Open source software was once relegated to hobbyists and tech-enthusiasts who enjoyed tinkering with code, but we’re entering an era of open source professionalization.
Businesses of all sizes are investing in open source projects and, to support these investments, 65% of hiring managers say they are expanding open source hiring into multiple parts of their companies—beyond just the IT and engineering aspects.
While hiring open source professionals is increasingly important, the rise of open source software is critical to the new Internet of Things and connected devices reality. You may not realize it, but the growth of Linux since the early 1990s has dictated the development of open source in the business and consumer worlds.
Windows 10's market share has stalled, according to all three of the traffic-measurement tools The Register tracks at the start of each month.
Our three sources are Netmarketshare, StatCounter and analytics.usa.gov. All three investigate web traffic to determine operating system prevalence, with the third source only considering traffic to United States Government web sites.
Back in September, complaints that reached the web (and even got confirmed by a supposed Lenovo official) claimed that installing Linux on a Yoga 900 was impossible because the operating system was blocked as part of a deal between Microsoft and Lenovo.
A KDE user for the second week in a row! And one who uses Activities. KDE isn’t an easy desktop environment, but it continues to attract power users. My suspicion is that as other desktop environments (across operating systems) simplify their interfaces, KDE will continue to attract new users who want a more sophisticated interface—even at the cost of a learning curve.
Amazon Web Services is letting customers download its own artisanal Linux.
The company has loosed its Linux Container Image to assist those planning a move into its cloud can test their software and workloads on-premises.
Previously the image was only accessible on-cloud, for customers running virtual machine instances on AWS.
The cloud giant's chief evangelist Jeff Barr made the announcement in this blog post.
Conversely, looking at new developments in technology can often give a hint at the future of business at large. I see three developments that have the potential to influence our company of the future in a major way.
Microservices Blockchain Industry 4.0
While this might read like a list of keynote topics at any major tech conference in 2016, let’s look further than the average trend report.
Apcera today is launching what it claims is the first enterprise-grade container management platform.
The idea is to provide a turnkey package that includes all the functions necessary for running containers — functions such as orchestration and networking, along with aspects such as security.
There are many examples of collaboration all around us that stretch far beyond the type of collaboration in open source projects. As preparation for her keynote at LinuxCon Europe, Jilayne Lovejoy, Principal Open Source Counsel at ARM, watched a TED talk by Rodney Mullen and was inspired by how he talked about collaboration within the skateboarding community where he compared it to hackers within the open source community.
Lovejoy says, “You'd think the people in this room had an invented the whole concept of collaboration, but you can actually find examples of collaboration all around us, like in the way skateboarding evolved from freestyle to street skating by adapting to a new environment.” She talks about how the values underpinning collaboration are inherently compelling and goes on to talk about how “it's about being motivated by the respect from your peers, the satisfaction of creating something others can use, and being part of a community that you helped build and you can see other people contributing that and taking it to the next level.”
Cloud Foundry, the open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud, surveyed nearly 900 executives and all of them are having fits finding enough staffers with cloud skills. How bad is it? Bad.
Jeff Garzik, CEO and co-founder of enterprise-grade blockchain solutions provider Bloq, has been elected as a representative to the Board of Directors for The Linux Foundation – a nonprofit organization promoting open source software. This key appointment recognizes Garzik’s commitment to innovating with open source technologies.
The Linux Foundation, the top non-profit, open-source group, has announced the appointment of Erica Brescia, co-founder and COO of Bitnami; Nithya A Ruff, director of Western Digital's Open Source Strategy Office; and Jeff Garzik, co-founder of Bloq, to its board of directors. Linux Foundation Logo
Ms Ruff and Ms Brescia join as at-large directors, and Mr Garzik comes on board as the representative of Linux Foundation Silver members. Brescia and Ruff will take the place of Larry Augustin and Bdale Garbee. Garzik replaces Matt Jones of Jaguar Land Rover.
Nithya Ruff, director of Western Digital’s Open Source Strategy Office, has joined the Board of Directors of the Linux Foundation. In addition to Ruff, the Linux Foundation has also appointed Erica Brescia, co-founder and COO of Bitnami and Jeff Garzik, co-founder of Bloq, to its Board of Directors.
Ruff runs the open source program office for WD and also leads the gender diversity efforts through the WD Women’s Innovation Network Board, which is an Employee-led group that advocates for women to achieve their highest potential in the company.
Fujitsu subsidiary PFU has announced Linux support for their SP Series scanners (SP-1120, SP-1125, SP-1130). Sadly, even in 2016, binary-only drivers are still a thing for printers/scanners.
The Fujitsu SP scanner Linux drivers released today are 32-bit and 64-bit binaries spun for Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 LTS and no sign of any source code nor does the README mention anything aside from the binary blobs that are behind an EULA barrier.
Interested in hacking on some low-level stuff and implementing a feature that's useful to a lot of laptop owners out there? We have a feature on libinput's todo list but I'm just constantly losing my fight against the ever-growing todo list. So if you already know C and you're interested in playing around with some low-level bits of software this may be the project for you.
Specifically: within libinput, we want to disable certain devices based on a lid state. In the first instance this means that when the lid switch is toggled to closed, the touchpad and trackpoint get silently disabled to not send events anymore. [1] Since it's based on a switch state, this also means that we'll now have to listen to switch events and expose those devices to libinput users.
Following last week's benchmarks of the GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti has been a request to see some fresh Blender benchmarks with CUDA acceleration of the Pascal line-up. Now having more time with these latest GTX 1000 series cards, here are such benchmarks.
It appears that the first day of November 2016 was fruitful for the open source ecosystem, as many major software releases and GNU/Linux distributions have landed, including the GStreamer 1.10 multimedia framework.
cURL 7.51.0 was released today and while it does add some new features it does contain a number of active CVEs.
Today a new major version of the libblockdev library was released - libblockdev 2.0. This new release breaks the C API [1], but for the sake of important new features that required such changes. So what's new?
ââ¬â¹Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) is used to encrypt connections between clients and the FTP server. SFTP provides file access, file transfer, and file management functionalities over over SSH tunnels.
Feral Interactive has just released Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Linux!
Great to see Feral get this game out now for Linux with the Windows release having just been this past August. While on Windows there is Direct3D 12 support and on macOS there is Metal, under Linux there is just OpenGL support. As mentioned yesterday with the Linux system requirements for this game, only NVIDIA graphics are currently supported. I'll be running some Mesa Git tests with this game shortly...
Retracing the life of the protagonist, his choices and their consequences are central to this open world game. Life and death and philosophical quandaries are ever-present in Mortido.
Just a word of warning, the latest Steam Client Beta has partially broken the downloading and updating of games on Linux.
I noticed it yesterday, as all my games repeatedly said "disk write error", even though the drive has been working perfectly with everything else. I checked on github, and it seems others are having this issue too.
The moment you've all been waiting for is here, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive has just made the big announcement today, November 3, 2016, for the launch of the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided video game on Steam for Linux, and SteamOS.
Exactly two weeks ago, the guys behind Feral Interactive teased the Linux gaming community with yet another AAA title, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, after giving us a unique chance of playing the excellent Mad Max open world action-adventure video game just a day before announcing the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Linux port.
Feral Interactive has published the system requirements for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. As usual, it's the GPU/driver requirements that are always most interesting.
I thought the recent port of Mad Max to Linux was our highlight of the year, but Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a whole ‘nother level of fun.
I have to say, I’m damn impressed at not only how many games Feral Interactive have ported this year, but also at the fact that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided came to Linux so soon after the original Windows release! Not quite the day-1 releases we need, but damn close.
With the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided release happening tomorrow, Feral Interactive have released the system requirements. It will need a pretty decent rig.
It is a heavy game, I've seen plenty of reports about the Windows version requiring a beefy PC to play it reasonably well, so this isn't surprising.
For so long Linux users filled very excluded from the gaming world, with a lot of games for other OSes and almost no games for Linux. For playing good Linux games with good graphics the solution was to use wine but, wine never worked very well out the box. Most of the games were small in size and not too good in graphics, the developers didn’t think of porting or creating games for linux because of it small size of users.
The GTK+ 4 work is continuing at full speed, and today I want to show one of the first concrete benefits from the GSK merge: We can now record and replay frames. If you ever wondered why your animation does not look quite right, this might be just the tool for you.
The development team of the GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) application designed for the GNOME desktop environment, released the second maintenance update to the 3.22 stable series.
We are looking at accommodation options for GUADEC 2017 in Manchester and we would like some feedback from everyone who is hoping to attend!
Manchester’s hotels fill up quickly in summer so we are going to do one or more group bookings now to ensure we have enough rooms for everyone.
There are a lot of reasons I recommend Ubuntu to Linux newbies. It’s well supported, reasonably stable, and easy to use. But I prefer to roll with Arch Linux myself. It has several compelling attributes, but one of its biggest pluses is that Arch is a rolling-release distribution.
What?
If you’re using Linux for the first time, there’s a pretty good chance your OS is what’s called a “versioned release” distribution. Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Mint all release numbered versions of their respective operating systems. By contrast, a rolling-release distribution eschews versions altogether. Here are a few of the things you can expect from a rolling release.
Those of us living in the Solus world know that its development team grows each day faster than that of other Linux-based operating systems, and magic happens all the time for the rolling distro.
The m23 project, an open-source network deployment and management system for Linux-based operating systems, recently announced the release and general availability of m23 Rock 16.3.
The name of the developers is not publicized on the website, but Q4OS clearly is intended as more than a community-supported general purpose Linux distro. The website also invites businesses to makes use of Q4OS.org's commercial support and software customization services.
The Trinity desktop provides a lightweight KDE environment. The Q4OS platform shows strong potential for business use. It could provide an interesting alternative for consumer home and small business use.
Dig through the annals of Linux journalism and you'll find a surprising amount of coverage of some pretty obscure distros. Flashy new distros like Elementary OS and Solus garner attention for their slick interfaces, and anything shipping with a MATE desktop gets coverage by simple virtue of using MATE.
Thanks to television shows like Mr Robot, I fully expect coverage of even Kali Linux to be on the uptick soon.
Arch Linux has long been known as a very powerful desktop distribution, but one that is not well suited for newcomers to Linux. In order to get the most out of Arch Linux, a user needs to learn the ins and outs of the command line.
Today, November 2, 2016, Douglas DeMaio from the openSUSE project announced the release and immediate availability for download of the second Release Candidate of the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system.
Douglas DeMaio today announced the release of openSUSE Leap 42.2 Release Candidate 2, giving testers one last chance to report bugs before the final. Elsewhere, Linux developers were suffering under a DoS attack today while at the Linux Plumbers conference and Scott Gilbertson shared his thoughts on Arch Linux. Dedoimedo reviewed Yakkety Yak and Bertel King, Jr. found five reasons to try it.
The development cycle for openSUSE Leap 42.2 Release Candidates (RC) is coming to an end.
RC2, which will be followed by the stable release of openSUSE Leap 42.2 on Nov. 16, is now available for testers after its release today.
Although its "Ruby" meetup, it usually isn't just about Ruby. The programming language itself is not that important. Important is the reason: To connect great minds, ideas and solutions together.
Today, Cisco announced its new UCS S-Series storage-optimized server with the introduction of the UCS S3260, marking its entry into the emerging server market for data intensive workloads.
Red Hat and Cisco have worked together for a long time, including our collaboration on Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Softpedia was informed today, November 3, 2016, by John Terrill from Red Hat about the general availability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 operating system for existing and new customers.
In our amazing Linux world, we have not one, not two, but three, count 'em, three major-league enterprise Linux distributions: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, and SUSE Enterprise Linux. In this series, we will contrast and compare all three. Each one is so large it would take a book to thoroughly cover them, so we'll hit the high points of major products, services, important partnerships, and support.
Thursday, November 3rd, 2016, is the Better Switchable Graphics Support Test Day! As part of this planned Change for Fedora 25, we need your help to test Better Switchable Graphics Support!
On 18 October 2016, we organized a workshop at the CMR Institute of Technology in Bengaluru, India. In the workshop, we covered topics of free and open source software (FOSS), Fedora, and git. Before talking about the event, I would like to thank a few people whose presence made this event a huge success.
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.
After a long break, the development of the Debian-based antiX MX operating system continues, and it looks like we need to get ready for a new major release, simply versioned as 16.
So you wanna transform Ubuntu 16.04 desktop to Apple’s MacOS X operating system. Well, I got you covered. Macbuntu Transformation Pack is available for Ubuntu 16.04 and I will guide you to set it up easily. The Macbuntu Transformation Pack contains themes for GTK, meaning there is support for Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE desktop environments.
GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton is always ahead of time, and it looks like he has just released a new build of his MeX GNU/Linux distribution that ships with the Refracta tools pre-installed.
Are you ready for the most important Ubuntu event in Europe in 2016? Well, you should, because the long anticipated UbuCon Europe conference is taking place in only two weeks from today, between the 18th and 20th of November.
Dubbed as the first international European Ubuntu conference, UbuCon Europe 2016 was put together by a group of Ubuntu members, and it now looks like everything is good to go. Registrations have been opened for the past two months, along with the release schedule, and the event will take place at the Unperfekthaus in Essen, Germany.
The latest version of the most popular Linux distribution is here, and it’s called Ubuntu 16.10. This release comes six months after its predecessor. The user-friendly desktop doesn’t offer any substantial new features this time around. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, views the existing experience as largely complete.
Benny Hill's music makes everything better. Fact. Now, I most strongly recommend that you hit Yakety Sax on Youtube, and let it play for the duration of this review. Your reading experience may be improved. Anyhow, it is time to test Ubuntu again. It's only been six month since the rather underwhelming Xerus LTS, and only a few days since I tested it the second time around, with only marginal improvements.
I am really angry, because I feel that the Linux desktop is dying, and Canonical is slowly spearheading this effort, the same way it once led Linux out of the basement and into the mainstream awareness. But let's see what gives. Maybe Yakkety Yak is a good release. Maybe it will behave nicely on my G50 box. Let us.
Today, November 3, 2016, Canonical informed us about the general availability of the final release of the company's Ubuntu Snappy Core 16 Linux-based operating system designed for Internet of Things (IoT).
Ubuntu Core 16 is released today. Otherwise known as Snappy, it is a pared-back version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system (OS) that's designed for IoT use cases.
On a press call, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth explained that one key difference between Core 16 and its predecessor is the way the software is distributed. On installing software in Core 15 the individual files were spread out all over the disk, as happens with a desktop OS. In Core 16 it remains as a blob.
"In Ubuntu Core 16 we keep all of the software as compressed and signed files," Shuttleworth said. This both takes up less disk space and is also more secure, he added.
The times changed, and my best friend is now Xubuntu 16.04, whereas my latest attempts to try Kubuntu back in 2011 and 2012 were not so nice.
I tried more recent versions of this operating system when I got orders for DVDs through the BuyLinuxCDs.co.uk site, but they impressed me so little that I didn’t bother to write anything about them.
Kubuntu 16.10 was released few weeks ago, and I decided to give it a go. The results were more impressive this time.
Linaro adds that work already has begun on network protocol stacks, such as OpenFastPath (OFP), products like the nginx web server accelerated with ODP and OFP and libraries like OpenSSL that provide crypto acceleration via ODP. In addition, ODP and ODP-based products, such as OFP, nginx and OpenSSL, now can be made available as packages in popular Linux distributions like Debian, CentOS and OpenEmbedded. To accompany the release, Linaro launched a validation test suite that permits users and vendors to verify API compatibility between different ODP implementations.
VoCore2 is an open source Linux computer and a fully-functional wireless router but its size is smaller than a coin. It can also act as a VPN gateway for a network, an AirPlay station to play lossless music, a private cloud to store your photos, video and code, and much more.
The Lite version of the VoCore2 features a 580MHz MT7688AN MediaTek SoC, 64MB of DDR2 RAM, 8MB of NOR storage, and a single antenna slot for Wi-Fi that supports 150Mbps.
All this for $4.
“IGEL Linux 10 is changing the game for thin client technology,” said Matthias Haas, Director of Product Management, IGEL. “It enables customers to access today’s most modern devices and endpoint computing capabilities, with the performance and power they demand for accelerated workforce productivity and the security and control IT needs for simplified management. You really have to try it to believe it.”
The 48 x 46mm Orange Pi Zero runs Linux or Android on a quad-core Allwinner H2, and offers WiFi, 10/100, microSD, USB host and OTG, and a 26-pin RPi header.
Shenzhen Xunlong has added a Raspberry Pi Zero competitor to its Orange Pi lineup of open source hacker boards. The new Orange Pi Zero is selling for just $7 plus shipping, for a total price of $10.30 when shipped to the U.S.
All the Tizen hysteria at the moment has been centered around the Gear S3 and rightly so as it is a very handsome piece of tech. First the smartwatch went on sale in Canada, soon thereafter the UK, and then Germany. Many websites had previously been reporting that the S3 was to be delayed until early 2017, but we told you all that you needed to just relax and the S3 will be with us shortly.
Google's Android operating system was the big winner in a big time for worldwide phone shipments, market researcher Strategy Analytics reported Wednesday.
Android captured 88 percent of all smartphone shipped in the third quarter of 2016, a period that also marks the fastest growth rate in a year. "Android's gain came at the expense of every major rival platform," Strategy Analytics' Linda Sui said in a press release.
While most of Android's gains can be attributed to the continued demise of BlackBerry and Windows smartphones, which are now practically non-existent on the market, iOS adoption remains at its lowest levels since mid 2014.
In the older days of Android, developers had to use the open-source Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment) to create apps for the platform. Google released its own IDE called Android Studio in 2014, but continued to support those that decided to stick with Eclipse.
Today, that support ends. The news follows the release of Android Studio 2.2 in September, although Google announced that it was planning on ending support for the Eclipse Android Development Tools in mid-2015.
Brian Behlendorf is well known in the open-source community as one of the founders of the Apache Software Foundation. Today, Behlendorf serves as the Executive Director of the Hyperledger project at the Linux Foundation, though he still takes an interest in Apache.
In a video interview, Behlendorf discusses how the Apache Way continues to influence the open source movement. Among the key ways that Apache has helped to influence open source development is by having a focus on enabling a community that outlasts the original developers.
New research shows that 98 percent of developers use open source tools at work, with 56 percent revealing that more than half of their development tools are open source, and 18 percent using only open source tools.
The study from code collaboration platform GitLab also shows that more than half of developers (55 percent) are able to choose the tools they work with.
When asked about the tools and techniques that are most important to them, 92 percent say distributed version control systems (Git repositories) are very or extremely important for their everyday work followed by continuous integration (77 percent), chat/collaboration tools (63 percent), agile development (59 percent) and continuous delivery (55 percent).
Where do your witty Tweets end up? What about the rest of the content you create inside walled platforms like Facebook, Swarm, and Instagram*?
Those posts and images are part of your identity yet they are "lost" in a sense when posted to platforms that aren't open. That's where the IndieWeb comes in; it's based around the idea that you have a personal domain and web space where you post everything first, then you can copy it to third party services, like Twitter.
The phrase that has been coined to describe it is: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, or POSSE.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are creating a lot of buzz right now, and open source tools are part of the buzz. A few months back, Google made a hugely influential contribution to the field of machine learning. It open sourced a program called TensorFlow that is now freely available. It’s based on the same internal toolset that Google spent years developing to support its AI software and other predictive and analytics programs.
Now, data science company DataRobot has announced the latest version of its enterprise machine learning platform. The new release integrates the TensorFlow library for deep learning along with new tools to help users extract insights from all models on the platform. This is a great example of how powerful open source tools are driving commercial offerings forward.
For future Chromebooks/Chromeboxes, Google appears to be building an open-source TPM 2.0 implementation that's possibly backed by open hardware.
Their own TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 implementation can be found in their Git code and here plus more code here. The TPM 2.0 implementation uses a Cortex-M3 core and there's also an FPGA version.
Over one year after the DirectFB project site disappeared and the code just appearing on GitHub, they have a project site restored but the development still appears rather dormant.
TM Forum is stepping up to be the organization that unites the multiple open source network management and orchestration efforts going on within telecom today, intending to create a hybrid network management platform that incorporates diverse open source efforts.
In an interview here today in advance of a TM Forum Workshop tied to Light Reading's OSS in the Era of SDN & NFV event this week, Barry Graham, senior director of agile business & IT for TM Forum, tells Light Reading the organization has already held one meeting of eight open source groups and is intending to create a Catalyst project for early 2017 as well. Catalyst projects are a TM Forum method of bringing network operators and others together to create real-world solutions that can be demonstrated to the broader community.
A team made of former Cisco and Nuage Networks veterans has developed an open source project it released this week named Trireme that takes an application-centric approach to securing code written in containers.
Now that organizations of all sizes have discovered that IT is indeed a competitive weapon, an interesting phenomenon is starting to occur. IT organizations that build their own software are moving to make that software available under an open source license. Case in point is Walmart, which is now making a React/Node.js application platform dubbed Electrode available as an open source project.
Alex Grigoryan, director of software engineering for the Application Platform at Walmart Labs, says even though Walmart has spent millions of dollars developing Electrode, the retailer has a vested interest in recruiting other IT organizations to contribute code to extend the core platform.
“We’re looking for contributions that can help us stay on the cutting edge,” says Grigoryan.
Second, since the software in an open source business is free, selling software licenses can't be the revenue model. There are a number of ways, however, to make money with open source. One is monetize stability. This is kind of what Red Hat does. They support both the leading edge technology through Fedora and monetize stability through Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both our open source, but people are willing to pay for stability.
Red Hat's Vincent Batts gives a presentation at systemd.conf 2016 conference entitled, "What's next for containers?". It is a good overview of where the various container projects are (with no mention of OpenVZ however) and what work needs to be done. I enjoyed his assessment that the first thing that is next is, "Get Past the Hype," and to, "Make Containers Boring." Vincent goes over several of the userland tools as well as covers the areas where Linux native containers still need work.
There have been a ton of conferences in the last couple of months... and luckily a lot of the presentations were recorded and have been posted. Here is Lennart Poettering's presentation from the systemd.conf 2016 conference on, "State of the Union / Portable Services".
The 7th edition of Software Freedom Kosova took place in Prishtina from October 21-23. The main conference venue was held at RIT Kosovo (AUK) and workshops were held at Prishtina Hackerspace as well as at Innovation Centre Kosovo (ICK). This years conference involved around 300 participants, 41 speakers, 48 sessions, 10 booth tables aand lots of food
Watching the ELCE 2016 / OpenIoT Summiy 2016 videos is free, but a basic registration is required. If you want to watch it, visit LinuxFoundation.org.
For the past several years, Gabor Szabo has been the owner and primary editor of the Perl Weekly, and the Perl Maven. Never willing to rest on his laurels, he recently started the Code Maven Podcast, and recently, during the last week of October, he spun up his newest site, a listing of open source technology events.
If implementing DevOps practices is difficult, then maintaining them may be even tougher. Michael Nygard knows this—which is why he's turned to the language of warfare to describe the ongoing campaign that is the agile workflow.
In his upcoming talk at this year's DevOps Enterprise Summit ("Tempo, Maneuverability, and Initiative"), Nygard, VP of Customer Solutions at Cogitect, Inc., will draw several useful parallels between the theater of modern war and the scene inside the contemporary IT shop. He graciously agreed to tell us about them in advance of the conference, which begins next week.
This is an overview of Thunderbird and hopefully it has highlighted a few new features to those of you who didn't know they existed and for others it might have convinced you that actually this is a tool I might want to use after all.
The RSS feed reader is very useful as it allows you to browse your favourite sites without actually visiting them.
Jamey Sharp, the developer known for some of his past contributions to X.Org, has been hacking a lot lately on his latest project: Corrode. This project is about automatically converting C source files into Rust.
Corrode is able to convert C code into Rust, but so far is able to perform just basic operations automatically and doesn't yet take full advantage of Rust's potential. Corrode is designed to help with partial automation of legacy code into Rust and as a new/complementary approach for static analysis of C programs. Corrode is going along so well that Mozilla has begun sponsoring Jamey's work with Mozilla continuing to spearhead Rust's development.
Today we release CODE 2.0 which includes Collaborative Editing. We've done a huge amount of work since CODE 1.0 - and many of these improvements have been back-ported for our customers & community, but it is perhaps well to credit the authors in one place and survey progress over the last six months.
I switched back to WordPress, on a premium subscription, because WordPress started supporting markdown, which I like, and because WordPress is open source software (with open source comments support), which I also like. What’s more, paying for hosting through Automattic means not having to mess with WordPress updates myself, and means helping to support a legit open source software company, and I’m into both of those, big time.
Anyway, I let my annual premium subscription auto-renew about a month and a half ago, so I’m out of the refund window, so I’ll probably stick around, although this markdown to HTML autoconvert misfeature is pretty distressing. Worst case scenario, I’m supporting open source software, so there’s that.
The European Commission Directorate General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) is using the open source tools for its interoperability testing. On Wednesday, the DG published a request for tender, specifying the eHealth test framework Gazelle and the healthcare documentation and ePrescription specification, implementation and testing tool Art-Decor as reference tools for its digital service infrastructure (DSI).
Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced a new open source software initiative to enable advanced open networking platforms such as routers, load balancers, and firewalls. A key part of the initiative is the release of the first ever software development kit: OpenNPU SDK, for the company's most advanced network processor unit (NPU), the NPS-400. OpenNPU is made available under either GPL or BSD license to enable developers to explore, research, and innovate with true programmable packet processing at 600 million packets per seconds. The OpenNPU SDK addresses the need for open source software aimed at the increasing number of open networking platforms proliferating the market today.
Denmark’s tax authorities (SKAT) are looking for a service provider that can help them with their tax account system, which uses Apache and Linux servers. SKAT on Wednesday published new information on its procurement request from last month.
You didn’t know we had one? We do! Sort of. David Graham is the Member of Parliament for Laurentides—Labelle, which is in Quebec. He’s also a cofounder of the OFTC (Open and Free Technology) IRC network and for many years used the online handle “CDLU,” for “Confused Debian Linux User.” Confused or not, he got his start in politics running for (and becoming) Secretary of Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit group that helps develop and spread free and open source software, most notably Debian Linux. David was also the newsfeed editor for Linux.com for eight years (Disclosure: I was his boss). He’s also a licensed pilot, a rail fan and the father of a delightful little girl. Hey! I’d vote for him. Wouldn’t you? Assuming we lived in his district, that is.
The web's early history is generally remembered as a few seminal events: the day Tim Berners-Lee announced the WWW-project on Usenet, the document with which CERN released the project's code into the public domain, and of course the first version of the NCSA Mosaic browser in January 1993.
The lead up to the official debut of HTML 5 in October 2014 was a very big deal. Now two years later HTML 5.1 was declared an official standard on November 1.
With HTML 5 work was ongoing for more than seven years and the standard replaced HTML 4.x which had been in place for a decade. HTML 5.1 in contrast is a very incremental step up, dealing with minor items that fell out from the original HTML 5 approach.
The human brain is predisposed to learn negative stereotypes, according to research that offers clues as to how prejudice emerges and spreads through society.
The study found that the brain responds more strongly to information about groups who are portrayed unfavourably, adding weight to the view that the negative depiction of ethnic or religious minorities in the media can fuel racial bias.
Hugo Spiers, a neuroscientist at University College London, who led the research, said: “The newspapers are filled with ghastly things people do ... You’re getting all these news stories and the negative ones stand out. When you look at Islam, for example, there’s so many more negative stories than positive ones and that will build up over time.” Everyone’s a little bit racist, sometimes | Dean Burnett Read more
The scientists also uncovered a characteristic brain signature seen when participants were told a member of a “bad” group had done something positive - an observation that is likely to tally with the subjective experience of minorities. “Whenever someone from a really bad group did something nice they were like, ‘Oh, weird,’” said Spiers.
The state of Michigan has reportedly issued preliminary approval for bottled water behemoth Nestlé to nearly triple the amount of groundwater it will pump, to be bottled and sold at its Ice Mountain plant, which lies roughly 120 miles northwest of the beleaguered community of Flint.
"Nestlé Waters North America is asking the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for permission to increase allowed pumping from 150 to 400 gallons-per-minute at one of its production wells north of Evart," MLive reported on Monday.
"The DEQ Water Resources Division conducted a site review and signed-off on the pumping increase in January, but the Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance is approving the permit," the report continued. The agency is accepting public comment on the proposal (pdf) until Thursday, Nov. 3.
While Nestlé and other bottled water companies have rankled many communities for privatizing their public water supply, the news particularly stung in Michigan, where citizens have faced a years-long nightmare over lead contamination in their drinking water. Many residents of Flint are still forced to rely on bottled water for cleaning, cooking, and bathing as government delays have hampered efforts to replace the corroded pipes.
According to James Bottomley, an IBM Research distinguished engineer and a member of the Linux Plumbers Conference committee, "Since yesterday we are being attacked from the outside. The attack follows us as we switch external IP and the team has identified at least one inside node which looks suspicious."
The conference is not being attacked by some sophisticated Internet of Things distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack like the Dyn attack. No, it's being mugged by one of the oldest attacks in the DoS book: a SYN flood.
Citing a computer virus outbreak, a hospital system in the United Kingdom has canceled all planned operations and diverted major trauma cases to neighboring facilities. The incident came as U.K. leaders detailed a national cyber security strategy that promises billions in cybersecurity spending, new special police units to pursue organized online gangs, and the possibility of retaliation for major attacks.
In a “major incident” alert posted to its Web site, the National Health Service’s Lincolnshire and Goole trust said it made the decision to cancel surgeries and divert trauma patients after a virus infected its electronic systems on Sunday, October 30.
Patients who had a scheduled operation on Tuesday November 1 have been told to presume it has been cancelled, unless they are contacted. A select number of services will continue; inpatients will continue to be looked after and patients who would be at “significant clinical risk should their treatment be delayed”, will also be treated. The trust is apparently reviewing the situation on an hourly basis.
Few details have been released about the nature of the attack but the shutdown has affected Goole and District Hospital, Scunthorpe General Hospital and Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital. Ed Macnair, CEO of CensorNet told SCMagazineUK.com that the “NHS is one of the most advanced in the world in terms of digitisation, which clearly has its benefits, but also increases the impact of a cyber attack. The NHS holds hugely personal information about patients and the consequences of that getting into the wrong hands could be devastating.”
Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) carried out a study into the cyber-resilience of the US healthcare industry last year, finding that security teams in the healthcare sector overemphasised protection of data and didn't focus on more advanced threats.
If you have an internet-connected home appliance, such as a crock-pot, a lightbulb, or a coffee maker, you can control it from the comfort of your smartphone. But a bug in the Android app that controls some of those devices made by a popular manufacturer also allowed hackers to steal all your cellphone photos and even track your movements.
Security researchers found that the Android app for internet-connected gizmos made by Belkin had a critical bug that let anyone who was on the same network hack the app and get access to the user’s cellphone. This gave them a chance to download all photos and track the user’s position, according to new research by Scott Tenaglia and Joe Tanen, from Invincea Labs.
Reproducible Debian Hackathon - A small hackathon organized in Boston, USA on December 3rd and 4th. If you are interested in attending, contact Valerie Young - spectranaut in the #debian-reproducible IRC channel on irc.oftc.net.
Linux/Moose is a malware family that primarily targets Linux-based consumer routers but that can also infect other Linux-based embedded systems in its path. The compromised devices are used to steal unencrypted network traffic and offer proxying services to the botnet operator. In practice, these capabilities are used to steal HTTP Cookies on popular social network sites and perform fraudulent actions such as non-legitimate “follows”, “views” and “likes”.
Cybercrime is the second most-reported economic crime in Australia and costs the economy an estimated $17 billion annually, but despite this there are widespread “frailities” in the governance of cyber security among executives in both the public sector and private enterprise, according to a newly published report.
The survey of Australia's security preparedness by the Macquarie Telecom Group and the National Security College found that there is considerable variation in cyber-risk governance arrangements and an absence of cyber-risk knowledge at the executive/board level.
Forest and land fires making the news in Indonesia is nothing new. But a hostage drama in the middle of “fire season”? That’s a new twist, and indeed dominated headlines in early September. After collecting evidence of burned land within a palm oil concession in Rokan Hulu, Riau, seven inspectors from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MOEF) were taken captive and violently threatened to handover or delete the gathered evidence.
Only a few days later, the head of the Peatland Restoration Agency (Badan Restorasi Gambut or BRG) was forcefully prevented from entering lands managed by a prominent pulp-and-paper concessionaire in Pulau Pisang, Riau. BRG was investigating reports of alleged illegal conversion of peatland.
Both incidents illustrate how divisive the fire issue is, particularly at the local level. The incidents also illustrate that despite political will and improved efforts to contain the fires, without an overarching and enforced fire policy, fires will continue to smolder.
Forest and land fires are now an annual man-made event. Some 2,356 hotspots were detected in Sumatra and Kalimantan between January and August of 2016, and fire-prone provinces of South Sumatra, Riau, Jambi, and parts of Kalimantan have declared emergency fire status. This is a significant improvement from last year, thanks largely to a wetter La Niña-induced dry season; the number of hotspots have dropped by over 74% compared to 2015.
Government has taken action that includes the moratorium on peat swamp conversion and the ban on new oil palm licenses. The establishment of the BRG in January 2016 is a particularly bold move, as President Joko Widodo set an ambitious target for the agency: restore two million hectares of degraded peatlands. Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya has also pursued legal action against those suspected of starting fires.
With other pressing developmental problems, it’s difficult for many African governments to justify the costs of ramping up the fight against elephant poaching. But a new study published in the journal Nature Communications might give them a good financial reason.
Elephants are a big draw to parks across Africa, so as their numbers dwindle, so too do the numbers of tourists coming to see them. The first continent-wide assessment of poaching’s effects on tourism reveal that the annual killing of elephants results in a $25 million loss in tourism revenue across Africa. What’s more, this lost revenue is significantly higher than the cost of combating poaching, making it economically favorable to invest in the protection of elephants.
Every year some 20,000 to 30,000 elephants are slaughtered for their ivory tusks to feed a demand for Chinese and Southeast Asian markets, despite a commercial ban on the trade of ivory. Elephant populations across the continent have fallen up to 60 percent.
Native American tribes, including the Sioux, have clear historical causes for grievances against the federal government, including treaties that were approved and then violated. Complaints that pipeline workers have already plowed up previously unrecognized sacred sites should be taken seriously. More broadly, though, the environmental costs of continued reliance on fossil fuels are not only real, but the damage is already underway. The pipeline begins at the Bakken Formation in western North Dakota then angles southeastward through South Dakota, Iowa and into southern Illinois before tying into an existing pipeline network. Proponents of the pipeline argue that the oil it will carry will get to market even if the project is scuttled, transported by truck or rail, which they say carry more risk of environmental damage. But data show that while train and truck accidents might occur more often, pipeline breaks spill more oil and generally cause more damage to the environment by fouling groundwater and wilderness areas.
Imtiyaz Sheikh Sardar, a resident of Honnavar in Uttara Kannada district, is penniless and starving in Saudi Arabia, where he has been working as a driver since 2014. Imtiyaz, whose Saudi employer hasn't paid him for months now, said that he is not being allowed to come back home. "I have been hungry for the last several days and my employer is not ready to listen to my grievances," said Imtiyaz in a WhatsApp message seeking immediate help from the Uttara Kannada district administration. In his communication, however, Imtiyaz has refrained from revealing his local address and only mentioned his passport number.
With no money to feed himself or support his family , Imtiyaz has decided to contact the Uttarra Kannada deputy commissioner's office, which is now working towards helping him return to India. "My family too is in trouble," he said in the WhatsApp message. Imtiyaz has thanked the authorities for their efforts to help him return.
A battered Dodge Challenger roars past as I head out on the nine-lane highway, riding past shuttered shops and decaying restaurants and row upon row of vacant, overgrown housing lots.
Normally I wouldn’t even consider cycling on such an expanse of road, but it’s not so bad in Detroit. After all, the birthplace of America’s car industry doesn’t have that many cars any more.
My ride along Jefferson Avenue passes the low bulk of Chrysler’s car assembly factory. Along with General Motors’ Hamtramck plant, it is all that remains of the once-great industry which supported this city. Where there were 285,000 jobs, now there are just 10,000.
In 1940, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the US; now it doesn’t even make the top 20. From a peak of 1.8 million inhabitants, the population now stands at 677,000.
But the city is resurgent – and its near-total collapse may unwittingly have created one of its most powerful and unique assets. The well-documented flight to Detroit’s sprawling suburbs killed the city inside, but it also left space. The wide rivers of asphalt carved deep into the city were designed to transport a population three times its current size.
Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU, the High Court has ruled.
This means the government cannot trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty - beginning formal exit-negotiations with the EU - on its own.
Theresa May says the referendum - and existing ministerial powers - mean MPs do not need to vote, but campaigners called this unconstitutional.
The government is appealing, with a further hearing expected next month.
A statement is to be made to MPs on Monday but the prime minister's official spokesman said the government had "no intention of letting" the judgement "derail Article 50 or the timetable we have set out. We are determined to continue with our plan".
Today’s ruling by the High Court requires the government to obtain approval from Parliament if it wishes to trigger ‘Article 50’, ie the process of withdrawing from the European Union. This short post won’t focus on the national constitutional law issues, but on the process of possible involvement of the EU courts in Brexit disputes.
The government has announced its intention to appeal today’s ruling to the Supreme Court. Some have suggested that the case might then be ‘appealed’ to the ECJ, but this misunderstands the judicial system of the European Union. There is no ‘appeal’ from national courts to the ECJ. Rather a national court may suspend proceedings and ask the ECJ some questions relating to EU law that the national court believes it needs the answers to. After the ECJ gives the answers to those questions, the national court resumes its proceedings and gives its judgment in light of them. The ECJ normally takes about 16 months to give a ruling, although it could (and probably would) fast-track a case raising fundamental questions about Brexit.
Peter Kadzik, the assistant attorney general of the U.S. Justice Department involved with the probe into Huma Abedin’s emails, gave John Podesta a heads-up on when the State Department would start releasing Hillary Clinton’s emails.
“There is a HJC oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division will testify,” Mr. Kadzik emailed from his personal gmail account, with the header “Heads up.”
“Likely to get questions on State Department emails,” Mr. Kadzik continued. “Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.”
Mr. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, then forwarded the email to Mrs. Clinton’s inner-circle and added: “Additional chances for mischief.”
The email was dated May 19, 2015.
Mr. Kadzik has a close relationship with Mr. Podesta. They both attended Georgetown University law school together in the 1970s and have remained good friends, with Mr. Kadzik frequently dining with Mr. Podesta.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Mr. Kadzik previously donated to Mrs. Clinton and the daughter of Mr. Podesta.
Even if Hillary Clinton does not win the presidency on Tuesday, Republicans on Capitol Hill say they are revving up for more investigations involving the former secretary of state.
House Oversight Committee members remain unconvinced that charges of impropriety against Clinton have been fully reviewed.
Chairman Jason Chaffetz also wants to know if the FBI's deputy director, Andrew McCabe, whose wife received $675,000 in political donations from a close friend of the Clintons, is still working on the Clinton email case in light of that disclosure.
A Department of Justice official who notified Congress Monday that the agency would "dedicate all necessary resources" to the reopened Hillary Clinton email investigation has a close relationship with campaign chair John Podesta, hacked emails show.
Peter Kadzik, assistant attorney general, sent his son to seek a job on the Clinton campaign given his personal relationship with Podesta. He was invited to a small birthday gathering for Podesta's lobbyist brother last year. Kadzik also dined with Podesta at his home in January, when the first FBI probe was well underway.
Emails made public by WikiLeaks over the past several weeks raise fresh questions about the Justice Department's handling of an investigation into a case with such close ties to the agency's leadership. Just one week before FBI Director James Comey closed the original Clinton email probe in July, Attorney General Loretta Lynch's private meeting with Clinton's husband sparked a wave of outrage that ultimately clouded the Justice Department's decision to end the investigation.
Memos prepared by legal counsel for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign reveal how the campaign developed workarounds so it could coordinate with a network of pro-Clinton super political action committees or Super PACs. The memos were explicitly developed to ensure regulators at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) would not detect any signs of unethical practices.
While the workarounds may not necessarily be illegal as a result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, they clearly undermine campaign finance law, and for those concerned about the influence of money in politics, the policies developed show how candidates can easily game the system.
The documents, produced by Marc Elias of Perkins Coie LLP, were attached to emails from the Clinton campaign, which were published by WikiLeaks. They were drafted on April 1, 2015, before Clinton officially launched her presidential campaign.
Perkins Coie recommended, “Secretary Clinton and her agents to make a hard solicitation for $5,000,” when discussing any Super PAC with prospective donors. Super PACs and their personnel would be free to “follow up with the donor—that day or at any other time of their choosing – to ask for additional funds, without any participation by Secretary Clinton or her agents.”
Those voting for Hillary Clinton, defending Clinton and supporting Clinton without reading the information reported by WikiLeaks are intellectually no different than those who criticize climate science without ever having read the science. In short, if you defend Clinton and ignore WikiLeaks, you have something in common with Sarah Palin. Let that sink in for a moment. Finished processing that? Now process this — if the journalists responsible for reporting on Watergate were labeled “Russian sympathizers,” charged by the media as “attempting to influence an election,” and banned from travel or communication access, how would history judge the event? This is exactly what has happened to Julian Assange, who has done more for journalism than any of these corporate-owned, brand-named media products have done this election cycle. Either you support access to information or you have a problem with an informed public. Which side are you on?
Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet and former Google chief executive, has been closely involved in the "strategic planning" of the 2016 Democratic Party presidential campaign for at least two years, emails released by whistleblowing outfit WikiLeaks suggest.
A number of emails, which were directly highlighted by the WikiLeaks Twitter account, show how Google has previously loaned a company jet to the Democratic Party for an official trip to Africa and how Schmidt himself wanted to be "head outside advisor" to any future presidential candidate.
In an email sent to Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills on 15 April 2014, Schmidt included a detailed draft plan on how the Democratic candidate should structure their campaign, where it should be based and how technology should be utilised for maximum effect.
It was sent directly to Robby Mook, who now serves as Hillary Clinton's campaign chief, and was later sent to John Podesta, whose emails were leaked online by the Julian Assange-led anti-secrecy group. At the time of writing, over 30,000 messages have been published.
"Here are some comments and observations based on what we saw in the 2012 campaign," Schmidt wrote, adding: "If we get started soon, we will be in a very strong position to execute well for 2016."
A new WikiLeaks release shows a possible conflict of interest between a Justice Department official and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, the DOJ official in charge of the email investigation, emailed Podesta a heads-up on the case in May 2015.
Under the subject "heads up," Kadzik wrote: There is a HJC [House Judiciary Committee] oversight hearing today. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails."
Podesta wrote back, adding other Clinton aides, "additional chances for mischief."
Kadzik used a private Gmail address to send the note, not his .gov email account.
Trump argued today in Florida this is yet another example of the "rigged system" being exposed by WikiLeaks.
"These are the people who want to run our country, folks!" he said about Kadzik and Podesta.
A senior Department of Justice official gave Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman a "heads up" about new developments related to Clinton's email use as secretary of state, according to hacked emails published Wednesday by WikiLeaks.
In May of 2015, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik emailed Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta to tell him about potential developments at an impending congressional hearing, as well as about a new development in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the emails Clinton turned over to the State Department from her private account.
In an email from Kadzik's personal account titled "Heads up," he wrote: “There is a [House Judiciary Committee] oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division will testify. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.”
A State Department official appeared to coordinate with Hillary Clinton's nascent presidential campaign hours before the former secretary of state's exclusive use of private emails was first detailed in a news account last year, newly released hacked emails show.
Emails from the files of Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta show that the department official provided Clinton aides with the agency's official response to a New York Times reporter in advance of the newspaper's March 2015 report that Clinton had used a private email account to conduct all of her work-related business as secretary.
Young people are planning to break from the two-party system in unprecedented numbers this year. Their discontent is real: one May 2016 poll showed 91 percent of voters under age 29 wanted an independent challenger to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Media pundits have reacted harshly toward these young rebels, especially those supporting me and Ajamu Baraka, who as progressive Green candidates are constantly framed as taking votes from Clinton.
But instead of attacking our young voters, why not ask what’s motivating them to vote outside the two-party box? They’re well aware of the conventional wisdom that they should vote for the “lesser evil,” which the media has beaten into them for months. What few pundits have been willing to admit is that for many young people, voting Green is not a whim but a well-considered decision.
Millennials are disillusioned with politics and desperate to change it. For many, WikiLeaks exposing how the Democratic Party sabotaged Bernie Sanders confirmed their suspicions that the political system is rigged. They see Clinton as the embodiment of a political establishment that serves the economic elite, and they reject Trump’s sexist, racist behavior and regressive platform.
Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire Facebook executive whose book “Lean In” has made her an icon to women in the workplace, is getting lots of attention as a potential Treasury secretary under Hillary Clinton.
But she’s also drawing red flags from progressives, who are suspicious about her ties to former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, unhappy with Facebook’s international tax practices and wary about seeing the next Democratic White House stack its Cabinet with allies of big business.
That makes Sandberg an illustration of the lingering skepticism by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other progressive Democrats about the staffing and economic policies of a Clinton presidency — even though Sandberg saidthis month that she has no intention of leaving Facebook.
Corporate media are focused on Donald Trump’s accusations of “oversampling” on the part of Democrats against Republicans. He’s half right, because polls do oversample declared Democrats by up to 14 percent in polls that compose the RealClearPolitics average.
The deeper story is that mainstream polls skew against youth and independents, who are undersampled in most polls up to a whopping 30 percent. A recent CNN poll sampled few people under the age of 50. Not one major poll lists alternative-party identification in the breakdown of its sample.
The first problem with sampling involves definitions. Most polls sample “likely voters,” with a bit of expansion to count for a smattering of “registered voters.” So who are “likely voters”? Voters who (1) consistently vote—which automatically excludes people ages 18 to 22, who have no voting history, (2) identify with either of the two major parties and (3) say that they intend to vote in the next election. “Registered voter” polls don’t count first-time voters not yet registered to vote, so forget about the opinions of those college students who are signed up in enthusiastic campus get-out-the-vote drives.
The questions asked in the polls reinforce established, dualistic views of the political spectrum. The presidential-preference questions in polls that deign to include Green Party nominee Jill Stein and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson don’t ask “Who is the candidate you want to vote for?” or “Which candidate is most aligned with your positions and values?” Nearly all the polls frame the presidential question as “If the election were held tomorrow, who would you vote for?” In a media landscape where we are told—through unbalanced news coverage, controlled debates and ceaseless cultural propaganda, down to the red and blue cups at 7-Eleven stores during election season—that only the Democratic and Republican candidates are considered viable, most people will, of course, hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils. It’s telling that the very next follow-up question reads, “If the election were ONLY held between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who would you vote for?” You might as well reword the questions to (1) “Which candidate do you think will win?” and (2) “Which of these two candidates do you hate the least?” Neither of these questions address the issue of who people want to be their next president.
The Electoral College has been on life support since a chad—specifically a “hanging” chad—tipped the White House to George W. Bush in 2000. The painful reality of how our Constitution works was never more apparent. The Gore/Lieberman ticket won the popular vote 50,994,086 to 50,461,092 but lost the electoral vote 266 to 271.
There was a lot more to it, but the punchline is that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Bush the winner because he won the electoral vote. It’s a tribute to the American national character that we weathered that cataclysm without civil war, but it left a bad taste in the electorate’s mouth.
The FBI's investigation into the Clinton Foundation that has been going on for more than a year has now taken a "very high priority," separate sources with intimate knowledge of the probe tell Fox News.
FBI agents have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple people on the foundation case, which is looking into possible pay for play interaction between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. The FBI's White Collar Crime Division is handling the investigation.
Even before the WikiLeaks dumps of alleged emails linked to the Clinton campaign, FBI agents had collected a great deal of evidence, law enforcement sources tell Fox News.
"There is an avalanche of new information coming in every day," one source told Fox News, who added some of the new information is coming from the WikiLeaks documents and new emails.
FBI agents are "actively and aggressively pursuing this case," and will be going back and interviewing the same people again, some for the third time, sources said.
Agents are also going through what Clinton and top aides have said in previous interviews and the FBI 302, documents agents use to report interviews they conduct, to make sure notes line up, according to sources.
New revelations from the emails of Hillary Clinton campaign head John Podesta on Wednesday appeared to show coordination between the State Department and the Democrat's campaign. The stolen emails released by Wikileaks suggested that a government official may have tipped Clinton off that news was about to break about the private email server she used as Secretary of State.
The message, dated March 1, 2015, came from Department of State press aid Lauren Hickey. In it, she describes having "just cleared" a reply to a New York Times reporter about to publish the story.
The mail also seemed to imply that the reply to the newspaper had been altered at the Clinton camp's behest, saying: "Yes on your point re records - done below," but without context, it was difficult to say what kind of change was made.
State Department spokesman John Kirby rejected the implication that anything untoward was taking place. Speaking to the press on Wednesday, Kirby said that his department was always determined to "provide accurate information to the media" and that this sometimes required checking in with relevant parties to ensure veracity.
Wednesday's trove of emails about Clinton's private server also included a note from Clinton aide Phillippe Reines saying "there's a lot to respond to here, but first and foremost the premise is wrong. There is nothing wrong with anyone having personal email addresses or her emailing someone's private account or vice versa. Maybe she was wishing [aide] Jake [Sullivan] a happy birthday. Or I was sending her a note about her mom. ... We're allowed to have personal lives."
A woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her when she was 13 called off a press conference at which she planned to speak out after receiving threats, her attorney said.
The unidentified accuser, known as Jane Doe, was set to make a public statement for the first time about the accusations Wednesday afternoon alongside lawyer Lisa Bloom.
The woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her when she was 13 years old at a party failed to show up at a press conference to give her first public statement as she "received terrible threats" and was "in great fear".
Her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, told reporters at a Los Angeles press conference that the accuser was "unable ultimately to do this".
Ms Bloom said the accuser planned to reschedule the press conference.
Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.
The latest batch consists of over one thousand emails, bringing the number released so far to over 44,000. WikiLeaks said it will publish a total of 50,000 emails in the run up to next week’s presidential election.
Senior Justice Department officials gave a “stand down” order to FBI investigators digging into the Clinton Foundation, according to a report.
The order was delivered in February — just as voting got under way in the Democratic presidential primary, a source told the Wall Street Journal.
“The message was, ‘We’re done here,’” a source told the paper, saying that prosecutors were not moved by the FBI’s presentation of evidence it had gathered to that point.
Soon after the presentation, Justice Department officials handed down the “stand down” message.
Two sources within the FBI told Fox News on Wednesday that the investigation of the Clinton Foundation is likely to lead to an indictment. Fox News' Bret Baier said Wednesday that the FBI probe into a possible pay-to-play scheme between Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation has been going on for over a year.
Sources told the news network that the investigation, which is conducted by the White Collar Crime division of the FBI, is a "very high priority."
One source further stated that the bureau collected "a lot of" evidence, adding that "there is an avalanche of new information coming every day."
Baier also said that the Clinton Foundation probe is more expansive than previously thought, and that many individuals have been interviewed several times throughout the course of the investigation.
The FBI has long been an iconic institution in American life. After the last week's announcement by FBI Director James Comey that the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server continues, it's hard to see it staying that way.
Wrote Roz Helderman, Tom Hamburger and Sari Horwitz in a story headlined "After another release of documents, FBI finds itself caught in a partisan fray": "For the second time in five days, the FBI had moved exactly to the place the nation’s chief law enforcement agency usually strives to avoid: smack in the middle of partisan fighting over a national election, just days before the vote."
Clinton and her allies -- including President Obama(!) -- are criticizing Comey for stepping into the fray so close to an election. Republicans, who spent the last several months castigating Comey for failing to indict Clinton over the email server when he initially wrapped the investigation in July, are now singing his praises.
The result of the FBI-as-political-football narrative is nothing but bad for the Bureau.
In the introduction, Assange writes: “Hillary Clinton made significant money from delivering these three speeches to Goldman Sachs immediately after stepping down from her role as Secretary of State. Now we can all profit from learning what the likely future president says behind closed doors.”
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein discusses Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and the "politics of integrity." She speaks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene on "Bloomberg Surveillance."
On November 1, WikiLeaks released an email that revealed one of the most dubious pay-to-play examples between the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons.
In a March 2015 email, Clinton Foundation director of foreign policy Amitabh Desai asked the Clinton campaign whether Bill Clinton could meet with Ukrainian Clinton Foundation billionaire donor Victor Pinchuk. The purpose of the meeting was to use Bill Clinton as a selling point to other Western leaders, so that Pinchuk could make a statement in opposition to Russian Leader Vladimir Putin.
The chain of emails that WikiLeaks released in its 26th batch of what has been dubbed the “Podesta emails” show communication between Clinton’s team and the State Department, right before the Times published its report.
It appears the State Department and its former spokeswoman Jen Psaki personally “cleared” and made changes to the report.
One-third of Australians, according to the latest poll, oppose Muslim immigration -- down on an earlier survey which put the figure at around fifty per cent. Whatever the actual number, it is heartening to note that good sense continues to defy the elites' favoured narrative
The government’s proposal for age verification to access pornograpy is running out of control. MPs have worked out that attempts to verify adult’s ages won’t stop children from accessing other pornographic websites: so their proposed answer is to start censoring these websites.
In fighting a lawsuit filed by the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, Gawker Media lost nearly everything — the verdict, its founder, its independence — but it maintained its resolute conviction that it would win on appeal.
On Wednesday, however, Gawker capitulated, settling with Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea, for $31 million, according to court documents, and bringing to a close a multiyear dispute that stripped the company of much that once defined it.
Faced with a $140 million judgment in the invasion of privacy lawsuit brought by Hogan over the publication of a video that showed him having sex with a friend’s wife — and the later revelation that Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was financing the lawsuit and others against the company — Gawker filed for bankruptcy in June and ultimately sold itself in August to Univision for $135 million.
When peer-to-peer file-sharing was in its infancy, Internet forums were the places where the enthusiasts came to meet. Regular users hung out with file-sharing site owners, while developers offered the latest builds of their new clients.
For a number of years, these forums housed thriving communities but slowly but surely most fell out of use, hit by a double whammy of failing to stay current alongside the advent of social media. For many, sites like Facebook and Reddit became the go-to place for discussion and news.
Of course, these platforms can be used for outright piracy too, with users posting links to the latest content on groups dedicated to file-sharing. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the entertainment industries who often put sites like Facebook under pressure to take action.
It comes after the Norwegian Consumer Council filed a complaint against fitness app Runkeeper in May for illegally sending users' personal data to a third party in the US, even when not in use.
The new complaint against Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin, and Mio will be sent on Thursday to both the data protection authority and Norway’s consumer ombudsman.
None of the four companies gives users proper notice about changes in their apps' terms and conditions, the complaint claims, and all of them collect more data than is strictly necessary to provide their service. Nor do the companies fully explain who they may share user data with, or for how long they retain that data.
As part of its AppFail campaign earlier this year, the Norwegian Consumer Council analysed the terms and conditions and privacy policies of dozens of everyday mobile phone applications. It found that fitness trackers were particularly bad at looking after personal data. Following the 24-hour readout of those T&Cs—designed to shame companies into behaving better—some did update their policies.
Investigators looking into corruption within Montreal’s police force for almost six months focused their attention on one of Quebec’s most prominent journalists even though he had neither reported on the corruption case nor had any strong connection to it.
Advocates of press freedom expressed alarm about revelations this week that the police had captured calls and text messages to and from an iPhone belonging to the journalist, Patrick Lagacé, a columnist with the Montreal newspaper La Presse, and were given permission to track his movements by using the phone’s GPS function.
In response, legal scholars have questioned the legality of the police action, and journalism organizations and politicians have condemned the police monitoring. On Tuesday, the government promised greater protections for journalists.
On Monday, La Presse reported that Mr. Lagacé had been spied on as part of an effort by Montreal’s police force to find the source of leaks to news outlets about an internal inquiry into allegations that members of a drugs and street-gang unit had fabricated evidence.
From January to July this year, the police obtained 24 warrants, allowing them to track Mr. Lagacé’s movements by activating the GPS chip on his phone and to record all the numbers associated with texts and calls to and from the device, according to La Presse.
Most of the warrants, the newspaper reported, were approved by Josée De Carufel, a justice of the peace who was previously a criminal prosecutor.
Mr. Lagacé said he believed that the surveillance was prompted by general concern within the police force over leaks to the media by its members rather than by worries that the leaked information about the drugs and street-gang unit might jeopardize the investigation. He added that most of the articles based on the leaks that concerned the police did not appear in La Presse but in a competing newspaper and on a television network owned by the same corporation.
The Congressional Black Caucus has called on Facebook to stop allowing advertisers to exclude racial and ethnic groups when placing housing ads in what lawmakers say is a violation of federal anti-discrimination housing laws.
"We are writing to express our deep concerns with reports that Facebook’s 'Ethnic Affinities' advertising customization feature allows for advertisers to exclude specific racial and ethnic groups when placing housing advertisements," members of the caucus wrote in a letter addressed to Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday.
“This is in direct violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and it is our strong desire to see Facebook address this issue immediately," reads the letter.
The birthday cards and letters for the Reverend Edward Pinkney’s 68th birthday this month will be opened and searched before reaching him. That is part of the price the political activist is paying for taking on a powerful corporation in Michigan.
Pinkney is currently serving a two-and-a-half to ten-year sentence — of which he has served 22 months already — after being found guilty of changing dates on a recall petition. Pinkney denies that he changed these dates.
He believes that his actual crime was to challenge the Whirlpool Corporation and its political allies in the city of Benton Harbor, Michigan.
Social activist Shelley Thio said in her Facebook that teen blogger Amos Yee will be released for Home Detention by the end of this week.
Staff at Amnesty International in Moscow say their office has been broken into and sealed off by municipal officials.
When employees arrived on Wednesday they found new locks on the door and a stamped paper across the entrance that demanded the office contact the city authorities, said Alexander Artemyev of human rights group’s Moscow office. No warning had been given.
“Our neighbours told us that five men came around 9.30am, broke in and then changed the locks. When asked what they were doing, the men said it was a rent issue,” Artemyev told the Guardian.
A Kurdish church leader smuggled to Britain says he received death threats – for having left Islam for Christianity – while living in makeshift camps in northern France.
The church leader, who did not wish to be identified, spent nine months living in camps outside the French cities of Calais and Dunkirk. He told World Watch Monitor that Kurdish Muslims in both camps antagonised him.
“In Calais, the smugglers [saw] my cross [round my neck], and said: ‘You are Kurdish and you are a Christian? Shame on you,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Why? I’m in Europe, I’m free, I’m in a free country.’ They said, ‘No, you are not free, you are in the Jungle. The Jungle has Kurdish rule here – leave this camp.’ The smugglers were from inside the camp, and were Kurdish. They said to me, ‘We will tell the Algerians and Moroccans to kill you.’”
The church leader, who taught art in his home in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as helping to lead a church there, said he received further threats in the camp outside Dunkirk. “They [set] fire [to] my tent,” he said.
As in almost all articles at mainstream Western media – staunch supporters of Ms Clinton’s candidacy and the geopolitical stances she represents – the Newsweek piece do not treat the main issues in the context: a) whether the published Clinton’s emails kept on private servers are a matter of state-secrets or of national security, b) whether the content of the revelations constitutes aggravating wrongdoings of for instance Hillary Clinton or the Clinton Foundation, the DNC tops, etc., or c) whether the revelations done by WikiLeaks refers to true facts –which should be the paramount concern of the analyses, instead of solely focusing in the messenger, or in how the true was obtained and by whom.
After the DNC email leaks that led to the resignation of top DNC officials, WikiLeaks has intensified its activity. Since October 7, they began publishing emails from the private account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. The archive contained transcripts of Clinton’s paid Goldman Sachs speeches that show her two faces and total disconnect from the middle class. It also revealed her private remarks dismissing climate activists. As usual, the leaks have been condemned by the status quo and Clinton loyalists. This time, a narrative that ‘Vladimir Putin was meddling in the election’ was used to discredit their publication, with the mainstream media creating an echo chamber of McCarthy-era style hysteria.
Over the years, as WikiLeaks grew, incorporating their evolving strategies, criticism against the organization has also changed. Back in the day, WikiLeaks was slandered with Pentagon official’s rhetoric of “blood on their hands”, and was depicted as reckless hackers putting innocents in danger. Proclaimed liberal media institutions such as The New York Times abandoned WikiLeaks, with then executive editor Bill Keller differentiating it from his kind of journalism.
Now, while the beam of transparency is focused on U.S. rigged contest for power, WikiLeaks is once again in the eye of media storms. Some criticize what they perceive as a politically driven information dump and question whether WikiLeaks has gone too far. This new sensation around WikiLeaks is now opening up a debate for all to examine the role of journalism and at the same time gives us an opportunity to understand how the organization’s efforts to open governments is changing the media landscape.
An extra 2,100 prison officers are to be recruited to ease staffing shortages in jails in England and Wales, Justice Secretary Liz Truss will say later.
Unveiling a White Paper, Ms Truss will say the new recruits should help to reduce attacks on staff and prisoners.
She will detail plans for more autonomy for governors and ensure drug tests for inmates when they enter and leave jail.
But Labour said the speech would be a "blatant PR stunt" unless comprehensive plans to address staff cuts were made.
Although some people of color were allowed to vote, many still faced disenfranchisement prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the recent gutting of that act by the supreme court, the systematic disenfranchisement of people of color is alive and well today.
Progress on suffrage has always tended to be incremental. And, far from being a closed chapter in our history, the fight to keep things moving forward continues to this day.
For every thousand people living in the US, seven are incarcerated. That population consists disproportionately of black and brown people, whether accused and convicted of crimes or held by immigration authorities.
Turkey could pull out of its refugee deal with the European Union this year if visa-free travel for its citizens is not introduced soon, the country’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Ãâ¡avuà Ÿoßlu, warned in an interview published Thursday.
“Our patience is running out,” Ãâ¡avuà Ÿoßlu told German newspaper Neuen Zürcher Zeitung. “We are waiting on an answer [on visa liberalization] in the coming days. If we don’t get one, we’ll terminate the agreement.”
On May 12, 1996, like a benevolent mad scientist, Brewster Kahle brought the Internet Archive to life. The World Wide Web was in its infancy and the Archive was there to capture its growing pains. Inspired by and emulating the Library at Alexandria, the Internet Archive began its mission to preserve and provide universal access to all knowledge.
A Polish appeals court has ruled that Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents, will remain in prison. The court refused the request for a supervised release and deems the accusations of the U.S. Government serious enough to keep him in custody.
There’s consistent disinformation from the copyright industry that even if a national parliament wanted to legalize file-sharing, it is not permitted to do so because of international treaties. This disinformational notion is hogwash, and I’m going to show exactly how it’s possible to legalize the private sharing of music, movies, and other culture while complying with all international treaties.
When determining whether it is possible to legalize file-sharing – defined as the noncommercial sharing of cultural works for personal use, without the consent of the distribution monopoly holder – and still stay in accordance with all international treaties, an obvious shortcut is to check if there is such legislation already somewhere, legislation that has been around for a long time and is accepted as a legislative precedent by the international community and the host legislature.
It turns out there is. Specifically, there is a very little-known such exception in Sweden (a country and a law I’m very familiar with since it’s my native country), and Sweden is affected by pretty much all existing EU treaties: what applies to Sweden will apply to any EU/EFTA country, like Germany, Czech Republic, or Iceland. When computer programs were moved in under the copyright monopoly umbrella in the early 1990s, politicians actually considered the cost of enforcement of the distribution monopoly when designing the law, unlike today.
You may have thought that if you owned your digital devices, you were allowed to do whatever you like with them. In truth, even for possessions as personal as your car, PC, or insulin pump, you risked a lawsuit every time you reverse-engineered their software guts to dig up their security vulnerabilities—until now.
Last Friday, a new exemption to the decades-old law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quietly kicked in, carving out protections for Americans to hack their own devices without fear that the DMCA’s ban on circumventing protections on copyrighted systems would allow manufacturers to sue them. One exemption, crucially, will allow new forms of security research on those consumer devices. Another allows for the digital repair of vehicles. Together, the security community and DIYers are hoping those protections, which were enacted by the Library of Congress’s Copyright Office in October of 2015 but delayed a full year, will spark a new era of benevolent hacking for both research and repair.