My point is that Windows can have the desktop for the casual users (what is left of them). The casual users are all using tablets and phones anyway. The Chromebook and MacBook Airs are taking a nice percentage of the rest of the market.
The real computer users who have something specific and niche to do are more than likely going to end up using Linux at some point anyway. Linux isn't going to be harmed by the release of a new Microsoft operating system because ultimately the target users are and probably always have been different people.
One of the reasons cited by users when they are told about switching to Linux is the fact that they don't have the same kind of apps as Windows does, but is that really enough?
New reports claim that Xiaomi is developing its first laptop running on the Linux operating system and will be released in the second quarter of 2016.
The reason Docker has so many people excited is that it allows for the creation of a strictly isolated environment that can contain everything that’s needed to develop, test, and deploy an application. The same container can run on a production server and the developer’s MacBook (with a lightweight virtual machine). Development environments can be distributed across multiple systems without anyone having to worry about having the right software versions. The containers can be pushed to dedicated servers, cloud servers, virtual servers, or any other instance of Linux.
WeaveDNS is a service discovery solution for containers on Weave (network), a a networking solution for Docker containers from Weaveworks.
WeaveDNS was introduced in version 0.9 of Weave, but in Weave 1.1, it was redesigned and nicknamed Gossip DNS. With Gossip DNS, container “registrations are broadcast to all weaveDNS instances, which subsequently hold all entries in memory and handle lookups locally.” That has led to performance and latency gains and a few other benefits.
The nonprofit organization, (The Linux Foundation) and IBM dedicated to boosting up the Linux and collaborative software growth, announced the OMP (Open Mainframe Project) at LinuxCon. With the announcement of new initiatives for the adoption of wider Linux at the enterprise level, IBM breathes new life into its open mainframe strategy. The mainframe is well and alive with Linux running via its circuits. The Open Mainframe Project’s founding Platinum members include SUSE, IBM, CA technologies and ADP.
In some respects, the Linux Foundation now provides 'Foundation as a Service,' though that's not the the goal that Zemlin has. Given the broader efforts of the Linux Foundation in 2015, Zemlin also has no plans to rename the Linux Foundation either.
"I do think there is a lot of value in the reputation that the name Linux implies, in terms of it being the most successful open source project in the world," Zemlin said.
The systemd developers, through David Herrmann, have had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the systemd 226 open-source init system for GNU/Linux distributions.
While a lot of features/changes have merged so far for the Linux 4.3 kernel, one feature you won't find at least not yet is KDBUS.
After originally being proposed for inclusion into Linux 4.1, KDBUS didn't make it earlier this year. It wasn't proposed for Linux 4.2 when in June, Greg KH mentioned he wouldn't push it until Linux 4.3.
In this tutorial, we’ll be discussing some random useful tools that can be used by system administrators for maintaining Debian and derivative distributions.
Today I have released Tunir 0.7. Tunir is a simple CI which developers can even use in their laptops. There are few major changes in this release. The first one is about no database support. Tunir itself will not save any data anywhere, this also means –stateless command line argument is now unnecessary. Even if you do not pass that option, tunir will print out the output of the tests on STDOUT.
At CERN the disk storage is managed by a system built in-house called EOS (developed by CERN’s IT Data & Storage Services group). EOS manages data from the LHC experiments and also from “regular” users and power applications such as CERNBox, a file storage/sharing service for CERN users.
Terminator is terminal emulator which includes numerous useful features such as multiple terminals in the same window (split view), notifications, supports saving and restoring custom layouts and much more.
The open-source PlexConnect is really just a brilliant translation layer that hijacks DNS (pointing http://trailers.apple.com to the PlexConnect server IP) and feeds the Apple TV data formatted like it expects. Rather than showing a listing of recent movie trailers, however, PlexConnect shows a direct interface with your Plex media server. And to be honest, the interface is actually surprisingly pleasant to use.
Samba, the world’s most used open-source software solution for accessing shared Windows folders over a network from GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, has reached version 4.3.
VirtualBox, a virtualization solutions that allows users to run and install operating systems inside other operating systems, has been updated to version 5.0.4 and is now ready for download.
The DockBarX Xfce4 Panel plugin was updated to version 0.4.1 recently, bringing a pretty important new feature: panel blending.
Building off last week's release of Wine 1.7.51 is the equivalent Wine-Staging update. Besides re-basing off this new Wine release that has XAudio2 support and other new functionality, the staging update has some new CSMT patches for boosting the Direct3D gaming performance.
Torchlight II is an incredibly fun and extensive action RPG developed and published on Steam for Linux by Runic Games. Users can now pick it up with a huge 75% discount.
Well now, this is unexpected. It seems we may be getting quite a few of the Saints Row games, as Saints Row: The Third is showing signs of coming to Linux.
The Steam for Linux platform seems to be on an upward trend again, and it registered an increase in the number of users, for the month of August.
The rather good strategy game Frozen Synapse is now available DRM free on GOG, along with the Red DLC.
Disclosure: Our lovely GOG contact and regular commenter on GOL provided me with keys, and I can confirm it works nicely.
Buying it on GOG grants you two copies like Steam does. It's actually on sale right now, and the normal price is cheaper than on Steam for me.
The MATE Desktop Environment, which began as an effort to save GNOME 2 from oblivion, continues to evolve. Now, the open source interface for Linux operating systems is adding novel features of its own, a sign that it has come far since its humble beginnings.
Tuesday, 08 September 2015. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.4.1. Plasma 5.4 was released in August with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:
Fixes for compilation with GCC 5 Autostart desktop files no longer saved to the wrong location On Muon Make sure the install button has a size.
Plasma 5.4.1 has been released by the KDE Community, and the KDE desktop has received a number of smaller changes and a few bigger improvements.
Epiphany 3.17.91 was released this morning, the near-final version of the GNOME web browser update ahead of GNOME 3.18 later this month.
Epiphany 3.17.91 is the controversial update to this web browser that enables ad-blocking and do-not-track by default. See that linked article for more of my commentary on the matter.
There are also a few other changes that worked their way into Epiphany 3.17.91.
The activity overview is, probably, the most revolutionary feature introduced with the birth of Gnome Shell. While not every user loves this innovation, it clearly provides a new way of using our workstations. By pressing the “Meta” key, we can now have the opportunity to navigate through windows, installed applications, and active workspaces.
Zbigniew Konojacki, the creator, maintainer, and lead developer of the 4MLinux distribution, was more than happy to inform Softpedia earlier today, September 8, about the immediate availability for download of the final release of 4MLinux 13.1.
The developers of the Waha Linux distribution have announced earlier today, September 8, the immediate availability for download of the Waha Linux 8.2 release, dubbed Hijra.
François Dupoux, the creator, maintainer and lead developer of the SystemRescueCd Live CD GNU/Linux distribution designed for system rescue and recovery tasks, has announced the release and immediate availability for download of SystemRescueCd 4.6.0.
TheeMahn, the creator, maintainer and lead developer of the Ultimate Edition project (formerly Ubuntu Ultimate), has had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of Ultimate Edition 4.6 Gamers GNU/Linux distribution.
The OpenELEC team is proud to announce the 5th beta of OpenELEC 6.0 (v5.95.5)
The most visible change is Kodi 15.1 (Isengard). Beginning with Kodi 15.0 most audio encoder, audio decoder, PVR and visualisation addons are no longer pre-bundled into OpenELEC but can be downloaded from the Kodi addon repo if required. PVR backends such as VDR and TVHeadend will install needed dependencies automatically. For further information on Kodi 15.1 please read http://kodi.tv/kodi-15-1-isengard-maintenance-release/.
One thing that particularly interested me was the screen size - at 13.3" it is larger than my usual netbooks (10"-11"), but still smaller than the 15" screen on my Asus which doesn't fit very well in my backpack. I'm hoping this will be a good replacement for the Aspire E11 that I got nearly a year ago, with a bit more comfortable screen and a wi-fi adapter that isn't as much of a pain as the E11's Broadcom.
Red Hat announced the details for the company's annual Red Hat Forum in Asia Pacific. In its fifth year, the forum series kicks off in Jakarta, Indonesia, this September, with thousands of attendees anticipated across 11 cities in Asia Pacific.
Diane Mueller, director of Community Development for OpenShift at Red Hat, has been selected by the Cloud Network of Women (CloudNOW) as one of the Top 10 Women in Cloud for 2015.
CloudNOW, a non-profit group focusing on female-led teams solving business problems utilizing technology, will recognize the women at its fourth annual awards program later this month.
In the case of an organization like Red Hat (the organization where I am the CEO) which operates as part of multiple open source software communities like Linux and OpenStack, these questions are all the more difficult to answer—like how to measure someone's contribution to an external community—and traditional performance reviews just don't cut it for us. For example, building open source software, like we do at Red Hat, involves collaborating with people outside of the company who volunteer their efforts. That means you can't simply issue orders or direct what work gets done and when. What you can do is build influence and trust with other members of the community. But doing that can involve making contributions that offer no direct output or result. It's not quid pro quo, and it's not easy to track and measure.
Finally, Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT), gained 3.22% Tuesday.
Red Hat declared that President and CEO Jim Whitehurst will serve as the keynote speaker at the 2015 Global Technology Distribution Council Summit of North America (GTDC NA).
Whitehurst’s keynote will focus on how open source software is driving innovation in the enterprise, particularly in the areas of the cloud, big data, mobile, and cloud applications. His presentation will also compare commercial to open source solutions and illustrate best practices as businesses shift to open source software.
Whitehurst will be speaking September 10, 2015, from 9:45 – 10:30 a.m. PDT, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, in San Francisco, California. For more information about the event, or to register for the 2015 GTDC NA Summit, visit the GTDC website for details.
So a number of people have been discussing the Internet of Things on Fedora for some time. We now have a Fedora IoT mailing list where these discussions can be more centralised and directed.
I’ve always upgraded my Fedora laptop incrementally using the recommended tools (yum, preupgrade, fedup). For this reason, my initial decision to install i686 Fedora (back when 32-bit compatibility was important) has carried through, and I’ve always used i686 Fedora, even though the CPU supports x86_64.
Last week, the official Fedora Project account asked users on social networks why Fedora is their distribution of choice. Probably the most frequent answer was that Fedora is THE GNOME distro, that it has the best supported GNOME, which really made me happy, but what made me even happier was that I found a lot of answers like “You won’t believe it, but I use Fedora for stability”. Indeed, the stability of Fedora has improved a lot since I started using it, especially in the last releases. How did we achieve it?
In response to the Snowden revelation that the CIA compromised Apple developers' build process, thus enabling the government to insert backdoors at compile time without developers realizing, Debian, the world's largest free software project, has embarked on a campaign to to prevent just such attacks. Debian's solution? Reproducible builds.
RoboLinux has added another milestone releases to its inventory with the Xfce Raptor v 8.1 release. The first RoboLinux 8.1 releases debuted in July with the Cinnamon desktop and not is being expanded with Xfce. RoboLinux 8.1 is based on Debian Jessia and is focussed on helping new able Windows users to migrate to Linux.
Canonical's Joseph Salisbury reported today, September 8, the summary of the Ubuntu Kernel Team's meeting that took place earlier on the official IRC channel of the project.
The next Ubuntu – 15.10, nicknamed Wily Werewolf – is beginning to take shape but, as before, the first beta code out of the gate doesn’t belong to the main desktop.
Rather, that honour belongs to the familiar clutch of Ubuntu fellow travellers – Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu MATE and Lubuntu.
Wondering what Ubuntu—Canonical's open source, Linux-based operating system—can do for your phone that Android and iOS can't? If the answer is yes, the company is hoping you'll take a look at a video showcasing Scopes, one of Ubuntu's key features for user devices.
One of the things that draws people to using Ubuntu is its package management. Despite upcoming changes to Ubuntu's software management, the current Debian package has been a large part of Ubuntu's success. One of the best parts about the Debian package management that Ubuntu provides is how easy it is to backup your software. In this article, I'll talk about some of the best techniques for backing up your software and how they differ from one another.
Erle Robotics, a Spanish company that makes robots, mainly drones, has started an Indiegogo campaign for their spider drone, called Erle Spider. This is the first legged drone powered by Canonical’s Snappy Ubuntu Core.
Erle Robotics is trying to raise $50,000 through the campaign in 45 days through different packages or perks. The best package for those enthusiasts who like ‘do-it-yourself’ is for $399. It will get you one spider kit for assembly; the kit comes with all needed parts. Those who are not into DIY can pledge $569 and a fully assembled, ready to crawl spider will be delivered to their doorsteps. The most expensive tier of the campaign is the $11,600 university pack, which buys 30 Erle Spider DIY Kits and comes with full tech support.
Erle Robotics has launched a six-legged Erle-Spider robot on Indiegogo, with an Erle-Brain 2 controller that runs Ubuntu Snappy and ROS on a Raspberry Pi 2.
The Ubuntu-powered land drone Erle-Spider is now on IndieGoGo and its makers are trying to raise enough money for manufacturing.
We reported a month ago that a group of engineers, open-source aficionados, and Linux enthusiasts started a new Kickstarter campaign for a device called Mycroft, which has been dubbed "An Open Source Artificial Intelligence For Everyone."
Chip blueprint scribbler ARM has released some of the source code for its first public beta of mbed, its operating system for the Internet of Things.
The Internet of Things is today's fancy word for embedded engineering, and ARM is all over that latter space: the tiny and relatively simple processor cores it designs are used in countless gadgets and gizmos, phones and tablets, controllers and sensors, smartcards, and so on.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation released its long-awaited 7-inch, 800 x 480 capacitive touchscreen for the Raspberry Pi, selling for $60.
How touching: the cheap-as-chips Raspberry Pi mini-computer now has an official 7-inch touchscreen for building a basic tablet or control panel.
The touchscreen comes from element14, the British company behind Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi micro-computer brain is designed to be plugged into other components to custom-build everything from computers to media servers to smart home devices. It's aimed at enthusiasts and newcomers to building computers and electronic equipment, and it also helps kids learn about coding and hardware.
The Samsung Gear S2 features a User Interface that is nothing like Android wear or Apple’s iPhone, Dare to be different! Check out the hands-on video walkthrough of the User Interface...
Floating apps have become emblematic of Android's unique flexibility and range. No other mobile OS allows non-system apps to directly interact with users and overtake the screen while another app is supposed to be in the foreground. This capability allows for a powerful and customizable user experience, but it can also quickly become a problem if an app is poorly implemented or its developer abuses this privilege for malicious purposes.
According to a rumor from the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is readying a $50, 6-inch Android tablet for a launch before Christmas this year. The company hasn’t had runaway success with its existing line of Android tablets, so it’s clearly hoping that cutting the price can get a few more people on board.
UCWeb on Monday brought what it calls the "biggest update" to its UC Browser app for Android, pushing it to version 10.7.0. The Android browser app now comes with a new user interface and gives users quick and easy access to more content from the Internet.
The Finnish gods of rebirth have sent an omen – live photos of the Android-powered Nokia C1. To be clear, that's Nokia Nokia, not the Microsoft sub-division. The handset looks pretty much just like the renders we saw earlier.
Interestingly, the screen is now reported as 5" 1080p, rather than 720p, which was the original rumor. Also, it allegedly runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow (pretty vanilla by the looks of it) on an Intel Atom chipset (with 2GB of RAM). From the photos it's still not clear if the phone is made of metal or plastic.
Earlier this year Nokia confirmed that it plans to return to the smartphone business, and soon after, revealed it was looking for a 'world-class partner' to manufacturing, sales, and marketing of the product. While the company is contractually barred from selling, or manufacturing smartphones until Q4 2016, a bunch of leaked images tip that the company has already started to work on an Android-powered smartphone.
Sadly, Google didn’t go with M&Ms or Macaroon (our personal favourite). Instead it chose chemical, sugar fluff -- otherwise known as Marshmallow. There’s even a new Android man too, which you can see below:
Google's new operating system, the Android Marshmallow 6.0, will be unveiled in this year's Q3. The OS is expected to carry new features intended to improve user experience and functionality.
Compiled below are the most notable features of Android M 6.0.
The Commission, which is in charge of antitrust issues in the European Union, accused Google in April of cheating competitors by distorting Internet search results in favor of its Google shopping service and at the same time opened the Android probe.
After trying to win over consumers with pricier tablets, Amazon is said to be working on a slate for the more budget-conscious.
The Internet retail giant is planning to introduce a $50 tablet with a 6-inch screen in time for the holiday shopping season, the Wall Street Journal reports. At half the price of Amazon's current 6-inch HD Fire tablet, the new slate would be one of the least expensive tablets on the market.
The tablet would be the first of a collection Amazon is planning to release this year that would include a 8- and 10-inch screens, the latter of which would be larger than Amazon's current HDX 8.9 tablet, the Journal reports.
Apple's iOS, exclusive to the iPhone and iPad, has lost its crown as the smartphone operating system of choice in Australia, with sales of Android phones overtaking those of the iPhone in the first half of 2015, according to technology analyst firm Telsyte.
Smartphones running Google's Android operating system – including those manufactured by Samsung, Sony, HTC, LG and more – made up 54 per cent of smartphone sales in the period, with iPhone sales sliding back to 41 per cent.
Lenovo, Motorola, and Google are bringing Android Wear to China in the form of the Moto 360 smartwatch. The watches will work with any Android device — but they won't work with iPhones. It might not seem like it, but it's actually surprising to see this platform get released in the country. Unlike Android on phones and tablets, Android watches have relied heavily on Google's services — services that are not available in China. And so, Google has decoupled Android Wear from its normal dependence on Google Now and Google Play.
No one knows that better than Joaquim Vergès. Vergès built a polished and popular Android Twitter client called Falcon only to run into Twitter's "token limit," which puts a cap on the number of users third-party apps can support. Long story short, Falcon hit the 100,000-user mark -- and Twitter cut Vergès off from allowing any more users to sign in.
If you own an Android device, find four similarly outfitted friends and line up, shoulder-to-shoulder. Look to your left. Look to your right. Chances are, one of you has Lollipop, the latest Android mobile operating system. Twenty-one percent of Android devices use Lollipop, according to the company's own breakdown. This figure is up significantly from May, when Android reported just nine percent of its devices used the new OS. The largest share of the Android OS pie goes to Kit Kat, with 39 percent, followed by Jelly Bean with 32 percent.
If you don’t like what Google’s doing with Android, you can always make your own version of it. That’s what OnePlus did after it cut ties with Cyanogen. Rather than stick with the plain Google AOSP, OnePlus took the operating system and branched it out into its own, bonafied Android fork. The result is a version of Android that looks like it’s stock, with useful, well-integrated extra features.
When I first got involved in Unix and open source, I was choosing a pseudonym for a little podcast that I do called GNU World Order. I naively thought that in a community that values technology and, frequently, speculative fiction, the name "Klaatu" would be a quaintly obscure reference to my favorite movies. Of course, I have since learned that "Klaatu" as your handle in the tech community is rather like "Bob Smith" in the real world, so online I am also sometimes known as "notKlaatu" to set me apart from the other Klaatus.
On 3 October 2015 Free Software Foundation Europe invites you for the 30th birthday party of the Free Software Foundation. While the main event will take place in Boston/USA, there will be several satellite birthday parties around the world to celebrate 30 years of empowering people to control technology, and one of them will be at Endocode in Berlin.
For the last two years, we had only lightning talks & workshops at the ownCloud Contributor Conference. This is an exceptionally good model for creation-type events like ours and your event might benefit from it, too.
While the FOSS/Linux expo season is winding down – Ohio Linux Fest, All Things Open and the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL) next month, and Fossetcon in November in sunny Florida, before we ramp up for the first-of-the-year 2016 event at SCALE 14x in January – thoughts wander to other events that could possibly take place sometime in the future, with a little imagination.
Last weekend, I had the first Inkscape workshop at smallworld. It was very successful, we had 13 participants.
Mozilla and seven other organizations will be participating in the Grace Hopper Open Source Day codethon taking place during the main conference event, on October 14. Emma Irwin is a Community Education Lead with Mozilla, and talks to me about why Mozilla is involved in the codethon, what she gets out of it, and what participants learn from it.
The Bugzilla bug tracker has been a major part of how Mozilla has kept Firefox secure and stable for a long time, but according to the company, it was also the key to a recent attack on Firefox browser users. "An attacker was able to break into a privileged user's account and download security-sensitive information about flaws in Firefox and other Mozilla products," Mozilla said Friday in an FAQ about the security snafu (PDF doownload available). "Information uncovered in our investigation suggests that the user re€¬used their Bugzilla password with another website, and the password was revealed through a data breach at that site."
Open source platform as a service can ease cloud app development and deployment. But it also poses these six challenges for developers and the business.
On September 8, The Document Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the world's most popular free and open-source office suite, published details about the program of the LibreOffice Conference 2015.
Montreal-based Orckestra, a provider of cloud-based multichannel commerce solutions, expanded today with the acquisition of Composite, Danish open source content management software vendor.
I recently received Debian bug report #798350 where the user had a problem with wordpress. After upgrading to version 4.3, the webservers performance degrades over time. The problem is also reported at the wordpress site with bug WordPress ticket 33423 including the fix.
Now entering its third year, the ROSE (Red Hat Open Source for Education) Project is a cross-community effort that brings students from Tira together with students from Yonatan Middle School in Ra'anana to the Red Hat offices in Israel to learn about the Linux operating system and Python programming. The students spent six months on a weekly basis working and learning together. At the graduation ceremony executive members of both municipalities were present and awards were given to the students including two special achievement awards.
I work at a university, in the computer science department, and my college-age students have access to all this technology and more. Imagine the things they're able to do and create—better yet, imagine the things they'll be able to do and create in five years with the next generation of all these technologies in the workplace and at home.
We're also endorsing hardware that respects users' freedoms. Hardware distributors whose devices have been certified by the FSF to contain and require only free software can display a logo saying so. Expanding the base of free software users and the free software movement has two parts: convincing people to care, and then making it possible for them to act on that. Through this initiative, we encourage manufacturers and distributors to do the right thing, and we make it easy for users who have started to care about free software to buy what they need without suffering through hours and hours of research. We've certified a home WiFi router, 3D printers, laptops, and USB WiFi adapters, with more on the way.
The UK government on 7 September published recommendations and guidelines on the use and implementation of ODF, the Open Document Format. The compendium is authoritative, from its general introduction to the recommendations on procurement, a guide on integration of ODF with enterprise software, software that allows collaborating on documents and a review of ODF’s change tracking features.
The arguably best town in the world is now even better! The beautiful city of Munich has become "a major contributor to open-source."
The city of Munich became famous in the open source community by ditching its dependency on Microsoft products and adopting open source. This, in turn, is having a secondary effect on the community because the developers working with the city are now contributing code back.
Selor, the recruitment and selection agency for the Belgian public administration, is encouraging the use of Mozilla’s open badges, aiming to make the recognising of skills and achievements interoperable across organisations and systems. The HR agency is one of the organisers of the first Belgian workshop on Open Badges on 26 November.
Working on the Open Web is a niche area of the greater open source community. Usually the work does not get the same level of fanfare of other areas of open source, but the work is very important.
Here, I've compiled a list of 15 people helping move the Open Web forward you should follow on Twitter. All of them are doing amazing work and have great content to share and will help keep you up to date on important things happening on the Open Web.
If you ask Rosalind Poon about the science class of yester-year -- the kind my generation, my parents' generation and their parents' generation attended, where the entire class follows the same instructions for an experiment like it was a recipe for baking cookies -- it doesn't explain how real science happens.
"If you think about champagne or penicillin," said Poon, teacher consultant with the Richmond School District and a trained biology teacher, "a lot of our discoveries are discovered by mistake."
The journey of the AXIOM camera began years ago with simple, small devices, and then gained suuport in 2014 with a successful Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that exceeded its funding goal. A couple months later, a grant from the European Union gave the project the financial momentum it needed to move forward.
How much money do authors typically make? And how much does it cost an author to self-publish a book?
Questions like these are part of a new author survey launched by Reedsy, an all-encompassing self-publishing platform.
Mark Headd is the key guy when it comes to developer evangelism at Accela -- the firm provides cloud-based 'civic engagement' solutions for government.
On International Literacy Day today Pratham Books threw open a portal that makes their collection of original books free to download, read, and disseminate.
It's part of children's rights: the right to education. And Pratham Books takes children very seriously. Their motto: a book in every child's hands has been something that they have worked together for, for many years.
HippyVM is an open-source project that's striving for 100% compatibility with Zend PHP while being more than seven times faster than stock PHP and more than twice as fast as Facebook's HHVM.
Ormandy's disclosures were made at the same time another researcher's findings, Kristian Erik Hermansen, were posted online. Hermansen publicly disclosed a zero-day vulnerability within cyberforensics firm FireEye's security product, complete with proof-of-concept code.
A public vulnerability disclosure warns that an attacker could remotely download files from an affected hard drive, thanks to the hard-coded default password.
An international agreement to treat certain software as weaponized is well on its way towards making computing less safe. Recent changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement -- originally crafted to regulate the sale of actual weapons -- have targeted exploits and malware. The US's proposed adoption of the Arrangement expands on the definitions of targeted "weapons," threatening to criminalize the work done by security researchers. While the Arrangement will likely have little effect on keeping weaponized software out of the hands of blacklisted entities, it could easily result in a laptop full of security research being treated like a footlocker full of assault weapons.
Duo Security, a cloud-based access security provider protecting the world's largest and fastest growing companies, today announced results from a Duo Labs research study focusing on mobile devices on corporate networks. Unpatched and end-of-life devices that are no longer supported by the manufacturer are much more prevalent than expected and create significant risk for corporate networks. The Duo Labs research draws on data gathered from thousands of customer deployments in more than 150 countries worldwide.
Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It's now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors, whether in cryptographic systems or physical systems: they're fragile.
The tale of three backdoors: TSA locks, the CALEA interface, and the Dual_EC PRNG, all amply illustrate the dangers posed by backdoors in systems. For backdoors may fail catastrophically, degrade national security, and can potentially be used against those who demanded the backdoors in the first place. The scars born by the security field in dealing with failed backdoors provides ample illustration why we find the idea of backdoors troubling and dangerous.
Yesterday I read an article on Motherboard about Debian’s plan to shut down 83% of the CIA with reproducible builds. Ostensibly this defends against an attack where the compiler is modified to insert backdoors in the packages it builds. Of course, the defense only works if only some of the compilers are backdoored. The article then goes off on a bit of a tangent about self propagating compiler backdoors, which may be theoretically possible, but also terribly, unworkably fragile.
I think the idea is that if I’m worried about the CIA tampering with Debian, I can rebuild everything myself from source. Because there’s no way the CIA would be able to insert a trojan in the source package. Then I check if what I’ve built matches what they built. If I were willing to do all that, I’m not sure why I need to check that the output is the same. I would always build from scratch, and ignore upstream entirely. I can do this today. I don’t actually need the builds to match to feel confident that my build is clean. Perhaps the idea is that a team of incorruptible volunteers will be building and checking for me, much like millions of eyeballs are carefully reviewing the source to all the software I run.
The original source document doesn’t actually mention deployment of the whacked SDK, just research into its development. Perhaps they use it, perhaps they rejected it as being too difficult and risky. Tricking a developer into using a whacked toolchain leaves detectable traces and it’s somewhat difficult to deny as an accident. If we assume that the CIA has access to developer’s machines, why not assume they have access to the bug database as well and are mining it for preexisting vulnerabilities to exploit? Easy, safe, deniable.
Debian has been getting a lot of attention the last couple of days for Jérémy Bobbio's work on Reproducible Builds. Bobbio has been working on this idea and implementation for a couple of years now, but after a presentation at Chaos Communication Camp last month it's come back into focus. In other Debian news, updates 8.2 and 7.9 were released.
Hidden backdoors into software have long been a concern for some users as government spying has increased around the world. Now the Debian project has taken aim at the CIA and other government spy agencies with reproducible builds that aim to stop hidden backdoors.
Exactly twenty years ago the European Court of Human Rights found that the British Government had acted illegally in shooting dead three IRA members in Gibraltar, even though the court accepted that the government had a genuine belief that they were planning a bombing attack. Indeed the court accepted the victims were terrorists, and refused compensation to their families on those grounds. But the court refused to accept there was no possibility of foiling the plot through methods other than summary execution.
The EU/Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CETA) may have run into more trouble following news that the EU trade commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, has indicated that that there are now “no plans” to change the initialed agreement containing a rejected ISDS clauses – as she had previously said would happen.
The Investor State Settlement clauses – which allow secret courts to adjudicate on disagreements between companies and sovereign states and on the ability of companies to sue sovereign countries at the ISDS court if they believe a country has taken actions which effect their profits or interests – have been holding up what the commission has described as “legal scrubbing” – tidying up the legal language and drafting errors.
Government statistics suggest the number of employed journalists has declined by 6,000 from a peak of 70,000 in 2013.
The latest figures, for the year to June 2015, estimate that 64,000 people in the UK describe themselves as “journalists, newspaper and periodical editors”.
This is a slight increase on the figure for the year to June 2014 of 60,000, but still a decline on the 2013 total.
Meanwhile, the number describing themselves as "public relations professionals" as risen sharply from 37,000 in 2013 to 55,000 in the last data.
IBM has scored a sweet new partnership with ARM, the company best known for designing the chips that power our smartphones and tablets. This deal will let IBM's cloud watch and analyze data from billions of devices on the internet.
The Internet of Things is the trend of adding chips and sensors to everyday items (from dishwashers to thermostats) and connecting them to the internet.
Sensors will do everything from monitor the health of industrial equipment to monitor your medical issues in a fitness device.
In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.
Apple’s response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.
The Obama administration on Wednesday will argue to a US appeals court that companies operating in the US must comply with valid warrants for data—even if that data is stored on overseas servers.
Facebook doesn’t just want to be a social network. It wants to be your world.
At an event at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters today, Facebook said that 45 million small businesses worldwide are now using Pages as their digital storefronts. And Facebook wants to make it even easier for you to find businesses, and for businesses to serve you, all within its app.
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The crux of these new updates comes down to the increasing power of your phone. As more and more users gravitate to mobile, businesses are hoping to reach users where they are. But according to a recent Forrester study, 85 percent of time spent on smartphones happens within apps, not web pages. That’s a problem not just for small businesses but larger businesses, too, says Benji Shomair, Facebook’s product marketing director for Pages. Apps are difficult and expensive to build—plus most users wouldn’t want, say, a company-specific app anyway.
Newly-released emails from the now-halted campaign finance investigation into Scott Walker and his allies are being touted by right-wing media as proof of the probe's partisan motivations.
Yet in many ways, the documents show the opposite.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board trumpeted the two emails, sent between two lawyers in 2013, claiming that they demonstrate "that partisanship drove Wisconsin's John Doe." Wisconsin Watchdog calls the emails "explosive," which "expose the regulator as hyper-partisan."
In truth, the emails demonstrate that prosecutors had a stated goal of not influencing the gubernatorial election, and show a career federal prosecutor leaning over backwards to avoid doing so, ultimately erring on the side of helping Walker and undercutting claims of his opponent.
The European Commission will not ask EU judges to decide on the legality of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in free trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
The United Nations' top official in charge of migration says that the crisis rocking Europe needs a "global response" amid a warning from the European Union that the situation could last for years.
During the past four years, 4 million Syrians have fled their country's civil war. The US has accepted just over 1,500 refugees, so far allowing Europe to take the lead on the issue.
The Tampa Police Department has suddenly been put in a very uncomfortable situation. On May 27, officers executed a raid on an alleged drug dealer. By the time it was done, one suspect had been killed by the SWAT team and only $2 worth of marijuana -- 0.2 grams -- had been recovered.
It was a righteous kill. Letting themselves in through an unlocked door after no one answered their knock, the SWAT team came across Jason Westcott in his bedroom. Westcott had a gun (a legally-owned one) which he raised when the cops came crashing through the door. He was shot multiple times. Open/shut. Officers in danger, suspect with weapon, etc.
As we see pictures of German citizens cheering tens of thousands refugees arriving from Syria and other war zones, we may be witnessing an emerging pattern of the years to come: bureaucracy is failing (EU), systems collapsing (millions of Asylum seeking refugees in urgent need of helping hands) -- AND: citizens rising to the occasion!
Now that some Amazon Prime subscribers are able to download movies and TV shows for offline viewing, rival streaming company Netflix has been left to defend its reasoning for not offering a similar service.
It's that time again. The White House's IP Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) -- often called the IP Czar -- is asking for public input on the upcoming "Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement" that it will be releasing next year. The Joint Strategic Plan comes out every three years and is supposed to guide the federal government in how it handles priorities around intellectual property enforcement. Now, I recognize that the cynical among you will already be insisting that there is no value in responding to this, because the government is going to simply repeat the arguments of the legacy industries and its copyright extremists. However, in the past, these open comment periods have actually helped, and the two previous Joint Strategic Plans have not been as bad as expected. In 2010, we sent in our feedback and was pleasantly surprised that at least some of it was reflected in the plan. It recognized the importance of fair use and encouraging innovation. It also admitted that most studies on the impact of intellectual property on the economy were bogus.
Opening keynote speaker Julia Reda, MEP for the German Pirate Party, started the debate by calling for more and better evidence. Recounting a number of tales of poor stats, she warned that industry lobbyists are quick to fill the evidence void.
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Closing keynote speaker Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley, encouraged academics to write more for non-academic audiences. She recounted her great fear that she would never be taken seriously again after penning an article for WIRED on the 'Copyright Grab.' Her fears were unfounded, but it does touch on a key point - there is a cultural taboo associated with non-academic publishing within academia. (Aha! That explains the slight terror I have every time I click the Blogger 'publish' button.)
Kim Dotcom and his former business partners want to delay an extradition hearing scheduled to take place in two weeks' time. The U.S. government wants Dotcom to face the largest copyright infringement trial in history but the Megaupload defendants say a fair hearing will be impossible if they aren't able to fund expert witnesses outside New Zealand.
A raid last week by the UK's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has done little to reduce the availability of packs containing the country's most popular music tracks. Aside from the disappearance of the torrents usually uploaded by the individual who was arrested, it was very much business as usual during last Friday's global release day.
Getty Images has a bit of a reputation for being a ridiculous copyright troll at times -- sending out threatening letters demanding large sums to "settle" for people who use an image from Getty's database. But, now, it appears to have taken the trolling to a new level, as the German blog GetDigital.de revealed last week when it reported that Getty had demanded nearly $1,000 for one year's use of an image of a penguin that is actually part of a semi-popular meme, better known as the Socially Awkward Penguin.