Modern IT infrastructure needs to be highly flexible as the strain on servers, sites and databases grows and shrinks throughout the day. Cloud infrastructure is meant to make scaling simple by effectively outsourcing and commoditising your computing capacity so that, in theory, you can turn it on and off like a tap. However, most approaches to provisioning cloud servers are still based around the idea that you have fixed-size server “instances”, offering you infrastructure in large blocks that must each be provisioned and then configured to work together. This means your infrastructure scaling is less like having a handy tap and more like working out how many bottles of water you’ll need.
In the continuing IT balancing act between development and operations teams, new technologies are constantly emerging and proceeding through a gauntlet that runs between the two groups. The sides generally line up like this:
When is less really more? When it's a Linux operating system designed to run containers, such as Red Hat Atomic Host, Ubuntu Snappy, or CoreOS. As developers increasingly embrace containers for building and running apps, these small footprint systems could change the operating system's long-standing role as a catch-all for historic but less-important functions, like fax servers.
Rarely does the juxtaposition between the push of innovation and the pull of caution become so evident than in the adoption of new technologies. Time after time, technological innovators introduce new software and hardware into the market that are eagerly consumed by early adopters and retail consumers. And yet it is businesses that tend to hold back, weighing their options before deciding how and if they will join the ranks of users for such new technologies.
As a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Eric Brewer devised the CAP theoremââ¬Å —ââ¬Å a governing concept in the design of distributed systemsââ¬Å —ââ¬Å and co-founded web-search pioneer Inktomi. In this interview, Brewer, now vice president of infrastructure at Google, explains why the work he’s doing on application containers could be at least as big as cloud computing and how the CAP theorem is holding up nearly two decades after its inception.
Brian "Redbeard" Harrington, principal architect at CoreOS, discusses the intersection of containers and the cloud.
Linus Torvalds released the Linux 4.1-rc4 kernel a short time ago, which is coming a day later than Torvalds' usual tradition of releasing new kernel versions on Sunday afternoons.
The RC4 release of Linux kernel 4.1 is getting us closer and closer to the final version, which should arrive sometime in Summer 2015. According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.1 RC4 is a little bit bigger that previous Release Candidate versions.
On May 17, we announced that Linux kernel 4.0.4 and Linux kernel 3.10.79 LTS were available for download, but another important kernel was published on the same day - Linux kernel 3.14.43 LTS, which is currently used in various GNU/Linux distributions.
Linus Torvalds himself has announced the availability of Kernel 4.1 RC 4, which has been released with one day delay. The kernel patch brings updates for the ARM, ARM64, and MIPS architectures, enhancements for the BTRFS and NFS filesystems and fixes for some regressions.
Nvidia has just published a new Linux Beta driver that brings a lot of new changes and improvements, not to mention support for a new mysterious GPU that hasn't been named.
As planned, Mesa 10.6 has been branched and due to lacking OpenGL 4.0 / OpenGL ES 3.1 support, the version will not be bumped to Mesa 11.0. This also now makes Mesa 10.7 officially under development.
With the Linux 4.1 kernel coming together nicely I've begun my testing (separate from all the fully-automated Git testing done each day via the LinuxBenchmarking.com systems) of this new kernel under a variety of different workloads, stressing different systems, and focusing on the changes in the major subsystems. One of the systems this week has been running some fresh Btrfs RAID Linux file-system benchmarks. From an eight-disk server I've started this Btrfs RAID testing as some fresh numbers since my Btrfs RAID tests from a few months back on an older server.
Rygel, a home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) that allows users to easily share audio, video, and pictures to other devices, such as TVs or tablets, has been updated to version 0.24.4.
A new version of the popular and cross-platform Plex Media Server has arrived today with several new features, as well as bug fixes that improve the overall stability and performance of the application.
Oracle has just announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the fourth Beta release of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.0 virtualization software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Everpad is an open-source Evernote client that syncs with all your Evernote-enabled devices. The client can access all the features of Evernote and integrates very well with the Unity desktop, permitting the users to use the Unity search engine to search in the Evernote notes along with local Linux files.
WeeChat is an open-source, multi-platform lightweight and extensible chat client, having a text user interface only. Having support for scripts and plugins that can be loaded either at startup or dynamically, the app has support for IRC.
Cutegram is an open-source Telegram application, similar to Sigram. It is developed in Qt5 and QML and uses the libqtelegram and the libappindicator libraries.
As version numbers go this sub version 1.0 milestone is underwhelming, but – and it’s a big ”but” – it is the result of four plus years hard work that’s paid of by delivering a major leap forward for the would-be Adobe Illustrator competitor.
Syncthing is a cross-platform peer-to-peer file synchronization client/server application written in Go. The tool is similar to BitTorrent Sync (but it's open source as opposed to BT Sync), and it's used to synchronize files between computers.
FFmpeg, a complete solution to record, convert, and stream audio and video, has been upgraded to version 2.6.3 and is now available for download and testing.
The Chrome 43 stable web-browser update delivers Web MIDI and Permissions API support. There's also various security and bug fixes with this latest Chrome browser update.
GOG have now made Blood: One Unit Whole Blood Linux compatible on their store using DOSBox. It's an old sadistic FPS, and I took a quick look.
Looks like Linux may get a newer Star Wars game with Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.
You will have to forgive me on this one, as I never played a Cossacks game, but it is from the developers of STALKER. Cossacks 3 has been announced, and apparently Linux support too.
Civilization: Beyond Earth is the latest game in the Civilization series developed by Firaxis and its makers have announced that a new expansion pack called Rising Tide is in the works. Even better, Aspyr Media will release it for Linux in autumn for the Linux platform.
Good news everyone! Civilization: Beyond Earth has announced an expansion called 'Rising Tide', and it will launch on Linux alongside Windows.
Prison Architect, a prison management simulator developed and published by the famous Introversion Software studio, is now available for purchase on Steam for Linux with a huge 80% discount.
DreadOut, a third person supernatural horror game developed and published by Digital Happiness on Steam, also received a Linux version.
'Rising Tide' is set for a fall release on PC at a price of $29.99, with Aspyr again in charge of Mac and Linux versions, which are also expected this fall.
In its recent publication of the "recommended requirements" Facebook Inc.'s (FB) head mounted display (HMD) subsidiary Oculus VR raised a couple eyebrows in putting a requirement pertaining to Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) "Windows 7 SP1 or newer" -- and then making no mention of Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) OS X or popular (sort of an oxymoron, granted) PC Linux distributions. Early on Oculus VR had promised cross platform support for Windows -- but also OS X and Linux. Had something changed?
Gaming hardware maker Razer, which leads the Open Source Virtual Reality standard drive, said this morning that Valve’s OpenVR initiative is the latest to sign up with the standard. The move brings together two heavyweights in the open-source battle for VR. And a $5.2 billion prize is at stake: That’s the amount the VR industry is expected to be worth by 2018, according to U.K. analyst KZero.
Machineers by developer Lohika Games is a construction puzzle game set in a world of robots. Previously only available on tablets, the two first of five planned episodes made their PC début last week.
Vendetta Online is a space MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) developed and published by Guild Software Inc. that is also available for the Linux platform. A new update has been released and is now ready for download.
Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power, the third game in the Trine series, is now in Steam Early Access, but only for the Windows platform. The developers have said that the Linux version will be made available, but only at a later date.
KDE's first update of its 15.04 series of Applications and Frameworks 5.10.0 are now available in Chakra. With this release kde-workspace has also been updated to version 4.11.19 and kdelibs and kdepim to 4.14.8. Have in mind that the applications that have been ported to Frameworks 5 will not be updated in the stable repositories but remain at their previous versions. The new versions of these packages are pushed into the [kde-next] repository which provides Plasma 5.
Over the weekend Jos Poortvliet announced that openSUSE Tumbleweed received "massive amount of changes" bringing Plasma 5.3 as the default desktop. Newly released Netrunner 16 also brought Plasma 5.3 as well as an interesting codename. Clement Lefebvre announced Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 upgrade path and said Cinnamon 2.6 and MATE 1.10 packages were right around the corner.
I've commented in my hands-on review of GNOME 3.16 that in GNOME, the "three lines" icon replaces the gear menu for the drop-down menu. This "three lines" menu icon is more common in other applications, including those on Mac OS X and Windows, so the new menu icon should be easier to find. I still believe that the "hamburger" is a good choice. Visually, the "three lines" icon represents a menu.
The development team behind the featureful and open-source GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) designed for developers who want to build apps for the GNOME desktop environment has released version 3.16.3.
Software installation is much easier in Makulu Linux. A variety of installed Personal Package Archives are configured to make finding and installing more software much more convenient than it often is with other distros. Steam and PlayonLinux are both included as well. Want more? How about Netflix and Popcorn Time? Both applications are fully supported.
NethServer is a Linux distribution based on the CentOS operating system. NethServer offers system administrators a "powerful web interface that simplifies common administration tasks, very easy/fast installation and a lot of pre-configured modules installable with a single click." The NethServer project provides service modules and web-based management tools for working with these modules. NethServer is available for the 64-bit x86 architecture exclusively and the ISO image for this distribution is 455MB in size.
A recent post by Gil Tene raises the importance of an important, little known patch to Linux kernels that should be reviewed by all users and administrators of Linux systems, especially those who utilize Haswell processors. Tene reports that in particular users of Red Hat-based distributions (including CentOS 6.6 and Scientific Linux 6.6) should apply the patch as soon as possible. Even if your instance of Linux is running in a VM, that VM is most likely hosted on a Haswell machine if is on the popular cloud providers (Azure / Amazon /etc) and would benefit from the patch.
I never thought I’d have to write this article in 2015. By now, I thought it would be self-evident how to derive revenue from open source software platforms. But alas, no. Despite the fact that the success of open source software is unparalleled and dominates the global software industry, there are still far too many startups repeating the same mistakes from a thousand startups past. And there are still far too many larger companies that simply don't understand what it means to participate in, much less lead, an open source community.
We had a major change earlier this week, with the new fudcon.in website going live. This was a major task I was involved in over the last couple of weeks, and also one of the major reasons why we did not have a lot of visible action on the website. Hopefully you’ll see more action in the coming weeks as we come closer to the big day with just over a month to go.
More than a year ago it was a change. A change in Fedora 22: The introduction of OpenCL. The idea was to get OpenCL somewhat usable out of the boxin Fedora, to enable people to use it, to further get more people testing it, to finally find more bugs and raise the demand. With a lot of help from others, especially Björn, the change made it into Fedora 21.
After having proposed a Fedora Cinnamon Spin for the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, Jan Kurik, Program Manager at Red Hat, published details of the proposal of a very interesting edition of Fedora, the Fedora Netizen Spin.
As shipped, Debian Jessie (8.0) did not include kernel support for the USB controller on APM X-Gene based machines like the Mustang. In fact, at the time of writing this that support has not yet gone upstream into the mainline Linux kernel either but patches have been posted by Mark Langsdorf from Red Hat.
The end of support for Windows XP runs a real crossroad for hundreds of educational institutions and their computer systems. Ubuntu is the change that cutting edge education needs.
The consequence, the real payoff, is that schools that use GNU/Linux end up doing more with computers in education, not less, and they have the resources and flexibility to do a much better job of educating students and preparing them for a society where IT is everywhere. Face it.
Canonical may still be mostly known for its Ubuntu Linux distribution, but the company now also offers a number of (paid) services for enterprises, often with a focus on the OpenStack platform. At the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth today introduced his company’s latest offering: Ubuntu Advantage Storage.
In an email sent to the Ubuntu Touch mailinglist on May 18, Ã Âukasz Zemczak from Canonical's Foundations Team announced some more details regarding the next major update of the Ubuntu for phones mobile operating system.
Canonical has been publishing Ubuntu Touch images and the developers used different channels to make their work known. That's about to change as the Ubuntu devs prepare to make some modifications to the current system.
Chinese phone maker Meizu is now selling a version of its MX4 smartphone with Ubuntu Linux-based software instead of Android. The Meizu Ubuntu MX4 is now available to developers in China. It should be available to the general public in China and Europe later this year.
At OpenStack Summit, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical and Ubuntu's founder, announced that benchmarks proved that Ubuntu's LXD container hypervisor "crushed" Linux's own built-in virtual machine (VM) hypervisor KVM.
Some seemingly harmless comments on the state of the open source community were met with debate.
Convergence used to mean a different thing a couple of years back. We used to think that it's about turning your phone into a working PC, and that was a great idea, but that concept has been refined mostly by the need of the real world. Sure enough, Canonical could have put forth a working prototype for a phone that doubled down like a PC, but they would limit themselves.
As with every major change to Ubuntu, I have Bodhi users asking if we will continue using Ubuntu as a base. As always, my answer is: Wait and see! I like waiting to actually see what a new technology has to offer instead of casting judgment beforehand.
The Linux Mint crew has tagged the release of the Cinnamon 2.6 desktop environment.
The Cinnamon 2.6 update is quite significant with support for systemd, panel support for multiple monitors, support for client-side decorations, and much more.
Pi Supply has achieved Kickstarter funding for a “Papirus” display HAT that supports E-paper displays up to 2.7 inches on the Raspberry Pi and other SBCs.
A new mini-computer is on the way, and it looks like it may be the Raspberry Pi killer we've all been waiting for (sorry Pi). C.H.I.P. is its name, and it looks set to wipe the floor with its established competitor on several counts:
The kernel supplied on NAND flash is recent enough that it supports CONFIG_FHANDLE which is needed for the upgrade to Jessie.
I spend a lot of time at conferences and events like Maker Faires, and having co-authored a book on the Raspberry Pi, I spend a lot of time talking to people about things like small electronics and open hardware. Probably the most frequent question I hear is, "Should I get a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino?"
Russia’s Ministry of Communications recently held a meeting about developing a home-grown mobile OS. Foreign mobile OSs currently account for 95% of the market, but Russia hope to cut this to 50% by 2025.
Tizen is a great platform to develop apps for if you are someone who comes from a web development background. The ability to write apps for wearable devices and smartphones using nothing more than HTML/CSS and JavaScript makes building simple applications a breeze. Tizen extends the functionality of these languages by giving them access to all of the sensors found in many wearable devices and smartphones, which allows developers to build unique apps using simple languages.
Google Nexus 5 and Nexus 4 have not received the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop OS update yet and its release is reportedly delayed.
If you’re one of the lucky ones with Android Wear 5.1.1, then there’s a nice little update waiting for you in the Google Play Music app.
Google’s new Nexus Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update comes with a number of big time bug fixes for Lollipop problems. It’s an exciting update and it’s one that some of you might want to install the second it comes out. Today, we take a look at a few reasons why you might want to install the Nexus Android 5.1.1 Lollipop when it arrives.
There is no question that news readers make up a category of apps that is completely flooded. On one hand, this is great because it gives people plenty of choices that offer all sorts of different functionality. But it also means that you might never find the perfect news app for you because there’s just so much clutter to dig through.
The Nvidia Shield Console looked pretty impressive when we checked it out at CES, but the 16GB of storage seemed problematic given how much space premium games can eat up.
Nvidia may have cooked up a solution, with a 500GB hard drive option appearing briefly on Amazon before it made like a Snapchat and disappeared.
With Android 5.1.1 finally rolling out to a wider range of Android Wear devices, Google is reportedly moving its focus to an even larger update. According to Artem Russakovskii, who has proved to be a well-connected source in the past, Google is working to bring some futuristic features to Android Wear dependent on new wearable hardware. Could that be a hint of an exciting new smartwatch to come?
Not too long ago, the Sony Xperia Z3 received the Android 5.0 Lollipop update, but it looks like it won't take long before the device gets another upgrade. Just recently, the handset was spotted running the newest build of the operating system, the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop.
It has only been a few weeks since the Android 5.0 Lollipop was rolled out to a number of devices but users are already looking forward to the release of the next Android M or Android 6.0.
It’s always fun to read what happens when fans of one mobile platform switch to another for a certain length of time, and web designer and Android fan Joe Casabona recently decided to try the iPhone 6 for a couple of weeks to see if it did anything better than his preferred operating system. While Casabona found a lot to like on the iPhone 6, there still wasn’t enough to convince him to make the switch and he’s decided to stick with Android for now.
Remix OS is a tweaked Android version, with a desktop interface and Chinese tablet maker Cube plans to release a tablet with this tweaked Android version.
When Linux first became a serious challenger for enterprise-class infrastructure, traditional IT vendors had to contend and to rationalize just what exactly this open source thing was. The initial response from many vendors was to attempt to stop it, but it only grew.
Firefox 38, released a few days ago, includes support for the Adobe CDM on Windows platforms. Currently this still a work-in-progress for OS X and Linux builds. On the bright side, Netflix has started to experiment with Adobe-CDM enabled streaming, thus removing the need for Silverlight.
Mozilla released version 38 of the Firefox web browser last week, and the updated version is available now in the Fedora repositories for Fedora 21, and for users running Fedora 22 pre-release versions. As has been the case since Firefox starting rapidly releasing new versions every 6 weeks or so, there are a handful of new shiny features, and many, many bugfixes.
The Fedora Project has just published details about the inclusion of the recently released Mozilla Firefox 38.0 web browser in the main software repositories of the Fedora 21 operating system.
Details about a number of Thunderbird vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been published by Canonical.
Mozilla has announced that Thunderbird 31.7 has been released and that it comes with a small number of vulnerability fixes, some more important than others.
The Open Web Device Compliance Review Board (CRB), in conjunction with its members ALCATEL ONE TOUCH, Deutsche Telekom, Mozilla, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Telefónica, has announced the first handsets to be certified by the CRB. The CRB is an independently operated organization designed to promote the success of the open Web device ecosystem by encouraging API compliance as well as ensuring competitive performance.
The company's new offering provides packaged engineered hardware to enable an organization to deploy and manage an OpenStack cloud, taking on VCE's vBlock.
In terms of OpenStack, Singh said that Walmart did a bunch of proof of concepts and came across OpenStack. Among the reasons why Walmart chose OpenStack is its flexibility and the ability to meet all of Walmart's needs. Perhaps even more important, though, for Walmart was the community surrounding OpenStack.
In August 2014, Walmart moved its entire ecommerce stack to OpenStack running on Canonical's Ubuntu Linux.
This myth ties back to several of the previously mentioned misconceptions about open-source cloud computing. A perceived lack of security, support and maturity and the idea that open source is in the hands of too many entities gives IT and business executives the sense that open-source cloud can not yet be trusted to support the most vital processes in the enterprise.
Red Hat's repackaging and integration effort aims to ease app delivery across all platforms: bare metal, VMs, and containers
Leading line up of companies including F5, Infoblox, Palo Alto Networks, and Red Hat collaborate with Nuage Networks on Reference Architecture
To help plug the OpenStack skills gap, the OpenStack Foundation and the Linux Foundation have been in talks about the creation of professional certification for those working with the open-source cloud project's technologies.
The OpenStack Foundation is rolling out its first round of interoperability testing that defines a common core for all OpenStack-powered platforms.
Today Bright Computing announced Bright OpenStack, a fully integrated software stack for deployment, management, and maintenance of private clouds.
When most people look to a cloud service provider to get a job done, they are thinking big, but some cloud tasks are smaller than others. Thats the thinking behind the Google Compute Engine Preemptible Virtual Machine.
The company said that it will roll out a series of OpenStack services designed to help enterprise customers use the cloud framework for hybrid, private and public cloud deployments.
UC Santa Cruz alumnus Sage Weil, who developed his computer science Ph.D. thesis project into a highly successful open-source software product (the data storage system Ceph), has made major gifts to UC Santa Cruz providing a total of $3 million to support research in open-source software.
While not a Linux distribution, PC-BSD is a noteworthy open-source computer operating system that offers a modern and unique desktop environment based on FreeBSD.
Instead we had way more IT than most schools because we got hardware from the recycling bins of businesses and Free Software from Debian. We did exactly the same sorts of things governments need to do: store, find, create, modify and present documents, run databases and servers.
You no longer have to be a rocket scientist to access more than 1,000 cutting-edge program tools from NASA.
This week, NASA published its second annual Software Catalog, which makes much of the coding its top scientists use on a daily basis available for public consumption at no cost.
The OpenStack Infrastructure team manages all the services that developers in the OpenStack project interface with on a day-to-day basis, including the code review and continuous integration system, Wiki, IRC bots, and mailing lists.
We are also an open source project in our own right. All of the code and configurations used in our infrastructure is available in a series of public code repositories and all of our documentation is publicly available. This is in contrast to many other open source projects that either rely upon proprietary resources provided by a code hosting service, such as SourceForge or GitHub, or have a company with an IT staff that manages an infrastructure, like the Ubuntu project.
Those that have dreamt of the possibility of a stylish open-source electric vehicle, listen up! The Luka electric vehicle (EV) is just such a project — an open-source project currently under development over in Europe that, if I may say so, is quite stylish.
When you look at the current methods of scanning 2D and 3D objects available today, you’re basically looking at an imaging process. Either you take a picture of a 2D object, or you grab a blob of point clouds with a 3D scanner and make a 3D object that way. It wasn’t always like this – real, hardware 3D digitizers were used all the way back in the 70s, and touch probes are standard equipment on high-end CNC machines.
We are from IntoRobot which is an experienced maker team of more than 20 faculty members and engineers from Switzerland, Hong Kong and Shenzhen. In the near future, we are going to release our open-source project, the Atom, by-far the world's smallest open-source dual-CPU core for IoTs and robotics. The Atom, small but powerful, consists of DUAL high performance processers, the STM32 MCU and the Linux-embedded CPU. The Atom helps people who do not have too much knowledge of hardware, software or programming to make their own complex IoT devices and robots. Furthermore, Atom's hardware and software are open-source, and people are welcome to develop their new hardware and software based on it.
What began as an experiment in consumer electronics in the early 1990s celebrates its 20th anniversary as a staple of enterprise computing this week. Java has become a dominant platform, able to run wherever the Java Virtual Machine is supported, forging ahead despite the rise of rival languages and recent tribulations with security.
And Julia is a big deal — it’s a free alternative to proprietary tools for doing data science, like MathWorks’ MATLAB and Wolfram’s Mathematica, and it’s more contemporary than open-source languages R and Python. More companies are hiring data scientists to make more data-driven decisions, and open-source tools often come in handy.
Frankly, the big objects are the easy part of security. But the tiny, insidious, and completely unforeseen vectors always seem to get us -- like a tiny bit of code that was overlooked for years in OpenSSL or Bash, or to take the latest example, Venom (CVE-2015-3456), which is the hyped name given to the latest threat to virtualized infrastructures.
Over the weekend, the US government announced that special forces soldiers entered Syria to conduct a raid that killed an alleged leader of ISIS, Abu Sayyaf. In the process, anonymous US officials leaked classified information to the New York Times that's much more sensitive than anything Edward Snowden ever revealed, and it serves as a prime example of the government's hypocrisy when it comes to disclosures of secret information.
Saudi Arabia is advertising for eight new executioners, in a recruitment drive which leading human rights charity Amnesty International has warned is symptomatic of an “unprecedented spike” of judicial killings in the country.
An advert for the position, posted on the country's civil service jobs website, states that no specific qualifications are required for the brutal role which involves “executing a judgement of death” and performing amputations on those convicted of less serious crimes.
The billionaire CEO of Continental Resources told a dean at the University of Oklahoma that he wanted earthquake researchers dismissed
‘Shocking’ revelation finds $5.3tn subsidy estimate for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday vowed to pass fast-track trade legislation before the Memorial Day recess, brushing aside calls for a prolonged floor debate on amendments.
“I want to be very clear … the Senate will finish its work on trade this week, and we will remain in session as long as it takes to do so,” the Kentucky Republican said on the Senate floor.
Why do establishment media watchers bristle at Hersh’s using anonymity for its intended purpose–protecting whistleblowers from retaliation–while expressing no problem with the routine use of unnamed sources to allow official spokespeople to make statements on behalf of their institutions with no accountability?
When the nameless are speaking on behalf of power, they’re in line with the official narrative: They’re on the rails. When an anonymous source is challenging power, they call that narrative into question–and go off the rails.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, the purveyors of Iraqi WMDs, the eternal predictors of imminent Iranian nukes, the drone apologists who insist every “military-aged male” is a militant are accorded a presumption of credibility. Whereas calling into question the official story provokes not just skepticism but hostility: It’s an affront, after all, to those journalists who have the restraint, decency and good taste to stay on the rails.
Counter-extremism powers that will allow the police to vet the online conversations of those considered extremists are to be fast-tracked into effect, David Cameron said.
While the European parliament continues to wrestle with the privacy repercussions of a proposal on collecting passenger data, Denmark plans to move ahead with its own domestic plan.
The European Commission published on 6 May its strategy for 2020 and the setting up of the Digital Single Market. Several important digital issues are concerned by this agenda: from copyright to crime, from telecommunications to VAT harmonisation. While La Quadrature du Net welcomes the Commission's engagement with these issues, it does this only with caution as previous attempts were harmful to the protection of fundamental rights.
President Obama has banned the sale of some kinds of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, following widespread criticism of a paramilitary-like response to riots in a St. Louis suburb last August.
In doing so, Obama put his stamp on the recommendations of a multi-agency federal working group that endorsed a ban on sales of some military equipment and providing more training, supervision and oversight of others.
Two of world’s most wanted hackers had committed suicide and no one still knows why. Aaron Swartz and Jonathan James, both hackers by profession and most wanted by the FBI have committed suicide in face of the federal investigation against their hacking crimes.
Interested thing is both hackers were not connected to each other in any way but were being tried for hacking by the same department and the case was being overseen by the same Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann. Could this have any hand in their suicides.
As I write, the UK’s electioneering is in full swing and politicians of all shades are making opportunistic statements that may turn out to be signals of future policy. Notable among them was a statement by Culture Secretary Sajid Javid, who revealed that the Conservative Party would ensure under-18s were prevented from seeing adult content on the internet. He did not elaborate exactly how that would be done.
Online pornography is a multibillion-dollar industry — 35 percent of all internet downloads are pornographic, and more than $3,000 is spent on internet porn every second. Every second! In the time it took you to read that sentence, $9,000 has been blown watching people get blown.
Former Facebook Europe chief and Tech City guru to join the Government benches in the House of Lords
Facebook's Internet.org project, which offers people from developing countries free mobile access to selected websites, has been pitched as a philanthropic initiative to connect two thirds of the world who don’t yet have Internet access. We completely agree that the global digital divide should be closed. However, we question whether this is the right way to do it. As we and others have noted, there's a real risk that the few websites that Facebook and its partners select for Internet.org (including, of course, Facebook itself) could end up becoming a ghetto for poor users instead of a stepping stone to the larger Internet.
On Monday, 65 advocacy organizations in 31 countries released an open letter to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg protesting Internet.org—an effort to bring free internet service to the developing world—saying the project “violates the principles of net neutrality, threatening freedom of expression, equality of opportunity, security, privacy, and innovation.”
The fake Internet will also restrict access to local service providers struggling to get a foothold online.
So things just keep getting stranger and stranger online. A bunch of mobile operators are apparently planning to start automatically blocking all mobile ads. Now, for those of you who hate ads online, this might seem like a good thing, but it is not. If you want to disable ads on your own, that should be your call. In fact, as we've noted before, we think people on the web have every right to install their own ad blockers, and we find it ridiculous when people argue that ad blocking is some form of "theft."
Nestlé is rebranding KitKats as "YouTube Break" for a limited run of 600,000 bars in the UK.
The Google-branded chocolate bars are the first of a series of 100 million differently-branded biscuits that will be produced as part of a new Nestlé campaign.
In a victory for free speech advocates, appellate judges have ruled that YouTube should not have forced to take down an anti-Muslim film that sparked violence in the Middle East and death threats to actors.
The 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal sided with Google, which owns YouTube, in its ruling Monday saying the previous decision by a three-member panel of the same court gave "short shrift" to the First Amendment and constituted prior restraint — a prohibition on free speech before it takes place.
According to a government agency responsible for promoting Sweden overseas, the country has several major brands to thank when it comes to being recognized on the world stage. In addition to car makers Volvo and furniture store IKEA, interest in Sweden has been boosted thanks to the notorious Pirate Bay. But the file-sharing fun doesn't end there.