It may be cheap but out of the box, but the HP ProBook 455 G2 Ubuntu won’t suit many users. A newer Ubuntu or Windows OS may help, but it’s not one for the typical untutored budget PC buyer.
Following the guest post this past weekend about Purism's Librem laptop remaining "blobbed up", the crowd-funded company has put out new information.
Purism posted some Librem 15 Rev2 debugging photos. Purism is getting close to production on this second revision of the Librem 15 laptop that will be in an aluminum casing.
In an interview, CEO Alex Polvi claims his company invented the cloud-native OS category and discusses how CoreOS's update strategy differs from the likes of Red Hat
Expanding the z Systems ecosystem means data scientists can use Apache Spark’s common programming framework and get the full use of the mainframe’s advanced analytics capabilities - without having to get sidelined by any specific format for data.
IBM has announced support for Apache Spark for Linux on z Systems, as part of its effort to expand the reach of its mainframe platforms. Among other benefits, the z Systems will now have a lot of appeal for data scientists that can leverage Apache Spark’s advanced analytics capabilities--all running on Linux.
Docker’s momentum has been increasing by the week, and from that it’s clearly touching on real problems. However, for many production users today, the pros do not outweigh the cons. Docker has done fantastically well at making containers appeal to developers for development, testing and CI environments—however, it has yet to disrupt production. In light of DockerCon 2015’s “Docker in Production” theme I’d like to discuss publicly the challenges Docker has yet to overcome to see wide adoption for the production use case. None of the issues mentioned here are new; they all exist on GitHub in some form. Most I’ve already discussed in conference talks or with the Docker team. This post is explicitly not to point out what is no longer an issue: For instance the new registry overcomes many shortcomings of the old. Many areas that remain problematic are not mentioned here, but I believe that what follows are the most important issues to address in the short term to enable more organizations to take the leap to running containers in production. The list is heavily biased from my experience of running Docker at Shopify, where we’ve been running the core platform on containers for more than a year at scale. With a technology moving as fast as Docker, it’s impossible to keep everything current. Please reach out if you spot inaccuracies.
In fact, history is filled with examples of great people declaring a holiday for themselves. Take Christopher Columbus, for example. Upon discovering “The New World”, Columbus immediately declared the second Monday in October to be “Columbus Day” (to be celebrated with cake… and balloons… and confetti). It took a year or two to catch on, but before the decade was through, most of the world was already celebrating this new holiday. It's true. Look it up.
SysAdmins of all experience levels, then, can benefit from brushing up on their job interview skills if they want to find and land a great new job.
Lennart Poettering today announced systemd.conf 2015, its inaugural conference devoted to the future of systemd.
The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration to advance the Internet of Things (IoT) through an open source software project, today announced that Philips has joined as a premier member. Philips joins more than 170 members of the AllSeen Alliance, including premier members Canon, Electrolux, Haier, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Qeo (a Technicolor company), Qualcomm Connected Experiences, Inc., Sharp, Silicon Image (a Lattice Semiconductor company) and Sony.
Its tests show the Tegra X1 is just a bit lower than an Intel Core i3 Broadwell system which his a thumbs up for ARMv8 hardware on Linux and Nvidia's Tegra plans.
The X1 SoC succeeds the K1 and is a 64-bit ARM design that's has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores. The X1 SoC uses Maxwell-class graphics and uses less than 10 Watts.
When AMD announced the Radeon R9 Fury line-up powered by the "Fiji" GPU with High Bandwidth Memory, I was genuinely very excited to get my hands on this graphics card. The tech sounded great and offered up a lot of potential, and once finally finding an R9 Fury in stock, shelled out nearly $600 for this graphics card. Unfortunately though, thanks to the current state of the Catalyst Linux driver, the R9 Fury on Linux is a gigantic waste for OpenGL workloads. The R9 Fury results only exemplifies the hideous state of AMD's OpenGL support for their Catalyst Linux driver with a NVIDIA graphics card costing $200 less consistently delivering better gaming performance.
Since the Linux 4.0 kernel there has been DisplayPort audio support for the open-source Radeon driver. That DP audio handling came after a big rework to the audio code in the Radeon DRM kernel driver. A half-year later it looks like all the audio code is now cleaned up and ready.
French programmer Fabien Chéreau developed Stellarium; he launched the project in the summer of 2001. It is available in RPM for Fedora and in .deb files for Ubuntu and Debian. An entire developer team produces Stellarium with the help and support of many people and organizations. And the Stellarium Wiki houses a complete user guide. You can also view a video of Stellarium in action.
As you may know, Relay is an open-source, lightweight, IRC client developed for Elementary OS and written in Vala and GTK+
As you may know, LyX is an open-source and multi-platform WYSIWYM/WYSIWYG document processor, using TeX / LaTeX behind some graphical user interface. It is ideal for writting academic articles, theses or books and has support for mathematical formulas.
Wine 1.7.48 didn't make it out last Friday for the usual bi-weekly development released, but is out there today.
Wine 1.7.48 prominently improves support for OpenGL core contexts, supports pixel snapping in DirectWrite, and the OpenMP implementation has been furhtered along. There's 39 known bug-fixes within this newest Wine snapshot.
I recently stumbled upon two websites for learning coding and programming skills: CodeCombat and Codewars. Both use a free software philosophy (all code examples are open source licensed and/or available GitHub) and help teach different computer programming languages. I tested CodeCombat and Codewars out when some of my students were seeking to learn the Python programming language.
Many of you already know that FISL (The International Free Software Forum) is one of the biggest FLOSS conferences in the world. From 8 to 11 July 2015, 5281 free software passionate people met in Porto Alegre (South Brazil) for the 16th FISL edition, enjoying activities such as talks, panels, hackathons, workshops, and community meetings. All kinds of FLOSS-related topics were in place: development, translation, artwork, education, robotics, entrepreneurship, audio-visual, women and gender, politics, academia and research ... Phew! that's tiring :) KDE has a long and memorable history at FISL and it wasn't different this year.
The beginning of the day was reading some social media in the morning with breakfast catching up with the times. While going though my Google+ feed I saw a post that I seen before about the a bug with a krunner plugin. The plugin in question was this which Riddell, Dan and I debugged to find some more info about the bug such as that is effects Kubuntu, Arch and openSUSE so it is upstream related.
The organising team have done a fantastic job: we’ve had free busses running from our accommodation to the venue, video recording of talks (which I’m sure someone will post about soon), easy to access food, two parties and people always on-hand to provide information.
KDE Activities are multiple desktops. While easy to understand, they open up the possibility of new methods of workspace organization as well as new ways to layout the desktop. They deserve to be recognized as an innovation as important as tabbed browsing, and should be a part of every desktop environment, yet most users have only vaguely heard of them, and even fewer have tried them.
When a feature so elegant is ignored, something has clearly gone wrong -- but what, exactly?
One thing is certain: Activities are one of the least unpublicized features on any desktop. From their introduction in KDE 4.0 to their implementation in Plasma 5, Activities have never had any online help. If you go to the desktop toolkit, you can click on Activities, but nothing suggests why you should bother. How to create an Activity is reasonably obvious with a little exploration, but why you would want to is never explained.
While FOSS Force gave you a look at setting up KDE Plasma on the desktop in Don Parris’ article last week, KDE recently jumped into the mobile fray by announcing KDE Plasma Mobile at their Akademy conference this week in Spain.
While it joins an already crowded field, with the likes of Android, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and others already in the mobile OS space, Plasma Mobile “offers a free — as in freedom and beer — user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices,” wrote Sebastian Kugler, a lead architect, on KDE’s website. “Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.”
The original plan was to allow an extension to handle the more crazy form-factors, but as I was blueprinting the APIs on paper I quickly found the tab-bar becoming a nightmarish monster which would have made custom tab extensions painful. Ultimately as a shortcut until a nice API can be made (and many more critical APIs can be rolled out) I’ll be adding sidebar tabs as a native feature. I may look at some sort of button form-factor as well, such as the ones commonly seen in mobile browsers.
During Akademy I hold a session about porting applications to Wayland. I collected some of the general problems I saw in various KDE projects and want to highlight them in this blog post, too.
After what now seems forever on a Windows based OS (most recently, XP and 7 for desktops, Vista for laptop), I decided to move away from XP and install Zorin OS 8 core. Although I am still on a learning curve, I cannot stress enough how much I love the OS and have not had a moment of wanting to go back to any Windows version.
Beta versions are not so optimized as the Stable ones due to debug flags and developer profiles, you can encounter errors and incomplete things, if you want a more polished system try the Stable version instead.
Webconverger is a Linux distribution used for deployment in places like offices or Internet cafes, which provides users only with web applications. A new important upgrade has been made available and is now ready for download.
Senior director and general manager, ASEAN, Damien Wong Yok Weng said Malaysia was an important market for the company and it had much potential for the adoption of open source technology across industries.
Speaking to reporters at the official announcement of the subsidiary here, Wong said in terms of expansion strategy, Red Hat had looked at all the surrounding factors in the information technology (IT) industry.
Parsix GNU/Linux, a live and installation DVD based on the testing packages from the Debian project that's using GNOME as the desktop, is now at version 8.0 Test 2 and is ready for download and testing.
Canonical said through the voice of Dustin Kirkland that you can use Ubuntu with Docker without violating any copyright policy, contradicting what Matthew Garrett said in a blog post just a week ago.
A second Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 iteration has been released by Canonical, and the new version comes with a reworked boot logic for BeagleBone Black, among other features.
Canonical has recently released a new OTA update for Ubuntu Touch and it brought a large number of new features and improvements, but also a nasty regression that caused the telephony function to fail on BQ phones and Nexus 4. That fix has finally landed.
Perhaps that’s a sign that it’s time for Canonical to take the opposite tack to Microsoft and move to less frequent releases, or at least less arbitrarily timetabled ones. Ubuntu is stable enough now not to need constant updating, and in this case waiting on the Linux 4 kernel would have made for a much more compelling release. Canonical’s engineers, meanwhile, could benefit from spending more time working on long-promised upgrades, and less time patching and polishing half-baked versions of things for a biannual release.
If you’re looking for a free, friendly and powerful OS for desktops and servers, Ubuntu is still an easy Linux distribution to recommend. But even for established Ubuntu users this update is neither practically nor emotionally compelling. If Canonical seriously wants Ubuntu to make more of a mainstream impact, Ubuntu 15.04 – a barely necessary update rolled out to serve a timetable rather than a strategy – is precisely the sort of thing it needs to stop releasing.
Earlier this week I posted some initial benchmark figures for the NVIDIA Tegra X1 on Ubuntu Linux. Those results showed much promise for this 64-bit ARM big.LITTLE SoC that also bears a Maxwell GPU, but that wasn't tested for the initial comparison. Here are a few more benchmark results from this Tegra X1, including an Ubuntu 15.04 installation to show the difference against the Tegra X1 on Ubuntu 14.10.
Alan Pope, or Popey, Ubuntu’s new Community Manager of Engineering at Canonical has proven in this article that porting HTML5 Games to Ubuntu Touch is not such a difficult task after all.
Ubuntu MATE devs recently decided to remove the Ubuntu Software Center from the default installation. The decision was met with some resistance, but a lot of users expressed their support for the removal of the Ubuntu Software Center. Now, the team has explained what are they putting in its place.
Avnet released a carrier board for its Linux-driven, FPGA-enabled MicroZed COMs featuring an Arduino shield interface and hooks to an optional MCU board.
The MicroZed Carrier Card Kit for Arduino extends Avnet’s SBC-like MicroZed computer-on-module with Arduino and MCU expansion. The $89 kit is designed for Internet of Things applications such as industrial control, remote sensing, and embedded vision.
SolidRun has revamped its line of sandwich-style, community-backed HummingBoard single board computers, adding a new high-end HummingBoard Edge model. Like the other HummingBoards, it runs Linux on swappable “MicroSOM” computer-on-modules running various Cortex-A9 based Freescale i.MX6 SoCs. SolidRun’s open-spec HummingBoard placed 21st out of 53 Linux- and/or Android-friendly hacker SBCs in our recent SBC reader survey.
Razer acquires Ouya's software, tech, patents and dev teams Gaming hardware company Razer has acquired the carcass of Ouya, including its software, tech and its technical and developer relations teams.
This review might not be very long but I have spent a long time playing and experimenting with Android x86 and if you stick with it and are willing to play with settings then you may get something close to desirable.
Those who will get the most out of Android x86 will be using a computer with a touchscreen.
Over the past two weeks we have seen three new Android phones announced that are priced to challenge Samsung, LG, and HTC devices typically found starting at $600.
Remix Mini is now on Kickstarter as the world's first true Android PC and its makers, Jide Technology, just might be the first company that takes an Android OS and makes it run like a proper desktop.
The XBMC Foundation's Team Kodi last week released version 15 of its popular, open source Kodi media player and home theater framework. The "Isengard" release of Kodi (formerly XBMC) offers enhancements ranging from new chapter support to an improved add-on manager, but the biggest news is the completion of the Android version.
Synopsys has announced the release of its annual Coverity Scan Open Source Report, which is widely followed. The 2014 report details the analysis of nearly 10 billion lines of source code through the Coverity Scan service and commercial usage of the Synopsys Testing Platform.
For the report, the company analyzed code from more than 2,500 open source C/C++ projects as well as an anonymous sample of commercial projects in 2014. Additionally, the report highlights results from several popular, open source Java and C# projects that have joined the Coverity Scan service since March 2013. Here are findings.
OpenDaylight, the open-source, software-defined network, is moving from the lab into full-scale production.
Our thoughts are with everyone who loved Nóirín, everyone who worked with them, everyone who went to their talks or learned from their writing, everyone who met them at a conference, everyone for whom they made the open source and technical communities a better place.
Almost three quarters of OpenDaylight users plan to use the open source SDN technology for Network Functions Virtualization, while over half are looking at it for cloud orchestration.
Colin Dixon, Technical Steering Committee Chair (TSC) at the OpenDaylight Project and a Principal Engineer at Brocade, said that the thing he's most proud of during the Lithium release cycle was that it landed on time, without too much pain. He commented that the maturity of the overall project has grown over the last two years, making a stable release cadence possible.
Whether you do some blogging, work as a journalist or just make use of popular social media and cloud computing tools, you probably regularly need to acquire and customize publishable graphics. The good people at NPR are out to make that job easier.
Continuous integration (CI) is an integral part of an agile software development setup. Sprint after sprint, teams strive to "not break the build" while delivering incremental features. But when developers focus completely on adding features, code errors can sometimes creep in and render the software unusable. To stop such errors from being integrated into the software configuration management (SCM), a CI server is the gatekeeper that helps keep a tab on code quality. Even if the code is integrated to SCM, a CI server can quickly tell you what went wrong. In this post, let's take a look at six open source CI server tools that you can use in your agile setup.
After a run of bad publicity and floundering to retain and attract users, parent company DHI today announced SourceForge.net and Slashdot.org are for sale. DHi said the reason was due to a refocus on their employment services. Elsewhere, CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi spoke with InfoWorld.com's Paul Krill about cloud strategies and OpenSource.com wants to know what is your favorite desktop environment.
It's been a rough year for SourceForge. SourceForge began last Summer by asking users to change their passwords for now reason at all before finally admitting the database had been hacked. Then they were found to be taking over software sources that appeared to have been abandoned and adding spyware into bundled installers. Later projects began fleeing in droves and SourceForge began a campaign to soften their image by reaching out and communicating more with "the community." Today their owner announced the immediate availability of SourceForge.net and as an added bonus, if you dial before midnight tonight, you'll get Slashdot.org too. The announcement said the sale was due to "not successfully [leveraging] the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business." No asking price was given, but DHi paid $20 million for the sites in 2012.
Today I learned of some of the worst kind of news, my friend and a valuable contributor to the great open source community Nóirín Plunkett passed away. They (this is their preferred pronoun per their twitter profile) was well regarded in the open source community for contributions.
A $10 device capable of skimming access cards on the go is soon to be released into the open-source community.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) cards are a quick and convenient way for businesses to track as and when their employees are on site, and also act as a way to both restrict and permit access to particular corporate locations. While RFID technology can help secure enterprise offices in this way, the ease in which these access controls can be hacked has hit the spotlight in the form of a tiny device which costs only $10 to make.
Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks began the second morning of OSCON 2015 with a talk about architecture.
Fowler started his talk by defining what architecture means with regard to software. The common definition that people have come to accept is: "the fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution."
A Boulder, Colorado-based startup announced today that it has raised $3.6 million in seed funding to build the commercial version of the SlamData open-source project, helping businesses visualize semi-structured NoSQL data.
SlamData, Inc. says that it’s using the SlamData project’s framework to create a native analytics platform for NoSQL information, building proprietary security and management features on top of the main feature set.
Beck, executive board member of Drupal Camp PA, said the camp he helps organize, which teaches people how to use the open-source programming software Drupal, can help almost anyone with basic computer skills build a website.
The Open nature of the Operating system is what has endeared it to many users. Customizations and tweaks are done easily, further allowing people to make better use of their devices.
Many third party software providers have made the market place an even better place.on the other hand, the iOS is not an open platform. You cannot tweak or change it in anyway and no third party app maker make an app for iOS without being put through the OS.
To be fair, the Chrome Web Store is not the world's worst app store. It's just almost the worst, ranking somewhere between the Blackberry App World and the Windows App Store. But, with some small improvements, it can be significantly better.
Mozilla plans to launch a new testing program next month that will let Firefox users try out potential changes to the browser, according to documents published by the open-source developer.
As open-source and Big Data offerings become more complex, consultants are stepping into the gap to help companies make the right choices for their IT needs. Rishi Yadav, CEO of InfoObjects, Inc., joined Juan Asenjo, lead technology architect for Rockwell Automation, Inc., on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s production team, at Hadoop Summit 2015 to talk about the maturing Big Data infrastructure market and business needs.
HP is growing its cloud offering with the acquisition of the Stackato Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) business from ActiveState. Financial terms of the deal are are not being publicly disclosed at this time.
Limitations in NoSQL databases mean they are more appropriate for some use cases than others.
LibreOffice 5.0 will be announced next Wednesday – August 5, 2015 – at noon UTC. It is our tenth major release, and the first of the third stage of LibreOffice development. To show the impressive amount of new features added to LibreOffice since version 3.3, released in January 2011, we have compiled a summary of all previous announcements.
Major release LibreOffice 5.0 is due next Wednesday with a lot of new features. Italo Vignoli today posted The Road to LibreOffice 5.0 in which he looks back at all the added features since January 2015 with version 3.3. Today's summary shows "the impressive amount of new features added to LibreOffice since version 3.3."
LibreOffice 3.3 was released in January 2011. This release was significant in that the development and management of LibreOffice had come together in a short time and put out a release that brought several new features. SVG support, easier title and page formatting and numbering, improved ergonomics in Calc, and Microsoft Works support were among the newest features added by The Document Foundation.
I have been using LibreOffice since it was called Star Office and all documents opened in a tabbed interface, as in most modern spreadsheet applications (anyone remember those days?). From those early days until now, I have considered Star Office/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice to be an excellent, if not superior, tool compared to many on the market.
The Document Foundation announced that LibreOffice 4.4.5 has been released and is now available for download. Until the launch of the new LibreOffice 5.0, in August, this is the most advanced version of the office suite you can find.
Snubbed by local media in their infancy for being too rudimentary, news outlets are taking a growing interest in using open-source content management systems like WordPress and Drupal.
Media companies’ tech execs say they like the open-source CMS platforms because the software now offers all the extras and options that managed CMS platforms do, while also allowing them more creativity and control.
Executives from open source CMS vendor HIPPO and proprietary CMS vendor Kentico squared off in a friendly debate about the pros and cons of open source versus commercial content management systems on a recent episode of the web-based show CMS Connected, hosted by commentator Butch Stearns.
Jahia, a leading open source User Experience Platform, proudly announces collaboration with Samsung subsidiaries to support and deploy digital and e-commerce projects as a global software partner. The partnership started in 2014 with the launch of a large Samsung portal, connecting thousands of retail locations that provide Samsung devices in the United States.
It is obvious that open source is much used today and plays an important role in many organizations, but how used is it in large enterprises? This question has been addressed in a recent study called The Open Source Era, conducted by Oxford Economics, a venture with Oxford University dedicated to forecasting and quantitative analysis, and WIPRO, an IT, consulting and outsourcing company.
Today’s CIOs absolutely must be considering open source software in their enterprises. Even if the Wild West still comes to mind when you hear the term, it honestly has been changing the way I think about technology and how CIOs run their organizations.
Open source software has become a critical driver for innovation at leading companies and public-sector organizations around the world, according to a new research report produced by Oxford Economics in partnership with Wipro Limited, a leading global information technology, consulting, and business process services company. The report, ‘The Open Source Era’, also shows that open source software is essential to the use of other cutting-edge technologies and that open source methodologies have spread far beyond software development.
It is obvious that open source is much used today and plays an important role in many organizations, but how used is it in large enterprises? This question has been addressed in a recent study called The Open Source Era, conducted by Oxford Economics, a venture with Oxford University dedicated to forecasting and quantitative analysis, and WIPRO, an IT, consulting and outsourcing company.
GitHub has received a $250m infusion of venture-capital cash that values the code-sharing website at $2bn.
Francois Tigeot's latest effort on porting the Intel i915 DRM code from the Linux kernel to DragonFlyBSD has paid off in the form of full acceleration for Broadwell "Gen8" HD/Iris Graphics.
Tigeot issued a call for testing a few days back of an update to the i915 DRM code that would position the DragonFlyBSD's code at the stage of the Linux 3.16 kernel. This updated code should fix some issues that previously caused X.Org Server crashes, correct outstanding bugs, improve performance for all GPU generations, and provide much improved support for Broadwell graphics. He noted that the Broadwell GPUs on DragonFlyBSD should now be fully accelerated with this new code.
RMS founded the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, and remains one of the most important and outspoken advocates for software freedom. He now spends much of his time fighting excessive extension of copyright laws, digital restrictions management, and software patents. RMS has agreed to answer your questions about GNU/Linux, how GNU relates to Linux the kernel, free software, why he disagrees with the idea of open source, and other issues of public concern. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Italian proponents of the use of free and open source software by public administrations are protesting a decision by the town of Pesaro to switch from using OpenOffice to a proprietary cloud-based office solution. They say the city has garbled the cost calculations and omitted a required software assessment study.
When it comes to identity management, major advances around a User-Managed Access (UMA) standard based on the OAuth protocol have made it possible for end users to define what level of permission and access they want to provide others with when accessing documents they create.
This year's Open Science series features great stories like Elon Musk's Hyperloop transportation system and the future of drones and open source at the Dronecode Foundation. And, our team answers the question, "What is open science, anyway?"
But you want even more open science goodness, don't you? Of course! So, here are 16 awesome open science projects you may have missed. Plus, three bonus reads. These are bookmark-worthy, folks.
Brent Picasso is CEO and co-founder of Autosport Labs (ASL), a company that develops open source motorsports technology. Their innovations allow enthusiasts to explore and enhance auto systems and to contribute back to the community.
According to the College Board, the average cost for books and supplies for the 2014-2015 school year was between $1,200 and $1,300. Because of the high costs, some students will wait to buy the books until they can afford them, missing assignments and having to start a course without all of the materials.
You’ve heard of open source software. Linux is perhaps the best-known example. But what about open source hardware? It’s not a new idea, but it’s now in New Hampshire proving itself valuable to one of the town of Merrimack’s biggest employers. David Brooks, a columnist for the Nashua Telegraph and writer at Granite Geek.org, spoke with NHPR's Peter Biello.
When you develop software, you need some kind of toolchain. For example, to develop for an ARM processor, you need a suitable C compiler, a linker, a library, and a programmer. FPGAs use a similar set of tools. However, instead of converting source code to machine language, these tools map the intent of your source code into configuration of FPGA elements and the connections between them.
If you've watched television recently, you've probably noticed that Kate Upton's tits really want you to play a smartphone game called Game Of War: Fire Age. That ad campaign cost approximately 40 million dollars, or about 5 million more than the entire development cost of Borderlands 2. They can afford their "it's like Game Of Thrones, but, somehow, even more sexual!" marketing because, as we write this, Game Of War is raking in more than a million dollars each day. Jason Croghan has spent several thousand dollars on it, and he told us all about how games like Fire Age sink their claws into you -- and don't let go.
British Gas Business has suffered a 95 percent loss in operating profit during the first half of this year, following a transition to a new SAP billing and CRM system.
The utility firm said in its profit announcement this morning: "British Gas Business was impacted by issues following the implementation of a new billing and CRM system in 2014, which has resulted in significant delays to issuing customer bills.
Flash-based SSDs have revolutionized enterprise storage. But SATA SSDs have serious problems that show that after more than 50 years of disk-based storage, our ancient I/O stack must be rebuilt. Here's why.
Yosemite, aka version 10.10, is the latest stable release of the Mac operating system, so a lot of people are affected by this vulnerability. The security bug can be exploited by a logged-in attacker or malware on the computer to gain total unauthorized control of the Mac. It is documented here by iOS and OS X guru Stefan Esser.
It's all possible thanks to an environment variable called DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE that was added in Yosemite. It specifies where in the file system a component of the operating system called the dynamic linker can log error messages.
If the environment variable is abused with a privileged program, an attacker can modify arbitrary files owned by the powerful user account root – files like the one that lists user accounts that are allowed administrator privileges.
There are a few other general security practices I put in place. First, as I mentioned before, because each host has a certificate signed by an internal trusted CA for Puppet, we take advantage of those certs to require TLS for all network communications between hosts. Given that you are sharing a network with other EC2 hosts, you want to make sure nobody can read your traffic as it goes over this network. In addition, the use of TLS helps us avoid man-in-the-middle attacks.
At the Black Hat hacker conference in two weeks, security researchers Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger plan to present the results of a year of work hacking a pair of $13,000 TrackingPoint self-aiming rifles. The married hacker couple have developed a set of techniques that could allow an attacker to compromise the rifle via its Wi-Fi connection and exploit vulnerabilities in its software. Their tricks can change variables in the scope’s calculations that make the rifle inexplicably miss its target, permanently disable the scope’s computer, or even prevent the gun from firing. In a demonstration for WIRED (shown in the video above), the researchers were able to dial in their changes to the scope’s targeting system so precisely that they could cause a bullet to hit a bullseye of the hacker’s choosing rather than the one chosen by the shooter.
Michael Moore’s new film, Where to Invade Next, explores how the US government maintains a state of “infinite war”, according to the Oscar-winning documentary film-maker.
Moore revealed rough details of the project, which he has been making “in secret” since 2009, in his first Periscope broadcast. He answered questions from fans posted on Twitter and started by saying he’d like to “say ‘Hello!’ to my NSA friends that are watching right now”. He’s been a vocal critic of the agency’s mass surveillance practices – revealed by the Guardian in 2013 – and called whistleblower Edward Snowden “the hero of the year”.
PacifiCorp and Berkshire Hathaway Energy should really consider a much more loftier goal but ultimately these companies are at the beck and call of shareholders so making large investments will reduce short term profits and that is why they are not going bigger. Another thing in addition to increasing these goals that PacifiCorp could do and should be doing across its grid is replacing transmission infrastructure with a smart grid where power can be stored when capacity exceeds demand. This in turn would reduce emissions significantly but also they could take steps like installing smart meters at all ratepayer locations (which PacifiCorp is behind on and only rolled out in a few small markets).
Like many other proud Greek-Americans, I’ve visited the country of my ancestors many times over the years. I even lived in Athens for two years while working for the U.S. government.
I recently returned to Athens for a week to help the Greek government draft a new whistlebIower protection law. It was my first trip to the country in nine years — and suffice it to say, a lot’s changed.
I followed the news of Greece’s financial collapse as closely as anyone. I’d heard the numbers — I knew that 40 percent of Greeks now live in poverty, for example, and that half of all young people in the country are unemployed. Seeing it in person was something else entirely.
A conversation about capitalism with two brilliant minds, Cornel West and Prof. Wolff, together in a rare joint appearance.
British Gas owner Centrica is axing up to 6000 jobs despite reporting that profits were up 44 per cent to €£656 million during the first half of 2015.
Profits were boosted by higher household gas usage because of colder weather and the falling price of wholesale gas. Centrica nonetheless decided to slash its interim dividend by 30 per cent and aim to cut costs by €£750 million in the next five years.
Normal children would be excited by a low roofed plastic wendy-house to hide away in and stew pretend tea. Some privileged toddlers may dream of a more stable wooden playhouse – big enough to host non-imaginary guests and less likely to blow away in a gust of wind. But no child other than Prince George could conceivably be the owner of a magnificent €£18,000 cottage on wheels.
The royal tot was given a luxury Victorian-style outhouse as a second birthday present from Dorset based company Plankbridge that started up with the help of The Prince’s Trust. It is positioned on the edge of the Prince of Wales’s wildflower meadow at Highgrove, probably in the hope that scenic views will inspire George to inherit his grandfather’s love of botany.
While you’d expect the average wendy-house to be cluttered with plastic chairs and bowls of fake fruit, this one is fitted with a wood-burning stove, oak floors and a day bed. To make matters more laughable the souped-up shed is known as “The Shepherd’s Hut”, a title which carries with it connotations of rural poverty and humbleness.
Usually investing in other countries is thought to both increase returns to the country doing the investment and diversify risks, since it is unlikely that foreign countries will be subject to the same problems that may be hitting China (or the US) at the same time. It is interesting that the New York Times seems to hold the opposite perspective.
Washington lobbying by companies and groups involved in global trade boomed in the past nine months, records show, as Congress debated a landmark trade pact proposed by President Barack Obama, the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Lobbying expenditures by members of a pro-TPP coalition increased to $135 million in the second quarter of 2015, up from $126 million in the first quarter and $118 million in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to Senate Office of Public Records reports reviewed by Reuters.
When I went to work for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin (PPWI) in 2003 as their legislative director, I was unprepared for the attacks this organization experiences on a routine basis. There are organizations solely dedicated to shutting Planned Parenthood down, and more pop up every day. Even before the 2010 tea party takeover in state Capitols around the country, including ours, the relentless legal and political attacks on Planned Parenthood were unending.
We’ve had a lot of recent success at getting the corporate media to respond to criticism, in great part due to your letters and emails. The fact that this correspondence is individually generated by you makes it all the more effective.
One of the most baffling elements to The New York Times botched story about a fictional "criminal" investigation bearing down on Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email account is the seemingly shrug-of-the-shoulders response from the Times editors who are ultimately responsible for the newsroom's black eye.
BBC journalists will be afraid of speaking out about the next big BBC scandal after seeing how those who tried to expose Jimmy Savile were forced out, according to the former head of investigations at Newsnight.
Merion Jones said the way he and other journalists who complained about the way the BBC handled the scandal were pressured to leave.
“We were told at the time that you won’t be sacked but over a year or two years you’ll realise you are being treated as an outsider, that you will never be trusted because you blew the whistle, and you will find yourself leaving,” he said. “I didn’t believe that, but I started watching what was going around me.
Darren, who currently sits as a Deputy District Judge and holds the title of Managing Associate with law firm Simmons & Simmons, has blown the dust of his abacus and actually totted up how many websites British browers aren't supposed to be able to reach any more.
Open Rights Group has responded to David Cameron’s call to shut down porn sites that don’t have age-restricted controls.
O’Reilly media’s social media manager Josh Simmons further inflamed the situation by installing “GGAutoblocker,” a mass-blocking tool developed by Harper, onto the convention’s official Twitter account. The tool has been criticised in the past for labeling a vast number of innocent Twitter users as “harassers.”
This criticism is supported by peer-reviewed research on the autoblocker, which found that just 0.66% of users blocked by the tool can be accused of genuine harassment. The autoblocker operates on the basis of guilt by association, with users automatically added to the blocklist based on who they follow.
Google will now let enterprise customers of one of its Cloud Platform services lock up their data with their own encryption keys, in case they’re concerned about the company snooping on their corporate information.
Recently, Congress heard testimony about whether or not backdoors should be introduced into encryption technologies, a technically problematic proposal that would fundamentally weaken the security of the Internet, according to a recent report written by eleven of the world’s leading cryptographers. But while Congress is reliving these debates from the nineties (we hear they’re in these days), the Crypto Wars are very much alive and well in other parts of the world.
The United Kingdom, Netherlands and Australia have gone farther than the proposals put forward by the FBI by introducing new regulations that seek to weaken and place limits on the development and use of encryption. These efforts, made ostensibly to protect citizens against terrorism, are likely to have severe economic, political and social consequences for these nations and their citizens, while doing little to protect their security.
According to the cryptographers’ report, encryption in fact has a critical role to play in national security by protecting citizens against malicious threats. The harm to the public that can be presented by lax digital security has been illustrated a number of times over recent months: data breaches such as the hack of the Office of Personnel Management compromised the personal information of tens of millions of Americans, while weak or flawed cryptography led to vulnerabilities such as Logjam and FREAK that compromised the transport layer security protocols used to secure network connections worldwide. Encryption is not only essential to protecting free expression in the digital age—it's also a critical part of national security.
In Peru, there is an internal confrontation between ministries due to the data protection provisions of the TPP. The Ministry of Health opposes to the extension on data protection due to the effects than it can have on access over medicines for Peruvians, as many international organizations such as Medicos Sin Fronteras have claimed. Nonetheless, the Ministry of Commerce, in a document published puts this statement in doubt. The document contains 105 questions about TPP. Regarding access to medicine the document raises a question: will the TPP affect public health? Then the document states that the same concern was made during the Peru-U.S. FTA negotiation, but that to the moment those concerns have not been rejected or accepted by the Ministry of Commerce.
The head of the FBI has spent the last several months in something of a panic, warning anyone who will listen that terrorists are “going dark”—using encrypted communications to hide from the FBI—and insisting that the bureau needs some kind of electronic back door to get access to those chats.
It’s an argument that civil libertarians and technology industry executives have largely rejected. And now, members of the national security establishment—veterans of both the Obama and Bush administrations—are beginning to speak out publicly against FBI Director Jim Comey’s call to give the government a skeleton key to your private talks.
Four months from now, at the same time that the National Security Agency finally abandons the massive domestic telephone dragnet exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, it will also stop perusing the vast archive of data collected by the program.
The NSA announced on Monday that it will expunge all the telephone metadata it previously swept up, citing Section 215 of the U.S.A Patriot Act.
The White House on Tuesday ended two years of ignoring a hugely popular whitehouse.gov petition calling for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be “immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon,” saying thanks for signing, but no.
“We live in a dangerous world,” Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s adviser on homeland security and terrorism, said in a statement.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) on Tuesday said the upper chamber is unlikely to move on a stalled cybersecurity bill before the August recess.
Senate Republican leaders, including Cornyn, had been angling to get the bill — known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) — to the floor this month.
But Cornyn said that there is simply too much of a time crunch in the remaining legislative days to get to the measure, intended to boost the public-private exchange of data on hackers.
“I’m sad to say I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he told reporters off the Senate floor. “The timing of this is unfortunate.”
On 23th July, the French Constitutional Council adopted a historical decision, standing out by its disregard for individual freedoms, right to privacy and freedom of speech. The "elders" have decided to avoid a real analysis of the proportionality of the new surveillance laws, and have shown their will to not stand in the way of the political game, becoming a mere rubber-stamping chamber.
A highly-capable Russian hacker group with links to Russian intelligence and that is known for going after high-profile foreign and corporate targets is deploying a powerful new data theft tool against Western systems, according to a new report by a prominent American cybersecurity firm.
A REPORT published today by Common Weal proposes a new plan to ensure Scottish data security and sovereignty after the revelation in the Daily Record on 24 July that the UK Government had revoked the spying ban on devolved parliaments, leaving MSPs at Holyrood open to hacking of communications by GCHQ.
The Ferguson cops charged Henry Davis with destruction of property because he bled on their uniforms when they beat him.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said Officer Ray Tensing "purposely killed" a 43-year-old motorist named Samuel DuBose on July 19. The officer, whom the university said had jurisdiction on the streets adjacent to the school, pulled over the motorist because the vehicle he was driving did not have a front license plate.
After University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing was charged with murdering Sam Dubose, an unarmed black man who had been pulled over on a traffic stop, it was clear that the police body cam video of the shooting played an enormous role in the indictment.
The "shoot first, ask for immunity later" mentality of today's law enforcement officers is perfectly highlighted in this story about a US military veteran finding himself on the receiving end of a military-style raid… all because a "helpful" neighbor reported him for being in the "wrong" apartment. (via Amy Alkon)
And indeed, for many, Holder’s seamless slide from theoretically prosecuting big banks to defending big banks from prosecution is a common-sense phenomenon only the hopelessly naïve would bother to decry. He’s a lawyer, what do you expect? was the substance of many a comment –of what comment there was, because, again, this latest glimpse of the porous tissue between regulator and regulated went down as no news at all for most of the press.
Criminalisation throws up a number of questions. Do existing laws cover the area to be criminalised? (For example, trade secret theft in the US is often covered by wire fraud laws.) Will criminalisation have the desired effect on incentives? Is it an appropriate use of police and public resources? Does harm exist? Is there a victim? How do magnets work?
The City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has been the subject of controversy following take-down notices sent to overseas domain registrars. We believe they need to strengthen their commitments to due process, independence and transparency.
Several prominent music groups including the RIAA, A2IM and ASCAP have accused CNET of hosting infringing apps on Download.com. In a letter sent to the CEO of parent company CBS, the groups urge the company to reconsider whether it's wise to offer "ripping" software.