And Sheila Jackson-Lee uses this agenda to take anti-Iran/China/N. Korea propaganda to a new level.
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House bill could kill music, radio stations with new tax
Jun 17 2009 – 4:01pm | Brett Thorne
It turns out it might not be the video that killed the radio star.
HR 848, known as the Performance Tax, could deal a huge blow to the already struggling radio industry. The bill would essentially tax radio stations for playing music in an effort to compensate artists for their performance on recordings.
Dan Schumacher, general manager of KTSW, said the bill has met with much opposition from organizations like the National Association of Broadcasters, of which he is a member.
“The difference between the performance tax and what we were already paying, originally, was that it only paid the songwriter,” Schumacher said. “Now it will pay the performers. So if you played fiddle on Merle Haggard’s third album, the record companies will somehow figure out a way to give you a percentage of a cent.”
The bill, which was introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) on Feb. 4, was ordered to be amended on May 13.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) is the only Texas representative co-sponsoring the bill. According to Jackson Lee’s official Web site, “Only Iran, China and North Korea join the United States of America in preventing artists from being compensated.”
According to Jackson Lee’s Web site, the bill aims to “help the people whose music makes us laugh, dance, sometimes sing and shout for joy because of the praise they provide us.” Some disagree with this assessment. Schumacher said record labels stand to collect as much as half of the performance fee so he questions how much benefit artists will receive.
“If this was for the artists, wouldn’t they get a bigger cut of the fee,” Schumacher said. “(The record labels) have done such a poor job working with new technologies so I think they’re looking for a new way to create another revenue stream without having to actually think up a new marketing plan to sell music.”
The bill would charge smaller stations a sliding scale fee between $500 and $2500 which would grant the station unlimited access to music.
Schumacher said he estimated KTSW we be charged somewhere around $1000.
“It’s just another check we would have to write,” Schumacher said. “It would be another drain on our budget. I’m certainly not going to cut back on my staff but that’s $1000 we won’t be able to spend on new headphones, software or what have you.”
The bill will most likely discourage upstart radio stations, but large commercial broadcasters will be hit the hardest. Schumacher estimated the fee would run in the 10’s of thousands for large stations like 101X in Austin.
“They will pay much more,” Schumacher said. “Commercial stations will get hit hard. Some stations might get rid of music or cut back. Some are saying ‘We might just go talk.’”
Josh Dent, music director of KTSW, said the radio industry already serves labels by exposing the public to new music.
“We play new music from labels everyday in order to get artists’ music heard,” said Dent, English junior. “It’s not our fault if people are just too lazy to go out and buy an album and instead just download, rip or burn everything. Radio stations should not have to pay for that.”
Dent said with listeners flocking to the Internet to get their music, the timing of the bill could not be worse.
“To me it is kicking an industry while it’s down,” Dent said. “I don’t see it having any type of positive effect whatsoever.”
Schumacher said he and others agree about the poor timing of the bill.
“We’re at a time where revenues have dropped,” Schumacher said. “There are a lot of executives from commercial radio stations who are saying this is a terrible time to add all these fees. Will this be the thing that destroys commercial radio? I don’t think so but it won’t help commercial radio that’s for sure.”
Radio Tax
New Radio Tax (Performance Fee) legislation currently in Congress would be devastating for radio.
Take Action today and let your member of Congress know that you oppose this legislation.
I am writing to ask you to oppose the creation of a new Tax on Radio in the form of a performance fee that will be forced on local radio stations if H.R. 848/S. 379 were to become law.
H.R. 848/S. 379 would lead to disastrous consequences for the radio industry and would force many radio stations out of business, result in job loss and less diversity on the air. There is no greater threat to the viability of local free over-the-air radio than this proposed tax.
A new intellectual property right for the record labels, most of which are foreign owned, amounts to a tax on local radio that could be the difference between radio’s future success or failure.
In addition, I ask that you immediately cosponsor H.C.R 49, “The Local Radio Freedom Act” to take a stand now for your hometown radio stations. Your co-sponsorship of this resolution will send a strong message of disapproval to Speaker Nancy Pelosi against full House consideration of H.R. 848/S. 379. This action could ultimately be the difference between survival and extinction for radio stations in your district.
In a revealing interview with the New York Times, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says abortion should be used to control useless eaters and unwanted populations.
Ginsberg: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
She does not say it like that, but she might as well have.
Asked out “reproductive choice” — that is, the choice to kill a fetus — Ginsburg said the Supreme Court ruling on Medicaid surprised her. In 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.
“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” said the Justice (emphasis added).
In other words, Ginsberg says abortion is a eugenics tool designed to weed out the undesirable and useless eaters, to specifically control the number of people the ruling elite “don’t want to have too many of,” i.e., the poor and specifically people of color.
“Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly,” declared Margaret Sanger, a member of both the American Eugenics Society and the English Eugenics Society and founder of Planned Parenthood. “Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to maintenance of those who should never have been born.”
Sanger was a follower of Francis Galton, the “humanist” who believed that inferior races and people should cease to breed or “be considered enemies of the State” and exterminated. The American and British Eugenics Societies were founded on Galton’s writings. Sanger became a member of the American Eugenics Society in 1930, and a member of the International Congress of Eugenics in 1932.
Elmer Carter, an editor of Sanger’s The Birth Control Review, wrote in 1932 about the “Negro Problem.” He said “that the race problem in America is infinitely aggravated by the presence of too many unhappy born, sub-normals, morons, and imbeciles of both races. Therefore, those fighting for birth control must take eugenics into consideration.”
Roe v. Wade was instituted primarily for eugenics, as James R. Weddington admitted in 1992. Weddington was one of the co-counsels for Roe v. Wade. “But you can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country,” Weddington wrote to then president Clinton. “Even if we make birth control as ubiquitous as sneakers and junk food, there will still be unplanned pregnancies” and the need for abortion.
In May, the London Times reported on the gathering of a “secret billionaire club” in New York. Attendees included David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Bill Gates and others who are obsessed with “how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population,” in other words culling the useless eaters.
“The notion that these elitists merely want to slow population growth in order to improve health is a complete misnomer,” writes Paul Joseph Watson. “Slowing the growth of the world’s population while also improving its health are two irreconcilable concepts to the elite. Stabilizing world population is a natural byproduct of higher living standards, as has been proven by the stabilization of the white population in the west. Elitists like David Rockefeller have no interest in ’slowing the growth of world population’ by natural methods, their agenda is firmly rooted in the pseudo-science of eugenics, which is all about ‘culling’ the surplus population via draconian methods.”
In his film Endgame, Alex Jones documents how David Rockefeller’s father, John D. Rockefeller, exported eugenics to Germany from its origins in Britain by bankrolling the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute which later would form a central pillar in the Third Reich’s ideology of the Nazi super race. After the fall of the Nazis, top German eugenicists were protected by the allies as the victorious parties fought over who would enjoy their “expertise” in the post-war world (see The Ruling Elite’s Agenda for Global Population Reduction).
“In the 1950s, the Rockefellers reorganized the U.S. eugenics movement in their own family offices, with spinoff population-control and abortion groups,” explains Dr. Len Horowitz. “With support from the Rockefellers, the Eugenics Society (England) set up a sub-committee called the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which for 12 years had no other address than the Eugenics Society. This, then, is the private, international apparatus which has set the world up for a global holocaust, under the UN flag.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, so her opinion about culling the useless eaters is understandable.
The eugenicist David Rockefeller, after all, founded the CFR.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A widespread computer attack that began July 4 knocked out the Web sites of the Treasury Department, the Secret Service and other U.S. agencies, and South Korean government sites also came under assault.
South Korean intelligence officials believe the attacks were carried out by North Korean or pro-Pyongyang forces. U.S. officials so far have refused to publicly discuss details of the attack or where it might have originated.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that its own Web site was among several commercial sites also hit.
The U.S. government sites, which included those of the Federal Trade Commission and the Transportation Department, were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week. South Korean Internet sites began experiencing problems Tuesday.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the nation’s main spy agency, told a group of South Korean lawmakers Wednesday it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers in the South were behind the attacks, according to an aide to one of the lawmakers briefed on the information.
The aide spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the information. The National Intelligence Service — South Korea’s main spy agency — said it couldn’t immediately confirm the report, but it said it was cooperating with American authorities.
Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the agency’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a notice to federal departments and other partner organizations about the problems and “advised them of steps to take to help mitigate against such attacks.”
Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack.
Attacks on federal computer networks are common, ranging from nuisance hacking to more serious assaults, sometimes blamed on China. U.S. security officials also worry about cyber attacks from al-Qaida or other terrorists.
This time, two government officials acknowledged that the Treasury and Secret Service sites were brought down, and said the agencies were working with their Internet service provider to resolve the problem. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.
Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.
Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.
According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was “100 percent down” for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.
Web sites of major South Korean government agencies, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, and some banking sites were paralyzed Tuesday. An initial investigation found that many personal computers were infected with a virus ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korea Information Security Agency official Shin Hwa-su said.
Associated Press writer Hyung-Jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.
South Korea has issued security warnings after the disruption of major Internet sites by an apparent cyber attack. Several U.S. Web sites have also been affected. Reports are emerging in South Korean media that intelligence officials suspect North Korea may have had a hand in the disruption.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency quoted parliamentary intelligence committee lawmakers as saying North Korea may be behind the apparent cyber attack.
Wednesday marks the 15th anniversary of the death of the North’s revered first leader, Kim Il Sung. In past years, North Korea has used the occasion to show defiance or superiority toward the South.
South Korean authorities began to notice the Internet disruption Tuesday evening. By Wednesday, Korea Communication Commission official Lee Myung-su said the attack program had spread far and wide.
He says 18,000 personal computers have been infected by a malicious code.
At least 11 South Korean government sites have been either greatly slowed or made unavailable, including the sites for the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, and the lawmaking National Assembly. Several major South Korean banks and the leading Internet portal, Naver, were also affected.
U.S. sites have also been affected, including the Treasury Department, Secret Service, and Federal Trade Commission. The Web site of Voice of America news has been unavailable in South Korea for two days.
Computer experts describe this kind of attack as a “distributed denial of service.” A computer virus spreads from one personal computer to another, directing data traffic from those computers to the targeted Web sites.
Shin Hwa-su, of the Korea Information Security Agency in Seoul, says the increased traffic overloads the target sites.
He says it is like 16-lanes worth of vehicles onto a four-lane highway. The road gets completely jammed and there is no movement.
Shin explains that any ordinary computer can turn into what programmers call a “zombie PC,” if it does not have the proper software to protect it from viral attacks.
Kim Jae-gyu, chief of South Korea’s Police Cyber Terror Center says a special task force has been formed to investigate the attack.
He says police have seized one computer that was sending out the malicious software, and have confirmed the program has targeted a total of 25 Web sites.
So far, South Korean authorities say the attack has been more of an inconvenience than a genuine security threat. They say no sensitive data appears to have been extracted from the targeted sites.
South Korea is one of the most wired nations in the world. Major governmental agencies like the Ministry of Defense find themselves under attack by hackers thousands of times on any given day. Parliamentary hearings on this particular round of attacks are scheduled for Thursday.
The list of victims from the recent wave of cyber-attacks continues to grow.
According to the Associated Press, the attacks, which hit computer networks in the U.S. and South Korea, specifically targeted the White House, the Department of Defense and the New York Stock Exchange, among others. The report went on to say that a closer inspection of the attack showed that government agencies like the National Security Agency, the State Department and the Homeland Security Department were also hit. Websites for the Treasury Department and Transportation Department were reportedly hit over the weekend.
Nasdaq and The Washington Post were not spared either.
The strikes are known as denial-of-service attacks, which are coordinated efforts meant to overwhelm sites with Internet traffic. The Yonhap news agency in Seoul reported that several unnamed South Korean officials believe North Korea was involved in the attack, though there is no explicit evidence for the claim.
Senate Commerce Chairman John (Jay) Rockefeller is aiming for a July committee vote on sweeping cybersecurity legislation he introduced in April with Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, a senior Rockefeller aide said today.
Before the markup, the bill could see significant changes and an additional hearing, according to Rockefeller chief of staff Ellen Doneski. Cybersecurity experts brought up some concerns on how to bolster national defenses against high-tech attacks at a hearing before the bill was introduced and before the White House unveiled its blueprint for a cybersecurity strategy.
One of the bill’s most controversial provisions, which high-tech policy watchers say would give the president the power to effectively shut off the Internet during a cyber crisis, is imperfect and needs to be changed, Doneski said.
The bill text states the president “may declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from any compromised federal government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network.”
She said drafters did not envision an “on-off switch” that the president could flip in the event of an emergency. Rather, the intent was to provide clear lines of authority to avoid the kind of mass confusion that erupted after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Doneski said.
Rockefeller’s team has been meeting with government and industry stakeholders to fine-tune the bill so it will be more warmly received when it goes before the committee, she added. She made her remarks at an event at Google’s Washington office.
When asked about the provision, Obama administration officials at the event declined to comment. Philip Reitinger, director of the Homeland Security Department National Cybersecurity Center, and Richard Hale, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s chief of information assurance, instead stressed the importance of public-private partnerships.
“If something bad happens, the last thing someone in the private sector is going to do is reach for the 300-page government binder,” Reitinger said. Articulating an incident response plan on the heels of the White House’s 60-day cybersecurity review is crucial, he added.
Under Rockefeller’s bill, the White House would be required to create an Office of the National Cybersecurity Adviser within the Executive Office of the President as well as an advisory panel of experts from industry, academia and nonprofits.
Last month, Obama pledged to personally select a cyber czar who would report to the National Security Council and National Economic Council, but the position remains vacant.
Rockefeller’s bill would have the Commerce Department devise a real-time IT monitoring program and require cyber standards for all federal agencies, contractors and grantees.
Under the rubric of cybersecurity, the Obama administration is moving forward with a Bush regime program to screen state computer traffic on private-sector networks, including those connecting people to the Internet, The Washington Post revealed July 3.
That project, code-named “Einstein,” may very well be related to the much-larger, ongoing and highly illegal National Security Agency (NSA) communications intercept program known as “Stellar Wind,” disclosed in 2005 by The New York Times.
There are several components to Stellar Wind, one of which is a massive data-mining project run by the agency. As USA Today revealed in 2006, the “National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.”
Under the current program, Einstein will be tied directly into giant NSA data bases that contain the trace signatures left behind by cyberattacks; these immense electronic warehouses will be be fed by information streamed to the agency by the nation’s telecommunications providers.
AT&T, in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the NSA will spearhead the aggressive new initiative to detect malicious attacks launched against government web sites–by continuing to monitor the electronic communications of Americans.
This contradicts President Obama’s pledge announcing his administration’s cybersecurity program on May 29. During White House remarks Obama said that the government will not continue Bush-era surveillance practices or include “monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic.”
Called the “flagship system” in the national security state’s cyber defense arsenal, The Wall Street Journal reports that Einstein is “designed to protect the U.S. government’s computer networks from cyberspies.” In addition to cost overruns and mismanagement by outsourced contractors, the system “is being stymied by technical limitations and privacy concerns.” According to the Journal, Einstein is being developed in three stages:
Einstein 1: Monitors Internet traffic flowing in and out of federal civilian networks. Detects abnormalities that might be cyber attacks. Is unable to block attacks.
Einstein 2: In addition to looking for abnormalities, detects viruses and other indicators of attacks based on signatures of known incidents, and alerts analysts immediately. Also can’t block attacks.
Einstein 3: Under development. Based on technology developed for a National Security Agency program called Tutelage, it detects and deflects security breaches. Its filtering technology can read the content of email and other communications. (Siobhan Gorman, “Troubles Plague Cyberspy Defense,” The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009)
As readers of Antifascist Calling are well aware, like other telecom grifters, AT&T is a private-sector partner of NSA and continues to be a key player in the agency’s driftnet spying on Americans’ electronic communications. In 2006, AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in a sworn affidavit, that the firm’s Internet traffic that runs through fiber-optic cables at the company’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco was routinely provided to the National Security Agency.
Using a device known as a splitter, a complete copy of Internet traffic that AT&T receives–email, web browsing requests and other electronic communications sent by AT&T customers, was diverted onto a separate fiber-optic cable connected to the company’s SG-3 room, controlled by the agency. Only personnel with NSA clearances–either working for, or on behalf of the agency–have access to this room.
Klein and other critics of the program, including investigative journalist James Bamford who reported in his book, The Shadow Factory, believe that some 15-30 identical NSA-controlled rooms exist at AT&T facilities scattered across the country.
Einstein: You Don’t Have to Be a Genius to Know They’re Lying
But what happens next, after the data is processed and catalogued by the agency is little understood. Programs such as Einstein will provide NSA with the ability to read and decipher the content of email messages, any and all messages in real-time.
While DHS claims that “the new program will scrutinize only data going to or from government systems,” the Post reports that a debate has been sparked within the agency over “uncertainty about whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency’s involvement in warrantless wiretapping during George W. Bush’s presidency would draw controversy.”
A “Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for EINSTEIN 2″ issued by DHS in May 2008, claims the system is interested in “malicious activity” and not personally identifiable information flowing into federal networks.
While DHS claims that “the risk associated with the use of this computer network security intrusion detection system is actually lower than the risk generated by using a commercially available intrusion detection system,” this assertion is undercut when the agency states, “Internet users have no expectation of privacy in the to/from address of their messages or the IP addresses of the sites they visit.”
When Einstein 3 is eventually rolled-out, Internet users similarly will “have no expectation of privacy” when it comes to the content of their communications.
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters, “we absolutely intend to use the technical resources, the substantial ones, that NSA has.” Seeking to deflect criticism from civil libertarians, Napolitano claims “they will be guided, led and in a sense directed by the people we have at the Department of Homeland Security.”
Despite protests to the contrary by securocrats, like other Bush and Obama “cybersecurity” initiatives the Einstein program is a backdoor for pervasive state surveillance. Government Computer News reported in December 2008 that Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said that “the misuse or exposure of sensitive data from such a program [Einstein] could undermine the security arguments for surveillance.”
And with Internet Service Providers routinely deploying deep packet inspection tools to “siphon off requested traffic for law enforcement,” tools with the ability to “inspect and shape every single packet–in real time–for nearly a million simultaneous connections” as Ars Technica reported, to assume that ISPs will protect Americans’ privacy rights from out-of-control state agencies is a foolhardy supposition at best.
The latest version of the system will not be rolled-out for at least 18 months. But like the Stellar Wind driftnet surveillance program, communications intercepted by Einstein 3 will be routed through a “monitoring box” controlled by NSA and their civilian contractors.
Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the plan called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block computer codes designed to penetrate or otherwise compromise networks. (Ellen Nakashima, “Cybersecurity Plan to Involve NSA, Telecoms,” The Washington Post, July 3, 2009)
However, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reported last September “that the Bush administration has authorized massive surveillance of the Internet using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the ‘Einstein’ program.”
While some researchers (including this one) question Madsen’s overreliance on anonymous sources and undisclosed documents, in fairness it should be pointed out that nine months before The New York Times described the NSA’s secret e-mail collection database known as Pinwale, Madsen had already identified and broken the story. According to Madsen,
The classified technology being used for Einstein was developed for the NSA in conducting signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations on email networks in Russia. Code-named PINWHEEL, the NSA email surveillance system targets Russian government, military, diplomatic, and commercial email traffic and burrows into the text portions of the email to search for particular words and phrases of interest to NSA eavesdroppers. According to NSA documents obtained by WMR, there is an NSA system code-named “PINWALE.”
The DNI and NSA also plan to move Einstein into the private sector by claiming the nation’s critical infrastructure, by nature, overlaps into the commercial sector. There are classified plans, already budgeted in so-called “black” projects, to extend Einstein surveillance into the dot (.) com, dot (.) edu, dot (.) int, and dot (.) org, as well as other Internet domains. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has budgeted $5.4 billion for Einstein in his department’s FY2009 information technology budget. However, this amount does not take into account the “black” budgets for Einstein proliferation throughout the U.S. telecommunications network contained in the budgets for NSA and DNI. (Wayne Madsen, “‘Einstein’ replaces ‘Big Brother’ in Internet Surveillance,” Online Journal, September 19, 2008)
A follow-up article published in February, identified the ultra-spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm as the developer of Pinwale, an illegal program for the interception of text communications. According to Madsen, “the system is linked to a number of meta-databases that contain e-mail, faxes, and text messages of hundreds of millions of people around the world and in the United States.”
In other words both classified programs, Pinwale and Einstein, are sophisticated electronic communications surveillance projects that most certainly will train the agency’s formidable intelligence assets on the American people “using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the ‘Einstein’ program,” as Madsen reported.
AT&T: “No Comment”
An AT&T spokesman refused to comment on the proposals and is seeking legal protection from the state that it will not be sued for privacy breaches as a result of its participation in the new program. “Legal certification” the Post reports, “has been held up for several months as DHS prepares a contract.”
NSA’s involvement is critical proponents claim, because the agency has a readily-accessible database of computer codes, or signatures “that have been linked to cyberattacks or known adversaries. The NSA has compiled the cache by, for example, electronically observing hackers trying to gain access to U.S. military systems,” the Post averred.
Calling NSA’s cache “the secret sauce…it’s the stuff they have that the private sector doesn’t,” is what raises alarms for privacy and civil liberties’ advocates. Known as Tutelage, NSA’s classified program can detect and automatically decide how to deal with malicious intrusions, “to block them or watch them closely to better assess the threat,” according to the Post. “The database for the program would also contain feeds from commercial firms and DHS’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, administration officials said.”
Jeff Mohan, AT&T’s executive director for Einstein, was more forthcoming earlier this year. He told Federal News Radio: “With these services, we will provide a secure portal from the agency’s infrastructure, or Intranet to the public internet. There is a technical aspect, which is routers, firewalls and that sort of thing that applies these security capabilities across that portal and looks a Internet traffic that comes from public Internet to Intranet and vice versa.”
The “technical aspect” will also provide federal agencies the ability to capture, sort, read and then store Americans’ private communications in huge data bases run by NSA.
Mohan said that AT&T will provide the state with “optional services such as scanning e-mail and placing filters on agency networks to keep malicious e-mail off the network as well as forensic and storage capabilities also are available through MTIPS [Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Services].”
In addition to AT&T, other private partners awarded contracts under the General Services Administration’s MTIPS which has a built-in “Einstein enclave” include: Sprint, L3 Communications, Qwest, MCI, General Dynamics and Verizon, according to multiple reports published by Federal Computer Week.
Claiming that the state is “looking for malicious content, not a love note to someone with a dot-gov e-mail address,” a former unnamed “senior Bush administration official” told the Post “what we’re interested in is finding the code, the thing that will do the network harm, not reading the e-mail itself.”
Try selling that to the tens of millions of Americans whose private communications have been illegally spied upon by the Bush and Obama administrations or leftist dissidents singled-out for “special handling” by the national security state’s public-private surveillance partnership!
An Electronic Spider’s Web
As the “global war on terror” morphs into an endless war on our democratic rights, the NSA is expanding domestic operations by “decentralizing its massive computer hubs,” The Salt Lake Tribune revealed.
The agency “will build a 1-million-square-foot data center at Utah’s Camp Williams,” the newspaper disclosed July 1. The new facility would be NSA’s third major data center. In 2007, the agency announced plans to build a second data center in San Antonio, Texas after the Baltimore Sun reported that NSA had “maxed out” the electric capacity of the Baltimore area’s power grid.
The San Antonio Current reported in December, that the NSA’s Texas Cryptology Center will cost “upwards of $130 million.” The 470,000 square-foot-facility is adjacent to a similar center constructed by software giant Microsoft. Investigative journalist James Bamford told the Current that under current law “NSA could gain access to Microsoft’s stored data without even a warrant, but merely a fiber-optic cable.”
A follow-up article by The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the facility will cost upwards of $2 billion dollars and that funds have already been appropriated by the Obama administration for NSA’s new data center and listening post.
The secretive agency released a statement Thursday acknowledging the selection of Camp Williams as a site for the new center and describing it as “a specialized facility that houses computer systems and supporting equipment.”
Budget documents provide a more detailed picture of the facility and its mission. The supercomputers in the center will be part of the NSA’s signal intelligence program, which seeks to “gain a decisive information advantage for the nation and our allies under all circumstances” according to the documents. (Matthew D. LaPlante, “New NSA Center Unveiled in Budget Documents,” The Salt Lake Tribune, July 2, 2009)
Not everyone is pleased with the announcement. Steve Erickson, the director of the antiwar Citizens Education Project told the Tribune, “Finally, the Patriot Act has a home.”
While the total cost of rolling-out the Einstein 3 system is classified, The Wall Street Journal reports that “the price tag was expected to exceed $2 billion.” And as with other national security state initiatives, it is the American people who are footing the bill for the destruction of our democratic rights.
Gloria Steinem: How the CIA Used Feminism to Destabilize Society
by Henry Makow Ph.D.
March 18, 2002
“In the 1960’s, the elite media invented second-wave feminism as part of the elite agenda to dismantle civilization and create a New World Order.”
Since writing these words last week, I have discovered that before she became a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA spying on Marxist students in Europe and disrupting their meetings. She became a media darling due to her CIA connections. MS Magazine, which she edited for many years was indirectly funded by the CIA.
Steinem has tried to suppress this information, unearthed in the 1970’s by a radical feminist group called “Red Stockings.” In 1979, Steinem and her powerful CIA-connected friends, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas prevented Random House from publishing it in “Feminist Revolution.” Nevertheless the story appeared in the “Village Voice” on May 21, 1979.
Steinem has always pretended that she had been a student radical. “When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era,” she told Susan Mitchell in 1997, “and that made me a Marxist.” (Icons, Saints and Divas: Intimate Conversations with Women who Changed the World 1997. p 130) Her bio-blurb in June 1973 MS. Magazine states: “Gloria Steinem has been a freelance writer all her professional life. Ms magazine is her first full-time salaried job.”
Not true. Raised in an impoverished, dysfunctional family in Toledo Ohio, Steinem somehow managed to attend elite Smith College, Betty Friedan’s alma mater. After graduating in 1955, Steinem received a “Chester Bowles Student Fellowship” to study in India. Curiously, an Internet search reveals that this fellowship has no existence apart from Gloria Steinem. No one else has received it.
In 1958, Steinem was recruited by CIA’s Cord Meyers to direct an “informal group of activists” called the “Independent Research Service.” This was part of Meyer’s “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” which created magazines like “Encounter” and “Partisan Review” to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose Marxism. Steinem, attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.
One of Steinem’s CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960’s, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women’s lib. In 1968, as publisher of New York Magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Warner Communications put up almost all the money although it only took 25% of the stock. Ms. Magazine’s first publisher was Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the cream of corporate America. It published ads for ITT at the same time as women political prisoners in Chile were being tortured by Pinochet, after a coup inspired by the US conglomerate and the CIA.
Steinem’s personal relationships also belie her anti establishment pretensions. She had a nine-year relationship with Stanley Pottinger, a Nixon-Ford assistant attorney general, credited with stalling FBI investigations into the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and the ex-Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Latelier. In the 1980’s, she dated Henry Kissinger. For more details, see San Francisco researcher Dave Emory.
Our main misconception about the CIA is that it serves US interests. In fact, it has always been the instrument of a dynastic international banking and oil elite (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan) coordinated by the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London and their US branch, the Council for Foreign Relations. It was established and peopled by blue bloods from the New York banking establishment and graduates of Yale University’s secret pagan “Skull and Bones” society. Our current President, his father and grandfather fit this profile.
The agenda of this international cabal is to degrade the institutions and values of the United States in order to integrate it into a global state that it will direct through the United Nations. In its 1947 Founding Charter, the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic activities. However this has never stopped it from waging a psychological war on the American people. The domestic counterpart of the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” was the “American Committee for Cultural Freedom.” Using foundations as conduits, the CIA controlled intellectual discourse in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and I believe continues to do so today. In “The Cultural Cold War,” Francis Stonor Saunders estimates that a thousand books were produced under the imprint of a variety of commercial and university presses, with covert subsidies.
The CIA’s “Project Mockingbird” involved the direct infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets. “By the early 1950’s,” writes Deborah Davis, in her book “Katherine the Great,” the CIA owned respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all.” In 1982 the CIA admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field. Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who ran the operation until his “suicide” in 1963, boasted that “you could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple of hundred dollars a month.”
I was born in 1949. Idealists in my parent’s generation were disillusioned when the Communist dream of universal brotherhood turned out to be a shill for a brutal despotism. My own generation may discover that our best instincts have also been manipulated and exploited. There is evidence that the 60’s drug counter culture, the civil rights movement, and anti-war movement, like feminism, were CIA directed. For example, the CIA has admitted setting up the (National Student Association as a front in 1947 http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html). In the early 1950’s the NSA opposed the attempts of the House Un American Activities Committee to root out Communist spies. According to Phil Agee Jr., NSA officers participated in the activities of SNCC, the militant civil rights group, and Students for a Democratic Society, a radical peace group.
According to Mark Riebling, the CIA also may have used Timothy Leary. Certainly the agency distributed LSD to Leary and other opinion makers in the 1960s. Leary made a generation of Americans turn away from active participation in society and seek fulfillment “within.” In another example of the CIA’s use of drugs to interfere in domestic politics, Gary Webb describes how in the 1980’s, the CIA flooded Black ghettos with cocaine.
I won’t attempt to analyze the CIA’s motivation except to suggest what they have in common: They demoralized, alienated and divided Americans. The elite operates by fostering division and conflict in the world. Thus, we don’t realize who the real enemy is. For the same reason, the CIA and elite foundations also fund the diversity and multicultural movements.
Feminism has done the most damage. There is no more fundamental yet delicate relationship in society than male and female. On it depends the family, the red blood cell of society. Nobody with the interests of society at heart would try to divide men and women. Yet the lie that men have exploited women has become the official orthodoxy.
Man loves woman. His first instinct is to nurture (”husband”) and see her thrive. When a woman is happy, she is beautiful. Sure, some men are abusive. But the vast majority have supported and guided their families for millennium.
Feminists relentlessly advance the idea that our inherent male and female characteristics, crucial to our development as human beings, are mere “stereotypes.” This is a vicious calumny on all heterosexuals, 95% of the population. Talk about hate! Yet it is taught to children in elementary schools! It is echoed in the media. Lesbians like Rosie O’Donnell are advanced as role models.
All of this is calculated to create personal confusion and sow chaos among heterosexuals. As a result, millions of American males are emasculated and divorced from their relationship to family (the world and the future.) The American woman has been hoodwinked into investing herself in a mundane career instead of the timeless love of her husband and children. Many women have become temperamentally unfit to be wives and mothers. People, who are isolated and alone, stunted and love-starved, are easy to fool and manipulate. Without the healthy influence of two loving parents, so are their children.
Feminism is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on society by its governing elite. It is designed to weaken the American social and cultural fabric in order to introduce a friendly fascist New World Order. Its advocates are sanctimonious charlatans who have grown rich and powerful from it. They include a whole class of liars and moral cripples who work for the elite in various capacities: government, education and the media. These imposters ought to be exposed and ridiculed.
Women’s oppression is a lie. Sex roles were never as rigid as feminists would have us believe. My mother had a successful business in the 1950’s importing watchstraps from Switzerland. When my father’s income increased, she was content to quit and concentrate on the children. Women were free to pursue careers if they wanted to. The difference was that their role as wife and mother was understood, and socially validated, as it should be.
Microsoft Corp. has taken the rare step of warning about a serious computer security vulnerability it hasn’t fixed yet.
The vulnerability disclosed Monday affects Internet Explorer users whose computers run the Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 operating software.
It can allow hackers to remotely take control of victims’ machines. The victims don’t need to do anything to get infected except visit a Web site that’s been hacked.
Security experts say criminals have been attacking the vulnerability for nearly a week. Thousands of sites have been hacked to serve up malicious software that exploits the vulnerability. People are drawn to these sites by clicking a link in spam e-mail.
The so-called “zero day” vulnerability disclosed by Microsoft affects a part of its software used to play video. The problem arises from the way the software interacts with Internet Explorer, which opens a hole for hackers to tunnel into.
Microsoft urged vulnerable users to disable the problematic part of its software, which can be done from Microsoft’s Web site, while the company works on a “patch” — or software fix — for the problem.
Microsoft rarely departs from its practice of issuing security updates the second Tuesday of each month. When the Redmond, Wash.-based company does issue security reminders at other times, it’s because the vulnerabilities are very serious.
A recent example was the emergency patch Microsoft issued in October for a vulnerability that criminals exploited to infect millions of PCs with the Conficker worm. While initially feared as an all-powerful doomsday device, that network of infected machines was eventually used for mundane moneymaking schemes like sending spam and pushing fake antivirus software.
Four men accused of being part of a gang that stole £1.75 million in a raid at Heathrow face the first criminal trial without a jury in England and Wales for 400 years after an historic Court of Appeal decision yesterday.
John Twomey, 61, Peter Blake, 56, Barry Hibberd, 41, and Glen Cameron, 49, must be tried by a judge alone after claims of jury nobbling at a previous trial, the court ruled.
The four are alleged to have taken part in a bungled armed robbery of a Menzies World Cargo warehouse in February 2004. They deny a series of charges, including conspiracy to rob and the possession of a firearm.
The robbery has already given rise to three trials at a total cost of £22 million. The third collapsed last year after what the judge called “a serious attempt at jury tampering”.
Under the rubric of cybersecurity, the Obama administration is moving forward with a Bush regime program to screen state computer traffic on private-sector networks, including those connecting people to the Internet, The Washington Post revealed July 3.
That project, code-named “Einstein,” may very well be related to the much-larger, ongoing and highly illegal National Security Agency (NSA) communications intercept program known as “Stellar Wind,” disclosed in 2005 by The New York Times.
There are several components to Stellar Wind, one of which is a massive data-mining project run by the agency. As USA Today revealed in 2006, the “National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.”
Got Police State? Check out this article from yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer telling us how wonderful it is to have security cameras everywhere. The group that owns and runs the surveillance system is a supposed “non profit coalition.”
Plenty of cameras monitor 55,000 Lancaster residents
On a sunny afternoon at H.M. Musser Park in Lancaster City, Vilma Caraballo pushed her grandson on a swing. Marion Young, 60, ate tortilla chips from her bagged lunch. And Maicol Ortiz, 19, sat on a brick wall, talking in Spanish with his 23-year-old girlfriend, Evelyn Monzon.
Above them, the scene was monitored by cameras installed at each corner of the park, part of an extensive, citywide surveillance system. By the end of July, Lancaster will have 165 cameras watching residents and visitors, making it the most highly surveilled city per capita in the state, and possibly the nation.
A similar program planned for Wilkes-Barre might soon steal that title, however.
Beyond the sheer number of cameras watching the city of 55,000, Lancaster’s program is unusual in that a private group, not police, monitors the cameras. The nonprofit Lancaster Community Safety Coalition provides its own training and is not overseen by any public agency.
Residents in the park recently had mixed reactions. The cameras are hidden inside black orbs hung from what look like white street lights. Inside the orbs the cameras swivel, pan, and zoom. They are powerful enough to make out a face or a license plate a block or more away.
“I like it,” said Caraballo, 51, who has asked that a camera be placed on her block. “I want them all over the city.”
Young, who works as a secretary at the courthouse, said, “I’m not doing anything bad. They can watch me all they want.”
Some, like 19-year-old Amanda Bachman, bemoan the cameras as another step in an increasingly regulated culture.
“What’s next?” Bachman said as she walked near the park. “You can’t get away with anything anymore. You can’t even smoke a cigarette in front of a building.”
The camera’s footage has helped police arrest people charged with homicide, assault, gun and drug sales, as well as lesser crimes: Staffers have called the police to report public drinking and two adults engaging in a “sex act” in a park, said the coalition’s executive director, Joseph R. Morales, who also serves on the City Council. In 2008, the coalition said, it made 492 calls to police, resulting in 82 arrests and 86 citations.
Supporters say it functions as a high-tech neighborhood watch group. This isn’t Big Brother watching, it’s the people next door.
“It’s a crucially important distinction because of the privacy issues that have come up,” said Dennis F. Cox, who was a part of a local crime commission that recommended installing the cameras. “It’s kind of a citizen effort . . . a way to have eyes and ears in the neighborhood.”
The coalition requires its 10 employees to undergo drug tests and a criminal-records check, and supervisors can track how employees use the cameras. If an operator tries to look into a window, the image inside the building is digitally blacked out, a safeguard installed to protect residents’ privacy in their homes.
The Supreme Court has ruled that people aren’t entitled to privacy in public places, said Stephen Henderson, an associate law professor at Widener Law. There are guidelines that law enforcement officials must follow, but none exist for private surveillance systems, Henderson said.
“You need those same safeguards built in,” Henderson said, “when private actors start conducting what are normally police functions.”
“You have all the potential for abuse and none of the accountability and oversight,” added Mary Catherine Roper, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
Morales said he would welcome guidance from state legislators or federal authorities on how to regulate private firms surveilling a city.
Lancaster might be just the start of privately run city surveillance. Mayor J. Richard Gray said other cash-strapped cities had approached him to ask about the program.
Wilkes-Barre, a city of 41,000, plans to install 150 cameras this year, monitored by a nonprofit called Hawkeye, said City Administrator J.J. Murphy. The city’s mayor chose the board members who will lead the nonprofit. The $2.3 million project is to be funded almost entirely by gaming revenues.
Surveillance in Wilmington is also run by a nonprofit, not police.
While Philadelphia may have fewer police cameras per capita watching its 1.4 million residents (the city currently has 96 but plans to install 154 more, possibly by year’s end), privately operated cameras watch college campuses, banks, hotels, and other businesses.
“Do you think you’re ever not on a camera in downtown Philly?” said Lancaster Mayor J. Richard Gray.
Lancaster’s crime rate isn’t unusually high for a city of its size and demographics. There have been two killings this year, and 109 incidents of aggravated assault, up from 81 last year at this time, said Lancaster Police Lt. Todd Umstead.
The crime commission found that residents were most concerned with noise, litter, and vandalism. It recommended greater community policing and camera surveillance.
The coalition, which lists the fire chief, a former police captain, and the district attorney on its board, put up the first camera at King and Lime Streets, a known drug corner, in 2004.
The crime rate hasn’t changed much, but police say they’re better equipped to find perpetrators.
“Even when the camera doesn’t capture an actual crime in progress, it captures movements of people prior to and after the crime,” Umstead said.
David Greiner, 51, a lifelong Lancaster resident, was one of the company’s first watchers and now supervises the crew. He has called in fights, robberies, and an attempted sexual assault.
Two years ago, Greiner helped catch a murderer. He called police when a fight broke out in a large group on the street in March 2007. Shots were fired before police arrived, and a man ran to a nearby home.
Greiner directed the police to the building; the man, Abdul Walton, 22, of Philadelphia, had shaved his beard in an effort to disguise himself. Walton was convicted of first-degree murder.
Camera footage has led other defendants to plead guilty and persuaded reluctant witnesses to step forward, District Attorney Craig Stedman said.
For taxpayers, the benefit of having a private operator is clear: Donations pay for a third of the coalition’s expected $600,000 annual budget, and covered most of the $3 million start-up costs, Morales said.
“If you don’t have money for cops, you buy a damn camera and put it on the street corner,” said Steve Murray, who owns Zap & Co., a vintage clothing and furniture store on Queen Street. “It’s not Tehran or Tiananmen Square here.”
Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, may soon have the power to classify millions of Americans as domestic terrorists. An amendment to H.R. 2647 (the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010), introduced by Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida, would grant Holder absolute authority to decide who is a terrorist.
Holder would have the ability to determine what groups and organizations are “of a violent, extremist nature.”
Hastings’ amendment follows the template advanced by the Department of Homeland Security’s infamous “Rightwing Extremism” report. In the report, DHS argued that “white supremacists” and “antigovernment” activists are recruiting Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to engage in terrorist violence. Section 524, the amendment proposed by Hastings, prohibits the recruitment, enlistment, or retention of “persons associated or affiliated with groups associated with hate-related violence against groups or persons or the United States government” (see PDF of the amendment). The amendment would give Holder the authority to determine what persons are “associated or affiliated with hate groups.”
In addition to groups or organizations “that espouse or engage in acts of violence against other groups or minorities based on ideals of hate, ethnic supremacies, white supremacies, racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, or other bigotry ideologies,” the amendment specifies groups and individuals that “espouse an intention or expectation of armed revolutionary activity against the United States Government, or the violent overthrow of the United States Government.”
Holder would have the ability to determine what groups and organizations are “of a violent, extremist nature.”
After it was discovered the alleged cop killer Richard Poplawski posted comments on Infowars, the corporate media and a number of so-called progressive bloggers, led by the Anti-Defamation League, attempted to link radio talk show host Alex Jones and others associated with the patriot movement to the avowed white supremacist. James von Brunn, the accused Holocaust museum shooter said to be a virulent racist, also posted on Infowars.
Infowars has an open comment forum attached to articles. Only comments calling for murder and violence or linking to pornography are removed. Spam and obnoxious troll behavior are also moderated.
Mother Jones scribe David Corn wrote last month that Von Brunn “held numerous extremist views,” including a belief that “that 9/11 was the product of a Jewish conspiracy.”
The ADL and numerous corporate media commentators have conflated 9/11 truth with antisemitism.
Eric Boehlert, a writer for Rolling Stone and blogger at the Huffington Post and Media Matters, took the ADL accusation against Jones one step further. “More recently, Jones has been warning listeners like Poplawski about The Obama Deception (that’s the name of Jones’ new documentary DVD) and how President Obama is bound to destroy America,” Boehlert argued.
The DHS report specifically mentions “white supremacist” hatred directed at Barack Obama.
On June 9, Fox News host Glenn Beck attempted to link Von Brunn to the 9/11 truth movement. “Our country is now vulnerable,” Beck declared. “Those people who would like to destroy us — our enemies like Al Qaeda. They’d like to destroy us, and they will work with anyone. There are also people like white supremacists or 9/11 truthers that would also like to destroy the country. They’ll work with anybody they can.”
As deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, Eric Holder said he was pleased that the Justice Department had been cleared of any wrongdoing in the 1993 premeditated assault on Mount Carmel outside of Waco, Texas, resulting in the incineration of seventy-six people, including more than 20 children and two pregnant women. The government and corporate media claim the assault on the Branch Davidians served as a motivation for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.
Holder had earlier recused himself after an initial investigation uncovered evidence of a coverup and other potential crimes by federal agents following the incident at Ruby Ridge. In that incident, government snipers had been given military style rules of engagement that contradicted standard FBI deadly force policy, resulting in the murder of former Green Beret Randy Weaver’s son and wife. The government refers to Weaver as a “separatist” and “white supremacist.”
Last month Holder testified on proposed federal hate crimes legislation during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “The attorney general invoked the shootings at the Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier this month and other recent acts of violence as reasons to pass the legislation,” the Washington Blade reported.
Holder also has a track record of opposition the Second Amendment.
Patrick Verner announced the release of Parted Magic 4.3, a bug fix release of the popular live CD designed for hard disk management tasks: "Not only did some bugs get fixed, but a few new programs were added too. chntpw, nilfs-utils-2.0.12, gdisk-0.2.2, Adblock Plus 1.0.2 are now part....
Point Clark Networks announced the availability of the community edition of ClarkConnect 5.0, a specialist CentOS-based distribution for routers, gateways and firewalls: "Highlights include: upgrade to CentOS 5.x; complete LDAP integration; protocol filtering; improved bandwidth management; mail quarantine; improved Windows integration (roaming profiles […]
CrunchBang Linux 9.04.01, an Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the lightweight Openbox window manager, is now available: "After a slight delay and a prolonged testing period, the final builds of CrunchBang Linux 9.04.01 are now available. As the version number suggests, it is based on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope. As with....
Miklós Vajna announced the availability of the second pre-release of Frugalware Linux 1.1, a complete, general-purpose distribution designed for intermediate Linux users: "The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.1pre2, the second technical preview of the upcoming 1.1 stable release. Improvements: a […]
The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PC-BSD 7.1.1, a desktop operating system based on FreeBSD 7.2: "Version 7.1.1 contains a number of bugfixes and improvements from PC-BSD 7.1, including KDE 4.2.4, improvements to printing support, Xorg Server 1.6.1, and much more. For a....
Ken Smith announced the availability of the first beta release of FreeBSD 8.0: "The first public test build of the FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE test cycle is now available, 8.0-BETA1. Through the next week or so more information about the release will be posted but here is the current....
The "KDE" edition of Sabayon Linux 4.2, a Gentoo-based desktop distribution and live DVD, is ready for download: "On the behalf of the Sabayon Linux team, we are happy to announce the immediate availability of Sabayon Linux 4.2 KDE. Distribution features: based on Sabayon 4.1 KDE, containing hundreds....
This week in DistroWatch Weekly: Review: CDLinux 0.9.2 Community Edition News: Debian and Ubuntu say Mono is no threat, rebootless updates for Jaunty, Fedora announces Fit and Finish project Released last week: PCLinuxOS 2009.2, Sabayon Linux 4.2 "GNOME", Calculate Linux 9.7 "KDE", Yellow Dog Linux 6.2, blackPanther OS....
Onur Küçük announced the availability of the release candidate of Pardus Linux 2009: "Highlight of this release is the new International Pardus 2009 ISO. You can now choose any of the 11 languages to install and enjoy Pardus 2009, all in one CD. The new test version of....
Calculate Linux Desktop (CLD) is a Gentoo-based operating system for PCs and notebooks. Alexander Tratsevskiy has just announced a new version 9.7 of its KDE edition. Main changes: "Support for Italian and Polish has been added. System installation on USB Flash cards has been added. Setting up of....
Linux.com: "Looking for a long-term solution to their IT needs, Sesame Workshop selected Novell ZENworks Asset Management to streamline its inventory processes, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the open platform for its Web architecture."
Phoronix: "Recently on our forums, Frank Earl (who goes by the synonym Svartalf), has been seeking the input of Linux gamers as to what games they would like to see ported to Linux. Frank has been working for Linux Game Publishing for a few years..."
Boycott Novell: "Is there no regulatory body that can get Microsoft’s fat fanny off of Linux so it can get some air? Instead the DOJ are investigating *Google*?"
IBM Developerworks: " This article (the second in a series) explains how to create and deploy new functions in the Vimscript language, giving several practical examples of why you might want to."
Florida Linux Show press release: "The Florida Linux Show and Florida Linux Alliance Group team up to present the the Florida Linux Show 2009 Orlando."
TuxArena: "FrostWire is an open-source, free Java-based peer-to-peer client with support for the BitTorrent protocol, skins and iTunes. The latest release, 4.18.0, contains many improvements, bug fixes and several changes."
Linux.com: "...just what is Google’s aim in building another OS? Why wouldn’t they just leave that nasty business to Microsoft, Apple and existing Linux distribution vendors?"
The Open Road: "Despite a meteoric initial public offering in 1999, Red Hat spent years fumbling about for a winning game plan, dabbling in technologies that took it far beyond its core competence in operating systems."
Linux Today Blog: "...the news is simply an announcement that the Chrome OS project has been officially launched. There is no OS yet. What levels of hysteria are going to be reached when the actual code is released? Rioting? Suicides? Looting?"
Howtoforge: "This tutorial shows how you can install Sun VirtualBox 3.0 (released on June 30, 2009) on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop. With VirtualBox you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux and Windows under a host operating system."
