It’s okay because Linux, or projects that are Linux-based, came in the back door. Linux now runs everything from the on board computer in my car to the communication and guidance systems that are relaying data between Earth and Mars. If you think that’s impressive, let’s stretch it out about a billion more miles and say between Earth and Pluto. NASA and the New Horizons Project chose open source software and Linux in particular because of it’s modular abilities and its open source heart, not to mention the rock-solid stability. How many times would NASA risk bricking a $500 million solar probe by having to reboot a Windows core system after every update?
“Please do not reboot your half billion dollar space probe until Windows completes the current updates. (currently 12 of 8179).”
When they founded CoreOS, Brandon Philips and Alex Polvi set out to essentially redesign the Linux operating system for distributed systems.
They began by looking at the areas where they thought the whole server infrastructure space could be improved. Then zeroed in on one of the hurdles of distributed systems: deployments -- including application lifecycle management. They also realized that managing the lifecycle of all the files on disk -- the traditional job of a package manager -- is really hard.
That may be changing. According to a recent O’Reilly Media study, 40 percent of respondents already run Docker in production. Docker has 75-plus paying enterprise customers for its data center product, which was made generally available in February, and almost 6,000 paying customers of Docker Cloud, the company’s hosted service.
The Btrfs file-system updates for Linux 4.6 are not particularly exciting this round.
While there are many new features to the Linux 4.6 kernel, the Btrfs changes for this next kernel cycle are on the lighter side.
Thanks to AMD having released their new GPU-PRO "hybrid" Linux driver a few days ago, there is now Vulkan API support for Radeon GPU owners on Linux. This new AMD Linux driver holds much potential and the closed-source bits are now limited to user-space, among other benefits covered in dozens of Phoronix articles over recent months. With having this new driver in hand plus NVIDIA promoting their Vulkan support to the 364 Linux driver series, it's a great time for some benchmarking. Here are OpenGL and Vulkan atop Ubuntu 16.04 Linux for both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.
Today, March 22, 2016, the Samba development team has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first release in the Samba 4.4 series.
This is the first stable release of the Samba 4.4 release series.
Ruarí ÃËdegaard from the Vivaldi team announced on March 22, 2016, the release and immediate availability of a new snapshot of the Chromium-based web browser for all supported platforms.
Good news folks, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem which was previously named Umbra is sitll coming to Linux the developers confirmed to me.
Just a few moments ago, March 23, 2016, Valve pushed a new Beta of its Steam Client for all supported platforms, including SteamOS, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
Hyper Light Drifter is one I have kept an eye on since the Kickstarter, as graphically it looks vibrant and beautiful. The good news is the release date now set as the 31st of March should include Linux too.
Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet was funded on Kickstarter in 2013. The campaign was featured in The Funding Crowd #4, and though it wasn't certain at the time, the final product is a fully native and polished Linux build.
Fear not ARK lovers, as ARK: Survival Of The Fittest is confirmed to be coming to Linux. We don't know when exactly, but it's at least in their plans for release.
If you expand the Early Access text it directly mentions both Linux & Mac, which is really pleasing to see.
Tuesday, 22 March 2016. Today KDE releases a feature-packed new version of its desktop user interface, Plasma 5.6.
This release of Plasma brings many improvements to the task manager, KRunner, activities, and Wayland support as well as a much more refined look and feel.
Today, March 22, 2016, the KDE Project has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of the major KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.
Early adopters have been able to test the Beta of KDE Plasma 5.6 since the beginning of the month, but now the acclaimed and highly anticipated desktop environment has been promoted to the stable channel and declared ready for deployment in production environments.
We have been working hard over the last 4 months to prepare Kdenlive 16.04, that will be released with KDE Applications around the 20th of april. This release will brings many stability and usability improvements as well as dozens of new features. We are now entering feature freeze and will concentrate on fixing as many bugs as possible for the release.
KDE's Kdenlive non-linear video editor was added to KDE Applications 15.08 and since then it's continued to advance in step with the four-month updates to the stack...
To celebrate the release of KDE Plasma 5.6 we’ve made a tech preview of our KDE neon developer edition installable images built directly from developer Plasma/5.6 Git branches
Kdenlive, the free and open-source video editor software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD operating systems will be updated this spring to version 16.04, a release that promises a set of cool new features.
With GNOME 3.20 on final approach for landing tomorrow, 23 March, here's a recap of some of the exciting changes and new features of this six-month update to the GNOME stack.
WebKitGTK+ 2.12 is all ready for this week's GNOME 3.20 release.
Carlos Garcia Campos of Igalia has provided a nice overview of the changes and new features found in this version of WebKitGTK+, the browser layout engine used by some GNOME components.
How easily can you use your computer? Today, the graphical desktop is our primary way of doing things on our computers; we start there to run web browsers, music programs, video players, and even a command line terminal. If the desktop is too difficult to use, if it takes too many steps to do something, or if the cool functionality of the desktop is hidden so you can’t figure out how to use it, then the computer isn’t very useful to you. So it’s very important for the desktop to get it right. The desktop needs to be very easy for everyone to use.
The wait is almost over, and later today, March 23, the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating system will be unveiled in its final, production-ready version.
With this occasion, we thought it would be a very good idea to summarize the best new features that have been made available in GNOME 3.20. For users, the soon-to-be-released desktop environment will have a much-improved font that not only supports new languages but also looks better, for a modern look and feel.
During the GNOME 3.20 development cycle, most of the core apps received a keyboard shortcuts overlay, which internally is known as "shortcuts windows." It can be accessed from any graphical app with Ctrl+F1 and displays info about the available keyboard shortcuts and multitouch gestures for the respective application.
OpenWrt, the open-source, Linux kernel-based operating system for routers and embedded devices, has been updated today, March 22, 2016, to version 15.05.1, the first point release in the "Chaos Calmer" series.
OpenWrt 15.05.1 is here to update many of the internal components, starting with the Linux kernel, which is now at version 3.18.23 (it fixes a keyring reference leak), and continuing with the OpenSSL 1.0.2f, Samba 3.6, as well as netifd, uhttpd, rpcd, uci, procd, ubox, and hostapd.
Softpedia has been informed today, March 22, 2016, by Rescatux developer Adrian Raulete about the availability for download of the sixth Beta build of his upcoming Rescatux 0.40 system rescue Live CD.
For those of you not in the know, Rescatux is a free Live CD based on Debian technologies that can be used for fixing issues with GRUB and GRUB2 bootloaders. It is considered by its developer as a more advanced version of the popular Super Grub2 Disk Live CD, which is also created by Adrian Raulete.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced financial results for its fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal year ended February 29, 2016.
“Enterprises increasingly adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures and open source technologies drove our strong results. The fourth quarter marked our 56th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, contributing to Red Hat’s first fiscal year crossing $2 billion in total revenue,” stated Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat. “Customers are demanding technologies that modernize the development, deployment and life-cycle management of applications across hybrid cloud environments. Many are relying on Red Hat to provide both the infrastructure and the application development platforms to run their enterprise applications consistently and reliably across physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud environments.”
Red Hat, which promised a few months ago to hit $2 billion in annual revenue, has done so and now claims to be the world’s first open-source company to reach that milestone. It crossed the $1 billion-a-year line four years ago.
Just think: Some people still don't believe that you can make money from Linux and open-source software. Fools! Red Hat just became the first open-source company to make a cool 2 billion bucks.
Red Hat Inc. ( RHT ) is due to issue its quarterly earnings report in the upcoming extended-hours session. Given its history, traders can expect very active trading in the issue immediately following its quarterly earnings announcement. Historical earnings event related premarket and after-hours trading activity in RHT indicates that the price change in the extended hours is likely to be of limited value in forecasting additional price movement by the following regular session close.
In the past few years, cloud computing has been one of the fastest growing industries, dominated by large name companies in Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Today in Linux news "a feature-packed" KDE Plasma 5.6 was announced with "improvements to the task manager, KRunner, activities, and Wayland support." A new project melds FreeBSD with Ubuntu to "escape from systemd" and ââ¬â¹Red Hat becomes first $2 billion open-source company. Getting Started with LibreOffice 5.0 is now available and Edubuntu may be on its last legs.
Remember Pear OS? Of course you do, it is the popular GNU/Linux distribution that looked very much like a Mac OS X operating system but that, unfortunately, was acquired by a big company whose name we don't know even to this day.
Last year we reported on the fact that Portuguese developer Rodrigo Marques has created a clone of the Pear OS Linux operating system and published it on the well-known SourceForge project hosting website under the name PearOS.
At that point in time, PearOS presented a huge disappointment to existing Pear OS users, who were used to having a near perfect, tweaked desktop environment that resembled the look and feel of the Mac OS X operating system created by Apple.
Seco’s Linux-friendly COM Express Type 6 Compact module runs Linux on a 3rd Gen AMD R-Series SoC, and offers -40 to 85€°C operation and a Mini-ITX carrier.
If you are part of an organization looking to get into the community-support game, you would do well to tread carefully and deliberately. Communities, particularly at the start of your involvement in them, can be delicate and fragile things. Stomping in there with big words and big plans and big brand engagement will cause a lot of damage to the community and its ecosystem, often of the irreparable sort.
The Mattermost project was named because the developers wanted to emphasize the importance of communication. And the design provokes a conceptual shift in classroom communications. Unlike email, Mattermost is a convenient virtual meeting room and a central dashboard for our district technology operations. When everyone connects in a transparent conversation stream, collaboration naturally happens in the open. I was incredibly fond of our internal IRC system, but I really love the Mattermost platform. It costs nothing more than a little server space and occasional software update attention. But even better, it serves as the communication hub for our Student Technology Help Desk, and helps our students collaborate during times when they are not together in the same physical space during a given class block.
Much has changed within the storage channel over the past few years. New technologies, especially cloud-computing, have created innovative business models that have transformed not only what channel businesses sell, but the way they sell them too. As a result, many resellers have evolved into service providers in a process that is now fairly well understood.
However, there is another, lesser-known evolution that is equally important: not only is the channel changing, but so too are customers. This new type of customer is comfortable with cloud technologies and with the increasingly related area of open source operating systems, which they are looking to use in new ways. If channel organisations are to capitalise on these customers then they need to understand how they can add value through open source.
The increased focus and adoption of open source software is bolstering telecom operator plans, forcing vendors to rethink strategy
Szilvi Kádár, Daniella Kà ârössy, and I are the organizers of Django Girls Budapest, a free workshop that teaches women how to code. We held our first Django Girls workshop in December 2014, and we're currently planning our fourth event. We'd like to share some bits and pieces of event organizing advice, and we hope you'll find some useful ideas for your next event.
We are just forty-eight hours after LibrePlanet 2016 successfully concluded. The second day carried the energy and excitement from Saturday, and attendance remained strong in all sessions.
The Government of Uganda through National Information Technology Authority (NITA-U) will host the 7th African Conference on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Digital Commons (IDLELO 7) in August 2016. The conference aims to support uptake of Open Source in Uganda and the region.
The Ministry of ICT has recently developed a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) Policy to provide guidance on deployment of Open Source Software and the use of Open Standards as a means of accelerating Innovation and local content development.
Google today announced plans to kill off the Chrome app launcher for Windows, Mac, and Linux in July. The tool, which lets users launch Chrome apps even if the browser is not running, will continue to live on in Chrome OS.
As you might suspect, the Chrome app launcher was originally ported from Chrome OS. Google first started experimenting with bringing the app launcher to its desktop browser in May 2013. The Chrome app launcher debuted on Windows in July 2013, followed by OS X in December 2013, and finally Linux in July 2014.
Small business domain host GoDaddy is famous for its racy commercials and its long history of servicing domains, but now it is entering the cloud business and placing its bets on OpenStack. The company has expanded its hosting services to offer Cloud Servers and Bitnami-powered Cloud Applications. The new offerings are designed to help the individual developers, tech entrepreneurs and IT professionals to quickly build, test and scale cloud solutions.
The LibreOffice Documentation Team has published Getting Started with LibreOffice 5.0.
The Ghost open-source software project today announced the beta release of a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The tool allows people to update their Ghost blogs right from the desktop, so you no longer need to go to a website to do that.
Jordan Hubbard from the FreeNAS project, an open-source initiative to create a powerful, free, secure, and reliable NAS (Network-attached storage) operating system based on BSD technologies, announced the release of FreeNAS 9.10.
FreeNAS 9.10 is the tenth maintenance release in the current stable 9.x series of the project, thus bringing the latest security patches from upstream, support for new devices, as well as several under-the-hood updates. As expected, FreeNAS 9.10 has been rebased on the latest FreeBSD 10.3 RC3 (Release Candidate) release.
Summertime is fast approaching, and this means GSoC is fast approaching too. This year we have some interesting potential projects. Check it out, and if you’re interested, apply! You have until Friday (March 25th) to get your application in.
GNU Parallel 20160322 ('Bruxelles') has been released.
Poland’s new eGovernment strategy recommends that publicly financed software should use an open architecture, and consider publication under an open source licence. The eGovernment strategy twice emphasises the use of open source, for a new system of public registers and for a eInvoicing system that interoperates with a national document management system.
The European Commission and the European Parliament generally use open source tools and methods for software development, concludes the EU-FOSSA project, following a review of 15 ongoing projects. The institutions’ project management tools make room for agile, collaborative development cycles.
Almost two years after its launch and four months since it was open sourced, Swift 2.2 has been released by Apple. The update is a major one because it now runs on Linux. Officially, Swift runs on Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 15.10 but it won't be long until it unofficially arrives on other distros such as Arch and Manjaro via the Arch User Repository (or AUR).
That might sound reasonable, especially the last part about not being able to lobby for more funding. It is aimed mainly at organizations that receive government grants, but many academics believe that it is so loosely worded that it will also apply to them, and will prevent them from pushing for new regulations in any circumstances. Even if that is not the UK government's intention, the mere existence of the policy is bound to have a chilling effect on the academics, since few will want to run the risk of having their grants taken away by inadvertently breaking the new rules.
In this process, Apple’s marketing VP Phill Schiller went on to call the old Windows PCs “sad”.
The iPhone unit sales were set to decline this year.
The tool allows security researchers to quickly disassemble and inspect code in related binary files, Google officials said. Google has made available for free a tool for quickly spotting similarities and differences in related binary files or software code.
The BinDiff tool gives security researchers a way to identify and isolate fixes for vulnerabilities in vendor-supplied patches. It also gives them a way to disassemble and compare malicious software files for differences and similarities in code.
On the final day of his historic trip to Cuba, President Obama addressed the Cuban people. "The United States and Cuba are like two brothers that’ve been estranged for many years," Obama said. "We both live in a new world, colonized by Europeans. Cuba was in part built by slaves who were brought from Africa … Like the United States, Cuba can trace her heritage to both slaves and slave owners.”
Following in the proud tradition of governments everywhere who believe a push for transparency is best performed under the cover of darkness, the Canadian legislators behind an attempt to update the Access to Information Act have decided to keep their transparency discussions secret.
Republican presidential candidates haven't exactly set a high bar for their understanding of climate science during the 2016 race so far. However, front-runner Donald Trump wins the prize for the most confounding denial of global warming expressed by a major party's presidential candidate to date.
The CEO of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s visited a fully automated restaurant, and it’s given him some evil ideas on how to deal with rising minimum wages.
MEPs highlight concerns about self-censorship in the Albanian media and deplore defamation threat to BIRN Albania following its investigation into candidates in the 2015 local elections.
We've written about Donald Trump's announced plans to "open up libel laws" which was specifically directed at the Washington Post, which he argued was purposely writing bad articles about him. Despite the fact that, even as President, he can't really change such laws (there's a little First Amendment issue to deal with), we noted that he can create real problems for free expression. For example, by blocking a federal anti-SLAPP bill from becoming law. And Trump is no stranger to SLAPP suits that are used to threaten or filed solely to silence people. He's threatened or sued an awful lot of people over perceived slights, such as claiming it was defamation to post a picture of him next to a picture of South Carolina murderer Dylann Roof. And then, of course, there's the famous case where he sued reporter Tim O'Brien for writing a book about him (that was actually mostly positive), but which pointed out that he was probably "only" worth a few hundred million dollars, rather than $10 billion.
Facebook and other social media are having a 'chilling effect' on our freedom by making us behave as if we are under constant surveillance, according to new research.
Facebook and other social media are having a 'chilling effect' on our freedom by making us behave as if we are under constant surveillance, according to new research.
Users are self censoring their day-to-day activities to avoid disapproval from online friends and family.
Now scientists warn that the fear of constant surveillance has led to a blurring of our online and offline lives and reduced our freedom.
The study of more than a hundred 19 to 22 year olds revealed they would hide cigarettes if pictures were being taken at parties for fear of being frowned upon for smoking.
It included in-depth interviews with 28 of the participants and experiments involving a further 80.
Since the autumn there has been speculation as to what, exactly, the regents would vote on; how would “tolerance” be defined? Well, now we know, and the document under discussion still shows the two main perspectives of the prior discussions. We see efforts to produce a broad and positive statement for tolerance, and also the fingerprints of those who wish to smuggle in a false and destructive equation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, thereby making the University of California a place where any criticism of a certain state’s illegal policies is intolerable.
The manner in which this is done in the current draft is deceptive and underhanded. In the main body of the text, the rightful condemnation of anti-Semitism is clear and unadorned: “In a community of learners, teachers, and knowledge-seekers, the University is best served when its leaders challenge speech and action reflecting bias, stereotypes, and/or intolerance. Anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination have no place in the University. The Regents call on University leaders actively to challenge anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination when and wherever they emerge within the University community.”
The second iteration of the Silk Road drug marketplace was shuttered in November 2014, almost exactly a year after it opened. Now, 17 months later, the right hand man of that website has accepted a plea agreement in a district court in the Western District of Washington.
Brian Farrell has formally admitted to being “DoctorClu,” a staff member of Silk Road 2.0 who provided customer and technical support, approved vendors, and promoted other employees, according to a court document filed earlier this month.
The Tor Project is fortifying its software so that it can quickly detect if its network is tampered with for surveillance purposes, a top developer for the volunteer project wrote on Monday.
There are worries that Tor could either be technically subverted or subject to court orders, which could force the project to turn over critical information that would undermine its security, similar to the standoff between Apple and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Tor developers are now designing the system in such a way that many people can verify if code has been changed and "eliminate single points of failure," wrote Mike Perry, lead developer of the Tor Browser, on Monday.
Anyone who values anonymity can benefit.
There continue to be many people around the globe who want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously, despite the fact that some people want to end Internet anonymity altogether. Typically, the anonymous crowd turns to common tools that can keep their tracks private, and one of the most common tools of all is Tor, an open source tool used all around the world.
Even as Apple continues to make headlines as it squares off with the FBI over privacy issues, Mike Perry, lead developer of the Tor Browser, wrote in a blog post that Tor developers are hardening the Tor system in such a way that people can verify if code has been changed and "eliminate single points of failure." "Even if a government or a criminal obtains our cryptographic keys, our distributed network and its users would be able to detect this fact and report it to us as a security issue," Perry wrote.
The Idaho mother who sued President Barack Obama over alleged unconstitutional telephone metadata collection has lost again in court. Anna Smith had her initial case dismissed in 2014, and this week her appeal met a similar fate.
On Tuesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Smith, finding that her case was now moot in light of the new changes to the now-expired Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
Anna Smith, a nurse and mother of two, sued President Barack Obama and other high-ranking government officials in June 2013, upon the exposure of a program that collected metadata from every American's phone records.
You may remember that, right after the Paris attacks late last year, politicians rushed in to demonize encryption as the culprit, and to demand backdooring encryption before the blood was even dry. Of course, it later turned out that there was no evidence that they used encryption at all, but rather it appears that they communicated by unencrypted means. Just yesterday, we noted that the press was still insisting encryption was used, and using the lack of any evidence as evidence for the fact they must have used encryption (hint: that's not how encryption works...).
A three-judge federal appeals panel has partly dismissed an Idaho woman's lawsuit over the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records as moot.
Nurse Anna J. Smith sued the government in 2013, arguing that the agency's collection of call records violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has stepped in to prevent a massive hack attack on Britain's energy networks after discovering so-called "smart meters" - designed to replace 53 million gas and electricity meters can be easily hacked.
As leading presidential candidates spoke at the Washington gathering of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), promising support and a crackdown on boycotts of Israel, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders made a dissenting speech in Salt Lake City, where he spoke up for suffering Palestinians. It received little broadcast media attention.
As Sanders trails Clinton in delegate count, his campaign has effectively been discounted by major media.
The Transportation Security Administration finally obeyed a 2011 federal court order March 3 and issued a 157 page Federal Register notice justifying its controversial full-body scanners and other checkpoint procedures. TSA’s notice ignored the fact that the "nudie" scanners are utterly unreliable; TSA failed to detect 95% of weapons and mock bombs that Inspector General testers smuggled past them last year while the agency continues to mislead the public about its heavy-handed treatment of travelers.
The Federal Register notice is full of soothing pablum about how travelers have no reason to fear the TSA, declaring that "passengers can obtain information before they leave for the airport on what items are prohibited." But it neglects to mention that TSA can invoke ludicrous pretexts to treat innocent travelers as suspicious terrorist suspects.
Flying home from Portland, Ore., on Thanksgiving morning, I had a too-close encounter with TSA agents that spurred me to file a Freedom of Information Act request. On March 5, I finally received a bevy of TSA documents and video footage with a grope-by-grope timeline.
President Barack Obama is in Cuba, and Silicon Valley is tagging along for the ride.
Executives from several technology companies are traveling with the U.S. president on his goodwill tour or introducing new business initiatives focused on the island—or both. Among the companies joining the Cuba parade this week are Google parent Alphabet Inc., Airbnb Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc., Priceline Group Inc., Stripe Inc., and Xerox Corp.
The protest began outside the W3C office and continued with a march past Google's Cambridge office, to Microsoft's office nearby. The companies are both supporters of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), the proposal to enshrine DRM in Web standards. The protest included free software users and developers, including Richard Stallman and Chris Webber, the maintainer of the GNU MediaGoblin decentralized publishing platform. A small number of protesters split from the group to enter the W3C meeting, then were ejected by police.
DRM in Web standards would make it cheaper and more politically acceptable to impose restrictions on users, opening the floodgates to a new wave of DRM throughout the Web, with all the vulnerabilities, surveillance and curtailed freedom that DRM entails.
Part of the fun of covering the sort of silly trademark disputes that we do here at Techdirt is seeing just how far companies, most often large companies, will go in trying to apply protectionist habits where they don't belong. This typically manifests itself in the key marketplace aspect of trademark law, where the brands in question are to be competing for customers who might become confused for an infringement to have occurred. Too often this aspect of the law appears to go ignored in claims of infringement, or else the concept of competitive marketplaces is stretched to the point of absurdity. As I said, this is often times amusing to us, because we're strange.
A UK's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has charged a man for operating several proxy sites and services that allowed UK Internet users to bypass local pirate site blockades. In a first of its kind prosecution, the Bakersfield resident is charged with several fraud offenses and one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property.
Everyone behind the failed clown school that was Prenda Law deserves what's happening to Paul Hansmeier. Unfortunately, it appears Hansmeier is taking the most damage from the fallout of Prenda's disastrous copyright trolling… or at least he's the one doing most of his suffering in public.
Of course, it's his own fault. Rather than get out of the trolling business, Hansmeier doubled down. He swapped porn stars for wheelchairs, pursuing small businesses for Americans with Disabilities Acts violations. Fronting as a public interest, Hansmeier's "Disabilities Support Alliance" is every bit the serial litigant Prenda was.