It started back in 2009, the first year of Lynn Bender’s fantastic brainstorm “Linux Against Poverty.” Lynn’s idea and subsequent involvement with our organization, then named The HeliOS Project, would infuse our effort with an energy and inventory we still rely on today.
Make no mistake about it. The 2016 Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop is wonderful. It's fast, its display is gorgeous, and, at less than three pounds, you can carry and code with it anywhere. But, oh, that price tag!
About 15 months ago, I reviewed Fedora 21 on the ASUS Zenbook UX305. As happy as I have been with that machine, a new year came along and I had the opportunity to pick up a new personal laptop. I found myself deciding between three models: the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, the ASUS Zenbook UX305UA, and the Lenovo Thinkpad T460s.
Microsoft broke my father's computer: it made him update to Windows 10, when Windows 10 can not use two of 3 USB ports. Ouch.
As I write this, I’m using Roon Server to play "Blue Moon" about my room, soon after noon. If you’re reading that, then by some miracle, all my editors laughed instead of cringed, and I can now safely relate to you what Roon Server is all about, and why you might want it. (Right after I have a macaroon.) You can read our full review here.
Crumbs swept aside…. Roon is the Stradavarius or Guarnerius of audio streaming, cataloging, and transcoding. Think of it as iTunes and Windows Media Player on steroids. Until recently, however, you had to keep a PC (or Mac, or Linux box) running 24/7 as a Roon server if you wanted to listen to your tunes any time you felt the urge. Now you can use a far more convenient-for-the-task NAS box.
A new cloud environment for business-to-business networks announced by IBM last week will allow companies to test performance, privacy, and interoperability of their blockchain ecosystems within a secure environment, the company said. Based on IBM’s LinuxONE, a Linux-only server designed for high-security projects, the new cloud environment will let enterprises test and run blockchain projects that handle private data for their customers.
The service is still in limited beta, so IBM clients will not be able to get their hands on it just yet. Once it launches, however, the company said clients will be able to run blockchain in production environments that let them quickly and easily access secure, partitioned blockchain networks.
Congratulations are due to Alan Cox, who was awarded an honorary degree by Swansea University for his work with Linux. "Alan started working on Version 0. There were bugs and problems he could correct. He put Linux on a machine in the Swansea University computer network, which revealed many problems in networking which he sorted out; later he rewrote the networking software. Alan brought to Linux software engineering discipline: Linux software releases that were tested, corrected and above all stable. On graduating, Alan worked at Swansea University, set up the UK Linux server and distributed thousands of systems."
Today's the day that we can finally publish NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 benchmarks! Today the GTX 1060 begins shipping as NVIDIA's $249 Pascal graphics card to take the Radeon RX 480 head-on. Here are all of the Linux benchmarks you've been waiting to see for the GTX 1060 under Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, and CUDA. compared to various other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on Ubuntu Linux.
While there's been no new communication about X.Org Server 1.19, the X.Org Server 1.18.4 release is now available.
Don't panic. Of course it isn't. Stop typing that angry letter to the editor and read on. I just picked that title because it's clickbait and these days that's all that matters, right?
With this week's release of libinput 1.4, Peter Hutterer has announced "libinput is done", at least in terms of its original goal.s
Peter proclaiming "libinput is done" just comes in regards to the project's original TODO list from when this input library was first conceived for Wayland's needs. That list included keyboard support, touchscreen handling, support for mice, touchpad support, graphics tablet support, track sticks, a reliable test suite, proper documentation, and more.
To complement yesterday's launch-day GeForce GTX 1060 Linux review, here are some more benchmark results with the various NVIDIA x60 graphics cards I have available for testing going back to the GeForce GTX 460 Fermi. If you are curious about the raw OpenGL/OpenCL/CUDA performance and performance-per-Watt for these mid-range x60 graphics cards from Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal, here are these benchmarks from Ubuntu 16.04 Linux.
Cumulus is a stylish desktop weather app for the Ubuntu desktop. It offers various settings, including an optional Unity Launcher temperature count.
The Fedora Workstation has a number of features in the GNOME desktop environment to conserve power and increase security. These are both important considerations for desktop and laptop users. One of these features is the automatic screensaver lock function. By default, if idle for 5 minutes, the screen locks. This causes two things to happen:
Good news everyone! A new release of USBGuard is finally available. As usual there are many bugfixes, several new features and some other changes. USBGuard has gotten a D-Bus component so the integration possibilities are endless now :D The usbguard-applet-qt subproject was merged into the main project repository. Thanks to that it will hopefully receive more love in the near future. One of the more important bugfixes delivered by this release is the rewrite of the USB descriptor parsing code which previously didn’t work correctly for many devices.
Okay, this program is free (beer), but not Free (speech). I wouldn't normally include a freeware application in a "Non-Linux FOSS" piece, because quite frankly, it isn't FOSS. But, I decided to break the rules a bit here because I realized how often I use a freeware program when I'm on OS X that I couldn't imagine doing without.
Many Linux users have voiced comments critical of Microsoft's effort.
Virtual Programming has announced the release date of Overlord (tomorrow!) with a new teaser video. Will be interesting to see how it performs.
Still, it's weird they put up some sort of Beta on Steam for Linux with a title of "Help test the mac and linux releases!" (see it here) if they are just going to release it in a few days anyway. I should note you aren't able to install that beta, as it complains it's not available on your platform.
Stardew Valley is finally getting Mac and Linux compatibility, developer Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone said on Twitter. The game is set to arrive on both systems next Friday, July 29.
Stardew Valley is one of those games I'm bound to keep buying as it shows up on more platforms. I can't help it! The pleasant farming life simulator has this soothing quality that's just so appealing.
ConcernedApe, the developer behind Stardew Valley has revealed that the Steam indie hit will be finally coming to Mac and Linux. The info was released on the developer’s Twitter Page this morning with the announcement that it will be releasing on these platforms as soon as July 29. It is also noted that this game is still scheduled for console releases this winter for Wii U, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The game’s publisher, Chucklefish, will be handling the Mac and Linux ports.
Just one day after Virtual Programming released a new teaser video for Overlord on Linux, the OSX/Linux game porting company announced their release date for the game that is coming to Linux and Mac,
I have been waiting and attempting to be patient on this, Stardew Valley has now popped up on SteamDB with a Linux/Mac testing branch.
We already knew it was coming to Linux, but I hadn't seen anything to indicate a release. It is now showing up on SteamDB. It still doesn't mean it's soon, even with the developer claiming back in June it would be "very soon" it's over a month later and it's only just popping up in a test branch on SteamDB.
Blossom Tales is a rather good looking Zelda-like action RPG that has been Greenlit to be on Steam and it's heading to Linux.
The good news, according to this recent tweet by John Romero, is that allegedly the patch is in a such advanced stage that now you should be able to play the game on Linux without any problem.
We should see this coming by now. The Cossacks 3 release date has been announced and I have it confirmed personally that the Linux release is now delayed.
Virtual Programming has been working on porting Overlord I and Overlord II to Linux and Mac. They have just released another teaser video, perhaps indicating the ports are almost ready to ship.
Overlord is an action role-playing game first released back in 2007 and its Overlord: Raising Hell expansion having been releasedi n 2008. To date the game has just been supported on Windows and the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 while Virtual Programming LTD is bringing the game to Linux and Mac OS X.
Right after the bad news about Cossacks 3 being delayed, we have some nicer news. Virtual Programming are teasing the Linux port of Overlord in a new video.
This is weird. The developer of VIDEOBALL has stated that they want a Linux & Mac version, but told people essentially it's the publisher who needs to be spoken to about it.
As promised, the Linux pre-alpha demo of the System Shock remake is now available to download from GOG.
Antraxx is a very interesting looking massively multiplayer mech shooter and the programmer has stated to me that Linux is a definite option.
Rogue Islands is a pretty good looking fast-paced shooter with blocky graphics will come to Linux and it looks good.
Last Month Cosimo came Beijing, and we had a meet up with Beijing GNOME User Group and Beijing Linux User Group in SUSE Office, Cosimo introduced ‘Looking ahead to GNOME 3.22 and beyond’, the flatpak bring lots of attention. Here I just shared some photos. Thanks for Cosimo’s coming!
With extraction support in Nautilus, the next feature that I’ve implemented as part of my project is automatic decompression. While the name is a bit fancy, this feature is just about extracting archives instead of opening them in an archive manager. From the UI perspective, this only means a little change in the context menu:
Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, is to improve support for extracting zips, tars and other compressed archives.
In Diana's usability test, she will moderate a "first experience" of GNOME. Testers will login to GNOME using a fresh "test" login, and go through the first-time experience. The testers will use a few scenario tasks to guide them through tasks that most users would usually do on a new computer (check email, copy files from a USB stick). Afterwards, Diana will interview each tester to see what they thought.
A ton of patches hit GNOME's Mutter this morning by Jonas Ãâ¦dahl as he's been working towards multi DPI rendering and other improvements by drawing monitor contents to individual frame-buffers.
Jonas has been reworking Mutter to draw monitor contents to individual frame-buffers rather than targeting a single frame-buffer, in order to support situations of having multiple monitors with a desire to have independent DPI changes for each display (e.g. one HiDPI display and other displays that are not), etc. Jonas summarized it with this bug report.
Linux is turning 25 this year. Since its inception in 1991, what started as a "modest new OS" has ballooned into a juggernaut with 258 distributions.
To celebrate Linix's big birthday, I have gathered together 25 pictorial representations of Linux distributions. Given a visual clue and a very brief description, how many of the Linux distributions represented here can you identify?
Good news from OpenMandriva Community!
A while after Beta2 we are glad to announce OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 RC1 release.
Work for the RC1 has further improved stability and performance. We have now support for the Japanese and Chinese languages so we would really welcome any feedback from those who speak them.
Jim Dean today announced the release of Fedora-based Korora 24, following just one day after their EOL announcement for version 22. Kate Lebedeff announced the release of OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 RC1 today with Linux 4.6.4, Xorg 1.18.3, and KDE 5.6.5. Two reviews of the 2016 Dell XPS 13 landed today praising the newest Ubuntu laptop and Sandra Henry-Stocker continued celebrating Linux' 25th birthday with a fairly tough quiz.
There is a lot of excitement around the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots because of new KDE features and the newest stable Linux Kernel, which is expected in the next snapshot.
Snapshot 20160715 brought all those KDE updates Tumbleweed users were looking forward to like Framework 5.24.0, Plasma 5.7.0 and Applications 16.04.3. Breeze icons have a new feature and there is now jump list actions for tasks within an application available with KRunner thanks to the new Plasma. There is plenty of other new features with Plasma 5.7, so check out the video to see what is new.
SUSE today introduced a new program that allows resellers of SUSE subscriptions to host SUSE software products on behalf of their end-user customers, providing more flexibility to both resellers and end customers as they extend the benefits of SUSE products beyond customers’ on-site data centers.
“Many of our customers are finding value in partnering with a managed cloud provider so they can stay fast and lean and focus their limited resources on their core business and on driving innovation,” said Ronald de Jong, president of sales at SUSE. “SUSE Reseller Hosting enables our reseller partners to easily create new offerings to serve these customers within their existing SUSE partnership framework, while growing the important relationships our SUSE end-user customers rely on.”
In this years edition of Google Summer of Code, an international annual program in which stipends are awarded to students to hack on Free Software during the summer, openSUSE members are mentoring seven students who all passed their mid-term evaluation last week. Go on to read what they have to say about their first 10 weeks in the program.
Red Hat has given its Ansible Tower a good scrubbing down before smoothing the UI to better penetrate big money corporate accounts.
Tower is Red Hat’s paid for version of the open source Ansible automation platform, effectively a GUI and services package around the core product. Well, we say GUI, but Tower 3.0, released today, has taken a long hard look at the UI, and decided it needed fixing.
Red Hat’s head of Ansible engineering, Tim Cramer said that to date, Tower had been “designed by engineers, for engineers.” He added, “It’s crucial we don’t have people being confused when they start using tower. Hence, 3.0 has a more streamlined interface when it comes to complex deployments.
Following with the complexity/confusion theme, permissioning has been overhauled, making it easier to enact explicit permissions for specific teams or organisations.
Cramer also highlighted increased networking support, with support from Cisco, Juniper, Arista and Cumulus. This essentially builds on the networking integration added with the last major update of the core Ansible platform back in February.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Ansible Tower 3, the latest version of its enterprise-grade agentless automation platform. Ansible Tower 3 by Red Hat gives teams the power to scale automation across the enterprise including streamlined interface, more powerful notifications, and explicit permissioning. Ansible Tower empowers users to extend their automation solutions to their entire team, so they can build, share and scale automation cross-functionally and consistently as they build out their DevOps capabilities.
Croatia-based system integrator and IT services provider Combis has become a RedHat Advanced Business Partner. RedHat is a US manufacturer of open source solutions aimed at companies of all sizes and from all industries. In order to earn the new status, Combis had to meet a number of criteria to demonstrate competence and ability, from participating in numerous professional trainings, adopting various technical and sales certifications and involvement in the presentation of Red Hat technologies.
They are based around the Cavium ThunderX processors that we’ve had at Red Hat for a while so they should run RHEL either out of the box or very soon after release.
While there are many Linux-based operating systems to choose from nowadays, not all of them are great. Quite frankly, there are probably only a handful of distributions that I would truly recommend.
My absolute favorite Linux-based operating system is Fedora, but understandably, it is not ideal for all beginners. While I like the focus on free software only, some folks need some non-free stuff. Adding repos and setting up some of this software can be tricky for some. Luckily, Korora is a distro that takes the work out of setting up Fedora for beginners. Today, it achieves version 24, code-named 'Sheldon'.
The Korora Project has released version 24 (codename "Sheldon") which is now available for download.
The universal package is the future of Linux and both Canonical and Red Hat have their own take. Which is the better solution? Or should there be a third?
The 2016 July cycle of Elections is in full swing. Voting officially began on Tuesday, July 19, and ends Monday, July 25th at 23:59 UTC. Voting takes place on the Voting application website. As part of the Elections coverage on the Community Blog, most of the candidates running for seats published their interviews and established their platforms here. Are you getting ready to vote and looking for this information? You can find the full list of candidates and links to their interviews below.
I am happy to release the F24-20160720 updated lives isos.
as always these respins can be found at http://tinyurl.com/Live-respins2
Using the updated isos will save about 500M of updates after install YMMV (Gold MATE install updates as of 20160720 is 513M)
I would like to thank the community and the seeders for their dedication to this project.
If you’ve been involved in free and open source projects like Fedora for very long, you know one of the most sought-after “swag” items is a t-shirt with your projects’ logo. Until now, the easiest way to get a Fedora T-shirt has been to go to a big event like Flock, or through events organized & supported by our Fedora Ambassadors around the world.
Simply put, I have been actively involved and an active user of Fedora for about 4.5 years. I have been, almost exclusively, a Linux user for 10 years and I had dabbled in Linux before that. I have been a Linux sysadmin and a Linux developer (mostly a developer) for approximately 15 years.
As of July 19, 2016, Fedora 22 has reached its end of life for updates and support. No more updates, not even security fixes, will be provided for Fedora 22. Fedora 23 will be maintained with updated packages until approximately one month after the release of Fedora 25.
Upgrading to Fedora 23 or Fedora 24 is highly recommended for all users still running Fedora 22. For more information on upgrading Fedora, check out the DNF System Upgrade page on the Fedora Project wiki.
This is by no means the end of the Debconf16 experience, but actually the starting. I hope to share more of my thoughts, ideas and get as much feedback from all the wonderful people I met during Debconf.
It seems like every article one reads about the Raspberry Pi always makes a reference to Raspbian. If not, then the writer will probably write about how wonderful Ubuntu MATE is on the Raspberry Pi. Which begs the question: Are there any other OS options for the Raspberry Pi? While there’s nothing wrong with either distro, we should remember that the main appeal of using Linux is the freedom and amount of choice that is offered to the user. With that being said, here are four other distros that offer a great user experience on the Raspberry Pi.
Earlier this week we saw Canonical demo wireless display on the Bq M10 tablet — but it’s not the only device capable of cable-free convergence.
MacBuntu (Macbuntu Yosemite/El Capitan) transformation pack is ready for Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial. This pack contains themes for GTK (which supports: Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce two themes dark & light for Gnome Shell, two themes for Cinnamon, two icon packs, cursors. There are some issues with 16.04 where it make some parts of the pack useless: 1) boot/splash we do not recommend you to install boot screen because there is a known bug for plymouth but we are still sharing, if you want to give it a shot; 2) Login screen, it is only offered for Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Gnome users but if you have multiple desktops then you can't choose and another known problem, if you remove lightdm-webkit then you will have blank screen, to solve this issue you have to install other display manager, so better to not install it. 3) Slingscold which is known as launchpad, it does work on some desktops but it may don't work for some users and you may see blank launcher.
make Ubuntu 16.04 look like MacOS with the MacBuntu 16.04 Transformation Pack.
Noobs Lab has detailed instructions on how to install it in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus.
Road testing the latest daily build of VLC just got a whole heap easier on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS — a snap, you might say.
After months of leaks the Meizu MX6 smartphone was unwrapped at a press conference in China earlier today. But the also-rumoured MX6 Ubuntu Edition was (alas) nowhere to be seen. Interestingly the specs of the device differ slightly from those that previous leaks, and benchmark charts claime
ArduCam unveiled a 24 x 24mm module with the ARM11-based core of the original Raspberry Pi, available with 36 x 36mm carriers with one or two camera links.
The promised second-generation version of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module featuring the same quad-core, 64-bit Broadcom BCM2837 SoC as the Raspberry Pi 3 will be out within a few months, according to a recent PC World interview with Raspberry Pi Foundation CEO Eben Upton. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a smaller computer-on-module version of the Raspberry Pi and are willing to settle for the old ARM11 foundation available on the current Raspberry Pi Compute Module, ArduCam could have you covered sooner.
Onion launched an “Omega2” module on Kickstarter, featuring a faster CPU, options for double the RAM and flash, and lower pricing than last year’s Omega.
Last year, Onion launched an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign for the original Omega module, with packages starting at $25. That campaign won $267,851 from 4,459 backers. Today, the company returned to the Kickstarter well seeking support for a version 2 follow-on to the Omega, appropriately dubbed Omega2. The new project has already reached more than 90 percent of its $15,000 funding goal — a modest feat, in light of the quarter of a million dollars last year’s project earned.
The Gateworks Ventana GW5530 SBC runs Linux on an i.MX6, and has mini-PCIe and SIM expansion, a 9-axis IMU, three video inputs, and -40 to 85€°C support.
The Ventana GW5530 is the latest in the 5th generation of the Gateworks Ventana family of NXP i.MX6-based SBCs, following last year’s similarly 800MHz, dual-core GW5520. The board is designed for wirelessly connected Man Portable Units (MPUs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), digital signage, and robotics.
In this interesting ELC video, Grant Likely, a Linux kernel engineer and maintainer of the Linux Device Tree, describes his sojourn into embedded hardware.
Sometimes the best tutorials come not from experts, but from proficient newcomers who are up to date on the latest entry-level technologies and can remember what it’s like to be a newbie. It also helps if, like Grant Likely, the teacher is a major figure in embedded Linux who understands how hardware is ignited by software.
At the Embedded Linux Conference, Likely — who is a Linux kernel engineer, and maintainer of the Linux Device Tree subsystem used by many embedded systems — described his embedded hardware journey in a presentation called “Hardware Design for Linux Engineers” — or as he put it, “explaining stuff I only learned six months ago.”
A few days ago the Intex Aqua Fish became publicly available. This is the first 3rd party phone officially running SailfishOS from Jolla.
As the first wave of hands-on reactions to Motorola's new Moto Z flagship start to surface, I can't help but think: Man, this sure is a different company than the Motorola we knew a few short years ago.
It quite literally is, of course: As we all recall, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo in early 2014 -- a mere 20 months after it took the company's reigns and transformed it into an idealistic model of what an Android manufacturer could and should be.
Inexpensive Android smartphones are nothing new. Getting premium quality phones at a low price is fairly new, however. While some folks hail these respectable wallet-friendly devices as a win for consumers, others -- such as yours truly -- view it as a race to the bottom which could ultimately harm the Android market overall.
Today, ZTE announces the ZMAX PRO Android smartphone. This device is chock full of premium features, such as an octa-core Snapdragon 617 processor, 2GB of RAM, expandable storage, and a fingerprint reader. The truly amazing aspect, however, is the price -- a shockingly low $99.
In life, you get what you pay for.*
*Exceptions: Costco wine, $1 New York City pizza and the Blu R1 HD smartphone, now sold by Amazon for $50. In those cases, the quality of the product far exceeds your low expectations.
Yes, you read that right, there’s an Android GOOGL, +0.56% 6.0 smartphone that costs less than family dinner at the Olive Garden. It’s cheap, but it’s not, you know, cheap.
The announcement this week that Splice Machine is open-sourcing its product has become just the latest reminder that -- in emerging technology markets -- open source is increasingly the rule, not the exception.
Open-source software is one of those overnight successes that's been a decade and more in the making. It's a far cry from the early aughts when Red Hat and JBoss blazed a trail that still has doubters. Arguably, there's still the issue of whether Red Hat, a publicly-traded, open source company, is a Unicorn from a different twist. Nonetheless, today, when we get acquainted to a new startup, one of the first questions that we pop is whether they're open source.
Splice Machine, the relational SQL database system that uses Hadoop and Spark to provide high-speed results, is now available in an open source edition.
Version 2.0 of Splice Machine added Spark to speed up OLAP-style workloads while still processing conventional OLTP workloads with HBase. The open source version, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, supplies both engines and most of Splice Machine's other features, including Apache Kafka streaming support. However, it omits a few enterprise-level options like encryption, Kerberos support, column-level access control, and backup/restore functionality.
This is the second in a two-part series on hiring and compensation practices in open organizations. In Want the best employees? Let them hire themselves, I introduced the concept of open hiring with examples from Drupal (the well-known CMS) and Gratipay (a payments start-up and open organization; I'm the founder). We saw how open source thinking about onboarding best practices can lead naturally to including new collaborators in money distribution.
Technological change forces economic growth. Technology extends the science of discovery and produces artifacts used in everyday life. It’s the small technical discoveries that make larger scientific endeavors possible. It's also these seemingly unrelated breakthroughs that make their way into our daily lives.
Looking back at 10 years of Hadoop, project co-founder and Cloudera Chief Architect Doug Cutting can see two primary factors in the success of open source big data technology: a heap of luck and the Apache Foundation’s unique support.
Gareth Rushgrove is known by many people as the creator and editor of the popular DevOps Weekly email newsletter, and he spent several years working for the U.K. Government Digital Service (GDS) on GOV.UK and other projects. As Senior Software Engineer at Puppet, you can find him building some of the latest infrastructure automation products when he isn't speaking at events on a wide variety of DevOps and related topics.
Last month I interviewed the Cockpit team about team practices. We had an interesting conversation from many different angles, but most notable were the themes we kept returning to: understanding goals, the importance of feedback loops, and committing to open and transparent communication. I found I could easily correlate each of these back to other teams I have worked with in the past. When you inspect the behaviors and inner workings of a team, these themes seem to be remarkably central to team conflict.
As we've noted, artificial intelligence and machine learning are going through aamini-renaissance right now. Google recently made a possibly hugely influential contribution to the field of machine learning. It has open sourced a program called TensorFlow that is freely available. It’s based on the same internal toolset that Google has spent years developing to support its AI software and other predictive and analytics programs.
In a related open project from the Google Brain team, dubbed Magenta, Google is calling for efforts to leverage TensorFlow and machine learning to create compelling art and music. Some of the early examples from this effort are eye-opening.
Nintendo NX spec rumors keep coming, and the latest chatter suggests that the console may support open-source virtual reality for certain games. This would allow the 2017 machine to compete with the likes of Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR.
The news comes to Design & Trend via Chinatimes as referenced by the sometimes-accurate Digitimes. The report should be taken with a grain of salt, but it's certainly interesting.
As indicated by the secondary source, Nintendo allegedly has a production partnership with a certain chipmaker called Pixart. While the outfit is most known for its heart-rate monitoring hardware, mentions are also made to "tape-out chips supporting VR technology by the end of 2016." These chips "will support next-generation Nintendo NX game machines."
Playing musical scores is a heavy kind of art. The Nootka app will help you understand the basics of music notation reading, and help you improve by practicing various kinds of exercises. Nootka gives real-time feedback, has multiple difficulty levels, and is customizable.
If you're in open source and looking for a job, chances are you won't have to search long. According to recent research, businesses are going out of their way to find—and hang onto—their best open source talent. Last month, the 2016 Open Source Jobs Report found that 79% of hiring managers have increased incentives to retain their current open source professionals.
There's a special place to chat with fellow photographers, learn about high-end FOSS photography software, and share your work with others. It's called PIXLS.US, and it's a large and wonderful world beyond Photoshop.
This is truly a golden age in the hobby of photography. Never before has it been so inexpensive and easy to take and share great photos. The rise of smartphones has fueled an explosion in casual photography, and the ecosystem is further extended through the proliferation of media-sharing apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Lower costs for better cameras has enabled many budding photographers to take up the hobby. Unfortunately, while much of the underlying software that fuels the apps and platforms is built on free/open source software, there is little fanfare for the projects that are available directly to photographers.
I just published the videos from Solskogen 2016 on Youtube; you can find them all in this playlist. The are basically exactly what was being sent out on the live stream, frame for frame, except that the audio for the live shader compos has been remastered, and of course a lot of dead time has been cut out (the stream was sending over several days, but most of the time, only the information loop from the bigscreen).
Please note that the systemd.conf 2016 Call for Participation ends in less than two weeks, on Aug. 1st! Please send in your talk proposal by then! We’ve already got a good number of excellent submissions, but we are interested in yours even more!
We are looking for talks on all facets of systemd: deployment, maintenance, administration, development. Regardless of whether you use it in the cloud, on embedded, on IoT, on the desktop, on mobile, in a container or on the server: we are interested in your submissions!
Browser plugins, especially Flash, have enabled some of our favorite experiences on the Web, including videos and interactive content. But plugins often introduce stability, performance, and security issues for browsers. This is not a trade-off users should have to accept.
Mozilla and the Web as a whole have been taking steps to reduce the need for Flash content in everyday browsing. Starting in August, Firefox will block certain Flash content that is not essential to the user experience, while continuing to support legacy Flash content. These and future changes will bring Firefox users enhanced security, improved battery life, faster page load, and better browser responsiveness.
Growth hacking often leverages customer data in the experimentation process, in the form of A/B testing. The goal is to use big data to gain a better understand of the customer, via a complete view across every touch point of the organization, in order to enable an optimal customer experience. Growth hackers—who can be anyone from marketing professionals to product manager and engineers—are seeking insights to help optimize marketing campaigns across channels, increase customer loyalty and retention, and enhance the customer experience.
Temasek Polytechnic (TP), Singapore and Cloudera have teamed on cultivating the next generation of data professionals through the Cloudera Academic Partnership (CAP) program.
Temasek Polytechnic (TP) and Cloudera are working together to cultivate the next generation of data professionals through the Cloudera Academic Partnership (CAP) program. Through this program, students from Temasek Polytechnic’s School of Informatics & IT (IIT) have access to the latest Apache Hadoop curriculum, software and skills training for the Hadoop platform.
The latest in a string of market research reports has arrived forecasting huge growth for big data analytics platform Hadoop, but not everyone agrees that Hadoop adoption is going so smoothly. According to researchers at Stratistics MRC, the global hadoop market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 53.7% over the forecast period 2015 to 2022. " Increasing investments in data management, rising amount of structured and unstructured data, hasty growth in consumer data and rapidly increasing demand for big data analytics are the factors influencing the market growth," the study's authors report.
Here are some of the details, and some of the warning signs coming in pointing to too much complexity required in deploying Hadoop.
Splice Machine, which provides an RDBMS powered by Hadoop and Spark, has announced a cloud-based sandbox for developers to put its just launched open source Community Edition to the test. The company is making available an open source standalone and cluster download, and has announced the general availability of V2.0, and the launch of its developer community site.
Yesterday I added Get around Brno page to the LibreOffice Conference website. There you can find comprehensive information about public transport in Brno, how to buy tickets, how to get to the hotel/venue if you arrive by train/bus/car/plane etc. All accompanied with maps and pictures of described places. So hopefully no one will get lost on their way to the hotel or venue, or struggle purchasing tickets.
In this week’s developer interview, we talk to Winfried Donkers, a Dutch coder who has been using LibreOffice (and its predecessors) for almost two decades, and today works on Calc.
Randal Schwartz, from TWiT.tv’s “FLOSS Weekly,” interviews Nicole Engard and Brendan Gallagher, about the open source Koha Integrated Library System (ILS), which originated in New Zealand in 1999. Along with being a web developer, Nicole is a prolific blogger on Opensource.com and last year was recognized by Red Hat for her significant contributions to open source advocacy.
Between 17 June and 8 July, you sent the EU-Fossa project 3282 answers, to help us choose which open source software to audit.
First, thank you very much for the many interesting and encouraging comments!
The European Commission is preparing a software source code security audit on two software solutions, Apache HTTP server and Keepass, a password manager. The source code will be analysed and tested for potential security problems, and the results will be shared with the software developers. The audits will start in the coming weeks.
Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) is helping government agencies pave the way for open source software use, opening doors for software developers keen to shape new innovative software, says Land Information Minister Louise Upston.
The NZGOAL Software Extension guidelines were themselves developed using open source tools and facilitated through Loomio, an online group decision-making platform. The final drafts were crafted through GitHub, an open source repository.
The British government’s Digital Service is looking for a chief penguin to head up open source.
GDS has created a brand-new position for an individual to conduct open source technology projects, adoption and working practices for the government's IT arm.
Moreover, the chosen candidate will be charged with forging relationships with individuals and projects outside government in the open-source community.
Until now, GDS had a number of people working in different roles taking the lead on open source. The new individual will be nestled in GDS’s technical architecture team.
Open Source Software specialist OpusVL has created a way to take the Gov.UK website theme created by the Government Digital Service (GDS) and reproduce it quickly in designing and building public sector websites.
The solution uses Bootstrap, an HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework originating from Twitter, which is used for creating front end websites and applications. With an increase in the variety of devices used to view websites, Bootstrap is a standard toolkit for building responsive design and enabling websites to be mobile and tablet friendly.
With sharing and re-use of software and technology high on the GDS agenda, OpusVL adopted the principle by importing the GDS work and “re-factoring” it in the form of the Bootstrap framework in addition to the methods originally created by GDS.
For decades now, open source tools and applications have been gaining enormous traction in parts of Europe, and cities such as Munich have even been involved in a multi-year effort to transform technology infrastructure by throwing out proprietary applications and using open source tools instead.
In the latest move on this front, Bulgaria recently passed legislation requiring that government software be open source. The move underscores how pervasive open source applications and platforms have become. Now, though, there is growing debate about whether Bulgaria is making a wise move, or one that could open it up to security threats.
Ripples from Bulgaria's recent decision requiring all software written for the government to be open source could build into something bigger.
The GNU General Public License (GPL) was designed to grant clear permissions for sharing software and to defend that freedom for users. GPL'd code now appears in so many devices that it is fundamental to modern technology. While we believe that following the GPL's requirements is neither burdensome nor unreasonable, many fail to do so. GPL enforcement — the process to encourage those who fail to correct problems and join our open software development community — is difficult diplomacy.
While it is nice to have access to produce that is not in season, the unseen use of pesticides and other harmful additives is a difficult problem to avoid.
With its customizable, open-source SoCs built on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture, SiFive, a San Francisco start-up, is poised to reverse the industry’s rising licensing, design and implementation costs.
With on the one hand Moore’s Law ended or approaching the end and on the other, vast investments required for to develop a modern, high-performance chip, it looks impossible for smaller system designers to join the traditional economic model of chip building. However, the body of software and tools available from the open-source community under the guidance of the RISC-V Foundation, can substantially cut the cost of developing custom silicon. System designers can use the SiFive Freedom platforms to focus on their own differentiated processor without having the overhead of developing a modern SoC, fabric or software infrastructur
If you find the prices of the current range of robotic lawnmowers just a little too high for your budget, you might be interested in a new open source remote control lawnmower which has been created called the Lawn Da Vinci.
Okay so it’s not completely autonomous but you can still add a little extra fun to those lawn mowing days, with the addition of a little remote control to the humble petrol powered lawnmower.
The evidence is overwhelming that large scale collaboration leads to superior technology. FOSS showed us the way and now free and open source hardware is rapidly gaining traction. There is a growing list of open source hardware projects, which are bringing millions (billion?) of dollars of value to the world. Now a new initiative from the Open Building Institute (OBI) is adding "house" to the list of killer open hardware apps.
You've heard of open source software. But what about open source hardware? Here's an overview of what open source hardware is, what the challenges are and why open hardware is poised to grow in importance as the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to boom.
Though Autodesk’s interest in 3D printing was not unknown, it may have been a bit of a surprise when the CAD developer entered the industry with its own 3D printer in 2014. Ember, Autodesk’s first hardware product, is a digital light processing (DLP) 3D printer capable of high-resolution prints for prototyping and even end part production. What may be most unique about the Ember is that both the printer and one of its materials are open-source, a bold move for a large corporation like Autodesk.
AT&T and Orange signed a deal to tackle NFV and SDN open source and standards issues that continue to plague the telecom industry
AT&T signed a deal with European operator Orange to work on open source and standardization initiatives linked to the carrier’s push toward increasing control of its network resources using software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technology.
Denmark’s public administrations should overhaul their eInvoicing solutions, writes the Agency for Digitisation (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen - DIGST). The agency wants public administrations to prepare to introduce a European-wide eInvoicing standard, and to concentrate on the use of Danish 2010 eInvoicing standard, OIOUBL. Its forerunner, OIOXML, is to be phased out.
Recently, I got a plea from the mother of a child with special needs. She asked: “Can you do a column on how to investigate your child’s special education file?” Two thoughts flashed to my mind: 1) That’s such a fundamental and important thing to be able to investigate. And 2) I don’t know anything about it.
Luckily, one of the joys of working at ProPublica is being surrounded by super smart people. And our education reporter, Heather Vogell, is uncommonly sharp, having covered the most important stories in education for years. (Remember the cheating scandal in Atlanta schools? Heather and her colleagues at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution uncovered that.)
Very few of you would be knowing about the existence of mineral oil-cooled PCs. These are custom made computers submerged in non-conductive mineral oil. Compared to regular air cooling , the mineral oil cooling setup works with up to 5-times more efficiency. If you find this interesting, you can read ahead and watch some useful videos that detail the process of making a mineral oil-cooled PC.
Despite “remarkable” progress by some countries on addressing noncommunicable diseases like cancer and diabetes, there is a need to accelerate efforts in order to meet agreed global commitments, the World Health Organization said this week.
The government has broken its pledges on NHS funding and is misleading the public about how much extra money it is actually putting into the health service, a committee of MPs has said.
In a highly critical report, the House of Commons health select committee accuses Jeremy Hunt and other ministers of giving the cash-strapped NHS “less than would appear to be the case from official pronouncements”.
The cross-party group of MPs refutes the health secretary’s persistent claim the government will have given the NHS in England an extra €£8.4bn by 2020-21 compared with 2015-16. That was one of the Conservatives’ key pledges in last year’s general election campaign, and was repeated many times after that by David Cameron and George Osborne while they were still the prime minister and the chancellor.
While the use of one toxic chemical—on our foods, lawns, and elsewhere—has its inherent risks, scientists warn that the combination of two or more such ingredients in common pesticides could have an even more noxious impact, one which is commonly overlooked.
In fact, a investigation released Tuesday by the environmental watchdog Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) found that over the past six years the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved nearly 100 pesticide products that contain these so-called "synergistic" compounds, effectively "increasing the dangers to imperiled pollinators and rare plants."
As CBD explains, "[s]ynergy occurs when two or more chemicals interact to enhance their toxic effects," turning "what would normally be considered a safe level of exposure into one that results in considerable harm."
"The EPA is supposed to be the cop on the beat, protecting people and the environment from the dangers of pesticides. With these synergistic pesticides, the EPA has decided to look the other way, and guess who's left paying the price?" asked Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center and author of the report, Toxic Concoctions: How the EPA Ignores the Dangers of Pesticide Cocktails (pdf).
The CrypTech project is an independent security hardware development effort that consists of an international team. CrypTech Alpha is an open source crypto-vault that stores the private/public keys and separates the digital certificates from the software using them. It has been developed as a hardware secure module (HSM) to make the implementation of strong cryptography easier.
One of the northwest’s best-known entrepreneurs has splashed out about €£10m on a cyber-security venture that helps businesses repel hackers.
Lawrence Jones, who runs the Manchester-based internet hosting and cloud computing specialist UKFast, has bought Pentest, an “ethical hacking” firm whose staff help detect flaws in clients’ cyber-defences.
Jones, 47, will merge Pentest’s 45 staff into his own cyber-security outfit, Secarma. “It’s become obvious that there is a massive need to put emphasis on cyber-security,” said the internet tycoon, whose wealth is calculated by The Sunday Times Rich List as €£275m.
A vulnerability in a widely used ASN.1 compiler isn't a good thing: it means a bunch of downstream systems – including mobile phones and cell towers – will inherit the bug.
And an ASN.1 bug is what the Sadosky Foundation in Argentina has turned up, in Objective Systems' software.
The research group's Lucas Molas says Objective's ASN1C compiler for C/C++ version 7.0.0 (other builds are probably affected) generates code that suffers from heap memory corruption. This could be potentially exploited to run malware on machines and devices that run the vulnerable compiler output or interfere with their operation.
Among the more plunderous cybercrime gangs is a group known as “Carbanak,” Eastern European hackers blamed for stealing more than a billion dollars from banks. Today we’ll examine some compelling clues that point to a connection between the Carbanak gang’s staging grounds and a Russian security firm that claims to work with some of the world’s largest brands in cybersecurity.
The Carbanak gang derives its name from the banking malware used in countless high-dollar cyberheists. The gang is perhaps best known for hacking directly into bank networks using poisoned Microsoft Office files, and then using that access to force bank ATMs into dispensing cash. Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab estimates that the Carbanak Gang has likely stolen upwards of USD $1 billion — but mostly from Russian banks.
Do you have an army of imposters online pretending to be you? Probably not, but now you can still request for a verified Twitter account.
On Tuesday, Twitter launched an official application process so that any account can be verified and receive a blue checkmark badge next to its username. Twitter users interested in applying should have a verified phone number and email address, as well as a profile photo that reflects the person or company branding.
Verified accounts get to filter their mentions to only see those from other verified accounts. But that seems to be the only real feature or perk that comes from having a blue badge–aside from bragging rights, of course. Additionally, verified accounts can’t be private, and the username must remain the same or you will have to seek verification all over again. If you are rejected, you can reapply after 30 days. Previously, the verification process was never clear-cut, and it seemed to require a direct connection to a Twitter rep.
A newly disclosed vulnerability could allow attackers to seize control of mobile phones and key parts of the world's telecommunications infrastructure and make it possible to eavesdrop or disrupt entire networks, security experts warned Tuesday.
The bug resides in a code library used in a wide range of telecommunication products, including radios in cell towers, routers, and switches, as well as the baseband chips in individual phones. Although exploiting the heap overflow vulnerability would require great skill and resources, attackers who managed to succeed would have the ability to execute malicious code on virtually all of those devices. The code library was developed by Pennsylvania-based Objective Systems and is used to implement a telephony standard known as ASN.1, short for Abstract Syntax Notation One.
Wednesday, July 20 is the final day of EFF's Summer Security Reboot, a two-week membership drive that focuses on taking stock of our digital security practices and bolstering the larger movement to protect digital civil liberties. Besides a reduced donation amount for the Silicon level membership, the Reboot features sets of random number generators: EFF dice with instructions on how to generate stronger and more memorable random passphrases. EFF even produced three new passphrase wordlists to improve upon Arnold Reinhold's popular Diceware list, first published in 1995.
EFF is a longtime advocate for personal security, and over the years we have continued to fight threats to user privacy and freedom. With the Summer Security Reboot, we want the public to engage with the larger questions of how one can and should control personal information in spite of high-profile attempt after attempt to compromise our devices. The world has increasingly recognized privacy and strong crypto as integral parts of protecting international human rights. A recent Amnesty International report states encryption is "an enabler of the rights to freedom of expression, information and opinion, and also has an impact on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly, association and other human rights." Strong passphrase use is but one basic part of a diverse toolkit that can help you protect personal information, whether from identity thieves or government surveillance (ideally both!).
A security researcher has located a flaw in Facebook’s device login feature that allows one to easily authorise apps on IoT devices. Due to the lack of CSRF protection, an attacker can fool Facebook’s systems and grab the access_token of the victim. Facebook has now fixed the bug and awarded $5,000 bounty to the white hat hacker.
The Neutrino exploit kit (EK) added a former Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability affecting to its arsenal.
Arbor Networks has published the statistics of the DDoS attacks in the first half of 2016. The largest one went up to 579Gbps. An interactive map shows the DDoS attacks made on a global level.
When Turkish President/aspiring Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan landed at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport early Saturday morning, he declared the attempted coup against his government a failure, and a “gift from God.”
Yet another? But yet another what? One does not even know. Once more tens of people killed, many more injured. Once more, a human being has carried them over towards death and suffering in his trajectory of violence and self-destruction. And both ISIS and most western commentators rush to describe him as the soldier of a cause when one does not even know if and when he discovered it.
The success of peace requires not only the legal security of the agreements, but also, importantly, a grassroots political process that includes popular support. To date, the government and guerrillas have done little to win public support over the agreement. In fact, many critics have opposed the advances of the Negotiating Table in La Habana, and some, including former president ÃÂlvaro Uribe, have called for a “civil resistance” claiming that the agreement promotes impunity. Levels of citizen knowledge about the agreements are low, legitimacy and popular confidence of the peace process have decreased in the latest months, polarization continues to grow with post-paramilitary groups committing human rights abuses, and political strategies to encourage support are non-existent.
Note that the government benches are almost empty. The people who bothered to be present and listen to the debate were overwhelmingly those who voted against Trident. With all Scotland’s MPs but one opposing, this is yet another reason to get a move on with Indyref2. I don’t share the criticism of the Tories for calling this debate and vote – it helpfully clarifies that the representatives of Scotland are treated with contempt, and that the Blairite majority in the Parliamentary Labour Party are in hock to arms industry interests.
On a hot Friday afternoon in April, hundreds gather at the House of Mourning to pay their respects to the fallen youth of the Kurdish city of Diyarbakñr. Among the crowd are families and friends, neighbors and colleagues, municipal officials and local politicians, as well as leaders of the Kurdish movement and many of its most committed supporters. At the invitation of our hosts, we are here to witness the funeral of Yusuf, 19, one of hundreds of young Kurds killed during recent clashes with Turkish forces in the ancient neighborhood of Sur.
It is to me disgusting that a politician so thoroughly disgraced as Liam Fox should be back in power. Answers were blanked on the actual purpose of the Werritty connection, and I think collectively we should try to do something about that.
An amateur report alleging Russian doctoring of satellite photos on the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 case – a finding embraced by The New York Times – is denounced by a forensic expert as an “outright fraud,” reports Robert Parry.
Over the weekend, after the initial reports of the purge unleashed by Erdogan against Turkey's public, we previewed the upcoming, far more dangerous counter-coup as follows: "it was the next step that is the critical one: the one where Erdogan - having cracked down on his immediate military and legal opponents - took his crusade against everyone else, including the press and the educational system."
The LRAD was first deployed for use in Iraq, and quickly found its way onto Navy and commercial ships sailing amongst Somali pirates. The bad boy is a sound cannon.
The LRAD company prefers to label its product a tool to broadcast messages and pain-inducing “deterrent” tones over long distances. The device produces a sound that can be directed in a beam up to 30 degrees wide, and the military-grade LRAD 2000X can transmit at up to 162dB up to 5.5 miles away.
Fun fact: A jet engine at 100 feet is 140dB. Sound at 180db will cause tissue damage.
But of course the LRAD is non-lethal, so its maker says that anyone within a 100 meters of the device’s sound path will experience extreme pain. The version generally utilized by police departments (the LRAD 500X) is designed for short bursts of directed sound that cause severe headaches in anyone within a 300 meter range. Anyone within 15 meters of the device’s audio path can experience permanent hearing loss.
Permanent hearing loss begins at 130dB, and if the device is turned up to 140dB, anyone within its path would not only suffer hearing loss, they could potentially lose their balance and be unable to move out of the path of the audio.
Scores of civilians trapped in Islamic State-controlled territory in northern Syria were reportedly killed Tuesday by airstrikes from Western coalition aircraft. The reported death toll, potentially the highest ever to result from a coalition bombing in the international campaign against ISIS, continued to climb as The Intercept reached out to monitoring groups tracking operations in the area.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 56 civilians were killed when their convoy of vehicles attempted to slip out of an area north of the city of Manbij in the predawn darkness, as U.S.-backed forces pushed forward in an increasingly bloody offensive in the area. In a brief phone interview, a representative from the Britain-based organization said that while coalition aircraft were believed to be responsible for the air raid, the group suspected it was a “100 percent mistake.”
Airwars, a nonprofit that tracks claims of civilian casualties resulting from the international air campaign against ISIS, said incoming reports indicated the death toll may prove to be well over 100 civilians — potentially making it the largest single loss of civilian life resulting from coalition airstrikes since the U.S.-led campaign to destroy ISIS began nearly two years ago. Tuesday’s reports were the latest in a string of recent incidents in which coalition aircraft have been implicated in the deaths of civilians in the Manbij area.
“Really these civilians are in a desperate situation,” Chris Woods, head of Airwars, told The Intercept. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
The Republicans were supposed to talk about how they plan to Make America Work Again last night. And I supposed Paul Ryan — and to a lesser extent Mitch McConnell, when he wasn’t being booed — presented a vision of how they think Republicans run the economy. That vision doesn’t actually resemble the protectionist big government approach Donald Trump has been running on. But given the revelation that Trump offered to let John Kasich run both domestic and foreign policy if he would be his VP candidate (Kasich was still reluctant), perhaps we should focus more on how Mike Pence wants to suffocate the economy.
Instead, as most people have focused, Republicans continued to attack Hillary (Hillary continues to attack Trump, though I suspect she will focus somewhat more on policy next week than Republicans have thus far). Many people have unpacked Chris Christie’s rabble inciting witch hunt last night, but Dan Drezner backs his review of it with some data on the risks to democracy (click through to read all of, which is worth reading).
It has become an article of faith among Republicans that the anti-Islam video, which had sparked protests in Cairo in the hours before the attack in Benghazi, and across the Arab world in the days after it, had absolutely nothing to do with the killing of the Americans. Inside that bubble, carefully nurtured by Fox News, any suggestion that the offensive video — a trailer for a film biography of the prophet made to antagonize Muslims — acted as a catalyst for the assault by Islamist militants was part of a cover-up by the Obama administration.
According to a subsequent investigation by New York Times reporters, however, “extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack” suggested that the violence was indeed “fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.”
The post-coup chaos in Turkey is a reminder about the risk of leaving nuclear weapons in unstable regions where they serve no clear strategic purpose but present a clear and present danger, explains Jonathan Marshall.
Why the long wait, and what do the 28 pages reveal?
If we’re to believe the headlines in Saudi media (e.g. Al Arabiya) and mainstream American media (e.g. Time and the Washington Times) the big news is what they don’t reveal: A “smoking gun” connecting the government of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.
If we’re to believe the 28 pages themselves, the big news is that they do, in fact, reveal a “smoking gun” connecting the government of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.
Here’s the opening sentence from the newly released material: “While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected with the Saudi government.”
The military upheaval in Turkey, whose final consequences are yet to be seen, highlights a major weakness in worldwide efforts to promote democracy. This event underscores the need to establish binding international legal principles to ban the recognition of military regimes as a result of coups d’état. Establishment of such principles, and the creation of the legal mechanisms for applying them, would foster democracy throughout the world.
The circumstances in Turkey mimic several similar situations in recent history: the coming to power of governments without support from the military. Once confronted with a threat to their political hegemony, the military either overthrow the civilian government or refuses to surrender power to democratically elected civilians.
Overt recognition by Western democracies or implied recognition through ambivalent signs of disapproval have encouraged military officers to overthrow many constitutional governments freely chosen by the people. The military relinquish power only when forced by popular will, or when its own incapacity to govern has made its position untenable.
This happened to the Greek junta after its debacle in Cyprus, to the Chilean regime under Augusto Pinochet and to the Argentine military after the Falklands conflict. New principles could be developed, however, that would automatically bar the recognition of such de facto regimes.
Given the need to expand the role of the United Nations in keeping peace, the General Assembly and its International Law Commission could be called upon to draw up appropriate legislation. As the late Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold once said, the United Nations is “the most appropriate place for development and change of international law on behalf of the whole society of states.”
Establishment of non-recognition of post coup d’état a universal principle raises some difficult practical questions. What about already established and recognized military regimes? These cases show the difficulties of applying the principle retroactively.
But what if a country’s military forces stage a coup against an oppressive or corrupt civilian regime? An ousted civilian government that has been freely elected by the people should not be denied recognition in favor of a post-coup military regime unless the overthrown government was responsible for gross human rights violations. Further, after a coup, recognition should be withheld until another civilian government is chosen in free and democratic elections.
In the wake of the two seemingly outrageous slayings of African American men by police in Minnesota and Louisiana and the equally heinous retaliatory killings of five police officers in Dallas by a black former Army Reservist, questions have been raised in all three cases about excessive police behavior.
A US air strike killed nearly 60 civilians, including children, in Syria on Tuesday after the coalition mistook them for Islamic State fighters.
Some eight families were hit as they tried to flee fighting in their area, in one of the single deadliest strikes on civilians by the alliance since the start of its operations in the war-torn country.
Pictures of the aftermath of the dawn strikes on the Isil-controlled village of Tokhar near Manbij in northern Syria showed the bodies of children as young as three under piles of rubble.
No better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act than filing a lawsuit claiming an agency is refusing to comply with it. FOIA enthusiast Ryan Shapiro has done exactly that, suing the DOJ [PDF] for the FBI's continued refusal to perform anything more than a cursory search, using its most outdated software, for responsive records.
Shapiro told the Guardian that the reason the DoJ gave for refusing to use its $425m Sentinel software to process Foia requests after ACS had failed to recover records was that a Sentinel search “would be needlessly duplicative of the FBI’s default ACS UNI index-based searches and wasteful of Bureau resources”.
Jason Leopold is back in court (is he ever NOT there?) battling the NSA and the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) over the release of documents related to the NSA and FBI's surveillance of federal and state judges. The two parties had already been told to do more looking around for responsive records by Judge Tanya Chutkan, who rejected their original request for summary judgment last July.
The two agencies went back and performed another search. And still came up empty-handed.
Let me rephrase that: the two agencies went back and performed another "search." Here's what that "search" actually entailed, as described in the opinion [PDF].
When more than 300 protesters assembled in May at the Holiday Inn in Lakewood, Colorado — the venue chosen by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for an auction of oil and gas leases on public lands — several of the demonstrators were in fact undercover agents sent by law enforcement to keep tabs on the demonstration, according to emails obtained by The Intercept.
The “Keep it in the Ground” movement, a broad effort to block the development of drilling projects, has rapidly gained traction over the last year, raising pressure on the Obama administration to curtail hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, and coal mining on federal public lands. In response, government agencies and industry groups have sharply criticized the activists in public, while quietly moving to track their activities.
The emails, which were obtained through an open records act request, show that the Lakewood Police Department collected details about the protest from undercover officers as the event was being planned. During the auction, both local law enforcement and federal agents went undercover among the protesters.
The emails further show that police monitored Keep it in the Ground participating groups such as 350.org, Break Free Movement, Rainforest Action Network, and WildEarth Guardians, while relying upon intelligence gathered by Anadarko, one of the largest oil and gas producers in the region.
More than 285,000 people have signed a petition calling for the closure of an aquarium in southern China that is home to an animal dubbed “the world’s saddest polar bear”.
The lethargic bear, whose name is Pizza, is on show at an “ocean theme park” located inside the Grandview shopping centre in the city of Guangzhou.
The aquarium made international headlines after its opening in early January with one Hong Kong-based animal rights charity denouncing it as a “horrifying” animal prison.
Six years after spilling more than 27,000 barrels of oil into local rivers, Enbridge Energy Limited Partnership is finally facing the music: a $177 million settlement with the U.S. government.
The music is a little soft.
The settlement covers two spills, but one of them was a doozy. On July 25, 2010, an Enbridge pipeline ruptured, ultimately spilling 20,000 barrels of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River and becoming the largest ever on-shore tar sands oil spill. Tar sands oil, extracted primarily in Canada and piped into and across the United States, is heavy, thick, and mud-like. Unlike most other oils, it sinks, making it even more difficult to clean up. After the Kalamazoo spill, Enbridge had to dredge the river and then replant native vegetation. At the five-year mark of the spill, the river’s ecology had not fully returned.
The future Republican presidential nominee is right to criticize so-called 'trade’ deals like NAFTA, but he does so for the wrong reasons.
The last-minute decision to include in the Republican platform a call to restore the firewall between commercial and investment banking comes as a surprise, because Donald Trump himself has never publicly addressed or endorsed such a reform in his year-long presidential run.
Trump did once say at a debate in New Hampshire, “nobody knows banking better than I do,” but a review of the transcripts of all twelve Republican debates shows that he never endorsed restoring Glass-Steagall, legislation first passed in 1933. Websites devoted to detailing Trump’s positions find no record of him having any opinion on the Depression-era law. The issues pages of Trump’s presidential website steer clear of anything related to banks or finance.
Sound familiar? King’s white moderate and Marx’s ostensible friend is our corporate liberal. Same spin, different decade. The corporate liberal is an embodiment of the idea that political parties are the graveyards of movements. Hedges himself wrote a book called, “Death of the Liberal Class” five years ago. It should’ve been the elegy before the interment of the Democratic Party as a serious option in electoral politics. Yet here we are, about to anoint another corporate liberal to the highest seat in the land. In that case, consider this article yet another epitaph awaiting its headstone. Let’s hope it’s not a long wait. Voices like Sawant’s and the momentum of movements like BLM give us reason to think it won’t be.
The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is flouting a rent-reporting requirement for apartments built under the city’s single biggest housing tax break. Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn’t seem to mind.
If he wins the presidency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would seek to purge the federal government of officials appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama and could ask Congress to pass legislation making it easier to fire public workers, Trump ally, Chris Christie, said on Tuesday.
Some Republican convention delegates are complaining that pro-Trump thugs harassed and threatened them for not falling into line behind the nominee.
This is not a new phenomenon; there’s even a Delegate Defense Hotline set up by the Ted Cruz campaign in April that bullied delegates can call.
Kera Birkeland, a delegate from Utah, said she was confronted by two women in the bathroom at the Quicken Loans Arena Monday night. “They yelled at me, called me names,” she wrote on Facebook. “They said I should die. They said the police should be pulled from the Utah delegation and we should all die. They never touched me. They did not say they would kill me. They just said I should die.”
Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, joked about the incident on Tuesday. “I think I have a pretty good sense of what’s going on in this convention, but I haven’t gone in to the bathrooms yet,” he told reporters.
Birkeland was part of a group of delegates who unsuccessfully called for a roll call vote on the convention’s rules on Monday – widely seen as the last gasp of a #Nevertrump movement. Birkeland initially supported Rand Paul for president, then Ted Cruz.
Tommy Valentine, a 22-year-old Virginia delegate, told ThinkProgress that representatives from the Trump campaign threatened him about the petition for a roll call vote: “I had one Trump staffer who came to me and said, ‘When Trump becomes president, he will remember,’” Valentine said. “They were going around to the delegates who would sign the documents intimidating them and telling them to take their names off it.”
RNC delegates and convention-goers can buy merchandise calling Hillary Clinton a “bitch” and a “tramp.” On both Monday and Tuesday, the floor has broken out in chants of “lock her up!” Listening to the speaker after speaker spend a significant chunk of their time denouncing Clinton, one might be led to believe hating on Hillary is an official plank in the Republican Party’s platform.
Tuesday was “Make America Work Again” day at the Republican National Convention, which also happened to coincide with the party formally nominating Donald Trump as its nominee.
But neither jobs nor Trump got much attention as a grab-bag of Republican headliners Tuesday spent most of their time demonizing Hillary Clinton and talking about themselves without offering an affirmative case for the nominee or a concrete economic policy agenda.
The keynoter, House Speaker Paul Ryan, spoke nearly 1,500 words, but mentioned Trump’s name just twice. Promising he’ll be standing alongside “Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump” at next year’s State of the Union address, Ryan spent the lion’s share of his time castigating the Democratic Party instead.
Appropriate progressive response to inadequate choice, says one Democratic delegate, 'would be expressions of outrage and nonviolent protest, from the convention floor in Philadelphia to communities across the country.'
The Republican National Convention has been an orgy of crazy talk – mixed in with some plagiarism by Donald Trump’s wife and a vast kangaroo court convicting Hillary Clinton – a truly remarkable spectacle, as Michael Winship describes.
Years from now, bright-eyed children will look up at Grandma or Grandpa and ask, “Where were you when they nominated Donald Trump?” Far too many prominent Republicans will have to hang their heads in shame.
As the garish imperial coronation in Cleveland reaches its climax, there will be much commentary—some, no doubt, from me—about fleeting events. Did So-and-so’s speech help Trump or hurt him? Did one line of attack against Hillary Clinton seem more or less promising than another? All of this is news, but we must not lose sight of the big picture: The “Party of Lincoln” is about to nominate for president a man who is dangerously unfit for the office.
Trump is a brilliant showman, no question about that. His life’s work has been self-aggrandizement, not real estate, and all those years of practice served him well when he turned to politics. He knows how to work a crowd. He understands television and social media. He dominated and vanquished a field of experienced campaigners as if they were mere apprentices.
Boris Johnson was embarrassingly forced on to the back foot during his first London press conference as foreign secretary on Tuesday as he was repeatedly pressed to explain his past “outright lies” and insults about world leaders, including describing the US president as part-Kenyan and hypocritical.
Standing alongside John Kerry, the US secretary of state, Johnson claimed his remarks had been misconstrued, that his past journalism had been taken out of context, and world leaders he had met since his appointment fully understood his past remarks.
What happens outside Quicken Loans Arena during the 2016 Republican National Convention may be more interesting than what happens inside the star-spangled halls.
Photojournalist Michael Nigro is in Cleveland to provide Truthdig with a view of noteworthy moments from around the convention centers, where protesters and activists have gathered to express their views.
Boos, screams of “no,” and cries of “shame” rang throughout the Republican National Convention’s arena Monday afternoon as party leaders rejected demands from at least ten states to allow a vote on the rules that bind delegates to vote for Donald Trump.
The delegates leading the eleventh-hour rebellion, including Colorado’s Kendal Unruh, were furious. She told ThinkProgress minutes after the vote that she felt cheated by her own party and its nominee.
Party divisions over Donald Trump reached the floor of the Republican Convention on Monday afternoon as anti-Trump delegates attempted a complicated procedural maneuver: petitioning the convention’s chairman to force a roll call vote over the acceptance of the convention’s rules.
It was an act of desperation.
“I think Trump is the absolute worst candidate that the Republican Party could put forth,” said Craig Licciardi of Flint, an alternate delegate from Texas who said that he supported the roll call vote. (Nearly half the delegates attending the convention are technically “alternates,” who don’t get an actual vote on the floor.)
Like many from his state’s delegation, he wore a Lone Star shirt and a cowboy hat. “He’s a Democrat in disguise,” Licciardi said. “I would hope that everything he says has a measure of truth to it, but it was only a few years ago that he was praising Hillary and Bill as his good friends, and good people.”
The Intercept and our partners at AJ+ produced the video above documenting the GOP’s 60-year-long de-evolution
The Republican Party is poised to nominate a presidential candidate who has built his platform on promises to ban a billion people from entering the United States based on their religious faith and build a gigantic wall south of the border.
But Donald J. Trump is not an accident. The GOP has in the last 40 years relentlessly devolved away from addressing the needs of ordinary people, catering instead to extreme ideologies and the wealthiest donors.
Rather than addressing pressing problems like income inequality and climate change, the modern GOP focuses instead on cutting taxes for the super-wealthy, expanding earth-killing carbon extraction, and endless war.
But it wasn’t always this way. Sixty years ago, the Republican Party was advocating for civil rights and gender equality, a stronger welfare state, and to protect the environment. This is the story of the Republican Party that once was.
Last week America suffered the loss of Sydney Schanberg, widely regarded as one of the greatest journalists of his generation. Yet as I’d previously noted, when I read his long and glowing obituary in the New York Times, I was shocked to see that it included not a single word concerning the greatest story of his career, which had been the primary focus of the last quarter century of his research and writing.
The cynical abandonment of hundreds of American POWs at the end of the Vietnam War must surely rank as one of the most monumental scandals of modern times, and the determined effort of the mainstream media to maintain this enormous governmental cover-up for over four decades raises serious doubts about whether we can believe what our newspapers report about anything else.
A couple of mainstream academics, one liberal and one conservative, whose names would be recognized as those of prominent public intellectuals, dropped me notes strongly applauding my effort to reopen the POW controversy and help get the truth out at last.
Each day of the Republican National Convention, as tens of thousands of delegates, reporters, and curious onlookers pushed and shoved their way down a single narrow street leading to the arena’s main stage, a group of vendors hawked t-shirts and buttons attacking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions.
The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected the faith that Henry Clay and his admirer Abraham Lincoln had in the federal government’s ability to invest in fostering economic growth and expanding educational opportunity. Its partisans embodied what John C. Calhoun, slavery’s chief ideological defender, described disdainfully as “the national impulse.” It was, in fact, a good impulse.
In the last 24 hours, the Donald Trump campaign has offered a number of dubious excuses for why Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention’s opening night appeared to lift passages of First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic Convention speech word-for-word. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who has enthusiastically endorsed Trump, offered a novel explanation: the Jewish agenda.
Trump initially refused to disavow the notorious white supremacist’s endorsement, eventually distancing himself from Duke after pressure from the party establishment. But Duke has continued to vociferously defend Trump against all accusations of racism, generally by blaming the Jews.
A central portion of Melania Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Monday night, about the core values her parents instilled in her and her sister as children, seems to have been lifted almost word for word from the speech Michelle Obama gave on the first night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
A key part of Donald Trump’s campaign to become the Republican presidential nominee was based on claiming to self-fund his campaign while calling his opponents “puppets” of big contributors. But the 2016 Republican platform takes some of the most extreme positions on money in politics, measures that would force almost all politicians to seek out their own personal puppet masters.
First, the GOP platform advocates “raising or repealing contribution limits” on donations directly to politicians.
Currently individuals can give only $2,700 per election directly to a candidate. Primaries count as separate elections, so you can give Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s campaigns $5,400 – half for the primary and half for the general elections.
Thanks to Citizens United and related rulings, you can also — if you can afford to — give unlimited amounts to Super PACs that are theoretically uncoordinated with campaigns.
The court also dismisses several other accusations by Albert, noting that Yelp has never solicited defamatory/misleading reviews and acts in good faith to remove defamatory or misleading postings when notified. It also points out that Albert's claim that Yelp itself creates misleading/defamatory reviews is not supported by any available evidence.
The plaintiff has asked for the opportunity to amend her complaint (not a bad idea, considering every allegation was rebuffed), but the court points out that the anti-SLAPP statute would be completely useless if complainants were allowed to rewrite their pleadings in light of a court's decision.
The high court of Paris has ruled that Google and Microsoft do not have to censor their search engines to remove all results involving the world "torrent" used in conjunction with the names of three French musicians.
The French music producers' association "Syndicat national de l’édition phonographique" (SNEP) had sought a court order to force the US companies to remove results for searches pairing the word "torrent" with the artists' names, which they claimed directed users to pirate sites.
As an article on the French site NextInpact explains, the Tribunal de grande instance de Paris refused to grant SNEP's request for Google's search results to be censored because of a legal technicality raised by Google's lawyers. SNEP's request referred to only three artists, and should have been on behalf of its entire membership, the high court ruled.
Google and Bing are not required to automatically filter "torrent" related searches to prevent piracy, the High Court of Paris has decided. The filter, requested by the local music industry group SNEP, would be too broad, ineffective, and target legitimate content as well.
The public broadcaster had been refusing to withdraw a decision taken to ban airing footage of protests where public property was being burned. This was despite an order made by the Independent Communications Authority (Icasa) and numerous court challenges.
Turkey has a pretty detailed history of banning websites that it doesn't like, so the news that it's now blocking Wikileaks hardly comes as a surprise. After all, following the failed coup attempt, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wasted no time in moving forward with what appears to be a somewhat vicious crackdown on tens of thousands of people. So, when Wikileaks suddenly released 300,000 emails from the Turkish government for anyone to search and explore, it's no surprise that all access to Wikileaks was quickly blocked.
Turkey has blocked access to the WikiLeaks website, the telecoms watchdog said on Wednesday, hours after it leaked thousands of ruling party emails just as Ankara grapples with the aftermath of a failed military coup.
Around 50,000 soldiers, police, judges and teachers have been suspended or detained since the attempted coup on the weekend, and Turkey's Western allies have expressed concern over the crackdown's reach.
WikiLeaks on Tuesday released nearly 300,000 emails from the AK Party dating from 2010 to July 6 this year. Obtained before the attempted coup, the date of their publication was brought forward "in response to the government's post-coup purges", WikiLeaks said on its website.
Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Communications also said it noted the judgment passed by the high court in Pretoria on Wednesday and hoped that the SABC would abide by the judgement.
The High Court in Pretoria on Wednesday granted an order interdicting the SABC from implementing or enforcing its censorship decision.
THE axed SABC journalists now want to be reinstated immediately, after the public broadcaster’s controversial editorial policy banning footage of violent protests came crumbling down in court yesterday.
The scales appeared to tilt in their favour when the high court in Pretoria granted an order interdicting the public broadcaster from enforcing its censorship policy.
A red brick wall. A white paintbrush. How long would it take to paint the wall? For an artist it wouldn't take long to give a fair estimate of the time. But in January this year, the task was entrusted upon two members of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) when British film-maker Charlie Lyne crowdfunded a film titled "Paint Drying" and made them sit through more than a 10-hour-long movie. All that was there in the film was a "single, unbroken shot of white paint drying on a brick wall"! On India's Republic Day when the U certificate for the film was posted on Reddit, BBFC's website crashed.
Algorithms make digitally mediated surveillance or watching over technically very easy. Applications can support and mitigate the damage of disasters, they can help protect people in public spaces, they can help signal health risks and in that sense, they combat disease. They help in monitoring climate change. Algorithms are being used to help companies to boost profits and countries are (in some cases) experiencing economic growth as a result – that is the claim and it can be verified. Algorithms also of course support sousveillance or undersight as Steve Mann and others call it; and so algorithmic based watching from below also supports a radical politics of resistance.
The FBI wants to implement a program to counter extremism in U.S. schools that’s similar to a disastrous one in the U.K.
Are these the tell-tale signs of kids at risk of committing violence: An 8-year-old who wore a t-shirt saying he wanted to be like a seventh-century Muslim leader? A 17-year-old who sought to draw attention to the water shortage in Gaza by handing out leaflets? A 4-year-old who drew a picture of his dad slicing a vegetable?
Teachers and school officials in the United Kingdom thought so, and they referred these children for investigation as potential terrorists. They were interrogated by U.K. law enforcement. They’re likely subject to ongoing monitoring, with details of their childhoods maintained in secret government files potentially indefinitely.
A report released last week by Rights Watch (UK) highlights these and other children’s experiences under a U.K. countering violent extremism (CVE) program known as Prevent. Prevent imposes a legal obligation on schools to implement policies assessing whether children have “extremist” views or are at risk of engaging in terrorism, and to “intervene as appropriate.” Intervention may include referring the child to a related program in which panels of police officers, teachers, and other government employees identify children they think are vulnerable to terrorist recruitment.
Why should any of this concern Americans? Because the FBI wants to do something a little bit too close for comfort in U.S. schools, and American schoolchildren may come under similar suspicion and scrutiny.
The French data protection authority on Wednesday ordered Microsoft to stop collecting excessive data on users of its Windows 10 operating system and serving them personalized ads without their consent.
The French data authority, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), said the US company had three months to stop tracking browsing by users so that Windows apps and third-party apps can offer them targeted advertising without their consent, failing which it could initiate a sanctions procedure.
A number of EU data protection authorities created a contact group to investigate Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system following its launch in July 2015, the French privacy watchdog said.
The privacy software Tor has aided everything from drug dealing marketplaces to whistleblowing websites in evading surveillance on the darknet. Now that same software can be applied to a far more personal form of security: keeping hackers out of your toaster.
On Wednesday, the privacy-focused non-profit Guardian Project, a partner of the Tor Project that maintains and develops the Tor anonymity network, announced a new technique it’s developed to apply Tor’s layers of encryption and network stealth to protecting so-called “Internet of things” or “smart home” devices. That growing class of gadgets, ranging from refrigerators to lightbulbs to security cameras, are connected to the Internet to make possible new forms of remote management and automation. They also, as the security research community has repeatedly demonstrated, enable a new breed of over-the-Internet attacks, such as the rash of hackers harassing infants via baby monitors or the potential for hackers to steal your Gmail password from your fridge.
Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift had an exhausting day on the internet on Monday. In the immediate aftermath of Kardashian releasing video footage confirming that Swift did, in fact, have a conversation with Kanye West about her name drop in his song “Famous,” public opinion has taken a dramatic turn against Swift.
Censorship on social media is a tricky issue. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram have to balance community policing with freedom of expression. When does bullying cross the line? Should hate speech be banned? And who gets to decide? It's often a gray area — except when it's black and white. Since Kim Kardashian uploaded snippets on Sunday night of Kanye's conversation with Taylor Swift — you know, the phone call about "Famous" that Swift insisted never happened — Kimye supporters have been hard-core trolling Swift's Instagram response to the debacle. Commenters have been calling her a liar, a fake, and things much nastier than that — or simply resorting to the snake emoji, as inspired by this tweet of Kardashian's. Not nice — but nothing egregious or unusual, either.
The federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA has not kept pace with wearable fitness trackers, mobile health apps and online patient communities, leaving a gaping hole in regulations that needs to be filled, according to a much-delayed government report released today.
The report, which was supposed to be complete in 2010, does not include specific recommendations for fixing the problem, even though Congress asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide them.
It’s been a rough month for Internet freedom in Russia. After it breezed through the Duma, President Putin signed the “Yarovaya package" into law—a set of radical “anti-terrorism” provisions drafted by ultra-conservative United Russia politician Irina Yarovaya, together with a set of instructions on how to implement the new rules. Russia’s new surveillance laws include some of Bad Internet Legislation’s greatest hits, such as mandatory data retention and government backdoors for encrypted communications—policies that EFF has opposed in every country where they’ve been proposed.
As if that wasn’t scary enough, under the revisions to the criminal code, Russians can now be prosecuted for “failing to report a crime.” Citizens now risk a year in jail for simply not telling the police about suspicions they might have about future terrorist acts.
But some of the greatest confusion has come from Internet service providers and other telecommunication companies. These organizations now face impossible demands from the Russian state. Now they can be ordered to retain every byte of data that they transmit, including video, telephone calls, text messages, web traffic, and email for six months—a daunting and expensive task that requires the kind of storage capacity that’s usually associated with NSA data centers in Utah. Government access to this data no longer requires a warrant. Carriers must keep all metadata for three years; ISPs one year. Finally, any online service (including social networks, email, or messaging services) that uses encrypted data is now required to permit the Federal Security Service (FSB) to access and read their services’ encrypted communications, including providing any encryption keys.
Randomly-generated passphrases offer a major security upgrade over user-chosen passwords. Estimating the difficulty of guessing or cracking a human-chosen password is very difficult. It was the primary topic of my own PhD thesis and remains an active area of research. (One of many difficulties when people choose passwords themselves is that people aren't very good at making random, unpredictable choices.)
The national security state steps out of bounds.
[...]
After 9/11, Hayden and a small group of White House officials, intelligence officers, and lawyers secretly put in place a warrantless wiretapping program whose purported legality relied on radical exceptions to both the Fourth Amendment and a federal statute that strictly governs foreign-intelligence surveillance on domestic soil. Even as he defends the program, codenamed "Stellarwind," as a "logical response" to 9/11 and "not the product of demented cryptologic minds," Hayden calls it "the agency's edgiest undertaking in its history." (He may be right, but he devotes just five lines to describing the program's most legitimate competitor for that title: the vast domestic spying, detailed in the 1975 and '76 Church Committee Reports, that he calls a "scandal" in scare quotes. He mentions government surveillance of "the likes of" Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and Benjamin Spock; he leaves out a host of legislators and civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr.) Situating the controversy Stellarwind ignited, Hayden writes my favorite sentence in the book: "Domestic intelligence has always been countercultural in America."
Using Xcode to spoof GPS locations in Pokemon Go (like we saw this morning) isn’t that much of a hack, and frankly, it’s not even a legit GPS spoof. After all, it’s not like we’re using an SDR to spoof the physical GPS signal to cheat Pokemon Go.
No sooner had the ink dried on the Second Circuit Appeals Court decision regarding Microsoft and its overseas servers than new legislation designed to undercut the court's finding has been printed up by the DOJ and presented to the administration.
Microsoft successfully argued that the US government couldn't force it to unlock a server in Dublin, Ireland, so it could rummage around for evidence. Nor could the DOJ force the company to act on its behalf, performing a search of its overseas servers for documents the US government couldn't access otherwise.
Since that decision obviously just won't do, the DOJ has presented proposed legislation [PDF] that would alter existing Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) so the agency can do the very thing a court just said it couldn't do.
The details are discussed in, um, detail over at the Lawfare blog by none other than a former DOJ lawyer (David Kris). Needless to say, the post skews towards "supportive," but the analysis is thorough and offers some excellent insight on what the DOJ hopes to open up -- and what it's willing to concede in return for this new power.
A former division chief for the National Security Agency, who admitted that he hurled his 3-year-old adopted son against a wall in his Maryland home, was sentenced to 12 years in prison Tuesday for the boy’s death.
Much of the six-hour hearing dealt with O’Callaghan’s mental state. He had served tours in Kosovo and Iraq as a Marine, saw the dead bodies of children, and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, testimony showed. His attorney, Steven McCool, described that history as a mitigating factor in the crime.
Politicians, lawyers, and civil rights groups have slammed the UK government's present and future surveillance laws in light of the advocate general's opinion on the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA)—which said that Theresa May's emergency spy law is legal if strong safeguards are in place.
[...]
Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson—who, alongside Tory MP and the government's new Brexit chief David Davis—brought the original legal action against the UK's DRIPA legislation, said: "This legal opinion shows the prime minister was wrong to pass legislation when she was home secretary that allows the state to access huge amounts of personal data without evidence of criminality or wrongdoing."
Human rights group Liberty, which represented Watson in the courts, said that if the CJEU judges agree with the advocate general’s opinion, "the decision could stop the government’s fatally flawed Investigatory Powers Bill in its tracks and mark a watershed moment in the fight for a genuinely effective, lawful, and targeted system of surveillance that keeps British people safe and respects their rights."
America is a ticking time bomb.
All that remains to be seen is who—or what—will set fire to the fuse.
We are poised at what seems to be the pinnacle of a manufactured breakdown, with police shooting unarmed citizens, snipers shooting police, global and domestic violence rising, and a political showdown between two presidential candidates equally matched in unpopularity.
The preparations for the Republican and Democratic national conventions taking place in Cleveland and Philadelphia—augmented by a $50 million federal security grant for each city—provide a foretaste of how the government plans to deal with any individual or group that steps out of line: they will be censored, silenced, spied on, caged, intimidated, interrogated, investigated, recorded, tracked, labeled, held at gunpoint, detained, restrained, arrested, tried and found guilty.
For instance, anticipating civil unrest and mass demonstrations in connection with the Republican Party convention, Cleveland officials set up makeshift prisons, extra courtrooms to handle protesters, and shut down a local university in order to house 1,700 riot police and their weapons. The city’s courts are preparing to process up to 1,000 people a day. Additionally, the FBI has also been conducting “interviews” with activists in advance of the conventions to discourage them from engaging in protests.
A bizarre case comes out of the Texas court system -- landing squarely in the middle of a legal Bermuda Triangle where illegal searches meet civil asset forfeiture… and everything is still somehow perfectly legal. (via FourthAmendment.com)
The facts of the case: police officers arrested Miguel Herrera and seized his 2004 Lincoln Navigator. An inventory search of the vehicle uncovered drugs and the state moved to seize the vehicle itself as "contraband" using civil (rather than criminal -- this is important) asset forfeiture. Herrera argued that the stop itself was illegal and anything resulting from it -- the drugs and the civil seizure of the vehicle -- should be suppressed.
The Supreme Court of Texas examines the facts of the case, along with the applicable statutes, and -- after discarding a US Supreme Court decision that would have found in Herrera's favor -- decides there's nothing he can do to challenge the seizure. He can't even move to suppress the evidence uncovered following the illegal stop -- the same search that led to the state seizing his vehicle under civil forfeiture statutes.
In another step towards the fascist state Donald Trump has warm dreams envisioning, FBI agents and Cleveland police officers “visited” the homes of local activists in an attempt to gather intelligence on possible planned demonstrations surrounding the Republican National Convention.
Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, insisted on Monday that there was nothing wrong with the lack of diversity at the Republican National Convention since, he said, members of other races had contributed relatively little to human civilization.
King’s literal assertion of white supremacy, in response to criticism of the party by the Esquire blogger Charlie Pierce, came during a live appearance on MSNBC, and seemed to stun the host, Chris Hayes, as well as Pierce and April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks’ Washington bureau chief.
Alfred Taban, a prominent South Sudanese journalist and editor-in-chief of the Juba Monitor, was arrested by government national security service agents on Saturday, according to the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project (DefendDefenders). His arrest reportedly stemmed from his recent editorial calling for the removal of South Sudan’s president Salva Kiir and his first vice president Riek Machar, following a new round of bloodletting in South Sudan’s long-running civil war.
“What Alfred wrote was within the constitutional right (freedom of expression), it is not an offense,” Edmund Yakani, the executive director of Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, a civil society organization that tracks the harassment of journalists, told The Intercept by email.
Power-seeking demagogues appeal, unknowingly, to our dangerous instinct to fear and hate rival groups: unknowingly, partly because the scientific community denies the existence of instinct.
It’s really simple: Government officials cannot punish subordinates for refusing to pray.
How does a 13-year veteran of the Puerto Rico Police Department go from being a patrol officer to washing police cars? In the case of Officer Alvin Marrero-Méndez, all it took was refusing to participate in his boss’s official Christian prayers. After Officer Marrero-Méndez, an atheist, objected to the unlawful practice and declined to join his colleagues in prayer, he was demeaned by his supervisors, stripped of his gun, and effectively demoted to a messenger and car-washer.
In 2013, the ACLU and ACLU of Puerto Rico filed a federal lawsuit against Officer Marrero-Méndez’s supervisors. Today, ruling against the supervisors, a federal appeals court affirmed the obvious: The government cannot punish someone for refusing to pray, and officials who violate this basic constitutional principle can be held liable in court for their conduct.
The defendants had argued that they should be immune from liability because, according to them, the law at the time was not clearly established. But as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit explained today, “If these actions do not establish religious coercion, we would be hard-pressed to find what would.”
One police officer was stabbed and another injured after a water fight in London's Hyde Park on the hottest day of the year turned violent.
Two other people suffered stab wounds in addition to the police officer as the park descended into a "war zone".
The first lecture in the series Foucault calls Security, Territory and Population is primarily a discussion of security. Instead of a definition, Foucault gives two sets of examples. The first group involves penal statutes. In the simplest case, there is a prohibited practice (you shall not steal) and a punishment (amputation). In the second, the disciplinary case, the prohibition and the punishment are present, but in a more complex context, including a system of supervisions, inspections and checks to identify the likelihood that a person will commit a crime; and instead of a spectacular punishment like amputation or banishment, there are incarceration and efforts at transforming the person. In the third case, the first two remain in place, but we add a supervisory regime of statistics and other efforts to understand the problem created by the prohibited practice and to set up mechanisms that are cost-effective in trying to keep the prohibited acts at a tolerable level with cost-benefit analysis and other constructs.
The second set of examples concerns illness. In the Middle Ages, leprosy was dealt with using a strict protocol of separation. A bit later, the Plague was treated with a robust series of quarantines, inspections and other regulatory steps to prevent spread. In the third case, there is smallpox, treated with inoculations, so that the crucial questions are the effectiveness of the vaccine, the modes of insuring widespread inoculation, and other more formal statistical understandings.
Underlying this question for the party was a question for the country as a whole, the fundamental and perennial question, ‘who is to be master?’ Is society to be dominated by a few hundred thousand bankers, industrialists and landowners? Or will the whole nation come to comprehend and control its economic policy and ‘distribute the product of its labours in accordance with some generally recognised principles of justice?’
One of the looming mysteries during the last several months of Brazil’s political crisis (as The Intercept has repeatedly noted) has been the complete absence of polling data from the country’s largest media outlets and polling firms. The lower house voted on April 17 — more than three months ago — to send to the Senate impeachment charges against democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff, which resulted in the temporary installation of her vice president, Michel Temer, as “interim president.”
Since then, there had been no published polls from Datafolha — the polling firm used by Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de.S Paulo — asking Brazilians if they favor Dilma’s impeachment, if they favor the impeachment of Temer, and/or if they want new elections to choose a new president. The last Datafolha poll prior to the impeachment vote was on April 9, and it found that 60 percent favored Dilma’s impeachment, while 58 percent favored the impeachment of Temer. It also found that 60 percent wanted Temer to resign after Dilma was impeached, and 79 percent favored new elections once they both left.
If you'll recall, early on this year we wrote about the very strange story in which the at-the-time scouting director for the St. Louis Cardinals, Chris Correa, used the old passwords of a former employee who had since taken a job with the Houston Astros to break into the opposing team's scouting database. The actions were fairly brazen, leading many to wonder how in the world Correa thought he was going to get away with this. The government charged him under the CFAA, to which Correa pleaded guilty. At the time, I concluded the post guessing that Correa, given his standing and the fact that he isn't named Aaron Swartz, would get off with minimal if any jail time.
Christopher Correa, the former scouting director for Major League Baseball's St. Louis Cardinals, has been sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for guessing the password of a Houston Astros manager.
In his grab-the-pitchforks address to the Republican National Convention on Monday night, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani insisted the enemy wasn’t “most of Islam,” just “Islamic extremist terrorism.”
But in an interview with The Intercept on the convention floor Tuesday night, Giuliani enthusiastically defended policies that treat all Muslims like criminal suspects.
Asked whether he supports Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s proposals to have police spy on mosques, Giuliani replied “I was the mayor who put police officers in mosques, in New York and New Jersey.”
Giuliani even claimed credit for a longer history of police surveillance of New York area mosques than is widely known, predating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “We did it for the eight years I was mayor,” he said. Giuliani was mayor from 1994 through December 2001.
“After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremist terrorists from New Jersey, I did it in early January of 1994.”
After the 9/11 attacks, the New York Police Department launched a now well-documented but then-secret program of spying on every mosque within a 100-mile radius of New York City, including in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England. The department acknowledged in 2012 court testimony that the program had never generated an investigative lead and in 2014, Mayor Bill De Blasio shut down the program’s most controversial unit.
Dozens of police officers swarmed protestors from the activist group CodePink outside a main entrance to the Republican National Convention Tuesday, because they were holding tennis balls.
In June, the City of Cleveland added tennis balls to its list of prohibited items inside a 3.3 square mile “event zone,” surrounding the Quicken Loans Arena. Other prohibited items included tape, rope, bike locks, and any stepstool that could be used to address a crowd. But the prohibition did not apply to guns – meaning that convention attendees and onlookers are allowed to openly carry firearms, including assault weapons.
Cleveland Police requested that Ohio Gov. John Kasich suspend open carry laws inside the “event zone,” but he denied the request.
After 14 years, the author of ‘Guantánamo Diary’ has been cleared for release from indefinite detention by the government.
After 14 long years languishing at Guantánamo without charge or trial, Mohamedou Slahi has finally been cleared for release.
Today the Periodic Review Board — a panel of national security, intelligence, and other officials — made that decision after determining that Slahi poses no significant threat to the United States. The government of his native Mauritania has said that it would welcome him home.
Slahi is the author of the best-selling memoir “Guantánamo Diary,” and he appeared before the Periodic Review Board on June 2. We provided the PRB with a slew of evidence and support for Mohamedou’s release. We especially appreciate the letter of support from a former U.S. military guard at Guantánamo who was assigned to Slahi for 10 months, and another support letter from former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions, Col. Morris Davis.
A campaign to free Slahi spearheaded by the ACLU has gathered major support both in the U.S. and abroad. The ACLU and Change.org have collected more than 100,000 signatures calling for his release. High-profile supporters of the petition include Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Roger Waters. In the U.K., several members of Parliament signed a letter urging the British government to call on the U.S. to release Slahi.
An interagency review board has determined that Guantánamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi poses no threat to the United States and has recommended that he be released, setting the bestselling author on the path to be reunited with his family.
Slahi was arrested in his native Mauritania in 2001, and was held and tortured in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Jordan before being secreted to Guantánamo, an odyssey he recounted in a memoir, Guantánamo Diary, which became a bestseller last year. He has been imprisoned for over 14 years without being charged with a crime.
In early June, Slahi made his case to the Periodic Review Board as part of a sort of parole process instituted by the Obama administration to evaluate the cases of the remaining men at Guantanamo to determine if they might be safely transferred to another country.
At that hearing, Slahi’s advocates, including his lawyer and two representatives from the military, described his plans to continue writing and to start a small business, and noted the strong network of family and other supporters who could help him. They spoke to his unusual language skills and warm relationship with his lawyers and even the guards assigned to him. The military representatives described him as “an advocate for peace,” and stated that they were “certain that Mohamedou’s intentions after Guantánamo are genuine, and that he possesses sound judgment, and that he is good for his word.” One former guard submitted a letter attesting that he “would be pleased to welcome [Slahi] into my home.” (In keeping with the general secrecy of proceedings at Guantánamo, Slahi was not allowed speak during the open portion of the review, and he declined to have his own statement from the closed session made public.)
Today ends the BEREC consultation on Net Neutrality. This consultation aimed at consulting the people on the guidelines clarifying the implementation of the telecom regulation1. The version sent by La Quadrature du Net is the one written by the FDN Federation, we believe this answer is appropriate and we support its provisions.
With much industry fanfare last month, Dutch telco KPN announced that it had completed nationwide coverage of the Netherlands in a wireless Internet of things network. Like a traditional cellular network, but with far lower costs and energy requirements, KPN’s network can connect sensors monitoring everything from rail switches at Utrecht Central station to depth sounders at the Port of Rotterdam and baggage handling at Schiphol Airport.
The planned transition of the internet's critical technical functions from the US government to a technical body may come under further attack after the Republican Party officially agreed to block it on Monday.
The Republican Platform for 2016 [PDF] was formally approved during a chaotic first day of the party's national convention in Cleveland, and among its 66 pages of policy positions is its stance on "Protecting Internet Freedom."
In contrast to most of the document, the effort to move ultimate control of IANA from the US Department of Commerce (DoC) to non-profit DNS overseer ICANN is covered in largely hyperbolic terms.
IoT Gateways connect IoT Devices to IoT back-end systems. Gateways connect to devices using interfaces like Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN, RS-485 and CANbus. Gateways connect to back-end systems through the Internet, commonly using Ethernet, WiFi, or cellular connections. Gateways perform multiple tasks, including concatenation of multiple devices, protocol conversion, device management, and security. Gateways may also perform application processing.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Rapid Intelligence System (ACRIS) is new database created by EUIPO’s Observatory in cooperation with DG Trade. The database provides EU companies with an overview of IP risks in third countries and offers a collection of IPR infringement cases. In the database, information is also given on the actions taken by third country local authorities in response to IP infringements. This information is intended to help companies to make informed decisions as to their business strategies in third countries and how to avoid and mitigate risks of IP infringement.
The United Kingdom-based Anti-Counterfeiting Group (ACG) industry group launched a “manifesto” earlier this month, calling on the government to establish a more effective and comprehensive response to intellectual property crime.
A summary press release and the manifesto can be found here.
The UK government is estimated by industry to lose €£1.3 billion in unpaid tax from the sale of counterfeits. Additionally, whilst there has been an increase in the counterfeit products entering the UK markets, there has unfortunately been a decrease in the number of these products being seized at EU borders, the group said.
A new publication analysing the relationship between intellectual property and access to science explores ways countries have developed to counter the potential barriers created by IP rights, and says patenting by universities is counterproductive.
The lessons derived from the history of AIDS treatment have become a rallying call for civil society organisations globally. Not being able to afford AIDS medicines should not be repeated for people with other diseases, including HIV co-infections, treatment activists told world leaders here.
A German software company, Bitmanagement Software, is now suing the US government for copyright infringement and demanding almost $600 million. The lawsuit, which was filed in the US Court of Federal Claims (basically a special court set up just for cases involving suing the US government for money), says that the US Navy copied Bitmanagement's 3D virtual reality software, BS Contact Geo. Apparently, the Navy had tested the software and had an evaluation license allowing the software to be used on 38 computers. And then the Navy just copied it onto hundreds of thousands of computers.
The lawsuit notes that the Navy had specifically requested the removal of Bitmanagement's usage tracking code, and then told the company that it wanted to license the software for upwards of 500,000 computers -- but also that it started doing those installs while the company was still negotiating a license. While that negotiation was ongoing, someone (accidentally, apparently) forwarded an email to Bitmanagement indicating that the software had already been installed on 104,922 computers. Apparently, a few months later, the Navy also disabled some other tracking software, called Flexwrap. This part is a bit confusing in the lawsuit, since earlier it notes that the evaluation contract required Bitmanagement to remove tracking software, but then the lawsuit notes that later on it was the Navy that removed Flexwrap, "in violation of the terms" of the license.
Sharing is an inherent feature of social media. But, asks Alice Gatignol, is there any way this can be reconciled with established principles of copyright protection?
Copyright holders running after pirates is not a new tune to our ears. Google, the biggest search engine provider on the planet, publishes regular reports of their fight against removing pirated content. They’ve managed to blank out around 523 million links from Google Search this year and will continue to remove more of them in the coming months.
Francis Gurry has appointed the new Deputy Director General for the Copyright and Creative Industry Sector. She is Sylvie Forbin, a national of France, and most recently Senior Vice President for Public and European Affairs, for Vivendi. Here is the WIPO announcement: as PDF.
If the past is a guide, she is a hardliner for the industry, opposing user rights and favoring very aggressive enforcement measures.
Among other things, she has described the social movements for access to knowledge as "very organized" and "opaque networks" that serve technology giants.
The crux of the argument is that these iconic characters currently appear to be in a bit of a death spiral. Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman met with a mixed-at-best response from fans and critics, and while both made good money in the big picture, they also showed some worrying signs — like failing to catch up to Marvel's superhero movies (which was the whole point) and breaking records of audience drop-off between the much-hyped opening night and the following week (when word begins to get around that the movie sucks). Schmidt is not the first to attribute this to the creators' disdain for the characters: Zack Snyder has openly expressed his lack of real interest in Batman and Superman, and made it clear that he doesn't really understand their appeal. Writer David Goyer has made similar comments. And the same people are already hard at work on the follow-up Justice League films, which seem unlikely to break the pattern of mediocrity.
This might be hard to believe for non-farmers, but owners of tractors aren't actually allowed to fix them, thanks to a set of laws designed to protect software intellectual property.
In the quest to stop the FCC from bringing competition to the set top box, the cable industry has trotted out all manner of misleading arguments, most of which have been pushed in editorials in newspapers nationwide without highlighting author ties to the sector. Some of them have tried to pretend that cable box competition will create a piracy apocalypse. Others have tried to somehow argue that better, cheaper hardware and choices will somehow harm minority communities. Most of those are just flimsy attempts to try and keep the FCC from cracking open a $21 billion monopoly on cable box rental fees.
Fearing their own loss of control, the entertainment industry has joined the cable sector in also claiming new cable box rules will somehow violate copyright law. Under the FCC's original proposal (pdf), the agency simply states that existing cable content must be delivered to third-party hardware using the copy protection of the industry's choice. Nothing in the rules will change that, or magically give third-party vendors the right to violate copyright. Still, opponents of the rules have consistently tried to claim the rules are some kind of cabal by Google to freeload off of and repackage "their innovation."