First, let me try to subjectively summarize the problem: Historically, the resources we get in GNU/Linux come from the distributions. Anything: executables, libraries, icons, wallpapers, etc. There’s been alternatives to all of those, but none has flourished as a globally adopted solution.
A recent survey by the Uptime Institute of 1,000 IT executives found that 50 percent of senior enterprise IT executives expect the majority of IT workloads to reside off-premise in cloud or colocation sites in the future. Of those surveyed, 23 percent expect the shift to happen next year, and 70 percent expect that shift to occur within the next four years.
Running Docker containers securely as part of a DevOps pipeline is a process that has many steps and requires diligence. That's the message coming from Cem Gurkok, lead information security engineer at Salesforce, in a session at the DockerCon 16 conference here.
While containers do represent a somewhat different paradigm for developers, security professionals might have a different view.
Docker is one of the most hyped technologies in IT today, as containers have gone mainstream. At the DockerCon 16 event, which was held June 19-21 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, 4,000 people gathered to learn and talk about Docker. Among the news coming out of the event was the release of Docker 1.12, which includes an integrated container orchestration capability referred to as Swarm mode. Docker CEO Ben Golub, meanwhile, said IaaS and PaaS either deliver too little or too much of what an organization needs, so he sees the emerging containers-as-a-service (CaaS) space growing, which is where Docker is aiming to play with its Docker Datacenter technology. Golub also announced a public beta of the Docker Store, which is a curated set of containerized applications that users can obtain, Also debuting was the public beta release of the Docker native application for Windows and Mac, opening up those products from the private beta that was first announced in March. Other public betas announced at DockerCon were Docker for Azure and Docker for AWS public clouds. The general idea with the new public beta releases is to provide more seamless, integrated experiences for users of specific platforms when using Docker. In a keynote at the conference, Docker founder Solomon Hykes claimed most people don't care about containers; they actually just really care about applications. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the DockerCon 16 conference.
There is a lot of hype and some confusion in the world of IT today about precisely what Docker is and how it enables the emerging world of micro-services. At the Dockercon 16 conference this week in Seattle, there were many talks explaining Docker capabilities, but it was perhaps the Day 2 keynotes that explained it best with some exemplary metaphors.
According to Keith Fulton, CTO at ADP, Docker is a lot like chicken nuggets and waffle cones (though not necessarily eaten together at the same time). ADP, one of the world's largest payroll processing firms, has over 630,000 clients. Fulton noted that ADP does more than just payroll today, and considered itself to be a Human Capital Management (HCM) firm, with services including recruiting and 401K planning.
After announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.6.3, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the availability of the fourteenth maintenance update for the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
Linux Foundation's open source Hyperledger Project has announced the addition of seven new members to the collaborative cross-industry effort that aims to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing important features and currently missing requirements.
The Hyperledger Project, a collaborative cross-industry effort created to advcance Blockchain technology, announced today that seven new members have joined to help reate an open standard for distributed ledgers for a new generation of transactional applications.
The context here was that we could almost get rid of thread-info entirely, at least for x86-64, by moving it into struct task_struct.
To finish things up, here is a fresh comparison of Intel Skylake HD Graphics under Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04.
There's a lot of benchmarking going on this weekend at Phoronix in preparation for next week's Radeon RX 480 Linux review. Here are some fresh results on the NVIDIA side showing the current performance-per-dollar data for the NVIDIA Maxwell and Pascal graphics cards for seeing what the RX 480 "Polaris 10" card will be competing against under Linux.
There was a 30~40% drop in some of the SPEC Java benchmarks when using the Linux 4.7 development code, but fortunately this regression has now been discovered and addressed.
If you are hoping to get your hands on a Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" graphics card when they begin shipping in a few days, here are the upgrades you need to make to your Linux system if you are wanting to make use of the open-source AMD Linux graphics stack.
The AMD developers still have a few more weeks to get their new feature material ready for the Linux 4.8 kernel while here is an early look at some of the code merged so far.
One of the changes we're looking forward to most with the AMDGPU DRM of Linux 4.8 is the OverDrive overclocking support. Finally the ability with the open-source AMD stack to overclock your GPU easily, but it's only supported for AMDGPU-capable hardware. There are commits though in the 4.8 W.I.P. branch for enabling the overclocking for Sea Islands with that experimental AMDGPU support. Another addition since the original AMDGPU overclocking support is there's now support for video memory overclocking too. Similar to the GPU core re-clocking, the memory overclocking can be done up to 20% in 1% steps.
With doing a lot of tests for next week's Radeon RX 480 Linux review, here are the numbers of some current AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards (obviously excluding the RX 480 that's still under NDA) under Linux with the performance-per-Watt.
On Saturday I posted some fresh NVIDIA performance-per-dollar Linux benchmarks for those wondering what the RX 480 will be going up against under Linux. Today are some performance-per-Watt figures in a similar manner with my GeForce Maxwell and Pascal cards along with a few pre-Pascal AMD GPUs.
Following the recent Windows vs. Linux AMDGPU-PRO / RadeonSI testing, GTX 1080 Windows vs. Linux results, and yesterday's Intel Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, here is a look at all three sets of numbers when using some OpenBenchmarking.org magic to merge the data-sets and normalize the results.
The trouble with video files is that they are not easily parseable. How can your computer tell whether that 8 GB file in your ~/Movies folder is the latest superhero movie, or your daughter's soccer game?
I consider myself an early adopter of digital content. I prefer a digital format, and since I consume a lot of independent content that doesn't have the budget for physical releases anyway, most of my purchases are digital files. I keep these on an NFS shared drive, and stream to Kodi or ncmpcpp, or whatever media client I happen to be using on any given Linux or Android device.
Recently I upgraded my laptop's Linux to the latest release, and I was surprised and saddened to discover that the wonderful music player Guayadeque seems to be considered as dead upstream, at least in Debian and Ubuntu. In a January blog post, the original author Juan Rios (@anonbeat) wrote that he is no longer able to support the code, which relies on outdated version of GStreamer 0.10. (When I asked about the status of Guayadeque on AskUbuntu, someone replied that it can now be built from source using the code on GitHub, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.)
If you're blind or visually impaired like I am, you usually require various levels of hardware or software to do things that people who can see take for granted. One among these is specialized formats for reading print books: Braille (if you know how to read it) or specialized text formats such as DAISY.
GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.
Data loss is one of those things we never want to worry about. To that end we go to great lengths to find new techniques and software packages to ensure those precious bits of data are safely backed up to various local and remote media.
A couple of weeks ago we released another significant milestone of the ownCloud Client, called version 2.2.0, followed by two small maintenance releases.
The Wine camp is out with their latest bi-weekly development release where they have continued focusing on some of the same work items they've been trying to address the past few releases.
Wine 1.9.13 features continued work on Shader Model 5 (SM5) support as needed for Direct3D 11 support. Wine 1.9.13 also is making more progress towards Direct3D Command Stream support for the long-standing multi-threaded work to boost Wine gaming performance. However, for Wine 1.9.13 the CSMT work hasn't landed nor separately is the D3D11 work yet in usable form.
Today, June 24, 2016, the Wine development team has announced the release and immediate availability for download of the Wine 1.9.13 snapshot towards Wine 2.0.
The Wine team released today another development release of their software. Version 1.9.13 has many small changes including 34 bugfixes.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) announced that Breathing Games an international community working to improve the quality of health care and life expectancy for people with respiratory disease through therapeutic, science-based-and fun-games, had become an affiliate member.
With one person in five now affected by chronic respiratory diseases-asthma, obstructive disease, and cystic fibrosis among many others-creating effective and engaging patient therapies is an increasingly challenging public health care issue. Patients, especially children, often perceive effective, traditional breathing exercises as boring and tedious. Poor patient compliance results in additional hospitalizations and increased costs. Research shows health-based gaming delivers promising results in positively changing behaviors and influencing health care practices.
Version 5.0 of the open-source Dolphin Emulator for playing Nintendo GameCube and Wii games on Windows/Linux/OSX is now available.
Dolphin 5.0 is powered by a revitalized dynamic compiler, requires OpenGL 3.x support (or Direct3D 10 on Windows), there is also an experimental D3D12 back-end but not yet any Vulkan back-end.
The developers of FORCED SHOWDOWN have emailed in to let us know that the deck building action twin-stick game is now available on Linux.
They have even sent in a key, so you can expect some thoughts on it soon.
GOG have now added in a Linux build for Two Worlds Epic Edition that requires Wine in order to function.
I have no problem with Wine being used to bring over older games.
As you may know (unless you’ve been living in Alpha Centauri for the past century) the openSUSE community KDE team publishes LiveCD images for those willing to test the latest state of KDE software from the git master branches without having to break machines, causing a zombie apocalypse and so on. This post highlights the most recent developments in the area.
The campaign season is over, and we’re slowly recovering and getting back into a productive groove of coding, coding, coding and more. Kickstarter has transferred €34,594.37 to our bank account, and we’ve started planning the next releases. Time for an update!
I was wondering if i should just be silent, since this is a negative post about Plasma. On the other hand we should not be afraid negative critics, learn from them, improve and make a better product. With that in mind, I decided to write this post anyway in hopes that it will ultimately improve the situation where improvements would be nice.
The developers of the KaOS Linux operating system have had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the KaOS 2016.06 ISO image with some very exciting goodies.
First and foremost, the devs have decided to move the distribution from the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series to Linux kernel 4.6, which makes it possible to fully automate the early microcode update. Furthermore, the default desktop environment has been migrated to the Beta of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.7.
Hi folks, now is the time to show the achievements which kept me busy from a month during the coding period for my ‘Google Summer of Code’ project LabPlot Theme Manager and taught me so many things related to an open-source community (KDE). This was a wonderful experience for me to brush up my coding skills and grow up a little-bit as a programmer.
DigiKam earlier used DBus under Linux system, but its support under Windows and OS X made digiKam unstable. The database core implementation based on DBUS was only used with old KIOSalve which is now removed.
After some work in the plugin development, now the project have a strong focus in a better integration with KDevelop workflow. Until now the Board Configuration window have some simple features to perform the upload process for beginner users, it's called by the embedded submenu in the KDevelop toolbar.
Thanks to a bug found in Spice's drag and drop implementation, I was able to improve the integration of our guest agent (spice-vdagent) with the Desktop Session on Linux and Windows. I enjoyed the process to solve those problems so I thought a blog post could be interesting as well.
Following the recent work we’ve been doing at Codethink in cooperation with Endless, it’s been a while now that we have the capability of building flatpak SDKs and apps for ARM architectures, and consequently also for 32bit Intel architectures.
The developers of one of the smallest GNU/Linux operating systems, Tiny Core, have announced that the next point release in the Tiny Core Linux 7 series, version 7.2, is now open for development.
Tiny Core Linux 7.2 RC1 (Release Candidate 1) has been released today, June 25, 2016, and it lets early adopters and public testers get an early taste of what's coming to the final Tiny Core Linux 7.2 operating system in the coming weeks.
The keynote speaker for the openSUSE Conference today and Chief Executive Officer of SoftIron, Norman Fraser, Ph.D., made a big announcement about the release of a new powerful ARM server that comes with essential tools to get the 64-bit ARM development up and running, out-of-the-box.
From 22 to 26 June, the openSUSE Conference has been taking place in Nürnberg. There's been live video streams for those not in Bavaria while now the video recordings are being uploaded for your enjoyment at your convenience.
The Microsoft Red Hat partnership became one of the more attention-grabbing alliances of 2015. The two became chummy after years of fierce rivalry when Red Hat solutions were made available on Microsoft Azure as well as colocation of support personnel. The partnership would also see Microsoft offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the first choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure.
The open source leader has made a habit of churning out consistent, profitable growth, even as its would-be open source peers rake in billions from VCs only to see it evaporate in the frenzied pursuit of paying customers. I've suggested that such companies need to become boring like Red Hat, but Red Hat's growth no longer looks pedestrian.
Fedora Linux is the community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL. Fedora 24 is comprised of a set of base packages that form the foundation of three distinct editions: Fedora 24 Cloud, Fedora 24 Server and Fedora 24 Workstation.
Delayed four times during its development cycle, Fedora 24 includes glibc 2.23 for better performance, and improvements to POSIX compliance and GNU Compiler Collection 6. All base packages have been rebuilt with GCC 6, providing better code optimization across all Fedora 24 editions, and improving the overall stability of each addition.
In the past we have had a tradition of sponsoring EMEA contributors that would like to attend Flock but are not going to receive funding as speakers.
FMN is the FedMsg Notification service. It allows any contributors (or actually, anyone with a FAS account) to tune what notification they want to receive and how.
This week is the Google Summer of Code 2016 midterm evaluation week. Over the past month since the program started, I’ve learned more about the technology I’m working with, implementing it within my infrastructure, and moving closer to completing my proposal. My original project proposal details how I am working with Ansible to bring improved automation for WordPress platforms within Fedora, particularly to the Fedora Community Blog and the Fedora Magazine.
It’s baseball season, and in baseball about this time of year talk turns to trades. Well, I’ve been traded for one game…er, review. That means that although I’ve downloaded and installed Fedora 24 on our test machine, I can’t really give it a full review here. However, I’ll make sure to point you to the review as soon as it goes up “on another network,” as Johnny Carson used to say. All I can tell you now is that so far it seems to do what it does well.
Matthias Klose has provided an update concerning plans for having GCC 6 become the default compiler of Debian 9.0 "Stretch."
Everything still is on target for making GCC 6 the default for Stretch; GCC6 is currently available in Debian Testing, build failures are being worked through in the testing/unstable world, and there will be some bug squashing parties this summer for trying to get GCC 6 into shape.
Coming hot on the heels of the Linux AIO Debian Live 7.11.0 release, Linux AIO Debian Live 8.4 is now available for download for all those who want to have a single ISO image with all the essential Debian GNU/Linux 8.5.0 Live CDs.
Linux AIO Debian Live 8.5.0 will offer you a bootable, live ISO image that contains the Debian GNU/Linux 8.5.0 Cinnamon, Debian GNU/Linux 8.5.0 KDE, Debian GNU/Linux 8.5.0 GNOME, Debian GNU/Linux 8.5.0 MATE, Debian GNU/Linux 8.5.0 Xfce, and Debian GNU/Linux 8.5.0 LXDE Live editions.
Hating jetlag based headache. Disturbed to see the Brexit result. Review wiki RecentChanges. Answer some questions about Launchpad on #debian-mentors. Whitelisted one user in the wiki anti-spam system. Reviewed and sponsored yamllint 1.2.2-1 upload. Noted OFSET repo is broken and updated Freeduc info. Noted the Epidemic-Linux website is having database issues. Noted that Facebook finally completely dropped their RSS feeds, dropped Facebook RSS feed URL generation from the Debian derivatives census scripts and notified the affected derivatives. Cleared up Tanglu hash sum mismatches again. Minor changes to Planet Debian derivatives.
Debian developer Matthias Klose has announced that the new GCC 6 compiler, which will be made the default GCC compiler for the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system, is now available in the Debian Testing repos.
Debian users who are currently using Debian Testing can make GCC 6 the default compiler by installing the gcc/g++ packages from experimental. If installing it, they are also urged to help fix reported built failures in Debian Testing and Debian Unstable.
The Snappy vs. Flatpak story continues, and Canonical is now demonstrating how easy it is to roll out a vendor-independent Snap store on the recently released Fedora 24 Linux operating system.
A couple of days ago, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth finally answered one of the big questions many members of the GNU/Linux community had been asking since the unveiling of Snaps as universal binary formats for major Linux kernel-based operating systems.
It's a bit earlier than expected, but the Peppermint OS 7 GNU/Linux distribution has been officially unveiled today, June 24, 2016, based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.
Peppermint OS 7 has been in development for the past year, and it comes as a drop-in replacement for the Peppermint Six version, which was officially released back in May 2015. It is distributed as 64-bit and 32-bit flavors for all computers, but the 64-bit one also offers complete support for UEFI/Secureboot systems.
On Kickstarter, a “MyPi” industrial SBC using the RPi Compute Module offers a mini-PCIe slot, serial port, wide-range power, and modular expansion.
You might wonder why in 2016 someone would introduce a sandwich-style single board computer built around the aging, ARM11 based COM version of the original Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. First off, there are still plenty of industrial applications that don’t need much CPU horsepower, and second, the Compute Module is still the only COM based on Raspberry Pi hardware, although the cheaper, somewhat COM-like Raspberry Pi Zero, which has the same 700MHz processor, comes close.
Android-x86 and GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton has informed Softpedia today, June 25, 2016, about the immediate availability of a new build of his RaspAnd distribution for Raspberry Pi single-board computers.
RaspAnd Build 160625 is the first to move the Android-x86-based distro to the latest Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow mobile operating system created by Google. And in the good tradition of the RaspAnd project, both Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Raspberry Pi 2 Model B are supported.
ADI Engineering, which built the latest MinnowBoard Turbot version of the open-spec, Linux- and Android-ready MinnowBoard SBC for the Intel-backed MinnowBoard.org community, has revealed a major update. Pricing and a few other details are missing from the announcement tweet, but there are photos and a full spec list. The board will ship in the third quarter.
Samsung will be utilising Tizen as the underlying technology that will be developed...
The Samsung Gear 360 camera was originally launched at this years Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain. Now we see that the camera, that has the unique feature of being able to take 360 degree video, has gone on sale in the United States. This is a limited release for the camera before the actual nationwide / global release.
Good news, one of my favourite games Control Tower has been released in the Tizen Store for Samsung Z1 and Samsung Z3, where you need to guide aeroplanes, helicopters, aircraft to their landing zone, without letting them collide. This action game is developed by game dev Bojan Skaljac, and download size is only 3.48mb. Overall the game play is pretty good and very addictive, but the down side is that in the free version we can only play one level out of 4.
iOS vs. Android has always been a burning topic for debates all over the internet. There are numerous users who have changed their Android smartphone with an Apple iPhone and later regretted their decision. In this article I’ll point out the reasons for which Android users switch to iOS and the problems they face after it.
In the first quarter of 2016, the global market share of Android was 84.1% in the first quarter of 2016. On the other hand, iOS with 14.8% market share worldwide was the next closest platform. However, the global market share of iOS witnessed a decline from 17.9% during the corresponding period last year.
As we move further down to the second half of 2016, the smartphone market is expected to get more competitive.
After the launch of major flagship smartphones like Samsung Galaxy S7, LG G5, HTC 10, Xiaomi Mi 5, OnePlus 3 and others in India, companies are now likely to focus on the mid-range segment in the next few weeks. Of course, we have Apple iPhone 7, Samsung Galaxy Note 6, the next Nexus smartphone series coming too, but they are still far.
Here are nine Android smartphones expected to launch in India soon.
He made the said comment in a Weibo post, where-in he also noted that Google's mobile OS has promoted the development of smartphones, which in turn has benefited consumers.
Interestingly, he didn't say anything about whether or not Huawei is developing an in-house mobile OS - said to be called Kirin OS. His silence on the matter, though, can be taken as a confirmation of sorts, especially when his comment reflects the possibility of Google restricting the companies’ freedom with Android in future.
To increase developer support and diversity in the Node.js open source community, the Node.js Foundation earlier this year brought in Tracy Hinds to be its Education Community Manager. She is charged with creating a certification program for Node.js, increasing diversity, and improving project documentation, among other things.
Eight months ago, without a lot of fanfare, a startup company called Snyk, with roots in London and Israel, started talking about its unique focus on helping developers keep open source code secure. Specifically, Snyk monitors vulnerabilities and dependencies in open source code and integrates securing open source into common developer workflows. The bottom line is that code vulnerabilities get checked in real-time, rather than getting focused on during official audits.
Now, Snyk is coming out of beta with its tools, and releasing some metrics on how successful it has been at finding probems and patching them.
When do you know a technology or process has reached the peak of its hype cycle and crossed over to the mainstream? When there's an executive dashboard to track key performance indicators.
US-based financial services company Capital One birthed an open source project that provides a dashboard for DevOps projects. The project, called Hygieia, is notable for several reasons.
Back when people were still using the term “Web 2.0,” everyone was excited about Twitter‘s impact on journalism. After all, anyone could use it. Maybe it could crowd-source journalism starting from the exact moment a newsworthy event happened across the globe!
Social media newsgathering and verification are no longer novel practices in the newsroom. But even if publishers now have a person or a team of reporters tasked with monitoring conversations on these platforms and verifying their accuracy, there have still been instances of fake rumours or misrepresented facts spreading online when news breaks.
A team of researchers, developers and journalists is hoping to solve this through the EU-funded project Pheme, an open-source dashboard they are currently building to help newsrooms detect, track and verify facts and claims the moment they start spreading on Twitter.
Defined in ETSI ISG NFV architecture, MANO (Management and Network Orchestration) is a layer — a combination of multiple functional entities — that manages and orchestrates the cloud infrastructure, resources and services. It is comprised of, mainly, three different entities — NFV Orchestrator, VNF Manager and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM). The figure below highlights the MANO part of the ETSI NFV architecture.
Container software and its related technologies are on fire, winning the hearts and minds of thousands of developers and catching the attention of hundreds of enterprises, as evidenced by the huge number of attendees at this week’s DockerCon 2016 event.
The big tech companies are going all in. Google, IBM, Microsoft and many others were out in full force at DockerCon, scrambling to demonstrate how they’re investing in and supporting containers. Recent surveys indicate that container adoption is surging, with legions of users reporting they’re ready to take the next step and move from testing to production. Such is the popularity of containers that SiliconANGLE founder and theCUBE host John Furrier was prompted to proclaim that, thanks to containers, “DevOps is now mainstream.” That will change the game for those who invest in containers while causing “a world of hurt” for those who have yet to adapt, Furrier said.
The company’s product, called Apstra Operating System (AOS), takes policies based on the enterprise’s intent and automatically translates them into settings on network devices from multiple vendors. When the IT department wants to add a new component to the data center, AOS is designed to figure out what needed changes would flow from that addition and carry them out.
The distributed OS is vendor-agnostic. It will work with devices from Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Juniper Networks, Cumulus Networks, the Open Compute Project and others.
Converged data vendor MapR has launched a new global partner program for resellers and distributors to leverage the company's integrated data storage, processing and analytics platform.
Activision Publishing, a computer games publisher, uses a Mesos-based platform to manage vast quantities of data collected from players to automate much of the gameplay behavior. To address a critical configuration management problem, James Humphrey and John Dennison built a rather elegant solution that puts all configurations in a single place, and named it Pheidippides.
The platform includes a large number of tools including Logstash, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, and Kibana.
We've been watching the Big Data space pick up momentum this year, and Big Data as a Service is one of the most interesting new branches of this trend to follow. In a new development in this space, BlueData, provider of a leading Big-Data-as-a-Service software platform, has announced that the enterprise edition of its BlueData EPIC software will run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds.
Essentially, users can now run their cloud and computing applications and services in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance while keeping data on-premises, which is required for some companies in the European Union.
For those unfamiliar with FreeBSD, it is considered one of the few operating systems left to be true UNIX. It is a direct descendant of the BELL/AT&T labs UNIX. Much of the software available for Linux is also available for FreeBSD as well, including Gnome and KDE desktop environments and much more user and server software. Despite the amount of software available, it is often thought of as an obscure system with a rather small software library. This is simply
The fifth alpha release of the huge FreeBSD 11.0 operating system update is now available for testing.
FreeBSD 11.0 is bringing updated KMS drivers, Linux binary compatibility layer improvements, UEFI improvements, Bhyve virtualization improvements, and a wide range of other enhancements outlined via the in-progress release notes.
The HAMMER2 file-system is going on four years in development by the DragonFlyBSD crew, namely by its founder Matthew Dillon. It's still maturing and taking longer than anticipated, but this is yet another open-source file-system.
First, the underlying DataBasinKit framework got an important update.
Government IT departments are often one of the last places that politicians or the general public look to when trying to squeeze more out of the limited public purse. This is not likely intentional. Elected officials and their constituents understand when roads and bridges are in need of repair. But the IT department is often just seen as a bunch of people in a far off building who make desktops work so that employees at the municipality can get their work done.
Open-source learning technology is at the core of higher education for institutions that want to reach broader audiences with very strict ideas about how convenient learning should be. But developing these initiatives does not happen quickly or easily. It requires strong leadership in information technology, expertise to determine which solutions work best for a campus, and a financial commitment to making sure the technology is sustainable.
Rysc Corp has unveiled a new open source board in the form of the Proxmark Pro which now offers a true standalone client and RFID test instrument, check out the video below to learn more.
The Proxmark Pro will feature an FPGA with 5 times the logic cells of the Proxmark3 and will remove the need to switch between HF and LF bit streams during operation, to use developers.
Many Python fans have longed for the language to adopt functional programming features. Now they can get those features without having to switch to a new Python implementation.
Coconut, a newly developed open source dialect of Python, provides new syntax for using features found in functional languages like Haskell and Scala. Programs written in Coconut compile directly to vanilla Python, so they can be run on whatever Python interpreter is already in use.
Ecma International, the organization in charge of managing the ECMASCript standard, has published the most recent version of the JavaScript language.
ECMAScript 2016, or JavaScript 2016, is the first release in the organization's new release schedule that it announced in 2015, when it promised to provide yearly updates to the JS standard instead of updates years apart.
The D programming language is just the latest to have support for Vulkan alongside C++, Rust (via Vulkano, if you missed that project), Go, and many other modern languages getting bindings for this Khronos Group high performance graphics API. Should you not be familiar with the D language, see Wikipedia.
I haven’t touched a Mac in over a decade but one came to my home yesterday in the hands of a visitor. A party was being planned and a document was produced on the Mac. It should have been simple to print over my LAN. I allow all comers. Somehow, it didn’t work. The printer was seen but no driver could be found and there was the “locked” icon beside it. The last time I was in a school that used Mac OS (Pre UNIXy version) printing kept failing to a bog standard HP Laserjet printer so the Macs e-mailed a Mac which had been liberated by me to GNU/Linux. A tech arrived eventually and made the Macs print again but within an hour of his departure printing failed again. Besides connectivity, the Macs butchered every file with a MacOS header of some kind which I had to strip off… MacOS/X is apparently much more sane.
The slaves of Microsoft accept that upgrading a motherboard is “essentially building a new PC”.
The African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) last week hosted a meeting of experts in Harare, Zimbabwe, to review the Draft Regulations for the Implementation of the Arusha Protocol for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants.
Today, June 24, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the general availability of the third maintenance release for the Linux 4.6 kernel series.
Linux kernel 4.6.3 is here two weeks after the release of the second maintenance update in the series, Linux kernel 4.6.2, to change a total of 88 files, with 1302 insertions and 967 deletions. Unfortunately, very few GNU/Linux distributions have adopted the Linux 4.6 series, despite the fact that Greg Kroah-Hartman urged everyone to move to this most advanced kernel branch as soon as possible from Linux 4.5, which reached end of life.
In Teardrop Attack, fragmented packets that are sent in the to the target machine, are buggy in nature and the victim’s machine is unable to reassemble those packets due to the bug in the TCP/IP fragmentation.
Organizations with high rates of code deployments spend half as much time fixing security issues as organizations without such frequent code updates, according to a newly released study.
In its latest annual state-of-the-developer report, Devops software provider Puppet found that by better integrating security objectives into daily work, teams in "high-performing organizations" build more secure systems. The report, which surveyed 4,600 technical professionals worldwide, defines high IT performers as offering on-demand, multiple code deploys per day, with lead times for changes of less than one hour. Puppet has been publishing its annual report for five years.
Over half of the world's most popular online services have misconfigured servers which could place users at risk from spoof emails, researchers have warned.
According to Swedish cybersecurity firm Detectify, poor authentication processes and configuration settings in servers belonging to hundreds of major online domains are could put users at risk of legitimate-looking phishing campaigns and fraudulent emails.
As part of a kernel fuzzing project by myself and my colleague Tim Newsham, we are disclosing two vulnerabilities which have been assigned CVEs. Full details of the fuzzing project (with analysis of the vulnerabilities) will be released next week.
While trial-and-error is generally useful when solving connection problems, the implication is undeniable: to make Clinton's private, insecure email server connect with the State Department's, it had to -- at least temporarily -- lower itself to Clinton's security level. The other workaround -- USE A DAMN STATE DEPARTMENT EMAIL ADDRESS -- was seriously discussed.
This latest stack of emails also exposed other interesting things... like the fact that Clinton's private email server was attacked multiple times in one day, resulting in staffers taking it offline in an attempt to prevent a breach.
Want some unsurprising news? Apparently a three year gag order has just lapsed, allowing Ladar Levison, the founder and former operator of Lavabit, the secure email service Ed Snowden famously used, to finally say that yes, the feds asked him to turn over his encryption key in order to access Ed Snowden's emails.
Democrats appointed to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee by Hillary Clinton and the party’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, defeated a ban on fracking on June 24.
Former U.S. Representative Howard Berman, American Federation of State, County, and Muncipal Employees executive assistant to the president, Paul Booth, former White House Energy and Climate Change Policy director Carol Browner, Ohio State Representative Alicia Reece, former State Department official Wendy Sherman, and Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden all raised their hands to prevent a moratorium from becoming a part of the platform.
Those who voted against the ban were met with a cry of, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” from the audience.
The leaders of three of the European Parliament’s largest groups have called for exit talks with Britain to begin immediately, and Members of Parliament are likely to vote on a resolution on the matter at a voting session on Tuesday, sources told POLITICO.
The whole world is reeling after a milestone referendum in Britain to leave the European Union. And although leaders of the campaign to exit Europe are crowing over their victory, it seems many Britons may not even know what they had actually voted for.
Awakening to a stock market plunge and a precipitous decline in the value of the pound that Britain hasn't seen in more than 30 years, voters now face a series of economic shocks that analysts say will only worsen before they improve. The consequences of the leave vote will be felt worldwide, even here in the United States, and some British voters say they now regret casting a ballot in favor of Brexit.
Across the United Kingdom on Friday, Britons mourned their long-cherished right to claim that Americans were significantly dumber than they are.
Luxuriating in the superiority of their intellect over Americans’ has long been a favorite pastime in Britain, surpassing in popularity such games as cricket, darts, and snooker.
In times like these, political journalists like me tend to reach for the collected works of WB Yeats. “All changed, changed utterly,” he wrote after Ireland’s Easter rebellion, and those words could not be more appropriate as a description of Scottish politics in the wake of yesterday’s Brexit vote. The Yeats poem captured a decisive moment that altered everything in its wake; for Scotland that moment was the 2014 independence referendum.
A striking victory for what I dubbed ‘Maggyism’ has taken place. It seeks the “liberation” of Europe from a ‘super-state’, not isolation. It might even succeed, this being a time of surprise, as the EU is struggling with a dysfunctional currency and has other electorates already enflamed by its rigid policies and lack of democracy. In England for sure, under the banner of Maggyism’s alluring yet chilling command to ‘take back control’, a new form of populist Toryism will be tested. The challenge for the left across England will go deep and it will have to discard its attachment to the ruins of Labourism if it is to recover.
Oil prices settled 5 percent lower on Friday after Britain's vote to leave the European Union spurred massive risk aversion and a rally in safe havens like the U.S. dollar that threatened to cut short a three-month-long recovery in global oil markets.
Financial markets have been worried for months about what a British exit from the European Union, dubbed widely as 'Brexit,' would mean for Europe's future, but were clearly not fully factoring in the risk of a 'leave' vote.
A Reality Check reader gets in touch to ask about what happens to his Italian wife. "My wife has lived and worked in the UK for 15 years having come over from Sardinia, Italy. We got married in March of this year."
It seems unlikely that your wife will be forced to return to Italy - nobody has suggested there will be deportations of people already living and working in the UK.
If there were to be problems, she may be eligible to apply for British citizenship as she is married to a British citizen and has been in the country for more than three years.
This is a man-made disaster. The EU is a mess but it is fixable. Breaking up the UK will be a bigger mess and it isn’t fixable.
The most significant announcement David Cameron made this morning was not that he plans to resign in October. It was that he will not be triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty in the meantime. When to “start the formal and legal process of leaving the EU” would be a matter for the new prime minister, he said.
A petition calling for Sadiq Khan to declare London an independent state after the UK voted to quit the EU has been signed by thousands of people.
The petition's organiser James O'Malley, said the capital was "a world city" which should "remain at the heart of Europe".
Nearly 60% of people in the capital backed the Remain campaign, in stark contrast to most of the country.
Out of 46,500,001 electorate 17,410,742 voted to leave, which is a mere 37.4% or just over a third.
Earlier this month, Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley incubator dropped a bombshell: it had selected this city to be the home of its new "Basic Income" pilot project, to start later this year.
The idea is pretty simple. Give some people a small amount of money per month, no strings attached, for a year, and see what happens. With any luck, people will use it to lift themselves out of poverty.
In this case, as Matt Krisiloff of Y Combinator Research (YCR) told Ars, that means spending about $1.5 million over the course of a year to study the distribution of "$1,500 or $2,000" per month to "30 to 50" people. There will also be a similar-sized control group that gets nothing. The project is set to start before the end of 2016.
A budget is a statement of priorities and values. In a political community, a budget also prioritizes the interests of some individuals and groups over those of others.
For example, the city of Chicago has spent more than $ 500 million since 2014 in literal blood money for the victims of police brutality. Collectively, the 10 largest American cities have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to settle police misconduct cases during the same time period.
These sums of money are the macro-level reflections of individual tragedies and needless deaths that include names such as Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, and Rekia Boyd.
One of Virginia’s delegates to the Republican National Convention has filed a federal lawsuit in an effort to avoid voting for presumptive nominee Donald Trump at the party convention next month.
The delegate, Carroll Correll Jr of Winchester, Virginia, argued in the suit that being forced to vote against his conscience was a violation of his constitutional rights.
The Chancellor told LBC earlier this week that he has no plan for the UK economy should the nation vote to leave the European Union.
He said: "Britain does not have a plan for Brexit. It's not for me to come up with [Leave's] plan.
"It wouldn't just be when we left in two years time that the economic hit would come," said Osborne. "It would start to come this coming Friday.
"That's when the uncertainty would start."
Iain says that means he shouldn't stay in his job.
Speaking on Britain Decides, LBC's results show, Iain said: "As far as I'm concerned - and I like the man and have a lot of respect for him - but his credibility has to be shot after this.
That's the meme that was (and still is) passed around on social media (rather gently) mocking Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for looking kinda like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Or, not even Gollum, but his nicer alter ego, Smeagol. Last we wrote about this, a Turkish court was assembling an expert panel to determine if that image is insulting to Erdogan. Since then, of course, we've learned just how insanely thin-skinned Erdogan is, having filed an average of over 100 actions against people for insulting him per month (how does he get any actual work done?).
Trade union Solidarity today said that the broadcasting measures instituted by the SABC amount to selective censorship. This comes after the SABC this week clearly showed its political colours by seemingly having instructed that the RSG radio programme, Kommentaar, be removed from the station’s programme schedule.
Some of the web’s biggest destinations for watching videos have quietly started using automation to remove extremist content from their sites, according to two people familiar with the process.
The move is a major step forward for internet companies that are eager to eradicate violent propaganda from their sites and are under pressure to do so from governments around the world as attacks by extremists proliferate, from Syria to Belgium and the United States.
YouTube and Facebook are among the sites deploying systems to block or rapidly take down Islamic State videos and other similar material, the sources said.
The technology was originally developed to identify and remove copyright-protected content on video sites. It looks for "hashes," a type of unique digital fingerprint that internet companies automatically assign to specific videos, allowing all content with matching fingerprints to be removed rapidly.
Have you read Ali Baba and the Forty Ownership-challenged Muslims? Or has it been taken off the shelves for Islamophobic tendencies?
Three SABC journalists have been suspended for failing to stick to the “violent protest” ban that has been implemented at the broadcaster, according the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef).
According to a report by the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef), Economics Editor Thandeka Gqubule, RSG executive producer Foeta Krige and senior journalist Suna Venter have been suspended.
Here’s a shout out to all of you who said “If I’ve got nothing to hide I’ve got nothing to fear” after the Snowden revelations. And this little gem deals only with publicly available information about you. Imagine what it’s like when it gets into the good stuff you think is private.
An Orwellian startup called Tenant Assured will to take a deep dive into your social media, including chats, check-ins, how many times you’ve posted words like pregnant, wasted, busted, no money, broke, moving back in with the parents, weed, or loan, and deliver to potential landlords and employers a “personality score.”
The FBI's use of a Network Investigative Technique (NIT) to obtain info from the computers of visitors to a seized child porn site has run into all sorts of problems. The biggest problem in most of the cases is that the use of a single warrant issued in Virginia to perform searches of computers all over the nation violated the jurisdictional limits set down by Rule 41(b). Not coincidentally, the FBI is hoping the changes to Rule 41 the DOJ submitted last year will be codified by the end of 2016, in large part because it removes the stipulation that limits searches to the area overseen by the magistrate judge signing the warrant.
For defendant Edward Matish, the limits of Rule 41 don't apply. He resides in the jurisdiction where the warrant was signed. He had challenged the veracity of the data obtained by the NIT, pushing the theory that the FBI's unexamined NIT was insecure (data obtained from targets was sent back to the FBI in unencrypted form) and info could have been altered in transit.
No matter how you may feel about the Second Amendment or firearms themselves, there's no way you can feel comfortable with access to Constitutional rights being predicated on something as worthless as the government's ever-expanding "you might be a terrorist" lists.
But that's what's being sought by legislators. In the wake of the Orlando shooting, politicians are searching for answers to unpredictable violent acts, and have seized on the FBI's multiple investigations of the shooter as a potential terrorist for deciding who can or can't obtain a gun. A "dramatic" sit-in by Congressional reps hoped to force the issue, even though it ended up pushing nothing forward at all.
Some legislators want gun ownership tied to terrorist watchlists -- the same watchlists that have turned 4-year-olds into suspected terrorists and designated entire families as suspicious simply because a single member somewhere in the branches of the family tree is under investigation.
When law enforcement agencies want to know what people are up to, they no longer have to send officers out to walk a beat. It can all be done in-house, using as many data points as can be collected without a warrant. Multiple companies offer "pre-crime" databases for determining criminal activity "hot spots," which allow officers to make foregone conclusions based on what someone might do, rather than what they've actually done.
Far-right demonstrators took to the streets today demanding repatriation of immigrants in the wake of the Brexit vote.
A tense stand-off took place in Newcastle city centre as groups defending refugees gathered to oppose the demo.
Supporters of the Newcastle Unites group gathered at The Monument, chanting “Refugees Welcome” and “Nazis out”.
Opposite stood members of the English Defence League, North East Infidels and National Front who shouted their counter arguments.
Russia’s parliament has passed harsh anti-terrorism measures that human rights campaigners including the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden say will roll back personal freedoms and privacy.
The lower house of parliament voted 325 to 1 on Friday to adopt the “Yarovaya law”, a package of amendments authored by the ruling United Russia party member Irina Yarovaya, who is known for previous legislative crackdowns on protesters and non-governmental organisations.
Police are investigating after cards reading "No More Polish Vermin" were allegedly posted through letterboxes following Britain's decision to leave the EU.
David Cameron gets heckled every day of his life. The media never bother to report the names of the hecklers or the gist of what they say.
Yet a single heckler shouts at Jeremy Corbyn at Gay Pride, and not only is that front page news in the Guardian, it is on BBC, ITN and Sky News.
What makes a single individual heckling a politician newsworthy? There are dozens such examples every single day that are not newsworthy.
The answer is simple. Normally the hecklers are promoting an anti-establishment view, so it does not get reported. Whereas this heckler was promoting the number one priority of the establishment and mainstream media, to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn. So this heckler, uniquely, is front page news and his words are repeated at great length in the Guardian and throughout the broadcast media.
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So far from representing a popular mood, Mauchlyne was this morning on twitter urging people to sign a 38 Degrees petition supporting the no confidence motion against Corbyn. Ten hours later that petition has gained 65 signatures, compared to 120,000 for a petition supporting Corbyn. Mauchline formerly worked for 38 Degrees, unsurprising given their disgraceful behaviour over the Kuenssberg petition. I am waiting for the circle to be squared and Kuenssberg to report on the significance of Mauchline’s lone heckle.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) should not wait 8 or 10 years before its next Internet Ministerial, said OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria at the closing session in Cancun Mexico yesterday. Gurria called for a faster pace for government and regulators to adapt to the digital markets. Better data on the data economy will help, as reflected in the new Cancun Declaration.
Net neutrality exists when Internet service providers (ISPs) must allow equal access to everything on the Web, rather than favoring some sites over others. It's a bedrock condition for Internet freedom, but ISPs generally oppose it because it prevents them from charging companies extra for privileged access to the network -- making a video from one Web site load faster than video on other sites, for example.
The Oculus team has reversed course on one of its most unpopular decisions since launching the Rift VR headset in April: headset-specific DRM. After weeks of playing cat-and-mouse to block the "Revive" workaround that translated the VR calls of Oculus games to work smoothly and seamlessly inside of the rival HTC Vive, Oculus quietly updated its hardware-specific runtime on Friday and removed all traces of that controversial DRM.
Weeks back, Karl Bode wrote about the curious position Oculus Rift had taken in updating its software to include system-checking DRM. VR headset technology and game development, experiencing the first serious attempt at maturity in years, needs an open ecosystem in which to develop. What this DRM essentially did was remove the ability for games designed to run on the Rift from running on any other VR headset, with a specific targeting of community-built workarounds like Revive, which allowed HTC Vive owners to get Rift games running on that headset. Oculus, it should be noted, didn't announce the DRM aspect of the update; it just spit out the update and the public suddenly learned that programs like Revive no longer worked.
The backlash, to put it mildly, was swift and severe. Oculus having been acquired by Facebook likely didn't help what were already negative perceptions, supercharging the outcry with allegations of the kind of protectionism and the lack of care for the public that Facebook has enjoyed for roughly ever. Still, many saw the whole thing as peons screaming at a feudal lord: Oculus would simply ignore the whole thing. Just weeks ago, in fact, Oculus was working journalists at E3 in defense of the DRM.
Genomic technology has rapidly created a multi-billion dollar growth industry. With life sciences companies scrambling in US and European courts for a share of the lucrative market, in-house IP counsel should start preparing for the next wave of IP litigation, explain Dominic Adair and Annsley Merelle Ward
Federal Law No 35-FZ of March 12 2014 introduced several substantial amendments into Part IV of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation which regulates intellectual property. Some of the amendments came into force on October 1 2014, and others did so on January 1 2015. We provide a review of the key amendments that involve patents.
Oh boy. A few weeks back, we wrote about the absolutely ridiculous story in which the four children of Frank Zappa appear to be fighting over the Zappa name. The story is somewhat complex and involved and is actually somewhat more nuanced than the unfortunately-all-too-typical "heirs of famous artist fight over splitting up the proceeds of that artist's legacy." In that original article, we noted that the dispute seemed to focus on two specific claims: first that the Zappa Family Trust (run by Ahmet and Diva, but to which all four children are beneficiaries) had a trademark on the tour name "Zappa Plays Zappa," under which Dweezil Zappa had toured for years. After some fairly public back and forth online, it became clear that there was an underlying dispute that had simmered for years here: Frank's wife Gail, who had controlled the ZFT, had trademarked Zappa Plays Zappa and charged Dweezil to use it, but had (according to Dweezil) then reneged on an agreement to share the proceeds from merchandise sales. Ahmet insisted that he'd allow Dweezil to continue to use the name for just $1, but it didn't seem that there was any interest in clearing up the older dispute about merch sales, or to allow Dweezil to get some of the proceeds from ongoing merch sales.
What trade mark issues arise with the resurrection of zombie brands? Carrie Bradley and Tony Dylan-Hyde examine the position in Europe and the United States
Almost two years ago, we excitedly wrote about the announcement behind Let's Encrypt, a free certificate authority that was focused on dramatically lowering the hurdles towards protecting much more of the internet with HTTPS encrypted connections. It took a while to launch, but it finally did and people have been gobbling up those certificates at a rapid rate and getting more and more of the web encrypted. This is a good thing.
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Update: And... of course, after this goes public, Comodo suddenly backs down. Of course that doesn't explain why it refused to do so when asked months ago.
For years Hollywood has waged a war on piracy, using digital rights management technologies to fight bootleggers who illegally copy movies and distribute them. For just as long, hackers have found ways to bypass these protections. Now two security researchers have found a new way, using a vulnerability in the system Google uses to stream media through its Chrome browser. They say people could exploit the flaw to save illegal copies of movies they stream on Chrome using sites like Netflix or Amazon Prime.
We've been covering the still going lawsuit by CBS and Paramount against Axanar Productions for making a crowdfunded fan film that they claim is infringing because it's looking pretty good. Things got a little weird last month when the producer of the latest Star Trek film, JJ Abrams, and its director, Justin Lin, basically leaked a bit of news saying that after they had gone to Paramount, the studio was going to end the lawsuit. At the time, Paramount said that it was in "settlement discussions" and that it was "also working on a set of fan film guidelines."
We pointed out that we were concerned about what those guidelines might entail, and worried that they would undermine fair use. In the meantime, as settlement talks continued, the case moved forward. I'm still a little surprised that the two sides didn't ask the court for more time to continue settlement talks, as that's not that uncommon, and it's something that a judge often is willing to grant if it looks like the two sides in a dispute can come to an agreement. But, without that, the case has continued to move forward with ongoing filings from each side.