Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made it clear he's no longer a fan of the "new" Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella.
Speaking at the Code Conference on Monday, Benioff talked about the short-lived bromance between the two companies and how it all ended up falling apart in just two years.
In particular, Benioff pointed to a meeting that took place between him and Microsoft's cloud boss, Scott Guthrie, that really killed the trust he had placed in the company.
The story goes that Benioff took a meeting with Guthrie after Microsoft chairman John Thompson, a friend of his, connected the two last year. He believed the meeting was intended to share more about Salesforce's business in hopes of possibly becoming an Azure cloud customer one day. But that wasn't Microsoft's real goal, according to Benioff.
I am shocked -- shocked -- that Accenture thinks Windows 10 would be the better choice.
While many hardware enthusiasts get excited by the announcement and release of shiny new hardware products, those who are dedicated desktop Linux users have learned to temper their excitement with the reality that when devices lack proper drivers and adequate documentation, it'll take a while before they are made useful. The 2016 MacBook Pro seems to be no different. An early adopter reported that several devices: the built-in keyboard and mouse, as well as the SSD, don't work at all right now for him under Linux. While support may eventually come, it won't be immediate.
There is a subset of the Linux community that likes running Linux on Apple hardware. Strange as it may sound, these users enjoy the virtues of Linux and the elegance of Apple’s computers. Unfortunately, it looks like the 2016 MacBook Pro is not currently compatible with Linux.
The TOP500 List shows 498 out of 500 of the speediest computers on the planet are running Linux. Linux has long-dominated the supercomputer ratings, but now it's getting close to knocking out all its competition.
Other than systems running Linux, there are two Chinese supercomputers running IBM AIX, a Unix variant. This pair, tied at 386 and 387, may not be long for the list. That's because supercomputers are growing ever faster.
Linux first appeared on the TOP500 supercomputer list in 1998, which was populated mostly by Unix. Today Linux runs 498 of those top 500 supercomputers, proving once again that Linux is dominating the world. Elsewhere, Clement Lefebvre said the Mint 18 update will probably be pushed into December due to continuing work on Cinnamon 3.2. Turns out there was a bit more intrigue behind the Munich Linux desktop dump and Jonathon Riddell has issued a user upgrade advisory for KDE neon users.
Getting live-patching capabilities into the mainline kernel has been a multi-year process. Basic patching support was merged for the 4.0 release, but further work has been stalled over disagreements on how the consistency model — the code ensuring that a patch is safe to apply to a running kernel — should work. The addition of kernel stack validation has addressed the biggest of the objections, so, arguably, it is time to move forward. At the 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference, developers working on live patching got together to discuss current challenges and future directions.
This article is not an attempt at a comprehensive summary for a half-day of fast-moving discussion; instead, the goal is to cover some of the more interesting topics as a way of showing that challenges that the live-patching developers must overcome and how they plan to get there.
I'm announcing the release of the 4.8.8 kernel.
All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...
This is a bit of an interesting corner case of a rant. I have not written this when I came up with it, because I came up with it many years ago when I actively worked on multimedia software, but I have only given it in person to a few people before, because at the time it would have gained too much unwanted attention by random people, the same kind of people who might have threatened me for removing XMMS out of Gentoo so many years ago. I have, though, spoken about this with at least one of the people working on PulseAudio at the time, and I have repeated this at the office a few times, while the topic came up.
Intel's SDK for OpenCL Applications 2016 Release 3 was quietly made available earlier this month and it offers some interesting Linux changes.
After running my initial Intel Kaby Lake Linux tests last week using a Core i5 MSI Cubi 2 with new "KBL" processor, which was done under Ubuntu 16.10, I turned my focus to testing a few other distributions with this newest-generation Intel processor.
The MSI Cubi 2 with Core i5 7200U was tested also with the Fedora 25 latest release candidate, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux. On all of these latest Linux distributions, the MSI Cubi 2 / Intel Kaby Lake didn't run into any issues to speak of! Great to see KabyLake support in good shape already on Linux for these mobile processors, so with the desktop launch ahead hopefully there won't be any issues. The main concern always with Intel CPU Linux support comes to the open-source graphics stack and there everything appears to be nailed down.
Read more
The second development milestone/test release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 6.8-Tana is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs.
It appears that the powerful, open-source, free and cross-platform darktable RAW image editor is about to get to the next level and enhance your photography experience on GNU/Linux and Mac platforms.
darktable 2.2.0 is currently in heavy development, with an initial Release Candidate version out the door, and it looks like it will be a major release sporting exciting new features and tools, including a brand new automatic perspective correction module, new raw overexposure indication, as well as Undo and Redo support.
The upcoming darktable 2.2 release also promises a new tool called darktable-chart, which allows for the creation of styles for the CLUT (Color Look Up Table) module used for changing colors in an image, a new Liquify tool, and a revamped LCh reconstruction mode in the Highlight reconstruction module.
If you’re a regular screen caster or YouTube how-to maker, you’ll know how difficult it can be to relay the keys you’re pressing on your screen.
Go For It! — it sounds like the name of an overly enthusiastic mobile workout app that you download with good intentions only to never actually use it. But thankfully (for our collective laziness) it’s not. Go For It! is, instead, a “stylish to-do list with built-in productivity timer“.
Today, November 14, 2016, Vivaldi developer PÃÂ¥l Andreas Franksson was pleased to announce the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Vivaldi 1.5 web browser.
Vivaldi 1.5 has been in development for the past two months, during which it received no less than fifteen snapshots that brought numerous improvements and fixes, including better Linux clipboard support, enhancements to tab dragging and inline title editing, inline editing of bookmarks and notes, as well as advanced tab dragging.
With today's Release Candidate build, Vivaldi 1.5 is one step closer to the final release, which should land by the end of the year with Chromecast support, enhancements to Reader View, the ability to drag tabs between windows, address bar improvements, performance improvements, and an engine upgrade based on Chromium 54.0.
Epic Games announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.14 today as the newest version of this incredibly powerful, cross-platform game engine.
Yeah, I'm far too much of a sucker when it comes to adventure and horror games with a future space sci-fi story. Tether [Official Site] now has a new trailer and it has sucked me in even more.
Valve's OpenVR based project, which goes by the obvious moniker of SteamVR, has been shown powering an HTC Vive, using Vulcan on an unspecified Linux distro. This proof of concept is to back up their claims that SteamVR should be available to consumers very soon. At the moment their are few VR games using either OpenGL or Vulkan so your software choices will be limited. At the same time, you may also be limited in the headset you can choose as Oculus developers have stated that all Mac OS support projects are currently on hold. Road to VR has the full presentation from Valve’s Joe Ludwig embedded in their post here.
The Linux version has been absolutely spot on. The only issue I really have with the game is that the load times between sections sometimes drags on on a bit. It was especially annoying when I had around 30 seconds loading for a tiny cutscene and another loading screen right after.
The developer of mech combat game 'Dark Horizons: Mechanized Corps' [Steam, Official Site] has tweeted out that they are testing a Linux version, and it's looking good.
Feral Interactive, through Rajitha Ratnam, informs Softpedia today, November 15, 2016, about the fact that the UK-based video game publisher will launch the Linux port of Total War: WARHAMMER on Steam, on November 22, 2016.
Developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega, Total War: WARHAMMER is a TBS (turn-based strategy) game that features real-time battles and tactics. The game is set in a world of legendary heroes, flying creatures, and giant monsters, and promises to offer users the same gameplay as in the rest of the Total War series.
"A fantasy strategy game of titanic proportions, Total War: WARHAMMER combines an addictive turn-based campaign of skillful empire building with colossal real-time battles as players strive to conquer all at the head of one of four mythic Races," said Rajitha Ratnam in the press announcement received by Softpedia.
Feral Interactive announced a few minutes ago on Twitter that they will be releasing Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux on 22 November.
KDE Frameworks are 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
Kitware released CMake version 3.7 on Friday night. There is one feature mentioned at the very bottom of the feature list that makes this a really exciting release for people writing tools that integrate with CMake: The server-mode.
With last week's CMake 3.7 release one of the less-advertised features is the build system's server-mode functionality, which is sure to excited integrated development environments (IDEs).
On November 14, 2016, Emmanuele Bassi reports on the latest work of various GTK+ developers for the cross-platform and open-source GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit, the core of the GNOME desktop environment.
Last week, we told you that GTK+ 3.22.3 stable release landed on the official channels and it's ready for integration in various GNU/Linux distributions that are already shipping with the newest GNOME 3.22 packages. Out report stated that GTK+ 3.22.3 brought many GL improvements and HiDPI support for the Windows platform.
The screenshot above …It shows madness incarnate. Okay, it doesn’t — but it is close! You’re looking at GNOME Web — the open-source web-browser formerly known as Epiphany — running on Windows 10 via the Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka Bash on Ubuntu on Windows).
It’s good to dive into our shared history every now and again to learn something new. We want to build a customized shortcut engine for Builder and that means we need to have a solid understanding of all the ways to activate shortcuts in GTK+. So the following is a list of what I’ve found, as of GTK+ 3.22. I’ve included some pros and cons of each based on my experience using them in particularly large applications.
Last Friday, both a GNOME bug day and a bank holiday, a few of us got together to squash some bugs, and discuss GNOME and GNOME technologies.
Guillaume, a new comer in our group, tested the captive portal support for NetworkManager and GNOME in Gentoo, and added instructions on how to enable it to their Wiki. He also tested a gateway related configuration problem, the patch for which I merged after a code review. Near the end of the session, he also rebuilt WebKitGTK+ to test why Google Docs was not working for him anymore in Web. And nobody believed that he could build it that quickly. Looks like opinions based on past experiences are quite hard to change.
Between Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE, you have a choice of well-supported distributions with lots of up-to-date software and commercial backing, as well as a choice of almost any desktop environment like GNOME, Unity or KDE.
There are many others, however. Linux Mint brings the stability of Ubuntu with a more familiar desktop for ex-Windows users, while Elementary OS gives a more simplified, streamlined desktop which may fare well with ex-Mac users.
After two Betas and three RC (Release Candidate) versions, the final release of the Salix Live Xfce 14.2 edition is now available for download, allowing users to take the Slackware-based OS for a test drive before installing it.
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Software Collections 2.3 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 6, which provide a curated set of the latest, stable and open developer tools, languages and related technologies.
Available on a separate lifecycle from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Software Collections and Red Hat Developer Toolset help bridge developer agility with production stability, powering modern application development without jeopardizing mission-critical systems.
Rackspace today announced support for Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, expanding its Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat porftfolio of services. This new version from Red Hat is based on the 10.2 Jewel community version release of Ceph and addresses key stability requirements for enterprise customers.
Open source solutions provider Red Hat Inc. announced Oct. 26 that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 has been awarded the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ for an unmodified commercial operating system under the Operating System Protection Profile. This marks the first time an operating system has been Common Criteria-certified with Linux Container Framework Support.
Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Software Collections 2.3, Red Hat’s newest set of open source web development tools, dynamic languages, and databases. Red Hat Software Collections are delivered on a more frequent release cadence than Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are designed to bridge developer agility and production stability. This helps to accelerate the creation of modern applications that can then be more confidently deployed into production.
Libvirt has long supported use of TLS for its remote API service, using the gnutls library as its backend. When negotiating a TLS session, there are a huge number of possible algorithms that could be used and the client & server need to decide on the best one, where “best” is commonly some notion of “most secure”. The preference for negotiation is expressed by simply having an list of possible algorithms, sorted best to worst, and the client & server choose the first matching entry in their respective lists. Historically libvirt has not expressed any interest in the handshake priority configuration, simply delegating the decision to the gnutls library on that basis that its developers knew better than libvirt developers which are best. In gnutls terminology, this means that libvirt has historically used the “DEFAULT” priority string.
Modularity (formerly, Modularization) is an ongoing initiative in Fedora to resolve the issue of divergent, occasionally conflicting lifecycles of different components. A module provides functionality (such as a web server) and includes well-integrated and well-tested components (such as Apache httpd and the libraries on which it depends). It can be deployed into production in various ways: as “classic” RPM packages or a container image, and is updated as a whole. Different modules can emphasize new features, stability, security, etc. differently.
openSUSE distributions’ build system is based on a generic framework named Open Build Service (OBS), I have been using these tools in my work environment, and I have to say, as Debian developer, that it is a great tool. In the current blog post I plan for you to learn the very basics of such tool and provide you with a tutorial to get, at least, a Debian package building.
Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.
The one thing that made me not try to blowtorch my laptop in anger after I was done reviewing the terrible Yakkety Yak was the inclusion of the Unity 8 desktop environment in the distro, allowing for some fresh testing. The word desktop is probably not the best vocabulary choice here, as this hybrid-like environment already blithely powers touch devices like the Ubuntu Phone and the M10 tablet. But we're on a laptop, so.
Anyhow, I wanted to explore Unity 8 some more, but I did not want to do it as part of the distro review. This is why we have this article here, to explore the merits and failings of Unity 8, and see whether we should be really afraid this may become the default and only choice for our desktops one day. Which it might. So read carefully.
Today and tomorrow is a very basic Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) where the developers are plotting their work for Ubuntu 17.04, the Zesty Zapus.
Today, November 15, 2016, is the first day of the Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) event put together by Canonical for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) Linux-based operating system.
It's not the first time we inform our readers about Ubuntu Online Summit taking place between November 15-16, 2016, but today is the big day, so we had to write another story just to make sure we've got your attention. The event welcomes all members of the community, as well as Ubuntu developers, and takes place online, so it's free.
Arne Exton, the developer of many GNU/Linux distributions and Android-x86 flavors, announced today, November 16, 2016, the release of a new version of his Linux For All (LFA) Live DVD.
I found the wattOS to be a reliable and useful alternative to other lightweight Linux choices available. It is much less bothersome to configure compared to Puppy Linux and the many variants in PuppyLand, for instance.
It's chief advantage is an ability to run on older hardware with a clean and familiar user experience. It might fall short of expectations, however, when you push it to the limit beyond basic computing functions like Web surfing, word processing, email and playing music. Its performance will be spotty for heavy video viewing and editing.
The latest XApps and the new MATE 1.16 desktop environment were pushed towards the Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” and LMDE 2 “Betsy” repositories.
We just finished addressing some issues with MDM, and we’re currently working on a few compatibility issues which affect the Cinnamon screensaver in LMDE and in Slackware before announcing the official release of Cinnamon 3.2.
We were expecting Cinnamon 3.2 to be out at the end of October and this probably will push the release of Linux Mint 18.1 into the month of December.
Seco announced a “SYS-A62-GW” IoT gateway that runs Linux on an i.MX6 Solo, and features WiFi, GbE, and two serial expansion board options.
Seco’s SYS-A62-GW is a low-end Internet of Things gateway that runs a Yocto Linux based distribution on NXP’s single-core, 1GHz i.MX6 Solo. We have seen several i.MX6 based gateways, including VIA’s Artigo A830. The SYS-A62-GW can “integrate with the most common industrial protocols for data aggregation, real time analysis, on-board processing, encryption and data transfer to the cloud on Linux,” says Seco.
Despite its rarity, more because of shortage of supplies than being a limited edition, the NES Classic is just begging to be torn down, hacked, and even repurposed. The first has already happened, though not yet on iFixit. The third depends on the second, which is already on its way, albeit rather slowly. A couple of Japanese hackers have revealed how they were able to compile their own version of Linux on the Japanese Famicom Mini, though with little practical application.
There is no question that Nintendo’s move to supply retailers with a millimeter-thin blanket of NES Classic Edition consoles on Friday caused a little backlash over the weekend. We’ve seen reports that one or two customers would walk into participating retailers only to purchase the store’s entire stock in one fell swoop — likely to resell them on eBay for a higher price. Those that did manage to get the currently rare console seemingly snagged an awesome deal and are now enjoying the refreshed 8-bit goodness while other fans now look toward Black Friday.
A lucky few were able to secure and purchase the new NES Classic Edition when it launched on Friday, but not every buyer is playing games on it. The hacking community has pounced upon the device to see what the little box can do, and you know what that means: installing Linux.
Or, at least, your own Linux kernel. The NES Classic Edition already runs on Linux, and Nintendo has complied with open source license rules by offering downloads of the tiny hardware's Linux source files. While a few enterprising hackers have posted about connecting a serial cable to the motherboard and trying to install their own kernels, one Japanese hacker pulled it off—and posted a guide explaining how he did so. (If you really care, he also posted the entire bootlog from his first successful boot.)
If you are searching for an open source smartwatch you might be interested to know that a version of the CulBox Arduino smartwatch has now been launched via Kickstarter thanks to serial Kickstarter campaigner Masih Vahida.
The Arduino smartwatch comes in the form of an open source DIY kit which is powered by a 32 bit Arm Cortex processor and comes complete with integrated Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity as well as 6 axis I2C Gyro and Accelerometer sensor.
While it may have seemed as if nobody was able to purchase an NES Classic Edition last Friday, the reality is that some shoppers did walk away with one of the hottest gifts this holiday season. Of course, not everybody that scored on launch day did so with the intention of reliving their past (at least, not right away).
AS MOST of the world continues to wait desperately for new stock of the Nintendo NES Classic Edition, you just know that somewhere, someone’s been there, done that, hacked it.
The console runs on Linux, and an enterprising member of our 'running things on things they’re not supposed to run on' club has managed to get Ubuntu Linux running on his machine.
Raspberry Pi's Raspbian Debian-based Linux distribution had been using xcompmgr as its compositing window manager on the desktop, but now they will likely be switching to the Compton fork for better performance.
Last month was a very busy month for the Tizen store as lots more games / apps have started being released on the Tizen platform. A recent boost to the ecosystem has been the launch of the world’s first 4G Tizen smartphone, the Samsung Z2, which has helped drive more Tizen apps to the store.
Taking the role of a Coast Guard Ship, you will fight the Chinese, protecting South East Asia Sea. They will send various ships and you will need to be precise because of the winds, strong or light, you will need to aim correctly with the right amount of power.
The $400 Android phone is having a moment.
Vendors like Huawei, OnePlus, and Alcatel are stuffing high-end tech specs into smartphones that cost hundreds of dollars less than flagships from Samsung and Google. And with the demise of smartphone subsidies in the U.S., you can save a lot of money by purchasing one of these devices unlocked and bringing it to your wireless carrier of choice.
Software installed on some Android phones secretly monitored users, and even sent keyword-searchable, full text message archives to a Chinese server every 72 hours, according to research from security firm Kryptowire.
Android is in a weird place. The latest version, 7.0 Nougat, is on very few devices, which highlights the operating system's biggest issue -- fragmentation. True, most apps will work fine on slightly older versions of the OS, but the true problem is security -- not compatibility. Once a manufacturer stops supporting a smartphone or tablet, the user is at risk of future vulnerabilities.
The Google Pixel phone combines a great design, amazing camera and uncluttered software which takes the Android experience to the next level.
In 2007, we launched Android, a free and open-source operating system. Smartphones back then were an expensive rarity. We wanted to change that — to stimulate innovation and increase choice for consumers — and it worked.
ARK Crew, developers of the new ARK cryptocurrency ecosystem, has announced the release of its open source code on GitHub. The source code launch was set to coincide with the platform’s first developer-focused bounty program, designed to encourage others to participate in the review and provide feedback on the project.
The same goes for the large amount of open source JavaScript projects available to us developers. Whether they are intended to help you build amazing apps, or as a learning resource to help you level up your skills, these are all projects, supported and maintained by the community. Thanks to the collaborative nature of open source, you’re free to download and modify any of them and, most importantly, to contribute any changes you make back to the project itself.
I love open source and I’m thankful for it. It’s an integral part of working on the internet, but one which it is all to easy to overlook. That’s why I’m happy that we’re dedicating a whole week’s worth of articles to the subject. Talking of which, let’s look at what we have in store…
Huawei demonstrated the OPEN-O Sun, said to be the world’s first Open Source SDN and NFV Orchestrator, at the Operations Transformation Forum 2016 in Wuzhen, China.
The forum brought together industry leaders from around the world to discuss the transformation of digital operations and share best practices. Helen Chen, leader of the OPEN-O Integration Project noted that the OPEN-O Orchestrator will soon be commercially available.
For advice on addressing this problem, Jonathan suggests we look to ecosystem management, "an industry in itself, with its attendant experts, who write books and speak at conferences." I recently read one of the seminal books in this area, Governing the Commons, by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, and I'd like to offer some initial thoughts on how it might apply to open organizations and open source sustainability.
[...]
Free-riding in open source communities leads to overworked and underpaid individuals, and eventually to burnout. It's bad for people, and it's bad for projects. It's a problem we need to address. Ostrom shows us how to tackle the problem with a methodical approach to institutional design and analysis. Open organizations that steward open source software projects have much to learn from her, while recognizing that we will need to adapt her recommendations to fit our situation.
The latest Chromium open-source browser development code adds support for motion sensors under Chrome OS and Linux.
Just a few moments ago, Mozilla started seeding the binary and source packages of the final release of the Firefox 50.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
Firefox 50 comes bundled with an Emoji One font, enabling Linux users to see full colour emoji on the web.
Over the past several months, we've taken note of the many open source projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to data-centric and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves these projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support.
Apache also incubates a number of interesting cloud-centric projects. Now, it has announced the availability of Apache jclouds v2.0, which is a Java multi-cloud toolkit.
GCC 7 feature development is officially over with the development phase entering stage three now where the focus is on bug-fixing.
While GCC 7 feature development has ended, Red Hat's Jakub Jelinek wrote in this latest GCC status report, "Patches posted early enough during Stage 1 and not yet fully reviewed may still get in early in Stage 3. Please make sure to ping them soon enough."
The Parliament of Navarre, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, wants the region to switch to free and open source software. A resolution urging the government to draft a migration plan was adopted by the Parliament on 27 October.
The United States government has made good on its policy of requiring agencies to release 20 per cent of their bespoke code as open source by making code.gov live, complete with lots of code.
Hungary’s central government wants to reduce its dependency on a handful of IT vendorsm. To begin with, a decision taken last week aims to reduce the use of a proprietary office productivity suite by 60 % in 2020. The government also wants to improve its procurement of IT solutions in order to to create business opportunities for small and medium-sized companies.
The draft, approved by the Russian Federation's Duma (lower chamber) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise Free Software over proprietary alternatives, gives precedence to local IT businesses that offer Free Software for public tenders, and recognises the need to encourage collaboration with the global network of Free Software organisations and communities.
Legislators have drafted a bill that will boost Free Software on multiple levels within the Russian Federation's public sector.
The draft, approved by the Russian Federation's Duma (lower chamber) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise Free Software over proprietary alternatives, gives precedence to local IT businesses that offer Free Software for public tenders, and recognises the need to encourage collaboration with the global network of Free Software organisations and communities.
The text enforces prioritising Free Software over proprietary alternatives by requiring public administrations to formally justify any purchase of proprietary software. The purchase will be considered unjustified if a Free Software solution exists that satisfies the list of technical specifications and standards. In addition, all IT purchase agreements in the public sphere must be registered in a dedicated registrar and detail the overall quantity and price of both purchased proprietary and Free Software.
One can easily see examples of software as a shared resource, whether shared by a few people or a few million people. Of course, these shared resources are not always as fully appreciated as they should be. They can pass underappreciated until drama such as a security vulnerability draws attention and illuminates the importance of what is being shared.
But a license? A shared resource?
Yes, open source licenses are shared resources. And, they, too, may be underappreciated until a vulnerability is exploited. Legal documents (contracts, licenses, whatever they may be called) are typically unique to each commercial enterprise. Certainly, there is some commonality. Lawyers adapt from what others have done. Patterns are followed. Text is reused.
It was only a few years ago when Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made the prediction that open source software would soon become nearly pervasive in organizations of all sizes. That has essentially become true, and many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so.
As businesses adopt open source platforms such as OpenStack and Hadoop, they are complementing them with their own open source projects.For these reasons and other ones, it is more important than ever to know your way around the world of laws and licenses that pertain to open source software. Leaders of new projects need to know how to navigate the complex world of licensing and the law, as do IT administrators. Here is our newly updated ollection of resources to help you navigate the world of open source laws and licenses.
We've rounded up some resources on open source, licenes and the law, as seen in this post, but the topic remains a moving target. Did you know that there is an official, free journal dedicated to open source law? It's the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, and it's worth looking into.
In a proprietary, license-based model, users might need to pay more to scale up their operations. For some, the extra costs might mean going through a procurement cycle, which takes time and resources.
About two months ago, I started rewriting the entire Makemypattern.com codebase. I am using this opportunity to implement some improvements and features that were difficult to implement in the existing backend. But my main reason is that I am going to make all of my code available as open source. And for that, I need to make it easy for others to extend and adapt the code.
With a mission that is not merely about making patterns anymore, I also feel like a name change was needed. So when I finish my rewrite, I will relocate to Freesewing.org, which is free as in beer and free as in speech.
zeromq2 and zeromq3 were additional/compat packages that made it possible to ship multiple versions of zeromq (namely the old versions 2 and 3). These days, they don't get any bugfixes anymore and the version 4 should be used were possible. There should have been enough time to port all dependant packages to zeromq-4 and I like to retire these packages.
Alphabet Inc’s Google is ready to spend billions to get millions of Indians online– through a slew of India-specific products and initiatives – to stay relevant in the world’s fastest-growing internet economy.
With 350-million internet users, India has already surpassed the US, and the number is expected to double by 2020. Around 15,000 new Indians log onto the internet every day, fitting perfectly in Google’s scheme of the “next billion internet users” gambit to acquire new customers.
But this wasn’t the case three years ago, not until smartphones burgeoned and a large number of people started accessing the Net through their phones.
All that makes India more important for Google, especially after China, which has the maximum number of internet users globally, closed its doors the American internet firm.
One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal preferences.
For sure, anybody who works on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an outsider. If you target a broad consumer audience, you will also have a higher IQ than your average user, higher literacy levels, and, most likely, you’ll be younger and experience less age-driven degradation of your abilities than many of your users.
Mayor Karen Weaver has asked for a renewal of the state emergency it was declared nearly one year ago over Flint's water crisis.
A resolution is on the agenda for Flint City Council members to approve or deny the request at Monday evening's meeting as the declaration is due to expire Nov. 14.
"Mayor Karen W. Weaver has stated that it imperative that Flint's state of emergency remain in place until the city of Flint's drinking water is deemed safe to drink without a filter," states the resolution.
Michigan’s senior U.S. Senator says there are some things that Congress has to address when it returns to work this week.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow says her top priority during Congress’ lame duck session will be lining up federal money for Flint.
“We have a promise that was made to me by the Speaker of the House and the Republican Majority Leader that before the end of this year we would pass the money that’s critical to fixing the pipes in Flint,” says Stabenow.
Last week, a German newspaper reported that Audi was hiding emissions-cheating software in its automatic transmissions. I don't know why it took a whole week, but Volkswagen finally came around to admitting as much.
"Adaptive shift programs can lead to incorrect and non-reproducible results" in emissions tests, Volkswagen told Reuters on Sunday. Software in the AL 551 automatic transmission may detect testing conditions and shift in a way that minimizes emissions, only to act "normally" out on the road. Much like Dieselgate's defeat device, that leads to higher-than-imagined pollution, which could be in excess of legal limits.
Audi's AL 551 can be found in both gas and diesel vehicles, including the A6, A8 and Q5.
A range of practitioners and representatives in the manufacture of medicines, intergovernmental officials, academics and civil society representatives last week gave diverse views on the effectiveness of a waiver to international trade rules intended to ease shipments of affordable medicines to low-income countries.
Alongside the first day of the 8-9 November World Trade Organization Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the intergovernmental South Centre held a side event to discuss experiences in the implementation and the effective functioning of the system.
Thousands of children have died of starvation and disease in Boko Haram-ravaged northeastern Nigeria, Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday quoting a new survey that is forcing Nigerian officials to stop denying the crisis.
The Paris-based organization hopes that official recognition of the calamity in which "thousands are dying" will help bring urgent aid before older children also start dying, Natalie Roberts, emergency program manager for northeast Nigeria, told The Associated Press.
A survey of two refugee camps in the northeastern city of Maiduguri shows a quarter of the expected population of under-5 children is missing, assumed dead, according to the organization. Under-5 mortality rates in the camps are more than double the threshold for declaring an emergency, Roberts said in a phone interview from Paris.
In 2016, keeping your Ubuntu network secure is more important than ever. Despite what some people might think, there's much more to this than merely putting up a router to protect a network. You must also configure each of your PCs properly to ensure you're operating within a secure Ubuntu network. This article will show you how.
Building software securely requires a verifiable method of reproduction and that is why the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative is supporting the Reproducible Builds Project.
In an effort to help open-source software developers build more secure software, the Linux Foundation is doubling down on its efforts to help the reproducible builds project. Among the most basic and often most difficult aspects of software development is making sure that the software end-users get is the same software that developers actually built.
A 17-year-old boy has admitted hacking offences linked to a data breach at the communications firm TalkTalk.
Norwich Youth Court was told he had used hacking tool software to identify vulnerabilities on target websites.
Last month we moved the neon archive to a new server so packages got built on our existing server then uploaded to the new server. Checking the config it seemed I’d made the nasty error of leaving it open to the world rather than requiring an ssh gateway to access the apt repository, so anyone scanning around could have uploaded packages. There’s no reason to think that happened but the default in security is to be paranoid for any possibility.
The Security B-Sides DC conference is part of the B-Sides movement, which was created to provide a community framework to build events for and by information security practitioners. Alex Norman, the co-director of Security B-Sides DC, tells us how he wants to expand information security beyond security professionals, and to involve a larger, more diverse community.
An old Linux security 'feature' script, which activates LUKS disk encryption, has been hiding a major security hole in plain sight.
With ubiquitous desktop computing now several decades old, anyone creating an operating system distribution now faces a backwards compatibility problem. Each upgrade brings its own set of new features, but it must maintain compatibility with the features of the previous versions or risk alienating users. If you are a critic of Microsoft products for their bloat, this is one of the factors behind that particular issue.
CVE-2016-4484 was disclosed on Monday as a Cryptsetup issue that allows users to easily gain access to a root initramfs shell on affected systems in a little over one minute of simply hitting the keyboard's enter key.
This Cryptsetup vulnerability is widespread and easy to exploit, simply requiring a lot of invalid passwords before being dropped down a root shell. The data on the LUKS-encrypted volume is still protected, but you have root shell access. The CVE reads, "This vulnerability allows to obtain a root initramfs shell on affected systems. The vulnerability is very reliable because it doesn't depend on specific systems or configurations. Attackers can copy, modify or destroy the hard disc as well as set up the network to exflitrate data. This vulnerability is specially serious in environments like libraries, ATMs, airport machines, labs, etc, where the whole boot process is protect (password in BIOS and GRUB) and we only have a keyboard or/and a mouse."
I think people are very determined to believe that Islam is just like any other religion, denying what it actually calls for -- the death or conversion of non-Muslims, the totalitarian rule of Islam around the globe, and the death of gays, apostates and rape victims who do not have four Muslim men as witnesses to swear they were raped rather than just having some fun.
One of the survivors of last year’s deadly attacks at the Bataclan theatre has described the moment a terrorist posed as a member of the French security forces to get in the dressing room she was hiding in.
Three heavily armed Isis fighters launched an attack on the 1,500-seat Bataclan theatre on 13 November. In less than three hours, the men were dead, having killed 89 people at the concert hall and critically injuring dozens.
Kelly Le Guen, a music reporter for RockUrLife and Webzine, was among a group of 30 people trapped in what she described as a “suffocating” room for more than two hours before security forces stormed the hall.
Four men allegedly set a 12-year-old boy alight after failing to sexually assault and rape him, according to the boy’s father.
Hafiz Sulaiman told police that his son was playing outside his house in Pakistan when the gang abducted him and took him to their house, reports the Express Tribune.
When his son started shouting they alleged poured petrol over him, set him on fire and fled the scene.
President-elect of the USA, Donald Trump, said during his campaign that other NATO members should pay a fair contribution and not rely on the USA to always bail them out.
On 13th November the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, defended his organisation in UK newspaper The Observer.
A taboo-busting reminder of Adolf Hitler’s life has popped up in Germany’s capital with the opening of a new exhibit — a replica of the Nazi dictator’s bunker.
Four Cabinet Ministers, including Boris Johnson, have vowed to continue to sell arms to Saudi Arabia in defiance of two parliamentary committees who called for Britain to cease military support for the country.
Saudi prosecutors filed criminal charges against two activists in late October 2016, for “forming an unlicensed organization” and other vague charges relating to a short-lived human rights organization they set up in 2013, Human Rights Watch said today. None of the alleged “crimes” listed in the charge sheet resemble recognizable criminal behavior, and none of them took place after October 2013.
The one thing you could say about empires is that, at or near their height, they have always represented a principle of order as well as domination. So here’s the confounding thing about the American version of empire in the years when this country was often referred to as “the sole superpower,” when it was putting more money into its military than the next 10 nations combined: It’s been an empire of chaos.
Back in September 2002, Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League, offered a warning I’ve never forgotten. The Bush administration’s intention to invade Iraq and topple its ruler, Saddam Hussein, was already obvious. Were they to take such a step, Moussa insisted, it would “open the gates of hell.” His prediction turned out to be anything but hyperbole — and those gates have never again closed.
Six years after the Swedish authorities opened an investigation into a rape accusation made against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, he was questioned about the matter on Monday.
The questions were prepared by prosecutors in Sweden, where an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange was issued in 2010, but were posed by a prosecutor from Ecuador under an agreement the two countries made in August. Ecuador granted Mr. Assange political asylum in 2012, and the interview occurred at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Mr. Assange has lived in the embassy since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over the rape accusation.
There’s no denying who the king of technology in the 20th century was: America. But the 21st century poses new challenges that must be met by the rise of the green technology and green energy sectors across the globe. And whatever country is producing the best green tech solutions is in the pole position to spring to the top of the 21st century technological heap.
America’s election of Donald Trump virtually guarantees that country will be China.
To be fair, China was already ahead of the US on this front. It began investing big in green tech more than a decade ago, and it is now the world’s leading investor in green energy. Last year alone, China invested more than US$100 billion in green energy – that’s more than double what the US invested – and that number is expected to grow. Trump or no, there’s a good chance China would have won this race. But the US, the second-biggest global investor, was in a better position than any other single nation to challenge China on this front.
Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump’s signature piece of property in the South, is just 70-miles north of Miami in Palm Beach, a mostly upscale barrier island. But the residence and private club is likely to be affected by the rising tides and increasingly powerful hurricanes that now regularly batter the coast of Florida.
Miami and nearby coastal towns in Florida are, and will be, impacted by changes in our climate—the sea levels in just the past decade rose at double the rate of the entire century before, according to the World Resource Institute. But in the end, Floridians chose noted climate change-skeptic Donald Trump as their future leader.
A European plan under which Britons will face a €£10 charge to travel to the EU after Brexit is to be discussed by interior ministers this week.
The plan for a European version of the US visa waiver programme has already won the backing of the British diplomat now in charge of European security.
Sir Julian King, the European commissioner for the security union is to give evidence to peers on Tuesday. He has described the plan as “a valuable additional piece of the jigsaw” in the war against international terrorism.
On 8 November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave only four hours' notice that virtually all the cash in the world's seventh-largest economy would be effectively worthless.
The Indian government likes to use the technical term "demonetisation" to describe the move, which makes it sound rather dull. It isn't. This is the economic equivalent of "shock and awe".
[...]
These may be the largest denomination Indian notes but they are not high value by international standards - 1,000 rupees is only €£12. But together the two notes represent 86% of the currency in circulation.
Think of that, at a stroke 86% of the cash in India now cannot be used.
What is more, India is overwhelmingly a cash economy, with 90% of all transactions taking place that way.
And that is the target of Mr Modi's dramatic move. Because so much business is done in cash, very few people pay tax on the money they earn.
Donald Trump's stunning victory in the US presidential election wiped more than $1 trillion (€£800bn) off the value of global bond markets in two days.
President-elect Trump has pledged to massively increase infrastructure spending, which has caused a big shift away from the safety of government debt and into the shares of companies who may cash in on any spending bonanza. The wider stock market has also risen on the back of investors' predictions of increased growth.
Turning on the government spending taps would push up inflation, meaning that the already meagre returns on US bonds would head into negative territory, adding more reasons to sell and move into riskier assets.
There's a righteous, almost smug satisfaction to buying something cheap. It feels like we're sticking it to the big companies by denying them those extra ten cents per unit on a box of Kit Kats. However, no one loves a bargain more than the businesses themselves. That usually takes the form of tax evasion and poor wages, but sometimes they like to get ... creative.
A baby died when a hospital in India refused to accept a deposit paid in banknotes which were withdrawn from circulation the day before.
Police said they are investigating a doctor in a Mumbai suburb who allegedly turned away a couple with a premature baby because they did not have the correct currency.
Kiran Sharma gave birth to a boy around one month early on 9 November and was rushed to Jeevan Jyot Hospital in Govandi to the east of the city, reported The New Indian Express.
The circumstances are different, but the general principle is the same -- and there's a really important issue at stake when it comes to FOIA and public records issues. The background is fairly convoluted, but here's a quick summary. After President Obama announced a plan to defer enforcement of certain immigration laws for certain individuals, a few states were upset about it, and Texas and Indiana (where Pence is governor) sued the President. Pence hired an outside law firm to handle the case, and a local lawyer thought this was a waste of taxpayer funds. The lawyer filed public records requests to get access to emails about the decision to hire the law firm and to find out the costs to taxpayers.
Pence's office released some emails, but they were apparently redacted in places -- and in one case an email referred to an attached white paper that was not included. The lawyer who filed the request, William Groth, went to court to demand that the Pence administration reveal the full email with the attached white paper. The Pence administration has argued that it's not subject to public records requests as "attorney-client" work material -- but also that the courts are not allowed to question what the government chooses to release or redact under public records laws. A lower court agreed -- following an Indiana Supreme Court ruling saying that the courts cannot "meddle" in public records decisions by the legislative or executive branch due to "separation of powers." That's a bizarre reading of the law that seems to actually turn the concept of separation of powers on its head, as it kind of destroys a key part of that separation: the checks and balances of the three branches of government.
A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces.
The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion.
A report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last month revealed how a CIA-funded tool, Geofeedia, was already being used by police to conduct surveillance of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to monitor activists and protesters.
Although Facebook and Twitter both quickly revoked Geofeedia’s access to their social feeds, the conference proves that social media surveillance remains a rapidly growing industry with no regulatory oversight. And its biggest customers are our own governments.
If the Democrats continue to front establishment candidates while the establishment's cherished beliefs continue to crumble, they will continue to lose.
American politics now: the anti-establishment, white-nationalism troll party and the pro-establishment party that thinks you'll vote for them because you fear white supremacists more than you hate the trolls.
American politics tomorrow, if we address ourselves to the work at hand: the terrified troll white-nationalist party versus the party of hope, change and rebuilding: "dismissing a major indicator of popularity like polling—a key tool of campaign journalism in virtually all other contexts—due to vague, handwaving claims of unvettedness comes across as far more a convenient talking point than an earnestly arrived-at conclusion."
When the liberal class heard news media report Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote, numerous people experienced meltdowns that involved blaming anyone and everyone but Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In particular, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was one of the targets, even though the math did not point to Stein as a culprit for the outcome.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow wailed, “If you vote for somebody who can’t win for president, it means that you don’t care who wins for president.” It not only displayed the prejudice many liberals have against allowing more choices and more voices in presidential elections, but it also exemplified a denial among liberal pundits. They reflexively lashed out at Stein or Bernie Sanders in order to ignore their failure to recognize how Trump had a strong chance all along to win because voters were fed up with the neoliberal economic policies of Democrats.
For this week’s “Unauthorized Disclosure,” the show returns with an interview with Jill Stein. She highlights what her campaign managed to accomplish. She looks back on smears she faced, such as the idea that she was anti-vaccine and says she views it as a “sign of the media’s weakness and also their fear and our strength.” Then, she shares how she was never confident Clinton would win the election and addresses the denial among Democrats, who do not want to confront the reality of what happened. She also lists off a number of initiatives and efforts she plans to help support in the aftermath of the election.
I sit in the tiny conference room adjoined to Julian Assange’s tiny living space in Ecuador embassy. I always feel a bit restless and nervous waiting for him. I worry how he’s coping. I realize how difficult it must be, to be here for years every day looking at these same walls, not feeling the sunshine.
Just then the cat pops in, making me feel more at ease. He has full reign. He is on the table sniffing the muffins and rubbing up against me purring and maybe a little disappointed that everything I’ve brought is vegan.
Next, the big man walks in, wearing a Sea Shepherd tshirt and jeans, a bit disheveled. It’s early but he manages a smile. He’s got a long day ahead.
The online group was grilled by users of Reddit in a questions and answer session on the online debating forum.
WikiLeaks became a focal point during the election campaign.
It published thousands of internal Democrat National Council emails, and more recently thousands more from the hacked email account of the Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.
Some Reddit users appeared suspicious Wikileaks had an agenda to get Donald Trump elected.
The Lawyer of Chelsea Manning, a former US soldier who is currently serving a prison sentence for disclosing secret diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, has put forth a petition requesting President Barack Obama to grant clemency and reduce the rest of her 35-year sentence to the more than six years she has already served.
Manning's punishment is the longest period of incarceration awarded to any leaker in American history.
A synagogue in Montana wants police protection after Nazi fliers were delivered nearby following Donald Trump's election win. Anxiety is now growing among American Jews after Trump appointed an alleged anti-Semite as one of his closest advisors on Sunday as the number of hate incidents continues to rise across the US.
The only thing that will save us from a populist racist oligarch demagogue is a populist anti-racist anti-neoliberal progressive with a mobilized movement behind them and serious contenders up and down the ticket.
Amid the growing post-election call for a "reckoning" within the Democratic Party, Rep. Keith Ellison on Minnesota has swiftly emerged as the favored progressive choice to lead that transition.
"Liberal lawmakers and advocacy groups have started plotting a major overhaul of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)," the Washington Post reported late Thursday, with the first step being a replacement for the embattled interim chair Donna Brazile.
The progressive flank of the party has largely placed the blame for the stunning election loss on the DNC and its elitist leadership, which they say is out of touch with the Left's grassroots base, which wants to see a renunciation of corporate influence.
Amid a national vote that rocked the political world Tuesday, voters in Maine narrowly approved a measure that supporters say will be respectively disruptive to the state’s political status quo.
With 98 percent of the vote reporting in the state, 52 percent of voters approved a ballot question making Maine the first state to implement ranked choice voting, a fundamental reform of how voters literally fill out their ballot.
In a ranked choice vote system, rather than simply voting for one candidate, voters rank their candidates by preference—first, second, third, and so on.
Maine residents have approved a ballot question that will allow voters to rank their choice of candidates.
Under the election overhaul, ballots are counted at the state level in multiple rounds. Last-place candidates are eliminated until a candidate wins by a majority.
Donald Trump has named Reince Priebus as his White House chief of staff, rewarding a loyalist to his party and its long-serving chairman by making him his top aide in the Oval Office. But he also named Steve Bannon, the head of his campaign and of the far-right website Breitbart, as his “chief strategist and senior counselor”.
The statement announcing Trump’s decision named Bannon first, despite the vague title of his role. It said he and Priebus would work as “equal partners”.
“Steve and Reince are highly qualified leaders who worked well together on our campaign and led us to a historic victory,” Trump said. “Now I will have them both with me in the White House as we work to make America great again.”
“I am thrilled to have my very successful team continue with me in leading our country,” Trump said in a statement.
If the world’s governments don’t prevent the planet’s surface temperature from increasing more than 2€°C, then life on Earth will become a difficult proposition for many humans, animals and plants. Glaciers will melt, sea levels will rise, crops will fail, water availability will decrease, and diseases will proliferate. Some areas will experience more wildfires and extreme heat; in others, more hurricanes and extreme storms. Coastal cities and possibly entire nations will be swallowed by the sea. There will be widespread social and economic instability, leading to regional conflicts.
President-elect Donald Trump is seeking top-secret security clearances for his adult children, CBS News reported Monday.
CBS News said the real estate mogul has asked the White House if he can obtain such clearances for Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., as well as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
But a transition team official told the presidential pool reporter Monday night that the president-elect did not request such a step and said the Trump children have not started filling out paperwork for such clearances.
Donald Trump will run policy proposals affecting the UK past Nigel Farage before consulting Theresa May, a Ukip donor has claimed.
Mr Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon will "run ideas" past interim Ukip leader Mr Farage, prominent Ukip donor Aaron Banks told the Daily Telegraph.
“There is no doubt about it that Steve Bannon will talk to Nigel Farage before any other British politician and run stuff by them," Mr Banks said.
Well, I was optimistic. The tea party radicals have gone nuclear, but I wasn't counting on a neo-Nazi running the White House, or on the Kremlin stepping in ...
Let me explain.
A few years ago, wandering around the net, I stumbled on a page titled "Why Japan lost the Second World War". (Sorry, I can't find the URL.) It held two photographs. The first was a map of the Pacific Theater used by the Japanese General Staff. It extended from Sakhalin in the north to Australia in the south, from what we now call Bangladesh in the west, to Hawaii in the east. The second photograph was the map of the war in the White House. A Mercator projection showing the entire planet. And the juxtaposition explained in one striking visual exactly why the Japanese military adventure against the United States was doomed from the outset: they weren't even aware of the true size of the battleground.
I'd like you to imagine what it must have been like to be a Japanese staff officer. Because that's where we're standing today. We think we're fighting local battles against Brexit or Trumpism. But in actuality, they're local fronts in a global war. And we're losing because we can barely understand how big the conflict is.
(NB: By "we", I mean folks who think that the Age of Enlightenment, the end of monarchism, and the evolution of Liberalism are good things. If you disagree with this, then kindly hold your breath until your head explodes. (And don't bother commenting below: I'll delete and ban you on sight.))
The logjam created by the Beige Dictatorship was global, throughout the western democracies; and now it has broken. But it didn't break by accident, and the consequences could be very bad indeed.
What happened last week is not just about America. It was one move—a very significant one, bishop-takes-queen maybe—in a long-drawn-out geopolitical chess game. It's being fought around the world: Brexit was one move, the election and massacres of Dutarte in the Philippines were another, the post-coup crackdown in Turkey is a third. The possible election of Marine Le Pen (a no-shit out-of-the-closet fascist) as President of France next year is more of this stuff. The eldritch knot of connections between Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Da'esh in the wreckage of Syria is icing on top. It's happening all over and I no longer think this is a coincidence.
As news of Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss sinks in, many Clinton supporters looking for someone to blame are pointing fingers at a familiar scapegoat: people who voted outside the two-party system.
Pundits are already trying to blame Libertarian Gary Johnson and me, the Green party candidate, for Trump’s win. For example, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow concocted a scenario in which by taking every Stein vote and half of Johnson’s votes, Clinton could have grabbed enough states from Trump to eke out an electoral college win, a story repeated by CNN. Unwilling to accept that Clinton didn’t motivate enough voters to win the presidency, and explore the reasons why, many pundits are instead looking to put responsibility for the loss onto others.
First the facts: if every single Stein voter had voted for Clinton, Clinton still lost.
The Green Party’s showing in this year’s election was strong but not significant enough to reach the desired 5%. It was more like 1%. Still, the Stein Baraka ticket garnered more than 1.2 million votes nationwide. That’s a big bump from the last Green Party presidential ticket in 2012 which won less than half a million votes.
Already some liberal pundits, shocked by the election of Donald Trump have begun blaming the Green Party for Clinton’s loss. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman tweeted on election night, “Jill Stein managed to play Ralph Nader. Without her Florida might have been saved.”
We know this because Wikileaks founder Julian Assange came into possession of it along with tens of thousands of other emails to and from Clinton’s strategist Podesta, and spread them across the internet.
Huma Abedin’s email revealed no high drama or internal backbiting, and so it did not grab headlines during the campaign. It simply noted that she had met with Smith, a San Francisco political consultant, and she attached a memo, titled thoughts.doc. Written by Smith, it maps out a strategy, though not one followed by Hillary Clinton.
Smith and his firm, SCN Strategies, are among the most successful Democratic campaign firms in the state and country. In 2008, he ran Clinton’s 2008 winning primary campaigns in California and Texas. And in 2014, he was making a pitch for a position in Clinton’s 2016 campaign; he didn’t get it.
“Today, you are a fully known quantity and a second-time candidate for President of the United States,” Smith wrote, setting forth how Clinton might announce her candidacy and frame her campaign. “As such you will be expected to have a clear and deep rationale for your candidacy from the first day of the campaign.”
Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee and former CNN contributor, went after her former employer at an event at a women’s college in Virginia Monday, blaming them for “ripping me a new one” instead of allowing her to defend herself after it appeared she tipped off Hillary Clinton’s campaign to town hall questions.
Brazile, who had been a contributor and commentator at CNN for 14, resigned from the network earlier this year after WikiLeaks published hacked emails that showed Brazile tipping off Clinton’s campaign in advance to at least two questions the Democratic presidential nominee could be asked at upcoming town hall events.
“CNN never gave me a question,” Brazile said at a talk held at Hollins University, according to The Roanoke Times. “I wish CNN had given me some other things, like the ability to defend myself rather than ripping me a new one.”
Brazile did not deny the allegations that she had emailed two questions in advance, but she said she “never got on Clinton’s campaign airplane or prepped the candidate for any of the debates,” according to the Roanoke Times. When the network cut ties with Brazile permanently, it said the company was “completely uncomfortable” with the revelations and asserted that it had not provided questions to Brazile in advance.
Rep. Keith Ellison formally announced his candidacy Monday to be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a race that has taken on unusual importance as the party looks for someone to lead its efforts to rebuild after last week's devastating loss to Donald Trump.
Ellison, a progressive who backed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary, enters the potentially crowded race as the clear favorite thanks to early backing from a number of leading Democrats.
"It is not enough for Democrats to ask for voters' support every two years. We must be with them through every lost paycheck, every tuition hike, and every time they are the victim of a hate crime," Ellison said in a statement announcing his bid. "When voters know what Democrats stand for, we can improve the lives of all Americans, no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation. To do that, we must begin the rebuilding process now."
More than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland didn’t vote, according to state election records.
At least seventy demonstrators either didn’t turn in a ballot or weren’t registered to vote.
KGW compiled a list of the 112 people arrested by the Portland Police Bureau during recent protests. Those names and ages, provided by police, were then compared to state voter logs by Multnomah County Elections officials.
Records show 35 of the protesters arrested didn’t return a ballot for the November 8 election. Thirty-five of the demonstrators taken into custody weren’t registered to vote.
A day after hundreds of students staged a peaceful protest at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, another large protest is taking place in the District.
Hundreds of students walked out of school at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School, in the Tenleytown neighborhood, Tuesday morning in protest of President Elect Donald Trump.
There are 67 days until Donald Trump's inauguration, a fact that seems to have surprised the president-elect – who reportedly never thought he'd remain in the race past October 2015 – as much as anyone. According to the Wall Street Journal, not only was Trump "surprised by the scope" of the president's duties when President Obama explained them to him in private last week, but his aides were unaware they would need to hire an entirely new White House staff.
On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.
Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.” His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here's a sample of the list
TV chef Anders Vendel said in a Facebook post that he was beaten up by three men, two of whom bound his arms behind his back, while the third beat him in the face. He estimated that he was punched twenty times in the face, which took place at 4am in central Malmö on Saturday.
The attack left him with a broken nose and extensive bruising around his right eye, mouth and jaw.
In the Facebook post, which has since been deleted but has been widely cited by populist media including Russian state propaganda channel RT, Vendel had said the men thought he resembled the US President-elect. He also said they were Muslim.
But in a comment to The Local on Monday, the chef said the way his case was being used abroad was "scary."
Headlines in RT, the Daily Mail and various other global media emphasised the attackers' supposed religion. None of them had spoken to the chef.
"I was angry, hurt and humiliated when I wrote what I was thinking at the time," Vendel said.
The election of Donald Trump symbolises the demise of a remarkable era. It was a time when we saw the curious spectacle of a superpower, the US, growing stronger because of – rather than despite – its burgeoning deficits. It was also remarkable because of the sudden influx of two billion workers – from China and Eastern Europe – into capitalism’s international supply chain. This combination gave global capitalism a historic boost, while at the same time suppressing Western labour’s share of income and prospects.
Trump’s success comes as that dynamic fails. His presidency represents a defeat for liberal democrats everywhere, but it holds important lessons – as well as hope – for progressives.
From the mid-1970s to 2008, the US economy had kept global capitalism in an unstable, though finely balanced, equilibrium. It sucked into its territory the net exports of economies such as those of Germany, Japan and later China, providing the world’s most efficient factories with the requisite demand. How was this growing trade deficit paid for? By the return of around 70 per cent of the profits made by foreign corporates to Wall Street, to be invested in America’s financial markets.
The popular Chinese microblogging site Weibo sent a push notification to countless smartphones in China on Monday, advertising a post that claimed that anti-Trump demonstrators in the United States were responsible for a surge of hatred against Chinese-Americans.
Weibo is the Chinese language equivalent of Twitter. Although Chinese speakers do use Twitter, the US-based service is blocked in mainland China. Weibo is not, and subsequently enjoys massive popularity on the mainland.
Like Twitter, Weibo features trending topics, and sometimes sends push notifications to your smartphone about a current popular trend if you have the app installed. A key difference is that hashtags on Weibo have their own pages, one that is controlled by a “host” that started the hashtag, or paid for it. That host can pin a post to the top of the page.
The Raleigh, N.C. affiliate of NBC censored “Saturday Night Live” in nine different parts of last night’s broadcast, citing language used by comedian and host Dave Chappelle and raising concerns on social media of whether broadcasters could become more wary of edgy content under an administration led by President-elect Donald Trump.
In this year's election, the most powerful news source was Facebook. More than 40 percent of US adults—that's more than watch any single TV channel—get their news from Facebook, according to Pew, and as plenty of journalists have recounted, the platform is flooded with hyperpartisan fake news.
A California history teacher has been placed on paid leave after comparing US president-elect Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler during one of his lessons.
Holocaust scholar Frank Navarro, who has taught at Mountain View High School for 40 years, said the school’s principal and district superintendent asked him to leave on Thursday, after a parent sent an email to school officials expressing concerns about a lesson plan for Mr Navarro's world studies class which drew parallels between Mr Trump and the Nazi leader.
“This parent said that I had said Donald Trump was Hitler, but I would never say that,” Mr Navarro told the San Francisco Chronicle on Saturday. “That’s sloppy historical thinking.”
Across the landscape of the Internet, a handful of websites have grown to become synonymous with the medium to which they operate within. To “Google” something, for example, is a term that is now rooted in our collective lexicon. When one says he or she is going to “Wikipedia” a topic, everyone present knows exactly what that person means. YouTube is the same way. 4.95 billion videos are viewed every day on the website, while 300 hours are viewed per minute. With those numbers, Google has an incredibly daunting task of trying to retain some level of control when it comes to the content that is allowed on the website. The survival of the website is contingent on keeping advertisers happy. One can only imagine how difficult a task it must be to try to guarantee advertisers that the videos on the platform reflect the right kind of image to viewers. There have been a series of attempts in the past to try to censor the content that deserves to be removed from the site. It used to be that a viewer could flag a video for violating the website’s terms of service, and upon review of that claim the video would be removed and a strike would be placed on the channel. Once a channel was issued its third and final strike, it would be terminated from the website. Granted, if the uploader felt as though his or her video was unfairly flagged, that person had the power to dispute the claim, but for the duration of dispute process, monetization was shut off. A new program, “YouTube Heroes” is the latest in these efforts.
A federal judge has tossed out a lawsuit from anti-Muslim groups that tried to blame the U.S. attorney general for the online censorship of their social-media posts.
The groups, American Freedom Defense Initiative and Jihad Watch, claimed in a lawsuit this past July that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were censoring their posts critical of Islam. Rather than suing the companies directly, however, the groups took aim at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Earlier this month, Indian news broadcaster NDTV received a blackout order from the government. Their coverage of the Pathankot terror attacks in January 2016 was identified as flouting the guidelines issued after the panic caused by the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks and their media coverage. An inter-ministerial committee of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry decided to take NDTV off air for a day, on November 9, 2016, as a penalty for disclosing so-called strategically sensitive information during the broadcast of the attacks.
Information and Broadcasting Minister Venkaiah Naidu has defended this decision on grounds of national security and alleged that the coverage violated India’s national interest, calling its opponents politically inspired. Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar has said that this is not to be regarded as a ban so much as broadcasting operations temporarily put off. He alleged that the display of aerial assets and the ammunition dumps at Pathankot during the broadcast constituted a threat to not just national security, but also the lives of serving personnel. He also declared that the previous UPA regime led by the Congress had issued nearly 21 times the number of guidelines to the media, arguing thus that the BJP-led regime was not out of line.
Are music bans in India and Pakistan an appropriation of art and performances by nationalist imperatives?
Liu Yunshan, the No 5 in the Politburo Standing Committee and in charge of ideological control, doesn’t look like an internet guru or a man who can influence the future of one of humanity’s great inventions.
On September 4, a group of young activists planned to attend a demonstration against Interim President Michel Temer in the city center of São Paulo. They never made it. Their group had been infiltrated by an Army Captain Willian Pina Botelho—via Tinder.
Surveillance and infiltration are not new tactics, but the ACLU revelation last month that Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook had been sharing data with surveillance service Geofeedia reminds us that the internet is bringing it to whole new levels. The story of the “Tinder infiltrator” serves as a reminder for a generation of young activists who are organizing online: don't stop organizing, but be vigilant.
FBI Director James Comey believes encryption is perhaps the biggest threat to public safety yet. So big, in fact, that he can only engage in hyperbole about it. There's been very little done to quantify the problem, even by the agency that seems to fear it most.
In 2015, Comey told senators that a "vast majority" of devices seized by US law enforcement "may no longer be accessible" due to encryption. Comey has a very strange definition of "vast majority," as Marcy Wheeler points out.
The German constitutional court has rebuffed a second complaint seeking to allow oversight bodies to see the US National Security Administration (NSA) selector list.
The list was pushed by the NSA to its German sister organisation BND to crawl through data traffic intercepted at the DeCIX, an internet exchange point in Frankfurt and traffic-wise the largest peering platform worldwide.
The list of so-called "selectors" - telephone numbers, email and IP addresses - was handed to Germany‘s foreign intelligence agency BND by the National Security Agency (NSA) with the aim of spying on German and European targets.
A federal judge has ordered the CIA and the National Security Agency to disclose to him whether they were involved in spying on Occupy Philadelphia protesters during their monthlong demonstration at what is now Dilworth Park five years ago.
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a lawyer for the demonstrators, U.S. District Judge Berle M. Schiller gave the agencies until early next year to submit a list of any records detailing the agencies' potential surveillance activities, along with a justification of why those documents should be withheld from public disclosure.
Schiller said he would rely upon that list to determine whether to release such documents or whether he would need to examine such records in person before making his decision.
On January 20, Donald Trump will gain control over the most powerful surveillance system in history. Worried? Here are some steps you can take to protect yourself.
The U.S. government has a long history of targeting activists. Agents spied on Martin Luther King Jr., bugging his hotel rooms in an attempt to find out personal information which could be used to discredit him. More recently, the FBI spied on Black Lives Matter activists.
U.S. intelligence agencies have unprecedented power to gather information on millions of American citizens. This information includes our communications, banking info, and web browsing data. We know that the National Security Agency (NSA) collects data on who you talk to, when, and where you call from.
The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations’ worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to Donald Trump.
It’s still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it’s not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government gives the president almost unlimited discretion in matters of national security, with few limitations or mechanisms for oversight. That includes NSA surveillance, as well as the expanding powers of the drone program. And from what Trump has said on the campaign trail, his targets for using those powers may cut against some of America’s most important civil rights.
What’s that song? On your cellphone, the popular app Shazam is able to answer that question by listening for just a few seconds, as if it were magic. On Apple’s computers, Shazam never turns the microphone off, even if you tell it to.
When a user of Shazam’s Mac app turns the app “OFF,” the app actually keeps the microphone on in the background. For the security researcher who discovered that the mic is always on, it's a bug that users should know about. For Shazam, it’s just a feature that makes the app work better.
The next time someone asks you for your cellphone number, you may want to think twice about giving it.
The cellphone number is more than just a bunch of digits. It is increasingly used as a link to private information maintained by all sorts of companies, including money lenders and social networks. It can be used to monitor and predict what you buy, look for online or even watch on television.
It has become “kind of a key into the room of your life and information about you,” said Edward M. Stroz, a former high-tech crime agent for the F.B.I. who is co-president of Stroz Friedberg, a private investigator.
Yet the cellphone number is not a legally regulated piece of information like a Social Security number, which companies are required to keep private. And we are told to hide and protect our Social Security numbers while most of us don’t hesitate when asked to write a cellphone number on a form or share it with someone we barely know.
Saudi education ministry has warned international schools from marking non-Islamic occasions, such as Christmas and New Year, the media reported on Monday.
The ban includes forbidding those schools from providing holidays on such occasions or changing the dates of exams to suit them, Xinhua news agency reported.
This is a time where “solidarity” is no longer an act of defending revolutionaries but fascists; where there is always support for Islamist projects like Sharia courts, the burqa, gender segregation, apostasy and blasphemy laws – whether de jure or de facto – but never for those who refuse to be silenced, erased and “disappeared”.
It’s a time when “progressive” all too often means protecting regressive identity politics, which homogenises entire communities and societies, and deems theocrats as the sole legitimate arbiters and gatekeepers of “community” values.
It’s a politics of betrayal – devoid of class struggle and political ideals – which sees any dissent through Islamist eyes and immediately labels it “Islamophobic” and blasphemous.
We are called “aggressive apostates”, “fundamentalist secularists”, “native informants”, “inflammatory”. We are accused of violating the “safe spaces” of Islamists on universities and even “inciting hatred”.
Pastor Mike Agbahime, husband of Bridget Agbahime who was killed by an irate mob in Kano for alleged blasphemy has finally spoken up on the events that lead to his wife’s death.
Agbahime in an interview with The Punch blamed Kano Governor Umar Ganduje for paving the way for the release of the arrested suspects.
Muslim clerics in Mauritania on Sunday urged the authorities to execute a blogger who was sentenced to death in 2014 for apostasy after writing a blog post on Islam and racial discrimination.
Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir's article touched a nerve in Mauritania, a West African country with deep social and racial divisions. He was tried for apostasy and received the death penalty despite having repented and saying his article was misunderstood.
According to the U.S.-based Freedom Now rights group who provide Mkhaitir with legal counsel, the blog post appears to have been the first he published. Prior to his arrest he worked as an engineer for a mining company and was not an activist, Freedom Now said on its website.
Police have raided a baby factory and arrested at least six pregnant women who are allegedly planning to sell their newborn babies after delivery in Delta State. The police said the arrest was made in Okwe community, Oshimili South Local Government Area of the state in Nigeria’s South-South region. They revealed that a victim, Blessing Aondoseer, had reported that her husband allegedly connived with some people to take away her two weeks old baby.
INDEPENDENT WATCHDOG Freedom House has issued its 2016 report along with a chilling warning that internet privacy is becoming something of an oxymoron.
Freedom House is based in Washington and deals with how countries handle and provide the internet and technology to citizens. We imagine that it is currently hiring. The Freedom On The Net report said that freedom has declined for the sixth year in a row.
The stunning upset election of Donald Trump has left many Americans wondering what has become of their country, their party, their government, even their sense of the world. Purple prose has been unleashed on the problem; comparisons to fascism and totalitarianism abound. Commentators claim that Trump’s election reflects a racist, sexist, xenophobic America. But we should resist the temptation to draw broad-brush generalizations about American character from last Tuesday’s outcome. The result was far more equivocal than that; a majority of the voters rejected Trump, after all. There is no question that President Trump will be a disaster—if we let him. But the more important point is that—as the fate of American democracy in the years after 9/11 has taught us—we can and must stop him.
The risks are almost certainly greater than those posed by any prior American president. Trump, who has no government experience, a notoriously unreliable temperament, and a record of demagoguery and lies, will come to office with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and, once he fills the late Antonin Scalia’s seat, on the Supreme Court as well. His shortlist of Cabinet appointees offers little hope that voices of moderation will be heard. Who, then, is going to stop him? Will he be able to put in place all the worst ideas he tossed out so cavalierly on the campaign trail? Building a wall; banning and deporting Muslims; ending Obamacare; reneging on climate change treaty responsibilities; expanding libel law; criminalizing abortion; jailing his political opponents; supporting aggressive stop-and-frisk policing; reviving mass surveillance and torture?
Whether Trump will actually try to implement these promises, and more importantly, whether he will succeed if he does try, lies as much in our hands as in his. If Americans let him, Trump may well do all that he promised—and more. Imagine, for example, what a Trump administration might do if there is another serious terrorist attack on US soil. What little he has said about national security suggests that he will make us nostalgic for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
When Barack Obama leaves the White House, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will almost certainly be elected Senate minority leader — and therefore become the highest ranking Democratic official in America.
The Louisiana legislature decided to help out its most underprivileged constituents -- law enforcement officers -- by making it a felony to "attack" them using nothing more than words.
When New Orleans police officers arrived at the scene of a disturbance to arrest an intoxicated man for banging on a hotel's windows and harassing the employees, the situation devolved into the totally expected.
In 2015, the authorities in California documented 837 hate-crime incidents, charting a surge in offenses motivated by religious intolerance toward Muslims and Jews, while crimes against Latinos grew by 35 percent.
Last week, shortly after Donald J. Trump was elected the country’s next president, the Southern Poverty Law Center put up a form on its website encouraging people to share details about potential hate crimes. By the next day, they’d received about 250 reports – more than they’re used to seeing in six months.
Then on Monday, the FBI released its latest national tabulation of hate crimes, data that showed an overall uptick of 6.8 percent from 2014 to 2015. The accounting, drawn from information passed on to the bureau by state and local law enforcement agencies, charted a 67-percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes.
In the horrific footage from Vienna, Austria, the youngster is seen being violently attacked by a group of girls and a boy in what is believed to be a “Sharia patrol”.
In this clip, she keeps her hands in her pocket and takes the savage beating, despite breaking her jaw in two places and blood dripping from her face.
The group is reported to have said in the video: “She has pulled the headscarf down, demolish her!”
Love's family plan to appeal against the decision. The 31-year-old—who has Asperger's syndrome—faces up to 99 years in prison and fears for his own life, his lawyers have said.
A home office spokesperson told Ars: "On Monday 14 November, the secretary of state, having carefully considered all relevant matters, signed an order for Lauri Love’s extradition to the United States. Mr Love has been charged with various computer hacking offences which included targeting US military and federal government agencies."
Rudd considered four so-called legal tests of the Extradition Act 2003: whether Love is at risk of the death penalty; whether specialty arrangements are in place; whether Love has previously been extradited from another country to the UK, thereby requiring consent from that country; and whether Love was previously transferred to the UK by the International Criminal Court.
However, the home secretary concluded that none of these issues applied to Love.
Brazil has been plunged into a fresh bout of political uncertainty after lawyers for former president Dilma Rousseff presented evidence suggesting her successor, Michel Temer, accepted bribes from a construction company.
If accepted the documents filed with the supreme electoral court raise the possibility of the 2014 presidential election being declared invalid due to campaign funding violations, which could force Temer from office.
The two politicians were running mates in 2014 but have since become bitter enemies. Rousseff, of the Workers party, was impeached and removed from the presidency in September on charges of window-dressing government accounts. She has levelled accusations of treachery at her replacement, Temer, of the centre-right Brazilian Democratic Movement party.
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, 'We saw a spike in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide beginning toward the end of 2015. That spike has continued until today and even accelerated after the election of President-elect Trump'
Even outside of fear of drawing an Islamist attack, avoiding conflict with Muslim employees affects both the company’s ‘inclusive’ image, and its liability to lawsuits by activist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). When special interest activist groups put pressure on businesses to give into their demands businesses often (depending on the issue/s) concede rather than face bad publicity. Businesses placating to Muslim demands is one of the objectives of the Hamas-affiliated CAIR. Masquerading as a civil liberties organization for Muslims, CAIR, as mentioned in the video, pressures businesses into accommodating the most trivial of Muslim practices advocated for in sharia law.
Decentralized and distributed networks are, quite simply, fundamental; everyone is affected in many ways by the degree of distributionââ¬Å —ââ¬Å not least one’s personal agency, the development of our societal structures, and our impact on this planet’s living systems.
As we instrument the planet, as we build out a pervasive computing environment, as increasingly little ‘undigital’ remains, ensuring the decentralized and distributed nature of that digital infrastructure is nothing short of mission critical. We must resist the easy short-term temptations of centralization to avoid its longer-term miseries.
The intergovernmental South Centre and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation have signed a five-year agreement to help the global south fight malnutrition, reduce poverty, and address climate change consequences. The memorandum of understanding was signed on the margins of the recent climate change discussion held in Marrakesh.
Global Consultation on Farmers’ Rights took place in Bali, Indonesia from 27-30 September and was co-organised by the governments of Indonesia and Norway. The secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) engaged in the preparatory process, according to the treaty’s website.
The consultation was attended by 95 participants from 37 countries, from all the seven regions of the FAO, according to a source. Participants came from governments, academia, international organisations (such as the ITPGRFA, the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants [UPOV], and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity), non-governmental organisations (such as Oxfam, the Development Fund, and SEARICE), and farmers and farmers’ organisation (such as la Via Campesina), the source said.
Long-time readers may remember our coverage of a slow-moving copyright case over public domain images from The Wizard of Oz and other movies. In brief: back in 2006, Warner Bros. sued vintage/nostalgia merchandise company AVELA, which had obtained restored images from old promotional posters for the films and was selling them for T-shirts and other products. Nobody disputed that these specific images were in the public domain, because the promo materials had not been registered for copyright even though the films were -- but Warner claimed that the images nevertheless infringed on the copyright in the characters established by the film. The court originally sided with Warner in full, but on appeal found that the exact two-dimensional reproductions of the images on T-shirts and the like were not infringing, but instances where they were combined with text and other images or used to create three-dimensional models were, and awarded some pretty huge damages. To complicate matters, there's also a trademark claim wrapped up in all this. There was another appeal, and now a court has upheld the ruling and the damages, giving movie studios another weapon in their war on the public domain (here's a PDF of the full ruling).
Now, there are a lot of layers here, and I'm going to focus on The Wizard Of Oz, since it provides the most interesting example. The 1900 book is in the public domain. The 1939 movie is still under copyright held by Warner. The associated 1939 promo materials were not registered (a requirement at the time) and are in the public domain. And many characters and other elements of the movie are also covered by trademark, also owned by Warner. Absolutely none of these facts are in dispute -- but put them all together and you have a giant mess that illustrates the flimsiness of the idea/expression dichotomy, and how something can supposedly remain in the public domain while being gutted of all its usefulness to the public.
A YouTube parody which hoped to provide a satirical take on Donald Trump's presidential campaign has ended in a lawsuit. Hugh Atkin portrayed elements of Trump's efforts in the style of and alongside images from A Clockwork Orange. Now the Australian is getting sued in the United States for copyright infringement.
The U.S. Government's Copyright Office has launched a new consultation seeking guidance on the future of the DMCA's takedown process and safe harbor. Through a set of concrete questions, they hope to find a balance between the interests of copyright holders, Internet services and the public at large.