The Linux Foundation hosts numerous Collaborative Projects -- independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development in an effort to drive innovation. For these projects, the Linux Foundation provides the essential organizational framework so that participants can focus on innovation and results.
To provide greater insight into some of these projects, we are talking with key contributors about what they do and how they got involved. In this article, we talk with Christian (Chris) Gromm, Principal Software Engineer in the Frameworks & Libraries team at Microchip AIS, about his work with the Automotive Grade Linux project.
HP’s latest Chromebook is a small laptop designed for use in classrooms. The HP Chromebook 11 G4 EE has a spill-resistant keyboard, rubber edges that help it survive 2.3 foot drop tests, and a 180-degree hinge that lets you fold the laptop flat and pore over the screen with a colleague.
I write to you today with some very important new about the Chromixium project. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Google’s Trademark Enforcement Team. I was duly asked to cease use of the name Chromixium for this project.
The new year is a good time to feature one of our favorite desktop creators, dobbie03. Here he’s running Arch Linux, and while it might look like not much is going on, let’s take a look at what it’s like when he’s working, and how he set it all up.
Many businesses have the need to integrate web hosting into the mix of services they offer. CMS professionals, web developers and designers, eCommerce consultants, and marketing agencies, often find that the best way to integrate web hosting with existing services is not to use an established hosting company’s reseller accounts but to develop a hosting platform over which they have complete control. It’s not as difficult as you might think — if you can handle Linux server administration and choose a good web hosting control panel, all you need is the server.
Working with containers presents its own unique set of challenges which can be daunting to any developer. Issues continuing to plague enterprises using containers for working at scale consist of visibility, service discovery, and container health—Just to name a few of the many sharks in the water. Meros has just released a public beta of software-as-a-service (SaaS) that promises to address these pain points while offering performance where it’s needed.
Linux-based OS10 designed to meld switches, servers, storage into a software-defined data center
"We introduced low-end Linux-based Power systems to capture the growing Linux market, and are building an IP stream through the OpenPOWER ecosystem," Schroeter said. "Even though the Unix market is declining, by delivering innovation and repositioning the platform, our Power systems have grown four quarters in a row. This is a good example of how we transform ourselves."
The EXT4 file-system updates aren't terribly exciting for the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window.
“The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors,” Garrett wrote in his blog. “Section 3.3(a) now says that no affiliate members may be involved in the election of directors, and section 5.3(d) still permits at-large directors but does not require them.”
So what happened to spark this move by the big money guys behind the foundation? Garrett offered an answer: “These changes all happened shortly after Karen Sandler announced that she planned to stand for the Linux Foundation board during a presentation last September,” he wrote. “A short time later, the ‘Individual membership’ program was quietly renamed to the ‘Individual supporter’ program and the promised benefit of being allowed to stand for and participate in board elections was dropped….”
The problem with Sandler, as the corporate bigwigs see it, is that she is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that’s highly focused on enforcement of the GPL, and which is currently funding a lawsuit against Linux Foundation member VMware in a GPL noncompliance case.
“The timing may be coincidental,” Garrett continued, “but it certainly looks like the Linux Foundation was willing to throw out any semblance of community representation just to ensure that there was no risk of someone in favor of GPL enforcement ending up on their board.”
Today, Linux Foundation president, Jim Zemlin, addressed the issue in a blog post on the foundation’s website. He was tardy weighing in, he said, because he “had been engaged in meetings on behalf of The Linux Foundation in China, with limited access to email and/or Internet.” Upon his return to the wired world, he was shocked to discover the brouhaha that’s developed “in social media.”
“The Linux Foundation Board structure has not changed,” he wrote.
“[T}he Board voted to keep Larry Augustin and Bdale Garbee as individual At-Large Directors in recognition of their longstanding service to the community and individual commitment to helping advance The Linux Foundation.” His post fails to point out that at-large directors serve one-year terms, meaning they’ll be gone soon enough.
I spend most of my time working on Project Atomic to further Linux containers deriving from a traditional upstream Linux distribution model, but the space of software delivery/runtime mechanisms is vast, and in particular, I have thought Unikernels were an interesting development. While I do like writing C, the thought of an OS/library in a high level language is an interesting one (particularly interesting to me for a long time is how garbage collection could be better if integrated with the OS).
The current development kernel version is 2.1.79, with no less than four pre-80 patches released. A code freeze is allegedly in place, though it doesn't appear to have frozen very solid yet. The stock .79 kernel has compilation problems, but with the pre-80 patches it seems pretty stable. Work continues on SMB and NFS support, and many other issues.
The Intel VMD (Volume Management Device) driver is explained by the new Kconfig entry as follows, "VMD is a secondary PCI host bridge that allows PCI Express root ports, and devices attached to them, to be removed from the default PCI domain and placed within the VMD domain." And it's further explained by its original patch series.
It's been about two years since last seeing any Xen PV vs. PVHVM benchmarks, but back then Xen PVHVM was smacking Xen PV's performance. Since then, with newly-published benchmarks, the lead has only expanded.
As a quick refresher, PVHVM is the Hardware Assisted Virtualization for Xen that's supported in conjunction with specialized drivers that are common to most modern Linux distributions and is an alternative to Xen's classic PV (para-virtualized) configuration. If you are unfamiliar, you can read more via the Xen Wiki.
Several of the places that covered this remarked about the extremely quiet nature of the process.
As a cultural libertarian, I loathe the Social Justice Warriors. I cannot stand them, and I fully support Linus and the Linux Foundation if they took preemptive action to stop SJWs from infiltrating the Linux Foundation.
A Red Hat developer has explained why asking the question "Is Wayland ready?" is wrong and why everyone else needs to be ready for Wayland.
We often see this question being asked pretty much everywhere, and everyone wants to know if Wayland is finally ready to be shipped as default. It seems that the community is asking the wrong question since Wayland is prepared and has been so for a very long time. The other ones are not ready for Wayland.
Earlier this week I carried out an OpenGL performance comparison of NVIDIA GPUs going back 10 years that included 27 different graphics cards from the GeForce 8 series through the latest-generation GeForce 900 Maxwell graphics cards. In this weekend article are some complementary tests from this comparison with the OpenGL benchmarks at 1920 x 1080.
On January 22, Collabora's Emil Velikov had the pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the ninth maintenance release for the Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.0 series.
This release has been tagged in git as "v0.6". You can also download a tarball (GPG signature). Prebuilt binaries for multiple distributions are available via the OBS, and so is a Windows installer.
If you’ve paid close enough attention to the news, you know that the Mozilla Foundation has cut the cord to Thunderbird. Considering that, for years, Thunderbird has been the most user-friendly desktop email client for Linux, this could have been a disaster for the open source platform. Fortunately, there’s a new kid on the block with plenty to offer. That new kid is N1 by Nylas.
Kodi 16.0 “Jarvis” has just been released by its developers, and it signals the fact that we’re getting closer to the stable version of this amazing application.
A new minor release of RcppEigen is now on CRAN and in Debian. It primarily upgrades to the recent 3.2.7 release of Eigen -- thanks once again to fine work by Yixuan Qiu. We also have one additonal PR by Alexey Stukalow who ensured that the fastLm() example will work fine with when the Intel MKL is used.
Bradley White from the upstream CCTZ team prepared some more changes in CCTZ itself -- so a new RcppCCTZ version got to CRAN the other day catching up with these changes.
Two ways to sort your music are either by the lookup method or the scanning method. The lookup method will check the existing metadata saved to the song file and compare that to the MusicBrainz database. This is usually a foolproof way to find data for a song. The scanning method will use an acoustic “fingerprint” of the song based on wavelengths and other miscellaneous sound-oriented factors of the song. It will compare the fingerprint to the existing MusicBrainz database for a match. This is the most accurate method to use, but it will not work out of the box in Fedora. There is an easy workaround to get scanning to work, however.
Only three days after the release of the previous snapshot, the Vivaldi developers are back with yet another snapshot build, this time fixing twenty-two more bugs reported by users.
According to the release announcement, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.0.377.10 is now available for download and testing for all supported operating systems (see download links at the end of the article), fixing more than 20 issues (details in the changelog below), which means that its development cycle continues at a rapid pace.
Linux operating systems gives the stability that Windows platform somewhere fails to deliver. But what about gaming? Can we compare Windows and Linux on gaming front? I don't think it will be a fare game to compare both on this aspect. Users who want to go with gaming will rarely use Linux and users who are comfortable with Linux operations will rarely go for Windows. Both are big competitors to each other and both have respective pros and cons.
The development team behind the OpenMW project, an open-source remake of the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind game for GNU/Linux operating systems, has announced today, January 22, the release and immediate availability for download of OpenMW 0.38.0.
A first-person puzzle game by the name of Attractio, developed by GameCoder Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, has been released for Linux on Steam.
Eclipse Phase is a pen and paper role-playing game from Posthuman Studios. For those not familiar with pen and paper role-playing games, Eclipse Phase is similar to the more well known Dungeons & Dragons. Players share stories and explore a fictional world by creating characters and rolling dice to resolve challenges while one person, the gamemaster, provides structure and guides the overarching narrative. However, unlike the traditional fantasy setting of Dungeons and Dragons, Eclipse Phase features a hard science fiction setting with transhumanism as the key thematic element. In the future portrayed in Eclipse Phase, the mind and body have become completely separate things that make it possible to create backups and forks of characters, like switching bodies to better suit the mission at hand.
ABC Murders is an adventure, detective game based on Agatha Christie's novel, where famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot goes after mysterious serial killer known by the name of "ABC".
Hopefully with Aspyr Media helping them out the game will see a really polished experience for Linux when it hits the full release next month.
Another updated version of a classic roguelike was released for Linux earlier this month. Players can expect to fight monsters, explore and have all the traditional trappings of dungeon crawlers.
Thanks as usual to SteamDB, it seems Rocket League is making preparations for the promised Linux & SteamOS version.
Fans of the beautiful game might be happy to know that we've had our first football (soccer for you Yanks out there) game available on Linux for a few months now. Well, first one that's more about the matches than the management side of things. Kopanito is a diverse and fast-paced game that looks pretty fun.
While it doesn't have a Linux icon, I assure you it's on Linux. It had the icon removed along with a bunch of other games a while ago due to not 100% working on SteamOS, but they are taking steps to fix it.
Skyborn is a pretty nice looking 2D RPG created in RPGMakers, and it has now launched on SteamOS and Linux. It flew under the radar a bit, so some of you probably didn't know either.
I have yet to give Bound By Flame a real good go, but it's really good to see this Action/RPG game get some support with a new patch in beta.
Do you think we should move to do these every 2+ months, rather than every month? This way we may get a better idea of change happening within the Linux gaming community? I am torn on it though, as it's fun to see changes between desktop environments so often.
The Krita project has made the first "pre-alpha" builds of its upcoming 3.0 release available for download. The release of 3.0 will mark a significant milestone in the project's history, bringing a new set of features, a port to Qt 5, and a commitment to supporting a new platform.
The alpha release was announced on January 17. For now, the post contains direct links to the binary packages, which are not available through the normal Krita download channels. As maintainer Boudewijn Rempt said in the post: "Right now, Krita is in the 'may eat your cat'-stage...." There are standard Mac OS X and 64-bit Windows installers provided. The Linux builds are provided as AppImage packages. The AppImage format includes an ISO 9660 filesystem that bundles all necessary files to launch the application, plus a small launcher binary that mounts the filesystem with FUSE and runs the application within. The upshot is that, like the Windows and OS X downloads, the Linux package should be portable (or at least portable enough to run on almost any desktop Linux distribution).
I had big issues with my Internet connectivity this past week, when my internet cable modem suddenly died. I was able to use a backup connection on my telephony modem but the 1 Mbit/sec up- and download offered by that outlet was not sufficient for the amounts of data I had to upload. So, I was very happy to get a new modem yesterday evening and found that my 200/20 Mbit/sec connection was restored overnight. That allowed me to upload the latest ‘ktown’ package set to the mirror server. KDE 5_16.01 is now available for your enjoyment. These packages are based on the latest KDE releases: Frameworks 5.18.0, Plasma 5.5.3 and Applications 15.12.1.
After having reached the first milestone of a read-only prototype of Kube, it’s time to provide a lookout of what we plan to achieve in 2016.
I have put together a Roadmap, of what I think are realistic goals that we can achieve in 2016. Obviously this will evolve over time and we’ll keep adjusting this as we advance faster/slower or simply move in other directions.
[...]
We polish Kube Mail, ensure it’s easy to install and setup on all platforms and that all the implemented features work flawlessly.
This is an overview guide to the KDE Plasma desktop environment within Linux.
Oh, and to be on the safe side, the type selector is only shown for existing objects if the type is already set to one of the defined types (and not for cases where there is a combination of tags, such as a place being defined as both an amenity and a shop, like say, a supermarket with a pharmacy department). This is done as a precausion to avoid any cases where tags would be overwritten in a non-obvious or hidden way. For objects where none of the type tags are defined, the selection will be permitted, and shows the initial ”None“ state.
The GNOME.Asia Summit 2016 team invites proposals for presentations at the conference. GNOME.Asia Summit is GNOME Asia’s user and developer conference, with the goal of spreading GNOME across Asia and encouraging contributions. The 2016 edition of the Summit will be held at the Manav Rachna International University, Faridabad, Delhi (NCR), India from April 21st to 24th.
GNOME.Asia Summit 2016 will follow the release of GNOME 3.20 and will be a great place to celebrate and explore the many new features and enhancements in the release, as well as potential work for upcoming releases.
Are you a distro hopper? Are you one of those people who knows what day of the week it is because of which distro you’re using? If so, this quiz is for you. But even if you’re one of those people who finds a distro you like and sticks with it until it becomes as comfortable as a well worn shoe, you’ve probably done your homework, and that’s why you were able to find the distro that was a perfect fit for you. In other words, you’ll probably do well on our quiz too — because it just might be a tortoise and hare sort of thing.
Kali Linux, a hacker’s favorite operating system, is here with its first Rolling release. This release ensures that you are always using the latest and best tools for pen-testing purposes. The first Kali Linux Rolling release also brings a Kali Linux Package Tracker tool and changes the way VMware guest tools are installed. You can read more about the features below and use the links for downloading Kali Linux Rolling 2016.1 ISO files and torrents.
Suman Chakravartula informs us today about the immediate availability for download of the Rockstor 3.8-11 free and open-source NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution based on GNU/Linux technologies.
Rockstor 3.8-11 is the third stable update in the 3.8 series, bringing all sorts of improvements to make the software more reliable and secure. Among the most important changes, we can mention multiple enhancements to the Rock-Ons system, which has just received support for third-party Rock-Ons.
Q4OS, a Linux distribution based on Debian and powered by a desktop environment called Trinity DE, has been upgraded to version 1.4.6 and is now ready for download.
I am happy to announce the release of Rockstor 3.8-11. This is our third release in the Stable updates channel and I’d like to thank subscribers for their support. As usual, subscribers can just update to this release from the Web-UI.
Deepin 15 has been released and announced by Deepin Developer on December 24 2015, ships with latest version of deepin desktop environment version 3.0, based on debian SID and powered by Linux Kernel 4.2.
Atalanta Sosnoff Capital reduced its stake in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) by 2.9% during the fourth quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the SEC. The firm owned 96,170 shares of the open-source software company’s stock after selling 2,870 shares during the period. Atalanta Sosnoff Capital’s holdings in Red Hat were worth $7,964,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC.
One of the S&P 500’s big winners for Friday January 22 was Red Hat Inc. (RHT) as the company’s stock climbed 2.57% to $72.12 on volume of 1.18 million shares.
The stock opened at $71.33 and saw an intraday low of $71.29 and an intraday high of $72.82. All told, the day saw a per-share gain of $1.81. The stock’s average daily volume of 1.61 million and 182.63 million shares outstanding. Red Hat Inc. now has a 50-day SMA is $79.82 and 200-day SMA is $77.18, and it has a 52-week high of $84.44 and a 52-week low of $62.43.
CommOps is the newest official sub-project in Fedora, and the team’s role is to assist other sub-projects in Fedora. This is done by building and improving interactions within the internal Fedora community, as well as by increasing communication across the Project as a whole. 2015 was an important milestone for the Fedora Community Operations (CommOps) team in so many ways. Remy DeCausemaker,the Fedora Community Action and Impact Lead, Justin Flory(jflory7) and the CommOps team as whole recently published an excellent Year-in-Review article on Fedora Community Blog describing the CommOps Team highlights of 2015 and their vision for the upcoming year of 2016.
In the past year to current day, women in computing is a hot topic in many discussions about diversity in computer science. Particularly in free and open source software, women are underrepresented, even more than average numbers in other computer science fields.
At tonight's FESCo meeting, it was decided to go with a three week delay rather than two. Adam Williamson's N-1 upgrades were approved as an officially supported path and Fedora 25 is penciled-in for November. Elsewhere, Jamie Watson was quick to testdrive Kali's new rolling edition and another Linux trojan was identified by researchers.
The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian 8 (codename "jessie"). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were published separately and are referenced where applicable.
Debian 8 (Jessie) has just gotten a new update, and developers have added a number of fixes and other adjustments for some serious issues.
The Debian developers have issued another update for the OS. It’s only for maintenance, and no new features have been implemented, but that’s to be expected with a regular update. The initial launch for Debian 8.0 was all the way back in April 2015, so three major upgrades in less than a year seems to be a great track record.
The Debian GNU/Linux project has released an updated version of its stable distribution Debian 8 ("jessie"). You must update to get corrections for security problem as this version made a few adjustments for the serious issue found in Debian 8.2.
I find it very ironic that one of the most divisive things that ever hit the Linux scene is a Desktop Environment called Unity. For those of you who are late to the party, Unity was introduced by Canonical in 2010 and became the default desktop experience on Ubuntu with the release of Ubuntu 11.04. Unity is both loved and hated, depending on who you’re talking to at the moment, and all you gotta do to start a lively discussion is bring it up in mixed (Linux minded) company. Opinions about Unity range from absolute disdain to unabashed “fanboyism.”
Despite being a very capable depth camera, support for Linux and OS X doesn’t exist. Researchers, roboticists and IoT developers are slightly miffed about this, and it seems like Intel doesn’t care about people using their hardware on platforms that aren’t Windows.
Relevant tech specs include Ubuntu 14.04 LTS version, quad-core ARM Cortex A-15 processor, NVIDIA Kepler-based GPU and support for CUDA, OpenCV and ROS.
IMX 7 on e-readers will be a game changer when companies have enough time to optimize their software. Hardware dithering will increase the performance of Android apps because it will be able to render animated page turns. I surmise that one of the big trends of 2016 will be companies gravitating away from Linux and embracing Android.
According to a new leak, it appears as though March 11 is possibly the date when the Samsung Galaxy S7 will release in the U.S. The information comes from Evan Blass (evleaks), a source who has a mixed track record when it comes to leaked information. Beyond the date of March 11, no additional details were provided.
Motorola officially launched the DROID Turbo 2 towards the end of last year, and since that time it has been gaining recognition as a strong device with decent hardware, thanks to the ShatterShield display, rear camera and good battery life. Almost a few months later, Motorola is now sharing the open source Android 6.0 Marshmallow kernels for the device so that developers can get their hands on them and do with them as they wish. What this boils down to is some of the necessary tools that developers will need to get started on working with the Android 6.0 software on the DROID Turbo 2.
Google is the default search engine on iPhones and it’s not because Apple considers Google the best search engine. It’s the result of a high-profile $1 billion deal between Google and Apple bosses.
This unknown fact was recently unmasked during a court hearing regarding Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over the Java copyright dispute. The documents produced in the court on January 14 showed that Google paid Apple $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default search engine on the iPhone, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Annette Hurst, a lawyer representing Oracle in its long-running case against Google, also revealed that Google paid Apple US$1 billion in 2014 to keep its search bar on the iPhone, according to both Bloomberg and Reuters.
Avast Software was kind of 'one of those Central and Eastern Europe' (CEE) security firms along with the other usual suspects that most of us can name... and then, it kind of became something more than that and started to boast more users than its competitors -- so that then... consequently, it has more than tripled in staff in the past five years.
Android-x86, a port of the Android operating system for the x86 platform that allows users to experience a mobile OS as a desktop experience, has been updated to version 4.4-r4 and is now ready for testing.
While news of the latest zero-day flaw against Linux is interesting, it is a seemingly trivial footnote in the context of the larger issue of known vulnerabilities for which user devices have not been patched. The truth is that the there are so many known vulnerabilities that an attacker can easily exploit that a zero-day isn't nearly quite as interesting, regardless of how easy or hard it might be to execute.
Nginx Inc is out this week with a new release of its flagship product platform, Nginx Plus R8. Among the highlights of the new web server platform are improved HTTP2 capabilities, OAuth authentication and HTML5 video caching features.
POSSCON has been cancelled. The surprise announcement was made Thursday by way of an email from IT-oLogy, the nonprofit organization which hosts the event. The conference, which focuses on the enterprise and is targeted at IT professionals who develop or use open source software, was scheduled to be held in Columbia, S.C. on April 12-13.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls — that covers most of you: From a press standpoint, to say that SCALE 14X was busy would be a clear understatement. While the event has pretty much ratcheted itself up to the next level, staying atop the show in my capacity as the publicity chair is somewhat daunting.
So rather than tell you what happened today, I’m just going to show you. You’ll thank me for it later, trust me.
One of the fears — one of the many in having an established conference at a brand spanking new venue — is this: Suppose they gave an outstanding Friday keynote, and nobody came? All those sleepless nights worrying about it were essentially for naught, since Cory Doctorow’s keynote at SCALE 14X Friday was a standing room only success.
Google Chrome is to drop support for all 32-bit Linux distros from March, 2016.
The change, which brings the platform in line with that of Mac OS X, will apply to all x86 Linux builds, regardless of distribution or version number.
Google dropped support for the 32-bit version of Chrome for Linux distros. Chrome won’t be updated on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as well, as Google recommends users to use the version 14.04 or newer. While this is not a huge deal, as there are alternatives like Chromium, it’s sad to see the 32-bit architecture being left behind.
Google Chrome users soon will get faster Web access through the Brotli open source compression algorithm, Google Web Performance Engineer Ilya Grigorik said Tuesday.
Mozilla has announced that it will close down its Persona.org identity service in November 2016. The browser maker stopped developing the Persona software in 2014, citing low adoption, but has maintained Persona.org as a public service. With the announcement that the service will be discontinued, the question arose as to whether or not the software could survive as an independent, community-driven project. Questions also arose as to why Persona failed to take off, and whether Mozilla should have managed the project differently.
The report, released today, looked at how large companies around the world are using cloud services, particularly OpenStack. This research polled 813 senior IT professionals in seven countries from companies with 250 or more employees. According to the report, 90 percent of large companies have implemented at least one private cloud solution to date.
Rackspace is hoping to court more business users of its managed MongoDB NoSQL database service by expanding encryption, disaster recovery and other features on its Dedicated ObjectRocket for MongoDB offering.
The LibreOffice codebase is, to be frank, messy. This isn't a criticism of previous developers - it's still an amazing product and an amazing feat of programming given the number of platforms it runs on. The StarView guys, and later OpenOffice.org development team, did a great job. For instance, I was reading up on the font mapping code and I often saw Herbert Duerr's name, and I've got nothing but respect for the work that he did and his dedication to the project.
With the release of LibreOffice 4.4 last year, we began making incremental updates to the main menus, with the major overhaul happening in the upcoming 5.1 release. The work is guided by LibreOffice’s new Human Interface Guideline (HIG), which has given us the core framework, however some questions have arisen challenging the reasoning of our work. So this post is a summary of what we changed, primarily focused on why we’ve done it – and a little outlook of what is planned for the future.
It’s been a long time I have talked about the project that I started with GSoC 2015 some time back. We reached at pretty much exciting results by the end of the summer where we could see the integration working pretty well with LibreOffice. We finished and merged all the major work on the Libreoffice side alongwith just-made-it-work integration with gnome-documents. Things were still in the development stage for gnome-documents, and we needed good amount of effort to get it merged upstream.
With an eye on the changing IT landscape, EMC and Pivotal launched a new program in Cambridge, Mass., focused on the development of open-source software and applications for the cloud.
In Japanese, “dojo” means “the place of the way,” and EMC and Pivotal have named the center the Cloud Foundry dojo. Cloud Foundry is a Platform-as-a-Service offering centered around cloud-native application development.
At its Video @Scale conference at company headquarters today, Facebook is announcing that it’s open-sourcing Transform, a piece of software it uses to stream users’ 360-degree videos in an efficient way.
The Lumina Desktop Environment is a new, BSD-licensed, graphical system environment which is designed primarily for BSD and UNIX-based operating systems. This focus on BSD systems results in a number of distinct differences in from the current collection of Linux-focused desktop environments, only one of which is independence from all the Linux-based system management frameworks.
For whatever reason it didn't come for many months until after Skylake CPUs shipped, but LLVM Git/SVN now has Skylake and its features added to the x86 target list.
Elena Demikhovsky of Intel landed this weekend the Skylake x86 target in LLVM that exposes all of the various CPU instruction set extensions supported by these latest-generation processors. There is also the Skylake server processor class for those with AVX-512 support.
The DragonFlyBSD Intel DRM graphics driver sure is getting close to catching up against the upstream Intel Linux graphics driver with the mainline kernel.
GNU Parallel 20160122 ('Bowie') has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/
Denmark’s Digital Welfare Strategy 2013 - 2020 is managed by the Danish government, Local Government Denmark (LGDK) and Danish Regions. The aim is to increase the uptake of eHealth solutions, and increase the use of technology to improve welfare.
The smart city activities of Riga and the intelligent transport systems devised by Latvia’s state road department are two of the many topics in next week’s “Open Technologies and Smart Solutions” conference. The meeting on 28 January is organised by Latvia’s Open Technology Association (LATA).
If there’s one field you wouldn’t expect to utilize crowdsourcing, it would be space exploration. However, that’s pretty much what the Open Space Agency (OSA) does. Founded by entrepreneur James Parr, OSA has created a network of amateur citizen scientists to supplement the work of the professional space agencies – or even create their own space programs – right from their backyards. At the heart of the collective is the Ultrascope, a robotic telescope, or automated robotic observatory, controlled by a smartphone.
Like many businesses, there are economies of scale in publishing. A book that only sells 1000 copies a year will necessarily be expensive. But how many people are going to take a class in introductory calculus this year? What about psychology or health? They have to number in the tens of thousands, if not higher. There are also some fields where knowledge or convention changes so rapidly that books must be constantly updated. But the state of the art in introductory calculus hasn’t changed a whole lot since Isaac Newton. There’s no defensible reason that most books, especially ones for introductory classes, should be so expensive. It seems to me, that purchasing textbooks is a classic principal-agent problem. Professors select their classes’ book and students are essentially obliged to purchase them. Value for money is usually not a central concern, and this lets publishers set essentially whatever prices they so desire.
Many developers working on open source projects choose to put their code on GitHub. By doing so, they use—and depend on—many of this platform's features, including support. According to The Register, more than 1,100 developers recently sent an open letter to GitHub about the lack of support. In response, GitLab, another code repository unrelated to GitHub, wrote a letter to developers about how they strive to help large and small open source projects use GitLab.
Until now, at least, 27 “selfie-related” deaths have been reported around the world last year, out of which around half of the deaths occurred in India.
Story of the history of computer from a mechanical device to smartphones in modern days computing — how the history of computer saw the replacement of different mechanical parts with electrical ones and then eventually with electronic ICs and Microprocessors — everything in detail.
Prime numbers, which can only be divisible by themselves, are presumably infinite. However, the higher you count, the fewer and farther between prime numbers are.
The previous highest known prime number held the record for nearly three years. On January 25, 2013, 2 to the power of 57,885,161 minus 1, a figure 17,425,170 digits long, was announced by Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will work with Nvidia Corp. on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and plans to enlist about 1,000 developers to work on its big-data platform during the next three years.
A hospital in Flint, Michigan, reported Friday that low levels of Legionnaires' disease bacteria were discovered in its water system.
The discovery came after the city switched its water supply and the medical staff noticed an increase in people coming in for treatment who were diagnosed with Legionnaires,' McLaren Hospital said.
Legionnaires' disease is a respiratory bacterial infection usually spread through mist that comes from a water source.
In the spring of 2013, Detroit was groaning under the weight of its troubles. It had accumulated billions in debt, was riddled with crime and had seen much of its affluent tax base disappear. A former mayor, Kwame M. Kilpatrick, was convicted of racketeering and fraud.
Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, swept in with a rescue plan: the appointment of an emergency manager, Kevyn D. Orr, who was charged with saving a city in fiscal despair. Many Detroiters were furious that Mr. Orr, then a high-profile bankruptcy lawyer from Chevy Chase, Md., had been given a role with extraordinary power, usurping control from local elected officials.
That anger has been revived in Michigan this week. Public outrage over the tainted water in Flint and the decrepit schools in Detroit has led many people to question whether the state has overreached in imposing too many emergency managers in largely black jurisdictions.
Even before the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was found to be tainted with lead—before water from some areas tested at more than twice the level considered to be toxic waste, and public-health officials said that every last child in the city should be treated as if the child had been poisoned—the governor’s office knew that the water was discolored, tasted bad, smelled strange, and was rife with “organic matter.” They knew, as one memo sent to Governor Rick Snyder in February, 2015, noted, that “residents have attended meetings with jugs of brownish water.” Officials figured that a reason it looked that way was the presence of rust. And they thought that was just fine. They wished, in fact, that the residents would realize how good they had it, when it came to the water’s substance, and stop complaining about its style. Various safe-water laws, the February memo said, “ensure that water is safe to drink. The act does not regulate aesthetic values of water.” The “aesthetics” (the word comes up several times in e-mails about Flint, which the governor released Tuesday night under pressure) were bad because “it’s the Flint River”; “the system is old”; “Flint is old”—the water, in a word, fit their picture of the city, in which about forty per cent of its hundred thousand people lived below the poverty line (and more than half are black). Until April, 2014, Flint had been part of Detroit’s water system, which had Lake Huron as its source. It was scheduled to be connected to a new pipeline in 2016 or 2017, which would save money; Flint is in such desperate financial straits that it was under the oversight of an Emergency Manager. When that manager felt he couldn’t negotiate a low enough price for Detroit water in the interim, the city was left with the option of drinking from the river that ran by it, and past its active and derelict factories, and had been last regularly used decades before. The city would treat the water itself. All the city had to do was pass a few tests; as long as it did, it didn’t matter if the residents were, in effect, drinking dirt. But then, almost immediately, the water began to fail the tests. In August, 2014, and again that September, the water was found to have unacceptably high levels of fecal coliform bacteria, and specifically E. coli. Certain neighborhoods were instructed to boil their water, while the city added chlorine to the supply to disinfect it. It took a lot of chlorine—and that may be where Flint’s troubles really began. (NBC has a timeline of the crisis.) The city’s water managers, unaccountably, seem not to have added any anti-corrosion agents to the water. Nor did they check for corrosion issues in a way they ought to have for a city Flint’s size. (In a remarkable memo a year later, Brad Wurfel, the spokesman of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, said that the staff had “made a mistake,” and followed the wrong protocol.) By October, 2014, General Motors had announced that it would no longer use the water, because it was corroding its equipment. It was also—and this should have been entirely predictable—eating into the lead pipes that delivered the water to people’s homes, causing them to crumble into the water. Flint is old, and its water system took decades to build. It took only months of cheap, corrosive water to mangle and perhaps permanently destroy it.
In recent months, Indonesia has again come under the international spotlight for a problem that has dogged the country for more than two decades - haze resulting from uncontrolled and sometimes uncontrollable land fires.
The last two major El Niño seasons - in 1997 and 2015 - elevated haze into a regional issue. Politicians struggled to find a balance between soothing domestic outrage and risking foreign relations fallout with Indonesia.
Exactly how much will it cost to secure “Things” connected to the Internet over the next five years? Two recent Internet of Things (IoT) forecasts from industry analysts can help answer the question.
"Security is a challenge for IT in general, but for IoT it's compounded by the fact that there are so many moving parts, so many access points through which something could be hacked or a vulnerability could be overlooked," Hayman told Datamation. Three major concerns are currently keeping security-conscious IT managers up at night.
Foxglove Security bod Stephen Breen has strung together dusty unpatched Windows vulnerabilities to gain local system-level access on Windows versions up to 8.1.
The unholy zero-day concoction, reported to Microsoft in September and still unpatched, is a reliable way of p0wning Windows for attackers that have managed to pop user machines.
Breen released exploit code for his attack dubbed Hot Potato following his talk at the Shmoocon conference in Washington over the weekend.
Cyber-crooks have used the open-source code of the EDAD2 ransomware to create the Magic ransomware strain, which was spotted in real-life attacks against users in the past few days.
Four people have been killed and several injured in shootings in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, police say.
The armed right-wing extremists who’ve taken over a federal building at a wildlife refuge in Oregon just keep digging themselves into an even deeper hole with their past unlawful indiscretions coming home to roost. It seems the government’s idea to wait them out has turned them into an even bigger joke than they already are. So, of course, Bill Maher took them to task on Friday’s “Real Time: New Rules.”
“They keep on promising to ‘occupy that building until… well, we’re not really sure,'” Maher mocked the disorganized cult of stupidity. “And they’re not sure, something about ‘redneck lives matter.'”
After Hillary Clinton spoke at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday, I asked her if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She laughed and turned away.
Clinton has recently been on the defensive about the speaking fees she and her husband have collected. Those fees total over $125 million since 2001.
Her rival Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, has raised concerns in particular over the $675,000 she made from Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that has regularly used its influence with government officials to win favorable policies.
The bitcoin digital currency is underpinned by a distributed ledger based on block chain technology: in this case the distributed bitcoin ledger ensures that the bitcoins are authentic. But the basic block chain approach can also be modified to incorporate rules, smart contracts, and digital signatures, which could make it a handy tool for government services.
As an entrepreneur, I know how difficult it can be to set up and run a successful business. To do this against a backdrop of the biggest companies in the world having an unfair advantage is a sure-fire way to threaten our vibrant business sector.
This is just one of the many reasons why the EU-US trade deal TTIP is a major threat to small and medium-sized business in the UK and Europe. And that's why I've joined with other British business owners to launch the initiative, Business Against TTIP.
There is a passage in Milan Kundera’s novel, The Joke, in which a young man sends a card to his girlfriend, and adds a funny comment about the communist regime of Czechoslovakia. The authorities intercept the letter, search for the sender and put him behind the bar. The author uses this fictitious incident to denote how the state with its all seriousness cannot take a joke.
For starters, we've added a page to help you teach your friends and community what you've learned. We've also made a number of improvements in the guide itself, including clarifying many technical points and updating it to reflect changes in the software. We've expanded the troubleshooting sections by adding links to external resources, so that you can get alternative explanations of the steps, if you find that helpful. There are also new, advanced sections so that skilled users, as well as beginners, can learn something new.
Privacy is a basic human emotion like love, aspiration, empathy, and understanding. It’s what we feel when we lock the restroom door, it’s what we feel when we lay back on the couch with a good book, it’s what we feel when we close our eyes on the warm beach and just have a little moment completely to ourselves.
Employees seeking to report wrongdoing are safeguarded across all federal agencies—but the process for doing so in the classified intelligence community can be dangerous.
The maker of McAfee antivirus and privacy advocate John McAfee is again in the headlines. In his latest op-ed, he stresses upon the need of encryption, calling it a necessity. Bashing the governments who demand restrictions on encryption measures, he says that Obama administration lacks the real understanding of privacy.
The leaders controlling the US surveillance apparatus can’t agree on encryption. FBI Director Comey has hysterically characterised it as a safe haven for evil-doers. A high-ranking Department of Justice official insisted that encryption could cause a child to die. Meanwhile, the National Security Agency’s leaders are extremely chill about encryption — which is terrifying.
“Encryption is foundational to the future,” NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers said in a speech today. “So spending time arguing about ‘hey, encryption is bad and we ought to do away with it’ … that’s a waste of time to me,” he continued.
That sounds nice and reasonable, right? Rogers isn’t going on a rogue stand for privacy, though. He’s maintaining a status quo. NSA Directors haven’t really given a shit about encryption for a while. And while it’s less annoying than Comey’s fear-mongering, the NSA’s relaxed attitude is worth treating with suspicion.
If you tuned into a talk by Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., this week, you might think the NSA had begun to change its tune about encryption—the technology favored by Apple and its Silicon Valley brethren to scramble users’ data and communications (much to criminal investigators’ chagrin), making them unintelligible to spies and hackers alike.
Ad blocking and the software that powers it seems to be in the news lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Recently, several prominent sites have attacked ad blockers in several different ways, ranging from lawsuits on the extreme end down to simply withholding content. These attempts are all misguided in the same way, however, in that they attack the software that readers find useful rather than attacking the core problem that makes users turn to ad blockers in the first place: incredibly crappy and occasionally downright dangerous advertising inventory.
One would think that websites and online advertisers would have much to learn from the providers of ad blockers. It seems there is little appetite for education amongst them, however, as we've recently learned that the Interactive Advertising Bureau has flat out barred Adblock Plus from its annual conference.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is easing its stance on encrypted data. The agency's director Mike Rogers shared his thoughts on the ongoing debate surrounding encryption and revealed that the NSA is now in favor of encrypted data.
The White House and CIA have yet to comment on the letter and there's nothing in the history of the incident that suggests either will move forward on this. Obama's on short time and the CIA already cleared itself of all wrongdoing with an in-house "investigation" and further showed its disdain for independent oversight by throwing its Inspector General and his report on the spying efforts under the bus.
Jason Leopold and Vice obtained hundreds of documents through FOIA requests that appeared to show the opposite of what the CIA's internal investigation claimed. But it was the CIA that had the last word, proclaiming itself innocent and simultaneously accusing Senate staffers of improperly accessing restricted documents.
But the most damning document -- at least in the context of a demand for an official apology from the CIA -- was the apology the agency unofficially disavowed when it cleared itself of hacking allegations.
By some miracle, I was in Delhi, and was able to attend the open house. The telcos made a huge pitch for differential pricing at the TRAI Open House on Net Neutrality, but civil society and the Save The Internet coalition and others argued that the Internet cannot be regulated like telecom networks because users on the Internet are both content creators and consumers.
But from the perspective of inmates and their friends and family, these new technologies often do not result in stronger lines of communication at all. Some prison officials use the technology to justify restricting in-person visitation or traditional mail. Many communications services are offered under unfair terms and with artificially inflated fees that are only possible because the services operate monopolies at each prison or jail. In addition, users of these systems face potential privacy violations, as illustrated by the recent Securus data breach of more than 70-million prisoner phone calls.
All societies share rich commons, the cultural and material resources shared by all, and owned equally by either everyone or no one. The air we can freely breathe, the sun that shines on us all. We once shared land too, but the development of small landholding enclosures created private property.
Now there’s a looming enclosure of the digital commons, with Facebook threatening to capture the future of India's internet. Its 'Free Basics' service threatens to limit free access to the digital sphere.
Usually when we talk about the Oscars behaving badly about intellectual property, it has to do with either its combat against film piracy or its rather stunning tradition of facilitating it. What's clear in most of those stories, though, is that when the Motion Picture Academy decides to sink its collective teeth into something, it is bulldog-ish in its unwillingness to let it go. It seems that this is the case on matters of trademark, as well. Unimaginably petty trademark matters.
In recent weeks the music industry has started to target the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) website over tens of thousands of copyright infringements. The deviant behavior doesn't come from typical pirates though, but from children using the Scratch project to share 'their' creative expressions.
Just over 30 years ago, the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Sony v. Universal City Studios (usually referred to as the Sony/Betamax case), clearing the way for a technology company to sells its products (Betamaxes, and by extension, VCRs) even though they could potentially be used for infringing purposes. After all, the court reasoned, customers also deployed their VCRs to engage in non-infringing fair uses, such as recording soap operas to watch after work. If a product was capable of “substantial noninfringing uses,” the fact that it could also be used for unlawful purposes shouldn’t be enough to force it off the market (and/or require its maker to pay millions in damages).
There’s a debate happening right now over copyright bots, programs that social media websites use to scan users’ uploads for potential copyright infringement. A few powerful lobbyists want copyright law to require platforms that host third-party content to employ copyright bots, and require them to be stricter about what they take down. Big content companies call this nebulous proposal “notice-and-stay-down,” but it would really keep all users down, not just alleged infringers. In the process, it could give major content platforms like YouTube and Facebook an unfair advantage over competitors and startups (as if they needed any more advantages). “Notice-and-stay-down” is really “filter-everything.”
One of the most crucial issues in the fight for digital freedom is the question of who will control the hardware that you have in your home, in your pocket, or in your own body.
Have you ever been frustrated when a beloved feature was taken away in an update? Or felt helpless to prevent the apps on your phone from oversharing your personal data with advertisers? Or had to pay through the nose for proprietary cartridges of ink or 3D printing material? Or found that your independent repair shop wasn’t allowed to fix your car or appliance? If so, then you've experienced a small—but accumulating—frustration of losing of control over your stuff.
Mickey Mouse is synonymous with copyright term extension, and with good reason. Every time the first Mickey cartoons creep towards the public domain, Disney's powerful lobbyists spring into action, lobbying Congress for a retrospective term-extension on copyright, which means that works that have already been created are awarded longer copyright terms. In the USA, copyright law is supposed to serve an incentive to make new works, and there's no sensible way that getting a longer copyright on something you've already made can provide an incentive to do anything except lobby for more copyright, and sue people who want to make something new out of your creation.
Darlene Love, the voice on the Phil Spector-produced hit "He's A Rebel," is suing Google and its ad producer, 72 & Sunny, for violating her publicity rights by using a song she recorded in one of its ads without her permission.
The lawsuit seems to revolve around California's much-maligned "right of publicity" law, which allows plaintiffs to sue entities for using pretty much anything about them, rather than just for bog standard copyright infringement.