks (25 February).
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Kexi uses a lot of the KDE and Calligra libraries, but some of the libraries used are not used by other Calligra apps, making them ripe for pulling out and maintaining separately.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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gThumb 3.3.3 was released recently, bringing new image tools, preferences dialog UI changes along with fixes for GTK 3.14 and more.
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Before I start, an addendum to my last post about the DX hackfest: I wish to thank Codethink for sponsoring dinner one night of the event. I forgot to include that in my original post, sorry! Thanks again to all the companies who let employees attend: Endless, Codethink, Canonical and Red Hat.
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DistroWatch.com is currently tracking 287 active Linux distributions. That’s a lot, but not every Linux distribution is a massive project. For every Ubuntu or Fedora, there are many more hobbyist distributions created and run by one or two people. Sometimes they grow into their own large projects, like Linux Mint did. And sometimes a developer decides to pull the plug, as CrunchBang’s developer recently did.
[...]
In the end, hobbyist Linux distributions are created to scratch an itch. Developers may eventually find that itch has been solved elsewhere, or may not want to put the long hours into scratching it anymore. CrunchBang no doubt has users who use and love it, even today—but the end of CrunchBang doesn’t have to be sad. CrunchBang’s developer now believes the larger Linux ecosystem has improved so much that CrunchBang is no longer necessary.
That’s good news for everyone, including Newborough, who now gets to spend his valuable time on something else. Thanks for a killer run, Philip.
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Security Onion is a Linux distribution for intrusion detection, network security monitoring, and log management. It’s based on Ubuntu and contains Snort, Suricata, Bro, Sguil, Squert, Snorby, ELSA, Xplico, Network Miner, and many other security tools. Security Onion is a platform that allows you to monitor your network for security alerts. It’s simple enough to run in small environments without many issues and allows advanced users to deploy distributed systems that can be used in network enterprise type environments.
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Time flies. It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been four years since I first took a look at a Linux distribution called UberStudent. Back then it was in its 1.0 release, called “Cicero.” The latest release, “Epicurus,” came out in mid-January, with a version number of 4.1.
There are a lot of Linux distributions out there. What makes this one worth checking out?
As with previous releases, what makes UberStudent unique is its target audience, and the software and little added touches it has as a result.
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New Releases
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In a world where everyone tries to drop 32-bit support for their OSes, Black Lab Linux developers have announced on Twitter that they’ve released a 32-bit version of their KDE-based distribution in order to support installations of the Black Lab Linux KDE Edition 6.0 SR1 operating system on low-end computers or machines with old/semi-old hardware components.
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Arch Family
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Richard M Stallman congratulated Arch for their achievement but also pointed out the areas where he thinks Arch needs improvement, “Arch’s lack of support of DRM and binary blobs are the only areas where I see hurdles in the wide-spread adoption of Linux. We have elevated the DRM implementation project at FSF to boost work on it. Today Arch is the second most popular operating system and this gap is only due to Arch’s bad philosophy of pure Open Source software. I think they should start offering proprietary and patented applications in their repositories.”
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that UAE Exchange, a leading foreign exchange and money transfer brand, has successfully created a scalable, secure, robust and high-performance datacenter environment by consolidating its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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The prolific developers at Red Hat have been relatively quiet in the New Year. Now, the open source leader is picking up the pace with the introduction of the latest version of its enterprise virtualization tool.
The company announced general availability this week of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 aiming to offer tighter integration with OpenStack while promising to ease deployment of IT infrastructures for traditional virtualization workloads along with enterprise-level cloud infrastructure.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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The top stories today are more thoughts on CrunchBang and Elementary OS’ move to raise capital. My Linux Rig spoke to Matthew Miller from Fedora about his desktop and Adam Williamson announced Fedora 22 Anacoda/DNF testing day. Canonical pats itself on the back for a job well done in media production and John Goerzen hits the complexity nail on the head.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Amazing, simply amazing! We have no idea how many Ubuntu phone units were sold today, but after only three hours all available BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphones were sold out. Looks like the Ubuntu community in Europe is really strong, as they also had to face some server issues with BQ’s online store, which apparently was not prepared for a large crowd.
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Flavours and Variants
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Now the first point is there is nothing wrong with charging money for work and time invested in a project. Nothing at all. Elementary OS is fully within its right to want to pay people for the time and work they have put in. That’s fine. Where I see the problem is when requests or payment start becoming more of a play on guilt, rather than a request for support.
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Upon first boot, Elementary obviously is designed to look and function like OS X. Although that might turn the stomachs of die-hard Linux fans, it provides an interesting platform for folks who appreciate the clean, functional layout Apple provides on its flagship OS. Elementary OS includes the Ubuntu Software Center, and like most variants, it can install any program in the Ubuntu repositories. Out of the box, however, it’s a clean, fast operating system that people familiar with OS X will recognize right away.
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Is the Pi robot a specific product or just a concept? An easy answer for some, but not everyone knows the score
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Shenzhen Xunlong has launched a $59 open-spec “Orange Pi Plus” SBC with a 1.6GHz quad-core Allwinner H3 SoC, 40-pin Pi-compatible expansion, WiFi, and SATA.
In December when Shenzhen Xunlong Software announced its open-spec, Linux- and Android-ready Orange Pi and Orange Pi Mini SBCs, both of which use the dual-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner A20 system-on-chip, the company also briefly noted an upcoming, quad-core Orange Pi Plus. The Plus was said to offer a quad-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner A31 SoC with a PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU. Instead, the shipping version, now available at AliExpress for $59, arrives with Allwinner’s new quad-core Cortex–A7 based H3 SoC and a Mali-400 MP2 GPU.
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Former Unbounded Robotics execs have launched “Fetch Robotics” with $3 million in funding, and will ship a ROS-on-Linux mobile manipulator bot in Q2 2015.
A startup called Fetch Robotics has announced $3 million in Series A financing from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and Shasta Ventures, along with a development team that jumped from the apparently now defunct Unbounded Robotics. Fetch Robotics plans to announce and ship two mobile manipulation robots in the second quarter that are aimed principally at the logistics and light industrial markets, “as well as for other human-robot collaboration opportunities,” says the company.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Tizen Operating System has got unexpected interest from the Russian Federation, as the Minister of Communications and Mass Communications Nikolai Nikiforov showed his enthusiasm for the Tizen based Samsung Z1 and the “de-monopolization of the global IT-ecosystems”. When prompted about the lack of software, Nikiforov said that conditions will be created to promote the independent mobile OS.
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Samsung’s 2015 TV Line up will be Tizen, and they have confirmed that they will be dropping Android as a suitable TV platform for them. Using Tizen and EFL for its User Interface, Tizen TVs will have great multitasking between applications and movie streaming services, and great gaming potential with Sony’s PlayStation Now service, and much more!
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Sony’s been trying the smartwatch thing for years, but the original SmartWatch and the SmartWatch 2 both… what’s the word I’m looking for here? Sucked? Yeah. But the SmartWatch 3 has solid performance and two nifty features you won’t find on any other Android Wear. It’s the first with built-in GPS and a screen you can read without backlighting.
Android Wear watches are off to a pretty decent start. The Moto 360, the LG G Watch R, and the Asus ZenWatch are all lovely and useful in their own ways. So why might you buy a Sony smartwatch instead?
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Android
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Most of us will never see our Android antivirus apps spit out a warning because most of us will never encounter malware on our phones. So how can you tell if your Android antivirus is actually protecting your phone against the malware that sometimes sneaks onto Google Play or is installed by an overbearing spouse? Independent testing lab AV-Test is here with the answers.
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Nokia has announced that an update for its Windows Phone and Android Here mapping apps will be rolling out from today.
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Google is working hard to kill the password. If you want to live in that future now, you can turn on a feature that automatically unlocks your Chromebook whenever you wander near it with your Android phone in your pocket.
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The Android Lollipop 5.0.2 update has been made available to some Nexus devices, including the Nexus 7 2012 and 2013 models and the Nexus 10. However, there is still no sign of the update for the Nexus 5 or the Nexus 4. While both the Nexus 6 and the Nexus 9 come with Android 5.0, apparently, the Nexus 5 Android 5.0 Lollipop update has been suspended because it was reported that the update causes the device’s battery to drain at a faster than normal rate.
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To this point, the PlayStation 4′s novel Remote Play function was only accessible on the PlayStation Vita, PlayStation TV, and certain Xperia mobile phones. That’s no longer the case, thanks to an unofficial port that lets the official PS4 Remote Play app work on practically any modern Android device.
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AT&T began deploying Android 5.0.1 for its LG G3 variant on Tuesday. The carrier will automatically push the roughly 700MB update over the air, but eager users can also manually search for the file by navigating to Settings>General>About phone>Software Update.
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Google started pushing out its latest version of Android in November, but most Android phone owners are still waiting for the update.
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Research firm Canalys says just 720,000 smartwatches powered by Android Wear, Google’s operating system for wearable devices, shipped in the last six months of 2014.
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JW Player, the streaming video company that (in the words of its president Chris Mahl) helps online publishers find “life after YouTube, or life beyond YouTube,” has made a big move onto mobile with the general release of its Android SDK.
The player already worked in mobile web browsers, so it wasn’t entirely absent from Android. But this will allow publishers to include the players directly in their apps, to customize its appearance, and to include video advertising.
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Regardless of the tinkering Google’s engineers have done under the bonnet, the most noticeable improvement has to be the overall look. Google is calling Android’s fetching new aesthetic “Material Design” and it’s all about giving the OS a more welcoming look. It’s mostly flat colours, clever use of shadow and UI elements which look like layers of paper stacked on top of one another. Google has left behind the world of skeuomorphic design –– just like Apple did with iOS 7 –– and the end result is something that looks less cluttered and more eye-catching.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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After releasing Android 5.0 Lollipop updates for a variety of top flagship handsets in the past weeks, including the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 3, Samsung has started rolling out the one official Lollipop ROM certain smartphone buyers were waiting for, the one made for the Galaxy Note 4.
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The other side of community involvement in an open source project is the end users. It’s hard to be a successful open source project if no one is using it! But aside from providing documentation and forums, how else can projects and users connect?
Kara Sowles, community manager for Puppet LabsOne way is a users group, a type of club where the members all share an interest in a particular arena. SHARE is one of the oldest computer users group around. The basic idea behind a users group is to provide more resources and share information among a local cell, provide support, encouragement, new ideas, mailing lists, and more. There are some challenges with belonging to a users group, managing a users group, and representing your open source project in a users group.
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Cisco is developing open source tools designed to allow network operators to describe policy in more meaningful terms.
The Noiro Networks team inside Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) is trying to solve the problem of network policy that doesn’t make sense in an application-centric world. Typical networking policy uses networking language — describing traffic flows or or whether specific ports are allowed to connect with each other. Instead, the Noiro Networks team is looking to describe policies in terms of how applications are allowed to interoperate, says Thomas Graf, a principal software engineer at Cisco working on Noiro Networks.
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If we’re going to do DevOps, we have to give up open source. Right? Wait, we’re an Agile shop, so we have to give that up, too. Right?
Over the last five years or so, I’ve talked with a lot of people confused about what it means to “do DevOps,” and clearly concerned about having to give up other things that have already proven their value in order to adopt DevOps. The bad news is, we’ve not done a good job in the DevOps community of nailing down what DevOps is and what it isn’t at an earlier stage in our development.
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Google today launched PerfKit, an open-source cloud-benchmarking tool that, in Google’s words, is an “effort to define a canonical set of benchmarks to measure and compare cloud offerings.” The PerfKit tools currently support Google’s own Compute Engine, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure clouds. Google says it has worked on this project with over 30 researchers, companies and customers, including ARM, Canonical, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Rackspace and Red Hat.
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Events
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The South California Linux Expo (SCALE) is an annual event aiming to provide educational opportunities on the topic of open source software. This is SCALE13X, and prior to the event I caught up with one of the speakers, Emily Durham, who will give a talk called Human Hacking.
Emily Dunham of Open Source Lab at OSUEmily is currently finishing her final year in computer science at Oregon State University (OSU), where she is the student systems engineer at the OSU Open Source Lab. Previous to that gig at OSU, she helped run the Robotics Club, Linux Users Group, and Security Club. Emily has 7 years of experience in open source communities, and I talked with her regarding her career and life, open hardware, community psychology, and of course, her upcoming talk at SCALE13X.
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SaaS/Big Data
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There are a lot of interesting announcements arriving as the O’Reilly Strata event rolls out. In one notable example, MapR and Mesosphere have announced a new open source Big Data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacenters. The initiative was kicked off by a developer at Ebay and turned into a collaborative effort between multiple companies. The project is now approaching Apache incubation.
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Funding
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We’ve been watching the Big Data space pick up momentum as 2015 begins, and now Hitachi Data Systems Corporation has announced its intent to acquire Pentaho in what is being billed as “the largest private Big Data acquisition transaction to date.” Hitachi claims that the acquisition will accelerate enterprise adoption of Big Data technologies and solutions through “easier, faster deployment, leading to faster ROI.”
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BSD
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Licensing
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Most discussions of free software licenses bore listeners. In fact, licenses are usually of such little interest that 85%of the projects on Github fail to have one.
However, one aspect of licensing never fails to stir partisan responses: the debate over the relative advantages of copyleft licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL), and permissive licenses such as the MIT or the Apache 2 licenses.
You only have to follow the links to Occupy GPL! that are making the rounds to see the emotions that this unending debate can still stir. Calling for an end to “GPL purism,” and dismissing the GPL as “not a free license,” the site calls on readers to use permissive licenses instead, describing them as “truly OSS [Open Source Software] licenses and urging readers to “Join the Fight!”
Occupy GPL! itself is unlikely to have a future. Anonymous calls to actions rarely succeed; people prefer to know who is giving the call to arms before they muster at the barricades. Nor is the site’s outdated name and inconsistent diction, nor the high number of exclamation and question marks likely to inspire many readers. Still, the fact that the site exists at all, and the counter-responses in comments on Google+ show that the old debate is still very much alive.
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As a recovering proprietary programmer, I can assure you that things work a bit differently in the open-source world, so some adjustment is required. But participation in an open-source project can be very rewarding and worthwhile!
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Security
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The Obama administration is establishing a new agency to combat the deepening threat from cyberattacks, and its mission will be to fuse intelligence from around the government when a crisis occurs.
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Most people use passwords many times a day. They’re the keys that unlock digital doors and give us access to our computers, our email, our data and sometimes even our money. As more and more things move online, passwords secure an ever growing part of our lives. We’re told to add capital letters, numbers and punctuation to these passwords to make them more secure, but just what difference do these have? What does a really secure password look like?
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Red Hat is introducing new identity management features as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, including a much-anticipated two-factor authentication option based on FreeOTP.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Secret embassy cables leaked by WikiLeaks in 2010 reveal the United States’ heavy involvement in the Philippines’ counter-terrorism efforts including the botched police operation in Mamasapano, Maguindanao, a party-list congressman claimed on Wednesday.
Kabataan Party-list Rep. Terry Ridon said the cables, which were from 2005 to early 2010, show how the US government planned to operate covertly within the ranks of Philippine forces.
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A shooting in the US, which has reportedly left three Muslims dead in a North Carolina university town, has set social media buzzing over accusations of double standards, with major media outlets failing to report the story.
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The U.S. ambassador to Lebanon announced a new shipment of weapons and ammunition have arrived in Beirut, the latest American assistance to Lebanon’s army as it fights ISIS along its border with Syria. The Ambassador said the equipment includes more than 70 M198 howitzers and over 26 million rounds of ammunition and artillery “of all shapes and sizes, including heavy artillery.”
“We are very proud of this top-of-the-line equipment. This is the best that there is in the marketplace. It’s what our soldiers use,” the Ambassador continued. “I know that in a matter of days it’s going to be what your brave soldiers are using in the battle to defeat terrorism and extremism.”
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Transparency Reporting
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The Republic of Ecuador will take the case of its most famous asylum seeker, Julian Assange, to the U.N. Human Rights Council, according to reports this week.
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London’s police chief said Tuesday that the cost of keeping watch on Julian Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy there, was draining resources and must be reviewed. Mr. Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, sought refuge in the embassy in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning on sexual assault allegations, which he denies. London’s Metropolitan Police have been standing guard around the clock to prevent him from fleeing, at a cost of about $15 million since the operation began. Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe told LBC Radio that officials were considering “how we can do that differently in the future, because it’s sucking our resources in.” Mr. Assange says the allegations were trumped up to facilitate his extradition ultimately to the United States, where he could be put on trial over huge leaks of information to WikiLeaks.
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A review of the round-the-clock operation to guard Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, was announced by Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe yesterday.
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The UK’s most senior police chief says he is reviewing the operation to guard WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange because it is “sucking” their resources. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg last week revealed the cost of the surveillance operation outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London had reached around £10m. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe told LBC radio: “We are reviewing the way forward there.” Mr Assange, who has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, has been living at the embassy since June 2012.
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Security costs for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange are to be reviewed, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe has said.
Maintaining a guard for Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in central London has cost £10m, according to figures disclosed to LBC radio.
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Finance
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The newspaper argued that similar policies would be followed by journalists in other parts of the globe, saying that it wouldn’t be responsible to just dump information on all account holders, as this could unnecesarily expose them to criminals after the extent of their wealth became public. Although no relevant accounts were tied to government officials by La Nación yet, investigations were said to be ongoing.
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Conservative donors, peers and a high profile MP are listed among the wealthy who legally held accounts in Switzerland with HSBC’s private bank, for a wide variety of reasons.
Their ranks include Zac Goldsmith, MP for Richmond Park, plus his brother the financier Ben Goldsmith, and a Swiss resident, German-born automotive heir Georg von Opel, who has donated six-figure sums in the past two years.
Peers named in the HSBC files include Lord Sterling of Plaistow, the P&O shipping and ports entrepreneur who was ennobled by Margaret Thatcher, and Lord Fink, who was a party treasurer under David Cameron and has given £3m to the Conservatives.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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February 04, 2015 “ICH” – Americans love their reality TV shows—the drama, the insults, the bullying, the callousness, the damaged relationships delivered through the lens of a surveillance camera—and there’s no shortage of such dehumanizing spectacles to be found on or off screen, whether it’s Cops, Real Housewives or the heavy-handed tactics of police officers who break down doors first and ask questions later.
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Privacy
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Afshin Rattansi goes underground on Google’s shady privacy record. Kristinn Hrafnsson, lawyer for WikiLeaks, warns that it appears Google is “not a benign company, it has sinister aims,” and reveals that it wants to be a dominant part of the military intelligence complex, handing information to the US government. Dr. Suzy Lishman, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, warns up to 10,000 deaths every year should be referred for further investigation, but are not due to massive numbers of death certificates being filled out minimally or wrong. We look into why the Church of England is removing the right to free speech for one of its vicars. Boris Johnson meets Hillary Clinton to discuss ISIS in New York. And if you’re a war-wounded veteran, you’d better hope you were injured after April 2005 – or you may lose most of your compensation to pay for basic care.
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Be careful about what you say in your living room if your new TV is on. News broke earlier this week that Samsung’s Web-connected SmartTV can listen to, record, and send what the television hears to a third-party company. The television doesn’t watch you watch it back, but it is listening.
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D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has ordered the D.C. Fire Department to lift the encryption of the department’s radios.
News4′s Mark Segraves broke the news on Twitter Tuesday night.
She has instructed the fire chief to stop encrypting the department’s radio transmissions beginning Friday morning. Encryption of the radios prohibits anyone except fire personnel from listening to the radio transmissions.
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President Barack Obama asked Germans to give the United States the “benefit of the doubt” when it comes to snooping by the National Security Agency.
In a Monday joint press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel held at the White House on Monday, Obama said he recognizes “the sensitivities around this issue.”
In October 2013, German media reported that Merkel had “strong suspicions” that her personal cellphone was being monitored by American authorities.
White House spokesman Jay Carney unequivocally told reporters at the time that such surveillance was not continuing, but he did not directly deny the allegations of past conduct. The next year, Germany decided not to renew its government contract with Verizon, citing concerns over spying by the National Security Agency.
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The first glimpse the world had of Edward Snowden was in a short video in a dark Hong Kong hotel room. But film-maker Laura Poitras’ journey with the NSA whistleblower began much earlier.
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In a ruling handed down Tuesday, a federal district judge in California refused to rule that NSA collection of Internet and phone content without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, and dismissed part of a lawsuit challenging the spy agency program.
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Ah well, all that discussion probably counts as a state secret. A concept which is getting more and more farcical every year.
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Despite the continuing torrent of disclosures concerning previously secret and wide-ranging government surveillance efforts, many criminal defendants are not getting notice of the secret surveillance authorities used in their cases. This is a serious problem—one felt acutely by defendants, but one that also has immense consequences for the public at large in an age of mass surveillance. To those whose liberty is not on the line, the right of criminal defendants to notice might seem like a narrow, procedural issue. It is not. In a world of multiplying surveillance techniques used in secret, the criminal defendant’s right to notice of surveillance used against him is vanishing—and this shift presents a fundamental obstacle for defendants, and a basic, structural problem for courts and the public.
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EFF will keep fighting the unlawful, unconstitutional surveillance of ordinary Americans by the U.S. government. Today’s ruling in Jewel v. NSA was not a declaration that NSA spying is legal. The judge decided instead that “state secrets” prevented him from ruling whether the program is constitutional.
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A U.S. judge on Tuesday ruled in favor of the National Security Agency in a lawsuit challenging the interception of Internet communications without a warrant, according to a court filing.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California wrote the plaintiffs failed to establish legal standing to pursue a claim that the government violated the Fourth Amendment.
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These findings are the result of the exposure of mass surveillance that seriously undermines the safety of journalistic sources, the safety of whistleblowers and freedom of the media, in stark contrast with a meaningful democracy where access to information, privacy and freedom of expression is protected.
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Twitter on Monday released its twice-yearly transparency report, showing a surge in government requests for users’ Twitter information.
The report, which discloses the frequency with which government agencies from around the world ask Twitter to hand over data on specific users, said total requests rose by 40 percent, to about 2,871, compared with the company’s last report, in July. The latest requests came from more than 50 countries.
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The Snowden docs show us that high value targets have been getting compromised forever, and while the game does heavily favour offence, how is it possible that defence hasn’t racked up a single catch? The immediate conclusions for defensive vendors is that they are either ineffective or, worse, wilfully ignorant. However, for buyers of defensive software and gear, questions still remain.
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TheWrap in conjunction with Facebook took a look at some of the chatter about the film — and its stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan — online. The data came from likes, comments and shares about the movie on Facebook. “For the past seven days, 3.7 million people had over 6 million interactions related to the Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson romp on Facebook,” TheWrap reported.
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Customers who are concerned about the surveillance capabilities of Samsung’s smart TVs have another headache to worry about: Tampering with the machine to disable such components may be a felony.
Samsung’s privacy policy raised concerns with privacy activists who spotlighted the warning: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.” Now there are concerns that tinkering with the software by tech-savvy customers may run afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
“Most smart TVs on the market have taken technological measures to prevent users from accessing or modifying firmware in order to prevent illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted material. But users could technically face felony charges for circumventing lockdown restrictions — even if the modifications they’re trying to make are legal under copyright law,” Slate reported Tuesday.
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That’s not exactly what the Terms say; they note that “if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted”. So we’re not just talking about the sort of data Google Now or Siri sends to their service provider (the phrase after you have started the voice recognition). Samsung also sends the commands themselves, plus any conversation around them. From that description, it seems the whole stream of conversation is likely to be sent.
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Civil Rights
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When a Washington, DC, area jury convicted Jeffrey Sterling of multiple counts of espionage, the smoking gun wasn’t a key bit of classified information found in the former CIA officer’s possession; it was a trail of phone calls and emails of unknown content.
The information about where those calls and emails went, however – to a New York Times reporter – was enough to convince a jury to send Sterling to prison for up to 80 years.
According to the US Justice Department, Sterling was providing Risen with details of a failed CIA attempt to undermine Iran’s nuclear programme by having a Russian scientist code-named Merlin pass along intentionally flawed blueprints. Risen then exposed the operation in his 2005 book, State of War.
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The most recent data on lynching, compiled by the Equal Justice Initiative, shows premeditated murders carried out by at least three people from 1877 to 1950 in 12 Southern states. The killers claimed to be enforcing some form of social justice. The alleged offenses that prompted the lynchings included political activism and testifying in court. FEB. 9, 2015 Related Article
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It is important to remember that the hangings, burnings and dismemberments of black American men, women and children that were relatively common in this country between the Civil War and World War II were often public events. They were sometimes advertised in newspapers and drew hundreds and even thousands of white spectators, including elected officials and leading citizens who were so swept up in the carnivals of death that they posed with their children for keepsake photographs within arm’s length of mutilated black corpses.
These episodes of horrific, communitywide violence have been erased from civic memory in lynching-belt states like Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi. But that will change if Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney, succeeds in his mission to build markers and memorials at lynching sites throughout the South as a way of forcing communities and the country to confront an era of racial terror directly and recognize the role that it played in shaping the current racial landscape.
Mr. Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, took a step in that direction on Tuesday when it released a report that chronicles nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950. The report focuses on what it describes as “racial terror lynchings,” which were used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. Victims in these cases were often murdered without being accused of actual crimes but for minor social transgressions that included talking back to whites or insisting on fairness and basic rights.
The report is the result of five years of hard work. Researchers reviewed local newspapers, historical archives and court records; interviewed local historians, survivors and victims’ descendants; and scrutinized contemporaneously published articles in African-American newspapers, which took a closer interest in these matters than the white press. In the end, researchers found at least 700 more lynchings in the 12 states than were previously reported, suggesting that “racial terror lynching” was far more common than was generally believed.
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Crossfire’s whole premise was a debate between left and right, one that at times degenerated into a shouting match. Stewart often criticized the show as dumbing down American public discourse. And, when Crossfire’s hosts invited him on to debate, he embarrassed them.
“You’re partisan — what do you call it — hacks,” Stewart said, to a stunned Carlson and Begala. “Stop hurting America.” Here’s the clip…
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White House to unveil on Tuesday the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center but critics fear an expansion of government monitoring of online data
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“I believe that the people who build these things have the ability to make them absolutely attack-proof, but in order to do that, they have to make them impervious to government intrusion,” Judge Nap said, adding that any government agency big enough to protect us is big enough to surveil us.
“The Internet cannot be protected by the government, because the government will never permit a system that it can’t zero into,” Judge Nap said, concluding that he would “absolutely not” establish this agency.
Watch Judge Nap and Stuart
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Last Saturday, January 31, CIA Inspector General David Buckley resigned after a little more than four years in office. His departure came at the end of the same month his office published a scathing report that found the agency committed serious wrongdoings in connection to its rendition, detention, and torture program. It was also the same month that his report was swept aside by a parallel investigation conducted by a CIA “Accountability Board” that was hand-picked by agency leadership. Unsurprisingly, the Accountability Board recommended holding no one accountable for any failings.
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The Guantánamo Bay war court is now costing US taxpayers over $7,600 per minute, according to new Pentagon figures.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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First it conquered search. Then it was online video and advertising. Now Google is turning its attention toward telecom — and it’s no experiment.
In recent months, Google has said it’s bringing ultra-fast Internet to at least 18 US cities, including Atlanta and Nashville. It announced pilot tests of a low-cost, modular smartphone. The company’s joined an influential lobbying group for upstart telecom firms. And now Google is considering an entry into wireless service, as first reported by The Information, a technology news site founded by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin.
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HTTP is the fundamental networking protocol that powers the web. The majority of sites use version 1.1 of HTTP, which was defined in 1999 with RFC2616. A lot has changed on the web since then, and a new version of the protocol named HTTP/2 is well on the road to standardization. We plan to gradually roll out support for HTTP/2 in Chrome 40 in the upcoming weeks.
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And, indeed, it appears the stock market acted accordingly. Following Tom Wheeler’s official announcement that the FCC would move to reclassify under Title II, all the key broadband players saw their stocks jump up, not down. If it was really that bad, you would have seen the opposite.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
02.11.15
Posted in News Roundup at 8:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Hiring top Linux and open source talent isn’t as easy as initiating a search with your favorite recruiter. Linux and open source developers and SysAdmins are among the most sought after talent in tech; companies like IBM, Twitter, Facebook and many more understand that to attract these folks, they have to do things differently. I’ve been working in open source since the late 90s and have seen first hand many of these changes.
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No matter. Millions of servers will not be properly migrated to M$’s next release on time so they might as well migrate to GNU/Linux and take charge of their futures rather than be dependent on M$’s schedule and desire for cash. Why should your organization uproot itself because another organization wants a fresh influx of cash? Do the right thing. Go to Debian GNU/Linux and FLOSS. It will work for you, not M$.
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While some Windows users are quite satisfied with Microsoft’s desktop operating system, others are not. Does it make sense for Windows users make the jump to Linux or Mac?
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You can answer three questions to choose between Linux or Windows, and you can gripe about how Windows is killing the traditional desktop, but all that is fluff. The purpose of an operating system is to put forth an environment where you can get things done—where you can get things done. You are what matters and everything else is bullshit.
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Server
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The Docker project team wanted to start the new year out right with something awesome; that’s why we’re super excited to announce the first Docker release for 2015. We’ve smashed many long-standing, annoying bugs and merged a few awesome features that both the community and maintainers are excited about. Let’s check out what’s in Docker 1.5.
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Notably, though, 49 percent of survey respondents pointed to a lack of operational production tools and problems with Docker’s security as the biggest obstacles to adoption.
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IBM announced a new 10-year services agreement with Shop Direct to move the multi-brand digital retailer to a hybrid cloud model.
Shop Direct said it will tap IBM’s outsourcing capabilities and the IBM Cloud for analytics, mobile, social and security services that will enable greater customer satisfaction and workforce productivity.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds announced the first new Linux kernel of 2015 on February 9, with the debut of Linux 3.19. It took seven release candidates to hit the final 3.19 release, which is about average.
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So nothing all that exciting happened, and while I was tempted a couple of times to do an rc8, there really wasn’t any reason for it.
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The Internet of Things is already a reality — thousands of devices, from home appliances and consumer electronics, to smartwatches and cars already connect to the Internet. The problem is that they don’t easily, or simply can’t, connect to each other to form an Internet of Everything, says Philip DesAutels, senior director of IoT at the AllSeen Alliance, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
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A collaboration between SUSE and Red Hat is going to bring relief to Linux users the world over: they’ll be able to patch their systems without reboots.
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The changes going in through Ingo Molnar’s branches aren’t incredibly exciting this round, but it looks like the scheduler tree updates have the potential to be semi-exciting. In particular, the kernel scheduler changes have minor micro-optimizations, various fixes and enhancements, and a idle-poll handler fix that has the potential to result in power-savings.
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Benchmarks
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If you’re wondering about any file-system performance changes for XFS/EXT4/Btrfs/F2FS when operating on a single SSD, I ran the vanilla Linux 3.18 vs. 3.19 benchmarks this weekend on an ASUS Zenbook UX301LAA with Intel Core i7 4558U Haswell processor and the file-system tests targeting the secondary 128GB SanDisk SATA3 SSD with this ultrabook. A development snapshot of Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 was used for this kernel/file-system comparison with its updated file-system user-space utilities. For this testing, the stock mount options of each file-system was used.
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Applications
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As you may or may not know, I have been working on this project for quite some time, but actually really started the most critical parts a couple months ago. After having looked for (and chosen) a new name for what was a prototype project, it’s now time for a very first release.
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Proprietary
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Opera Software, though Ruarí Ødegaard, has announced today, February 10, that the developer channel of the amazing Opera web browser is now open and updated to version 29.0.1770.1, based on the Chromium 42.0.2287.0 web browser.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I will try again (as in this issue) to explain why we decided to slowing that feature. Slowing means that it will be done later, not never, as it was stated. It is just that we think that other things benefit the whole idea of ownCloud more. That has plain technical reasons. Let’s dive a bit into.
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From almost every app being on the command line to doing everything through the web browser, GNU/Linux has come a long way towards user-friendliness. But in always using that ever-present Firefox or Chromium session, something has been lost along the way.
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Wine or Emulation
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With Wine 1.7.36 having been released on Friday, the Wine-Staging crew released their respective updated version of Wine patched with experimental features.
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Games
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I took a look at the game a little while ago and was impressed by the ambition and vision of the game. If the game lives up to the promise and has a good launch, I could see myself sinking in a lot of hours. It’s been a while since there’s been a good city builder available and it’s even nicer that we look set to get a same-day release on Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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A few years ago I used to regularly publish videos, so back then I started with an evaluation of FOSS video editors available for Fedora. At the time I decided the “winner” to be Kdenlive (at the time PiTiVi was useless, OpenShot unavailable and Blender unknown for its video editing capabilities), despite all the drawbacks of its KDE interface and sudden crashes.
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In Plasma 5.3 some of the things that were lost along the way of the port to Plasma 5 due to the massive architecture change will be back.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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New Releases
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The second beta release of elementary OS ‘Freya’ is now available for download, and arrives some six months after the first beta was released to much excitement.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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With more than 600 branches across 30 countries, UAE Exchange has a large, and growing customer base. However, rapid expansion caused performance and availability concerns about the company’s distributed IT systems, previously comprised of servers running various versions of UNIX . To better support its fast growing portfolio of web-based applications for new services such as payment for credit cards, utility bills, subscriptions, airline tickets and others, the company needed to consolidate its environment on a single platform.
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The joint solution will leverage NEC’s infrastructure offering and Red Hat’s cloud solution to help service providers quickly adopt NFV.
Red Hat and NEC want to make it easier for communications service providers to embrace network-functions virtualization in their data centers.
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As 2015 begins, we’re seeing a lot of action from telecom players and the open source community surrounding Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology. Now, Red Hat and NEC Corporation have formed a partnership to develop NFV features in he OpenStack cloud computing platform, with the goal of delivering carrier-grade solutions based on Red Hat’s OpenStack build.
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Fedora
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The Korora 21 screenshot tour series ends with the Xfce edition, which is built around the lightweight and fast Xfce 4.10.1 graphical desktop environment and targeted at users of low-end machines or computers with old/semi-old hardware components.
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I’ve had Fedimg spin up some fresh Fedora 21 Cloud AMIs on Fedora’s official AWS account. I’ve done this for a couple of reasons.
First, the AMIs linked to by the official download page were created on the Fedora Cloud SIG community account. In production, Fedimg registers the AMIs with the official Fedora AWS account, but I had triggered these uploads from a machine configured with the community account credentials. Registering these AMIs from the official Fedora AWS account (to which few people have access) provides additional security. You can further verify uploads by checking out the associated fedmsgs. For instance, here are the latest upload messages. In this example, you can see information about the AMI, including its ID and the name of the image it was created from.
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The famous Network Security Toolkit (NST) computer operating system used by many network administrators and security specialists to analyze and monitor networks, as well as to tighten the security of computer networks, received an update on February 9, 2015. The version is now Network Security Toolkit 20 SVN 6535.
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Debian Family
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Yesterday, however, I’ve seen an experienced Linux person frustrated because the shutdown function of the desktop was doing nothing whatsoever. Today I found John Goerzen’s post on planet.
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Derivatives
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The Elive Team proudly announced the immediate availability for download and testing of a new Beta version of their Elive computer operating system, based on the highly acclaimed Debian GNU/Linux distribution.
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The Univention Corporate Server (UCS) enterprise-ready Linux server distribution based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system has been updated today, February 11, to version 4.0-1, a minor release that includes an updated Debian base and various tweaks.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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For those of you who don’t know me, I am an open source community management and leadership dork. I spent just under eight years as Ubuntu community manager at Canonical, leading a team of six and providing community management consultancy via my own practice. I then moved on to join XPRIZE last year. I wrote “Art of Community,” “Dealing With Disrespect,” and a few other books, founded the Community Leadership Summit, which takes place just before OSCON in Portland each year, co-founded a technology podcast called Bad Voltage, and record some music from time to time.
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After years of development, the first Ubuntu phone is finally here (Europe only) and while the hardware is average at best, the OS is a breath of fresh air, bringing innovations like scopes and “magic edges”, designed not just to be different, but in many ways, better than the current trends.
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Some news sites claimed earlier that the Ubuntu Phone Aquaris E4.5 smartphone will ship today, February 9. It turns out that the information is completely false, as BQ immediately posted on their Twitter account that the device will be available this week, but not today.
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We have some amazing news for you guys if you’re in the market for an Ubuntu Phone, as both Canonical and BQ have confirmed a few minutes ago on their Twitter accounts that limited Ubuntu phones will be available for you to buy tomorrow, February 11, 2015, between 9am and 6pm CET (Central European Time).
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As we announced yesterday, Ubuntu Phone’s flash sale happens today, February 11, 2015, right now. Therefore, if you are desperate to get one today, forget about reading this article and go get yours from BQ’s online store.
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Videos of the first Ubuntu-based phone to be released in the UK show that the low-budget handset may struggle in terms of performance. The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition will be released this week, and marks the end of a two-year journey for Ubuntu to find a manufacturer willing to ship its smartphone OS.
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Open-source technology is one solution to this challenge, especially where it allows the tight integration of software with a range of hardware options.
An important aspect of this is the creation of open-source platforms around the Linux operating system, which has a growing software infrastructure that OEMs can take advantage of to develop and debug designs.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Today we are excited to see that the source code for Tizen 2.3 has been finally released. The last code drop for mobile was back in November 2013, so this is seen as something quite overdue by platform developers. We hope more OEMs will now stop sitting on the sidelines and join Samsung in developing Tizen based Smartphones and wearables, that will further enrich the Tizen ecosystem.
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Samsung recently launched its first Tizen OS smartphone in India and although initial reports said that the Korean tech giant managed to sell 50,000 units in the first 10 days, concerns were raised over Tizen’s skimpy app ecosystem.
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We are excited to announce the availability of Node.js v0.12! It has been a long process, and we want to thank contributors and all of the community who waited patiently for this event. Node.js has such a vibrant and enthusiastic community, and we’re very lucky to have you all supporting us.
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In a bid to quell an uprising within the Node.js ranks, vendor sponsor Joyent has announced an independent foundation to provide an open governance structure for the project.
Though big players including IBM, PayPal and Microsoft will be involved, CEO Scott Hammond said the foundation will help ensure all voices are heard.
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Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript framework, is getting its own open-source foundation and will no longer be governed by Joyent, the cloud-infrastructure provider plans to announce on Tuesday. It should take around two to three months before the foundation is formally established, and until then, Joyent will remain the corporate steward of the Node.js open-source project, according to Joyent.
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Events
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It’s been one of those years, and with 2015 being the 13th year for the Southern California Linux Expo — hence SCALE 13x — you might expect that superstition would be rearing its ugly head.
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OSDC Nordic is an upcoming open-source friendly community-oriented xevent, held May 8th – 10th in Oslo.
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Web Browsers
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In the past, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the go-to Web browser for Internet users. But end-user confidence in Internet Explorer appears to be waning.
Last summer, Google Chrome passed Internet Explorer in combined U.S. desktop and mobile Internet market share for the first time. Chrome now holds 31.8 percent of total market share compared to Internet Explorer’s 30.9 percent share. Furthermore, Chrome has been growing at a rate of 6 percent year over year from 2008, while Explorer has been decreasing at a rate of 6 percent during the same time frame.
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Mozilla
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The Firefox OS-based “Matchstick” media player has been delayed a half year to August, and will receive an overhaul to move to a quad-core SoC and add DRM.
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One thing I am trying to convince folks though is that working in the open is not so hard that we ignore the principles of working in the open and avoid trying to build a good foundation of open processes. One thing I am finding when I have these discussions though is people do not always feel empowered to speak out about working in the open. Simply put teams and organizations will get in these status quos where they put off this hard work and nobody really comes around often to challenge the status quo because often the debates that pursue of working in the open are filled with disagreement.
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SaaS/Big Data
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OwnCloud Server 8 has been released this morning and with it comes improved sharing and collaboration between clouds and other features.
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ownCloud Server 8 has been released and come full with features to make browsing and sharing the contents of your cloud quicker. The search interface has been updated to provide a simpler and easier user experience by introducing: enhanced result set reporting which speeds up access to searched siles, additional search parameters and other general usability improvements to make finding files easier. To aid your search, the new release comes with the ability to assign a favourite icon to files and folders.
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ownCloud, a free software alternative to proprietary web services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and others that you can install on your own server, has reached version 8.0.0.
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CloudStack is an open source cloud software platform which is designed to deploy networks of scalable virtual machines in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service environment. It is often likened to OpenStack, and provides on-premises cloud computing as part of a hybrid cloud solution.
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Public Services/Government
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A new open source, online collaboration tool will allow Defense Department employees to easily and securely web conference and instantly chat from anywhere around the world.
The Defense Information Systems Agency is expanding the capability called Defense Collaboration Services, or DCS, across the department, according to a Feb. 6 press release from the Air Force.
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An NHS open source community interest company (CIC) has been set up to guide the development of an electronic patient record system, which NHS England hopes will ignite the open source digital health and care services markets to better serve clinicians and patients.
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Openness/Sharing
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Are you the kind of drone pilot that wants to do things with your aircraft no one’s thought of before? If so, then Tower, the new open-source flight control app from 3D Robotics, could well be for you.
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3D Robotics, the largest U.S.-based drone manufacturer, today announced the launch of its open-source Tower flight control app for drone copters and planes on Android phones and tablets. The app gives users a few new ways to talk to their drones, but far more importantly, it offers developers a new way to build new features for drones into the app without having to reinvent the wheel by starting from scratch.
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Modelling energy usage is not enough, so an energy measurement board (the ‘MAGEEC Wand’) has been created, which can be applied to a range of embedded architectures. MAGEEC was presented at GNU Tools Cauldron – the annual gathering of GNU tools developers (CC- licensed video and slides at gnu.org) – this July in Cambridge, on the Atmel AVR. Since this, further work has completed the “proof of concept” framework, which fits both GCC and LLVM compilers – a working system that currently awaits further optimisations.
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Open Hardware
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Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), the initiative from Razer and Sensics to connect multiple VR software and hardware partners together, had a good handful of partners at CES 2015, and 13 more have been announced today. The new partners include Jaunt — a maker of cinematic VR experiences that already has apps for Google Cardboard — plus a few game developers, audio and interface accessory companies.
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Open Source Virtual Reality, a Razer-spearheaded coalition that was introduced at CES 2015 in January, has announced 12 new partners.
OSVR aims to build an open source VR platform that developers and hardware makers can use to create virtual reality devices and experiences across multiple operating systems
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Health/Nutrition
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Every six months, like clockwork, I fly home to the UK for three days for one reason: to pick up my supply of prescription medication.
I consider myself lucky—drugs are cheap there, where a national health service exists that I can partake of as a UK citizen. The very vast majority of Americans are not as fortunate. John Oliver, fellow Brit, comedian, and host of Last Week Tonight, said Sunday in a skit about Big Pharma that the cost of drug spending in the U.S. last year “works out to be about a thousand dollars per person.”
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Radical right-wingers in a series of red states are punishing hundreds of thousands of low-income people by blocking efforts by Republican governors to expand Medicaid—state-run health care—by modifying Obamacare to include Republican ideas.
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Security
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Cybercrooks have cooked up a Linux backdoor boasting multiple malicious functions.
The Swiss Army Knife-style malware – dubbed Xnote.1 by Russian anti-virus company Doctor Web – can be used as a platform to mount DDoS attacks and other malicious tasks.
To spread the new Linux backdoor, criminals mount a brute force attack to establish an SSL connection with a target machine.
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The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), which was formed last year to identify open-source projects in need of extra support, expects to name the projects that will receive its backing within a few months, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, which oversees the CII.
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Administrators of tens of thousands of MongoDB databases around the world failed to enforce any security mechanisms, allowing access outside the backend and exposing information of millions of customers to unauthorized parties.
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Managed cloud hosting provider SingleHop hopes to stand out from the pack with new security tools that outsource data protection and DDoS-attack mitigation to the cloud. Its solution, Shield Plus Advanced Security, debuted this week.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Enormous Gender Disparity Present Across All Three Outlets. Fox News featured women in roughly 25 percent of recorded segments, while MSNBC and CNN each featured female guests in just over 20 percent of segments discussing foreign affairs and national security.
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On January 26, the New York Times claimed that “a CIA drone strike in Yemen. . . . killed three suspected Qaeda fighters on Monday.” How did they know the identity of the dead? As usual, it was in part because “American officials said.” There was not a whiff of skepticism about this claim despite the fact that “a senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, declined to confirm the names of the victims” and “a C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.”
That NYT article did cite what it called “a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP), who provided the names of the three victims, one of whom was “Mohammed Toiman al-Jahmi, a Yemeni teenager whose father and brother were previously killed in American drone strikes.” The article added that “the Qaeda member did not know Mr. Jahmi’s age but said he was a member of the terrorist group.”
In fact, as the Guardian reported today, “Mr. Jahmi’s age” was 13 on the day the American drone ended his life. Just months earlier, the Yemeni teenager told that paper that “he lived in constant fear of the ‘death machines’ in the sky that had already killed his father and brother.” It was 2011 when “an unmanned combat drone killed his father and teenage brother as they were out herding the family’s camels.” In the strike two weeks ago, Mohammed was killed along with his brother-in-law and a third man.
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Mohammed Tuaiman becomes the third member of his family to be killed by what he called ‘death machines’ in the sky months after Guardian interview
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At least part of the reason for this is that many American officials have continued in Bush’s tradition of defining the U.S. conflict with extremist Middle Eastern groups as a grand civilizational and religious battle, thus playing in to the same sharply polarizing narrative those groups seek to promote.
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On Sunday night, a series of YouTube videos appear to show a large explosion in Donetsk, Ukraine (several can be watched here). However, it wasn’t a “tactical nuclear weapon,” as some social media users claimed, but just a big blast–reportedly Ukrainian army artillery fire hitting an ammunition depot held by the rebel Donetsk People’s Republic.
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Transparency Reporting
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…in-depth look at the vital role of whistleblowers in ensuring public safety and government accountability.
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British police are reviewing the operation to guard WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the UK’s most senior officer has said.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe told LBC radio that the force is assessing its options due to the pressure the operation at the Ecuadorian embassy in London is putting on resources.
“We won’t talk about tactics but we are reviewing what options we have. It is sucking our resources,” he said.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Harper, who assumed office in 2006 and who has been a staunch supporter of Canada’s tar sands industry, has tried to silence activists who speak out against the industry. But he hasn’t stopped there: his administration has been accused of muzzling its scientists and meteorologists in an attempt to stop certain information on climate change or environmental issues from reaching the public. Under Harper, Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol — which the prime minister once referred to as a “socialist scheme” — in 2011 and cut about 500 jobs from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 2013. The government also closed seven scientific libraries in 2014.
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Finance
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Given this lopsided distribution of income gains, it’s not irrational for people who make quite a bit more than the median income to identify with the middle class and applaud policies that are aimed at curbing the accumulation of wealth by the super-wealthy. But Edsall’s argument for the failure of middle-class populism depends on better-off voters who think of themselves as middle class not really being middle class–and knowing somehow that when politicians talk about the “middle-class,” they aren’t talking about them.
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McKinsey, one of the world’s preeminent business consultants, released a sobering new report this week detailing that, worldwide, total debt has risen by 40.1 percent — or $57 trillion — since the financial crisis of 2008. “Debt,” here, can mean many things: debt to other countries and international institutions, as in Greece and Italy, which were bailed out by the troika; it also means debt to financial institutions, or household and personal debt of the kind those of us paying off mortgages, medical debt or student loans here in the states know all too well. It all means bad news for the economy.
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On Wednesday, the European Central Bank announced that it would no longer accept Greek government debt as collateral for loans. This move, it turns out, was more symbolic than substantive. Still, the moment of truth is clearly approaching.
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Half of our nation, by all reasonable estimates of human need, is in poverty. The jubilant headlines above speak for people whose view is distorted by growing financial wealth. The argument for a barely surviving half of America has been made before, but important new data is available to strengthen the case.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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An upcoming House Oversight Committee hearing features two conservative media darlings infamous for their anti-immigrant rhetoric and peddling misinformation about voter fraud and election law.
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I don’t know that there’s anyone who seriously argues that there’s any actual doubt that Israel has nuclear weapons; if there were any lingering questions, they were resolved by the revelations of Mordechai Vanunu, a whistleblower who exposed details of Israel’s nuclear warhead lab in 1986 and was imprisoned by Israel for 18 years as punishment. Later on in the piece, in fact, the Times notes that “the Arms Control Association, a research group in Washington, says Israel is believed to have 100 to 200 warheads.”But it’s still treated as claim to be attributed to a source rather than a verified fact.
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A hundred and fifty plus 72 is 222 congressmembers, or 51 percent of the House of Representatives. That’s a pretty big “fringe.”
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Censorship
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Mr Galloway has used his Twitter account to claim he was the victim of a “lynch mob”. He encouraged his supporters to call the BBC and complain about the treatment he received.
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Galloway has complained about the BBC and Freedland’s behaviour, accusing the broadcaster of setting him up. He has written a scathing piece about his experience here.
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Privacy
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Fitness trackers and even Samsung televisions are becoming more advanced, and that data can inadvertently reveal sensitive things we never meant to make public
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On Tuesday, former Florida governor Jeb Bush published Volume 1 of an e-book detailing all of his official correspondence while in gubernatorial office. Although the e-book is edited and e-mail addresses have been redacted, the Governor’s Office also published six Outlook files full of all of Bush’s unredacted correspondence—creating a trove of full names connected with personal e-mail addresses, home addresses, phone numbers and even social security numbers, as The Verge first reported.
[....]
The scope of the e-mails is vast and includes everything from automated messages to brief summaries of the state of Cuban refugees who arrived on Florida’s shores to oddly personal e-mails from constituents. Some e-mails include correspondence that had not been addressed to Bush originally but showed up when part of an e-mail was forwarded to him. Other e-mails include personal information about people who aren’t involved in the e-mail thread at all. “Did you get this? Eric’s wife is being induced tomorrow a.m. so we’ll be out of town for a while. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your family!” one cheerily reads.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit Monday in order to learn more about the United States Marshals Service’s use of airborne cell-site simulators.
The San Francisco-based advocacy group filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of Justice (DOJ), the USMS’ parent agency, shortly after the revelations came to light in November 2014. However, the DOJ has not produced any responsive documents and has long exceeded the 30-day deadline as defined under the FOIA law.
In the suit, which was filed in federal court in Washington, DC, the EFF asks the court to compel the DOJ to immediately produce the documents. The DOJ did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.
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Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the only one in Silicon Valley with Craigslist envy. A decade ago, Google tried to meld classified ads with other crowdsourced content in a website called Google Base. The service never took off, and it now redirects to a site soliciting retailers to list on Google’s shopping search engine. Along with the big companies, countless startups have set out to make prettier, more functional versions of Craigslist, only to fail.
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If you’ve ever filed a public records request with your local police department to learn more about how cell-site simulators are used in your community—chances are good that the FBI knows about it. And the FBI will attempt to “prevent disclosure” of such information.
Not only can these devices, commonly known as “stingrays,” be used to determine a phone’s location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. During the act of locating a phone, stingrays also sweep up information about nearby phones. Last fall, Ars reported on how a handful of cities across America are currently upgrading to new hardware that can target 4G LTE phones.
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The U.S. Government often warns of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks from adversaries, but it may have actually contributed to those capabilities in the case of Iran.
A top secret National Security Agency document from April 2013 reveals that the U.S. intelligence community is worried that the West’s campaign of aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks enabled Iran to improve its own capabilities by studying and then replicating those tactics.
The NSA is specifically concerned that Iran’s cyberweapons will become increasingly potent and sophisticated by virtue of learning from the attacks that have been launched against that country. “Iran’s destructive cyber attack against Saudi Aramco in August 2012, during which data was destroyed on tens of thousands of computers, was the first such attack NSA has observed from this adversary,” the NSA document states. “Iran, having been a victim of a similar cyber attack against its own oil industry in April 2012, has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others.”
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Civil Rights
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Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report that three of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen, the main airport in Norway. This way the travelers can have their body photographed without cloths when visiting Norway. Of course this horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that “now travelers can move past the security check point faster and more efficiently”, but fail to mention that the machines in question take pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the public. The article is written in a way that leave the impression that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create the sketch figures. In reality the same nude pictures are still taken, but not presented to everyone. They are still available for the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.
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Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 after being convicted of leaking classified national security documents to WikiLeaks.
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Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Google has decided to mothball its home-grown SPDY internet application-layer protocol in future versions of its Chrome browser, in favor of the Internet Engineering Taskforce’s HTTP/2 spec.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Today it was revealed that a Swedish prosecutor is trying to force the .SE registry, via a court case, to ban ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se from being in use. He even wants to go so far as to claim the domains for the state in order to put up a ‘stop’ logo on them.
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RapidShare, once the most popular file-hosting service in the Internet, has announced that it will shut down next month. The company doesn’t cite a reason for the surprising shutdown, but losing the majority of its users in recent years after the implementation of tough anti-piracy measures is likely to be connected.
[...]
RapidShare fought many legal battles with entertainment companies seeking to hold the company liable for the actions of its users, and to top it off the site was called out by the U.S. Government as a “notorious market.”
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Andrus Nomm, one of the seven Megaupload employees indicted by the United States, has been arrested. The U.S. authorities have yet to comment on the arrest of the programmer but Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken believes that he may have cut a deal with the FBI.
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Send this to a friend
02.10.15
Posted in News Roundup at 7:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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There’s been a lot of interesting Linux news of late. Not just GNU/Linux, but all types of Linux, Android, Chrome OS, Firefox OS, embedded (IoT), cloud computing, cars, TVs, just about anything you can think of. But truth be told, I’d like to see more Linux on the desktop — just as Linus Torvalds said he would like to see that.
The recent purchase of a Chromebook for my son got me thinking about a new opportunity for Linux on the desktop. This is not an idea for getting a standard GNU/Linux desktop to automagically replace all existing Windows desktops, but to leverage the cloud computing paradigm with a bulked-up Chromebook-like system that would be workable for 80 to 90 percent of personal, school, and business needs.
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Kernel Space
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The latest open-source desktop program making optional use of systemd is the popular VLC media player.
As of this morning, there’s now a native logger module for the systemd journal within VLC.
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Last Sunday when releasing Linux 3.19-rc7, Linus Torvalds mentioned he was looking at doing the official 3.19 release in one week. It seems to have been a relatively calm week to end out 3.19 development with no nasty regressions turning up, so chances are in a few hours he’ll have the new release out the door.
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The Linux 3.19 kernel was tagged in Git close to an hour ago now. Surprisingly, as of writing this news post, Linus Torvalds has yet to issue any Linux 3.19 release announcement but things went according to plan as per last week with the plans for 3.19 final.
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News of the release emerged in a typically economical Sunday evening post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, in which Torvalds noted there are still a couple of bugs in this release but they were pretty obscure so “… while I was tempted a couple of times to do an rc8, there really wasn’t any reason for it.”
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Good news for all users of a GNU/Linux operating system, as Linus Torvalds announced the immediate availability for download of the Linux 3.19 kernel, which brings interesting features, the usual bugfixes, and general performance improvements.
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As the AllSeen Alliance’s senior director of IoT, Philip DesAutels (shown) works with Alliance members to advance the Internet of Everything by building out an open source software framework, AllJoyn, to seamlessly connect a range of objects and devices in homes, cars and businesses. He oversees and guides all aspects of the Alliance, from governance and technology, to the developer community and marketing efforts.
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It looks like the infrastructure to facilitate live kernel patching will be added to the Linux 3.20 kernel, the result of collaboration for SUSE’s kGraft and Red Hat’s Kpatch.
Last year SUSE and Red Hat introduced their own live kernel patching mechanisms after not knowing each company was independently working on a solution for patching running versions of the Linux kernel against basic security/bug fixes. In the months since the unveiling of kGraft and Kpatch, the kernel developers have been working together to come up with a common base that addresses the needs of each implementation. That common work for supporting Kpatch and kGraft is now what’s ready for merging into Linux 3.20.
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Today in the Linuxsphere the systemd controversy doesn’t seem to be subsiding as the main reason for it is no more. Jim Zemlin blogged about The Linux Foundation’s efforts to save small but key projects from starving to death as well as contributing to the security process. Speaking of security, a new trojan has been identified that can open backdoors on Linux servers that can, among other things, participate in DDoS attacks. Matt Hartley shares his list of the best software ever for Linux and Leif Lodahl declares LibreOffice better than the competitors.
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The HID subsystem work for Linux 3.20 includes improvements to the Logitech HID++ protocol implementation, support for composite RMI devices, a new driver for the BETOP force feedback controller, new hardware support in the Wacom driver, and various fixes. The fixes and new device ID additions are “all over the place” for HID drivers.
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Benchmarks
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While my full Linux review of the NUC5i3RYH / Core i3 5010U will come in the days ahead on Phoronix, this weekend I uploaded some preliminary benchmark data for those curious. The Intel Core i3 5010U features a dual-core processor with Hyper Threading and is clocked at 2.1GHz for its frequency without Hyper Threading. The i3-5010U has a 15 Watt TDP, 3MB cache, and supports DDR3L/LPDDR3 1600/1333MHz memory. The graphics processor is Intel HD Graphics 5500 with a maximum frequency of 900MHz.
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For any Intel Haswell Linux users with Iris Graphics thinking of switching to the Linux 3.19 kernel when it’s released in what might just be a few hours, be forewarned as testing this weekend revealed there looks to be an OpenGL performance regression attributed to this new kernel.
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Applications
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Version 7.6.0 of the powerful MKVToolNix software is now available for download, still providing computer users with one of the best collection of tools for analyzing, converting, merging, and splitting Matroska (popularly known as MKV) files on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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For hardcore geeks, Common UNIX Printing System or simply CUPS is an open-source printing layer for UNIX-like operating systems, including GNU/Linux, BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD), Solaris, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. For end users, CUPS is that piece of software that lets them add printers, manage printers, as well as print documents on their computers.
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The Oyranos library became quite slower during the last development cycle for 0.9.6 . That is pretty normal, as new features were added and more ideas waited for implementation letting not much room for all details as wanted. The last two weeks, I took a break and mainly searched for bottlenecks inside the code base and wanted to bring performance back to satisfactory levels. One good starting point for optimisations in Oyranos are the speed tests inside the test suite. But that gives only help on starting a few points. What I wished to be easy, is seeing where code paths spend lots of time and perhaps, which line inside the source file takes much computation time.
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Over the years, there have been a number of claims that the Linux desktop is lacking in terms of good, highly useful software. Today, I’m aiming to put this myth to bed once and for all. Continue reading for my list of the top ten best applications for Linux.
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It is my pleasure to finally release Icemon 3.0 to the public. If you don’t know it — Icemon is a GUI monitor for Icecream, a distributed compiler system.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Under a superficial examination, the Pebble doesn’t exactly look like an ideal device for gaming. If we look at its puny 80MHz processor, which is paired up with a monochrome e-paper screen, the display does not only lack the ability to display colour but is furthermore not particularly well suited to frequently updating content. The Pebble also interacts with its user via a grand total of four buttons, one of which cannot be accessed easily by third-party applications.
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Years ago, I worked for an automotive IT provider, and occasionally we went out to the plants to search for rogue Wireless Access Points (WAPs). A rogue WAP is one that the company hasn’t approved to be there. So if someone were to go and buy a wireless router, and plug it in to the network, that would be a rogue WAP. A rogue WAP also could be someone using a cell phone or MiFi as a Wi-Fi hotspot.
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One of the most popular articles on this site shows how to install Ubuntu and Minecraft on the HP Chromebook.
Some people have found the guide difficult to follow and so I have decided to rework it and I also retested all the steps to make sure they work correctly.
This guide shows how to install Ubuntu with the Unity desktop on a HP Chromebook using Crouton.
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Recently I have spent a lot of time with Linux iSCSI Target software solutions. After using iSCSI Enterprise Target (IET) (not active), the Linux SCSI Target framework (TGT), and the generic SCSI Target Subsystem (SCST), I have come to the realization that SCST definitely stood out as the most superior of the bunch and with good reason. It is also the most storage industry supported of iSCSI Target solutions.
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Games
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Within a short period, two people showed up with proposals for games for inclusion with GNOME 3.16. One is a 2048 clone, the other is a revival of Atomix (last maintenance was GNOME 2.14). Both proposals seem to be maintained by just one person.
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As a story-based adventure it’s a decent attempt, even if it has some omissions or streamlining that work against its overall purpose. It’s not the finest thing ever to grace the screen of my lowly Pentium 4, but I wouldn’t mind trying it again, just for fun.
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Dead Island has been patched to fix multiple issues in the Linux version, so it looks like it’s properly playable now months after release. It may have taken over 3 months for the game to get these fixed, but it’s good to see the port wasn’t forgotten about as we thought previously.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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LXQt 0.9.0 has been released, dropping compatibility with Qt 4 and setting the minimum version required to be Qt 5.3. This release features lots of internal cleanups and refactorings which should make it faster. The release also utilise KDE Frameworks for the first time, KWindowSystem replaces the XFitMan library, KGuiAddons replaces a dependency on xlib in lxqt-panel.
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Version 0.9 of the lightweight LXQt desktop environment was released this Sunday. LXQt is the next-generation, lightweight desktop derived in part from the LXDE and Razor-Qt desktops. LXQt 0.9 is the release that begins to enforce Qt5.
LXQt 0.9 abandons Qt4 compatibility and now requires Qt 5.3 or newer. LXQt 0.8 that was released last October had full Qt5 support while maintaining Qt4 compatibility, but this new version focuses exclusively on modern Qt5 library support.
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Three days after the official announcement of Manjaro Linux 0.8.12, a point release that brings only a couple of changes, such as out-of-the-box support for Microsoft’s exFAT filesystem and Pacman 4.2 package manager, the Manjaro community released today the LXQt edition of the acclaimed Arch Linux-based computer operating system. At the moment of writing this article, only the 32-bit Live image was available for download, but that’s more than enough for us to take a quick screenshot tour of the release.
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After three months of development work we are proud to announce the release of version 1.13 of EFL, Elementary, Evas Generic Loaders and Emotion Generic Players.
In this 12 weeks we got over 700 commits from 68 authors in EFL alone. Doing 111275 line insertions and 28292 line deletions. Elementary has another 370 commits by 48 authors.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I started off my Project under Season of KDE 2014 with a motive to design and revamp KDE’s own blog aggregator, PlanetKDE. Initiated by my mentor Jonathan Riddell, back in 2008, this website did an amazing job of scraping off content from KDE’s bloggers.
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Plasma 5 has the potential to revitalize the Linux world, it’s that important and meaningful. Of course, we must not forget that applications play their critical role, but if you need to sell your product, the first look, the very first impression is important. And in that regard, Plasma has everything to gain and lose. After what happened with Gnome, it’s the one remaining bastion of sanity in the Linux desktop world. And so we begin.
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A 15 minute review of the forthcoming Plasma 5 distro
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I’ve never really had the time to explore KDE Plasma 5 since it was released back in July 2014. I’ve played with it a bit, but not much.
Now that it’s at version 5.2 and at that stage when its deemed almost ready for primetime, that is, ready to replace all aspects of KDE Plasma 4, I decided to kick the tires a little bit harder.
To do that, I had to download and install an ISO image of a release candidate of KaOS – KaOS-kf5 ISO 2015.01.25.
KaOS is a KDE-centric Linux distribution that uses a rolling release development model. It was inspired by Arch Linux and uses that distribution’s package manager. Tt also makes use of the Calamares graphical installer, which I wrote about recently (see Calamares will be the graphical installer on the next OpenMandriva edition).
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Dear GNOME community, you all owe Krzesimir Nowak, Andrea Veri, and Olav Vitters some icecream and drinks: The Bugzilla software running on bugzilla.gnome.org has been upgraded to the latest stable version available.
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We’ve had some fairly high profile Linux distros fold up their tents and move along. Whether due to a lack of financial support or the project growing larger than a one man dev team can manage, distros do go away. It’s never for a good reason but the fact remains: When a distro ceases to exist, a lot of people get left in the lurch.
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Reviews
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It has been a while since I reviewed Manjaro Linux. In fact, my last review of it was almost 2 years ago. Since then, I have seen a lot of news about how much it has grown and how good it has gotten. I figured I should give it another review.
For those who don’t remember, Manjaro is a distribution that based on Arch Linux. It maintains a rolling-release base, and it is compatible with most Arch repositories, though some of its repositories are its own. It officially supports KDE and Xfce, though community editions exist for other DEs as well.
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From a practical point of view, I’m sure most people will stick with running either Arch Linux or vanilla FreeBSD. However, as an experiment into what is possible, ArchBSD does provide us with something interesting, something a little different. With some work to flesh out the documentation and more volunteers to keep the base operating system up to date, I think ArchBSD could be a viable server operating system.
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New Releases
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After two years of development, Offensive Security, the creator of the famous BackTrack Linux distribution, has announced today, February 9, that the first point release for its Kali Linux computer operating system designed for penetration testing and digital forensics operations is now available for download.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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News from OpenMandriva has it that the next release of the distribution will feature the Calamares graphical installer.
Calamares is a “distribution independent installer framework” that features a modular design with 25 modules already implemented. It has plugin interfaces for C++, Python and a generic process, and an advanced partitioning tool with support for DOS and GPT partition tables.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The short story is that I didn’t do many tweaks to my GNOME 3.14 desktop and it’s going well. Fedora 21 with GNOME 3.14 is running well for my X1 Carbon connected to this affordable 4K monitor. The only tweaks made were enabling icons on the GNOME Shell desktop (to get closer to my original workflow) and allowing thumbnails on images greater than 10MB (with the many original DSLR photos for Phoronix articles being 15MB+).
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Derived from Fedora 21 and powered by the pursuit of perfection, dedication and freedom, the final version of Korora 21 computer operating system is here, available for download in four separate editions with the Cinnamon, KDE, GNOME, and Xfce graphical desktop environments, as announced by its developer Chris Smart on the project’s website.
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It has taken a few weeks longer than we had hoped, but we’re finally happy to announce that the final release of version 21 (codename “Darla”) is now available for download (we strongly recommend using BitTorrent).
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Debian Family
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The issue is the same as I have with the boot-times for my desktop PC, systemd makes assumptions that break Debian systems. In my case, systemd insists on every other service starting and running before attempting to start X, the thing I want up ASAP. In the case of the bug reported above, how the system time was handled over a reboot is changed with systemd. The old behaviour was that the clock was stored and retrieved so things survived reboots nicely. No more. Poettering et al have decided that time should be set by NTP or other means and systemd should not have anything to do with that although systemd is replacing the old init that did… BREAKAGE!!! Now I know why Linus swears so much! If a change to systemd breaks user’s systems, it’s a bug in systemd, not that the world needs to change to be the way Poettering wants. Putting folks who break things in charge of millions of systems is a tragedy of huge proportions. People should not have to rewrite init scripts to switch to systemd. Otherwise, systemd should get the Hell out of our way… or go away…
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For years, I used to run Debian sid (unstable) on all my personal machines. Laptops, workstations, sometimes even my personal servers years ago ran sid. Sid was, as its name implies, unstable. Sometimes things broke. But it wasn’t a big deal, because I could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was. It was the price I paid for the latest and greatest.
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Derivatives
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Philip Newborough, aka @corenominal, posted his decision to stop work on the distro last Friday.
“I’m leaving it behind because I honestly believe that it no longer holds any value, and whilst I could hold on to it for sentimental reasons, I don’t believe that would be in the best interest of its users, who would benefit from using vanilla Debian,” he wrote.
CrunchBang’s a Debian variant optimised for the desktop and back in 2009 we rated it a contender for use on Netbooks. Newborough wanted it that way: his aim was to create a lightweight distro at a time few existed.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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After nearly two years of development, Canonical has confirmed that the first Ubuntu smartphone is scheduled to go on sale in Europe starting next week.
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Two years after its initial announcement, Canonical will finally release its Ubuntu Phone in Europe during the coming week.
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Remember the Indiegogo campaign that popped up back in 2013 for the Ubuntu Edge smartphone? If not, it’s okay; it’s just important to know that it happened. At the time, Ubuntu for phones and a Ubuntu smartphone was a pretty big deal. Ubuntu, an already popular open-sourced operating system for computers, had arguably the best potential to become the “fifth” major operating system in the smartphone industry. Unfortunately, the goal needed for the Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding campaign, which was $32 million, was never reached (although it did manage to earn a staggering $12.8 million).
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Canonical is all set to release its first Ubuntu-based smartphone in partnership with Spain’s BQ, a company known for making ebook readers, smartphones and tablets in Europe. The smartphone, named Aquaris E4.5, has till date been available with Android 4.4 KitKat OS, and will now be released in a new version running Ubuntu OS for phones, which has previously also been called Ubuntu Touch OS. The smartphone is dubbed the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition.
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As you may know, Folder Color is an open-source app that allows the users to easily color their folder icons, initially created for Nautilus.
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The already crowded mobile operating system market has a new entrant—Ubuntu. The open-source Linux operating system, which has been running on PCs and servers for years, is now available in a smartphone known as the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition. The Aquaris E4.5 is not necessarily an impressive device. The smartphone looks like most other devices on the mobile market shelves and comes with standard components one would expect from midrange handsets. But that might not matter. It’s the operating system that makes the smartphone unique in the marketplace. The Aquaris will only be available in Europe, and it’s not expected to be a huge seller even on that continent, but it will be viewed as a test that prompts other smartphone makers to think about using Ubuntu Linux as their mobile operating system. They will want to see how customers respond to the first model to see if there is a future for Canonical’s operating system on mobile devices. This slide show takes a look at the Aquaris E4.5 to see how it might fare in the market and to see what is in the device that could potentially attract buyers in an increasingly crowded mobile space.
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The “age of Aquaris” is now here as a long-awaited Linux mobile device becomes reality with the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone.
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THE first Ubuntu smart phone goes on sale in Europe in the next few days, but early reports suggest that very few people outside the continent will get to see or buy one any time soon. This is a bit of a disappointment for dyed-in-the-wool Ubuntu users who have waited eagerly to see how well their operating system of choice runs on a mobile device.
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Flavours and Variants
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Six months after the first beta, elementary OS Freya beta 2 was released yesterday. Based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (which is supported until April 2019), Freya beta 2 comes with various UI improvements, UEFI/SecureBoot support along with other interesting changes as well as almost 600 bug fixes.
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After six months of hard work, the development team behind one of the most beautifully designed GNU/Linux operating system in the world, elementary OS, happily announced on February 8 the immediate availability for download of the second Beta for the forthcoming Freya (version 0.3) release with over 600 fixes, but still based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).
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The Elementary OS team has announced the release of second beta of their upcoming Feya. The release comes six months after the first beta and packs a lot of features such as UI improvements, new apps and 600 bug fixes.
This is the last beta. Elementary OS team says that the next release will be a release candidate, which will be a ‘cleanup and details release’ where amongst other things, translators will help ready the release for worldwide consumption.
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Merrii announced a high end, Android- and Linux-ready “H88 Hummingbird” SBC based on the octa-core Cortex-A15/-A7 Allwinner A80 SoC.
The second-generation Raspberry Pi 2 managed to maintain its $35 price despite moving to a quad-core Cortex-A7 system-on-chip, but faster, pricier quad- and octa-core ARM SoCs haven’t seen as much traction in the single board computer scene. Yet, just as we’ve seen a lot of SBCs based on the Cortex-A7 based Allwinner A20 or Cortex–A9 based Allwinner A31, several companies and community projects are now trying out the octa-core Allwinner A80. The A80 combines four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores in a Big.Little configuration.
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Linaro has launched an open-source spec for ARM SBCs called “96Boards,” first available in a $129 “Hikey” SBC, featuring a Huawei octa-core Cortex-A53 SoC.
Linaro, the ARM-backed not-for-profit engineering organization that has aimed to standardize open source Linux and Android software for Cortex-A processors, is now trying to do the same thing for hardware.f Linaro, which is owned by ARM and many of its top system-on-chip licensees, has launched 96Boards.org, a cross between a single board computer hacker community and an x86-style hardware standards organization.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Russia’s Minister of Communications and Mass Media, Nikolai Nikiforov, has announced that his administration is to support the development of open-source IT software by awarding grants to developers who produce applications which run on platforms other than Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.
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Samsung has been arguably the most popular Android manufacturer over the past few years, which would make sense given that the South Korean company has several different lines of Android devices. You have the Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung Galaxy Alpha, Samsung Galaxy Zoom, Samsung Galaxy Mega… the list goes on (and on, and on…) The bottom line here is that Samsung and Google make a pretty good team when you look at the numbers.
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South Korea-based Samsung has just begun domestic sales of high-end televisions with a smart interface powered by its own Tizen operating system.
It is part of a wider push by the consumer electronics firm to incorporate the software in a wide range of its home products – everything from fridges and washing machines to robotic vacuum cleaners.
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Android
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It would be something of an understatement to say that the smartphone market is hot: it has clearly taken over from the desktop sector as the mainstream that defines the direction of computing. That’s good news for open source, since it means Windows is increasingly irrelevant as far as the future is concerned. Android, of course, is dominating this sector, but nothing stays still: there will, one day, be an “after Android” – so who will be the key player(s) there?
Not, I fear, Tizen. Although to begin with I hoped this might develop into a strong alternative to Android, that is clearly not to be. I’ve not written much about it here, since it seems to spend most of its time merging with other projects and re-branding itself. This article has an excellent representation of how Tizen has evolved over the years; it also reviews the first Tizen phone, from Samsung, concluding.
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But companies are indeed bothering to make new designs and try different approaches to the tried and true tablet formula. The latest of which is Dell, which recently launched the clumsily named Venue 8 7000 Series (I’m just going to call it the Venue 8). The $399 Venue 8 is part of a design renaissance at Dell (along with the new XPS 13 laptop), showcasing premium materials and killer displays. It also acts as a vehicle for some never-before-seen mobile technologies from Intel. There are really two things that matter with the Venue 8, and they’re why anyone is spending time talking about it: its design and its camera array.
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Dave Hakkens is the founder of Phoneblocks, an initiative that supports and pursues the creation of modular hardware for cellular phones to reduce electronic waste (e-waste) and increase efficiency. In this interview, Dave shares the story of what brought him to this mission and what he believes the future holds for one of our most treasured devices, the phone.
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Netflix has developed a platform, using soon-to-be open source tools, that probes for vulnerabilities and monitor data leakage.
One initiative dubbed the “Dirty Laundry Project” monitors for Netflix assets unintentionally exposed by its staff.
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Network monitoring is a key component in making sure your network is running smoothly. However, it is important to distinguish between network monitoring and network management. For the most part, network monitoring tools report issues and findings, but as a rule provide no way to take action to solve reported issues.
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We found all four products to be capable network monitoring tools that performed well in our basic tasks such as checking for host availability and measuring bandwidth usage. Beyond the basics, there were quite a few differences in terms of features, granularity and configuration options.
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I’ve been designing and developing commercial software for more than 30 years, and I’m pleased to announce that for the first time, some of my software has been released as a new open source project. For open source at Dell, it’s a Java project called Mensa.
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Events
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SaaS/Big Data
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ownCloud reached version 8 today, February 9, 2015. We’re talking about the ownCloud Server, a powerful, open-source, free, and self-hosted file sharing solution that offers easier and faster file syncing and sharing functionality, along with numerous other attractive features. ownCloud Server is considered by many a Dropbox replacement and it is distributed in two editions, ownCloud Community Edition and ownCloud Enterprise Edition.
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When you put your data in the public cloud — whether it be Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, or other services. It’s dictated by the terms and services of the service provider and is subject to laws that may give the government full access to your data without giving you the slightest hint of any compromise.
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VMware has remained in the news cycle since its announcements on the cloud computing front last week. In a blog post, the company announced the launch of VMware Integrated OpenStack, which, notably, is available for use, free of charge, with VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus, vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus and all editions of vCloud Suite. The company is also pushing its vision of “one cloud, any app, any device.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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With the recent release of LibreOffice 4.4 there was a significant bump in compiler requirements in order to begin allowing LibreOffice developers to use basic C++11 functionality. Going forward, the compiler requirements will continue to rise as the developers of this open-source office suite seek to utilize more modern C++ features.
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Let’s have a look at some of the areas where LibreOffice is actually BETTER than the competitor Microsoft Office.
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CMS
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It goes without saying that WordPress is big — the Goliath of free and open source content management systems (CMS). WordPress is the number 1 CMS system currently in use, and increased its usage on more than 2 million domains since June 2014.
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Funding
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This past week the person who manages one of the world’s most important cryptography projects, Werner Koch, went from going broke to raising more than $100,000 for his project, GNU Privacy Guard. This is in addition to the $60,000 The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) dedicated to Werner last month. GnuPG is used not just to encrypt and authenticate email but provides the confirmation that software packages and releases are what they claim to be. Facebook, Stripe and others are answering the calls to support the individuals who are developing the world’s most critical digital infrastructure.
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In 2014, OpenSSL had a gigantic security problem: Heartbleed. Its root cause? A combination of blind trust in the open-source programming method and a shoe-string budget. Less than a year later Werner Koch, author and sole maintainer of the popular Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) email encryption program, revealed he was going broke supporting GnuPG.
Koch’s story had a happy ending. First, The Linux Foundation, via its Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), donated $60,000 to GnuPG. Then, e-payments vendor Stripe and Facebook agreed to sponsor the program’s development to the tune of $50,000 a year.
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BSD
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With the growing adoption of systemd, dissatisfaction with Linux has reached proportions not seen in recent years, to the extent that people have started talking of switching to FreeBSD.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We provide “patchsets” to stable releases. Patchsets allow quick bug fixes and updates for production systems.
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Project Releases
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The Postfix open-source mail server software reached the big 3.0 milestone on Sunday with various improvements to this Sendmail alternative.
The release of Postfix 3.0.0 stable brings SMTP UTF8 support for internationalized domain names and address local parts, support for Postfix dynamically-linked libraries and database plug-ins, support for operations on multiple look-up tables, support for pseudo-tables, table-driven transformations of DNS lookup results, an improved configuration file syntax, and per-session command profiles.
More details on Postfix 3.0 can be discovered from Postfix.org.
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A new releases of the RPushbullet package (interfacing the neat Pushbullet service) arrived on CRAN today.
It brings several weeks of extensions, corrections and cleanups—with key contributions by Mike Birdgeneau and Henrik Bengtsson.
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Public Services/Government
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The Greek region of Attica, encompassing Athens, is considering a switch to free and open source solutions. Representatives of the regional authority discussed the move with the Greek Free/Open Source Software society. GFOSS has offered to help modernise Attica’s ICT policies.
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A new open source, online collaboration tool will allow Defense Department employees to easily and securely web conference and instantly chat from anywhere around the world.
The Defense Information Systems Agency is expanding the capability called Defense Collaboration Services, or DCS, across the department, according to a Feb. 6 press release from the Air Force.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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With the rise of distributed manufacturing of 3D printing, hardware designs released under open source licenses are increasing exponentially. These designs—for everything from phone cases to prosthetic hands for children—can have an enormous value for those who need and want them.
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The results of Pearce’s case study analysis were shocking. “Millions of dollars of value can be created by designers if they share their work under open licenses, says Pearce. “For individuals or funding organizations interested in doing the most good and maximizing value for the public it is clear that supporting open designs should be a top priority.”
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Makers, developers and hobbyists looking to add networking functionality to their projects in the form of NAS, VPN and Firewall features may be interested in a new piece of open source hardware called the ONetSwitch developed by MeshSr.
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One day the robots may rebel against humans, taking control of the world and turning us into a relatively green source of energy. But today is not that day, even if one such robot did “attack” its owner in South Korea.
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To most outside observers, the collapse of RadioShack Corp. was set in motion years, if not decades, ago.
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Security
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Seen on an ATM in Hong Kong airport.
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If you’re one of the unlucky 80 million Anthem customers whose Social Security number, salary, and other sensitive data were stolen by hackers, the most basic step to protect yourself is to set up a fraud alert with the three major credit agencies: Experian, Equifax, or TransUnion.
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Xnote a new multi-purpose backdoor Linux trojan authored by ChinaZ, converts Linux systems into botnets
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The malware will only be installed in a system if it has been launched with superuser (root) privileges. During installation, the malware creates a copy of itself in the /bin/ directory in the form of a file called iptable6. The malware then tries to hide itself by deleting the original launch file.
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The backdoor contains a list of control servers within its body, and tries to contact them one by one. Once a connection to one of the servers is established, information is exchanged between them in compressed packets.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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• If the video of a prisoner being burned to death displays “a level of brutality shocking even by the standards” of Islamic State, how should we describe the actions of the US and UK around the world? According to a 2012 joint report from the NYU and Stanford University law schools on US drone strikes in Pakistan, “the missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration”. Similarly barbaric, in 2008 the Sunday Times reported British forces were using Hellfire missiles in Afghanistan, creating “a pressure wave which sucks the air out of victims, shreds their internal organs and crushes their bodies”.
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‘I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia,’ says former senator and commission member
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Transparency Reporting
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Michael Ratner says that US government is still pursuing criminal investigations against Wikileaks Editor and staffers, not just because of what they have already released to the public but because of what they still continue to release
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The man who stole the trove of secret files that sparked a global scandal over banking giant HSBC’s alleged assistance to wealthy tax dodgers called Monday for more protections for whistleblowers.
Herve Falciani, the former HSBC employee behind the so-called SwissLeaks revelations, said far more needed to be done to protect whistleblowers like himself, including financial support.
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Ecuador prepares a side event for March 19 or 20 in the framework of the 28th Session of the Human Rights Council to deal with the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who is wanted in Sweden and the US.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Australia’s hottest year on record would not have happened without climate change, according to a new report.
The country experienced its hottest day, month, season and calendar year in 2013, registering a mean temperature 1.2C above the 1961-90 average.
The Climate Council says recent studies show those heat events would have occurred only once every 12,300 years without greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.
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The UK government has broken a key pledge to support green energy abroad over “dirty” energy projects by spending more than three hundred times as much backing fossil fuel energy compared with clean energy projects via the government’s export credit agency.
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The sharp decline in honeybees has been linked with a change in the foraging behaviour of young bees brought on by some kind of environmental stress such as parasitic attacks or pesticides, a study has found.
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One of the biggest jokes in conservation is the Japanese government’s claim to be engaged in “scientific whaling”. All the killing by its harpoon fleet takes place under the guise of “research”, as this is the only justification available, under international rules.
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Finance
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Hervé Falciani’s long, strange journey from bank computer expert to jailed fugitive to candidate for office to spokesman for whistleblowers
They almost had him.
On December 22, 2008, Swiss federal police handcuffed 36-year-old Hervé Falciani, a systems specialist they suspected of stealing data from HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), his employer, and trying to sell it to banks in Lebanon. They seized his computer, searched his Geneva home and interrogated him for hours.
Then – on the condition that he return the next day for more questioning – they let him go.
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According to a report released on Sunday, files analyzed by 140 reporters in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) have revealed that British banking giant HSBC provided accounts to international criminals, corrupt businessmen, politicians and celebrities.
“HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws,” ICIJ reported.
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Britain’s biggest bank helped wealthy clients cheat the UK out of millions of pounds in tax, the BBC has learned.
Panorama has seen thousands of accounts from HSBC’s private bank in Switzerland leaked by a whistleblower in 2007.
They show bankers helped clients evade tax and offered deals to help tax dodgers stay ahead of the law.
HSBC admitted that some individuals took advantage of bank secrecy to hold undeclared accounts. But it said it has now “fundamentally changed”.
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Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channelled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag-men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.
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HSBC found itself under fire again on Monday after news reports over the weekend provided more details about long-running accusations that its Swiss private banking arm helped clients hide billions of dollars in assets from international tax authorities before 2007.
In a report released on Sunday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, an organization based in Washington, said that secret documents revealed that bank employees had reassured clients that HSBC would not disclose details of their accounts to tax authorities in their home countries and discussed options to avoid paying taxes on those assets. Also contributing to the report were the newspaper Le Monde in France, The Guardian in Britain, the BBC program “Panorama” and CBS News’s “60 Minutes.”
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The US government will come under intense pressure this week to explain what action it took after receiving a massive cache of leaked data that revealed how the Swiss banking arm of HSBC, the world’s second-largest bank, helped wealthy customers conceal billions of dollars of assets.
The leaked files, which reveal how HSBC advised some clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, were obtained through an international collaboration of news outlets, including the Guardian, the French daily Le Monde, CBS 60 Minutes and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The files reveal how HSBC’s Swiss private bank colluded with some clients to conceal undeclared “black” accounts from domestic tax authorities across the world and provided services to international criminals and other high-risk individuals.
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Prominent Australian political and business figures are among thousands of people identified as Swiss bank account holders, a cache of leaked documents from the Swiss arm of the HSBC bank shows.
They include the late media mogul Kerry Packer and the former ANZ Bank chairman Charles Goode.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and the Guardian has accessed data on the accounts, which reveal unprecedented insights into offshore banking with the Swiss arm of the bank.
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Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channelled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag-men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.
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Team of journalists from 45 countries unearths secret bank accounts maintained for criminals, traffickers, tax dodgers, politicians and celebrities
Secret documents reveal that global banking giant HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws.
The leaked files, based on the inner workings of HSBC’s Swiss private banking arm, relate to accounts holding more than $100 billion. They provide a rare glimpse inside the super-secret Swiss banking system — one the public has never seen before.
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HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files.
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Some projections endorsed by the European Commission point to positive, though negligible, gains in terms of GDP and personal incomes. Others make greater claims, asserting that the deal will add over £100 billion to the UK and European economies every year.
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The EU and the US are negotiating their proposed free trade agreement behind closed doors. Third countries, for instance in Africa, have no say in these talks, although the deal could have a far-reaching impact on them.
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With a new ‘HSBC list’ of Swiss bank accounts revealing over 1,000 Indian names, Switzerland today said these are from “stolen data” — an assertion that might make it difficult for India to get details on these accounts without any additional evidence.
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An international collaboration of media outlets have leaked HSBC files which prove the Bank has actively sought to undermine domestic tax laws and keep millions of pounds from reaching the UK Treasury – but what is truly remarkable, it the complicity of the UK government in helping the 1% avoid paying their dues.
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The only countries that held more money in the HSBC branch were 11,235 Swiss with $31 billion, 8,844 Britons with $21.7 billion, 1,138 Venezuelans with $14.7 billion, 4,193 Americans with $13.4 billion and 9,187 French with $12.5 billion.
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Hundreds of South Africans have stashed more than $2-billion (about R23-billion) in accounts at Swiss banking group HSBC, details of which have now emerged in a leak that shines a new spotlight on the secretive world of Swiss banking.
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Last year more than 200,000 people were prosecuted for not having a TV licence.
More than fifty – many of them women – went to prison for it.
But HMRC say it is not in the public interest to prosecute tax criminals and the bankers and accountants who set arrangements for them.
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Censorship
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KickassTorrents has lost access to its Kickass.so domain name and is currently offline. The Somalian domain of the most-visited torrent site on the Internet is now listed as “banned” by the .SO registry, forcing the site’s operators to find a new home.
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Privacy
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Part of the Samsung Smarttv EULA: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”
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My name is Alison, and I’m the founder of the Library Freedom Project, an initiative that aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries. It’s a partnership among librarians, technologists, attorneys, and privacy advocates to teach librarians about surveillance threats, privacy rights, and privacy-protecting technology tools. So far, we’ve been all over Massachusetts and parts of New England, and we have been awarded a generous grant from the Knight Foundation to bring privacy training to libraries across the United States.
We teach librarians three things. Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts teaches the current state of digital surveillance. Jessie Rossman, an attorney and surveillance law expert also from the ACLU of Massachusetts, offers a privacy-focused “know your rights” training. I teach technology tools – like Tor and Tails .
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Campaigning group Privacy International is preparing to help “potentially millions” of people request that their GCHQ records be deleted, following a landmark ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal on Friday.
The IPT ruled that the intelligence-sharing relationship between the US and UK had been unlawful prior to December 2014, because the rules governing the UK’s access to the National Security Agency’s PRISM and UPSTREAM programmes had been kept secret.
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The recent ruling that mass surveillance of UK citizens’ internet communications by the UK intelligence services was unlawful until the end of 2014 does not go far enough, according to Open Rights Group.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled that UK intelligence agency GCHQ had breached the Human Rights Act by using intelligence on UK residents from the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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For the state of Iowa to step forward, alongside others, in mitigating the powers of the NSA comes as a pleasant surprise. The federal agency has shown that it has no intention of reining in their surveillance.
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The UK government slipped out consultation documents on “equipment interference” and “interception of communications” (read: computer hacking by police and g-men) on Friday.
They were made public on the same day that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that the spying revelations exposed by master blabbermouth Edward Snowden had accidentally made British spooks’ data-sharing love-in with the NSA legal.
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A documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has won the prestigious Directors Guild Award as best movie in the category. Laura Poitras, the director of Citizenfour, received her award at a ceremony in Los Angeles on Saturday.
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The Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill 2014-15, having been rushed through the House of Commons with alarming speed and ease, has passed its second reading in the House of Lords. It is now in the final committee stages and on course to become law within a matter of weeks.
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The unresolved fallout between the U.S. and Germany over espionage and mass surveillance has slid to the background ahead of a visit today by Chancellor Angela Merkel to Washington, according to her top aide.
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As Chancellor Merkel visits President Obama on Monday, the US sees Europe as a continent in crisis. Two experts take on the roles of Germany and the US to tease out the countries’ views on key international issues.
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Polarizing divisions will color President Barack Obama’s discussions with German Chancellor Angela Merkel when the supposedly staunch allies meet at the White House on Monday for talks expected to primarily address the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
The meeting comes after a year of lingering tensions in a relationship that, at least publicly, was tested by reports of CIA spying and National Security Agency surveillance of the phone calls of Merkel and other European leaders.
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Altegrity Inc, owner of the company that carried out background checks on former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday as it implements a restructuring deal with its lenders.
Altegrity, which owns USIS Investigations Services, listed assets and liabilities of more than $1 billion, according to court documents.
The company said some of its lenders, including funds managed by Third Avenue Management, Litespeed Management LLC and Mudrick Capital Management LP, have committed to provide $90 million in debtor-in-possession financing.
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These enhanced minimization procedures collectively represent a response to heavy criticism that Section 702 constitutes a “backdoor” that would allow the intelligence community to monitor the communications of American citizens, without a warrant, if these communications were incidentally collected as a result of surveillance on foreign persons.
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Let’s go to another room so that the telly can’t hear us! Samsung’s smart TVs don’t just respond to your spoken commands any more – they also tell unspecified third parties what you’re saying while you sit in from of them.
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Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.
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Not long ago, the sharing economy seemed to have taken over. Privacy was dead, and no one cared. But that was until revelations about government spying and worse came to light. Today, it seems just as many people are sharing…but many do so with more caution.
For some of us, the need to go truly anonymous is more important than ever. But when you go to a service online and its first three choices for signup are to use your existing Google, Facebook, or Twitter account credentials, it’s almost like a subtle background check. Other services—like Google—expect you to share a phone number and older email address—to sign up (and if not at initial signup, you’ll need them for activations later). So you’re not exactly hiding your tracks.
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The e-mail was blunt: Mark Zuckerberg had no interest in playing nice with the guy from next door.
“How do we make this go away?” a Zuckerberg adviser wrote to his real estate agent. “MZ is not going to take a meeting with him … ever.”
Now that 2013 e-mail, and others like it, are at the center of property war gone rogue. On one side is Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook Inc. On the other is the businessman from next door, a real estate developer who hoped to profit from Zuckerberg’s desire for privacy.
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Guess who’s eavesdropping on you now? It’s not some nefarious government agency (although, rest assured, there has been no downturn in surveillance). Nope, it’s that smart TV you paid good money for and invited into your home.
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The new privacy policy for Samsung’s smart TVs allows the company and its partners to listen in on everything their users say.
The policy has drawn the ire of internet users, who compared it with George Orwell’s dystopian fiction 1984.
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A Texas teenager has been fired from her job at a pizza parlor before she even started after she sent out a tweet complaining about the gig and her new boss saw it.
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Some folks have taken issue with this, going so far as to call Tor employees “government contractors.” On the one hand, this is pretty sensational talk: In much of Europe, for example, public funding of advocacy isn’t uncommon. On the other hand, there are real issues with implicitly supporting what is ultimately an imperialist agenda by taking US government funds.
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Backed by a number of tech companies, California is eyeing state legislation to protect its citizens from warrantless government surveillance of e-mails, text messages and cellphone communications. The proposed legislation is being backed by state senators Mark Leno, a Democrat, and Joel Anderson, a Republican.
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The Silk Road trial has concluded, with Ross Ulbricht found guilty of running the anonymous online marketplace for illegal goods. But questions remain over how the FBI found its way through Tor, the software that allows anonymous, untraceable use of the web, to gather the evidence against him.
The development of anonymising software such as Tor and Bitcoin has forced law enforcement to develop the expertise needed to identify those using them. But if anything, what we know about the FBI’s case suggests it was tip-offs, inside men, confessions, and Ulbricht’s own errors that were responsible for his conviction.
This is the main problem with these systems: breaking or circumventing anonymity software is hard, but it’s easy to build up evidence against an individual once you can target surveillance, and wait for them to slip up.
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A German-Arab web of companies advertises a new government spyware “made in Germany” at international surveillance industry trade shows. In a lengthy investigation, we gathered background information on companies and actors involved. It remains unclear, whether the company even has a finished product for sale, nevertheless they continue to promote the product – directly to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
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Civil Rights
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During widespread protests in New York last summer after the killing of Eric Garner by police officer Daniel Pantaleo (who was not charged in Garner’s killing), New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton had this message for protesters: “You must submit to arrest, you cannot resist …The place to argue your case is in the courts, not in the streets.”
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A 74-year-old man is dead and an officer is on administrative leave pending an investigation into the fatal shooting. Police say Officer Josh Lefevers shot and killed James Howard Allen after Allen pointed a gun at the officer in his home and refused to drop the weapon.
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It took nearly two years, but a North Carolina judge dismissed a case against a man who was arrested for drinking a can of Arizona Iced Tea in a parking lot of a liquor store.
And only because it was captured on video.
Otherwise, the cop’s word would have been treated as gospel, resulting in a conviction of trespassing and resisting arrest against Christopher Lamont Beatty, a former soldier who is also a hip hop musician known as Xstravagant.
But even despite the video evidence, prosecutors along with his own lawyer, tried to get him to agree to a plea deal where he would accept probation and community service.
In other words, they wanted him to admit to a crime he did not commit without even having the chance to be tried for that crime.
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CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who was released from a federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, last week, after serving about 23 months in jail, called for CIA case officers to be prosecuted for “flouting” the law when they tortured detainees.
In an interview for “Democracy Now!”, Kiriakou addressed the shocking details in the executive summary of the Senate intelligence committee report on the CIA’s torture program. He said he understood that President Barack Obama was not going to pursue the prosecution of CIA officials who carried out torture. Obama was not going to prosecute officers who carried out the “day-to-day torture program.” Lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department were going to get a pass too. However, there are officers, who clearly violated the law, when they carried out interrogations.
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In a broadcast exclusive interview, we spend the hour with John Kiriakou, a retired CIA agent who has just been released from prison after blowing the whistle on the George W. Bush administration’s torture program. In 2007, Kiriakou became the first CIA official to publicly confirm and detail the agency’s use of waterboarding. In January 2013, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. Under a plea deal, Kiriakou admitted to a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing the identity of a covert officer involved in the torture program to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. In return, prosecutors dropped charges brought under the Espionage Act. Kiriakou is the only official to be jailed for any reason relating to CIA torture. Supporters say he was unfairly targeted in the Obama administration’s crackdown on government whistleblowers. A father of five, Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA as an analyst and case officer, leading the team that found high-ranking al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in 2002. He joins us from his home in Virginia, where he remains under house arrest for three months while completing his sentence. In a wide-ranging interview, Kiriakou says, “I would do it all over again,” after seeing the outlawing of torture after he came forward. Kiriakou also responds to the details of the partially released Senate Committee Report on the CIA’s use of torture; argues NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did a “great national service,” but will not get a fair trial if he returns to the United States; and describes the conditions inside FCI Loretto, the federal prison where he served his sentence and saw prisoners die with “terrifying frequency” from lack of proper medical care.
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A federal judge is demanding that the government explain, photo-by-photo, why it can’t release hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pictures showing detainee abuse by U.S. forces at military prison sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a courtroom in the Southern District of New York yesterday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, which asserted that the threat of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda exploiting the images for propaganda should override the public’s right to see any of the photos.
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Are you, your family or your community at risk of turning to violent extremism? That’s the premise behind a rating system devised by the National Counterterrorism Center, according to a document marked For Official Use Only and obtained by The Intercept.
The document–and the rating system–is part of a wider strategy for Countering Violent Extremism, which calls for local community and religious leaders to work together with law enforcement and other government agencies. The White House has made this approach a centerpiece of its response to terrorist attacks around the world and in the wake of the Paris attacks, announced plans to host an international summit on Countering Violent Extremism on February 18th.
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Ethan Czahor’s tweets began disappearing today after news broke that he had been hired by Jeb Bush. A spokesperson for Bush told BuzzFeed News: “Governor Bush believes the comments were inappropriate. They have been deleted at our request. Ethan is a great talent in the tech world and we are very excited to have him on board the Right to Rise PAC.” Czahor also apologized in a tweet on Monday.
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The 9/11 trial judge abruptly recessed the first hearing in the case since August on Monday after some of the alleged Sept. 11 plotters said they recognized a war court linguist as a former secret CIA prison worker.
Alleged plot deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh, 42, made the revelation just moments into the hearing by informing the judge he had a problem with his courtroom translator. The interpreter, Bin al Shibh claimed, worked for the CIA during his 2002 through 2006 detention at a so-called “Black Site.”
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In early 2003, James Risen, an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, prepared a story about a covert CIA effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. Before publishing it, he informed the CIA of his findings and asked for comment. On April 30, 2003, according to a subsequent Justice Department court filing, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice met with Risen and Jill Abramson, then the Times’s Washington bureau chief. Tenet and Rice urged the Times to hold Risen’s story because, they said, it would “compromise national security” and endanger the life of a particular CIA recruit. (The agent is referred to in the Justice filing as “Human Asset No. 1.”) Eventually, the Times informed the CIA that it would not publish Risen’s story. Abramson said recently that she regrets the decision.
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A US defense contractor that provided interrogators to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq sought to have a federal judge dismiss a lawsuit because its employees were working under military control in wartime.
Four former inmates of the notorious prison, where horrific abuses took place during the Iraq war that damaged US credibility, have sued CACI International Inc. for torturing them ahead of interrogations.
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I do think there have been some very significant changes as a result of [our] reporting. There hasn’t been a lot of legislation passed. But I never thought that the place to look for restrictions on the power of the U.S. government would be the U.S. government itself, because human beings generally don’t walk around thinking about ways to restrict their own power.
I think the much more significant changes are the changes in consciousness that people have, not just about surveillance but about privacy, the role of government, their relationship to it, the dangers of exercising power in the dark and the role of journalism as well.
There are all kinds of ways that surveillance is now being curbed, from other governments acting in coalition to impede U.S. hegemony over the Internet to technology companies like Facebook, Yahoo and Google knowing that, unless they make a real commitment to protecting their users’ privacy, they’re going to lose a generation of users to other countries’ companies.
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It wasn’t former director Leon Panetta, who was ultimately responsible for the actions of his agency. It wasn’t any number of agents, officials or supervisors who directly or indirectly participated in the ultimately useless torture of detainees. It wasn’t the private contractors who profited from these horrendous acts committed in the name of “national security.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In the excitement following FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s announcement that he would propose Title II classification for Internet service providers, it’s important that we understand a few things. First, this is not a done deal yet, though it looks likely to pass. Second, this is only the first step in a long and arduous journey.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Since the gains for this industry are expected to be so large, and those for other industries so small, why not drop all the contentious stuff that threatens to derail the whole deal, and concentrate on cars? In any case, it would be more honest to rename the TTIP proposal as the “Atlantic Car Trade Agreement,” since that’s what it is really about. We could even call it “ACTA” for short.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
02.08.15
Posted in News Roundup at 12:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Applications
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In our connected world, the traditional UNIX privilege separation is not enough anymore. Security models are changing in order to provide a higher level of protection expected by users. We start with seccomp-bpf, a software techniques introduced in 2010 that seems to gain more and more popularity as networked application grow and expand. After a short introduction and a look at some of the software packages using seccomp-bpf, we continue with the list of the projects released during January.
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If you’re new to FreeBSD and PC-BSD, you might not yet be aware of all their package manager’s many commands. Nobody expects you to, at least not initially.
Pkg is that package manager and one of the its many commands I think you should get to know asap is the audit command. It’s used to audit installed packages against known vulnerabilities. I could be wrong, but I don’t think your favorite Linux distribution’s package manager has an equivalent command.
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Instructionals/Technical
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On a secret cloud server, with ssh key access only, I like to keep a encrypted text file with passwords that I can never remember e.g. because I seldom use some of them, and/or have too many of them.
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Games
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I’ve had a rotten time trying to update this site over the past couple days. My home network has been exceptionally flaky since Friday afternoon, and on top of that, I spent the precious little time I had yesterday testing and prodding a program, only to find when I was done writing, that I had already seen it a year ago.
[...]
That’s tornado. As I understand it, tornado is a remake of a classic C64 game called Weatherwar, with the object being to destroy your opponents house by controlling the elements. It’s a variation on the catapult game theme, since your success at tornado will depend a little on your ability to calculate the target given information on wind speeds.
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duelcommander got lumped into my “game” category but I almost hesitate to call it that. It appears to me to be more a framework for a combat system, much like you might expect in larger, more complex games.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Xfce 4.12 is running about two years behind its original schedule but there’s now a concerted effort underway to get out this lightweight GTK+ desktop environment out around the end of February or early March.
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Fluxbox 1.3.6 was released last month after this lightweight window manager went two years without a new release. It looks like the rate of development of Fluxbox is ticking back up as Fluxbox 1.3.7 was just tagged this morning.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Ever since we introduced our ideas the next version of akonadi, we’ve been working on a proof of concept implementation, but we haven’t talked a lot about it. I’d therefore like to give a short progress report.
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System Settings is a strange part of Plasma; it composes of umpteen modules gradually written over the last 15 years by a lot of different people.
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Yup, I just got bored of running Spotify on my cellphone when working on computer. Unfortunately there is no native support for Spotify on Fedora just like in Debian / Ubuntu (which are preferred distros by Spotify for Linux today).
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There are so many Linux-based operating systems nowadays, that it can be maddening to try and settle on one. For many home users, sticking with Ubuntu or Mint is probably for the best. Why? These distributions are beginner-friendly while also be powerful for experts too. In other words, you can grow with them without fear of hitting a ceiling.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition will retail for €169.90 and be sold via BQ.com through a series of flash sales.
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Canonical and BQ want to make this release memorable so they have planned a bunch of Flash Sales, available via the BQ.com official website, and will cost about 169.90 Euros (~ $193 / £127).
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The Telegram application is now ready for daily usage and has been added to the Ubuntu App Store, so that the users can install it easily. This messenger service is among the most popular ones in its category because it has good encryption and via the Telegram API, a lot of Telegram clients for Linux have been developed.
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Almost a year after Ubuntu developer Canonical joined hands with Meizu and BQ to manufacture handsets with the Linux-based OS installed on them, the company has now announced its plans to release the world’s first Ubuntu smartphone – the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition.
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Phones
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Tizen
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He was replying to a lad, telling him that they are going to help developers to port their applications from iOS and Android Monopoly to Sailfish OS and Tizen.
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Events
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The Lenovo ThinkPad T430s is now the latest laptop to be running atop Coreboot as an alternative to its proprietary UEFI/BIOS.
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BSD
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The last PC-BSD release I reviewed was PC-BSD 10.1. And that was actually just late last year. You may read that review at PC-BSD 10.1 review.
It was the worst edition of any distribution I have even reviewed.
An installation of the Cinnamon desktop, which shipped with Cinnamon 2.2, was especially bad. Out of the box, it was unusable. When PC-BSD 10.1.1 was released (on February 2 2015), I knew I had to take another look at a Cinnamon installation.
So that’s what this article is about – a cursory review of an installation of PC-BSD 10.1.1 Cinnamon.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU lightning is a library to aid in making portable programs that compile assembly code at run time.
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Pictures have emerged showing the Sochi Olympics Winter Park standing empty and neglected just a year after Russian president Vladimir Putin pumped billions into the venue.
Many of the custom built stadiums, which cost an estimated $51 billion in total, now appear deserted and unused.
The companies that maintain the facilities are reportedly struggling to stay afloat as tourist numbers plummet.
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The Deputy Prime Minister is found to be trailing Labour by 10 points in his Sheffield Hallam constituency, according to a survey for the trade union Unite.
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Health/Nutrition
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Is the Central Intelligence Agency partially culpable for bringing crack cocaine to US streets, especially to the black neighborhoods of South Central, Los Angeles, and hence supporting its spread like an epidemic among the forgotten children of the “American Dream”? Yes it is, perhaps to the surprise of younger generations; and Kill The Messenger, a film released in November 2014, reminds us of this.
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Security
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Britain’s security services have acknowledged they have the worldwide capability to bypass the growing use of encryption by internet companies by attacking the computers themselves.
The Home Office release of the innocuously sounding “draft equipment interference code of practice” on Friday put into the public domain the rules and safeguards surrounding the use of computer hacking outside the UK by the security services for the first time.
The publication of the draft code follows David Cameron’s speech last month in which he pledged to break into encryption and ensure there was no “safe space” for terrorists or serious criminals which could not be monitored online by the security services with a ministerial warrant, effectively spelling out how it might be done.
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The Obama administration has accused North Korea of hacking Sony in retaliation for “The Interview,” a goofball comedy about assassinating the country’s real-life leader, but the case may be another politicized rush to judgment by the U.S. government, writes James DiEugenio.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The government of Niger claims it killed over 100 fighters from Islamic militant group Boko Haram when the fighters attacked within the borders of the country for the first time.
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President John F. Kennedy increased U.S. involvement, and the CIA encouraged the assassination of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, which led to a succession of unstable and short-lived juntas.
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Baines Johnson embarked upon the massive escalation that would bring us the Vietnam War as we came to know it and that would bring an end to his presidency.
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So Barack Obama has killed at least 2,500 in drone strikes during the six years of his presidency, not including those killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Spanish Inquisition reportedly killed 2,250 over 350 years. For comparative purposes, I would note, as I reported here at PJ Media last month, that Boko Haram reportedly killed 2,000 over several days in a massacre in Northern Nigeria.
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Nothing good so far has come out of all the high-level meetings in Kiev and Moscow. US-NATO continue to threaten Russia with more and wider war in Ukraine. Russia is basically told they have to accept the US-NATO backed onslaught in eastern Ukraine. Russia must stop supporting eastern self-defense forces or expect even more of the west’s Strategy of Tension.
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A Green Beret officer who was stripped of a prestigious valor award and dropped from the Special Forces fell out of favor with Army officials after the CIA shared information it gathered about him while he was going through screening for a potential job, according to officials familiar with the case.
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If a decision is made to honor Poroshenko’s request for aid in the escalating conflict in Ukraine, action will not be taken right away. An anonymous official said that a public effort to arm Poroshenko’s troops could cause tension between the United States and its allies in NATO and the EU. The official also said that it would take time to decide what to send. In the past, the government has sent Soviet-made weapons from a CIA warehouse in North Carolina. The official said that this could be a viable option in this case, if the United States decides to offer support.
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These were largely courtesy of the CIA, which reportedly devised no fewer than 638 plots to kill him, ranging from your typical poisoned handkerchief scheme to fungus-infected diving suits and exploding molluscs.
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While watching the film, I kept waiting for something to be said or even suggested, about the deeper reason our military was in Iraq other than the film’s repetitive message: “They are the bad guys and we are the good guys.”
I kept hoping to at least see a Chevron Oil rig burning in the distance.
One scene was quite effective in portraying even the women and children as evil, showing a veiled mother and child in an almost Madonna and child way, beautiful but evil and carrying a grenade. The message here was that all Iraqis were evil, men, women and children, and all of the American troops there were the good guys.
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Obama and Washington had a very different response to the March 2013 death of Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela who used his nation’s also remarkable oil wealth to reduce poverty and inequality in his nation. Chavez won respect and even adoration from much of his nation’s citizenry, including especially the poor, even as he offered remarkable tolerance and freedom to wealthy elites who hated him and his egalitarian agenda.
Surely, then, the president of the world’s self-proclaimed greatest democracy, the United States, reacted to Chavez’s death with words of sympathy and respect that went beyond the reverence and compassion he expressed for the deceased king of an absolutist, arch-repressive, and ultra-reactionary dictatorship, right? Hardly. The White House responded with the following dismissive and disrespectful statement: “At Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history, the United States remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights” – a commitment that finds curious expression in Washington’s longstanding support for the Saudi dictatorship.
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The brouhaha about possible Saudi Arabian funding of Al Qaeda in the run-up to the September 11, 2001, attacks is being fueled from two directions. It is being pushed by Zacarias Moussaoui, sometimes called the “twentieth hijacker,” now serving a life sentence in a federal supermax penitentiary. There are also allegations of Saudi funding in a congressional report on 9/11, a portion of which has not been released. That Saudi Arabia or its royal family were complicit in an attack on New York and Washington is completely implausible. The Saudi ruling class long ago decided that they would trade foreign policy independence for an American security umbrella, given that they preside over a small country with enormous petroleum wealth and resources, and could not protect themselves from external threats. Moreover, they are heavily invested in the New York stock market, and took an enormous bath on September 12 and after, as the latter suddenly lost half its value. The whole idea is a nonstarter.
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A CIA leak and the a reading of the 28 pages by two US senators had revealed that there was enough evidence to show the involvement of the Saudis in the attack. A CIA leaked memo had gone on to show that it was not the Al-Qaeda or the Taliban that carried out this attack, but it was Saudi Arabia.
Further the memo also went on to read that wealthy Saudis, diplomats and intelligence officials employed by the Saudi Royal family had helped the hijackers with both logistics and finances.
The pages which had been blacked out by the Bush administration suggest that the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles had facilitated the arrival of two hijakers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in 2000.
A Saudi intelligence official named Osama Bassnan and a spy Omar Bayoumi established a base in San Diego which housed the hijackers. This was the same place where al Qaeda cleric Ankar Al-Awlaki met with the hijackers.
[...]
Some of the pages even indicate that a huge amount of money had been sent to the hijackers. Specific information suggests the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar had sent $130,000 to Saudi intelligence agent Osama Bassnan.
Although Prince Bandar had claimed that this money was a donation made to Bassnan who had an ailing wife, the US had managed to track that this money had infact reached the hijackers. There was also a trail that Prince Bandar had paid for the establishment of an Islamic Centre in Virgina which was incidentally close to the Pentagon.
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Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called ‘20th hijacker’ in the 9/11 plot, has alleged that Saudi diplomat discussed plans to shoot down Air Force One
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A convicted al-Qaeda operative has claimed that members of the terrorist network received extensive financial support from members of the Saudi royal family throughout the late 1990′s and into 2000, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
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There is a coup underway in Venezuela. The pieces are all falling into place like a bad CIA movie.
At every turn, a new traitor is revealed, a betrayal is born, full of promises to reveal the smoking gun that will justify the unjustifiable. Infiltrations are rampant, rumours spread like wildfire, and the panic mentality threatens to overcome logic.
Headlines scream danger, crisis and imminent demise, while the usual suspects declare covert war on a people whose only crime is being gatekeeper to the largest pot of black gold in the world.
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The fallout in Argentina from the mysterious death of a prosecutor in January has exposed to the public a power struggle at the highest levels of the state.
On February 1, a Buenos Aires newspaper reported that prosecutor Alberto Nisman—who was found dead on January 18 with a suspicious gunshot wound to the head—had prepared draft warrants for the arrest of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Foreign Minister Hector Timmerman, and Congressman Andres Larroque preceding his death.
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The founder of Stratfor, the “private CIA” firm, says that the overthrow of Viktor Yanokovych in Ukraine in February 2014 was “the most blatant coup in history.” The President of the Czech Republic contrasts that coup versus Czechoslovakia’s authentically democratic 1968 “Velvet Revolution,” and he says that “only poorly informed people” don’t know that the governmental overthrow in Ukraine in 2014 was a coup. America’s liberals, then, are indeed poorly informed, and they are so partly because they don’t want to know the truth about Obama; America’s conservatives, by contrast, simply hate Obama, merely because he’s a black Democratic politician (and any President who has been so good to Wall Street would be loved by them if he were a white Republican); they don’t mind (and they actually support) that Obama hates Russia and institutes an ethnic cleansing campaign in his aggressive war against Russia. Whereas conservatives don’t mind Obama’s ethnic-cleansing campaign to get rid of pro-Russians in Ukraine, liberals don’t want to know about it. The result is actually conservatives reigning in both Parties, not just in one: we now have one-party government, in all but name.
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Clashes took place in Benghazi where pro-government forces led by CIA-linked General Khalifa Haftar have been trying to retake the city from an umbrella group of Islamist militias opposed to the Tobruk governent.
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The cowardly NATO assassinations of Hezbollah’s top commander Imad Mughniyeh (2008) and his son Jihad Mughniyeh (2015) which both took place outside any battlefield, highlights the criminal nature of colonial militarism which does not recognize ‘military rules of engagement’ because it has never had any legal grounds for being in the Middle East.
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In 2008, Lebanese terrorist overlord Imad Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria. Twisted metal wreckage was all that remained of his Mitsubishi Pajero. And according to a report from the Washington Post, the CIA built and tested the entire system at a secret facility, somewhere in North Carolina.
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NBC’s new show Allegiance, debuting tomorrow night, starts out with a scene of a man being burned alive, which appears to be a case of very unfortunate timing, given what’s been in the news this week.
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When word recently leaked that the CIA inspector general was preparing to step down, agency Director John Brennan issued a glowing statement about his watchdog’s work.
Left unsaid was the role CIA Inspector General David Buckley had in refereeing one of the most acrimonious disputes between a spy director and his congressional overseers in decades.
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A member of the panel that investigated JFK’s death now worries he was a victim of a “massive cover-up.”
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Lee Harvey Oswald may have been part of a conspiracy, according to investigative reporter Philip Shenon, whose book “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination,” has just been issued in paperback.
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However, David Slawson was a young lawyer who became a part of the Warren Commission in January, 1964. He is now 83-years of age. The retired law professor now believes that he and the other members of the commission victims of a ‘massive cover-up.’
Slawson’s individual assignment within the Warren Commission was to investigate whether there was any involvement from a foreign nation in the assassination of President Kennedy. Until last year, he was certain that his reported findings were accurate. Recently he discovered that the CIA and other agencies withheld large amounts of information from his investigation. He has now determined that others were aware of Oswald’s plans before the shooting occurred. With the definition of ‘conspiracy,’ when at least two people conspire to commit a wrongful act, Slawson now is certain that a conspiracy did exist.
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A former CIA contractor says since the Ukrainian forces are using cluster bombs and illegal weapons against civilians, Washington’s decision to provide Kiev with further lethal aid does not make any difference.
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A series of recent setbacks underlines this point. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has quietly withdrawn from strike missions in Syria, with questions emerging about how far any country other than the US is now operating over it.
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It’s no secret that the mid-20th century was a dirty time for U.S. intelligence agencies. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was waging personal wars through the government, infiltrating social movements and encouraging civil rights leaders to commit suicide. The CIA was working with the Mafia to assassinate foreign leaders, and had gotten into the business of overthrowing foreign governments, leaving a trail of fractured regimes through Africa and the Middle East.
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In most countries controlled by the Emperor the most important “asset” are the military.
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Kadyrov also suggested the West was backing IS in order to distract public attention from numerous problems in the Middle East, in the hope of destroying Islamic nations from inside.
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Transparency Reporting
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Risen has published many important stories, and two books, about secret and often illegal practices at the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA. I’ve heard many Lovejoy addresses, but rarely has there been a statement as startling as Risen’s assertion, in response to a question, that President Obama “hates the press.”
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Americans tend to believe in government that is transparent and accountable.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It was the Newman government’s great hope for Queensland’s economy: a proposal for Australia’s biggest coal development, unprecedented in scale.
Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s mammoth Carmichael mine, in central Queensland, is pledged to bring with it 10,000 jobs and $22 billion in taxes and royalties.
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Some North Dakota companies have shut down 40 percent of their operations as plummeting oil prices render their industry far less economic than it became during the boom of the past five years.
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Finance
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Rashia Wilson bought a $92,000 Audi, proclaimed herself a millionaire, and announced on her Facebook page that she was “the queen of IRS tax fraud,” as prosecutors told the story.
But even more than her flamboyance, it was the seeming ease of her crime that was most stunning: She and an accomplice were alleged to have hijacked the identities of other taxpayers to get fraudulent refunds. They used stolen Social Security numbers, a computer, and basic knowledge of how to file a tax return, according to the government.
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With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy.
Mrs. Clinton has not had to wade into domestic policy since before she became secretary of state in 2009, and she has spent the past few months engaged in policy discussions with economists on the left and closer to the Democratic Party’s center who are grappling with the discontent set off by the gap between rich and poor. Sorting through the often divergent advice to develop an economic plan could affect the timing and planning of the official announcement of her campaign.
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Business tycoon and former Fidesz insider Lajos Simicska, speaking out as the key editors of his media group resigned, apparently in protest against Simicska’s threat to launch a “media war” against Orbán’s government.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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William Colby, ex-director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a man who should know Western media: “The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Not long after becoming a whistle-blower Colby died in a freak canoeing accident.
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Not only did Williams lie just one time about the incident, he’d done it numerous times over the years.
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Further scrutiny of NBC News anchor Brian Williams’ other past statements began to surface Friday when the New Orleans Advocate reported that the newsman’s account of his experience covering Hurricane Katrina may not be entirely accurate.
In a 2006 interview with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Williams said he witnessed a body floating in the French Quarter area of the city. “When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country,” Williams told Eisner, who suggested in the interview that Williams emerged from former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw’s shadow with his Katrina coverage.
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But the caustic media big shots who once roamed the land were gone, and “there was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top,” as one NBC News reporter put it.
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You don’t have to be North Korean to be annoyed by this film.
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There’s a whole host of people that’ll tell you that comedy can’t be insulting – by its very nature, it’s a joke, therefore it’s not an insult. What they forget is, if it’s not funny, it’s just sort of sad and offensive.
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As the South Korean government, which has executed hundreds of thousands of leftists and suspected leftists, now bans the Unified Progressive Party (UPP), which got 10% of the vote in the last election, so too the U.S. imperialists are ratcheting up their economic sanctions and cyber attacks on North Korea. They are doing this partially on unsubstantiated accusations of terrorist threats flowing from the idiotic movie “The Interview”.
Korea was divided by the U.S. imperialists after WW II who imposed a far right capitalist dictatorship on South Korea that carried out mass executions of hundreds of thousands of leftists and suspected leftists. While in the south the new government employed the torturers and murderers of the Japanese occupation, in the north a new government was born out of the leadership that fought against Japanese occupation. Through social revolution they established a planned socialist economy that greatly benefitted the working class. In the 1950s the United States sent troops to Korea and carried out a brutal war against the Korean people in an attempt to destroy the social revolution in the north and protect the brutal capitalist dictatorship in the south. In that war, conservative estimates are that the U.S. murdered 3,000,000 people. North Koreans, perhaps more accurately, estimate 5,000,000 people.
Korea is one country and discussion of reunification is popular. Leninist -Trotskyists also call for Korean reunification, but only through a social revolution in the South. Kim Il Sung’s illusions in a peaceful reunification after the imperialists murdered 5,000,000 people is a deadly pipe dream. The only reunification the imperialists and the capitalist government in the South will agree to is one that annexes the north and destroys the gains of the North Korean Revolution, much as was done to East Germany. For any useful reunification to occur, the brutally repressive capitalist state of South Korea must be smashed in a proletarian socialist revolution. In addition, the highly deformed Stalinist government in the DPRK that promotes these kinds of deadly illusions really needs to be swept away in a political revolution as well. That is a revolution that overthrows the Stalinist bureaucracy and establishes workers democracy and an internationalist revolutionary program, while at the same time maintaining the social gains of the revolution including the socialist planned economy, socialist food distribution, free education to higher grade levels than the South, and guaranteed free socialized healthcare.
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JAMES FRANCO and Seth Rogen reteam for this infamous comedy romp that’s finally released after generating global headlines for all the wrong reasons.
[...]
VERDICT: An abomination of a comedy, pitched to the lowest common denominator, with some seriously questionable intent to boot.
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Censorship
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Last week, students at Goldsmiths College in London banned a performance by the fantastic feminist comedian Kate Smurthwaite in an act of neurotic prudery that bordered on the insane. Her show was on freedom of speech – yes, yes, I know. She told me that Goldsmiths did not close it because of what she had planned to say, but because she had once said that the police should arrest men who go with prostitutes and that she was against patriarchal clerics forcing women to wear the burqa. In the demonology of campus politics, these were not legitimate opinions that could be contested in robust debate. They marked her as a “whoreophobe” and “Islamophobe”, who must be silenced.
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Online magazine Spiked has published a ranking of the attitudes of British universities towards free speech, placing Oxford in the “red” category. The website states that universities in this category, the “most censorious” one, have “banned and actively censored ideas on campus”.
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Spiked’s Free Speech University Rankings, which launched this week, shows that many of the day-to-day restrictions on campus free speech emanate not from universities but rather from students themselves. This free-speech league table came out in the same week as a debate about the impact of the government’s proposed anti-terror legislation on higher education really took off. Vice chancellors have taken to the airwaves, started petitions, and penned letters to national newspapers in defence of academic freedom. It would be easy to get the impression that students have created an environment in which banning things on a whim is the new normal, while academics look on in horror and champion the cause of free speech.
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This isn’t about your photos or public messages violating Facebook’s own rules, like posting pornography. This is Facebook (FB, Tech30) acting as a government censor on that country’s behalf.
It’s worst in India, Turkey and Pakistan, where thousands of pages and photos get pulled down every year for “blasphemy,” criticizing the government or posting something that’s religiously offensive.
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Mihir Joshi, an Indian musician recording his first album last year, needed a word to rhyme with today in one of his songs and found one that he thought fit perfectly. But India’s Central Board of Film Certification disagreed, and replaced it with a beep when the music video debuted on TV over the weekend.
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“As a correspondent, I just shared a piece of news that was true with my followers. Sharing this kind of news with people is my job,” Yazıcı said. Her colleague, Taraf’s political editor Dicle Baştürk, received a similar notification and did not delete her tweet. She says it’s still visible. Days later, Baştürk received another email from Twitter informing her that the company may still have to remove it.
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Dennis Toeppen, the owner of the Illinois bus company Suburban Express, has become something of a legend for the way he manages his company’s reputation online and deals with customers who fail to play by his rules. Still facing a trial in Lake County for misdemeanor charges of electronic harassment, Toeppen has continued to police reviews of Suburban Express on Yelp and other services, using his company’s website as a way to call out those who he believes have wronged him. From his perspective, this is just digital self-defense; from the perspective of his targets, it’s Internet intimidation and an attempt to damage the reputations of anyone who complains about how Toeppen does business.
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The US Department of Defense has been given a week to explain why it has not yet complied with a federal court order to list the individual exemptions for the disclosure of over 2,000 photographs depicting military abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Privacy
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Appear in a photo taken at a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic, and your friends might recognize you. But a machine probably won’t—at least for now. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you, has trained on dozens of photos of your face, and has high-quality images to examine, your anonymity is safe. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for doing all that is beginning to blossom.
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The Obama administration requested $53.9 billion for its spy agencies in the year beginning Oct. 1, up sharply from its request of $45.6 billion last year.
The money would be used to fund operations spread across six federal departments, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
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In 1991, Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N.Y.) introduced The End the Cold War Act that would have abolished the Central Intelligence Agency and transferred all of its functions to the Department of State. The Act declared that “the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency as a separate entity during the Cold War undermined the role of the Department of State as the primary agency of the United States Government formulating and conducting foreign policy and providing information to the President concerning the state of world affairs.”
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The German magazine Focus says Britain has threatened to cease cooperation with Germany’s BND intelligence service. The BND in turn has been accused by a Berlin inquiry panel of withholding documents.
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Germany’s Parliament is getting ready to review the NSA with a Parliamentary inquiry. Both Britain and the U.S. are threatening to discontinue sharing intelligence with Germany as a result. This ‘threat’ has not been verified. However, with tensions as they are and a crisis meeting to discuss intelligence in Germany’s intelligence sharing, the threat may be genuine.
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This shouldn’t come as much of a shock, but your Smart TV is probably spying on you. This doesn’t mean it is out to do something malicious or that the machine has become self-aware, but it does mean that advertisers and third parties have another route to figure out how to reach you.
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Director Johanna Hamilton talks about her latest documentary, “1971.” On March 8, 1971, The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, as they called themselves, broke into a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, took every file, and shared them with the American public. These actions exposed COINTELPRO, the FBI’s illegal surveillance program that involved the intimidation of law-abiding Americans and helped lead to the country’s first Congressional investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies. Never caught, forty-three years later, these everyday Americans – parents, teachers and citizens – publicly reveal themselves for the first time and share their story in this documentary. Hamilton is joined by two members of The Citizens’ Commission, Bonnie Raines and John Raines. The film opens at Cinema Village February 6.
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For more than 18 months the response from the security services to the disclosure by Edward Snowden of the mass harvesting of personal data of British citizens has been to say: “Trust us, nothing we are doing is unlawful.”
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Civil Rights
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Yesterday, an important committee in the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill to take action against federal indefinite detention powers. The unanimous tally was 20-0.
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A bill introduced in the Washington state legislature would prohibit the state from assisting the federal government in the indefinite detention without due process under provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) or any other federal acts purporting to authorize such powers.
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A bill up for consideration in the Mississippi Senate would prohibit the state from assisting the federal government in the indefinite detention without due process under provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), or any other federal acts purporting to authorize such powers.
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The United Kingdom’s costs for its embassy “siege” against Julian Assange, who has not been charged with an offence, has hit 10 million pounds, Scotland Yard confirmed today.
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We’re all braced for another grotesque video clip from the fundamentalist nutters of the so-called Islamic State, because they’ve released a primer on the likely beheading of two Japanese hostages – unless Tokyo will hand over a $US200 million ransom in the coming days.
IS’s video production values are sickeningly creepy – the prisoners in orange jumpsuits; their would-be executioner in black, wielding a knife and spewing bile.
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The real breeding ground for extremism stems from the treatment of immigrant groups within Europe. Racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination have driven a generation of young migrants to radical movements as a solution to an absence of job prospects, poor education, deteriorated neighborhoods, lack of respect, and repeated bouts in jail. Ironically, the crackdown on these communities in the aftermath of the attacks could potentially escalate the problem.
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So, what if I told you that an internationally known American – a 75-year-old Army veteran and a longtime official at the Central Intelligence Agency, someone who had famously questioned the imperious Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about his Iraq War lies in a public event that led evening newscasts in 2006 – was recently denied entry to a public speech by another Iraq War icon, Gen. David Petraeus, and – despite having paid for a ticket – was brutally arrested by the police and jailed?
Wouldn’t that be a story? Wouldn’t that be something that the news media, especially the “liberal” news media, should jump all over? Wouldn’t a newspaper like the New York Times just love something like that?
But what if I told you that the New York Times wasn’t interested at all? You might think that perhaps the event occurred in some distant hamlet, maybe a small college town where there wasn’t much media, so it just fell through the cracks.
Yet, this story actually played out in New York City, the media capital of the world, on the Upper East Side at the 92nd Street Y in full view of hundreds of New Yorkers on the night of Oct. 30, 2014. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern was roughly arrested, with the police ignoring his howls of pain as they pulled his arms behind his back. (McGovern had recently suffered a painful shoulder injury from a fall.}
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CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who has been serving a prison sentence at the federal correctional institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania, has written a letter reporting that a correctional officer committed suicide in January. How the prison officials handled the death stood in stark contrast to the treatment prisoners experience when an inmate dies or an inmate needs to go to a funeral for an immediate family member.
For much of Kiriakou’s prison sentence, Firedoglake has published his “Letters from Loretto.” He was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under President George W. Bush’s administration. In October 2012, he pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) when he confirmed the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter. He was sentenced in January 2013 and reported to prison on February 28, 2013.
Kiriakou writes in the letter dated January 22, 2015, that he did not know the officer or ever “have any contact with him,” however, it is his understanding that the man was a “nice guy,” someone “friendly, reasonable and honest.” He feels very sorry for his family, but the response from staff was “fascinating.”
As a CIA officer, when he lost a colleague, a star would go up on the agency’s Wall of Honor. Everyone would move on. That is not how the prison chose to handle the death.
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John Kiriakou was the first whistleblower to reveal that torture was the official policy of the the Goerge W. Bush Administration.
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“I knew I was not guilty, and my attorneys knew I was not guilty, but a jury would convict a ham sandwich given a chance,” he said.
The government pursued the prosecution on the leak because of the 2007 television interviews, he said.
“I’ve maintained from the very beginning, as did my attorneys, that my case was not about a leak. My case was about torture,” he said.
A Justice Department spokesman said Kiriakou has made the whistleblower retaliation claim since he was indicted.
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It is a scandal stretching across six decades: the forced removal of hundreds of native people from a British overseas territory to make way for a US military base. That Diego Garcia, the main island in the Chagos archipelago – seven atolls in the Indian Ocean – has played a part in the CIA’s torture programme has only added to Britain’s sense of shame.
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The United Nations, which is the legal guardian of scores of human rights treaties banning torture, unlawful imprisonment, degrading treatment of prisoners of war and enforced disappearances, is troubled that an increasing number of countries are justifying violations of UN conventions on grounds of fighting terrorism in conflict zones.
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The ex-CIA officer who first blew the whistle on the agency’s waterboarding practice says the 30-month prison sentence he got for revealing classified information was “worth it.”
“It’s been a terrible three years, and it’s ruined me financially and personally, but in the greater picture it’s all been worth it,” John Kiriakou told Fusion over the phone from Arlington, Virginia, where he just began serving an 85-day house arrest sentence. It was his first interview since leaving a federal prison in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
“I’m proud I had a role in seeing that torture is now banned in the United States,” he said.
For now, he’s only able to leave his home to go to a halfway house or to church, so Kiriakou, 50, is struggling to wrap his head around everything that happened while he was behind bars—namely the release of the Senate’s torture report less than two months ago.
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The Obama Administration is pledging that it won’t destroy or return copies of the full-length Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA detention and interrogation practices without permission from the federal courts.
In a court filing Friday night, the Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge James Boasberg not to grant an American Civil Liberties Union motion seeking to block the government from returning the unabridged versions of the so-called torture report to the Senate as new Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has requested.
However, Justice Department lawyers agreed not to send the report back to the Hill while the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit is pending, unless they seek Boasberg’s okay to do so.
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When conservative Christians claim that the Bible God condones torture, they’re not making it up. A close look at the good book reveals why so many Christians past and present have adopted an Iron Age attitude toward brutality.
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When the hijacked airplanes hit the World Trade Towers on 9/11, John Yoo was working in his Justice Department office in Washington, D.C. At the time, he was assigned to one of the most crucial legal departments in the federal government, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Although he was an important lawyer in the administration of President Bush, Yoo himself was not well known outside of a close circle of Washington bureaucrats and policy wonks. He wasn’t famous. But all of that would change very quickly.
Yoo had taken a leave of absence from Berkeley Law School to work for the Bush administration. His academic work had focused on constitutional law and foreign affairs, and he had earned a reputation for being a strong supporter of presidential war powers. According to Yoo, the president of the United States has virtually unlimited power as the constitutionally appointed commander in chief of the armed forces. Although Congress can play some role in times of war, Yoo had insisted in a series of law review articles that this role was secondary at best. In times of crisis, presidential power always trumps congressional deliberation.
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Everybody gets upset by the anti-democratic acts, the shelving of the Constitution, the non-compliance with judicial decisions and the pressure on the business world, civil society and opposition parties.
Maybe we should just be sad about people who, after being humiliated in the past and imprisoned for exercising fundamental rights, embraced democratic reforms and standards, only to abandon this democratic stance. Maybe we should be just sad about a person or a group of people who have been against a single-party regime for many years but have started to implement one. We should be sad about people who, after arguing that they would subscribe to religious and ethical principles, violated all ethical rules and considerations once they acquired power.
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An 8-year-old boy in Nice, a small city on France’s Mediterranean coast near Italy, was hauled out of school to the police station. The boy’s father was called, television crews were summoned and headlines blared about the boy allegedly not respecting the minute of silence for Charlie Hebdo victims. An atmosphere of frenzied overreaction was created. (TV2, Jan. 28)
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The US leadership role in the world is undermined by political dysfunction and polarization in the country, the US National Security Strategy released on Friday stated.
[...]
A CIA torture report released in December detailed a wide range of practices used by the agency, including waterboarding, mock executions, prolonged sleep deprivation and threats of sexual abuse in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
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Last year, government lawyers made inquires into allegations that CIA personnel and Senate Intelligence Committee staffers broke federal laws in connection with the committee’s work on the Senate torture report. But the Department of Justice has classified dozens of pages of documents related to that investigation.
[...]
VICE News filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for those criminal referrals as well as all documents that “refer” to it. In a letter dated January 26, the Justice Department’s National Security Division said it identified about 85 pages — and that it was withholding all but two pages on grounds that disclosure would threaten national security, result in an unwarranted invasion of privacy, and reveal behind-the-scenes deliberations.
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Many in Congress and the news media were surprised by a recent CIA Accountability Board report that cleared CIA personnel of wrongdoing in last year’s spying-on-Congress scandal, a finding that contradicted a July 2014 report by the CIA Inspector General. However, a close reading of both reports — which were released in unclassified form last month — indicates that the fault in this affair lies almost entirely with the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose staff appeared to have engaged in serious misconduct, including trying to smuggle a camera into a secure CIA facility, hacking into a CIA computer system, and stealing and misusing classified documents subject to attorney-client privilege.
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Mr Krongard was Executive Director of the CIA from 2001 to 2004 and a former chairman of Alex. Brown and Sons, a Baltimore investment bank.
After being recruited, Hale says he helped run a fake company created under a legitimate corporation the Agency created.
The fake company included shipping and trucking companies which Hale ran whilst leading the bank.
Hale travelled extensively to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Poland, Denmark, and Norway. This was in order to provide cover to operatives supposedly working for the company.
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“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived,” wrote Maya Angelou, “but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” We call on U.S. Sen. Richard Burr to stop trying to unlive our nation’s ugly torture program, and face it with courage.
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Last Saturday, January 31, CIA Inspector General David Buckley resigned after a little more than four years in office. His departure came at the end of the same month his office published a scathing report that found the agency committed serious wrongdoings in connection to its rendition, detention, and torture program. It was also the same month that his report was swept aside by a parallel investigation conducted by a CIA “Accountability Board” that was hand-picked by agency leadership. Unsurprisingly, the Accountability Board recommended holding no one accountable for any failings.
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Winston-Salem’s own Sen. Richard Burr is at the center of an epic struggle over whether we will be allowed to know the truth about the taxpayer-funded torture that stains our nation’s soul. He has taken an astonishing action that appears at odds with both law and morality.
Sen. Burr, now chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently wrote to the White House insisting that all copies of his committee’s 6,900-page report on CIA torture be “returned immediately.” The report had been distributed to many agencies and departments within the executive branch, and the idea of its being totally wrapped in secrecy again is ludicrous.
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The FAIR study reviewed the guests of several popular news shows in the week when the report was most prominently discussed. The surveyed programs included the five Sunday talk shows (NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, ABC’s This Week, Fox News Sunday, and CNN’s State of the Union) along with four weekday news shows (MSNBC’s Hardball, Fox’s Special Report, CNN’s Situation Room, and the PBS NewsHour).
[...]
Only 18 guests articulated clear opposition to the CIA’s torture practices. That’s just half the number who spoke up in support.
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British prime minister David Cameron has hinted that UK will launch an investigation by an independent inquiry into the country’s involvement in CIA torture.
The Intelligence Security Committee (ISC) is already investigating whether British officials were complicit in torture overseas.
Revelations were made recently that British overseas territory of Diego Garcia had been used to interrogate terrorist suspects.
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He also has expressed concern at the “disproportionate” number of young black Americans who die in encounters with police officers and the high rate of blacks in U.S. prisons and on death row.
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The article continues with a condemnation of a petition from Nobel Peace Prize winners Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Mairead Corrigan Maguire, with 129 other signatories, which criticized HRW for having “close ties to the U.S. government which call into question its independence.” There has been plenty of mudslinging back and forth about this, but in essence, the authors of the petition contend that Human Rights Watch employs too many former American officials, including veterans of the CIA and a former NATO Secretary General, thus compromising the independence of the group. They think this influence causes Human Rights Watch to go easy on American violations.
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According to Wikidpedia, “An expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of the person’s upbringing. The word comes from the Latin terms ex (“out of”) and patria (“country, fatherland”).”
Defined that way, you should expect any person going to work outside of his or her country for a period of time would be an expat regardless of his skin color, country, etc.
That is not the case in reality: expat is a term reserved exclusively for western White people going to work abroad.
Africans are immigrants.
Arabs are immigrants.
Asians are immigrants.
However Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for inferior races.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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After waffling for months on the question of Net neutrality, who would have guessed that former telecom lobbyist Tom Wheeler would argue such a strong case for reclassifying broadband as a Title II common carrier? Though the FCC steered clear of onerous regulation, the reaction from telecoms has been largely a howl of distress.
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There’s been plenty of propaganda concerning the net neutrality fight, but with FCC boss Tom Wheeler finally making it official that the FCC is going to move to reclassify broadband, it’s kicked into high gear of ridiculousness. An astroturfing front group that’s anti-net neutrality is trying to make a “viral” anti-net neutrality video, and it did so in the most bizarre way, by making an attempted parody porno video, based on the classic “cable guy” porno trope.
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DRM
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A year ago, the largest video site on the net ditching Flash would have been a blow for Internet freedom. Today, it’s a bitter reminder of how the three big commercial browser vendors—Apple, Microsoft and Google—Netflix, the BBC, and the World Wide Web Consortium sold the whole Internet out.
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Send this to a friend
02.07.15
Posted in News Roundup at 8:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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The upcoming PapyrOS is trying to build an entirely new Linux distro (based on Arch Linux) which will have Android 5.0′s now famous material-design inspired look and feel.
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Server
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Oracle puts its official mark on Oracle Linux and MySQL images on the Docker Hub registry.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has released stable kernels 3.10.68, 3.14.32, and 3.18.6, each with important fixes and updates throughout the tree.
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Graphics Stack
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While all exciting work going into Mesa Git is for Mesa 10.5, Mesa 10.4.4 is out for stable users sticking to tagged releases. Mesa 10.4.4 fixes just a handful of bugs rangingg from core Mesa to the i965 driver and DRI3.
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A set of fourteen patches were published today for the Intel Mesa DRI driver for implementing glMemoryBarrier() as needed by OpenGL 4.2 and newer.
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Benchmarks
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As the latest Linux benchmark numbers to deliver for Intel Broadwell and the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon ultrabook, here’s a nine-way Linux laptop/ultrabook comparison. All nine devices in this article were tested against the latest snapshot of Ubuntu 15.04 while running a big set of benchmarks and also monitoring the CPU temperatures and battery power consumption while testing for a nice look at Clarksfield/Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell mobile hardware on Linux.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wireless printing has made it possible to print to devices stored in cupboards, sheds and remote rooms. It has generally shaken up the whole process of printing and enabled output from smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers alike. But you don’t have to own a shiny new printer for this to work; old printers without native wireless support don’t have to end up in the bin, thanks to the Raspberry Pi.
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine (Wine is not an emulator) 1.7.36 is now out and comes with quite a few improvements and new features, not to mention the fixes for various applications and games that have been added.
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Wine 1.7.36 has been released and it brings a few new features while correcting 44 outstanding bugs over the past two weeks.
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Wine development team was able to produce a new experimental release today. 1.7.36 bringing many new features and as many as 44 bugfixes.
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Games
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Feral Interactive, a game publisher and developer that historically focused on bringing AAA games to Mac OS X, is now looking to do more Linux game ports.
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While LZHAM 1.0 was recently released, the former Valve engineer behind the compression library targeting game assets, Rich Geldreich, is already targeting more post-1.0 improvements to this library.
Rich Geldreich blogged today about some upcoming LZHAM decompressor optimizations that improve the speed by up to around 2%, which can become significant when dealing with game assets of several gigabytes.
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Feral Interactive are looking to expand their team to help out with the Linux (and Mac) porting, so this could be a great opportunity for a few of you. Feral are responsible for the excellent Linux ports of XCOM Enemy Unknown and Empire: Total War.
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Apotheon is an indie game based on the concept of taking the ancient Greek mythological pottery art-style and story; incorporating it with a 2D metroidvania (platform adventure), heavy physics driven, open world. Wow, what a mouthful description. I hope I didn’t butcher it because it’s one hell of an adventure I want to embark on!
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Red Goddess, an upcoming platformer projected for release this month, now has a new trailer showing off some more action as well as introducing the plot of the game.
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Deadnaut is Screwfly Studios’ second game and follow up to cult hit, Zafehouse: Diaries. Deadnauts, so named because they’re unlikely to return, must explore, investigate and fight their way through the derelict ships of dead civilisations. Every mission is unique and no two locations are the same.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.5.4
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Linux Questions — the place you go where you really need a Linux or FOSS question answered because, well, most of the smart FOSS folks are there answering them — released the results of its Members Choice Awards for 2015.
So when the membership of LQ speaks — or at least votes on FOSS programs — you should probably listen. Don’t take my word for it: Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols thinks so, too.
There were some expected results: For example, LibreOffice wins the Office Suite category by a ton, garnering 86 percent of the vote. To break this down, that’s nearly 9 in 10 folks favoring LibreOffice to the second-place finisher, Apache OpenOffice, and the others.
Same with categories like Browser of the Year — Firefox, need we say more? — with the blazing vulpini taking 57 percent in a crowded field. Same for Android, the Mobile Distribution of the Year which finished 40 percentage points ahead of the second-place finisher. Even vim, at 30 percent in a crowded field, heads up the Text Editor category with three times the votes of Emacs.
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New Releases
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Looking for a bit of mystery from your Linux distribution? 4MLinux delivers just that—and much more. In fact, the four M’s in its name stand for maintenance, miniserver, multimedia and mystery—the four elements that the distribution delivers. The “mystery” actually refers to gaming, which is a component of 4MLinux. This is not your average Linux distribution in other areas as well. Many Linux distributions in the market today are based on larger community Linux distributions. For example, many distributions use Ubuntu as a base, and Ubuntu itself is based on the upstream Debian Linux project. That’s not the case with 4MLinux, however, as it’s not based on another Linux distribution. Many Linux distributions also tend to favor GNOME or KDE as the default desktop, but not 4MLinux. 4MLinux leverages Joe’s Window Manager (JWM) as its default desktop environment. 4MLinux is available in several editions, including an Allinone Edition and 4MRescueKit, which focuses on the maintenance capabilities. 4MLinux 11.0 Allinone and 4MRescueKit were released on Jan. 24, while 4MLinux 11.1 beta Allinone was released on Feb. 1. In this slide show, eWEEK examines the key features in the new 4MLinux 11.1 Allinone update.
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Arch Family
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We’re happy to announce the 0.8.12 release of Manjaro Linux installation media, including images for the Xfce and KDE4 desktop environments, and our minimal ‘Net’ edition. This release is predominantly a maintenance release and includes very few changes to system defaults relative to the previous 0.8.11 ISOs, with some notable exceptions, such as out-of-the-box support for the exFAT file system and the change to pacman 4.2. Otherwise all the usual upstream updates are included, along with the latest from the Xfce 4.11 development series and the KDE 4.14 series.
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Manjaro, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and powered by the Xfce and KDE desktop environments, has been upgraded to version 0.8.12 and is now ready for download.
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Slackware Family
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Repeat message: Widevine is a Content Decryption Module (CDM) used by Netflix to stream video to your computer in a Chromium browser window. With my chromium and chromium-widevine-plugin packages you no longer need Chrome, or Firefox with Pipelight, to watch Netflix. The chrome-widevine-plugin is optional. If you don’t need it, then don’t install it. It is closed-source which for some is enough reason to stay away from it. The Chromium package on the other hand, is built from open source software only.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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It has taken a few weeks longer than we had hoped, but Korora 21 images are now available. I strongly recommend downloading with BitTorrent if you can.
The 21 beta was quite successful and we were able to make some minor changes to help improve the overall experience. Users who are currently on the beta need not re-install, updates are provided via the package manager. Users who are on 20 may consider upgrading, however this is not necessary as version 20 is supported for another 6 months or so.
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Debian Family
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It’s the end of an era, lightweight Linux fans. Philip Newborough has decided that it’s time to move on, and he’s ceasing development of #! — CrunchBang, for the uninitiated.
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Derivatives
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By now, most if not all of you have seen Philip Newborough’s announcement that he is moving on. First things first: Thank you, Philip, for providing sensible and solid leadership over the past several years. And, of course, all of us are grateful for your bringing CrunchBang — a simple and solid distro that works on a wide range of hardware — into the world.
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Philip Newborough today announced the end of his Linux project that produced the fairly popular CrunchBang distribution. A few years back it seemed like a post would pop up every few days praising CrunchBang but Newborough said today that it was time to call it quits. “When progress happens, some things get left behind, and for me, CrunchBang is something that I need to leave behind.” He said his users would be better off using vanilla Debian nowadays. Once upon a time CrunchBang filled a niche but today there are other more popular choices according to Newborough. He said of CrunchBang, “I honestly believe that it no longer holds any value.” So the community bids adieu to yet another favorite…
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone has been announced and will begin shipping in the days ahead.
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Canonical and BQ are launching the first Ubuntu Touch phone — the dual-SIM, quad-core, 4.5-inch “Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition” — for 170 Euros unlocked.
Starting on Monday, Spanish mobile manufacturer BQ will begin selling the world’s first Ubuntu-based phone, the Aquaris E4.5. The long-awaited Ubuntu phone will initially be sold in a series of limited volume “flash sales” across Europe that will be announced in the coming week. You can buy the dual-SIM phone unlocked for 169.90 Euros (about $190) and then purchase SIM bundles from 3 Sweden, amena.com (Spain), giffgaff (UK), and Portugal Telecom.
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Canonical announced today that the first Ubuntu phone, made in partnership with BQ, called Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition, will go on sale in Europe starting next week on BQ.com, through a series of “flash sales”, and it will cost 169.90 Euros (~ $193 / £127).
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Jane Silber, CEO at Canonical comments; “The launch of the first Ubuntu smartphones is a significant milestone. The new experience we deliver for users, as well as the opportunities for differentiation for manufacturers and operators, are a compelling and much-needed change from what is available today. We’re excited that a rising star like BQ has recognised this opportunity and is helping us make it a reality.”
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Let’s face it, if you’re going to buy a new smartphone, you’re probably looking at the iPhone and Android first, because almost everyone you know has either one or the other, You may also be inclined to try other things such as Windows Phone and BlackBerry, which may better suit your current smartphone needs. But don’t forget that there are plenty of other mobile operating systems to choose from, although they’re not very popular.
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Unity 8 is coming to the Ubuntu desktop and it’s bringing with it the Mir display server, Qt implementation, and a host of other core modifications. That doesn’t mean that traditional GTK+ apps won’t work anymore and there is proof of that.
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Following the announcement of the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition that will begin going up for sale next week, the first real hands-on videos of the Ubuntu Phone in action are starting to come out…
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BQ and Canonical announced the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition yesterday, which will available for purchase very soon, but only in Europe. The rest of the world will have to wait, but there is good news. The United States haven’t been forgotten and plans are in motion to have a hardware partner for those territories as well.
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The Creator 120 and the Raspberry Pi 2 are single-board computers designed for developers and hobbyists.
The Creator C120 was announced in late 2014, but started shipping at about the same time that the Raspberry Pi 2 was announced/starting shipping, which was just last week.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Tizen based Samsung Z1 has now gone on sale in India, and now has also began its rollout in Bangladesh, but there is one major problem that faces overseas linux enthusiasts / early Tizen adopters that have purchased the Z1, namely being you can only access the Tizen Store using the Samsung Z1 from the country that this product is currently being sold in.
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Android
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Samsung is losing ground, and that has allowed iOS to overtake Android in the US. But with the flagship Samsung Galaxy S6 now on the horizon, will it have what it takes to win back the fans.
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Over the past year some excellent Android tablets have been released to rival Apple’s popular iPad lineup, and choosing the right one can sometimes be difficult. These days consumers have a lot of choices and making a decision isn’t going to be easy. This is especially true for the average buyer that doesn’t keep up with the latest and greatest device announcements, or know about budget options released during the year.
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Part of the allure of Android One was that it would bring faster, almost Nexus-like updates to lower end phones, promising an affordable offering that would still provide a decent Android experience. With the slow update to Lollipop and the fact that sale numbers are reportedly not all that high, is Android One delivering on this promise? That’s exactly what we wish to discuss for this week’s Friday Debate. Can Android One prove to be a success, despite a somewhat slow start, or with so many other affordable devices is it a largely unnecessary program?
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Cloud has become one of the buzzwords in modern computing; there are so many advantages of cloud that it can’t be ignored. It is becoming an integral part of our IT infrastructure. However cloud poses a serious threat to the ownership of data and raises many privacy-related questions. The best solution is to ‘own’ your cloud, either though an on-premise cloud running in a local network disconnected from the Internet or one running on your own secure server. Seafile is one of the most promising, open source-based cloud projects.
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Last week I was in Italia at the Cisco Live! Milano event where I also had the opportunity to speak about OpenDaylight (ODL) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). What stood out for me the most during my time there was the tremendous progress being made on technologies that are really disrupting the networking space
SDN and NFV have been advancing innovation in the networking industry over the past few years, but it’s still early, and not many of the technologies have made it out of the lab and into the networks – until now.
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Events
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The calls for proposals (CFPs) for Linux Plumbers Conference microconferences and refereed track presentations are now up. The conference will be held August 19-21 in Seattle, WA, co-located (and overlapping one day) with LinuxCon North America.
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The X.Org Board of Directors have decided on Toronto, Canada as the location for this year’s annual X.Org Developers’ Conference.
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The second release candidates to Wayland 1.7 and the reference Weston compositor is now available.
Wayland 1.7 RC2 fixes a regression on older systems (Ubuntu 12.04 ea) and a fix for a test failure on systems with the Yama Linux Security Module enabled. Wayland 1.7 RC1 was released last week.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Encouraged by the promise of cost savings and better efficiency, early adopters are wading into Hadoop as a central reservoir for their analytics data.
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I recently taught an MBA course at the University of San Francisco titled the “Big Data MBA.” In working with the students to apply Big Data concepts and techniques to their use cases, I came away with a few observations that could be applied by any entrepreneur.
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Pivotal, the cloud computing spinoff from EMC and VMware that launched in 2013, is preparing to blow up its big data business by open sourcing a whole lot of it.
Rumors of changes began circulating in November, after CRN reported that Pivotal was in the process of laying off about 60 people, many of which worked on the big data products. The flames were stoked again on Friday by a report in VentureBeat claiming the company might cease development of its Hadoop distribution and/or open source various pieces of its database technology such as Greenplum and HAWQ.
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Though the open-source OpenStack cloud platform only has two major releases in any given year, each release is preceded by a steady cadence of incremental milestone updates.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In recent times Red Hat has proven, through their political maneuvering and control over the GNU/Linux community, the need to rethink the definition of “Software Libre”. The violent and absurd landing of systemd over 99% of the GNU/Linux distributions is proving that it is not enough that the source code of the software is free for users to be free. We have lost the freedom of choice, control, and decisions made on our systems.
In the times we live is not enough that the source code is released under the GPL license to ensure that software is free. Some years ago, when words GNU and Linux perhaps were known to few, and the companies behind them were not competing for the millions of dollars generated today, perhaps this was true. But today there are other variables at play such as freedom of developers and users.
Whoever controls the free software developers will be able to control his users. It has become clear that even though the source code is free, if the user loses his ability to choose freely and hasn’t resources (knowledge, time and money) to adapt the code to your needs and/or preferences, ” freedom “is an empty word.
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Richard Stallman has come out against support for basic LLVM debugger (LLDB) support within Emacs’ Gud.el as he equates it to an attack on GNU packages.
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The GNU C Library version 2.21 is now available.
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Project Releases
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After Opera 27 stable, Opera 28 beta released with new features and improvements. The new major features are regarding bookmarks, syncing bookmarks with multiple devices is very useful feature added to this beta release.
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Public Services/Government
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“Our nation’s elections systems and technology are woefully antiquated. They are officially obsolete,” says Greg Miller of the TrustTheVote Project, an initiative to make our voting system accurate, verifiable, transparent, and secure. He adds: “It’s crazy that citizens are using twentieth-century technology to talk to government using twentieth-century technology to respond.”
Miller and others are on a mission to change that with an entirely new voting infrastructure built on open-source technology. They say open source, a development model that’s publicly accessible and freely licensed, has the power to upend the entire elections technology market, dislodging incumbent voting machine companies and putting the electorate at the helm.
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Licensing
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You’ve found an amazing open source project that you think will enhance your proprietary software. But before you and your team of developers can get to work incorporating someone else’s code into your own product, there are some basic steps that you need to take.
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Openness/Sharing
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This week the team at Raspberry Pi unvieled the Raspberry Pi 2. Its increased horsepower means that emulation of the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1 are possible, as the Raspberry Pi team shows us with some gameplay footage of Mario Kart 64 and Spyro the Dragon.
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Free and Open Source software has revolutionized how the world consumes software. Linux, BSD, httpd, nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and thousands of other software products are consumed voraciously. But almost universally people are only consuming. And generally that’s okay. Sharing is one of the key tenets and strengths – that we are able to freely share code to help our neighbor.
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Health/Nutrition
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According to the World Health Organization, they have a higher measles immunization coverage among 1-year-olds than the United States. And, as this interactive map shows, they are far from alone.
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The agency’s new inspection model is a threat to food safety, federal whistleblowers allege
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Security
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We’re addicted to Adobe Flash, and it’s time to break the habit. In the last three months, multiple Flash security holes have been found and exploited. In the last two weeks alone, security expert Brian Krebs has reported that Adobe has released three emergency Flash security patches. Enough already.
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A while back I wrote about John McAfee saying that North Korea had nothing to do with the Sony breach, now Taia Global a US security firm is stating that Russian hackers could have been the ones behind the attack and that they could still have access to Sony’s servers.
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There’s a new twist in the already tangled tale of the Sony Pictures mega-hack: it’s now claimed Russians possibly broke into the company’s computers.
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The insurer acknowledged that data accessed by hackers had not been encrypted, as is the normal practice at many companies.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In other words, Kissinger blames the U.S. and Europe for the current catastrophe in Ukraine. Kissinger does not begin at the point where there is military conflict. He recognizes that the problems in Ukraine began with Europe and the U.S. seeking to lure Ukraine into an alliance with Western powers with promises of economic aid. This led to the demonstrations in Kiev. And, as we learned from Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the U.S. spent $5 billion in building opposition to the government in Ukraine.
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For years, some current and former American officials have been urging President Barack Obama to release secret files they say document links between the government of Saudi Arabia and the Sept. 11 attacks.
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Questions over the 28-page section of the congressional report have been raised this week following the deposition of imprisoned former al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui in which he claimed major Saudi figures were donors to his group in late 1990s.
Saudi officials have denied this.
According to White House spokesman Josh Earnest, US intelligence last year began reevaluating the decision to classify the section following a request from congress, though no timescale for the decision was given.
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Although U.S. drones firing missiles at suspected bad guys in faraway places — such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — have gotten much publicity in recent years, it was recently revealed that the CIA assassinated top Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mugniyah with a good old-fashioned car bomb in Damascus, Syria with President George W. Bush’s strident approval in 2008. Because of an executive order, signed in 1975 by President Gerald Ford, prohibiting assassinations by the CIA, presidents usually get around that order by using the military to kill an enemy bigwig and then make the disingenuous claim that it was merely taking out a “command and control” target rather than an assassination. In this case, Bush, never one to observe constitutional or legal niceties, became incensed that the CIA director was being too timid in carrying out the hit using the exploding car. The real issue in such cases is not whether it is more dangerous to liberty to kill the enemy using a high-tech drone or a more traditional car bomb, but whether it constitutional to do either.
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But despite their vaunted precision, there are reports the latest strike in Somalia, on January 31, killed or injured civilians.
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At least 45 suspected al-Shabaab militants have been killed in drone strikes in Southern Somalia on Saturday, a government official said.
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A commander of Islamist militant group al-Shabaab was killed in a US drone attack in Somalia, the East African nation’s National Intelligence and Security Agency said Wednesday.
“The killed al-Shabaab commander is called Abdinur Mahdi, also known as Yusuf Dheeg,” NISA said in a statement.
Dheeg, who was killed on Saturday, was in charge of coordinating attacks inside and outside of Somalia, as well as assassinations and suicide bombings, the statement added.
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At least 2,464 people have now been killed by US drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones since President Barack Obama’s inauguration six years ago, the Bureau’s latest monthly report reveals.
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This week Women Against War and members of several other Capital District peace groups joined in a Statewide lobbying initiative of our two Senators, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, after having to re-schedule our Monday appointments due to the foot of snow and more that fell on the area.
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According to Peter Singer, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute, “The first predator drones were used in 1995 during the Balkan conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. By 2000, the Air Force was developing ways to weaponize predator drones, as they were previously used exclusively in spy missions. When the US started the war in Iraq, back in 2003, there were a handful of drones in the air. By 2010, there were over 5,300 drones operating in Iraqi airspace. Additionally, the US went into Iraq with zero unmanned ground systems. By 2010, there were over 12,000 operating in the combat zone.”
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Three BBC journalists have been questioned by Swiss police for breaching high-level security protocols by using a drone at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.
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My fear is that some of the dishonest people in government will abuse drones and push for drone strikes on U.S. soil. Food for thought.
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It was recently reported that $400 million worth of US military weapons went missing in Yemen over the past several years. The equipment includes helicopters, night-vision gear, surveillance equipment, military radios and airplanes.
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Chaos in the functionally leaderless country has seen Houthi rebels reportedly take control of Yemeni military’s arms depots and bases
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America’s war machine breeds enemies faster than the US can kill them, argues Larry Beck.
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As Europe still reels from the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks in Paris, something far more profound to Western security is happening largely unnoticed—the failure of remote-control warfare. Open Briefing’s remote-control warfare briefing for January, commissioned by the Remote Control project, identified and analysed several trends, which taken together indicate the tactics and technologies deployed are coming back to haunt those Western powers that have embraced them in recent years.
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President Obama is being urged to supply Ukraine with “defensive lethal assistance”, which sounds almost like a contradiction in terms. James Morgan asks what people mean by “defensive” weapons – and finds out it’s what a hedgehog has.
It’s widely believed in the US, and in other Nato countries, that Russia is not only arming the rebels but sending soldiers to fight alongside them, so the pressure is increasing on the White House to ramp up military supplies to the Ukrainian government to help it resist a new offensive.
Currently the US only provides non-lethal equipment, such as gas masks, night-vision goggles and radar. How much further can it go without escalating the conflict or being seen as an aggressor?
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The leaders of Germany and France fly to Kiev and Moscow with new Ukraine peace plan as Nato bolsters eastern Europe against Russia and EU agrees new sanctions. Follow the latest developments
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Vladimir Putin has restarted his war against Ukraine, and the U.S. and Europe are unsure how to respond. While Europe has apparently decided that no toughening of economic sanctions is called for, some in Washington are calling for equipping Ukraine with lethal weapons.
Yet arming Ukraine is likely to backfire: It risks misleading the country — which is now pressing to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — into believing the U.S. will do what it takes to defeat Russia. It also risks encouraging Russia to expand the war, because it knows the U.S. and its NATO allies don’t have sufficient interests at stake to go all the way. The parallels often drawn with the war in Bosnia, where a U.S. arms and training program eventually turned the war and forced a peace, aren’t helpful: Serbia was a military minnow next to Putin’s nuclear-armed Russia.
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Video gamers are more prepared for military service than people the same age were in previous generations.
“We don’t need Top Gun pilots anymore, we need Revenge of the Nerds,” said Missy Cummings, former US Navy pilot, Assoc. Prof. of Aeronautics, MIT in Drone Wars: The Gamers Recruited To Kill, a documentary film about gamers and drone operators.
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Many who are praising the film say the movie is about him, not about the politics of the Iraq war. “It’s a movie about a man, a character study,” said lead actor Bradley Cooper. “The hope is that you can somehow have your eyes opened to the struggle of a soldier, as opposed to the specificity of the war.” Others argue American Sniper is “both a tribute to the warrior and a lament for war,” as the Associated Press reviewer wrote.
Bullshit. Regardless of the intentions of those making these claims, bullshit.
This is a profoundly reactionary movie. American Sniper humanizes and glorifies Chris Kyle, an unrepentant Christian fundamentalist mass murderer, who killed 160 Iraqis (supposedly the most “kills” by any U.S. soldier in history). Meanwhile, the movie demonizes and dehumanizes every single Iraqi (with the possible exception of one family), portraying them as evil terrorists and “savages” who deserve to die.
By telling this story through Kyle’s eyes and purported experience (and prettifying that story), American Sniper weaves a fable about the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its role in the world: America is a force for good. Whatever its mistakes, the U.S. sends its military to places like Iraq to try to protect the innocent and destroy evil. It promotes the outlook that only America and American lives count and anything goes to “defend” them. This is the big lie on the big screen.
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The Pentagon is doubling down on the development of a new arsenal of stealth fighters, bombers, and drones in its newly unveiled budget for next year.
Never mind the “fifth generation” stealth jets currently rolling off defense contractor assembly lines. The Pentagon is starting to pour money into three different projects to research and develop “sixth-generation” stealth fighters, plus funding for a new Air Force stealth bomber and new Navy carrier-based stealth drone.
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Brussels. Ottawa. Sydney. Paris. “Terrorist” attacks in these western cities in the last one year have claimed 29 lives. Add to this the beheadings of western citizens by the Islamic State. The horror evoked by these has led to an outcry against Islam and fierce debates about the necessity of reform in Islam. In France, 3.7 million people marched in solidarity — in the largest public rally since the Second World War — with the victims of Charlie Hebdo to show that western civilisation cannot be defeated by Islamic fanatics.
We are back to the days of 9/11 and other terror events in the West, and the debate assumes familiar directions: freedom of speech versus violent threats to it and the enlightened West versus barbaric Islam. We are presented this black and white world even by non-Muslim and non-western nations who have joined the project of moderating and domesticating Islam. Of course, there have been nuanced positions which have affirmed the right to free speech while at the same time calling out Charlie Hebdo for its racist portrayals of Islam. But the issue is larger than this.
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The Pentagon would get $585 billion next year under the Obama administration’s proposed budget, reversing a five-year decline in military spending and blowing past mandatory spending caps imposed by Congress.
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The Pentagon has said it has killed 6,000 fighters since coalition strikes began five months ago; the intelligence community estimates 4,000 foreign fighters have entered the fray since September. (A higher estimate, made by The Washington Post, holds that 5,000 foreign fighters have flowed into the two countries since October.)
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New Zealand’s contribution to oppressed peoples’ fighting US imperialism will be high on the agenda of his talks in Wellington today with British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond.
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Agonizing as it may be, we need to stand humbly before all these fraught, painful questions because the problem in Mindanao is neither just a military, a legal, or an institutional problem—something that could be solved by increased firepower, policy formulation or institutional reengineering. It is ultimately and inescapably a moral problem: something that could only be solved by resolving broader questions of power and justice—and thus, something, that could only be solved through politics in the broader sense of the term: politics not as wheeling and dealing, but politics as the struggle over how we should live with our fellow human beings, over how should organize our society so we can live the “good life”—the kind of politics that people will kill and die for.
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They were not alone. Big Brother was up there monitoring their every move.
“Kasalukuyan pong nag-e-encounter ang 5th Battalion sa Maguindanao para sa misyon kay Marwan” (The 5th Battalion is right now engaged in a mission in Maguindanao against Marwan), an officer from the assault team said, recording what was happening on the ground about 8 in the morning of Jan. 25 in Mamasapano, Maguindanao.
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A drone sent by the United States was key in locating pinned Philippine National Police Special Action Force units during the recent Mamasapano operation where 44 elite lawmen were killed, “24 Oras” reported on Wednesday.
According to the GMA News source, the US sent a drone to Mamasapano, Maguindanao after the PNP-SAF asked for support.
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Relatives describe Mohammed as a joyful 12 year old, enjoying school. When he was killed in a latest drone strike in Yemen, authorities listed him as a ‘militant’. The family previously lost Mohammed’s father and brother in a similar attack.
Mohammed Saleh Qayed Taeiman had been among the three killed in the drone strike last week, according to the Yemeni National Organization for Drone Victims (NODV). It also said that previous US drone strikes had killed Mohammed’s father and his brother in 2011, and in a separate attack, another brother had been injured.
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The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has summoned Islamabad Police Inspector General (IG) Tahir Alam Khan on February, 9 in contempt of court case against Islamabad Secretariat Police station house officer (SHO) for not registering murder case of two people killed in a drone attack in the area of Mir Ali at South Waziristan in 2009.
As the case came up for hearing before IHC Monday, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, counsel for petitioner Karim Khan, Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Nawaz Bhatti from Secretariat Police Station and legal counsel Abdul Rauf appeared in the court.
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While it is unclear if they were drone strikes versus another type of aerial assault, BIJ notes that 2014 saw the highest number of confirmed U.S. drone strikes in the east African nation of any year despite the administration’s praise of Somali government reforms.
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This is the first attack since Monday, when the US similarly destroyed a car in Maarib and similarly labeled all of the slain “al-Qaeda” only for one to turn out to be a 12-year-old student.
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A 12-year-old Pakistani boy who lost his grandmother in a U.S.-led drone strike says he is afraid of the blue sky; he would rather see the gray sky because he knows then that the drones will not fly. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’S), commonly known as drones, and particularly armed drones, are most effective when weather conditions provide for clear visibility, hence the better ability to hit identified targets. Drones aren’t flown on overcast days due to cloud cover and lack of visibility.
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A policy of targeted extrajudicial assassination is by its very nature immoral.
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Once extrajudicial killing was policy reserved for rogue nations like Nazi Germany and communist Russia. Rep. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the AUMF, said in her dissenting vote, “Let us not become the evil we deplore.” We now know that drone warfare, no matter how it is managed, is in fact a deplorable evil.
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Jordan executed two Iraqi prisoners Wednesday, in answer to the Islamic State group’s killing of a Jordanian hostage in Syria.
Jordanian officials hanged an Iraqi woman sentenced to death for her role in a 2005 suicide bombing in Amman. It also executed another Iraqi who had ties to al-Qaida.
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When ISIS beheaded two American journalists, there was outrage and denunciation throughout the West, but when the same ISIS beheaded hundreds of Syrian soldiers, and meticulously filmed these war crime, this was hardly reported anywhere. In addition, almost from the very beginning of the Syrian tragedy, al-Qaeda groups have been killing and torturing not only soldiers but police, government workers and officials, journalists, Christian church people, aid workers, women and children, as well as suicide bombings in market places. All this was covered up in the mainstream media, and when the Syrian government correctly denounced this as terrorism, this was ignored or denounced as “Assad’s propaganda.”
So why weren’t these atrocities reported in the western media? If this was reported it would have run counter to Washington’s proclaimed agenda that “Assad has to go,” so the mainstream media followed the official line. There is nothing new in this. History shows that the media supported every Western-launched war, insurrection and coup – the wars on Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and coups such as those on Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, and most recently in Ukraine.
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If Yemen is any kind of model, it is a model of how badly U.S. interventionism has failed.
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From record ticket sales to major media accolades, from the halls of Congress to the White House, the nation has spoken: “American Sniper” is all-American. Chris Kyle—the most lethal killer in U.S. military history, a true hero, a brave warrior—has been anointed as a role model for all that America has come to stand for.
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Over the weekend, The Washington Post reported on a joint U.S.-Israeli operation that killed Imad Mughniyah—Hezbollah’s reported chief of international operations—on the streets of Damascus in 2008. The account raises questions about whether the killing violated international law, and central to the Post’s story is the assessment that these actions “pushed American legal boundaries.”
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Consider the staggering number of murders of innocent human beings committed by the United States government — and ask yourselves how many Auroras those murders represent. I have tried to make calculations of this kind before: using conservative estimates of the deaths in Iraq, the murders in that country alone represent a 9/11 every day for five years. An equivalent number of Auroras would be much higher. modified from Arthur Silber
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So what happened? The Arab Spring didn’t go as hoped — and the United States began to lose the war. An al-Qaida offshoot shockingly conquered large swaths of Iraq and Syria. Libya descended into civil war. Yemen, which Obama cited just last year as proof of his successful strategy, is on a similar downward spiral. The Taliban is gaining ground in Afghanistan. Boko Haram is carving out another space for barbarism in Nigeria.
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We’ve been trained to think of war preparations — and the wars that result from being so incredibly prepared for wars — as necessary if regrettable. What if, however, in the long view that this book allows us, war turns out to be counterproductive on its own terms? What if war endangers those who wage it rather than protecting them? Imagine, for a moment, how many countries Canada would have to invade and occupy before it could successfully generate anti-Canadian terrorist networks to rival the hatred and resentment currently organized against the United States.
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The U.S. spends nearly $1 trillion on national security programs and agencies annually, more than any other nation in the world. Yet despite this enormous investment, there is not enough evidence to show the public that these programs are keeping Americans any safer – especially in the intelligence community. Excessive government secrecy prohibits the public and oversight agencies alike from determining whether our expensive intelligence enterprise is worth the investment.
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Transparency Reporting
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The UK government has now spent £10 million keeping Wikileaker Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
A website set up by Wikileaks supporters, called govwaste.co.uk, has a counter on the front page that has just creeped past the £10,000,000 mark. The website reads: “Julian Assange has been effectively detained without charge since December 2010.
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Nick Clegg could face legal action following remarks made about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Speaking on LBC on Thursday, the deputy prime minister commented on Assange’s long stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the £10 million cost of policing the building – comments Assange believes could be defamatory.
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In SILENCED: The War on Whistleblowers, three Americans reveal the persecution they’ve faced after they dared to question U.S. National Security policy in post 9/11 America. Everyone knows the name Edward Snowden, the fugitive and former intelligence contractor, but Academy Award nominated documentarian James Spione introduces us to three other whistleblowers of the era, speaking for the first time in one film, who discuss in dramatic and unprecedented detail the evolution of the government’s increasingly harsh response to unauthorized disclosures.
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Finance
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The funding round, which comes from Quest Venture Partners, Crypto Currency Partners and the AngelList Bitcoin Syndicate, among others, is a step towards creating a scoring system for addresses on bitcoin’s network.
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President Obama has unveiled his $4 trillion budget proposal for next year, asking Congress to raise taxes for the wealthy and corporations to help fund education and fix crumbling infrastructure. The plan includes tax cuts for some poor and middle-class families. It also seeks to recoup losses from corporations that stash an estimated $2 trillion overseas by taxing such earnings at 14 percent, still less than half of the 35 percent rate for profits made in the United States. The budget takes aim at the high cost of prescription drugs, proposes a new agency to regulate food safety, and seeks $1 billion to curb immigration from Central America. It also calls for a 4.5 percent increase in military spending, including a $534 billion base budget for the Pentagon, plus $51 billion to fund U.S. involvement in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Speaking at the Department of Homeland Security, Obama said across-the-board cuts known as sequestration would hurt the military.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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I’ll save you the trouble of writing a rejection letter, because I know why you wouldn’t run cartoons like these: You would recognize that lumping people together who have nothing in common but their religion is straight-out bigotry. You wouldn’t take it seriously as a defense if I pointed out that the Lord’s Resistance Army and McVeigh really were bad guys.
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Mitt Romney definitely had his down sides as a candidate: the retread factor, and, as I noted two weeks ago, the fact that he made all those dramatic and (apparently) wrong predictions about the future of the economy. But I will say this for him. He did pass the this-guy-looks-and-sounds-like-a-plausible-president test. I always thought that was his greatest strength. He’s central casting.
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Brian Williams said he is temporarily stepping away from the “NBC Nightly News” amid questions about his memories of war coverage in Iraq, calling it “painfully apparent” that he has become a distracting news story.
In a memo Saturday to NBC News staff that was released by the network, the anchorman said that as managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” he is taking himself off the broadcast for several days. Weekend anchor Lester Holt will fill in, Williams said.
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Censorship
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We’ve been talking a lot lately about how the new school of website design (with ReCode, Bloomberg, and Vox at the vanguard) has involved a misguided war on the traditional comment section. Websites are gleefully eliminating the primary engagement mechanism with their community and then adding insult to injury by pretending it’s because they really, really love “conversation.” Of course the truth is many sites just don’t want to pay moderators, don’t think their community offers any valuable insight, or don’t like how it “looks” when thirty people simultaneously tell their writers they’ve got story facts completely and painfully wrong.
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An official of the Hong Kong Democratic party says Chinese authorities have seized about 8,000 rolls of toilet paper printed with the image of the territory’s pro-Beijing chief executive, Leung Chun-ying.
Lo Kin-hei, a vice-chairman of the liberal party, said on Saturday that police seized the toilet paper and another 20,000 packages of tissue paper from a factory in the Chinese city of Shenzhen where a friend of the party placed the order to obscure the party as the true buyer.
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Agency brass tried to spike a story implicating the CIA in the killing of a top Hezbollah terrorist. Newsweek complied. The Post didn’t.
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Privacy
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It is a rare thing to bring truth to bear on the most powerful and secretive arm of the state. Never before has the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – the British court tasked with reviewing complaints against the security services – ruled against the government. Not once have the spooks been taken to task for overstepping the lawful boundaries of their conduct. Not a single British spy has been held accountable for mass surveillance, unlawful spying or snooping on private emails and phone calls.
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In its first ruling against an intelligence agency since it was set up in 2000, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) declared today that GCHQ’s access to information intercepted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) breached human rights laws.
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GCHQ, the UK intelligence agency, unlawfully accessed millions of personal communications collected by the NSA, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has ruled today.
The Tribunal is the only UK court with the power to oversee GCHQ, Mi5 and Mi6. This is the first time it has ever ruled against one of the intelligence and security services.
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The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has declared British intelligence services acted unlawfully by accessing the personal communications data gathered by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
The IPT, set up 15 years ago to oversee the activities of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, ruling follows a complaint made by several civil liberties organisations, including Amnesty International, Privacy International, Bytes for All and Liberty.
The Tribunal said the way intelligence was shared between GCHQ and the NSA’s Prism surveillance programme was unlawful up until December 2014, because the rules governing the practice were kept secret.
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The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has ruled that GCHQ illegally spied on British citizens.
The tribunal, which was created in 2000 to keep Britain’s intelligence agencies in check, stated that GCHQ’s access to intercepted information obtained by the US National Security Agency (NSA) breached human rights laws.
It marks the first time that the IPT has ruled against an intelligence agency in its 15-year history.
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The sharing of mass surveillance data between U.S. and U.K. intelligence services was unlawful before December 2014, but since then it has become legal, a U.K. tribunal has ruled.
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The British government and its intelligence agencies have successfully fended off the privacy lobby for more than a year and a half since the first of the Snowden revelations, engaging in the time-tested tactics of attack, obfuscation and setting up sham inquiries.
That strategy worked until Friday when the ruling of the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) blasted a hole through it.
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In a bizarre twist of events the Tribunal declared that intelligence sharing between the United States and the United Kingdom had been unlawful prior to December 2014, because the rules governing the UK’s access to the NSA’s PRISM and UPSTREAM programmes were kept secret.
Prior to December last year, the secret policy breached Article 8, the right to a private life, and Article 10, the right to freedom of expression without State interference, the tribunal said.
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A COURT HAS RULED THAT AN UNDER-THE-COUNTER information sharing pact between the US National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ was unlawful.
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The U.S. National Security Agency and its intelligence partners are reportedly sifting through data stolen by state-sponsored and freelance hackers on a regular basis in search of valuable information.
Despite constantly warning about the threat of hackers and pushing for their prosecution, the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Canada and the U.K. are happy to ride their coattails when it serves their interests, news website The Intercept reported Wednesday
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With that new equipment in place in January 2013, the state was seeing an average of 50,000 a day with spikes up to 20 million, Squires told The Associated Press. In February 2013, the number rose to an average of 75 million attacks a day, with up to 500 million on some days.
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Paranoid about the National Security Agency spying on you via your webcam? Don’t be. It’s safe to webchat again. Well, at least if you’re Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency. That is, unless he’s watching you.
Alexander was spotted on Tuesday on a train from Washington to New York by the principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Chris Soghoian. The four-star general turned top paid security consultant was working away on his Apple Macbook with the webcam uncovered.
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New initiatives on data collection by the US Government will set certain limitations on the use of signals intelligence collected in bulk.
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The US Intelligence community has proposed to limit the length of time it can hold information on citizens and hide secret data collections.
The proposals are in response to President Barack Obama‘s statement a year ago, in which he said that reform was needed for American surveillance practices in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations about NSA snooping.
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A recently launched website that tracks and lists transparency reports from across the web has already received over 20 submissions since its launch on Monday, co-founder Nadia Kayyali told the Sputnik international news service.
Kayyali, who is also an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said that EFF became involved in the project because they thought it was important to provide information to people about what companies have so-called ‘canaries.’
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Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is calling on President Barack Obama to immediately end the National Security Agency practice of scooping up huge amounts of data from innocent Americans.
He said that data includes phone calls that start and end in America.
“The president has the authority to end this dragnet surveillance immediately,” Wyden said. “The idea of collecting millions of phone records on law-abiding Americans doesn’t make any sense.”
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Turns out, not even the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee can figure out what’s happened to the National Security Agency (NSA) staffers who were involved in the LOVEINT spying scandal.
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Personal data sent to Canadian websites is often routed through the United States where the National Security Agency collects it, according to Andrew Clement, a University of Toronto professor.
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After two terrorist attacks on Canadian soil, the federal government proposed new anti-terror laws. Although it’s released details on its bill, many questions remain. Will these laws affect our privacy? How about our freedom of speech? Will they improve security? Considering the experiences of our southern neighbours with mass surveillance programs and the controversial National Security Agency (NSA), these questions seem crucially important.
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Personal data sent to Canadian websites is often routed through the United States where the National Security Agency collects it, according to Andrew Clement, a University of Toronto professor.
The professor is part of the team of University of Toronto and OCAD University students and professors that has created IXmaps , an online interactive tool that lets Canadians to see how their web traffic moves around the Internet.
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Germany’s foreign intelligence agency has been using its sophisticated electronic systems to collect 220 million bits of metadata a day from satellites and Internet sources and shares that information with U.S. intelligence agencies, according to Zeit Online. Once it crosses the Atlantic, the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) use it for their own spying and anti-terrorism activities.
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Die Zeit claims the BND scoops up 220m metadata every day, through satellites and internet cables. This is just the phone-related surveillance, with the extent of web-based surveillance as yet unknown.
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The piece, which appears to be based on official leaks ahead of a Tuesday announcement, suggested foreigners will get for the first time get limited rights regarding how their personal data is treated after it’s been scooped up by agencies such as the NSA. Whereas the data of Americans would be deleted after incidental collection, foreigners’ data would be deleted after five years.
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The Obama administration has announced changes to the surveillance operations conducted by the United States intelligence community, but critics are already using words like “weak” to describe the so-called reform.
Adjustments to how US intel agencies collect and hold bulk data on Americans and surveillance records concerning foreigners are outlined in a report published on Tuesday this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
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Last month, the National Research Council concluded there is no technological replacement for the National’s Security Agency’s mass surveillance and therefore should not be fully replaced.
“No software-based technique can fully replace the bulk collection of signals intelligence,” the report stated.
But there may in fact be a viable alternative — and it’s been around for more than a decade, according to J. Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA analyst.
Wiebe, who created this alternative surveillance technique, spent three decades at NSA and received its second-highest award, the Meritorious Civilian Service Award.
The idea behind Wiebe’s alternative is simple. It boils down to “connect the dots,” he said Saturday at an event sponsored by the Newseum and the Washington, D.C. Public Library.
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As Obama tightens surveillance guidelines, uncertainty lingers on NSA program. “The Obama administration on Tuesday announced a series of modest steps to strengthen privacy protections for Americans and foreigners in U.S. intelligence-gathering, including an end to the indefinite gag order on certain subpoenas issued to companies for customers’ personal data,” writes the Post’s Ellen Nakashima. “At the same time, U.S. intelligence officials said they were still hoping to fulfill a goal President Obama set a year ago: ending the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Americans’ phone records.”
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The new rules “clearly show that the government continues to stand by a number of its troubling mass surveillance policies, despite mounting evidence that many of these programs are ineffective,” said Neema Singh Guliani of the ACLU.
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RSA, with its noted BSafe encryption technology, was bought by EMC in 2006 for $2.1bn, with Coviello in the RSA CEO chair. Its reputation as a trusted security technology supplier was tarnished by allegations from whistleblower Edward Snowden that it was paid $10m by the NSA to use encryption tech with a backdoor for the g-men (and, by extension, world+dog).
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British spies have warned the government they may cut off ties with their German counterparts over a parliamentary inquiry into spying by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
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The new law, set to go into effect later this year, will store data in Australian servers for two years. This data will be provided to Australian authorities, who can perform direct warrantless searches of potential criminals.
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Resisting a campaign for greater transparency, the White House has decided to keep American taxpayers in the dark about how much they’re likely to spend on government spy agencies.
President Barack Obama unveiled his fiscal 2016 budget requests Monday with the continued omission of proposed spending levels for specific intelligence agencies, which are funded with a so-called “black budget” supplement debated and voted upon behind closed doors by congressional appropriators.
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Zimmermann, creator of the PGP email privacy package, countered Cameron’s argument that encryption is creating a means for terrorists and child abusers to communicate in private, arguing instead that intelligence agencies such as GCHQ and the NSA have “never had it so good”.
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As the wearable technology industry explodes, security experts warn that the data collected could be stolen or misused.
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Following EFF’s victory in a four-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the government released an opinion (pdf), written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2010, that concluded that Section 215—the provision of the Patriot Act the NSA relies on to collect millions of Americans’ phone records—does have a limit: census data.
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Exploitation, either political or personal can occur from the mass information gathered in intelligence operations…
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While the laws that have created this system were passed in the interest of public safety, in protection from risks of terrorism, the post-9/11 world had led to military and cyber exploitations of power that have killed many in wars and drone attacks, as well as ruining lives due to racial and radical profiling. It is vital to consider how much of our private spheres should the government be allowed to have access to. The failures of honouring American rights and dignity thus far must be rectified by transparent and honest accounts from the National Service Agency about their mechanisms of tracking potential threats and treatment of unrelated personal data. Ultimately, no government should have the authority to ubiquitously and opaquely conduct their surveillance. The people should be informed before supporting beyond intent to include the implementation.
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The conflict between privacy and security is a long-running one, often inflamed by global threats, but always present. In a 2008 Wired article, the extent to which individual privacy should be sacrificed for matters of national security was laid bare by the then-director of national intelligence Michael McConnell.
“In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. ‘Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,’ he said. Giorgio warned me, ‘We have a saying in this business: Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”
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ProPublica has the details on this story, which traces Koch’s work on Gnu Privacy Guard and the Windows secure email client, GPG4Win. Since 1997, Koch has maintained and improved his own secure email software. He credits a talk by Richard Stallman for giving him the idea — at the time, the Pretty Good Privacy software package wasn’t available for export, which led RMS to challenge European programmers to create their own implementation.
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During a 10-minute period one day in November 2008, British spies vacuumed up 70,000 e-mails to and from journalists at major media outlets in the United States and the U.K. And they did it with the blessings of Washington.
Thanks to the Snowden leaks, many Americans are familiar with the surveillance that the NSA and other agencies are conducting on American citizens and citizens of other nations. It is not only U.S. agencies that are spying on our communications; GCHQ, the U.K. equivalent of the NSA, has been conducting is own comprehensive surveillance for quite some time now. The Guardian reported last month that the British agency “has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations.” While not really a revelation in itself, this is bold, specific confirmation of what many have known since Edward Snowden came forward. We are being spied on, not only by nosy corporations and our own government, but by our “allies” as well.
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House and Senate lawmakers are expected to reintroduce bipartisan legislation on Wednesday that would require law enforcement to obtain a search warrant before accessing the content of private emails.
The Email Privacy Act, sponsored by Reps. Jared Polis and Kevin Yoder, is landing with more than 220 cosponsors, meaning it already has the backing of more than half of House members. Sens. Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee are also slated to reintroduce their mirror version of the bill, though it was not immediately clear how many cosponsors they had on board.
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It’s only days, a few weeks at most, into the 2015 season for state legislatures, and already there are hundreds of bills looming that challenge the power of Washington on issues ranging from Common Core to marijuana and the National Security Agency, according to a new report.
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Another reason the Snowden affair is interesting is that it crosses the typical, dismal political categories that infect American politics. Some on both the right and the left consider Snowden a traitor. Other people from all corners of American politics deplore the invasive snooping of the NSA. Other fascinating questions are who is Edward Snowden and why is he doing this?
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‘How do you get the audience to feel it? Not just to know it in their brains, but to walk out of the theatre and think twice as they use their phones or their email.’
She believes that telling Snowden’s story and questioning the practices of her own government was an obligation.
While she can’t say whether Snowden, still living in exile with his girlfriend in Moscow, is happy, she is confident of at least one thing.
‘I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have any regrets.’
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When film director Laura Poitras calls from New York, she warns that our conversation is likely to be monitored by the US Government.
Since 2006, after she released the first documentary in her trilogy about America post 9/11, she has been stopped and detained by federal agents at US airports every time she enters the country.
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Edward Snowden is the fourth most admired man among Germans, according to a new YouGov poll. The NSA whistleblower, whose leaks exposed US spying on German officials – including Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, came in just ahead of racecar driver Michael Schumacher.
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Mass surveillance isn’t the security blanket that politicians are holding it up to be. For many people surveillance makes them less safe.
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NIS agents were found to have meddled in the 2012 presidential election in the form of an online smear campaign targeting the opponent of the eventual winner, conservative Park Geun-hye. Last year, Won Sei-hoon, the agency’s then-director general, was found guilty of overseeing the operation and sentenced to two years in jail.
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On February 4, 2015 Rep. Ted Poe of Texas asked for permission to address the United States House of Representatives:
The SPEAKER pro tempore. “Under the Speaker’s announced policy of January 6, 2015, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) for 30 minutes.”
Mr. POE of Texas. “Mr. Speaker, just a few weeks ago, this Chamber was filled with Members of the House of Representatives, and all of us stood up and raised our right hands, and we took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. It is the same oath the President takes and that others take–the military. We do that for a lot of reasons, but the main reason is that, in this country, the Constitution is paramount to all other law. I agree with that philosophy. The Constitution, I think, is a marvelously written document, as well as the Declaration of Independence, which justified the reason for us to start our own country.
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Almost two-thirds of investigative journalists (64 percent) polled in a recent survey said they believe that the U.S. government has probably collected data about their phone calls, e-mails, or online communications. Furthermore, 80 percent of those surveyed believe that being a journalist increases the likelihood that their data will be collected.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance by government agencies has made a big impact on investigative journalists, according to a new study.
The survey of 671 journalists, conducted by the US-based Pew Research Center and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, found that 64% believe that the US government has probably collected data about their communications.
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Civil Rights
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This is the first article in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how discourse regarding law enforcement related issues in the US has been constructed to justify abuse by the police.
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Conservative media lashed out at President Obama for mentioning the Crusades and Inquisition at the National Prayer Breakfast after condemning the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) as a “death cult” that distorts Islam.
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Guest Attacked Obama For Not Letting Company His Firm Represents Sell Drone To Jordan
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Anyone paying attention knows that 9/11 has been used to create a police/warfare state. Years ago, NSA official William Binney warned Americans about the universal spying by the National Security Agency, to little effect. Recently, Edward Snowden proved the all-inclusive NSA spying by releasing spy documents, enough of which have been made available by Glenn Greenwald to establish the fact of NSA illegal and unconstitutional spying, spying that has no legal, constitutional, or “national security” reasons. Yet Americans are not up in arms. Americans have accepted the government’s offenses against them as necessary protection against “terrorists.”
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Former pro cyclist Lance Armstrong was issued two traffic citations in January for allegedly hitting two parked vehicles in Aspen’s West End and leaving the scene — with his girlfriend apparently telling police initially that she had been behind the wheel in order to avoid national headlines.
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Messrs. Petraeus and O’Hanlan are unconcerned about the nation’s alarmng liberty and justice deficit. The President plays prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to kill any American citizen he decreees based on secret evidence is a threat to the national security. Thousands of innocent civilians abroad are killed by predator drones. The National Security Agency conducts surveillance against the entire United States population without suspicion that even a single target has been complicit in crime or international terrorism.
Individuals are detained indefinitely without accusation or trial at Guantanamo Bay. Eighteenth century British legal scholar William Blackstone — who was gospel to the Founding Fathers — wrote: “[T]o bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom.”
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In the dead of night, they swept in aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Landing in a remote region of one of the most volatile countries on the planet, they raided a village and soon found themselves in a life-or-death firefight. It was the second time in two weeks that elite U.S. Navy SEALs had attempted to rescue American photojournalist Luke Somers. And it was the second time they failed.
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The imperial presidency persists. Look at Obama and his drones. Look at George W. Bush. Bush, who lost the popular vote, stole the 2000 election with the Electoral College’s help. As for the Senate, it is surely the world’s most undemocratic legislative body. Since every state gets two senators, one Californian voter has some 1.5 percent of a Wyoming voter’s power. Wyoming’s population is smaller than NJ’s Bergen or Middlesex counties. Senators from Mississippi or Utah can then filibuster and kill reforms voters from demographic mega-states like California or New York demand. These states are less urbanized and diverse in general. With growing inequality between the classes and races, and growing repression in the form of mass incarceration, we need to radically reform and amend our Constitution. As political scientist Daniel Lazare said, the alternative would be, “the old pre-reform Mississippi state legislature stamping on democracy — forever.” I’m sorry Lincoln’s ghost, but that’s not a Union worth saving. But hey, maybe Hillary can save us.
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Under the terms of his house arrest, Kiriakou is unable to give media interviews at this time.
Radack said he eventually hopes to be an anti-torture and prison reform advocate.
Kiriakou’s official release date is May 1, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website.
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On Monday, BBC Four screened a remarkable film in its Storyville series. The Internet’s Own Boy told the story of the life and tragic death of Aaron Swartz, the leading geek wunderkind of his generation who was hounded to suicide at the age of 26 by a vindictive US administration. The film is still available on BBC iPlayer, and if you do nothing else this weekend make time to watch it, because it’s the most revealing source of insights about how the state approaches the internet since Edward Snowden first broke cover.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Net neutrality propaganda is starting to get weird. A brand new interest group showed up this week with a confusing porn parody that seems to equate Title II reclassification of the internet with dragnet surveillance, among other fallacies. It’s a good chance to talk about what the Federal Communications Commission’s new open internet policy is — and what it isn’t.
An anti-big government campaign backed by a US Senator released this godawful video that looks like a tasteless ripoff of the age-old “cable guy” porn cliché — except you know not to actually expect any sex because it’s YouTube.
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