Hopping to the competitor’s side of the fence/gate, just like in Troy
Summary: Vista 10 adoption is already plateauing (at very low levels considering the zero-cost ‘upgrade’) and Microsoft is trying to assert or exploit (patent) monopolies where adoption and market growth are extremely high (Free software)
Barely anybody is using Microsoft’s ‘new’ (rebranded) browser, according to this article which cites an IDGreport, which in turn uses Microsoft-friendly data sources such as Net Applications. That’s despite Microsoft’s dirty and anti-competitive tricks regarding the default Web browser (Microsoft overriding users’ preferences) [1, 2] in Vista 10. Microsoft Emil, who is writing lots of propaganda pieces for Vista 10 over at VentureBeat these days, is trying to give a terribly false impression by passing the gross distortion/illusion that Vista 10 now has majority market share (extreme cherry-picking) while even the most Microsoft-friendly surveys put its market share at under 5%, instantaneousness debunking Microsoft’s unverified claims of 75 million Vista 10 ‘users’ (however Microsoft defines these). Matt Weinberger, in the mean time, comes out with another promotional Microsoft piece advocating a new Microsoft monopoly (because the operating system monopoly has been lost to Android, GNU/Linux, and so on). One Microsoft apologist (very Windows-centric) is now trash-talking GNU/Linux and devaluing privacy in an effort to convince people to adopt Vista 10 and avoid GNU/Linux. How much more blatant can it get? Microsoft doesn’t “love Linux”, it just hates it. The Microsoft boosters truly fear Free software and they’re pretty bad at hiding it.
“Expect Microsoft to continue wielding patents against GNU/Linux and Android (it’s still happening), especially now that Windows is in a state of crisis.”Android is currently being besieged by Microsoft. A site that is affiliated with Microsoft’s MSN (and by its own admission “owns shares of Microsoft”) is trying to promote Microsoft inside Android, a former Microsoft lackey (see her career history, before she scrubbed it off her profile) is promotingSkype on Android, and Ketan Pratap says “Microsoft’s Push Into Google’s Android Is Good News for Users”. That’s almost as foolish or terrible as saying that the Trojan horse was good for Troy.
Microsoft is viciously attacking Google, Android, and ChromeOS using patents. Make no mistake about it, there is extensive evidence of that and not even Microsoft would deny it when asked. When Microsoft approaches Android et al. it’s part of an effort to weaken competitors, not contribute or complement them.
Patents are an ugly business. They’re offensive, not defensive, but tabloids like Gizmodo make gossip out of Google’s patent search, adding a ‘sexy’ angle to it. Google is no fan of patents and it tries combating them using prior art searches.
There is a practice we’ve been covering here in relation to patent attacks to Android. Tim Sparapani calls this “Attack of the Patent Privateers”, alluding to a system of cartels that collude against competitors (assuring one thrives with protectionism, not innovation). As Sparapani puts is, companies like Apple or Microsoft “are becoming more clever about using – or misusing, depending on your perspective – the patent system to extract funds from competitors or thwart others’ growth. This harms America’s best companies and most promising startups.
“One example of this growth is the emergence of so-called patent privateering, which contributes to an ever-greater amount of frivolous or abusive patent litigation. Privateering is a pleasant euphemism for empowering a pirate to attack your competitors for profit. Patent privateering occurs when a company lends or sells a portion of its patents to another litigious company to sue alleged patent infringers who are all too often the competitors of the original patent recipient company that was under the impression it had licensed the entire portfolio.”
That’s what Microsoft is doing to Android and Google, using Nokia‘s patents in MOSAID/Conversant‘s hands, to give just one example. Microsoft even does this more directly with Vringo. Sparapani uses the word “pirate”, not “troll”, to refer to the types of goons whom Microsoft empowers to attack competitors.
Patents are thankfully collapsing with developments such as the Alice determination. Patents on software lose their value, as do their profiteers, based on this latest analysis of the Marathon Patent Group, which (as the name implies), is not a producing company. This is basically nothing but a bunch of goons for hire — people who will use patents to attack by proxy (hence retaliatory litigation becomes an impossibility). To quote the latest on this:
According to Zacks, “Marathon Patent Group Inc. is a patent and patent rights acquisition and licensing company. The Company acquires patents from a wide-range of patent holders from individual inventors to Fortune 500 companies. It serves its clients through two complementary business units: IP Services and IP Licensing and Enforcement business. Marathon Patent Group, Inc. is based in Alexandria, Virginia. “
Expect Microsoft to continue wielding patents against GNU/Linux and Android (it's still happening), especially now that Windows is in a state of crisis. Microsoft will do this not only directly (blackmail using patents) but also indirectly, using entities like the one above (we wrote about several of them before).
Microsoft does not want peace, it wants domination. As long as this remains the case, peace will be reached with Microsoft only when Microsoft is practically dead. █
Back in December 2014, word got out that Xiaomi might be looking to enter the laptop market. Currently, the company is selling handsets, tablets, wearables, plus other accessories. But the Chinese device maker is apparently interested in branching out and infiltrating itself into niches it hasn’t dabbed into before. Like laptops, for instance.
Computers have fascinated me since childhood, but my first encounter—like many others—was not with Linux. For me, it was with Microsoft Paint. Then, many years later in 2011, it was my Wikipedia mentor, Shiju Alex, who introduced me to Linux. Since then, it’s been my life!
If I recall correctly, Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS (Lucid Lynx) was my first distro. It was different, light, and fun. And, I would often switch back to Windows for something, then back to Ubuntu. The smoothness—and having a virus-free environment—was wonderful and enticed me to continue on with Linux. Unlike today, Ubuntu was not a graphic-rich distro at the time. I was coding less than I am today, so I was working more with editing images using GIMP and Inkscape.
The politics of Ireland have been complex but they were using GNU/Linux a lot back in 2008 according to StatCounter but there was a huge drop when “7” emerged. Slowly but surely, GNU/Linux is back in Ireland.
The No. 1 Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, which is the fourth biggest smartphone seller globally, is reportedly looking to foray into a new sphere-laptops.
According to DigiTimes’ supply chain sources, Xiaomi is working on a lineup of laptops that are poised for an early 2016 release. The company is allegedly partnering with Foxconn and Inventec for that purpose. The production schedule for the laptops is not known at this juncture as it is yet to be confirmed.
The report also divulges that Xiaomi will initially launch a 15-inch laptop model which will be Linux-based. This size has been chosen as it is the most popular screen size in China. The Xiaomi laptop is estimated to be priced at around $470, per the supply chain sources.
Windows 10 has a privacy issue, no matter if Microsoft agrees with this or not, but it’s pretty clear that the existing configuration of the operating system isn’t quite what users have been expecting when they decided to upgrade.
The Linux Foundation is no stranger to the world of open source and free software — after all, we are the home of Linux, the world’s most successful free software project. Throughout the Foundation’s history, we have worked not only to promote open-source software, but to spread the collaborative DNA of Linux to new fields in hopes to enable innovation and access for all.
The EXT4 file-system updates have been sent in for the Linux 4.3 kernel.
There isn’t much to the EXT4 updates for Linux 4.3 besides clean-ups and fixes. Ted Ts’o wrote in the pull request, “Pretty much all bug fixes and clean ups for 4.3, after a lot of features and other churn going into 4.2.”
The X.Org Foundation, through Keith Packard, announced the immediate availability for download of the first Release Candidate (RC) build towards the X.Org Server 1.18 open-source implementation of the X Window System.
NVIDIA has announced their GRID 2.0 platform while also unveiling their Tesla M6 and M60 server cards.
GRID is NVIDIA’s virtual GPU technology for “sharing true virtual GPU hardware acceleration between multiple users.” Notable to GRID 2.0 is Linux support to complement Windows. GRID 2.0 also aims to have 2x greater density, 2x greater performance, support for 128 users per server, and now supports 4K displays.
Kornelix, the developer of the popular Fotoxx open-source image editor software for GNU/Linux operating systems, informed us about the release and immediate availability for download of Fotoxx 15.09.
CodeWeavers, the company behind the commercial CrossOver application for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating system, which aims to be a user-friendly graphical interface for Wine, announced the availability of CrossOver 14.1.6.
Armello backers, the wait is over! The game, which was first introduced on Kickstarter last year by League of Geeks, is now available for PS4, Windows, Mac and Linux.
There’s no denying that Minecraft is a favorite game to millions. And being written in Java enables it to run on a variety of platforms, including Linux. With a huge modding community, there are countless Minecraft tinkerers out there who would love to be able to get under the hood and play around with the source code themselves. Unfortunately, the source is not available to the general public.
Medieval II: Total War has popped up on SteamDB with Linux information, and we also have Feral Interactive teasing us on twitter again, looks like they are behind it.
About a month ago, Eric Griffith posted an article on Phoronix where he compared Fedora’s KDE spin to the main Fedora Workstation which uses GNOME. In that article, Eric described a number of issues that he became fully aware of when comparing his favorite desktop environment, Plasma (and the KDE applications he regularly uses) with GNOME’s counterparts.
I read that article, shared it with other KDE designers and developers, and we came to the conclusion that yes, at least some of the issues he describes there are perfectly valid and clearly documented. And since KDE does listen to user feedback if it makes sense, we decided we should do something about it.
The developers behind the TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment) project, an open-source desktop environment that keep the spirit of KDE3.5 alive, have announced the immediate availability for download of Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.1.
I believe that in today’s world where more an more of our daily life depends on technology it is crucial that people have control over that technology. You should be empowered to know what your technology does and you should be empowered to influence it. This is at the core of Free Software. Unfortunately it is not at the core of most of the technology people interact with every day – quite the opposite – walled gardens and locks wherever you look with few exceptions. KDE is working hard to provide you with technology that you control every single day so you are empowered and the one ultimately in charge of your technology, data and life – the basis for freedom for many today. This is written down in the first sentence of our manifesto: “We are a community of technologists, designers, writers and advocates who work to ensure freedom for all people through our software.”
The Calligra team is pleased to announce the release of Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active 2.9.7. It is recommended update that brings further improvements to the 2.9 series of the applications and underlying development frameworks.
Kontact has, in contrast to Thunderbird, integrated crypto support (OpenPGP and S/MIME) out-of-the-box.
That means on Linux you can simply start Kontact and read crypted mails (if you have already created keys).
After you select your crypto keys, you can immediately start writing encrypted mails. With that great user experince I never needed to dig further in the crypto stack.
Fullscreen applications launchers are my favorite kind of application menus, of which there are several to choose from on the K Desktop Environment, or KDE.
On KDE 4, available options are the Takeoff Launcher, Simple Welcome, and Homerun.
Two months of bug fixing, feature implementing, Google-Summer-of-Code-sweating, it’s time for a new release! Krita 2.9.7 is special, because it’s the last 2.9 release that will have new features. We’ll be releasing regular bug fix releases, but from now on, all feature development focuses on Krita 3.0. But 2.9.7 is packed! There are new features, a host of bug fixes, the Windows builds have been updated with OpenEXR 2.2. New icons give Krita a fresh new look, updated brushes improve performance, memory handling is improved… Let’s first look at some highlights:
The development team of the popular, open-source, and cross-platform digital painting software Krita, acclaimed by numerous artists from all over the world, have announced the release of the last maintenance version of the 2.9 branch.
While the GNOME Project prepares for the release of the second Beta build of the forthcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, the GTK+ development team announced the release of GTK+ 3.17.8.
In the last 2 days, I refactored the whole GimpFileDialog code, which was completely mixing every concepts with hard-to-read if {} else {} statements inside a single class. GimpFileDialog became a generic parent class, containing only logics common to all file dialogs, and I added 3 specific children: GimpOpenDialog, GimpSaveDialog and GimpExportDialog.
Philip Müller, the lead developer and creator of the Manjaro Linux project, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first Release Candidate build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 distribution.
After announcing the release of the Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 RC1 distribution, Philip Müller comes with some more great news, this time for KDE fans, as the first Release Candidate build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux KDE 15.09 operating system has been seeded to testers worldwide earlier today, September 3, 2015.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) reported an earnings surprise of 14.81% when the company last reported earnings for the period ending on 2015-05-31. The reported EPS of $0.31 was $0.04 away from what Wall Street analysts had expected. A significant surprise factor often results in stock volatility and sharp price movements following the earnings announcement. In terms of sales expectations, the surprise factor in per share dollar terms was $8.757 away from what analysts had projected for the quarter, or a difference of 1.854%.
I’m not going to do a day by day outline of what I did at flock, if I did it would basically be “blah blah blah I talked a lot to a lot of people about a lot of tech topics” and anyone that’s ever met me would have guessed that! It was, as in the past, a great conference. A big shout out to the organisers for an excellent event with two excellent evening events! So I’m going to give a brief summary to my talks and link to slides and video recordings.
Writing documentation is not only about writing, but actually a lot about layout, accessibility, UX and UI, too. So I actually enjoyed listening to Beth Aitman, for example (here are here slides). Among the most memorable were Elijah Caine with his talk about writing emails, which I really really hope more people could listen to, and Christina Elmore talking about creative problem solving. One of my personal favorites was a lightning talk by Marcin Warpechowski about laptop stickers! TL;DR – stickers are a great way to engage employees and the community! Got me (and actually everybody) excited about stickers even more and willing to create some. GitHub’s octocat also contributed to my feelings about stickers. They actually produce a special version for all conferences they attend! Also I think it was ladies from GitHub taking most the notes (or maybe I just happened to seat behind them ).
For this test day we are going to concentrate on the base image. We will have vagrant boxes (see this page for how to set up your machine), qcow images, raw images, and AWS EC2 images. In a later test day we will focus on the Atomic images and Docker images.
The development team behind the Robolinux project announced earlier today, September 3, the immediate availability for download of their brand new Robolinux Xfce 8.1 “Raptor” Linux distribution.
Canonical’s Zoltán Balogh published a very interesting article for all Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Phone app developers, informing them about the upcoming, next-generation version of the Ubuntu SDK (Software Development Kit) software.
Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has had the great pleasure of informing all users of the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and BQ Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition smartphones that the Ubuntu Touch OTA-6 software update has been officially released.
Cristian Parrino, leader of the team behind the Ubuntu Phone project as well as of the development team that creates the Ubuntu Touch operating system, has announced his resignation.
We’re sorry to give you, guys, such bad news, but Cristian Parrino decided that it was time to step down from leader position and leave Canonical. The announcement was made public a few hours ago.
Martin Wimpress, the lead developer and maintainer of the Ubuntu MATE operating system, had the great pleasure of informing us about the contributions made to various open source projects during the month of August 2015.
In the latest salvo in the Canonical IP controversy, Jonathan Riddell today posted his own IP Policy. Elsewhere, the GNOME Foundation today posted support of an updated User Data Manifesto and SUSE today revealed some SUSECon 2015 plans. Phoronix reported Monday that ext3 will be removed from the kernel and Red Hat announced the release of 7.2 Beta.
In some more relaxing news, Jonathan Riddell, leader of the Kubuntu Linux distribution, has had the great pleasure of announcing his own IP (Intellectual Property) policy, mocking Canonical’s.
We’ve looked at robots a few times here at Linux User & Developer, from our very first from-scratch build with a Dawn Robotics kit in issue 132 through to robotics kit reviews, tutorials on the 3D-printed Rapiro and programming guides for last year’s Pi Wars challenges. It’s an incredibly exciting field that’s expanding all the time, especially with the rise of drones more recently that’s driving interest in the field, but if you’re coming to it all for the first time then it can be tough to know exactly where to start.
There’s never been a better time to buy an Android smartphone. Not only is there a huge array of different handsets from a multitude of manufacturers to choose from, but what you get for your money is simply incredible.
So far, we have utilized open source as a model to innovate quickly and engage with customers and a broad developer community. SmartOS and Node.js are open source projects we have run for a number of years. In November of last year we went all in when we open sourced two of the systems at Joyent’s core: SmartDataCenter and Manta Object Storage Service. The unifying technology beneath both SmartDataCenter and Manta is OS-based virtualization and we believe open sourcing both systems is a way to broaden the community around the systems and advance the adoption of OS-based virtualization industry-wide.
A set of automated calibration techniques for tuning residential and commercial building energy efficiency software models to match measured data is now available as an open source code. The Autotune code, developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is available on GitHub.
Cloud developers and operators are facing a challenge: Much of the IT toolkit that has worked well for “silo” architectures and well enough for virtual machine environments isn’t a good match for apps made using containers or for microservices, where components may be not just on different machines but in many locations, and instances may come, go, or multiply. Yesterday’s “network fabric” does not accommodate this activity efficiently or reliably.
For a clear and encouraging look at where this should be going, read Phil Windley. He not only writes eloquently about the IoT, but he has been working on GPL’d open-source code for things and how they relate. To me, Phil is the Linus of IoT—or will be if people jump in and help out with the code. Whether Phil fills that role or not, nobody has more useful or insightful things to say about IoT. That’s why I decided to interview him here.
Next up on Brother FOSS’s Traveling Salvation Show — pack up the babies and grab the old ladies and everyone go — brings the proverbial tent and revival show to Columbus, Ohio, at the beginning of next month.
After announcing the promotion of the Google Chrome 45 web browser to the stable channel on September 1, Google pushed earlier today, September 2, the Chrome 46 web browser to the Beta channel for testers worldwide.
Google released Chrome 45 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android yesterday, and today we’re learning that the Android update includes support for a new feature called Chrome custom tabs. You can download the new Chrome version now from Google Play, but you won’t see Chrome custom tabs right away — today’s news is primarily aimed at developers. That said, Google has partnered with a few apps already — Feedly, The Guardian, Medium, Player.fm, Skyscanner, Stack Overflow, Tumblr, and Twitter will support custom tabs “in the coming weeks.”
SAP is out to create closer connections between the worlds of Big Data and Business Intelligence. The company is embracing Spark via SAP HANA Vora, a new in-memory query engine that leverages and extends the Spark framework to produce enriched Hadoop queries and experiences.
The European Broadcasting Union, one of the world’s largest broadcasting networks and the organisation behind the Eurovision Song Contest, has sought help to manage the open-source MySQL databases that power its online video and audio streaming services.
I woke up this morning babe, and the Internet was storming, inside of me. And when I get that feeling I know I need some LibreOffice testing. Yes. What happened was, I opened the browser, like, and I was, like, there’s a new, like, LibreOffice, like, and it’s a whole-number version. Yay.
In all seriousness, LibreOffice 5.0 got me really excited. Yes, I know, it was an almost arbitrary increment of a minor version to a major one, much like Mozilla did with Firefox a few years back. Still, I totally liked the previous version, and for the first time in many years, it showed real, actual potential of being a viable alternative to payware solutions. Let’s see in which direction this latest edition carries the good news and all that hope.
The claim certainly generated plenty of headlines about the benefits of moving from OpenOffice to Office 365. However, it seems that, from the report, some of those savings are tied to the specific scenario facing the local authority in question, while others would diminish over time, as the bulk of the cost difference stems from estimates of lost productivity during years immediately after shifting to OpenOffice.
These past years -and months- we have had several examples how lack of funding can cut a project’s ability to develop, patch and maintain its codebase and by project I mean developers not getting adequate money, if no money at all, for what they do. There is really two sides to the same coin here. There’s the one where an entire industry re-uses entire FOSS stacks or components, sometimes without even acknowledging it licence-wise or even just in name. And there’s the other side, where the same industry will not compensate anyone upstream, because the license terms enables simple reuse and distribution of those software components.
I set out to run FreeBSD on my Beagle Bone Black (now dubbed “smurf” by the kids on account of it’s small and blue), for network services. My DSL modem is a crappy under-configurable thing, but I don’t dare to start hacking on it directly because it runs the telephony side of things, too. So I decided to use the Beagle Bone Black to take control of my home network.
The Irish Government opened an ‘expression of interest’ for a new open data public body in charge of the Open Data Strategy Governance and presented a new version of the national Open Data portal.
The Scottish government has published an open data resource pack aimed at helping all local public authorities to implement their own open data plan. This resource pack has been developed to support the Open Data Strategy of Scotland.
This summer, the Bulgarian Council of Ministers organised ‘A Date with Data’. The theme for this one-day event was ‘Open Data for Transparent Governance’. The programme featured presentations, panel discussions, demonstrations of visualisations, and other applications of open data.
SanDisk is best known for storage. Led by Nithya Ruff, the company’s head of open-source strategy, the company is integrating open-source into storage. In their latest deal with Nexenta, an open source software-defined storage leader, the pairing of NexentaStor with SanDisk’s all-flash InfiniFlash IF100 system underlines this shift.
Over the past few years we’ve noticed that portions of the 3D printing community have regularly struggled with 3D modeling software. After all, the hobby itself isn’t cheap, so do you splurge on expensive, professional tools, or do you stick to a more limited free one? And does your programming experience limit your choice, or are you willing to learn a new language for the sake of the software you found? If you’ve struggled with these issues yourself or are unhappy with your current setup, then we’ve got some good news for you: a brand new, free and open source online 3D modeling tool has just launched a beta version; called CraftML, it is especially interesting for being accessible through common web technologies including html, css and Javascript.
But where, one may ask, will we as a global workforce find the next generation of bright young programmers, hardware engineers, and system administrators? This is the problem being addressed—in part—by CoderDojo, an Ireland-based international organization of more than 700 coding clubs worldwide. By engaging young people ages 7-17 in informal, creative environments, independent clubs of youngsters can learn web and application development along with other opportunities to explore technology and learn what excites them. Volunteer adults lead the local clubs, called Dojos, and teams of mentors and helpers are working together to keep the Dojo active and healthy. The kids are usually referred to as Ninjas and can complete activities and earn belts as their skills grow, although most clubs are using color-coded USB bracelets to signify ranks.
Sure, sure the mouse won on desktop and the trackpad won on laptop. IBM’s magnificent Trackpoint is a tiny minority share of the pointer market on both, maybe even headed for extinction. Even Lenovo has been leaving it off some ‘Thinkpads’.
Two days ago, I commented I was seeing only 1/10th or so of the theoretical bandwidth my Intel GPU should have been able to push, and asked if anyone could help be figure out the discrepancy. Now, several people (including the helpful people at #intel-gfx) helped me understand more of the complete picture, so I thought I’d share:
Bitcoin contributors and developers released an open letter that asked the cryptocurrency’s community to come together to reach a technical consensus on the currency’s security and scalability.
We think that “RSA-CRT hardening” (for the countermeasure) and “RSA-CRT key leaks” (for a successful side-channel attack) is sufficiently short and descriptive, and no branding is appropriate. We expect that several CVE IDs will be assigned for the underlying vulnerabilties leading to RSA-CRT key leaks. Some vendors may also assign CVE IDs for RSA-CRT hardening, although no key leaks have been seen in practice so far.
Intel Security has released a five-year retrospective report on industry threats, finding people have become dependent on devices at the cost to their security and privacy, allowing malware and ransomware attacks to rapidly grow.
I would like to officially announce that at NICE we have been working on a TLS backend for glib using Openssl. This still lives on the wip/openssl branch of glib-networking but hopefully next cycle we will manage to merge it to master.
The planet of the trees has given way to the planet of the apes. The Earth has lost more than half of its trees since humans first learned how to wield the axe, scientists have found.
A remarkable study has calculated that there are about 3 trillion trees on the planet today but this represents just 45 per cent of the total number of trees that had existed before the rise of humans.
Using a combination of satellite images, data from forestry researchers on the ground and supercomputer number-crunching, scientists have for the first time been able to accurately estimate the quantity of trees growing on all continents except Antarctica.
What do Governor Scott Walker and Walmart have in common? They talk pay raises in public while cheating their workers of pay.
When Walmart announced with great fanfare that it was boosting pay for frontline workers, CMD questioned the spin. After all, Walmart is regularly forced to pay back wages between 2007-2012 amounting to an astonishing $30 million according to a U.S. Senate report. This week, Bloomberg reported that Walmart is cutting hours for its workers, robbing many of the benefit of the recent pay hike.
The Guardian has a fascinating piece on house prices which deserves to be read and studied in detail. In London in 2013 the median house price had reached 300,000 while the median salary was 24,600. House prices are 12.2 x salary. That means it is in practice impossible for working people, without inherited wealth, to buy a house.
But the point is, that it should be equally impossible to rent a house. Landlords look for a rental return of approximately 6% of rental value. So that would put median rent in London at around 18,000 pa, which is a realistic figure. But nobody on a salary of 24,600 before tax can pay 18,000 pa in rent. So we should be at a stage where it is impossible for Londoners who have not inherited homes to live there at all.
Benefit spending is constantly in the news but how much do we really know about where the benefits money goes in the UK?
Well, we have collected the data as part of our annual analysis of UK public spending. It shows how benefit spending dominates the UK’s budget each year – but it also breaks it down in detail.
What it shows is that the Department for Welfare and Pensions is the biggest spending department in the UK – spending £166.98bn in 2011-12, which is Of that huge sum, £159bn was spent on benefits – an increase of 1.1% on the previous year. That is 23% of all public spending.
But there’s a more fundamental problem with the Times story than suggesting that criticizing police violence is (maybe) responsible for a rise in homicides: It’s not clear that the rise in homicides that the story is pegged to actually exists as a nationwide phenomenon.
The evidence for this supposed murder wave seems to be the responses the Times got when it called police departments across the country. After the story’s lead detailed a rise in homicides in Milwaukee, the story continued: “More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago.” That’s 30 out of a number that the New York Times does not disclose, making it a numerator without a denominator—though the story makes reference to the (steady) crime rate in Newark, which is the 69th largest city in the country, so depending on how thorough the Times‘ survey was, it’s possible that half or more of the cities it contacted did not report any increase in violence.
And when the story rephrases the data, it’s clear that “increases in violence” is a flexible concept: “Yet with at least 35 of the nation’s cities reporting increases in murders, violent crimes or both, according to a recent survey, the spikes are raising alarm among urban police chiefs.” How many cities actually had a rise in homicides–the statistic that justifies the story’s lead about “cities across the nation…seeing a startling rise in murders”? Remarkably, the Times story doesn’t say.
O’REILLY: Now, we want Kate’s Law, which would say, if an aggravated felon — someone convicted of an aggravated felony in the United States is deported and comes back, mandatory five year prison, can get more, all right, in a federal penitentiary. You support that?
RAMOS: No. Because I don’t think–
O’REILLY: It’s outrageous. It’s outrageous.
RAMOS: –you are approaching the problem in a global way. And this is a problem. I’m not here to be defend criminals.
Twitter has suspended the accounts of two popular torrent and linking sites in response to dubious takedown notices. The accounts in question didn’t link to any infringing material on Twitter, but were called out because their websites allow people to download pirated movies.
“EU needs to finish its work on data protection so that better enforcement and fines of 2% of turnover make this a board room issue for every organisation.”
The e-newsletter, which contains the latest information about HIV services and treatment, is sent out monthly but normally the details of recipients are hidden. Instead the full list of recipients was visible, therefore revealing the fact that everyone in the address bar is HIV-positive. The clinic then sent an email trying to recall the original one, alerting patients to the mistake, before sending a further email apologising.
A federal judge, whose ruling against the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data was overturned by an appeals court last week, maintained Wednesday that he believed the surveillance program violated the constitutional rights of “tens of millions of people every single day.”
With the case back in his court, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon urged conservative activist Larry Klayman to amend his challenge to the NSA program, suggesting that he would again rule to block the bulk collection before it expires Nov. 29.
Today, the non-profit ISPs FDN and the FDN Federation as well as La Quadrature du Net announced the introduction of two legal challenges before the French Council of State against the Internet surveillance activities of French foreign intelligence services (DGSE). As the French government plans the introduction of a new bill on international surveillance, these challenges underline the need for a thorough oversight of surveillance measures.
There are times when political considerations must give way to the relief of immediate human suffering. The current refugee crisis is one of those times and the UK must take genuine refugees on the same scale as Germany, starting immediately.
More migrants and refugees are arriving in Europe than ever recorded before as war, persecution and poverty continues to drive people from their homes – and the numbers are still rising.
One in every 122 people in the world is currently either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum because the “world is a mess”, according to the head of the UN’s refugee agency.
Yesterday’s tragic images of a young Syrian boy washed ashore on a beach in Turkey have shocked many Britons into using social media to say that those fleeing war and persecution are welcome in the UK.
People across Britain are calling on the government to address the plight of those trying to escape conflict in their home countries.
David Cameron has responded to photographs of a dead Syrian child washed up on a Turkish beach by telling The Independent that Britain is doing enough to help refugees.
A string of politicians and charities have urged the Prime Minister to do more to improve the desperate plight of those fleeing war-torn countries, following The Independent’s publication of the powerful images of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi.
Thousands have signed a petition calling on the Government to ensure the UK works with other European Union countries to set and welcome a quota of refugees.
The pictures were sent to Downing Street, whose response suggests the Prime Minister is content the UK should not do any more to improve the ongoing crisis.
Jeremy Corbyn has hit out at David Cameron over his “wholly inadequate” response to the Syrian refugee crisis, after the emergence of powerful images showing a dead child washed up on beach in Turkey.
The Labour leadership front-runner said Britain was being “shamed by our European neighbours” by refusing to take in more than just a few hundred Syrian refugees and said we were failing in our duty under international law and “as human beings” to offer those fleeing conflict a place of safety.
Downing Street isn’t saying whether David Cameron has seen the photo of the little boy in the red shirt and the blue shorts. I’m not entirely sure why. Actually, the little boy is still wearing his shoes. I’ve only just noticed that. I think it’s his shoes that make it look like he’s only sleeping.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to look at it. In fact, he shouldn’t have to. None of us should.
There are lots of very difficult decisions you have to make as prime minister. Whether to go to war. When to make peace. Where the axe of austerity should fall. Where the hand should be stayed.
Just as there is no moral equivalence of a rapist and the rape victim, there is none between the police and Blacks. It is nowhere near a 50/50 equivalence of blame between the police and Blacks, though it is not surprising that there may be some Black pastors or some in the NAACP who will equally tell police and Blacks to tone down the rhetoric, or worse tell only Blacks to do so. It is not a school ground situation where a principal may tell two boys who are fighting to just shake hands and make peace.
Three journalists working with Vice News have been charged with “engaging in terrorist activity” on behalf of ISIL (ISIS), because one of them used encryption software. A Turkish official told Al Jazeera: “The main issue seems to be that the [journalists'] fixer uses a complex encryption system on his personal computer that a lot of ISIL militants also utilise for strategic communications.” There are no details as to what that “complex encryption system” might be, but it seems likely that it is nothing more than the PGP email encryption software, or perhaps the The Onion Router (TOR) system, both of which are very widely used, and not just by ISIL.
The correspondent and cameraman for Vice News, who are both British, and their fixer, who is Iraqi but Turkey-based, were arrested last Thursday in Diyarbakir, located in south-eastern Turkey, and an important centre for the country’s Kurdish population. According to The Guardian, the Vice News journalists were covering “recent clashes between Turkish security forces and the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement, the youth wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).”
A Transportation Security Administration agent at New York’s LaGuardia Airport was arrested after being accused of luring a woman to an airport bathroom under the pretense of a security search and molesting her, authorities said on Friday.
The suspect, identified by officials as Maxie Oquendo, 40, was wearing a TSA uniform when he brought the 22-year-old traveler to an upstairs bathroom and molested her on Tuesday night, according to Joe Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Digital Rights Management (DRM), the backbone of copyright protection for every form of digital property from games and software to ebooks and music is finally coming to blows with its natural enemy: the open-source software movement.
The fight is rooted in the longstanding belief of organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that DRM and open source are “fundamentally incompatible” and comes to the fore on an unlikely front: Wi-Fi routers.
Summary: An episode which focuses on the rise of Chromebooks, serious issues pertaining to privacy, media bias, and the demise of Windows
This is the first show to have been recorded this year and hopefully the resumption of TechBytes as a weekly of bi-weekly show. We are hoping to facilitate live broadcasting of the show as well (coming soon). The show officially turns 5 in just 4 weeks from now.
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