#MSM: Does #America need a #PirateParty? - #UMMYES

In Washington, there seems to be little understanding of how cyber-activists are changing the balance of power between government and the people, or why legislation viewed by some as potentially curtailing the future growth of the Internet is problematic for so many younger voters.

There appears to be even less understanding of how the free sharing of knowledge made possible by the Internet can lead to a vast bubbling-up of innovation and economic growth from the grassroots level. Politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to be just waking up to the fact that young voters who hold cyber-activists such as RSS co-founder Aaron Swartz in such high esteem, can provide an innovative breath of fresh air in American politics—a break, perhaps, from the divisiveness of left vs. right politics.

What America may need, in other words, is something like Iceland’s Pirate Party.

Campaigning on a platform of Internet reform, Iceland’s Pirate Party recently won a surprising 5.1 percent of the national vote, just barely giving the party their first-ever seats in a national parliament. In Iceland’s parliament, 3 of the 63 seats now belong to what was once a fringe party that advocates cyber-activism, total government transparency, free sharing of knowledge, and direct democracy. The Pirate Party supports universal, unrestricted access to the Internet as the foundation of any civil society—and they’re willing to put their mouths where their Internet connections are. The head of Iceland’s Pirate Party, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, has been willing to take on the United States government over Wikileaks and the whistleblower case of Bradley Manning.

The Pirate Party is a can-do party preaching to the Internet faithful, and it’s a party that plans to go European-wide in 2014. Based on early successes in places such as Sweden and Germany, there’s a plan afoot for the Pirate Parties across Europe to unite, resulting in a pan-continental platform for Pirate Party candidates to run on across 25 different countries for the European Parliament. Instead of campaigning on nation-specific issues, such as taxation or spending, they’d be campaigning on universal issues related to cyberspace. This is somewhat more radical than it sounds—it’s essentially throwing open the party doors to any citizen in any European nation who believes in direct democracy. As a result, you’ll likely get a mix of politicians who don’t look anything like what we imagine politicians to look like – Birgitta Jónsdóttir, for example, defines herself as a “cyber poet” and activist, rather than as a politician. Think of her as the head of a movement, rather than a party.The other two Pirate Party members elected to office in Iceland are a computer programmer and a student from the University of Iceland.

Think what a similar type of political movement could do in the U.S.

Instead of the arguably dysfunctional system dominated by “career politicians” and big campaign donations, you’d get a system in which individuals without any experience at all in politics could potentially get elected. In doing so, we’d get closer to what the ancient Greeks actually had in mind for their model of Athenian democracy, when they suggested that randomizing the political process in some way would be the best way to avoid political deadlock and the rule by the wealthy.  That same idea, in various formats, continues to make its way around the Internet in new permutations, such as a new proposal from Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy to randomly select a group of anonymous “electors” from a group of registered voters.

Of course, all this comes with a caveat. As we saw with the recent case of the Boston bombing, entrusting anything entirely in the hands of the Internet is a dicey proposition. As fun as it would be to elect members of the Twitter and Reddit generation to political office, it also comes with a dark side, as The Post’s Caitlin Dewey reminded us: “The problem, of course, is that the Internet is not the master key able to unlock all knowledge.” The fact remains that, Pirates—even when they’re called “pixel Pirates”—are still Pirates.

But maybe that’s what American politics needs—a new political party that’s radical, just not too radical. In the world of American politics, the emergence of the Pirate Party across Europe should be an early warning signal—issues such as Internet censorship and freedom of expression online are no longer the obscure issues of the intellectual fringe—they are the new way to mobilize huge swathes of the population that view these issues as the linchpins of innovation, creativity and even job creation. Instead of raising the white flag when it comes to solving Washington’s most intractable problems, maybe we should be raising the black pirate flag instead.

#MSM - Obama Has Created An Illegal, Anti-Privacy Internet Program That Is Scarier Than #CISPA

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Obama Has Created An Illegal Anti Privacy Internet Program That Is Scarier Than CISPA

Are you a “Critical Infrastructure Sector?” If so, then the Justice Department is giving you their stamp of approval to monitor private communications on your networks; an act which, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, is a questionable legal use of an Executive Order. Through two recent Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) recently revealed that the Justice Department has authorized internet providers — most prominently AT&T — to intercept and monitor communications on their networks. Its good news for these sectors: they get to freely violate existing federal wiretap laws. It’s bad news for you and me, though. Through these acts we lose major privacy rights; namely not having our communications and private data tracked. Worse yet, it’s due to a government-corporate partnership. Sounds bad? What is worse is that it ignores the actual cyber security issues we have, and it sets a terrifying precedent for the future.

The program in question began as an effort between the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and commercial defense contractors to protect military and commercial defense companies from cyber threats, in particular data theft. While the risk of cyber attacks on our military is a valid concern, it is clear now that this was not all that was on the architects of this project’s mind.

Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lyn said at the time of the program’s inception: “It is possible to imagine attacks on military networks or on critical infrastructure like the transportation system and energy sector that cause severe economic damage, physical destruction or even loss of life.”

No less than two years later, President Obama signed an Executive Order expanding this service to the same “critical infrastructure.” The president’s public renunciation of SOPA and CISPA is thus puzzling; those acts would accomplish many of the same goals and would be doing so legally. Obama’s Executive Order, on the other hand, is not legal.

But what’s most telling is that these safeguards are doing nothing to stop the underlying problem in the majority of these attacks: our global economic rival and current frenemy, China.

China accounted for 41% of the world’s computer attack traffic in the fourth quarter of 2012 and it is heavily suspected that hundreds of attacks are actually coming from the Chinese militaryitself. Adding fuel to that fire, a Chinese general just claimed that these cyber attacks are potentially as powerful as a nuclear weapon. If they are able to attack this powerfully, are we simply waiting for an electronic 9/11 to hit us before our electronic privacy is taken away forever? This act certainly sets the precedent for removing our privacy with its vague notion of what “critical infrastructure” is, which could potentially be interpreted as broadly as the infamous “interstate commerce” has been. If it is, than “critical infrastructure” could mean almost anything; and all our electronic privacy could be washed away. Coming at a time when Americans are becoming more wary of government intrusions into their privacy, this act is an embarrassment to our country and a failure of our leadership.  

Fedz wants to makes it teh mandatory for websites to has backdoors installed in their warez! #MSM

For two years now, the FBI has been talking about how new Internet communications technologies are stopping them from getting the bad guys. In 2011, the FBI’s top lawyer called it the “going dark” problem. Last year, FBI Director Robert Mueller related similar concerns to Congress, stating it needs “wiretapping backdoors” into popular websites, or it would have to shut down more investigations. The FBI’s position was reportedly that installing such “backdoors” should be mandatory, not optional.
Now it looks like those proposals are back, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper cites unnamed administration officials saying that Facebook and Google are specifically being pressured to allow for electronic communications to be intercepted “as they occur”—a kind of digital-age wiretap that could read, for instance, Facebook messages or Gchats.
In the new proposal, which is still in draft form, not only would installing backdoors be mandatory, there would be fines for companies that didn’t comply. The exact amount isn’t clear, but it would consist of “a series of escalating fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars.” It gets worse: “After 90 days, fines that remain unpaid would double daily.”
Law enforcement’s ability to wiretap was already extended to Internet technologies like VoIP with the 1994 CALEA law. But that law is written to apply to Internet service providers, not giant web companies like Google and Facebook—hence the FBI’s desire for expansion.
The FBI declined to comment on the piece, but the Post quotes the FBI’s top lawyer complaining publicly that the agency doesn’t have access to techniques that are available to law enforcement in other nations.
“The importance to us is pretty clear,” said FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann, speaking at an American Bar Association conference in March. “We don’t have the ability to go to court and say, ‘We need a court order to effectuate the intercept.’ Other countries have that. Most people assume that’s what you’re getting when you go to a court.”
Tech companies will probably react coolly to this proposals, as they did to proposed CALEA expansions last year. “It’s important to also understand that law enforcement today has access to a vast wealth of information about suspects that their predecessors merely a decade ago could only have dreamed of,” said Computer and Communications Industry Association president Ed Black. “The claims of ‘going dark’ must be evaluated in this context:  massive amounts of information are stored online and shared with law enforcement—when they have gone through the proper process.”

#Seattle #police detail plan for #MayDay - to protect Goldman Sachs’ office... | #MSM

Video Here: http://pwny.biz/Nk

ocal anarchists have announced they’ll target big business as a part of their May Day protests.

 Puget Sound Anarchists have posted a call for protestors to rally in front of a building where investment bank Goldman Sachs has an office in downtown Seattle.

Seattle police says officers will be prepared at that location and others around the city on Wednesday.

 ”We’ve done an assessment of likely targets and there will be officers posted in those locations. We can’t possibly post at every potential window there’s a lot of windows in the city but we can certainly to a risk assessment and staff to where we think those incidents might occur and create contingencies under those areas we may have missed,” said Capt. Chris Fowler of the Seattle Police Department.

 Aside from a peaceful protest to the Federal Building during the day, local anarchists are also planning a protest beginning at Pine and Broadway at 6 p.m. The anarchists have not announced a route for May Day.

 ”The marches are taking place at different times so this year is substantially different than last year in many different respects,” said Fowler.

 Seattle police says it is adding extra staff for this year’s May Day but would not reveal any specifics.

 Last year anarchists caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage and even triggered a civil emergency.

 The mayor’s office says this year, the city will wait until it’s necessary to issue a civil emergency based on the facts.

Immigrant Rights Groups, Labor, #Occupy Plan #MayDay Protests ~ #MSM

Protest groups across the country are gearing up for May Day protests on Wednesday. In New York, Occupy Wall Street has posted a schedule for the day, kicking off with young workers marching from Bryant Park in solidarity with the Transport Workers Union. Occupy says it plans to visit the offices of union busters and companies with whom the TWU members have contract disputes.

At around noon, protesters will then go on an “immigrant worker justice tour,” in order to highlight the daily struggles facing immigrants and workers in New York City. Activists will visit several workplaces in midtown to “demand an end to exploitation of immigrant workers” with the march ending at Senator Schumer’s office for a speak-out on what real immigration reform looks like.

Occupy has also scheduled an event to “Save The People’s Post Office” where protesters will meet at the Peter Stuyvesant Post Office at 14th Street and First Avenue. I previously have written about the fake USPS budget crisis and how our pro-privatization Congress refuses to allow the Post Office to save itself.

The evening will culminate with a rally for labor and citizens’ rights at City Hall, a May Day People’s Assembly at Foley Square and a memorial for Kimani Gray, the Brooklyn teenager slain by the NYPD, at Zuccotti Park. Protesters plan on addressing racial profiling under stop-and-frisk, full legalization for immigrants, an immediate end to deportations, the injustices of the 1 percent and the devastating consequences of austerity.

Nationally, May Day protests have already attracted the attention of authorities. FBI agents in Seattle and Olympia have reportedly been showing up at people’s houses, schools, workplaces and even favorite jogging routes to question individuals about their May Day plans.

The agents were mostly chummy with the people they contacted. As one woman talked to agents, another housemate described their manner as “jokey and flirty—I almost thought they were gonna ask her out!”

Flirty or not, they identified themselves as members of the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit. Apparently, the vandalism of May Day 2012, and the potential demonstrations on May Day 2013, are terrorism investigations. (Which, frankly, seems to me like a grave insult to anyone from Boston to NYC to Kandahar who’s been a victim of, or lost a family member to, actual terrorism.)

In one case yesterday, the agents reportedly turned up at a public park to intercept two joggers. The joggers said “no, thanks” and went home. About 20 minutes later, the agents reportedly showed up at their house.

This highly invasive behavior by authorities isn’t unusual. In 2012, the NYPD raided activists’ homes before the annual protests. At the time, the National Lawyer’s Guild said it was aware of at least five instances of the NYPD’s paying activists visits, including one where the FBI was involved in questioning.

Ayn Dietrich, a spokesperson for the FBI, would neither confirm nor deny anything about the visits to theSeattle Stranger. However, she did say, “We do all kinds of routine activities throughout the state on any given day. If we have people out there, it could be community outreach, emergency response, or investigative work…. We sometimes knock on doors when there’s an issue of a missing child. We’re around the community, especially with ethnic minority groups, to let them know they can come to us to report hate crimes.”

It’s ironic Dietrich specifically mentioned ethnic minority groups, given that they’re doing some of the most serious planning around May Day, specifically in fighting for immigrant rights, legalization and an end to deportations. In California, large protests are expected because some undocumented immigrants and their supporters view this as their best chance in many years for immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

Reporter David Olson writes that many grassroots immigration activists are unhappy with key elements of the Senate immigration bill, such as the thirteen-year wait for potential citizenship for undocumented immigrants, which Olson says many view as “excessive,” and a trigger mechanism in the bill that makes a path to citizenship dependent on the implementation of stringent border security measures.

Though there is considerably less press coverage of this year’s May Day in comparison to last year’s events—when activists were still coming down from the frenzied energy of the Occupy movement’s apex—now is actually the time when the most exciting grassroots workers’ actions are taking place. Fast food workers in New York City and Chicago have shown innovative ways non-unionized workers can fight for living wages and demonstrated for workers everywhere that labor rights aren’t just for a select sect, but rather for everyone who has ever worked for a day’s wages.

@ACLU: #CISPA Is Dead (For Now)

The Senate will not take up the controversial cybersecurity bill, is drafting separate legislation

Sen. Jay Rockefeller says CISPA's passage was "important," but its "privacy protections are insufficient."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller says CISPA’s passage was “important,” but its “privacy protections are insufficient.”

CISPA is all but dead, again.

The controversial cybersecurity bill known as the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives last week, will almost certainly be shelved by the Senate, according to a representative of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

The bill would have allowed the federal government to share classified “cyber threat” information with companies, but it also provided provisions that would have allowed companies to share information about specific users with the government. Privacy advocates also worried that the National Security Administration would have gotten involved.

“We’re not taking [CISPA] up,” the committee representative says. “Staff and senators are divvying up the issues and the key provisions everyone agrees would need to be handled if we’re going to strengthen cybersecurity. They’ll be drafting separate bills.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., chairman of the committee, said the passage of CISPA was “important,” but said the bill’s “privacy protections are insufficient.”

That, coupled with the fact that President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the bill, has even CISPA’s staunchest opponents, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, ready to bury CISPA and focus on future legislation.

“I think it’s dead for now,” says Michelle Richardson, legislative council with the ACLU. “CISPA is too controversial, it’s too expansive, it’s just not the same sort of program contemplated by the Senate last year. We’re pleased to hear the Senate will probably pick up where it left off last year.”

That’s not to say Congress won’t pass any cybersecurity legislation this year. Both Rockefeller and President Obama want to give American companies additional tools to fight back against cyberattacks from domestic and foreign hackers.

[READ: Lawmakers Who Pushed CISPA Were ‘Doxed’]

But cybersecurity legislation in the Senate, such as the Cybersecurity and American Cyber Competitiveness Act of 2013, has greater privacy protections than CISPA does. Richardson says that bill makes it clear that companies would have to “pull out sensitive data [about citizens]” before companies send it to the government and also puts the program under “unequivocal civilian control,” something CISPA author Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., was unwilling to do.

Even if the Senate gets something done, Rogers and other CISPA supporters will likely have to compromise more than they’ve been willing to over the past year as Obama has made it clear he will veto legislation that doesn’t have more privacy protections.

“The way [Rogers] talks, [the House] has gone as far as they possibly can on privacy,” Richardson says. “I don’t know if that’s true and I’m not sure how they’ll respond when the Senate puts something back to them. But if they don’t figure out a compromise, they might not get any legislation at all.”

The commerce representative says that the Senate committee is “working toward separate bills” to improve cybersecurity, which are currently being drafted. But don’t expect these bills soon, as the Senate considers immigration, an Internet sales tax, the aftermath of the Boston bombing and the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control crisis in the wake of sequestration.

Richardson says she thinks it’ll be at least three months before the Senate takes a vote on any cybersecurity legislation.

“We need to be vigilant as the year moves on to make sure that whatever the next product is, it’s not CISPA-lite,” she says. “I think this is probably going to take the rest of the year.”

  The #Boston #bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions - #MSM As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge There’s not much to say about Monday’s Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why. There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Much of that reaction is all-too-familiar and quite revealing in important ways: (1) The widespread compassion for yesterday’s victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid. My Guardian colleague Gary Younge put this best on Twitter this morning: Juan Cole this morning makes a similar point about violence elsewhere. Indeed, just yesterday in Iraq, at least 42 people were killed and more than 250 injured by a series of car bombs, the enduring result of the US invasion and destruction of that country. Somehow the deep compassion and anger felt in the US when it is attacked never translates to understanding the effects of our own aggression against others. One particularly illustrative example I happened to see yesterday was a re-tweet from Washington Examiner columnist David Freddoso, proclaiming: Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?” I don’t disagree with that sentiment. But I’d bet a good amount of money that the person saying it - and the vast majority of other Americans - have no clue that targeting rescuers with “double-tap” attacks is precisely what the US now does with its drone program and other forms of militarism. If most Americans knew their government and military were doing this, would they react the same way as they did to yesterday’s Boston attack: “Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?” That’s highly doubtful, and that’s the point. There’s nothing wrong per se with paying more attention to tragedy and violence that happens relatively nearby and in familiar places. Whether wrong or not, it’s probably human nature, or at least human instinct, to do that, and that happens all over the world. I’m not criticizing that. But one wishes that the empathy for victims and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence would at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does (far, far more often than it is targeted by such violence). Regardless of your views of justification and intent: whatever rage you’re feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that’s the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday’s victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that’s the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It’s natural that it won’t be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate. (2) The rush, one might say the eagerness, to conclude that the attackers were Muslim was palpable and unseemly, even without any real evidence. The New York Post quickly claimed that the prime suspect was a Saudi national (while also inaccurately reporting that 12 people had been confirmed dead). The Post’s insinuation of responsibility was also suggested on CNN by Former Bush Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend (“We know that there is one Saudi national who was wounded in the leg who is being spoken to”). Former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman went on CNN to grossly speculate that Muslim groups were behind the attack. Anti-Muslim bigots like Pam Geller predictably announced that this was “Jihad in America”. Expressions of hatred for Muslims, and a desire to do violence, were then spewing forth all over Twitter (some particularly unscrupulous partisan Democrat types were identically suggesting with zero evidence that the attackers were right-wing extremists). Obviously, it’s possible that the perpetrator(s) will turn out to be Muslim, just like it’s possible they will turn out to be extremist right-wing activists, or left-wing agitators, or Muslim-fearing Anders-Breivik types, or lone individuals driven by apolitical mental illness. But the rush to proclaim the guilty party to be Muslim is seen in particular over and over with such events. Recall that on the day of the 2011 Oslo massacre by a right-wing, Muslim-hating extremist, the New York Times spent virtually the entire day strongly suggesting in its headlines that an Islamic extremist group was responsible, a claim other major news outlets (including the BBC and Washington Post) then repeated as fact. The same thing happened with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when most major US media outlets strongly suggested that the perpetrators were Muslims. As FAIR documented back then: “In the wake of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media rushed — almost en masse — to the assumption that the bombing was the work of Muslim extremists. ‘The betting here is on Middle East terrorists,’ declared CBS News’ Jim Stewart just hours after the blast (4/19/95). ‘The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East,’ ABC’s John McWethy proclaimed the same day. “‘It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,’ wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (Chicago Tribune, 4/21/95). ‘Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working,’ declared the New York Times’ A.M. Rosenthal (4/21/95). The Geyer and Rosenthal columns were filed after the FBI released sketches of two suspects who looked more like Midwestern frat boys than mujahideen.” This lesson is never learned because, it seems, many people don’t want to learn it. Even when it turns out not to have been Muslims who perpetrated the attack but rather right-wing, white Christians, the damage from this relentless and reflexive blame-pinning endures. (3) One continually encountered yesterday expressions of dread and fear from Arabs and Muslims around the world that the attacker would be either or both. That’s because they know that all members of their religious or ethnic group will be blamed, or worse, if that turns out to be the case. That’s true even though leading Muslim-American groups such as CAIR harshly condemned the attack (as they always do) and urged support for the victims, including blood donations. One tweeter, referencing the earthquake that hit Iran this morning, satirized this collective mindset by writing: “Please don’t be a Muslim plate tectonic activity.” As understandable as it is, that’s just sad to witness. No other group reacts with that level of fear to these kinds of incidents, because no other group has similar cause to fear that they will all be hated or targeted for the acts of isolated, unrepresentative individuals. A similar dynamic has long prevailed in the domestic crime context: when the perpetrators of notorious crimes turned out to be African-American, the entire community usually paid a collective price. But the unique and well-grounded dread that hundreds of millions of law-abiding, peaceful Muslims and Arabs around the world have about the prospect that this attack in Boston was perpetrated by a Muslim highlights the climate of fear that has been created for and imposed on them over the last decade. (4) The reaction to the Boston attack underscored, yet again, the utter meaninglessness of the word “terrorism”. News outlets were seemingly scandalized that President Obama, in his initial remarks, did not use the words “terrorist attack” to describe the bombing. In response, the White House ran to the media to assure them that they considered it “terrorism”. Fox News’ Ed Henry quoted a “senior administration official” as saying this: “When multiple (explosive) devices go off that’s an act of terrorism.” Is that what “terrorism” is? “When multiple (explosive) devices go off”? If so, that encompasses a great many things, including what the US does in the world on a very regular basis. Of course, the quest to know whether this was “terrorism” is really code for: “was this done by Muslims”? That’s because, in US political discourse, “terrorism” has no real meaning other than: violence perpetrated by Muslims against the west. The reason there was such confusion and uncertainty about whether this was “terrorism” is because there is no clear and consistently applied definition of the term. At this point, it’s little more than a term of emotionally manipulative propaganda. That’s been proven over and over, and it was against yesterday. (5) The history of these types of attacks over the last decade has been clear and consistent: they are exploited to obtain new government powers, increase state surveillance, and take away individual liberties. On NBC with Brian Williams last night, Tom Brokaw decreed that this will happen again and instructed us that we must meekly submit it to it: “Everyone has to understand tonight that, beginning tomorrow morning early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country, and however exhausted we may be by that, we’re going to have to learn to live with them, and get along and go forward, and not let them bring us to our knees. You’ll remember last summer, how unhappy we were with the security at the Democratic and Republic conventions. Now I don’t think we can raise those complaints after what happened in Boston.” Last night on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, an FBI agent discussed the fact that the US government has the right to arrest terrorism suspects and not provide them with Miranda warnings before questioning them. After seeing numerous people express surprise at this claim on Twitter, I pointed out that this happened when the Obama administration exploited the attempted underwear bombing over Detroit to radically reduce Miranda rights over what they had been for decades. That’s what the US government (aided by the sham “terrorism expert” industry) does in every single one of these cases: exploits the resulting fear to increase its own power and decrease everyone else’s rights, including privacy. At the Atlantic, security expert Bruce Schneier has a short but compelling article on how urgent it is that we not react to this Boston attack irrationally or with exaggerated fear, and that we particularly remain vigilant against government attempts to exploit fear to impose all new rights-reducing measures. He notes in particular how the more unusual an event is (such as this sort of attack on US soil), the more our brains naturally exaggerate its significance and frequency (John Cole makes a similar point). In sum, even if the perpetrators of Monday’s attack in Boston turn out to be politically motivated and subscribers to an anti-US ideology, it will still be a very rare event, one that poses far less danger to Americans than literally countless other threats. The most important lesson of the excesses arising from the 9/11 attacks should be this one: that the dangers of overreacting and succumbing to irrational fear are far, far greater than any other dangers posed by these type of events.
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The #Boston #bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions - #MSM

As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge

There’s not much to say about Monday’s Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why. There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Much of that reaction is all-too-familiar and quite revealing in important ways:

(1) The widespread compassion for yesterday’s victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid. My Guardian colleague Gary Younge put this best on Twitter this morning:

Juan Cole this morning makes a similar point about violence elsewhere. Indeed, just yesterday in Iraq, at least 42 people were killed and more than 250 injured by a series of car bombs, the enduring result of the US invasion and destruction of that country. Somehow the deep compassion and anger felt in the US when it is attacked never translates to understanding the effects of our own aggression against others.

One particularly illustrative example I happened to see yesterday was a re-tweet from Washington Examiner columnist David Freddoso, proclaiming:

Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?”


I don’t disagree with that sentiment. But I’d bet a good amount of money that the person saying it - and the vast majority of other Americans - have no clue that targeting rescuers with “double-tap” attacks is precisely what the US now does with its drone program and other forms of militarism. If most Americans knew their government and military were doing this, would they react the same way as they did to yesterday’s Boston attack: “Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?” That’s highly doubtful, and that’s the point.

There’s nothing wrong per se with paying more attention to tragedy and violence that happens relatively nearby and in familiar places. Whether wrong or not, it’s probably human nature, or at least human instinct, to do that, and that happens all over the world. I’m not criticizing that. But one wishes that the empathy for victims and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence would at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does (far, far more often than it is targeted by such violence).

Regardless of your views of justification and intent: whatever rage you’re feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that’s the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday’s victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that’s the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It’s natural that it won’t be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate.

(2) The rush, one might say the eagerness, to conclude that the attackers were Muslim was palpable and unseemly, even without any real evidence. The New York Post quickly claimed that the prime suspect was a Saudi national (while also inaccurately reporting that 12 people had been confirmed dead). The Post’s insinuation of responsibility was also suggested on CNN by Former Bush Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend (“We know that there is one Saudi national who was wounded in the leg who is being spoken to”). Former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman went on CNN to grossly speculate that Muslim groups were behind the attack. Anti-Muslim bigots like Pam Geller predictably announced that this was “Jihad in America”. Expressions of hatred for Muslims, and a desire to do violence, were then spewing forth all over Twitter (some particularly unscrupulous partisan Democrat types were identically suggesting with zero evidence that the attackers were right-wing extremists).

Obviously, it’s possible that the perpetrator(s) will turn out to be Muslim, just like it’s possible they will turn out to be extremist right-wing activists, or left-wing agitators, or Muslim-fearing Anders-Breivik types, or lone individuals driven by apolitical mental illness. But the rush to proclaim the guilty party to be Muslim is seen in particular over and over with such events. Recall that on the day of the 2011 Oslo massacre by a right-wing, Muslim-hating extremist, the New York Times spent virtually the entire day strongly suggesting in its headlines that an Islamic extremist group was responsible, a claim other major news outlets (including the BBC and Washington Post) then repeated as fact. The same thing happened with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when most major US media outlets strongly suggested that the perpetrators were Muslims. As FAIR documented back then:


“In the wake of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media rushed — almost en masse — to the assumption that the bombing was the work of Muslim extremists. ‘The betting here is on Middle East terrorists,’ declared CBS News’ Jim Stewart just hours after the blast (4/19/95). ‘The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East,’ ABC’s John McWethy proclaimed the same day.

“‘It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,’ wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (Chicago Tribune, 4/21/95). ‘Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working,’ declared the New York Times’ A.M. Rosenthal (4/21/95). The Geyer and Rosenthal columns were filed after the FBI released sketches of two suspects who looked more like Midwestern frat boys than mujahideen.”

This lesson is never learned because, it seems, many people don’t want to learn it. Even when it turns out not to have been Muslims who perpetrated the attack but rather right-wing, white Christians, the damage from this relentless and reflexive blame-pinning endures.

(3) One continually encountered yesterday expressions of dread and fear from Arabs and Muslims around the world that the attacker would be either or both. That’s because they know that all members of their religious or ethnic group will be blamed, or worse, if that turns out to be the case. That’s true even though leading Muslim-American groups such as CAIR harshly condemned the attack (as they always do) and urged support for the victims, including blood donations. One tweeter, referencing the earthquake that hit Iran this morning, satirized this collective mindset by writing: “Please don’t be a Muslim plate tectonic activity.”

As understandable as it is, that’s just sad to witness. No other group reacts with that level of fear to these kinds of incidents, because no other group has similar cause to fear that they will all be hated or targeted for the acts of isolated, unrepresentative individuals. A similar dynamic has long prevailed in the domestic crime context: when the perpetrators of notorious crimes turned out to be African-American, the entire community usually paid a collective price. But the unique and well-grounded dread that hundreds of millions of law-abiding, peaceful Muslims and Arabs around the world have about the prospect that this attack in Boston was perpetrated by a Muslim highlights the climate of fear that has been created for and imposed on them over the last decade.

(4) The reaction to the Boston attack underscored, yet again, the utter meaninglessness of the word “terrorism”. News outlets were seemingly scandalized that President Obama, in his initial remarks, did not use the words “terrorist attack” to describe the bombing. In response, the White House ran to the media to assure them that they considered it “terrorism”. Fox News’ Ed Henry quoted a “senior administration official” as saying this: “When multiple (explosive) devices go off that’s an act of terrorism.”

Is that what “terrorism” is? “When multiple (explosive) devices go off”? If so, that encompasses a great many things, including what the US does in the world on a very regular basis. Of course, the quest to know whether this was “terrorism” is really code for: “was this done by Muslims”? That’s because, in US political discourse, “terrorism” has no real meaning other than: violence perpetrated by Muslims against the west. The reason there was such confusion and uncertainty about whether this was “terrorism” is because there is no clear and consistently applied definition of the term. At this point, it’s little more than a term of emotionally manipulative propaganda. That’s been proven over and over, and it was against yesterday.

(5) The history of these types of attacks over the last decade has been clear and consistent: they are exploited to obtain new government powers, increase state surveillance, and take away individual liberties. On NBC with Brian Williams last night, Tom Brokaw decreed that this will happen again and instructed us that we must meekly submit it to it:


“Everyone has to understand tonight that, beginning tomorrow morning early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country, and however exhausted we may be by that, we’re going to have to learn to live with them, and get along and go forward, and not let them bring us to our knees. You’ll remember last summer, how unhappy we were with the security at the Democratic and Republic conventions. Now I don’t think we can raise those complaints after what happened in Boston.”

Last night on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, an FBI agent discussed the fact that the US government has the right to arrest terrorism suspects and not provide them with Miranda warnings before questioning them. After seeing numerous people express surprise at this claim on Twitter, I pointed out that this happened when the Obama administration exploited the attempted underwear bombing over Detroit to radically reduce Miranda rights over what they had been for decades. That’s what the US government (aided by the sham “terrorism expert” industry) does in every single one of these cases: exploits the resulting fear to increase its own power and decrease everyone else’s rights, including privacy.

At the Atlantic, security expert Bruce Schneier has a short but compelling article on how urgent it is that we not react to this Boston attack irrationally or with exaggerated fear, and that we particularly remain vigilant against government attempts to exploit fear to impose all new rights-reducing measures. He notes in particular how the more unusual an event is (such as this sort of attack on US soil), the more our brains naturally exaggerate its significance and frequency (John Cole makes a similar point).

In sum, even if the perpetrators of Monday’s attack in Boston turn out to be politically motivated and subscribers to an anti-US ideology, it will still be a very rare event, one that poses far less danger to Americans than literally countless other threats. The most important lesson of the excesses arising from the 9/11 attacks should be this one: that the dangers of overreacting and succumbing to irrational fear are far, far greater than any other dangers posed by these type of events.

(via antidelusions)

Source: descentintotyranny

This Week In Disaster #1 - 05/04/2013 (by thefinancialreality) Thanx to @ZeroHedge

~

A concise summary of the week’s crucial events.

Send me an email: thefinancialreality@gmail.com
Write shit: www.thefinancialreality.com
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Channel: www.youtube.com/user/thefinancialreality

Julius Reade

Source: youtube.com

Where Kim Dotcom and #Mega have the edge on #Dropbox and Box.net

Kim Dotcom THR3
Summary:

Alleged pirate Kim Dotcom’s latest venture, Mega, tackles cloud storage. Whatever Dotcom’s motives, Andy Manoske, of GGV Capital, says his startup is bringing a much-needed upgrade to security standards for the cloud storage business.

As a world (in)famous technologist with the literal last name “Dotcom,” Kim Dotcom is a man whose swag is matched only by the damages sought against him by the U.S. government. His filesharing site Megaupload was long the ire of record companies and movie studios, who say it was a massive and sprawling repository of pirated content.

If the accusations are true, it was one of the more successful pirate operations in history. At its peak, Megaupload saw approximately 7 percent of internet traffic and grossed over $150 million in annual revenue. But Megaupload’s incredible run ended in the fall of 2012 when the FBI forcefully took down the site and sought Kim’s extradition from New Zealand to face a litany of criminal charges.

Of course, you can’t expect to keep a guy with the last name Dotcom down, and sure enough he recently announced the relaunch of a Megaupload redux dubbed Mega. Only Mega is a security- and privacy-conscious file-sharing service that audaciously targets storage industry magnates like Dropbox and Box.net.

And loathe as some of us may be to admit it, he just may be on to something. Mega differentiates itself by embracing client-side encryption: generating and storing the keys on a user’s local machine rather than encrypting everything in the cloud. The result of such client-side encryption is not only a far more secure product – and a security practice the industry should embrace – but a significant reduction in cost and legal liability for Mega and other cloud storage providers that use this architecture.

How Mega is different

Security is one of the biggest inhibitors to cloud adoption. Yielding sensitive data to a third party over the public internet continues to be a dealbreaker for many medium- to large-scale enterprises, with their desire for privacy and concerns of regulatory and legal exposure.

In the movement to the cloud, data is exposed at two points to attack or compromise: in-flight (when it is being transmitted over the security no-man’s land of the public internet) and at-rest (when it physically sits on servers within the cloud system). In both instances there are a myriad of threats that could allow that data to be stolen or compromised.

Mega employs cryptography to protect data in-flight and at-rest. Now by all means, using encryption to protect data in-flight isn’t really game changing. Similar to most security-conscious sites, Mega wraps communication between its users with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption.

But Mega is unique in its approach to handling encryption at rest. Rather than encrypting and storing keys for a client’s data within Mega’s infrastructure, Mega pushes their cryptography back to their users. So Mega users encrypt their own data prior to sending it to Mega’s servers, and store keys locally such that even Mega can’t read their data – or be forced to yield it to authorities.

While this sounds like a feature tailored solely to the needs of a company that will frequently find itself at the end of a subpoena, the desire to have users keep their own keys and send data in the form of encrypted “ciphertext” (rather than unencrypted “plaintext)” is actually one shared by mainstream small businesses and enterprises alike.

Benefit for providers

Having cloud providers hold ciphertext and having users handle their own encryption and keep their own keys makes sense on both sides of the fence.

In an architecture where customers are responsible for their own encryption and key management, significant legal liabilities are lifted from the service provider. Customers would assume personal liability for the selection and correct implementation of encryption algorithms – a critical concern for compliance regulations like PCI-DSS that incorporate strict rules on cryptography.

By having their customers manage keys locally, service providers can also significantly reduce costs. Many modern PCs incorporate a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) – a hardware device that can safely store cryptographic keys for prolonged periods of time. Storing keys locally on a TPM is relatively costless for the customer, but safely storing keys en masse in the cloud requires the use of expensive key management servers.

The cost of encryption

Encryption is also still not a costless process. By pushing customers to encrypt and decypt their own data, cloud providers can also redirect the significant compute time required to handle cryptography towards providing a higher quality of service for their customers.

For customers, sending only ciphertext to the cloud and keeping keys locally has real benefits beyond peace of mind. If a cloud services provider is ever hacked, that customer’s data will be encrypted in a way that can’t be decrypted using its service provider’s security infrastructure. There’s no master database of passwords that an attacker can break into. Customer data on the service provider remains locked in ciphertext and encrypted using one of any number of symmetric key algorithms.

It’s important to note, though, that there are consequences for moving to a client-side encryption architecture. For instance, when customers send only ciphertext to the cloud, popular means of reducing the on-disk footprint of data such as deduplication (in short, a process where copies or parts of files are deleted and data is instead “pointed” towards a single instance) are generally rendered impossible.

It’s also important to note that, for the server to dedupe data encrypted by the client, the client must yield sensitive information about the plaintext at various points during its encryption. The fact that Mega seems to perform client-side encryption with deduplication is a red flag to many security cognoscenti, and may even be a sign that Mega has more visibility into its clients; data then it otherwise claims.

Holes in Mega’s strategy

Mega’s security infrastructure is far from perfect. Their decision to handle cryptography in browser-based Javascript has already earned wide-spread criticism, and due to implementation issues in how Mega creates keys for users,  hackers could work around encryption and access plaintext data (what’s called a “side-channel attack”).

Regardless, to give credit where it’s due, Kim Dotcom’s decision to push encryption to the client is an impressively forward-thinking maneuver that should be replicated by Dropbox and other cloud storage providers. Client-side encryption makes financial and legal sense for customers and service providers, helping to enable even regulatory compliance-bound customers to embrace cloud computing at scale.

#Links #RoundUp from 13/3/2013: #Akamai Gives #GNU / #Linux Numbers; #Sabayon Linux 11 #Review

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Enterprise Desktops and Linux

      Linux wears many different hats. Server, desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, embedded, if there is a device with a CPU there is a good bet that it can run linux. Regardless of Linux’s domination in the datacenter, and it’s mainstream acceptance in mobile and other areas, the fate of the Linux Desktop is what gets people worked up. When a highly public person like Miguel de Icaza switches his desktop to OS X, quite a bit of discussion ensues.

      Much discussion, and most of it for naught. The personal computer that de Icaza uses is of little importance to the Linux community as a whole. He is making a switch during a transitionary period of personal computing, where we are moving from PCs to tablets and smart phones, and the new mobile computing platform is clearly the way of the future. The role of PCs will continue to decline, especially in the home use market. However, the enterprise will have a use for PCs for many, many years to come, and this is where the best opportunity for the Linux desktop resides.

    • Is this the easiest way to try Linux on a Win7 laptop?

      If you’re a Windows 7 user who wants to try out Linux for the first time, one of the easiest ways to do so is to install Ubuntu by using the Windows Ubuntu Installer, or Wubi for short. Using this installer, you can run Ubuntu on your Windows system without having to deal with partitioning and formatting issues, and if you ever get sick of the Linux variant, you can easily uninstall it from within the Programs applet in the Control Panel.

    • HTML5 Brings Netflix to Samsung’s ARM Chromebook

      Google has been working with Netflix (take some tips Canonical) to bring the DRMed services to the Chromebook. This is major as instead of using Microsoft’s Silverlight Netflix is using HTML5 video streaming (which now supports DRM for HTML5 on Chromebooks). Recently Google enabled the much controversial DRM (digital repression management) support for HTML5 in Chrome OS to bring services like Netflix to Chromebooks using HTML5 instead of controversial Silverlight of Microsoft.

  • Server

    • Akamai CSO Andy Ellis Details Linux Usage – VIDEO

      It should come as no surprise that Akamai, the world’s largest Content Delivery Network uses Linux as a core underpinning for its’ 120,000 server network.

    • Patching Dependencies

      So, we were caught in a situation where if we upgraded Postfix, we might break the installed MySQL client. There are a couple of things wrong with this situation. First off, why, oh why, does Postfix require a MySQL client to be installed? Postfix is our MTA, a mail transfer agent, setup because it is easy to configure and we need to do a couple things differently from what is available out of the box. We have absolutely no use for MySQL on every server in the environment. Secondly, why was the third party MySQL (or is that first party, since it is from Oracle?) installed over the default filesystem? Packages that are bundled for inclusion on an operating system should respect that operating system’s package manager and install all of their files to /usr/local/. This keeps the filesystem clean, and does not interfere with the standard package manager and patching process.

  • Kernel Space

    • Kernel-level app whitelisting support for Android devices

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel X.Org Driver Update Gets New Features

        Chris Wilson of Intel OTC announced the release of the xf86-video-intel 2.21.4 X.Org driver on Monday morning. This new driver has clumsy PowerXpress integration, run-time detection of available CPU instruction sets, Haswell fix-ups, and more work on the SNA acceleration architecture.

      • NVIDIA Updates Its Legacy Linux Graphics Driver
      • Intel’s graphics driver installation program for Linux

        On its “Open Source Technology Center” 01.org, Intel recently released an installation program that updates Intel graphics drivers for some Linux distributions, including the 32- and 64-bit x86 versions of Fedora 17, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10. Once the program package is installed, the intel-linux-graphics-installer program can take a look at the distribution and connect to repositories from which it pulls packages with newer drivers.

      • NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Benchmarks On Linux

        Here’s some of the first OpenGL benchmarks of the ultra high-end $999 (USD) NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN running on Linux.

        The mighty-impressive NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN was released in mid-February as a graphics card with 6GB of video RAM and boasts 4.5 TeraFLOPS of single-precision compute power and 1.3 TeraFLOPS of double-precision compute power. The NVIDIA 313.26 driver was released to support this ultra-powerful NVIDIA GeForce graphics card under Linux.

      • Mesa/Gallium3D Gets Its First ARM SoC GPU Driver

        The first working ARM System-on-Chip (SoC) GPU graphics driver built for Gallium3D has been merged into mainline Mesa!

        The driver that was merged into mainline Mesa is the Gallium3D Freedreno for Qualcomm Snapdragon/Adreno graphics hardware. This Freedreno Gallium3D driver initially supports the A220, which is the GPU that Qualcomm uses with its Snapdragon S3 SoC.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma 2 With KDE Frameworks 5 Looks Awesome

        Sebastian Kügler of KDE has talked about progress made on Plasma 2, the port of the Plasma Workspaces desktop to using KDE Frameworks 5 that in turn works atop Qt 5. The possibilities opened up for Plasma 2 due to KDE Frameworks 5 and using an OpenGL scene-graph are impressive and awesome.

      • The Kolab story

        Today I’d like to share a success story of a picture perfect project collaboration as it only happens in the open source world without any commercial, political or geographical borders. It all started back in 2009 after a short interview about Roundcube was published on a techworld.com blog. Short time after we got an email from Georg Greve, founder of the FSFE and member of the Kolab Groupware project. At that time, Kolab already made its name as a free competitor to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook and they were just about to found a new company to push Kolab to the next level. One thing Kolab definitely needed was a better web client to access all the groupware data from anywhere. And this is where Roundcube seemed to fit in perfectly. Although Roundcube was “just” an email client, the Kolab guys saw great potential in our codebase and the vital community around it. And now, more than three years after, we can all witness the great success of this decision.

      • Basic RAW Processing in digiKam

        For this project, we’ll use a photo of the famous Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Spain (you can download the RAW file from https://www.box.com/s/cq3uknqt54o3usf1jg3r). The photo was taken with a Canon PowerShot S90 camera, and the RAW file exhibits several obvious flaws, including visible barrel distortion, underexposed areas, and noise. In other words, this particular RAW file is perfect for tweaking in digiKam.

      • the case

        Natural ecosystems are wonderful things full of complexity and beauty. There are few ecosystems on this planet that are occupied by only one or two species. Most are a complex meshing of variety, though it is not uncommon for there to be dominant species (numerically, positionally) within them.

        Interesting things happen when you change an ecosystem, however. If you remove a species, particularly a populous one, it leaves an opening full of suddenly unused resources in its wake. This opening usually fills up quickly with other species, often creating instabilities that over time even out until the system reaches a new equilibrium. Change the environment in some way (more water, less water; more heat , longer cold; etc.) and previously successful groups may find themselves marginalized, once again creating opportunities for others to grow and proliferate.

      • extending plasma desktop scripting

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME and Kylin become official Ubuntu flavours

        The Ubuntu Technical board has given the official designation to two Ubuntu flavours, Ubuntu GNOME and UbuntuKylin. The decision was made in an IRC meeting and announced by the projects this week. Ubuntu GNOME 3 sets out to deliver the GNOME 3 experience on Ubuntu, while UbuntuKylin aims to offer a fully customised Chinese user experience on Ubuntu 13.04. The official blessing gives the developers of each flavour access to Ubuntu’s build infrastructure and allows them to be managed as part of the Ubuntu project rather than as an unsupported fork.

      • A Linux Conspiracy Theory

        Can we really and seriously believe that William Jon McCann, described as one of the main driving forces behind the concepts of GNOME 3, doesn’t know what Xfce is? What are the consequences of having a large corporation like Red Hat (perhaps with strong influence from the ultra-wealthy Google) in control of widely used open source projects like GNOME and GTK, with its teams of developers routinely altering their APIs in unpredictable, erratic ways and offering no real support to independent projects using their libraries? It’s clear that with the advent of GNOME 3, GNOME has become a corporate product solely created for and controlled by Red Hat.

  • Distributions

    • Distro deluge: Six imminent Linux releases previewed

      A number of interesting new Linux releases are due out in the next few days or weeks. Here’s a quick overview of some of them.

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • The delayed Mageia 3 Beta 3 arrives for testing

        Mageia 3 Beta 3, the delayed beta release that pushed Mageia 3′s release date into May, has now been released by the development team. The team say they had to face quite a lot of bugs during the QA phase of testing the beta 3 ISO images and that it took more time than expected to fix them. Another beta, beta 4 is scheduled for 28 March, followed by a release freeze on 7 April, release candidate on 19 April, and final release on 3 May.

      • Mageia 3 Beta 3, A Quick Test Drive

    • Gentoo Family

      • Reviews: First look at Sabayon Linux 11

        Sabayon Linux is a distribution which uses Gentoo Linux as its base. The Sabayon project is very diverse, featuring many different desktop spins (KDE, GNOME, MATE and Xfce) along with some minimalist and server spins. Each flavour of Sabayon is available in 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds. This gives users a variety of editions from which to choose and one of them is bound to fit our needs. The distribution maintains a rolling release, meaning packages are constantly updating to keep users up to date with the latest available versions of software. I decided to try the latest release of Sabayon, version 11, and opted to try the project’s KDE edition. The KDE edition can be downloaded as a 2.2 GB ISO image.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat clone CentOS 6.4 replicated and released
      • Red Hat Opens Up Cloud PaaS Development on OpenShift Origin

        Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering started its life as a mostly proprietary product built on technology acquired from Makara in 2010.

        In April of 2012, Red Hat made OpenShift available as open source under the OpenShift Origin effort. Simply making a project open source, however, doesn’t make it a true open source community with contribution and collaboration.

      • Apple, Red Hat, VeriFone highlight tech trading

        Tech companies ended up putting in a mixed trading session Tuesday, with notable losses coming from Apple Inc. and Red Hat Inc., but decent gains coming elsewhere from the likes of VeriFone Systems Inc.

      • Red Hat rolls FuseSource middleware into JBoss stack

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Project’s Robyn Bergeron: The Linux Desktop Is Almost Ready for Its Close-Up

          “I think we offer quite a bit more choice to people. Think in terms of the number of desktop choices we offer. Consider that if somebody in the Fedora community wants to add to those choices, we are supportive of that interest. We will do that. We are not dictating from on high. We don’t focus on ‘Thou shalt have’ and ‘Thou shalt not have.’ We are definitely a distribution that is focused on freedom.”

        • Fedora Linux Looks To Improve Its Boot Experience

          Matthias Clasen sparked a new mailing list thread on Monday amongst Fedora developers to improve the Fedora boot experience.

        • RAID Re-do for Anaconda

          So I think out of all of the feedback we got about the Anaconda UI redesign, the one piece of the UI that’s received the most negative feedback is the RAID configuration piece of the custom partitioning UI. The designs for how this UI ended up getting implemented in Fedora 18 was posted to this blog in December 2011. I really wish we’d received the level of feedback we received post F18-Beta and post F18-GA at that point, so the design could have been modified before it was implemented! That being said – I’m not placing blame with anybody but myself – I got this design wrong, and for that I am sincerely sorry.

    • Debian Family

      • Everyday Linux User Review of Crunchbang Linux #!

        Ok so I have put off doing this review for sometime. I tried Crunchbang for the first time about a year ago and I was a little underwhelmed.

        […]

        There are some distributions that have a lot of glitz and glamour and they lack functionality (if these distributions were people my nan would say they were “all skirt and no knickers”). There are other distributions that are built for do-ers. (and of course there are some that provide Glitz and glamour as well as functionality).

      • Debian community to elect new project leader

        The candidates have been announced and the election process for the new Debian Project Leader (DPL) has officially begun. Gergely Nagy, Moray Allan and Lucas Nussbaum are campaigning for the top position in the Debian Project. After three terms, current Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli is not running for re-election this year.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Developing Its Own Calculator, Calendar, Etc
          • Chromebook Pixel: Run Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS

            A common complaint about Chrome OS is that it’s not a full OS. That’s no longer true as you can easily run Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS on the Chromebook Pixel and toggle between the two.

          • Ubuntu Display Server Fallout

            Recently, many people have expressed concern over Ubuntu’s desire to migrate from the X Window System to the Mir display server, which the Ubuntu team will manage themselves. The bulk of the concern seems to be confusion over why Ubuntu developers wouldn’t use Wayland instead.

            In this article, I’ll explore the official reasoning for the decision, while also exploring some additional considerations that most people aren’t talking about.

          • Shifting to Ubuntu in 2013

            Seven years ago, it was a bit of a challenge to shift to open source because Linux desktop operating systems weren’t all that easy to set up and use. Today, it’s a snap to install and use Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions with an estimated 20 million users worldwide.

          • One year on, Ubuntu still to announce a single TV hardware partner

            More than a year after it announced plans to develop an Ubuntu-powered TV, Canonical, the company behind the operating system, is still to announce a hardware partner for the project.

            Ubuntu TV is one element of Canonical’s ‘four screen’ strategy, under which the company wants to see its open source operating system also appearing on smartphones, tablets and PCs.

            First announced at CES 2012 in Las Vegas, Canonical hoped that Ubuntu TVs would appear by the end of the year.

          • Monthly versions of Ubuntu might be too unstable, Shuttleworth warns

            Developers at Canonical have been considering a completely new release cycle for Ubuntu in which the interim releases that occur every six months would be dumped in favor of “rolling releases” that happen far more frequently but not necessarily on a set schedule.

            Last month, Canonical VP Rick Spencer suggested that Canonical “take a monthly snapshot of the development release, which we support only until the next snapshot.” Users could then choose either the Long Term Support (LTS) edition that comes out every two years, the monthly snapshot, or the absolute newest build, which could conceivably be updated every day.

          • Ubuntu’s Release Cycle and its Impact on the Channel
          • Ubuntu 13.04: how things are shaping up

            Ubuntu 13.04 is the latest version of Ubuntu, scheduled to be released on the 25th of April this year. But what’s it shaping up to? In this article I’ll sum up some of the changes since the last LTS (Long Time Support) release, Ubuntu 12.04. You might wonder “Why not Ubuntu 12.10?” The answer is simple; I never used Ubuntu 12.10 after my first crashtastic experience in VirtualBox. I’m not saying Ubuntu 12.10 was a bad release, but it didn’t really work for me.

          • What’s Good For Canonical Is Best For Ubuntu

            Mark Shuttleworth can’t leave well enough alone. First it was Unity. Then it was Wayland. Now it’s Mir. Inquiring minds want to know: what does he think he’s trying to do? It’s simple, really. He’s not trying to do anything. All indications are that he’s actually accomplishing what he’s setting out to do. Except for making money and only time will tell if that’s going to work out for him.

            Unity was a no-brainer. Practically everybody hated GNOME 3, so he pretty much had to do something. What everyone expected that something to be was along the lines of Cinnamon or MATE, an interface that would offer users the look and feel of GNOME as they knew it, not as it had become. What Shuttleworth offered was, in the words of Monty Python, “something completely different.” Different from both GNOME 2 or 3. Different from KDE. Different from Windoze and OS X. Unique to Ubuntu.

          • If Ubuntu wants to succeed on tablets and smartphones, the waiting game must stop
          • Can Canonical Rally Its Community for Ubuntu Convergence?
          • Ubuntu’s Release Cycle and its Impact on the Channel

            Daylight savings just began, which means it’s the time of year to start looking forward to the spring release of Ubuntu. But could this year’s version, 13.04, be the last one in the biannual release cycle that Canonical has stalwartly maintained for almost a decade? For the moment, that remains uncertain, but the issue, which has produced a stunning amount of debate, could have ramifications well beyond the Ubuntu ecosystem.

            Rumors of changes to the Ubuntu release policy have circulated for several months, but Ubuntu developers initially rejected them. The issue re-emerged a couple of weeks ago, however, when Rick Spencer, vice president of Engineering at Canonical, launched a wide public discussion by suggesting on the Ubuntu developers’ email list that a “rolling release” cycle might better serve the Ubuntu community. That would be a major shift away from the current model, under which Canonical introduces a new version of Ubuntu every six months. It designates one out of every four of those releases for “longterm support” (LTS), meaning they receive support and updates for five years.

          • Canonical and Ubuntu may be doing the right thing
          • Ubuntu shouldn’t matter to those who care about free desktops

            So Canonical is chaining its desktop Ubuntu Linux distribution to a phone/tablet/TV future, and they want us, the community, to write apps for their in-the-works devices and not care so much about the core operating system itself.

          • Ubuntu Unity Existed Before The GNOME Shell?

            Mark Shuttleworth has irritated some open-source developers by his latest claim: Ubuntu’s Unity existed before the GNOME Shell.

            Red Hat’s Adam Williamson, among other open-source developers, are ticked off by some of Mark Shuttleworth’s recent claims regarding Ubuntu. It’s just not about Mir, but other topics too. The Fedora QA manager wrote a personal blog post today entitled Dear Mark Shuttleworth: please tell the truth.

          • Let’s go faster while preserving what works best
          • Ubuntu Used as Online Gambling Station in Airport
          • How to Upgrade Ubuntu 12.10 to Ubuntu 13.04
          • Shuttleworth Goes on the Defensive for his Linux Vision

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Trisquel 6.0 LTS “Toutatis” has arrived!

              This long awaited release is based on Ubuntu Precise, and as usual comes full of free software goodness. We continue to provide an easy to use classic desktop experience complete with full featured browsing, office, communications and social networking utilities. Download it while it is hot!

            • Ubuntu GNOME Is Now An Official Ubuntu Flavor

              As some non-Mir news, Tim Lunn of the Ubuntu GNOME project wrote into Phoronix that the OS spin is now an official Ubuntu flavor. Ubuntu GNOME was originally released last year in conjunction with Ubuntu 12.10, but now the flavor has been approved by the Tech Board per the IRC meeting logs.

            • Gnome gets official status within the Ubuntu family
            • How will changes at Ubuntu affect Kubuntu: exclusive interview with Jonathan Riddell

              There are some major changes happening at Ubuntu which pans from changing base technologies to community involvement. Ubuntu has quite some flavour and derivatives and there was some concern among the users how these changes will impact these distributions, so we reached out to two major distributions which are based on Ubuntu – Linux Mint and Kubuntu.

            • Xubuntu Pangolin on Asus eeePC

              The combination of Xubuntu 12.04 and eeePC is amazing. This Linux distro has breathed fresh air into the lungs of my netbook. Unless it dies because of hardware fatigue, it should breeze on for a few years more without any trouble, blessed with an enhanced and improved presentation layer, much faster responsiveness and multitasking, and the latest set of programs and gadgets. Really nice. So if you happen to have a netbook, I do warmly recommend you give it a try with an Xfce-flavored distro, you’re bound for a pleasant surprise. Well, not a surprise, if you know what you’re expecting, but you get the drift.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Q&A with Mentor Graphics’ John Cherry: Android or Embedded Linux?

      As we discovered last week, Linux pros don’t think Android is the new embedded Linux. Android does, however, have a lot of great uses in embedded projects and many features that even hard core embedded Linux developers can envy.

      To dig a little deeper into some of the similarities and differences between Android and embedded Linux, we talked with John Cherry, Senior Engineering Manager of Linux Runtime Services at Mentor Graphics. While you might not need Android in a fixed function device such as your toaster (or maybe you do?), he said via email, “Android is no longer just a mobile communication and tablet operating system.”

    • Phones

      • The elusive third great mobile OS

        commentary BlackBerry. Windows Phone. Firefox. Tizen. Ubuntu. There’s a lot of interest in creating an alternative to Android and iOS. But the lack of concentrated industry support may spell doom.

      • Jolla hires designers behind Huawei devices, Nokia E-Series for Sailfish phone

      • Ballnux

      • Android

        • XOLO’s Q800 quad-core Android phone launched for Rs 12,499

          XOLO has launched its first quad-core Android smartphone in India. Powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the new Q800 phone has a 4.5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 960 x 640 pixels. It features a 1.2GHz quad-core processor.

        • LG announces global roll-out of Optimus L5II

          LG has announced that its 4-inch dual-SIM smartphone, Optimus L5II, will make its debut in Brazil, eventually trickling out to markets in Central / South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

          The handset packs 1Ghz processor and 512MB of RAM powering Android 4.1.2 aka Jelly Bean layered in the latest LG UX specific tweaks: Quick Button and Safety Care.

        • Phonegap Application Development

          Developing native code for Android is relatively easy. You’ll have to learn to use Android’s XML-based screen layout mechanism, and you’ll have to learn Java. For iPhone, you’ll need to learn Objective C. If you want to develop for Windows Phone, you’ll need to learn C# as well. Instead, you simply could use Phonegap and maintain a singe code base in HTML/JavaScript/CSS. This is the definition of a “no-brainer”.

        • Android is so in (in Asia)
        • Intel Delivers Innovations Atop Google’s Android

          Intel has released their own spin of Google’s Android operating system with some features not yet found in the upstream open-source Android project.

          For the past half-year Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have been working on Android-IA, their project that optimizes the AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) code for Intel hardware.

        • Android-powered light switch seeks to control your home

          Ube announced today that its WiFi Smart Dimmer switch, currently an in-process project at Kickstarter, will be able to control other smart devices throughout the home via gestures on the dimmer’s capacitive multi-touch interface.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Community is an art form

    The collaborative community contribution model of open source computing is an art form.

    This is a view shared by an increasing number of respected speakers in the industry as open platforms now become seriously architected into our computing services from mobile devices to enterprise clouds.

  • Open Source / Open Development / Open Design: Leveraging Transparency for Greater Success

    >

  • 4 Myths About Open Source We Should Put to Rest

    Growing consumerization of technology means an increasing number of people have control of what technologies they use in both their personal and business lives. Two of the biggest areas where this trend manifests itself these days are mobile technologies and software, the latter of which has resulted in a steady and significant growth in the use of open source software (OSS) thanks to its lower cost and relatively similar functional capabilities. Respondents in last year’s annual Future of Open Source Survey, which is currently being run for 2013 and can be taken here, indicated that by 2017 organizations will spend 50 percent more than they do now on OSS purchases.

  • Software Company Anahata To Open Source Anahata-Util Library
  • Open source networking: Mellanox introduces Open Ethernet

    The era of closed platforms in the Ethernet switching industry is over, according to Mellanox Technologies, the Israeli data center Ethernet and InfiniBand networking specialist.

    Mellanox has introduced its Open Ethernet initiative, which gives customers the option of running a complete open source networking stack on Ethernet hardware, allowing them to tweak and customize networks to their own specifications, said Gilad Shainer, senior director of market development at Mellanox.

  • Events

    • Open Source at CeBIT 2013

      Open Source software has had a special area for itself at the CeBIT trade show for the last five years. The H went along to see what was new this year and in the process met Knoppix creator, Klaus Knopper, saw the latest in 3D printing, and talked with John “Maddog” Hall about Project Cauã.

  • Web Browsers

    • Here come Stitcher browser plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome

      Stitcher has come up with new plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome browsers. You can now listen to the streaming service any time on any browser thanks to the new browser plug-ins customized for Chrome and Firefox. These plug-ins also enable users to stream their favorite programs along with over 15,000 shows using easy toolbar access providing full playback control, the company said.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Puppet and CloudStack
    • Rackspace Rolls Out Improved Open Source Private Cloud
    • In Five Years, Expect Far Fewer OpenStack Service Providers

      The OpenStack Foundation is crowded with heavy-hitting sponsors and partners, and in recent months we’ve seen OpenStack services and announcements from Rackspace, HP, Internap and AT&T. Dell, Red Hat and IBM are also diving into the fray. It seems inevitable that there could eventually be a market shakeout, and some organizations deploying OpenStack could end up very unhappy with the support and services that they are getting.

    • AWS plugs Node.js into Elastic Beanstalk

      Amazon has plugged Node.js into its free platform-as-a-service, Elastic Beanstalk.

      Elastic Beanstalk helps developers deploy applications by automating capacity provisioning, load balancing, health monitoring, and auto-scaling the company announced in a blog post on Monday

      It also promises some Node.js-specific support features for Elastic Beanstalk, like being able to couple Elastic Beanstalk with the Amazon RDS tech, and to run the Node.js app inside Amazon’s enterprise-friendly virtual private cloud. Elastic Beanstalk now also supports PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, and Java, alongside Node.js.

  • CMS

    • Drupal’s Founder Sees Big Things Ahead for Version 8 of the CMS

      Dries Buytaert is the founder and lead of the open source Drupal content management system, which OStatic and many other web sites are based on. He’s also the co-founder of Acquia, which offers a commercially supported version of Drupal. Dries is one of the more respected pundits in open source, and has submitted guest posts here on OStatic.

  • Education

    • OER university practices go well beyond open enrollment

      While mainstream attention has been focused on MOOCs, the Open Educational Resource university (OERu) has been developing a parallel education offering which is distinctively open.

      The OERu aims to provide free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials with pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognized education institutions.

    • How to organize an education hackathon
    • Open Ballot: What does education need?

      So, we put it to you open balloters. What do you think?

      Kids should be able to use MSOffice, since that’s what they’ll need to use in most jobs.
      Kids should understand how computers work, and how they interact.
      Kids should be able to program.
      Kids should be able to install Gentoo. We’re trying to build a 1337 super race!
      Kids should know nothing otherwise they’ll steal our jobs. As Homer Simpson said, “Children are the future … unless we stop them now”

      Or, of course, any other thoughts.

  • Healthcare

    • Success of GNU Health goes beyond free software

      In 2006, Luis Falcón founded GNU Health, a free health information system that recently recieved the “Best Project of Social Benefit” award given by the Free Software Foundation.

      GNU Health, and in Latin countries, GNU Solidario, started as a free software project for Primary Care facilities in rural areas and developing countries. Since then, it has evolved into a full Hospital and Health Information System used by the United Nations, public hospitals and Ministries of Health (such as in Entre Rios, Argentina), and private institutions around the globe.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The Guile 100 Programs Project

      Guile 100 hopes to be a collection of useful examples of how to use Guile. Every few weeks, I’ll announce a theme for a collection of tasks. Then each week, I’ll announce a challenge in that theme: a script to be written or a problem to be solved.

    • Cynthiune 1.0.0

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Swiss Canton’s use of open source document management system renews dispute

      The Swiss Canton of Bern has decided to switch to Open Justitia, a management system for legal documents, developed as open source by the country’s Federal Court. The canton procured support for the installing and maintaining the software from a Swiss IT service provider. One competitor disputes the contract. The firm, whose offer of its own proprietary alternative was turned down, is rallying for political support.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Zend Optimizer+ will land in PHP 5.5

      Zend Optimizer+ is to be integrated into the currently-in-development PHP 5.5. The announcement was made by Zeev Suraski, CTO and co-founder of Zend Technologies. The opcode cache and code optimiser was recently open sourced; previously it was only available as part of the proprietary Zend Server. It improves the performance of the interpreter by optimising the bytecode generated from PHP source files. It also stores precompiled bytecode in shared memory instead of reloading and recompiling source code from the hard disk when needed.

    • Uni profs: Kids today could do with a bit of ‘mind-crippling’ COBOL

      Want a guaranteed job in IT? Learn COBOL, even if it cripples you mentally – that’s the advice of university profs teaching tech.

      Ignore, for a second, the fact COBOL doesn’t feature in the top 20 of languages developers are using in anger today. Those in charge of setting university IT curricula reckon there’s no better guarantee of a job than tooling up on COBOL.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • On keeping a name relevant

      My conclusion is that when it comes to Freedom (Software Freedom or otherwise) standards actually matter as much as rights. Standards, regardless of what they are about, industry specifications, public policies, conventions defining legal terms, even words and their meaning, are the fundamental building block on an open, inclusive and efficient system. While their use may be twisted -any tool can, for the hand that uses the tool is the one ultimately defining its intent- standards form the basis of innovation, be it technological or social, and even political. Standards are what we must agree on first in order to agree on principles, values, and on the way we live. Our world, our countries, our lives, the industries we are working in are thus powered by standards. But it would be a pale assertion to stand at that line; for the author of this blog does not just stick to standards. He believes in Freedom as the energy in everything good that’s been happening in his life and around him as far as he can witness; and if the truth about the “primum mobile” will forever remain a mystery to Man, at least part of its manifestation lies in our innate and universal potential and right to Freedom. Software is no different in that respect. This blog will thus continue to be not just powered by standards. It will always be moved by Freedom.

Leftovers

  • Why Antibiotics Are the Wrong Approach to Shadow IT

    Possibly because the bad ones can kill you, bacteria get a bad rap. Those Purell stations you see at conferences? They’re barely competent as a viricide, but excel at destroying bacteria. And while the CDC says they’re not necessary, anti-bacterial soaps remain all the rage these days.

    We’ve been conditioned to consider bacteria as the enemy by way of related horror stories. The toxin produced by Clostridium botulinum, for example, the bacteria which allows celebrities to give their faces a carboard-like appearance, is incredibly toxic. 1 gram of it, in fact, is enough to kill 14,000 people. Escherichia coli, a normally helpful occupant of our digestive tract, has a variant that can cause hemorrhagic diarrhea, kidney failure or even death.

  • Science

  • Hardware

    • Western Digital RE4 1TB SATA Enterprise HDD

      Benchmarks up this afternoon are of a Western Digital RE4 WD1003FBYX, an internal enterprise hard drive, being tested from Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel. This Linux disk drive comparison was done with an EXT4 file-system and other disk benchmarks are available from different solid-state and traditional rotating hard drives.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • As Big as Terrorism

      UK deaths last year from antibiotic resistance: 5,000
      Uk deaths last year fron terrorisn: nil

    • Airport Screening Concerns Civil Liberties Groups

      …asked a Virgin America flight attendant for a soda and was told he had to request one using the aircraft’s seat-back system…

      […]

      “My biggest concern is that somebody on an aircraft has the power to outright lie about an incident and get me in all kinds of trouble,” he said. “Civil rights have gone out the window.”

    • 12 Companies Cashing In On Drones
    • Iowa leaders should take strong stand against drones

      At 11:47 a.m. Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky embarked on a near-13 hour deliberative filibuster, stalling the nomination of CIA Director John Brennan, to gain clarity on the possibility of the CIA’s drone assassination program being used against American citizens at home.

      The CIA regularly uses drones armed with Hellfire missiles to engage various targets abroad. Drone strikes have a cruel and unusual record. Afghani President Hamid Karzai demanded the attacks end, after the drone’s Hellfire engulfed 30 civilian locations in 2012.

    • Afghan Says Force Backed by the C.I.A. Beat Him

      The 29-year-old engineering student was standing outside his classroom here on Saturday morning when he said two pickup trucks full of armed men pulled up. The men, said to be members of a C.I.A.-backed Afghan strike force, grabbed him, tied his hands behind his back, draped a black hood over his head and drove him to an undisclosed location where, the student says, he was beaten and whipped.

    • After Afghan Raid, Focus on Captors
    • CIA Ramps Up Role in Iraq
    • CIA ups Iraq role to fight Syria Islamists
    • Killing a Citizen: NYT, Awlaki and ‘Muddying the Moral Clarity’

      Indeed, the Times story does a remarkable job of conveying official justifications for the Awlaki killing–but we hear nothing from those who have questioned the government’s account and its legal rationale. The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have led the legal challenge on the Awlaki case, and issued a response (3/10/13) to the Times story.

      The Times story also included information about the drone killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki. He was killed several weeks later, along with about a dozen others in Yemen. The strike was based on bad intelligence; the intended target was not among those killed.

  • Cablegate

    • Bill Keller Ponders What Would Have Happened if NYT Published Information from Bradley Manning
    • Forget WikiLeaks: Manning Should Have Gone to NYT
    • Interview uncut: Jacob Appelbaum

      RU: It’s interesting to have a book on Cypherpunk with Julian Assange as the author (his name, at least, is writ largest) when most people think of WikiLeaks as an anti-secrecy organization. Did he (or all of you) intentionally want to complexify the discussion around WikiLeaks or did anything like that even cross your mind(s)?

      JA: Personal privacy and institutional transparency are complementary ideas that help to create a free and open society.

    • Mark Weisbrot on Hugo Chavez, Kevin Gosztola on Bradley Manning

      This week on CounterSpin: Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is dead but his independence and help for Venezuela’s poor remains unforgiven in the US press. We’ll talk to Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research about what media’s portrayal of Chavez says about media.

    • The War Against Bradley Manning — A War Against All Who Speak Out Against Injustice

      Time and again, throughout America’s history, individuals with a passion for truth and a commitment to justice have opted to defy the unjust laws and practices of the American government in order to speak up against slavery, segregation, discrimination, and war. Even when their personal safety and freedom were on the line, these individuals spoke up, knowing they would be chastised, ridiculed, arrested, branded traitors and even killed.

    • WikiLeaks: GSL Doesn’t Want ICRC And UN Involved In Identification Of Those Killed In The War – Gota To US

      “Defense Secretary Gothabaya Rajapaksa was sharply critical of international organizations in his final meeting with Ambassador. Rajapaksa said the ICRC’s job was essentially finished now that the conflict was over. He said the GSL is unhappy with the UN and ICRC for being critical of the GSL when they should have been working with the government to help resolve the conflict and address the challenges Sri Lanka faced. The Defense Secretary said the GSL doesn’t want the ICRC and UN involved in identification of those killed in the former conflict zone because of their ‘negative’ attitude. He claimed their reporting would likely inflame passions, exacerbate divisions, and be contrary to the goals of reconciliation and closure. Ambassador strongly disagreed, saying the ICRC was performing excellent work in assisting GSL efforts to deal with the humanitarian crisis.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

  • Finance

    • A Resurgent Goldman Can Reshape Wall Street

      The current system has made the people who work on Wall Street fabulously rich, and given the rest of us one financial crisis after another. It makes no effort to hold financial professionals responsible for their bad behavior. Instead, they continue to reap all the financial rewards for taking risks with the money of their depositors, counterparties, creditors and shareholders, with little or no accountability when things go awry. After what Wall Street put us through in 2008 and 2009, you would think that the compensation system would have been changed to prevent a repeat. You would be wrong.

    • Rigging the I.P.O. Game

      ONCE upon a time, in a very different age, an Internet start-up called eToys went public. The date was May 20, 1999. The offering price had been set at $20, but investors in that frenzied era were so eager for eToys shares that the stock immediately shot up to $78. It ended its first day of trading at $77 a share.

      The eToys initial public offering raised $164 million, a nice chunk of change for a two-year-old company. But it wasn’t even close to the $600 million-plus the company could have raised if the offering price had more realistically reflected the intense demand for eToys shares. The firm that underwrote the I.P.O. — and effectively set the $20 price — was Goldman Sachs.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • From Tabloids to Tablets: News Corp Spends Big on LA School Board Race, Sets Sights on Public Education “Market”

      A subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – parent company of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal – has spent a whopping $250,000 on the Los Angeles school board race, just as the corporation focuses on making money off of public education. News Corp and its for-profit education subsidiaries are also members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the education initiatives promoted by News Corp’s preferred candidates track the ALEC agenda.

      Murdoch has called the for-profit K-12 education industry “a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed” – and his News Corp is investing big to capture that market. In 2010, News Corp acquired Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, for $360 million. Its latest venture is a digital K-12 curricula to be sold and taught on a specialized “Amplify Tablet” that runs on the Android platform.

    • EU attempts to brainwash children with ‘sinister Soviet-style propaganda’

      European Parliament chiefs are considering setting up a site to target young children with a “playful” presentation of their working methods and democratic principles.

      It adds to concern highlighted by the Daily Express about educational materials produced for schools by the European Commission that critics claim are a bid to make children feel positive about the EU.

    • Another WI Supreme Court Election Battle Dominated By Outside Spending

      Ever since Governor Scott Walker imposed his anti-union legislation on Wisconsin, the state has become exceptionally polarized. This polarization is reflected in the current race for Supreme Court. Once again Wisconsin is seeing massive spending from outside groups in a race that is officially nonpartisan.

      The 2011 Supreme Court race between incumbent Justice David Prosser — who was formerly a GOP lawmaker in the state — and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg became a referendum on Walker’s controversial Act 10, with record-breaking spending by groups like the Koch-linked Citizens for a Strong America, the powerful Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the Wisconsin chapter of Club for Growth, and the union-backed Greater Wisconsin Committee. Prosser ultimately won in a narrow victory after the last-minute discovery of uncounted votes in heavily Republican Waukesha County.

  • Privacy

    • Data Protection: Last Opinion Vote in JURI on 19 March

      Revision of the European Data Protection Regulation is ongoing and the “Legal Affairs” (JURI) Committee will vote on its opinion on 19 March. Unfortunately, there are strong indications that JURI will vote in the same way as the previous committees and weaken the protection of EU citizens’ privacy against corporations that collect, process and trade their personal data. With only one week left before the vote, citizens must act urgently and contact their members of the European Parliament (MEP).

    • Councils reassess their use of CCTV
    • Open source cloud offers another route to better security

      The news that IBM is going to shift all its cloud services and software to an open cloud architecture comes as no great surprise. After all, it had already signalled an intent to open up the cloud when it joined the OpenStack Foundation last year as a ‘platinum’ sponsor and then went on to contribute to the codebase.

    • Study links Facebook ‘likes’ with personality traits

  • Civil Rights

    • EU sweats over how to bring Hungary into line
    • Cops Detain 6-year-old for Walking Around Neighborhood (And It Gets Worse)

      Readers — The story below makes me so sad and so angry, and you will see why. If anyone at Child Protective Services or the police department would pick up a single book written before predator panic swept the country, they’d see that 6-year-olds were always part of the neighborhood scene, scampering, playing, or even — in many eras and areas — working! The idea that a 6-year-old can’t be outside without constant supervision is new and warped.

    • What U.S. Commitment to African Justice and Human Rights?

      What happens in other countries is important to U.S. media when they can claim that the news matters to U.S. interests. So it was not altogether surprising to see the March 8 headline in the New York Times, “Leader of Vote Count in Kenya Faces U.S. With Tough Choices.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality Neutralised in France?

      Questioned by the French government on the need to legislate on the protection of freedoms on the Internet, the National Digital Council (Conseil national du numérique or CNNum) published today an opinion on Net neutrality1 [fr]. It recommends that the French government makes this principle of non-discrimination into law, broadening its scope to include search engines and other online services. But by overbroadening the neutrality principle, the CCNum’s recommendations could result in a meaningless law.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Angry judge blasts porn trolls: “Someone has an awful lot to hide”

        In a Los Angeles federal courtroom on a blindingly sunny Monday afternoon, US District Judge Otis Wright expressed incredulity at the sheer gall of the Prenda porn copyright trolling firm.

        Judge Wright had ordered six other Prenda affiliates (or alleged affiliates) to show up in response to his order regarding possible sanctions for their behavior. None of those named parties showed up to the hearing in person, apart from Alan Cooper of Minnesota. (Cooper has alleged that Prenda attorney John Steele used Cooper’s name improperly as the CEO of copyright licensing firm AF Holdings.) Lawyers Steele, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and Prenda paralegal Angela Van Den Hemel had filed a notice on Friday saying that travel to the Central District Court of California was impossible for the out-of-state parties. Today, they were represented by another attorney who identified herself as Heather Rosing.

#MSM - #Australia heat wave: New color added to weather maps, fire danger "catastrophic."

Australia weather maps get new color: bright purple

From now on, temperatures above 50 Celsius, or 122 Fahrenheit, will be represented in bright purple on Australia’s official weather maps. Above, predictions for Monday, Jan. 14 show highs topping 120 in parts of Southern Australia.

Screenshot / Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The last four months of 2012 were the hottest on record in Australia. But January is shaping up to be even hotter.

Between Jan. 3 and Jan. 6, an amazing 18 different weather stations recorded all-time temperature highs, according to a special climate statement from the country’s Bureau of Meteorology. Those included a mark of 118 degrees in Eucla, Western Australia, and an unheard-of 107 in Hobart, Tasmania, which bills itself as the gateway to Antarctica.

But the bureau’s forecasters believe the worst is yet to come—which is why they’ve added a new color to their official weather maps, for temperatures up to 54 degrees Celsius (129 Fahrenheit). In other words, they believe the country’s all-time high temperature of 123 degrees, set in 1960, is about to go down, and hard.

Earlier today, the Sydney Morning Herald grabbed a screenshot of an official weather prediction map that showed a splotch of shocking purple over South Australia, the brand-new indicator for temperatures in excess of 50 Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). It appears the bureau has since eased its predictions for Monday, as the purple has receded for the time being. But the new color lives on in the temperature index to the right of the maps, reflecting a new climate reality in which a 129-degree day would no longer be off the charts.

Meanwhile, the country’s fire danger levels have been elevated to “catastrophic,” with over 100 blazes already burning in its most populous state, New South Wales.

Of course, it isn’t just Australia that’s getting toastier these days. After Europe’s 2003 and 2010 heat waves broke 500-year seasonal average temperature records, researchers predicted in the journal Science that such “mega-heatwaves” would become five to 10 times more common on the continent in the decades to come.

Here in the United States, July marked the hottest month on record, surpassing the worst of the 1936 Dust Bowl, and the corresponding drought took a significant toll on the country’s overall economic growth. On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that 2012 was the hottest year on record by a full degree.

Welcome to the 21st Century. It’s gonna be a scorcher.

Troll Artist of the Day Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) apparently had a field day yesterday with an anonymous hacker slash troll, after solving a series of riddles e-mailed by the hacker led the police to an island near Tokyo where they found a cat wearing a collar with a digital memory card that allegedly contains detailed information about a computer virus. Hat tip goes to The Daily Dot.
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Troll Artist of the Day

(via thedailywhat)

#MSM - Brandon Bryant: Drone operator followed orders to shoot a child... and decided he had to quit - #DropTheDrone

‘Did we just kill a kid?’: The moment drone operator who assassinated Afghans with the push of a button on a computer in the U.S. realized he had vaporized a child… and could not go on

A former U.S. drone operator has opened up about the toll of killing scores of innocent people by pressing a button from a control room in New Mexico.

Brandon Bryant, 27, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container.

But, after following orders to shoot and kill a child in Afghanistan, he knew he couldn’t keep doing what he was doing and quit the military.

Scroll down for video

Too much: Brandon Bryant, 27, pictured, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container

Too much: Brandon Bryant, 27, pictured, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container

‘I saw men, women and children die during that time,’ he told Spiegel Online.’I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn’t kill anyone at all.’

Bryant joined the military by accident when he accompanied a friend who was enlisting in the army and heard that he could go to university for free if he signed up to the Air Force.

He excelled in his course and was assigned to an intelligence collection unit where he soon learned how to control the cameras and lasers on a drone, to analyse ground images, maps and weather data.

He was made a sensor operator, the equivalent of co-pilot, and at just 20 flew his first mission over Iraq - seated in the safety of a control room in Nevada.

Drone operators: A drone pilot, left, and a drone sensor operator practice on a simulator at Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico

Drone operators: A drone pilot, left, and a drone sensor operator practice on a simulator at Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico

But it began to take its toll immediately.

The first time he fired a missile, he killed two men instantly and cried on his way home.

‘I felt disconnected from humanity for almost a week,’ he said.

But it was an incident when a Predator drone was circling above a flat-roofed house made of mud in Afghanistan, more than 6,250 miles away, that really sticks in his mind.

The hut had a shed used to hold goats and when he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser.

The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.

‘These moments are like in slow motion,’ he told the website.

As the countdown reached seven seconds, there was no sign of anyone on the ground.

Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point.

But when it was down to three seconds, a child suddenly walked around the corner.

The next thing he saw was a flash on the screen - the explosion. The building collapsed, and the child disappeared.

Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach, he told the website.

‘Did we just kill a kid?’ he asked the pilot next to him.

‘Yeah, I guess that was a kid,’ the man replied.

Thoughts jotted in his diary on uneventful days clearly show the heavy burden his job was placing on him.

‘On the battlefield there are no sides, just bloodshed. Total war. Every horror witnessed. I wish my eyes would rot,’ he wrote on one occasion.

He began to shut himself off from his friends, and his girlfriend complained about his bad moods.

‘I can’t just switch and go back to normal life,’ he said to her. He stopped sleeping and began to exercise instead.

Drones: Bryant worked as a sensor operator, the equivalent of a drone co-pilot (stock photo)

Drones: Bryant worked as a sensor operator, the equivalent of a drone co-pilot (stock photo)

One day he collapsed at work, doubling over and spitting blood. The doctor ordered him to stay home, and not to return to work until he could sleep more than four hours a night for two weeks in a row.

‘Half a year later, I was back in the cockpit, flying drones,’ Bryant told Spiegel Online.

But he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now Bryant has left the military and is living back at home in Montana where he feels he is slowly recuperating.

‘I haven’t been dreaming in infrared for four months,’ he said with a smile.

VIDEO: Inside the Air Force’s Unmanned Drone Control Center:

#MSM - Antivirus Software Mogul #McAfee Wanted By Police

John McAfee, founder of online security product line McAfee Security, is in hiding in Belize wanted for murder, according to a report.

McAfee is wanted for “allegedly” killing American expatriate Gregory Faull, a neighbor and a long time rival who was found dead at his home on the island of Ambergris Caye in Belize on Sunday morning.

It was reported that McAfee has had run-ins with the local Belize authorities before. In April, the Gang Suppresion Unit raided one of his businesses looking for drugs and guns. They seized some arms, but McAfee claims they were legally held. He later said he was being victimized for refusing to give money to a local politician.

It appears that since the year 2010 he has been posting online about his attempts to purify the drug called “bath salts,” a drug not to be confused with bathing products of the same name. McAfee also claims that he’s gotten mixed up with Belizean gangsters and that there had been “in the last year alone, eleven attempts to kidnap or kill me.”

McAfee is not only worried about the Belize authorities, though. He also fears that the murderers may have gotten the wrong man and that he was really the target.

McAfee is believed to be still hiding out somewhere in Belize. There are also mixed reports whether he’s really wanted for murder or just for questioning.

#MSM - @CNBC EXECS CHILDREN MURDERED 1 DAY AFTER #CNBC REPORT $43 TRILLION BANKER LAWSUIT? - #WTF

~

Watch video here:
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/10/cnbc-execs-children-murdered-1-d…

other sources:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49555671
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/26/us/new-york-nanny-deaths/index.html#cnn-disqus-…

Source: youtube.com

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