Most modern desktop and notebook computers ship with Intel or AMD processors and Windows or OS X software. A few companies are positioning products with ARM-based chips as desktop computers. But the Tavolga Terminal TB-T22BT is something different.
This all-in-one desktop PC has a MIPS-based processor and runs Debian 8 Linux software.
I have Linux on my phone right now (I’ve finally switched from Apple -> Android). My terror of malware aside, it’s a delightful experience. I see people using Linux on their desktops/laptops, and it JUST WORKS.
This continues to amaze me. In the 90s, back when I started using Linux, one did not simply ‘install’ Linux.
Avnet has announced a pan-EMEA distribution agreement with Cumulus Networks to offer “the industry’s first true full-featured Linux OS for networks” to customers and partners.
Late last year, Docker snapped up cross-cloud container management service Tutum, but it wasn't clear how the acquired company's handiwork would manifest under the Docker brand.
Earlier this week, we found out: Tutum reemerged as Docker Cloud amid little fanfare, but with more than only the badges swapped on the product. Cloud now cross-integrates with all of Docker's other services, and Docker promises to unveil more features for shortly.
I'm announcing the release of the 4.4.4 kernel.
All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade.
The latest version of the stable Linux kernel, 4.4.4, has been revealed today by Greg Kroah-Hartman, which makes it the most advanced stable version available.
I have been attending LinuxCon since 2009 and since last year they have started a ‘childcare’ at the event so moms and dads can drop their kids there and attend the events. The Linux Foundation is now partnering with Women Who Code to increase participation of women in the foundation’s events.
“Increasing diversity in technology takes more than one approach. From our partnership with Goodwill to support people from disadvantaged backgrounds to our work with Women Who Code and a variety of other organizations, we hope to have at least a small impact on this important issue,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “We’re looking forward to meeting and working with women from the program and helping them to advance their careers and contributions in the open source community.”
The Vulkan 1.0 specification is less than one month old and NVIDIA has already released their third Linux driver beta. Meanwhile, sadly, AMD hasn't made public their proprietary Vulkan Linux driver.
Last week I posted various LLVM Clang and GCC compiler benchmarks using packages available on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and with the testing from a Xeon Skylake system. Today are some complementary tests when benchmarking GCC 5.3.1 and LLVM Clang 3.8 while testing each compiler with a variety of different optimization levels.
Rather than testing GCC vs. Clang compilers with just one set of CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS, for this comparison I tested each of these open-source compilers with a variety of different optimization levels. GCC 5.3.1 and LLVM Clang 3.8 were each tested at -O0, -O1, -O2, -O2 -march=native, -O3, -O3 -march=native, and -Ofast -march=native.
The main differences as I (Daniel Stenberg) see them. Please consider my bias towards curl since after all, curl is my baby - but I contribute to Wget as well.
Please let me know if you have other thoughts or comments on this document.
The Steam Hardware & Software Survey: February 2016 has been made public, and it looks like the Linux platform hasn't managed to get over the 1% hurdle.
The number of Linux Steam users has been keeping steady at the same level for the last few months, just below 1%, and it looks like not much changed for the month of February. We were hoping to see Linux usage growing from month to month, but that is not happening.
Sad news, as Deep Silver originally confirmed to me Homefront: The Revolution was going to be a day-1 release, now they are saying when.
Last summer we reported on America's Army being ported to Linux and that it was trailing the renewed Mac OS X port. Today is some new information on America's Army coming to Linux.
While it's been several months since last hearing anything about America's Army for Linux, I heard this morning from the team that the game just very recently got the game compiling and running on Linux after being faced by some delays. While it's working, it will still take some time before it's ready for external testing, but they are now putting more effort into their Linux and Mac ports.
I could add a menu with sorting/grouping options, which would allow novice and intermediate users to find the function, but that still does not hint at the shortcut, and the functions to set the sorting would have to be disabled on Linux because wxGTK cannot set the sort column from a program.
With the Plasma 5.6 beta out the door, the KDE development community has today announced the formation of a Distribution Outreach Program.
The people who package and distribute our software to the world are crucial to our user's experience. In keeping with our original KDE vision, we want to improve the working relationships between distributions and KDE developers. Not only do we want to foster professional friendship, but we also want to help our software shine in each distribution.
GNOME 3.19.91 is now available. This is our second beta release on the way to 3.20. Please try it and let us know how well it works for you.
Just ahead of this month's GNOME 3.20 release is now the Mutter 3.19.91 development release.
Notable to this new Mutter release is that it adds a --nested switch when running Mutter. Using this argument will allow running a nested Wayland session.
A similar technique I learned from former member of the GNOME Foundation board of directors Jonathan Blandford goes one step further. The principle of targeted selection is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So, if you are hiring someone to manage a team, ask about a time that they were a manager in the past. If you need someone who can learn quickly in a new and fast moving domain, ask them about a time that they were in a similar situation. Then, dig deep for the details. What did they do? How did they interact with others? How effective was the outcome of the situation?
In a recent video, I gave my viewers a fun walk-through sharing what makes Ubuntu MATE awesome and why I think it’s the perfect distro for newcomers. To that end, here are some of the important highlights of the video included in this article.
Simplicity Linux 16.04 is a Linux distribution based on LXPup, which uses the LXDE desktop. The second Alpha version in the new series has been released and is now ready for testing.
Quick announcement about the availability of 14.04.4 point release.
We are happy to announce the release of Chakra's first 2016 ISO, codenamed "Ian", in memory of the late Ian Murdock, founder of Debian.
This ISO doesn't introduce any major changes, but offers an updated snapshot of our stable repositories to new users. It can be considered a maintenance release, providing all the bug fixes and package updates that occurred in the last 3 months, ever since the previous ISO was released. As always, we ship the latest available versions of KDE's Plasma, Applications and Frameworks.
Sabayon Linux, an operating system designed for Linux enthusiasts who want the latest packages and the best performance based on Gentoo, is now at version 16.03 and is ready for download.
Manjaro 15.12 (Capella) has just received its tenth update, and it looks like the support cycle for this version of the distro is coming to an end.
SUSE has announced the availability of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6, which it is positioning as an enterprise-ready distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds with less stress on IT staff and resources. Like many other new distributions, this one embraces container technology.
Based on the OpenStack release Liberty, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 delivers availability enhancements along with Docker and IBM z Systems mainframe support that the company claims can make it easier to move business-critical applications and data to the cloud.
Ths commit to NetworkManager Git explains, "Until now the internal DHCP client could start a DHCPv6 transaction but was not able to parse the lease and pass the information back to the core. Add the missing glue code to make this work."
As most distributions have switched to systemd as default "init", some people have asked why we actually keep sysvinit around, as it's old and crusty, and systemd can do so much more.
My answer is: systemd and sysvinit solve entirely different problems, and neither can ever replace the other fully.
For those running Fedora 23, the Linux 4.4 kernel has been pushed down as a stable update for the operating system.
If looking to take advantage of the new Linux 4.4 features and you are running Fedora 23, you are only a dnf update away from having this major kernel update.
For those interested in the performance of Fedora Linux, here are some recent curiosity-driven benchmarks I completed this week.
Aaeon’s industrial Mini-ITX EMB-Q170A, EMB-Q170B, and EMB-H110B SBCs tap Intel’s 6th Gen Core “Skylake” CPUs, with up to 32MB DDR4 RAM and 4K video support.
In a couple of weeks (March 11th) the Fedora Security Team will be meeting in Washington, D.C. to hack on training, security fixes, and other issues. All Fedora contributors are welcome to stop by…
Till Fedora 22 release we have tested our Cloud images only with manual help. The amazing Fedora QA team organized test days, and also published detailed documentation on the wiki about how to test the images. People tried to help as when possible, as not having access to a Cloud was a problem for many. The images are also big in size (than any random RPM), so that also meant only people with enough bandwidth can help.
The top story of this slightly slow new day was the announcement from Jonathan Wiltshire, Debian release assistant, stating Debian 9 would be delayed two months. Steven Ovadia dug up an interesting blog post from someone claiming to suffer from Linux Desktop PTSD and KDE announced a new community outreach program. Jason Baker posted a round-up and poll of the top five Linux shells and why do distros look so darn insecure?
The Debian release team has decided that the freeze for 9.0 "Stretch" will be slightly delayed.
The reason for this delay is wanting to get the Linux 4.10 kernel into Debian Stretch. Linux 4.10 is desired since it is expected to be an LTS kernel that will be maintained longer by upstream and offer improved compatibility.
The Debian developers have decided to postpone the launch of the upcoming Debian 9 "Stretch" so that they incorporate the Linux kernel 4.10.
We don't usually see this kind of planning, but Debian is not your run-of-the-mill Linux distribution. They really like to plan things ahead, and they want to have Linux kernel ready for their users. The only problem is that the Linux kernel is only slightly predictable when it comes to its schedule.
Canonical has detailed three Perl vulnerabilities that have been identified and fixed in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
Review Canonical's next version of Linux-based operating system Ubuntu has hit its first beta stage – and while Ubuntu's Unity release is sitting out its first beta, as is Kubuntu, there are plenty of changes and new features in the rest of the Ubuntu family.
This release cycle is gearing up for the next Long Term Support release, which means all Ubuntu 16.04 flavours will be supported for five years.
That's enough for the first evening with the new Raspberry Pi 3. The verdict, so far, is very positive. It's fast, it has added a couple of important new features, the most important of which is built-in WiFi, and it is still compatible with the previous Raspberry Pi models. What more could you ask for?
With the Raspberry Pi 3 64-bit ARM $35 development board that launched earlier this week, there is working open-source kernel code for this new board powered by the Broadcom BCM2837 and it's looking like it hopefully won't be too long before the support is mainlined.
So while waiting for local scratch kernel builds for much more interesting devices I started looking around to see if I could find details of the kernel sources for the new BCM2837 SoC that is centre stage in the Raspberry Pi 3.
The problem is I couldn’t. What I did find is the hack the Raspberry Pi Foundation uses to boot the RPi3 on github.
At its core, Android is just Linux. But Android provides a runtime and various other libraries that applications depend on, so you can’t just install Android apps on Linux and expect them to work. Open-source project Shashlik is attempting to bridge the gap, and now offers a preview release that can run many Android applications on Linux today.
Last month was word of Android-x86 joining the company behind Remix OS, an Android-based OS designed for PCs and laptops. Out now is the Remix OS Beta that's leveraging the Android-x86 project.
The Android-x86 project site posted the brief message, "Remix OS for PC - Beta version built on Android-x86 project is available for download." This beta version of Remix OS is available for free download from Jide.com, the company behind Remix OS.
You can choose from dozens of excellent open source accounting programs for everything from simple basic ledger bookkeeping to invoicing, inventory tracking, point of sale, payroll, taxes, and reporting and forecasting, and this roundup highlights five of the best.
The main thing to remember about small business accounting software is that it's not magic. It doesn't turn you into an accountant any more than owning a hardware store turns you into a carpenter, electrician, or plumber. You still need to know the fundamental principles of accounting and bookkeeping.
This past summer, I was an intern at the GVIS Lab at NASA Glenn, where I brought my passion for open source into the lab. My task was to improve our lab's contributions to an open source fluid flow dynamics simulation developed by Dan Schroeder. The original simulation presents obstacles that users can draw in with their mouse to model computational fluid dynamics. My team contributed by adding image processing code that analyzes each frame of a live video feed to show how a physical object interacts with a fluid. But, there was more for us to do.
Though widespread interest in software containers is a relatively recent phenomenon, at Google we have been managing Linux containers at scale for more than ten years and built three different container-management systems in that time. Each system was heavily influenced by its predecessors, even though they were developed for different reasons. This article describes the lessons we've learned from developing and operating them.
OpenDaylight (ODL) was introduced 33 months ago and is now 600+ developers strong. The platform has been integrated into dozens of solutions and used by organizations spanning telcos, enterprises, and research, and more recently finance and energy as shown in a recent survey. We also just announced that Beryllium - the community’s fourth release - is now available for download.
Another small change that will have a big impact for Debian and for free software was an improvement to gem2deb that fixes a reproducibility issue in Ruby packages and will help currently more than 100 Ruby packages become reproducible.
Mozilla announced four Firefox OS to Connected Devices projects, including a home automation system, an AI agent, a voice interface, and a “SensorWeb.”
In December, when Mozilla announced a halt to development and sales of its open source, Linux-based Firefox OS mobile distribution, the company said it was already shifting the HTML5-focused open source Linux OS to Internet of Things projects. A month ago, Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices posted a blog entry noting progress on projects such as its Vaani voice interface. Jaaksi has now revealed more details on Vaani and three other projects, and invited open source developers to pitch in.
On the heels of its introduction as a hot publlic company back in 2015, Hortonworks, which focuses on the open source Big Data platform Hadoop, has steadily expanded and adjusted the focus of its technology stack. Now it is serving up new adjustments. Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF), Hortonworks' streaming data package, based on Apache NiFi, now includes Apache Storm and Apache Kafka.
If you're unfamiliar with Apache NiFi, it is built around Niagarafiles, which is software that the NSA created to aggregate sensor data on the right systems and generate analytics from the data. Onyara will give Hortonworks an important play as the Internet of Things shapes up.
My last full-time job was manager of a university's database department. Ironically, I know very, very little about databases themselves.
One of the tech sector's biggest upcoming trials—Oracle v. Google—careened Tuesday away from the hot-button topic of copyrighting application programming interfaces (APIs) and instead focused on the presiding judge's concern that the tech giants are setting up jurors to fail. US District Judge William Alsup believes it's all so the loser could challenge the verdict of the second upcoming trial set for May.
Judge Alsup said Tuesday that the tech giants jointly submitted a proposed questionnaire (PDF) for prospective panelists containing "so many vague questions" that "the loser on our eventual verdict will seek, if history is any guide, to impeach the verdict by investigating the jury to find some 'lie' or omission during voir dire."
When it comes to JavaScript, Oracle is not the first name that comes to mind. But the company this week is staking a bigger claim in Web development with the open source release of Oracle JET (JavaScript Extension Toolkit) 2.0.0.
"The aim of Oracle JET is to provide a stable basis for intermediate to advanced JavaScript developers to efficiently visualize data in the cloud," said Geertjan Wielenga, principal product manager in the Oracle tools group, in a blog post. Oracle has used JET to develop its own cloud applications during the past three years.
Less than five years ago Facebook announced the Open Compute Project (OCP), a cooperative industry effort that has resulted in the delivery of significantly more efficient hardware to a broader marketplace of high performance computing customers.
On a sunny November day, representatives of roughly 75 well-funded startups gathered at San Francisco art gallery for a first-time meetup.
That personal tidbit aside, another important part of March — especially this month — is that on the road to FreeBSD 11 sometime later this year, FreeBSD 10.3 is well along the way, with the third beta already available, according to a very detailed post by Marius Strobl on the FreeBSD Stable mailing list.
To summarize, installations for FreeBSD 10.3 Beta3 are now available for amd64, i386, ia64, PowerPC, Sparc and a variety of ARM processors. Checksums, too numerous to list here, can be found in Strobl’s original post, linked in the paragraph above.
With LLVM Clang 3.7 came full support for OpenMP 3.1 at long last but with OpenMP 4.5 being the latest spec, Intel and others involved with the Clang OpenMP initiative haven't let up and continue working towards supporting the latest OpenMP 4.x interfaces.
There are no doubt many eyes on OpenBSD's continuing network SMP renovation.
I have a pleasant announcement to make! On February 11, 2016, we have started a non-profit around the GNU Guix project, ââ¬Å¾Guix Europe“, and celebrated comme il faut with a bottle of champagne. Precisely, it is an ââ¬Å¾Association loi 1901“, named after the venerable French law first passed in 1901 (but many times amended since then).
Released GnuTLS 3.4.10 a bug fix release of the current stable branch.
The partnership could help raise awareness of open educational resources among faculty members. A recent study showed that many faculty members consider the cost of textbooks before deciding which course materials to assign to students. At the same time, many faculty members are unaware of OER. OpenStax says about 400,000 students are using its 16 free textbooks this academic year.
One answer to the problem of high textbook prices could be open source textbooks, which are available online at little or no cost.
Students with the North Carolina Public Interest Research Group’s textbook affordability campaign promoted open source textbooks in the Pit in February.
Sam Snider, the textbook affordability campaign coordinator, said the reason for high textbook prices is a lack of alternatives to traditional course materials.
“Think about textbooks. You want to make an A right? You gotta buy the textbook to make an A, so boom, you got no choice. Consumer choice, very low, and so that makes the price elasticity very low as well,” he said.
Programmers need some tools to writing application and scripts with them, one of the most important tool for programming is a good IDE (integrated development environment). there are different IDEs that you can use such as Pycharm, Spyder, vim, Emacs, Eclipse and ETC.
Last week, IBM reported to investors that its workforce at the end of 2015 was almost as big as its workforce at the end of 2014 (within less than 1 percent), in spite of a year in which 70,000 employees left the company, to be replaced with new hires and acquisitions.
By the end of this week, the picture may look quite different. Today reports are coming in that big layoffs across the United States are underway, likely one-third of the U.S. workforce, according to one soon-to-be-laid-off IBMer. (At the end of 2015, IBM had approximately 378,000 employees worldwide; it no longer breaks out numbers for individual countries.) Such reports used to be gathered by the Endicott Alliance, a union organizing effort that closed its doors last year. Now they are being collected by an informal Facebook group, “WatchingIBM,” that was started by former members of that organization.
Some good news for security researchers: the US government's adoption of the Wassenaar Arrangement will no longer treat the tools of security research like crates of machine guns. While exploits and penetration tools can be used by bad people for bad things, they're also invaluable to security researchers who use these to make the computing world a safer place.
Vague wording in the US government's proposed adoption of the 2013 version of the Wassenaar Arrangement threatened to criminalize the development of security research tools and make any researcher traveling out of the country with a laptop full of exploits an exporter of forbidden weapons.
Last year, the personal records of 100,000 taxpayers wound up in the hands of criminals, thanks to a flimsy authentication process in the agency's "Get Transcript" application. In short, the IRS used all-too-common static identifiers to verify taxpayer identity (information that could be found anywhere), allowing criminals to use the system to then obtain notably more sensitive taxpayer information and ultimately steal finances. At the time, the IRS breathlessly insisted it would be shoring up its security standards, though it failed to really detail how it would accomplish this.
1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface if you use the browser extensions.
Security guru Bruce Schneier has issued a stark warning to the RSA 2016 conference – get smart or face a whole world of trouble.
The level of interconnectedness of the world's technology is increasing daily, he said, and is becoming a world-sized web – which he acknowledged was a horrible term – made up of sensors, distributed computers, cloud systems, mobile, and autonomous data processing units. And no one is quite sure where it is all heading.
I suppose this was inevitable. As video games become more refined as an artform and as those games evince more realistic graphics, animations, and all the rest, I suppose it had to be that some folks out there would try to pass game footage off as real footage depicting their own power. I just never really thought it would be established nations that otherwise purport to be players on the world stage doing this. Yet, as we have seen done by Egypt, North Korea, and even Russia in the past, so too do we now find that Iran is trying to brag about its own military capability using game footage.
Iran’s state television has been running impressive footage claiming to show ace Hezbollah fighters picking off fighters from the Islamic State group (IS) one-by-one with clear, cold precision. But here’s the thing: this video looks just like a scene from a video game. And it is…
Apparently a new feature of the modern war of terror is the shameless, blameless, overt targeting of hospitals, doctors and bed-ridden patients, all without the means of even modest self-defense.
The Iraq invasion is a good example of Faulkner’s line about the past not even being past. Claims about the lead-up to the calamitous 2003 attack, who believed what and when, and even claims about the war’s impact on the course of Iraq and US history resurface repeatedly in US political discourse, including in the 2016 presidential election.
Parts of Britain could see almost four inches of snow on Friday, with flights delayed and motorists warned of treacherous driving conditions, as March continues to feel more like winter than spring.
Ploughs were used to clear the runway at Leeds Bradford Airport, in West Yorkshire, which was forced to close after northern England was hit with snow showers overnight.
Met Office weather warnings are in place for Northern Ireland, north Wales, northern and western England as well as Scotland as a cold frontal system continues to make its way in from the Atlantic.
Over the last year and a half a number of prominent voices in the Bitcoin community have been warning that the system needed to make fundamental changes to its core software code to avoid being overwhelmed by the continued growth of Bitcoin transactions. There was strong disagreement within the community, however, about how to solve this problem, or if the problem would ever materialize.
For a few years now, the city of Portland and the state of Oregon have been jumping through hoops to try and make Portland as attractive as possible for Google Fiber. That has involved rewriting city ordinances so that Google can place its utility cabinets along public rights of way, something previously banned in the city.
The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do.
Perhaps the most unusual feature of the Sandy Hook story is the large number of photographs that have been released in order to document the story. It is as if there is no event without the proof supplied by the photographs. This is unusual. When, for example, the FBI murdered approximately 100 men, women and children in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, the reality of the victims did not have to be established with a large number of photos establishing that the victims were real people with real families. When workers “go postal” and shoot their coworkers, photos are not used to prove that those killed were real people with real families. When an airplane crashes, the event does not have to be verified with news coverage of grieving relatives.
fter four years, MSNBC cancelled the talkshow of African-American writer and political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry. The cable news network had repeatedly pre-empted her weekend morning show, and in response to questions about her absence from MSNBC’s roster had scheduled Harris-Perry to appear in a weekend news-reading role.
[...]
So bringing up the status of people of color at the network is something that you can’t do at MSNBC without destroying your relationship there—despite the fact that, as CNN’s Dylan Byers (3/2/16) pointed out, MSNBC has cancelled or sidelined numerous non-white hosts in recent years, including Martin Bashir, Toure, Karen Finney, Al Sharpton, Joy Reid, Alex Wagner and José Díaz-Balart.
A council has been accused of taking the p*** - by trying to outlaw SWEARING in the streets at a posh docklands development.
Salford council has brought in a Public Space Protection Order to cover the Quays area in a bid to curb anti-social behaviour.
Part of the order says it will be deemed a criminal offence if anyone is caught “using foul and abusive language”,
But the order fails to give any guidance on which words will be considered “foul and abusive” enough to constitute a criminal offence.
Anyone breaching the conditions faces an on-the-spot fine.
It could be bad news for disgruntled Manchester United fans on their way back from Old Trafford - thousands use The Quays as a walking route to and from the ground.
Cracking down on this sort of thing is a decent enough notion in theory: if you were having a nice walk through Salford Quays, only for a complete stranger to scream, “No, fuck you!” in your face, then that would seem pretty anti-social.
[...]
What kind of swears might get you a fine is not exactly clear. Expletives generally break down pretty neatly into three groups: they relate to sex, bodily functions or religion. As Sam Leith once noted when reviewing a history of swearing for the Guardian: “Really, this book should have been called ‘Holy Fucking Shit’.”
But which of those categories – and which words within them – are most profane has often been subject to change. Blasphemy, which would once have got you a stint in the stocks, is now seen as largely inoffensive. Meanwhile the venerable old English word “cunt”, which Geoffrey Chaucer cheerfully used as a quaint source of puns, is now seen as the very worst word of all. All too often, offence is in the ears of the listener as much as the mouth of the speaker.
Last week, we wrote about the exciting decision by President Obama to nominate Dr. Carla Hayden to be the next Librarian of Congress. As we noted at the time, she seemed immensely qualified for the position, having successfully run and modernized the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. She also clearly recognized the importance of open access and access to culture. Given the job, there's really no honest reason that people can find to criticize the choice. She seems almost perfectly qualified for the position.
A congressional committee on Wednesday heard testimony from students and education experts in an attempt to forestall a troubling trend of censorship in higher education.
The Ways & Means Subcommittee on Oversight sought to clarify Internal Revenue Service rules that some universities have interpreted as requiring them to bar students from using school resources for partisan activity.
New Voices laws have been around for decades and have been enormously successful in restoring common sense to schools' and colleges' oversight of journalism, ensuring that students can write without fear about the issues on which their unique perspective needs to be heard. But the movement has taken on added urgency in recent months, for three main reasons.
Journalism student Maggie Gottlieb said protecting students from unfair censorship is important now more than ever, as school administrators continue to use prior review to control what their school's newspaper publishes.
She talked about abortion — and defended women's right to choose it.
In an email to artnet News this morning, the Armory Show's communications manager Audrey Rose Smith stood in solidarity with the Focus show's curators Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba over their decision not to include the potentially controversial text.
India's censor board has barred filmmakers from releasing censored parts of their films on the Internet. The move comes amidst a debate on the role of the government body and will give it unprecedented control over the censorship of online content as well.
The Censor board has now asked filmmakers to give an undertaking that they will not release uncensored parts of movies to anybody including online. The move is aimed to expand censorship on films to online platforms like YouTube and Netflix.
Days after China’s microblogging site Weibo was thrust back into the spotlight by the muzzling of one of its most influential users, a new report peels back the curtain on how the Twitter-like service handles censorship requests.
China plans to promulgate a new law with clear guidelines to promote "open and transparent" censorship system, a senior Chinese official said today, as the country expands its links with Hollywood and Bollywood.
A new bill to promote China's movie industry, world's second largest box office market, will provide clearer lines for filmmakers, Fu Yinga spokesperson for the annual Chinese national legislature the National People's Congress (NPC) said.
To highlight censored songs and artists throughout history, Music Freedom Day presents a playlist of 60 songs – available on Spotify – that highlights the theme of the event.
Mozilla today joined a coalition of technology companies, including Google, Nest Labs, Facebook, WhatsApp, Evernote, Snapchat and Microsoft, in filing an amicus brief in support of Apple’s position in its ongoing dispute with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In our brief we urge the district court not to force Apple to undo its own security protections to break into an iPhone.
Ultimately, companies like Mozilla are constantly striving to build more secure products. We make decisions every single day intended to protect our users. But those decisions affect all our users, which means Mozilla cannot weaken security for one user without effectively weakening it for everybody else. And it also means we cannot stand by as other companies are required to do so.
Today, RespectMyNet.eu is being relaunched. This a joint initiative by Access Now, Bits of Freedom, Digitale Gesellschaft, EDRi, Initiative fur Netzfreiheit, IT-POL, La Quadrature du Net, Nurpa, Open Rights Group, Xnet and several individual contributors.
Well here's a surprise. The Wall Street Journal Editorial board, which is notoriously pro-surveillance, has come out with an editorial that argues that Apple is right on encryption and should resist the FBI's demands. I was not expecting that. This is the same WSJ that fought hard against amending the PATRIOT Act, which it insisted was necessary for surveillance. This is the same WSJ that published an editorial calling Ed Snowden a sociopath and arguing for less oversight of the NSA. Hell, it's the same WSJ that a little over a year ago published a piece by former publisher L. Gordon Crovitz, arguing that Apple is crazy for not installing backdoors in its iPhones.
The argument used today by everyone from the FBI to our own government is that strong encryption weakens national security and presents a real and present danger to our wellbeing. But that same argument has been used in all the 'crypto wars' dating back at least thirty years, and it's as wrong now as it was then.
Binney is a former highly placed intelligence official for the National Security Agency-turned-whistleblower, as well as the subject of director Friedrich Moser’s fascinating, provocative documentary A Good American. If what Binney and Moser’s documentary suggests is true, then not only should the NSA leadership have been able to prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but their failure to do so was caused by arrogance, corruption, and greed of the highest order, all of which the agency has attempted to cover-up in the following years.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation insisted that it was helpless.
The bureau told a judge in February that Apple has the “exclusive technical means” to try to unlock the contents of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone — and that’s why it should be forced to do so.
While Apple continues to resist a court order requiring it to help the FBI access a terrorist's phone, another major tech company just took a strange and unexpected step away from encryption.
Amazon has removed device encryption from the operating system that powers its Kindle e-reader, Fire Phone, Fire Tablet, and Fire TV devices.
I and many others agree. Which raises serious questions why the company where Vogels is CTO seems to now be doing the exact opposite.
Facebook is being investigated in Germany for allegedly breaching data protection rules by forcing users to hand over too much personal information.
The country's competition watchdog said today that it suspects the social networking site of abusing its dominant market position to gather sensitive information.
The California-based firm has repeatedly faced challenges to its terms of service in Germany and last month was ordered to pay a fine for making excessive demands on the intellectual property of its users.
Honduran indigenous and environmental organizer Berta Cáceres has been assassinated in her home. She was one of the leading organizers for indigenous land rights in Honduras.
In 1993 she co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). For years the group faced a series of threats and repression.
According to Global Witness, Honduras has become the deadliest country in the world for environmentalists. Between 2010 and 2014, 101 environmental campaigners were killed in the country.
In 2015 Berta Cáceres won the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s leading environmental award. In awarding the prize, the Goldman Prize committee said, “In a country with growing socioeconomic inequality and human rights violations, Berta Cáceres rallied the indigenous Lenca people of Honduras and waged a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam.”
Now that Super Tuesday is behind us and the field of presidential candidates is narrowing with the suspension of Dr. Ben Carson's campaign, a potentially paradigm-shattering general election looms ever closer. "The stakes in this election have never been higher," Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said in her speech after she had been declared the victor over Sen. Bernie Sanders in seven of 11 Super Tuesday states. As Donald Trump, piling victory upon victory on top of insult upon insult, edges closer to clinching the Republican nomination, the GOP is in chaos, with some predicting a historic split in the party. The presidential race to date has been well-characterized by a line of closed captioning text from a recent Republican debate: "unintelligible yelling." The circuslike atmosphere masks deeply troubling statements made by several candidates that fan the flames of racism, white supremacy and xenophobia. It also deflects attention from a critical, and worsening, deficit in our democracy: the attack on the right to vote, and in particular, the wholesale disenfranchisement of close to 5 million Americans, mostly people of color.
This week, the Canadian government will begin forcing Canadian cable operators to provide cheaper, more flexible cable TV packages. Under the new CRTC rules, companies must provide a so-called "skinny bundle" of discounted TV channels starting March 1, and the option to buy channels a la carte starting December 1. But while the CRTC's attempt to force innovation on the cable industry may be well-intentioned, it's already clear that Canadian cable operators plan to do everything in their power to tap dance around the requirements.
For years incumbent ISPs like AT&T have spent millions lobbying for laws in roughly twenty states prohibiting towns and cities from building or expanding broadband networks -- even in cases of obvious market failure. The laws are pure protectionism, taking the right to make local infrastructure choices out of the hands of local communities -- all to protect companies like AT&T from the faintest specter of competition. And while some states have been waking up to the fact that letting AT&T write protectionist state law hurts consumers and state businesses longer term, Missouri apparently isn't one of those states.
Having your own advertising spread all around the internet is every company's dream. A dream that might become less pleasant, though, if that advertising starts infringing another company's trade mark and you can't manage to take it down, whilst the trade mark owner is breathing down your neck. In a nutshell, this is the factual scenario of the decision that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued today in Daimler AG Együd Garage Gépjármà ±javító és Ãâ°rtékesítà â Kft (C-179/2015). The ruling addresses the notion of "trade mark use" in online advertising and explores possible remedies against trade mark infringements on the internet that may be very useful in the era of viral marketing.
Mark Twain can be the subject of fascinating discussion for any number of reasons, but around these parts we talk intellectual property. Some years back, Mike wrote about Twain's support for copyright extensions, including when he even went so far as to advocate for infinite copyright. Well, it turns out that Twain's concept of infinite copyright might have been particularly germane to his legacy, as EFF's Parker Higgins takes us on a delightful stroll, over at Fusion, through the historical copyright case concerning the novel Twain might or might not have written...from beyond the grave.
The year 1917 was apparently a time in some ways even stranger than our own, in which the public was wrapped up in its interest in the occult. It was during that time that an author by the name of Emily Grant Hutchings attempted to publish the latest work of Twain's, entitled Jap Herron. Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens, had died in 1910, seven years earlier. So, how did Hutchings get Twain to write this book even as his body decomposed below ground? Why, through a Ouija board, of course!
In a decision of 28 January 2016, the Oberlandesgericht Munich, like the first instance court before it, held that YouTube is not liable for financial damages for hosting copyright infringing videos.
Plaintiff was the German collecting Society GEMA, acting on behalf of composers. It sent YouTube a list of 1,000 videos with music viewable on YouTube.com that were uploaded without the consent of the copyright holders and demanded information on the revenue generated by the display of these videos in preparation of claiming damages. When YouTube refused to comply, GEMA sued before the Landgericht Munich, which dismissed the complaint.