In both cases, bundling is either a restraint of trade or simply a wasted motion. You don’t paint a house green only to paint it red if you have any sense. The right way to do IT is to make your choice and buy/acquire what you need to accomplish your goals in the most efficient manner possible. Bundling exclusively That Other OS with all PCs was only good for an illegal monopolist and its “partners” in crime. This is not about denying businesses profits. It’s about competition in the market and freedom for users/buyers to have choice.
When Tim Serewicz started teaching Linux system administration classes at IBM, his boss thought Linux was “just a fad." Serewicz has since made a full-time career out of teaching admins the latest technologies in the ever-evolving and growing Linux ecosystem. He has taught at IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Red Hat and now teaches OpenStack and Linux performance and tuning courses for Linux Foundation Training.
A patch has been submitted to the Linux kernel to fix a problem that was really bothering the users of Dell laptops, and that's the ability to use the airplane mode switch.
With the Linux 4.1 kernel having recently been released, I decided to conduct a fresh round of file-system comparisons on this new kernel using a solid-state drive. The file-systems tested in this article were the in-tree EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, F2FS, ReiserFS, and NILFS2 file-systems while a follow-up article will take a look at the out-of-tree contenders like Reiser4 and ZFS atop Linux 4.1.
Remember RSS? You know, the short headlines and sentences of a few words each. Every major news site and blog has a feed. You can still get news the old fashioned way, only in a much nicer format.
Victor Vran, an action RPG set in the kingdom of Zagoravia, will exit Steam Early Access and launch for PC, Mac and Linux on July 24, developer Haemimont Games has announced.
Compulsion Games just announced in their Kickstarter campaign that they'll be releasing We Happy Few for Linux.
Our very first official LEGO game is now available on Linux, but is it worth your time? I took a look with our caster Samsai.
Rogue Invader is a new roguelite game from Squishy Games (Nathan Rees and Lee J Hinkle) that is now counting on your votes on Greenlight. And they are now asking all people interested in Linux version, to voice their opinions here. This isometric, 2D sidescroller puts you in the shoes of massive expedition force sent to defeat alien menace. But due to a clerical error an invading fleet have only one gun and one drop pod. So you will be sending only one soldier at a time to accomplish this task.
You can add Torque 3D into the list of game engines that support Linux, it's not 100% finished, but it's good to see them do it.
Project Ascension is a new open source project that aims to bring together all the major stores like Steam, Origin, and uPlay under one application. After numerous mockups and suggestions from the community, we finally have an official video that shows the progress made so far.
Infinifactory, a sandbox puzzle game developed and published on Steam by Zachtronics, has been released on the Linux platform as well, and it's 10% off until July 7.
KDE recently released the latest slew of security updates for KDE Applications 15.04, bumping the version number to 15.04.3. Other than security fixes there are translation updates, there are no big features so upgrading will go smoothly.
KDE announced just a few minutes ago the immediate availability of the third maintenance release for the KDE Applications 15.04 software suite that is being distributed as part of the next-generation KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.
The crowdfunding campaign to provide funding and greater community engagement around the refactoring of Roundcube's core to give it a secure future has just wrapped up. We managed to raise $103,531 from 870 people. This obviously surpassed our goal of $80,000, so we're pretty ecstatic. This is not the end, however: now we begin the journey to delivering a first release of Roundcube Next. This blog entry outines some of that path forward
No backports PPA required.
Therefore, I thought that a closer collaboration with Linux Veda could be mutually beneficial: Getting exclusive insights directly from a core KDE contributor could give their popularity an additional boost, while my articles could get an extended audience including people who are currently interested in Linux and FOSS, but not necessarily too much interested in KDE yet.
Originally I planned to work on the KCM UI at this time. But as I am unsure how it should look like, I started a discussion on VDG forum, and decided to switch to other tasks.
It’s been one heckuva road, but I think the dust is starting to settle on the UI design for Fiber, a new web browser which I’m developing for KDE. After some back-and fourth from previous revisions, there are some exciting new ideas in this iteration! Please note that this post is about design experiments – the development status of the browser is still very low-level and won’t reach the UI stage for some time. These experiments are being done now so I can better understand the structure of the browser as I program around a heavily extension-based UI, so when I do solidify the APIs it we have a rock-solid foundation.
GUADEC is the biggest gathering of GNOME users and developers, which takes place in Europe every year. It includes conference days, the GNOME Foundation annual general meeting and hacking in a week of coding and discussion.
Q4OS is a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses a desktop environment called Trinity DE, which was forked a while ago from KDE. The end result is an operating system that looks and feels like an older Windows version.
Scientific Linux is supposed to be a serious, stable, useful operating system. So is CentOS. And they both try to be fully compatible with RedHat Enterprise, because after all, that is what they are all about. However, while the latter does manage to do this in a rather smooth, pleasant manner AND still be a great candidate for home use, Scientific Linux fails in its mission statement on oh-so-many levels, definitely not helped by using the Gnome nonsense. Oh man how have the tables turned. Gnome 2 used to be my favorite desktop environment, and Gnome 3 is my most hated one.
Opensuse Tumbleweed has been static since the 20150612 snapshot. But today the 20150630 snapshot was released. We are moving again.
For a relatively small company, Red Hat, inc. has become a major player in open source technology.
“It is definitely more than a Linux company,” said theCUBE cohost Dave Vellante, summarizing day one of Red Hat Summit 2015. “This conference is ground zero for an open-source revolution.”
Miniman and Vellante also discussed Open Container platform. “I would want to have something that will work across multiple environments,” said Miniman. “CoreOS and Docker are two of the main players, and they have similar missions.”
Prior to becoming self-employed, I'd worked at Linux New Media for several years. Back then, Linux New Media was a German-owned tech publishing company, with locations in several countries, and a small portfolio of print publications and digital products in a handful of languages. At Linux New Media, I worked with editors and writers around the world, and most closely with a small team I helped build up in our newest location, an office in Lawrence, Kansas. Most members of our Kansas team were colleagues—and friends—I'd had since starting my career in the late '90s, when I worked as an editor on Sys Admin magazine. Although we didn't call Linux New Media an "open organization" back then, it certainly was. Working at that company prepared me for the culture at Red Hat.
Paul Cormier, president of Product and Technologies for Red Hat, Inc., told theCUBE during Red Hat Summit 2015 that everything the company creates goes back to the open-source community. A newly acquired company may present the one exception.
Back in late 2013 I joined what was jokingly referred to as the Red Hat IT “DevOps” team. We didn’t like that name, so we changed it and there-after became officially known as Team Inception. From the time the team was formed, we all accepted that the team was to retire in 18-24 months. We were totally cool with that too! To us having a pure “DevOps” team in perpetuity just didn’t make sense.
The platform offers enterprises a full technology stack to enable mobile-centric workloads to integrate with existing IT infrastructures, reducing the complexity and increasing agility across mobile development and deployment cycles.
All self-contained changes were approved this week except for the io.js change and the proposed Netizen spin. The Fedora Netizen spin was to be about: "Fedora Netizen is an open source operating system for enabling internet citizens to engage with online services and communities...The philosophy for Netizen closely relates to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs by establishing three primary software package levels in a hierarchical model. The first and lowest software package level addresses the need for Netizen Privacy in the areas of personal privacy, informational privacy, and communication privacy. After Netizen Privacy, the second software package level addresses the need for Netizen Security in the areas of data security, local security, and network security. After Netizen Security, the third software package level addresses the need for Netizen Engagement in the areas of publishing, education, and social engagement. Future Netizen software package levels will address analytics, awareness, design, develop, and others."
Yeah, it’s too simplistic for real-world use, but you get the idea. And, in the end, that’s all end users need to know—replace the word ‘yum’ with ‘dnf’ and you’re good to go.
Has the Fedora team gone in the right direction with the migration from Yum to DNF? If not, how should they have approached this transition?
There were quite a few interesting headlines in the reader tonight. First up, Linux Mint 17.2 was released and openSUSE Tumbleweed is back on a roll. Christian Schaller recently said that Fedora is planning to do for video what PulseAudio did for audio. Several reviews warrant a mention and RedMonk published their bi-annual programming language rankings report. Sourceforge is forming a community panel and Linus Torvalds was interviewed over at Slashdot.
The package is also waiting in NEW to be accepted for Debian experimental.
Last month I started to track all the small Debian-related things that I do. My initial motivation was to be concious about how often I spend short periods of time working on Debian. Sometimes it’s during lunch breaks, weekends, first thing in the morning before regular work, after I am done for the day with regular work, or even during regular work, since I do have the chance of doing Debian work as part of my regular work occasionally.
Now that I have this information, I need to do something with it. So this is probably the first of monthly updates I will post about my Debian work. Hopefully it won’t be the last.
I can't begin to tell you how saddened I am that I've had to write this. I wanted the Ubuntu Phone to completely blow me away and pull me from the Android platform with ease and grace. Instead, it solidified my opinion that jumping into the ring with Android and Apple is a fight that most aren't really ready to take up.
Please, Canonical, go back to the drawing board and return with a UI that makes sense... or simply return all of your focus on what you do best and leave the mobile platform to Google and Apple.
Canonical has published details in a security notice about an unattended-upgrades vulnerability that has been identified and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Linux Mint 17.2, code-named "Rafaela," was officially released on June 30 by Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre, providing users with an incremental update over the Linux Mint 17.1 release that debuted on Nov. 29, 2014. Linux Mint's focus is always on the desktop, and the 17.2 update aims to further improve the desktop user experience with additional polish and fine-tuning on both the Cinnamon and MATE desktops.
When I switched to Linux, my first distribution was Ubuntu and it was using Gnome 2. The experience I had with Gnome 2 was amazing. At the time the latest Windows was XP and Ubuntu was still in 9.04. One of the advantages of Linux (depending on the desktop environment) is the ability to give your system a personalized look and feel.
The Ubuntu MATE team and Portuguese hardware manufacturer, LibreTrend, have formed a partnership which will see Ubuntu MATE become one of the operating systems which will ship on the LibreBox by default, this puts them alongside Trisquel Gnu/Linux.
The Ubuntu MATE distribution has managed to score a second hardware deal, this time with a company called LibreTrend. Very soon we'll start seeing a new computer from LibreTrend with the Ubuntu MATE OS as an option.
LibreTrend the Portuguese based Linux software and hardware design company and the developers of the Ubuntu MATE operating system that has been created to focus on usability and stability.
Avalue unveiled three Linux-friendly embedded boards based on Intel’s 14nm Braswell SoCs: a Qseven COM, a COM Express Type 6 COM, and a 5.25-inch SBC.
According to Digitimes and StatCounter the smartphone is the new PC and */Linux is the winner in a competitive market for client operating systems. That Other OS is still ahead in total share of client OS page-views but is in decline while Linux operating systems grow by high single digits.
The Tizen Experts site was the first website to report on a new Tizen Smartphone, the Samsung Z3, and now there is confirmation that it will be the next Tizen Smartphone to be released, with the model number SM-Z300H.
June is officially over, which means it’s time to take a look back at what goodies it brought. The summer months are usually a hot time for new games. June was no exception. We saw a bunch of awesome new games launch last month. If you were busy swimming and grilling you probably missed a few. We have a list of the best games to launch in June. Download a few of these to pass the time while you’re traveling on vacation or when the AC goes out.
Fans of no-contract prepaid smartphones have five more models to choose from as AT&T, Cricket Wireless and Boost Mobile unveiled their latest Android devices that come with no long-term commitments. AT&T offers the Motorola Moto E and ZTE Maven 4G LTE phones, priced at $99.99 and $59.99 through AT&T stores or at ATT.com. Cricket Wireless, a division of AT&T, is offering the ZTE Sonata 2, a 4G handset that sells for $29.99, through Cricket stores or CricketWireless.com. The Moto E features a 4.5-inch thin-film-transistor (TFT) display, a 1.2GHz processor and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, while the ZTE Maven has a 4.5-inch display, a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU and a 5MP main camera. Cricket's Sonata 2 has a 4-inch WVGA display, a 1.2GHz CPU and a 5MP main camera. Sprint's Boost Mobile division, meanwhile, launched the LG Tribute 2 smartphone, which retails for $99.99, and the LG Volt 2, which sells for $149.99, through BoostMobile.com. The LG Tribute 2 has a 4.5-inch IPS display, a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU and a 5MP rear camera, while the LG Volt 2 has a 5-inch HD IPS display, a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU and an 8MP rear camera. This slide show takes a closer look at the five phones.
It took only five years from the release of the first device running Android for the platform to become the most popular mobile operating system on the planet. That rapid adoption rate has been matched by the pace of development on the operating system itself, transforming Google's OS from an awkward, if interesting, fledgling effort into the refined and feature-packed offering we see today. As Google looks forward to "the next billion users," let's take a look back at Android's evolution.
The brand new Android 5.1.1 (build LMY48G) update for the Nexus 7 (2013) WiFi that first serviced via factory image earlier in the week is now available for download as an over-the-air .zip from Google. Yep, you can sideload this little guy as long as you are coming from LMY47V.
Google has gone back to the drawing board for Android One and come up with a version 2.0 as it were. Having met with a tepid response for the first phones based on the system in September last year, it appears to be reorienting the strategy toward people who've had smartphones before rather than first-time users, said a person with knowledge of the plan.
The month of June was extremely busy for manufacturers and carriers alike looking to deliver the latest Android 5.1 Lollipop update to a slew of smartphones, and for Motorola especially. The company has pushed out updates to an array of devices, and now we have additional details regarding the original Moto X Android 5.1 Lollipop update.
Android and Chrome are better together. Google continues to tie the laces between the two operating systems, giving developers—and adventurous everyday users—the tools to put Android apps on Chrome OS.
Then we have our wild cards, two phones are included this quarter, and both deserve some sort of mention. One isn’t available yet, while the other is about to receive a much anticipated successor. Without further ado, let’s dive into the top 5 Android smartphones for July 2015. And please, as always, keep in mind that these are in no particular order; each phone has plenty of pros and cons.
Reports from earlier this month that BlackBerry would soon launch a full fledged Android-powered smartphone are looking up. Ex-tipster who still occasionally tips/confirms new devices @Evleaks tweeted earlier today that a device called the BlackBerry Venice is headed to AT&T later this year. He specifically mentioned that this device would be powered by Android and that — here’s the best part — it will feature a slide-out physical keyboard for QWERTY fans.
Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur known for founding the transportation related companies such as Zipcar, Buzzcar and Veniam. She wears many hats and is an inspiration to women all around the globe. She is also a strong supporter of Open Source and Open Collaborative technologies. She recently authored a book called Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism. Chase will be delivering a keynote at the upcoming LinuxCon event.
In my daily life (both personal and professional) I use open source for just about anything, from LibreOffice to Drupal, Kolab, Piwik, Apache, KDE, etc.
Being part of the communities of these projects for me is a very special extra dimension that creates a lot of extra motivation and satisfaction.
For me, open source isn’t so much of a choice it is simply the standard.
One of the great things about open source is its reach beyond just the software we use. Open source isn’t just about taking principled stands, it's about making things better for the world around us. It helps spread new ideas by letting anyone with an interest modify and replicate those ideas in their own communities.
In this collection, let’s take a look back at some of the best articles we’ve shared this year about the ways that open source is making an impact on communities and improving the lives of people across the world.
Forget about having multiple game launcher clients slowing down your computer – a community born on Reddit wants to unify all the popular game launchers into one multi-platform launcher.
Project Ascension started as a community discussion on social bookmarking website Reddit in April, when users complained that they were tired of having many different game launcher ecosystems, such as Steam, Origin, GOG and uPlay.
In the enterprise, open source software can be a great benefit for those who take the time to weigh the risks and select the right platform.
"Fifteen years ago, we made the decision to bring Linux into the mainframe. In fact, this was the first $1 billion commitment IBM made to Linux back in the year 2000. And I’d like to think, in some small way, we helped bring Linux to the enterprise with that commitment of over 15 years ago," Balog said.
SourceForge has begun outreach to Open Source developers and end-users in an effort to form a Community Panel to help guide future development of our products and policies.
We expect to have ongoing communications with members of our Community Panel in coming weeks, to be followed by an in-person event at summer’s end on the east coast of the US.
Once again the OSI and our Board of Directors will be at OSCON. Just like in years past, the OSI will again be strongly represented with presentations form our Board Directors, Affiliate Members and Individual Members, a booth in the Expo Hall and even a dedicated session on how to use OSI's resources to change the open source world.
We have already covered a lot of enterprise applications on our site before. However, one would never expect apps in this genre to exist on a browser like Google Chrome. But, nothing could be further from the real truth. Google's effort to outsmart even the biggest players in the enterprise market are gradually paying off. Slowly spreading its wings into the business world, Google is venturing into arenas where Microsoft once reigned supreme. While the competition doesn't concern us much, but what has happened, in effect, is that the rivalry is bringing out the best in both companies.
Mozilla has finally released the stable version of Firefox 39 after it delayed the launch for a couple of days. It's not a major release, but it does have a few interesting features and quite a few bug fixes.
Whichever social network you choose, it’s undeniable that being social is a key part of why you enjoy the Web. Firefox is built to put you in control, including making it easier to share anything you like on the Web’s most popular social networks. Today, we’re announcing that Firefox Share has been integrated into Firefox Hello. We introduced Firefox Share to offer a simple way of sharing Web content across popular services such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Google+ and other social and email services (full list here) to help you share anything on the Web with any or all of your friends.
The Greek city of Livadeia has moved to the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools, replacing a proprietary alternative, the city administration announced in May. The switch is part of the city’s government modernisation, the town in central Greece said.
Some people were hanging around Michael Lucas’s table at BSDCan, and the topic of conversation turned to Tarsnap. (Lucas has a book about it.) Each person went round the circle and said they were happy to pay Colin for his service, but when it was finally my turn I was forced to admit that while I would pay for Tarsnap, I found a bug and so, thanks to the bounty, it may be more accurate to say I get paid to use it.
Greets, hackers! I just finished implementing a little embedded language in Lua and wanted to share it with you. First, a bit about the language, then some notes on how it works with Lua to reach the high performance targets of Snabb Switch.
The OPNsense 15.7 release added i386 and NanoBSD support, LibreSSL support, re-based to FreeBSD 10.1, added OpenDNS support, intrusion detection support, new local/remote backlist options, some security fixes, and added many other new features.
My workshop on Email Self-Defense took place at the 12th annual Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, New Hampshire. Around eight people attended, which was a few more than I expected. Christopher Waid and Bob Call of ThinkPenguin joined me in helping everyone who brought a laptop to set up GnuPG properly. Those who didn't bring a laptop participated by observing the process on the system most similar to their own and asking questions about particular steps, so as to enable them to achieve the same configuration when they returned home.
The Blender Foundation, the developer of Blender, an integrated 3D creation software suite, has just announced that a new version of the suite, 2.75, has been released and is now available for download.
The first release candidate for Kodi 15 has arrived.
Kodi 15 is building up many new features from Android 4K@60Hz support to adaptive seeking support to Android H.265 support to many other updates and additions.
Members of the House, committees and staff have officially received the green light to obtain open source software for their offices, and to discuss software code and policy with developers, citizens and other legislators in communities such as GitHub, according to the Congressional Data Coalition advocacy group.
The White House joined open source code repository site GitHub in 2012. But it wasn't until this May a sitting congressman, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., first joined the site. Connolly used it to make edits to guidance on implementation of the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act.
When did the use of open-source software become such a worrisome thought? Big names such as VMware, Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco, to name but a few, have been caught infringing on open-source software licenses.
The Dead was one of the first and most successful open source business models. They never felt their albums captured their true sound and musical depth. This could only come through their live performances. And yet, because they were very experimental and bold risk takers, any particular show could fall flat or even spontaneously combust. Thus, it was important to see many shows because magic would inevitably transpire and they wanted all of their fans to know what that was like and have a hunger for more once it had been experienced. A true natural high for anyone that has experienced it. As it’s been said, there is nothing like a Grateful Dead show.
The 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) wrapped up last month, and while teams from Korea and the U.S. took away $3.5M in prize money, the real winner was the open source robotics movement. Of the 23 teams competing in the DRC, 18 utilized the open-source Robotic Operating System (ROS) and 14 used Gazebo, an open source robot simulator that allows developers to test concepts in robust virtual environments without risking valuable hardware.
The same developers who are bringing wireless remotely controlled microchip implants are actually focusing on their first flagship product: Gates Foundation-funded birth-control microchip implants. Wireless technology allows the remotely controlled chip to turn a woman's ability to conceive off or on at will - temporary sterilization.
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro added that a U.S. Embassy advisor drafted the script that the coup plotters read in video they planned to air.
Energy giant BP has agreed to settle outstanding state and federal claims against it relating to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster for $18.7 billion. The fines, to be paid over 18 years, are a small fraction of the damages caused by the largest offshore oil spill in US history and minor in relation to the immense profits of the transnational oil company.
Five years ago, the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed out some 134 million gallons of oil, soiling 1,000 miles of Gulf of Mexico coastline. On Thursday, BP agreed to pay an $18.7 billion settlement that will help repair the damage from the televised spill that began April 20 and ended July 15, 2010.
The train derailment occurred Wednesday at 11:50 p.m. ET, and caused toxic substances aboard the train to catch fire. As of Thursday morning, the fire was still burning.
Yes, it may be unlikely that Sanders will win the nomination. In national polls for the primaries Hillary Clinton, the favorite, did not poll less than 50 percent since April. Bernie Sanders has not polled over 25 percent since June 2014. But recent polls seem to suggest growing support for Sanders, particularly in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. Regardless of the results, however, Sanders’ bid for the candidacy has led to a discussion around socialism.
The Euro project will continue to be extremely strong. New money will be funnelled into the pockets of bankers. It is important to recall that 100% of these bailout funds go to bankers, none of it goes to the Greek people and none of it stays in Greece. The same bankers will become the beneficiaries of servicing of new loans provided to vast corporations to buy up Greek public assets, cheap.
As Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras stands off against the so-called Troika, questions abound about the future of his country.
But there should also be pressing questions about the future of the European Union. The shaky legal foundations of the EU have been laid bare by this crisis.
Supermarket chain owned by one of Germany’s wealthiest families given money over past decade by World Bank and others as it expands into eastern Europe
NPR ombud Elizabeth Jensen wrote a column (7/1/15) responding to a FAIR Action Alert, “NPR Celebrates Fast-Track Victory With an All-Corporate Lobbyist Segment” (6/27/15).
Jensen acknowledges that the report in question (Morning Edition, 6/25/15), which featured three executives from business lobbies talking about Congress’s passage of corporate-backed Fast-Track legislation, “would have been stronger and more complete if it had included a voice representing the opponents.”
For a public radio service, NPR is notoriously known for its lack of diversity within its staff, audience and guests invited onto their shows—problems that NPR has itself acknowledged (6/30/14).
A new FAIR study finds that NPR’s diversity problem also extends into the board of trustees of its most popular member stations: Two out of three board members are male, and nearly three out of four are non-Latino whites. Fully three out of every four trustees of the top NPR affiliates belong to the corporate elite.
He’s the author of the classic book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, which assesses the textbooks used in US classrooms, turning up falsehoods, elisions and distortions. He explains some of the reasons students say they hate history–and non-white students hate it most of all.
Reddit has been in the news a lot in recent months, and not for any positive reasons. Now the site is again making headlines as its moderators go on a strike and put Reddit in a virtual state of lockdown.
Reddit is in revolt. This week, Victoria Taylor, director of talent and coordinator of the site's popular "Ask me Anything" (r/IAmA) subreddit, left reddit, apparently against her will. In response, a group of the site's coordinators have pulled the shades on some of the site's most popular sections.
People may wonder why this issue has attracted so much attention. After all, a speech made by an eminent scientist — a Nobel Prize-winner, no less — to a small group of journalists in South Korea in a previous age would have received no attention at all.
But after the 72-year-old Prof’s weak jokes about how ‘girls’ are a distraction in laboratories — which made some listeners titter and others roll their eyes — just three people tweeted shock-horror, and the storm began.
Sir Tim quickly found his career and reputation, built up over 50 years, all but ruined. Although he apologised for his error, he was still unceremoniously hounded out of honorary positions at UCL, the Royal Society and the European Research Council.
That response was, in my view, hasty and disgraceful —and out of all proportion to his alleged ‘crime’.
Earlier this year, there were some questions raised when it appeared that UK Prime Minister David Cameron was suggesting that he wanted to undermine all encryption on the internet. Later, some suggested he was looking more at undermining end point security. However, after being re-elected, and apparently believing that this gave him the mandate to go full Orwell, Cameron is making it clear that no one should ever have any privacy from government snoops ever.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which provides oversight for UK intelligence services, admitted yesterday that its judgement made on 22 June wrongly failed to declare that Amnesty International had been subject to unlawful surveillance by GCHQ. The IPT revealed this in an e-mail sent to the ten NGO claimants involved in the earlier legal challenge to UK government surveillance. As Amnesty International explained: "Today’s communication makes clear that it was actually Amnesty International Ltd, and not the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) that was spied on in addition to the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa."
The IPT said in its original judgement that communications by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the South African non-profit Legal Resources Centre had been illegally retained and examined.
However, the tribunal made it clear in the email sent on Wednesday that it was Amnesty International and not the Egyptian organisation that had been spied on, as well as the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa.
The IPT email made no mention of when or why Amnesty International was spied on, or what was done with the information obtained. The organisation is calling for an independent inquiry into how and why a UK intelligence agency has been spying on human rights organisations.
THE PRESTIGIOUS HARVARD UNIVERSITY has revealed that it was the victim of a security breach in June affecting eight schools and administrative organisations at the university.
The intrusion in the IT systems of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Central Administration was discovered on 19 June, and is thought to have exposed various log-in credentials, including for Office 365, which were stored on the compromised networks.
"At this time, we have no indication that research data or personal data managed by Harvard systems (e.g. Social Security numbers) have been exposed," said the university IT team in an advisory on its website.
The sheer quantity of communications that XKEYSCORE processes, filters and queries is stunning. Around the world, when a person gets online to do anything — write an email, post to a social network, browse the web or play a video game — there’s a decent chance that the Internet traffic her device sends and receives is getting collected and processed by one of XKEYSCORE’s hundreds of servers scattered across the globe.
One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse. Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Linux would not be here without the Net. Nor would countless other building materials and methods that support networked life and the institutions that rely on networks, which now include approximately everything.
[...]
All these things need to be as casual and easily understood as clothing and shelter are in the physical world today. They can't work only for wizards. Privacy is for muggles too. Without agancy and scale for muggles, the Net will remain the Land of Giants, who regard us all as serfs by default.
A British tribunal admitted on Wednesday that the U.K. government had spied on Amnesty International and illegally retained some of its communications. Sherif Elsayed-Ali, deputy director of global issues for Amnesty International in London, responds:
Just after 4 p.m. yesterday, Amnesty International received an email from the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which hears cases related to U.K. intelligence agencies. The message was brief: There had been a mistake in the tribunal’s judgment 10 days earlier in a case brought by 10 human rights organizations against the U.K.’s mass surveillance programs. Contrary to the finding in the original ruling, our communications at Amnesty International had, in fact, been under illegal surveillance by GCHQ, the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency.
There's been a bunch of fuss online over the "news" that Craigslist is supposedly donating $1 million to EFF when the money is not actually from Craig. It's from a startup that Craigslist has sued out of business, under a dangerous interpretation of the CFAA that harms the open internet. Obviously, EFF getting an additional $1 million in resources is really great. But it's troubling to see so many people congratulate Craigslist and Craig Newmark for "supporting EFF." Craig himself has contributed to this misleading perception with this tweet implying he's giving his own money to EFF...
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And yet Craigslist sued these companies under a tortured definition of the CFAA, arguing that the mere scraping of its data to provide value on top of it (none of which took away any value from Craigslist) was "unauthorized access."
The number of available IPv4 address spaces has fallen so low that the US organisation responsible for handing out addresses has rejected a request because there was not enough stock.
The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) posted a note on its website confirming the move, although it did not say from where the request had come.
“ARIN activated the IPv4 Unmet Requests policy this week with the approval of an address request that was larger than the available inventory in the regional IPv4 free pool,” said ARIN chief executive John Curran.
APPLE QUIETLY KILLED OFF Home Sharing for music in iOS 8.4, and has pissed off its customers in the process.
Home Sharing for music launched in 2011 as part of iOS 4.3, and allowed iPhone, iPad and iPod users to stream music from a computer running iTunes, as long as the devices were connected to the same WiFi network.
In an effort to reclaim an estimated $67 million in assets, Megaupload's legal team has appealed the forfeiture the U.S. Government won earlier this year. The filing refutes the claim that Kim Dotcom and his former colleagues are fugitives, and warns of the dangerous precedent the District Court ruling will set.
The Internet is built on copying. That's true at a purely technical level: as packets of data move around the world, they are copied from network to network, and finally to the end-user's device. But it's also true in terms of how people use the Internet: they are constantly sending copies across the network, whether partial snippets or entire works. That's a big problem, because once a creation is in a fixed form, it is automatically subject to copyright, an intellectual monopoly that gives creators the power to prevent copies being made of their work. Quite simply, this situation ensures that almost everyone using the Internet is also breaking the law multiple times every day.