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Submission + - NZ government denies 'mass domestic spying' (bbc.com)

Submitted by Kittenman
Kittenman writes: The BBC and several domestic NZ sources are covering the latest revelations raised by Kim Dotcom, who is funding a political party in NZ as it heads to a general election on the 20th. Dotcom flew in a US journalist, Glenn Greenwald, and arranged for satellite links to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, in their respective hideouts, at a 'disclosure' presentation in Auckland.

The NZ Prime Minister (John Key) has denied all claims. No-one making the claims can actually come up with a plausible reason why the NZ government would want to spy on its citizens.

Submission + - Is Adobe dropping all Linux support? (adobe.com)

Submitted by NetAlien
NetAlien writes: QUESTION: Is Adobe dropping all Linux support? Flash. Now Reader...

Preparing for US naturalization, one is immediately hindered by the US Government's use of Adobe's PDF XFA format — the form loads only to recommend that the user download Adobe Reader "for Windows, Mac or Linux". Attempting to download Reader, the first option is to select the OS — SURPRISE! Linux is absent. OK... so download a Windows version (I selected 7) and install with Wine. Sigh... that fails.

Another case for free and open formats...

Submission + - Aussie state cops outed as Finfisher law enforcement malware users

Submitted by Bismillah
Bismillah writes: Wikileaks latest release of documents shows the the Australian New South Wales police force has spent millions on licenses for the FinFisher set of law enforcement spy- and malware tools — and still has active licenses. What it uses FinFisher, which has been deployed against dissidents by oppressive regimes, for is yet to be revealed.

Submission + - Malware Distributed Through Twitch Chat Is Hijacking Steam Accounts

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you use Twitch don't click on any suspicious links in the video streaming platform's chat feature. Twitch Support's official Twitter account issued a security warning telling users not to click the "csgoprize" link in chat. According to f-secure, the link leads to a Java program that asks for your name and email. If you provide the info it will install a file on your computer that's able to take out any money you have in your Steam wallet, as well as sell or trade items in your inventory. "This malware, which we call Eskimo, is able to wipe your Steam wallet, armory, and inventory dry," says F-Secure. "It even dumps your items for a discount in the Steam Community Market. Previous variants were selling items with a 12 percent discount, but a recent sample showed that they changed it to 35 percent discount. Perhaps to be able to sell the items faster."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What to do after digitizing VHS tapes? 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now that I've spent close to a month digitizing a desk drawer's worth of VHS tapes, deinterlacing and postprocessing the originals to minimize years of tape decay, and compressing everything down to H.264, I've found myself with a hard drive full of loosely organized videos. They'll get picked up by my existing monthly backup, but I feel like I haven't gained much in the way of redundancy, as I thought I would. Instead of having tapes slowly degrade, I'm now open to losing entire movies at once, should both of my drives go bad. Does anyone maintain a library, and if so, what would they recommend? Is having them duplicated on two drives (one of which is spun down for all but one day of the month) a good-enough long term strategy? Should I look into additionally backing up to optical discs or flash drives, building out a better (RAIDed) backup machine, or even keeping the original tapes around despite them having been digitized?

Submission + - Comcast Tells Customers to Stop Using Tor Browser (deepdotweb.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Comcast agents have reportedly contacted customers who use Tor, a web browser that is designed to protect the user’s privacy while online, and said their service can get terminated if they don’t stop using Tor. According to Deep.Dot.Web, one of those calls included a Comcast customer service agent named Jeremy...

Submission + - New Details About NSA's Exhaustive Search of Edward Snowden's Emails (vice.com) 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Vice News reports, "The NSA disclosed these new details about its investigation into Snowden in response to a FOIA lawsuit VICE News filed against the NSA earlier this year seeking copies of emails in which Snowden raised concerns about spy programs he believed were unconstitutional..... As part of this investigation, the Agency collected and searched all of Mr. Snowden's email available on NSA's classified and unclassified system. This included sent, received, and deleted email, both in his inboxes still on the networks and email obtained by restoring back-up tapes from Agency networks. Multiple members of the Associate Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence read all of the collected email. Additionally, given that organizational designators appear for each NSA sender and recipient for email transmitted on NSA's classified and unclassified systems, searches of Mr. Snowden's collected email also were done using the organizational designators for the offices most likely to have been recipients of any email written raising concerns about an NSA signals intelligence program. ... Those offices included the NSA's Office of General Counsel, the Office of the Comptroller, and the Signals Intelligence Directorate Office of Oversight and Compliance. Moreover, Sherman said, the NSA tasked the Office of General Counsel, the Office of Inspector General, and the Office of the Director of Compliance to "search for communications to or from Mr. Snowden in which he may have raised concerns about NSA programs." ..."The search did not identify any email written by Mr. Snowden in which he contacted Agency officials to raise concerns about NSA programs," ..."

Submission + - Sen. Jeff Sessions Unfriends Mark Zuckerberg Over US Worker Hiring

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) challenged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to "hire American workers for a change." The speech attributed President Obama's plans for executive action on immigration to meetings between White House officials and Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC. Such presidential action, explained FWD.us, would allow tech companies to recruit the "very best" people from around the world instead of settling for U.S. workers who are "just sort of okay." Facebook, reported the Washington Post in 2013, became legally "dependent" on H-1B visas and subject to stricter regulations shortly before Zuckerberg got immigration reform religion and launched FWD.us. The immigration bill passed last year by the Senate included the so-called "Facebook loophole", legislative slight-of-hand which could make Facebook exempt from H-1B dependent employer rules even if it becomes more dependent on H-1B employees. By the way, in its diversity disclosure, Facebook — like other tech companies led by FWD.us Founders and Major Supporters — opted not to share any info on the countries the best-and-the-brightest employees hail from, as one might find in a university's Statistical Abstract. Must be considered trade secrets, huh?

Submission + - diaspora* version 0.4.1.0 released (diasporafoundation.org) 1

Submitted by jaywink
jaywink writes: A new diaspora* version 0.4.1.0 is out. It includes a lot of pages ported to Bootstrap, many bug fixes and small enhancements. Also included is a Terms of Service -feature for podmins. Diaspora* is an open source social networking server that joins all running pods into one big decentralized social network.

Submission + - KDevelop 4.7.0 Released (kdevelop.org)

Submitted by KDE Community
KDE Community writes: KDevelop team is proud to announce the final release of KDevelop 4.7.0. This release is special, as it marks the end of the KDE4 era for us. As such, KDevelop 4.7.0 comes with a long-term stability guarantee. The CMake support was improved and extended to ensure that all idioms needed for KF5 development are available. The unit test support UI was polished and several bugs fixed. In the same direction, some noteworthy issues with the QtHelp integration were addressed. KDevelop's PHP language support now handles namespaces better and can understand traits aliases. Furthermore, some first fruits of the Google summer of code projects are included in this release. These changes pave the path toward better support for cross compile toolchains. Feature-wise, KDevelop now officially supports the Bazaar (bzr) version control system. On the performance front, it was possible to greatly reduce the memory footprint when loading large projects with several thousand files in KDevelop. Additionally, the startup should now be much faster.

Submission + - Verizon Working On a La Carte Internet TV Service (pcmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One of the reasons people have been fleeing cable TV in droves is the idea that they're paying for hundreds of channels but only using a handful. Even though that's not really true, Verizon is now working an an internet TV service that lets people pick and pay for only the channels they want. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said, "I think everyone understands it will go to a la carte. The question is what is that transition look like ... I don't think there is anyone that would stand up here and say the only way it's going to be offered five years from now is linear and it's going to be tied to your TV set because frankly they will miss the market and they will be the ones left behind."

Submission + - Robot Operating System (ROS) to Officially Support ARM Processors (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which maintains the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) and oversees the ROS.org website, has announced its first formal support for an ARM target. The organization will add support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, a smartphone-oriented, quad-core, Cortex-A15-like system-on-chip running up to 1.7GHz. The Linux version of ROS for Snapdragon 600 will be available in Q4 of this year, with the Android version due in the first half of 2015. The OSRF will test, refine, and fully integrate support for the ARM instruction set architecture into ROS development efforts. OSRF will also perform ongoing maintenance to support ROS on the Snapdragon 600.

Submission + - Adding Patterns and Animations to HTML5 Progress Bars (htmlgoodies.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The addition of the Progress element to the HTML5 spec has opened a whole new avenue for providing visual feedback on long-running tasks. In the Using CSS to Make a Visually Consistent Cross-browser HTML5 Progress Bar article, I demonstrated how to turn off the browser's default styling in order to give the Progress Bar element a consistent appearance across browsers. Beyond that, we went as far as to introduce different color schemes and even gradients to our progress bars. In today's article, we'll see how advanced CSS3 properties can be employed to do things that Web developers could once only dream of.

Submission + - Swedish ISP makes music video of security police visit (youtube.com)

Submitted by BlkAdr
BlkAdr writes: In 2013 Swedish internet service provider Bahnhof got a visit by Swedish secret police (SÄPO) pressuring Bahnhof give the police access to customer data. SÄPO made up stories of imagined terrorist attacks with hundreds killed to pressure Bahnhof, however Bahnhof was recording the meeting with a hidden recorder. You can read more about this here: http://www.goteborgdaily.se/ne.... Today Bahnhof reenacts this with a music video http://youtu.be/rHVVpNRwLk0.

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