I switched to Linux a few years ago. Four, I think. It wasn't my first time— I remember driving with my friend Phil to pick up a Slackware Linux CD in 1997, being very excited about how different it was, and then switching back to Windows a couple weeks later when I wanted my computer to be usable again.
Looking to get a jump on the forthcoming deluge of CES news, Acer has released a new all-in-one PC family that adds a couple of interesting wrinkles to the popular desktop category.
How we use computing infrastructure has changed drastically over the past two decades, moving from buying physical servers to having tools and technologies that make it easy for companies and individual developers to deploy software in the cloud. In his LinuxCon Europe keynote, Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), provided us with a brief history of the cloud and how CNCF fits with where we are now.
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This brings us up to the present with the 2015 formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kohn says that “cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to segment applications into microservices, packaging each part into its own container and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization.” The value propositions from cloud native computing include isolation, no lock-in, unlimited scalability, agility and maintainability, improved efficiency and resource utilization, and resiliency.
Thanks to the efforts of The Linux Foundation, the level of interoperability between software-defined storage (SDS) systems should increase substantially in 2017. An OpenSDS project being led by The Linux Foundation now has the support of Dell EMC, which has contributed a software development kit (SDK) that promises to make it simpler to plug any type of storage device into an SDS system.
First, in the Linux 2.4 / 2.5 era. Wikipedia describes the situation like this:Before the 2.6 series, there was a stable branch (2.4) where only relatively minor and safe changes were merged, and an unstable branch (2.5), where bigger changes and cleanups were allowed. Both of these branches had been maintained by the same set of people, led by Torvalds. This meant that users would always have a well-tested 2.4 version with the latest security and bug fixes to use, though they would have to wait for the features which went into the 2.5 branch. The downside of this was that the “stable” kernel ended up so far behind that it no longer supported recent hardware and lacked needed features. In the late 2.5 kernel series, some maintainers elected to try backporting of their changes to the stable kernel series, which resulted in bugs being introduced into the 2.4 kernel series. The 2.5 branch was then eventually declared stable and renamed to 2.6. But instead of opening an unstable 2.7 branch, the kernel developers decided to continue putting major changes into the 2.6 branch, which would then be released at a pace faster than 2.4.x but slower than 2.5.x. This had the desirable effect of making new features more quickly available and getting more testing of the new code, which was added in smaller batches and easier to test.
While Linux 4.10-rc1 was only released yesterday and there will be about two months before it rolls around to the Linux 4.11 merge window, Intel OTC already has new code ready for testing.
Intel i915 DRM maintainer Daniel Vetter published the latest changes for their -testing branch of material that will in turn target Linux 4.11. Changes up for testing include some DisplayPort link rate fixes, prep work for atomic watermark updates on Valleyview and Cherryview, a clean-up to the platform enumeration code, Gen9 (Skylake) watermark fixes, prep work for DisplayPort link failure fallback handling, GEM_WARN_ON support, overlay fixes, and other code changes.
Hitting the end of the year as well as yesterday's Linux 4.10-rc1 kernel marking the end of the merge window, here is a look at some kernel development statistics.
What you will not find as part of the list of new Linux 4.10 kernel features is BUS1, the successor to the un-merged KDBUS initiative and a new approach for in-kernel IPC. While it didn't land in 2016 to the mainline kernel, it's making progress.
Since writing a few weeks ago about the slow pace recently for BUS1, I heard more information from one of the developers and there has also been some new activity in their Git tree.
Linux creator Linus Benedict Torvalds released the 4.9 version of Linux Kernel. It is expected as the biggest released ever by Linux in the numbers of commits. Due to some important matter, Torvalds tackled the numerous lines of kernel code.
The new Linux Kernel 4.9 features Intel DRM fixes, Better Raspberry Pi Zero support, and other 28 ARM devices. It also includes Better security, memory protection, and file system improvements. The Ubuntu and Linux users can also enjoy the feature of the new released Linux by downloading and installing it to the system.
Almost any longtime Linux user or Phoronix reader will surely agree with me that Mesa absolutely rocked this year for the open-source graphics stack.
This year Mesa finally hit OpenGL 4.5 compliance (along with OpenGL 4.3/4.4 before that), received its first Vulkan drivers via Intel ANV and the unofficial Radeon RADV code, saw many significant performance improvements throughout core Mesa and the hardware drivers, seen improvements to NIR and other core areas of Mesa, saw AMD Polaris support in RadeonSI at launch, the OpenSWR software rasterizer was merged, various improvements to the Gallium3D state trackers like for video acceleration and D3D9, and so much more.
With this weekend's release of the Darktable 2.2 RAW digital photography workflow software being out and it having OpenCL improvements among other advancements, I've been carrying out some fresh benchmarks for this popular open-source, cross-platform program.
We’re often asked what our essential Ubuntu apps are, but rather than reply in the comments I figured I’d write a list of what are, for us, must-have apps for Ubuntu.
Whether you’re new to Ubuntu or a recent convert from Microsoft Windows, you should find some software to suit you in the list below. Naturally, not all of the apps featured below will be of use to everyone so do Use the comments below to share your best Linux apps.
This list could be doubt he length and still barely scratch the breadth of variety and divergence that exists within the Linux app ecosystem.
Piwik 3.0.0 brings many improvements to Piwik, including a full redesign of the application, security improvements and several major improvements in the core analytics platform and core plugins APIs.
Here's another Christmas present for all fans of the Open Source ecosystem, as Calibre developer Kovid Goyal announced the availability of Calibre 2.75.1 maintenance update on Christmas Day.
The fact of the matter is that Calibre 2.75.0 arrived two days before Christmas Day, but the small 2.75.1 bugfix release landed a couple of days later, on December 25, 2016, to address a regression in version 2.75.0 that broke the Live CSS feature in the editor, which might have also caused various other minor issues in the viewer.
Just in time for Christmas, a new version of the popular, open-source and cross-platform MPV video player has been released, build 0.23.0, for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
MPV is an MPlayer-based multimedia player that looks to gain a lot of ground lately and become the go-to video player for many computer users, no matter the operating system used. MPV 0.23.0 is the latest version of the application, arriving five weeks after the release of the 0.22.0 update.
OBS Studio 17.0.0 [github, Official Site] has been released and it's a pretty fun one. It now has a feature that allows you to capture a snapshot of a specific time before hitting a hotkey.
An new release of Linux radio app Gradio is now available to download, and from reading its change-log it sounds like an update that’s worth tuning in for. If you haven’t heard about the app before, you’re in for a treat. Gradio lets you find and play public radio stations on Ubuntu.
We decided not to call this the top 10 best Linux games of 2016, because that would suggest we can have an informed opinion about every little game that was released in the past 11~12 months – and that would be just wrong, as our time is limited and there is no way we could have enough time to play most titles out there for Linux.
So we will focus on what we thought was great based on what we had time to play. There won’t be any particular order (who cares), so don’t assume the first one or the last one is our top 1 pick or something. Alright, let’s go through our picks then.
OpenMW 0.41 was released today as the newest version of this open-source game project working to re-implement the game engine found within Elderscrolls III: Morrowind.
OpenMW 0.41 implements more capabilities such as particle textures for spell effects, AI combat improvements, support for water rendering in OpenMW-CS, and much more. OpenMW 0.41 also has dozens of bug-fixes.
The speed with which the prevailing opinion of Denuvo, the DRM unicorn de jour, has changed has been nearly enough to make one's head spin. It was only at the start of 2016 that the software was being rolled out en masse by many game publishers, leading some normally bombastic cracking groups to predict that the video game industry had finally found its final solution to piracy. That lasted until roughly the middle months of the year, when several games using the DRM were cracked. While Denuvo's makers remained fairly silent, the opinion of it shifted from "final solution" to "hey, it's still the hardest DRM to crack." Cracking groups that typically measure their work in weeks were finding cracking Denuvo to be a project measured in months. That likely explained why so many big-ticket games still used it. Until, somewhat suddenly, multiple big-name games began dropping Denuvo from their code via patches and updates. The latest example of this was Doom silently nixing Denuvo, with id Software not even referencing the move in its patch notes.
And so the speculation began as to what was going on. Some said the game makers were finally realizing that DRM is pretty much useless at everything other than being a minor inconvenience for cracking groups and a major inconvenience for many legitimate customers. Others suggested that perhaps Denuvo offered some kind of money-back deal if a game using it was cracked within a certain time-frame. Still others claimed that publishers were only using the DRM during the initial release window of the game to protect it during the most crucial sales period, and then dropping it afterwards.
Most of you will probably agree that 2016 was the best year yet for Linux gaming with having a ton of new game releases, several of which were AAA game titles, the premiere of Vulkan is an important step for the future, Valve working on Linux VR efforts, and the Linux graphics drivers getting into better shape for handling the next era of Linux games.
While 2016 was great, some of you may have been let down by still the relatively minor amount of AAA games making their way to Linux especially on a quick turnaround time to the Windows game releases. There are also some that may have felt letdown by the relatively minor movements around Steam Machines and SteamOS this calendar year, the Steam Linux gaming percentage being around 1% or less, Linux VR support not yet up to scratch, some Linux game ports still performing significantly lower than their Windows ports, etc.
The upcoming space sim Star Citizen is a game for Windows and Linux. However, Cloud Imperial Games, the developers are switching the game to a new engine after four years of development.
The spiritual successor of Wing Commander Series, the Star Citizen is reportedly switching from the CryEngine of Crytek into Lumberyard by Amazon. The game's single player mode, Squadron 42 is also switching to a new game engine.
The developers of Lifeless Planet [Steam, Official Site] have continued to improve their Linux beta, as it's now running on Unity 5 and has the improved graphics from the PS4 version.
It is one of the cards you can get too -- if you help out KDE by the end of the year.
Here is a video demonstrating some of these new LVM capabilities. Note this is done directly from my main system, I’m resizing my encrypted rootfs without using any Live CD.
Let’s start with important things. Last Sunday the Milan local group had a special dinner to celebrate the incoming Christmas holidays. For sure we have to thank Spinnski: food was great! During the dinner we had Secret Santa: you receive a gift, given by whom? According to fate. It was funny, and we had lot of laughs for some funny gifts.
both icon set’s are available with system settings -> Icons -> Get new Theme. The icon sets are well maintained and the designers are very welcome in help and KDE support. Thanks a lot. Don’t forget to vote in the store.
As 2016 draws to a close, it is time for Linux enthusiasts to take a look at the most popular distributions of the year.
In this article we will review the 10 Linux distributions with most hits during the last 12 months as per Distrowatch, and discuss the reasons behind their popularity.
A note for new users: Distrowatch.com has been a reliable source of information about Linux distributions since 2001. As the use of Linux eventually took off during the early 2000’s, more and more distributions along with other Free and Open Source Software programs have been added to their listings.
That said, here’s the list of the top 10 distributions of 2016, in descending order, as of December 25, 2015.
A new stable release of the Debian-based Parrot Security ethical hacking and penetration testing operating system has been released on Christmas Day, versioned 3.3.
Powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.8 series, Parrot Security OS 3.3 is here a little over two months since the release of Parrot Security 3.2, but it doesn't look like it's a major update and all that, as it only updates a few core components and hacking tools, and addresses a few of the bugs reported by users since version 3.2.
The GNU Guix project builds a transactional package manager system and it is the base feature around which Guix SD(system distribution) is built.
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The 3.01 release brings a number of major fixes since 3.0 release:
updated software new drivers and kernel – better support for newer hardware many bugs fixed stable Plasma running on Wayland
Just before Christmas the OpenMandriva team announced an update to Lx 3.0 complete with Plasma 5.8.4 and Linux 4.9.0. Elsewhere, Christine Hall posted her review/non-review of Mint 18 and Gabriel Cánepa summarizes the top distros of the year. LinuxBSDos.com previewed Fedora 26 LXQt while Phoronix.com looked back at Fedora in 2016.
Not long after Lx 3.0 final release we are proud to announce OpenMandriva Lx 3.01.
Chakra GNU/Linux developer Neofytos Kolokotronis informed users of the Linux-based operating system originally based on Arch Linux about the latest software updates that landed in the stable repositories and are available for installation.
If you've been waiting for a new, big update of your Chakra GNU/Linux distribution, here it is. It includes many of the latest applications and technologies, including Linux kernels 4.8.6 and 3.16.38 LTS, the LibreOffice 5.2.4 office suite, GRUB 2.02 Beta 3 bootloader, as well as KDE Frameworks 5.29.0 and linux-firmware 20161005.9c71af9.
The computers worked frantically while I relaxed with my family. Slackware 14.2 and -current packages are ready for LibreOffice 5.2.4. Enjoy the newest version of this highly popular office suite.
If you’re running any desktop flavor of Fedora 25, congratulations! You’re using one of the better-designed desktop Linux distributions.
However, “better-designed” does not necessarily mean that everything is in place, for in the case of Fedora 25, it certainly is not. Most important components you expect to see on a modern desktop operating system, like a firewall application, are in place. But a few are not.
Take, for example, that firewall I referenced above. It’s called FirewallD on Fedora, and the system gives you three means by which to interact with it: From the command line, from a graphical interface called firewall-config, and from an applet, aptly called firewall-applet The first two come pre-installed, but not the third.
LXQt is a one of many desktop environments available on the latest edition of Fedora 25. However, unlike the GNOME 3, KDE, Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce desktop environments, Fedora LXQt does not have it’s own installation image. In other words, it’s not a Fedora Spin.
To install a Fedora 25 desktop running the LXQt desktop, you’ll need to install the system using a netinstall or DVD image and select the LXQT desktop package group and related packages from the package selection step.
Because of an ongoing effort to produce a Fedora LXQt Spin, that process is set to change when Fedora 26 comes along next year.
In the big software era, understanding the economics of OpenStack is essential. That's a big message coming from the folks at Canonical, which is increasingly focused on OpenStack and cloud computing.
No category of wearable tech has had a more turbulent year than the smartwatch. There have been ups. There have been downs. Then Fitbit bought Pebble and everyone lost their minds.
2016 proved that smartwatches are struggling to find their place in the wearable world, but that's doesn't mean it's over, and 2017 could be a fascinating time for these devices as lessons from this year are taken away and applied to next year's wearables.
With so much having gone on in 2016, we've broken down the year into the big smartwatch events that made headlines and got us talking.
Open source AsteroidOS is aiming to be a direct competitor for Android Wear that might just be a reasonable and viable alternative to the defunct Pebble smartwatch.
Pebble's demise brought about by Fitbit's piecemeal acquisition therefore effectively snuffing it made the smartwatch market to become smaller. Although it is without question that even before the acquisition, the Android Wear scene was already declining with earlier models no longer receiving Android Wear updates.
Samsung have announced an addition to its Smart Home portfolio, a new Wind-Free air conditioner, to be launched at CES 2017, Las Vegas. The AR9500M air conditioner has Samsung’s Wind-Freeâ⢠Cooling technology – resulting in cooler indoors whilst being more energy efficient.
The AR9500M is a wall mounted unit that is able to disperse cold air through 21,000 micro air holes using two modes – “Fast Cooling Mode” and then switching to “Wind-Freeâ⢠Cooling Mode”, which is up to 72 percent more efficient than Fast Colling mode.
ASUS has announced the launched of its latest affordable 4G smartphone, the Zenfone GO 4.5 LTE.
The device sports a premium metallic IMR hairline finish with diamond-cutting technology, and measures just 3.6 mm at its thinnest edge. The ergonomic arc design boasts of a physical rear-facing volume key allowing users to adjust the volume or click multiple selfies with easily.
Now, press renders of one of the devices — the Galaxy A5 — along with the specs have leaked. Based on the renders, it looks like the smartphone will be available in four different colors. In addition to the Black and Gold color option, you’ll also be able to get the Galaxy A5 in Blue or Pink.
Cyanogen has switched gears, leaving the Android variant CyanogenMod in the lurch, CyanogenMod's developers aren't giving up. They're forking the code into LineageOS.
Softpedia was informed today, December 26, 2016, by Marius Quabeck, the creator of the magic-device-tool software that lets users install or replace their mobile operating systems on Android and Ubuntu Phone devices about the fact that the tool is now available as a Snap.
That's right, you can now install the Magic-Device-Tool via a Snap package on your Ubuntu Linux operating system or a supported OS by Canonical's latest Snappy technologies. This comes as great news as you won't have to clone the GitHub repo of the software to install it on your GNU/Linux distribution.
"You'll have to install it as "sudo snap install magic-device-tool --devmode" because there is no USB interface for snap yet so it can't run confined," said Marius Quabeck exclusively for Softpedia. "The script version will still be supported, but we recommend user to use the Snap, where the focus will be from now on."
The first few years of open source work on software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) were defined by some nebulous goals. But this year, three clear trends emerged from the haze.
First, the Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD) became really popular. It garnered so much attention in 2016 that its originator — On.Lab‘s Open Network Operating System (ONOS) — established CORD as a separate open source entity.
The convergence between the internet and telecommunications worlds is bringing to the forefront different approaches to deploying services. In the internet world, large cloud players built their data centers using white box hardware and open source software to ease and improve service delivery. In the process, they achieved unparalleled scale and cost efficiency. On the other hand, telecom service providers have relied on specialized vendors, whose solutions were based on proprietary, in-house implementations of standards-based technologies. This lengthens the service creation cycle and reduces the ability of service providers to compete effectively especially with over-the-top players.
Tahoe-LAFS is a free and open source decentralized data storage system, with provider-independent security and fine-grained access control. This means that data stored using Tahoe-LAFS remains confidential and retrievable even if some storage servers fail or are taken over by an attacker.
Using a Tahoe-LAFS client, you turn a large file into a redundant collection of shares referenced via a filecap. Shares are encrypted chunks of data distributed across many storage servers. A filecap is a short cryptographic string containing enough information to retrieve, re-assemble and decrypt the shares. Filecaps come in up to three variants: a read-cap, a verify-cap and (for mutable files) a write-cap.
Starting with version 1.12.0, Tahoe-LAFS has added Tor support to give users the option of connecting anonymously and to give node operators the option of offering anonymous services.
Chrome Remote Desktop has been around since the early days of Chrome. Even before Chrome OS existed, Chrome Remote Desktop was a shining example of how powerful the Chrome apps could be.
If you’re anything like me, you spend basically all of your time on “holiday” not with family enjoying a nice cup of cocoa, but rather fixing and setting up all their devices. This can be annoying itself, but when you go back home, it can be even more of a pain helping out remotely without being able to see what they see. One app from Google that can help in this situation — it’s been available for Chrome and Chrome OS for a while now — is Chrome Remote Desktop.
World-renown programmer and ex-Mozilla developer Risitas, the CIO of the highly prestigious Spanish alt-browser company Las Paelleras S.A., talks about Firefox in an exclusive interview.
Linux and open source software are not just fueling charities, they are gifting the freedom of education and knowledge to the people the charities are helping because of the low cost, yes, but also the exceptional technology. This sentiment is proven when you look at the work the Linux Foundation does supporting a variety of community initiatives and organizations that are using Linux and open source software.
Expose those who abuse the open source label and community: Each year we discover more and more disingenuous organizations that promise open source software, yet do not release their work under an OSI approved open source license, risking our software freedom, or, promise the ideals of open source software but in fact only use the label to promote their proprietary interests. We want to raise $2,500 to develop a system to verify claims of open source licensing made through crowd-funding efforts.
The long in-development "NewGVN" code to provide a new global value numbering (GVN) algorithm within the LLVM code-base has been merged to master.
Among the ways in which the Electronic Frontier Alliance supports the digital rights movement is amplifying creative grassroots tactics that concerned individuals around the country are using to promote digital civil liberties. By finding ways to demonstrate these principles within their community, even small groups can help shift cultural norms, as well as public policy.
The Free Culture Club, a student organization at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, is supporting creativity and access to knowledge by providing a repository of openly licensed intellectual works in a common campus space.
For too long, much of our science has been kept behind doors that are both closed and locked. It’s past time to bring openness to science, in much the same way we’re bringing openness to software.
Meson also has/had a lot of quirks (examples #785, #786, #753) and wasn’t really easier to use than our GNU Make setup. At least for me – given that I know GNU Make very well. The number one advantage of Meson was overcome with migrating Rapicorn to use a non-recursive Makefile (I find dependencies can still be expressed much better in Make than Meson), since parallel GNU Make can be just as fast as Ninja for small to medium sized projects.
A Muslim-owned restaurant in London is offering a three-course meal to homeless and elderly people on Christmas Day so that “no one eats alone”.
Shish Restaurant, in Sidcup, is asking local residents to spread the word of its offer and has put up posters saying “We are here to sit with you” on 25 December.
The restaurant urged people to share its plan through social media - where the initiative was widely praised.
George Michael was secretly trying to heal the pain around the world.
The superstar singer — who died on Sunday at 53 — never boasted about his charitable side, but now countless people are coming forward to share stories of Michael's giving ways.
"A woman on 'Deal Or No Deal' told us she needed €£15k for IVF treatment. George Michael secretly phoned the next day and gave her the €£15k," game show host Richard Osmond tweeted on Monday.
The term Brutalism, or New Brutalism, was coined to describe an emerging international style of architecture in the early 1950s. The name referenced Le Corbusier’s use of “béton brut,” or unfinished concrete, and described large, usually government or institutional buildings characterized by the rejection of Beaux-Arts styles. A relatively cheap way to build, Brutalism grew popular in post-war Europe and emerging countries like India and the eastern bloc. But architects were looking for more than cost cutting: for many, Brutalism represented a rejection of bourgeois comforts and pretense. The movement emphasized the valuation of existing materials (no paint, no dressings), the importance of image (an imposing presence) and the “clear exhibition of structure” to lay bare a building’s function.
Russian investigators are looking into a disturbing video of a bear being crushed to death by a group of men riding in off-road vehicles over Siberian tundra.
In the video, apparently shot by one of the assailants, two trucks normally used by Russian oil and mining workers in off-road conditions repeatedly drive over a brown bear sitting in the snow.
Investigators in Russia’s Yakutia region, which spans the Siberian Arctic, said they were examining the incident to determine whether it constitutes an animal cruelty criminal offence.
In the clip, which went viral on Tuesday and was picked up by state media, one of the men in the truck shouts “Squash him! Squash him!” and squeals as the vehicle runs over the bear.
Researchers with the Navajo Birth Cohort Study aren’t looking for simple answers about how uranium exposure affects health. We already know—and have known for decades—that contact with uranium can cause kidney disease and lung cancer.
This study is the first to look at what chronic, long-term exposure from all possible sources of uranium contamination—air, water, plants, wildlife, livestock and land—does down through the generations in a Native American community.
Since the study began in 2012, over 750 families have enrolled and 600 babies have been born to those families, said Dr. Johnnye Lewis, director of the Community Environmental Health Program & Center for Native Environmental Health Equity Research at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center and NBCS principal investigator.
SQL is insecure, tell everyone. If you use SQL, your website will get hacked. Tell everyone.
I saw the news that the US Elections Agency was hacked by a SQL injection attack and I kind of lost it. It’s been well over two decades since prepared statements were introduced. We’ve educated and advised developers about how to avoid SQL injection, yet it still happens. If education failed, all we can do is shame developers into never using SQL.
I actually really like SQL, I’ve even made a SQL dialect. SQL’s relational algebra is expressive, probably more so than any other NoSQL database I know of. But developers have proven far too often that it’s simply too difficult to know when to use prepared statements or just concatenate strings — it’s time we just abandon SQL altogether. It isn’t worth it. It’s time we called for all government’s to ban use of SQL databases in government contracts and in healthcare. There must be utter clarity.
Once again Conficker retained its position as the world’s most prevalent malware, responsible for 15% of recognised attacks. Second-placed Locky, which only started its distribution in February of this year, was responsible for 6% of all attacks, and third-placed Sality was responsible for 5% of known attacks. Overall, the top ten malware families were responsible for 45% of all known attacks.
It’s easier than many people realize to modify someone else’s flight booking, or cancel their flight altogether, because airlines rely on old, unsecured systems for processing customers’ travel plans, researchers will explain at the Chaos Communication Congress hacking festival on Tuesday. The issues predominantly center around the lack of any meaningful authentication for customers requesting their flight information.
The issues highlight how a decades-old system is still in constant, heavy use, despite being susceptible to fairly simple attacks and with no clear means for a solution.
“Whenever you take a trip, you are in one or more of these systems,” security researcher Karsten Nohl told Motherboard in a phone call ahead of his and co-researcher Nemanja Nikodijevic’s talk.
An impressive and user-friendly digital presence is an indispensable asset to any brand. It is often the first point of contact for customers who expect and demand great functionality and engaging content across multiple platforms. The finding that nearly half of us won't wait even three seconds for a website to load bears witness to ever increasing customer expectations which must be met.
Partnership with a digital agency can be a great way to keep up to speed with rapid change and innovation but to ensure the very best outcome, both client and agency need to find an optimum commercial, creative and secure cultural fit. This should be a priority for both sides from the very first pitch. The promise of exceptional creativity and customer experience is one thing, but considering the more practical aspects of how the relationship will work is entirely another.
An important feature of the way the Mirai botnet scans devices is that the bot uses a login and password dictionary when trying to connect to a device. The author of the original Mirai included a relatively small list of logins and passwords for connecting to different devices. However, we have seen a significant expansion of the login and password list since then, achieved by including default logins and passwords for a variety of IoT devices, which means that multiple modifications of the bot now exist.
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If you ignore trivial combinations like “root:root” or “admin:admin”, you can get a good idea of which equipment the botnet is looking for. For example, the pairs “root:xc3511” and “root:vizxv” are default accounts for IP cameras made by rather large Chinese manufacturers.
7 things all travelers with smartphones and computers should do to be secure while traveling.
When Anis Amri washed up on European shores in a migrant boat in April 2011, he landed on the windswept Italian island of Lampedusa already a fugitive. Sought in his native Tunisia for hijacking a van with a gang of thieves, the frustrated Italians would jail him for arson and violent assault at his migrant reception center for minors on the isle of Sicily.
The first female pilot to serve in Afghanistan's air force has applied for asylum in the United States because she is "scared" for her life.
Captain Niloofar Rahmani, 25, made headlines when she completed her training in 2013, having defied her parents to join the programme in Texas.
She persisted despite receiving death threats during and after she completed her training.
As the first female airplane pilot in Afghanistan, Niloofar Rahmani became a powerful symbol of what women could accomplish in the post-Taliban era. But in the ultraconservative country, the limelight also brought threats, sending her into hiding from insurgents and vengeful relatives.
To his neighbors in a village in western Hungary, 76-year-old Istvan Gyorkos was just an old man who mostly kept to himself. Hardly anyone looked askance at his passion for guns and for training youths in paramilitary tactics.
In late October, however, Mr. Gyorkos, a veteran neo-Nazi and the leader of a tiny fringe outfit called the Hungarian National Front, suddenly took on a more sinister visage when, according to Hungarian police officers who raided his home in search of illegal weapons, he shot and killed a member of the police team with an assault rifle. Members of his family say the dead policeman was shot by a fellow officer.
The saga then took an even stranger turn: Hungarian intelligence officials told a parliamentary committee in Budapest that Mr. Gyorkos had for years been under scrutiny for his role in a network of extremists linked to and encouraged by Russia. So close was the relationship, the committee heard, that Russian military intelligence officers, masquerading as diplomats, staged regular mock combat exercises using plastic guns with neo-Nazi activists near Mr. Gyorkos’s home.
The next day, Vice-President Joe Biden telephoned Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdish region, and urged him to retake the dam as quickly as possible. American officials feared that ISIS might try to blow it up, engulfing Mosul and a string of cities all the way to Baghdad in a colossal wave. Ten days later, after an intense struggle, Kurdish forces pushed out the ISIS fighters and took control of the dam.
But, in the months that followed, American officials inspected the dam and became concerned that it was on the brink of collapse. The problem wasn’t structural: the dam had been built to survive an aerial bombardment. (In fact, during the Gulf War, American jets bombed its generator, but the dam remained intact.) The problem, according to Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi-American civil engineer who has served as an adviser on the dam, is that “it’s just in the wrong place.” Completed in 1984, the dam sits on a foundation of soluble rock. To keep it stable, hundreds of employees have to work around the clock, pumping a cement mixture into the earth below. Without continuous maintenance, the rock beneath would wash away, causing the dam to sink and then break apart. But Iraq’s recent history has not been conducive to that kind of vigilance.
The German political hierarchy and major media remain hostile to any détente with Russia, but the ground may be shifting under the feet of Chancellor Merkel and her allies, reports Gilbert Doctorow.
Stepping off the subway in his army uniform, Victor Yu prepared to face the onslaught ahead. Instead of charging into a crowd armed with rifles, he was met with smartphones, overwhelmed on a street in Hong Kong by pictures and selfies rather than enemy fire.
Yu is a member of Watershed, a local historical group working to raise awareness of what they feel is Hong Kong’s forgotten history. The performance comes at a time when instruction of the city’s history is becoming increasingly politicised, with recent government attempts to bury details that may be embarrassing for China.
Israel has escalated its already furious war with the outgoing US administration, claiming that it has “rather hard” evidence that Barack Obama was behind a critical UN security council resolution criticising Israeli settlement building, and threatening to hand over the material to Donald Trump.
The latest comments come a day after the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, was summoned by Netanyahu to explain why the US did not veto the vote and instead abstained.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has made it known that Donald Trump should not go unchallenged by his congressional colleagues as troubling comments by the President-elect about nuclear weapons this week sparked alarm across the United States and the world.
Following an initial out-of-the-blue tweet Thursday saying the U.S. should "expand" its nuclear arsenal followed by "clarifying" remarks Friday to MSNBC in which Trump said, "Let it be an arms race," Sanders responded: "It's a miracle a nuclear weapon hasn't been used in war since 1945. Congress can't allow the Tweeter in Chief to start a nuclear arms race."
Israel’s foreign ministry said Tuesday the country was “reducing” ties with nations that voted for last week’s UN Security Council resolution demanding a halt to settlement building in Palestinian territory.
Refuting reports that ties had been suspended, foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said in a message to journalists that Israel was “temporarily reducing” visits and work with embassies, without providing further details.
Deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely said Tuesday she was concerned that Israel would miss opportunities to explain its position by cancelling visits, but that she supported making clear “you can’t take Israel for granted.”
The personnel who command, operate, and maintain the Minuteman III have also become grounds for concern. In 2013, the two-star general in charge of the entire Minuteman force was removed from duty after going on a drunken bender during a visit to Russia, behaving inappropriately with young Russian women, asking repeatedly if he could sing with a Beatles cover band at a Mexican restaurant in Moscow, and insulting his military hosts. The following year, almost a hundred Minuteman launch officers were disciplined for cheating on their proficiency exams. In 2015, three launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Montana, were dismissed for using illegal drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamines. That same year, a launch officer at Minot Air Force Base, in North Dakota, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for heading a violent street gang, distributing drugs, sexually assaulting a girl under the age of sixteen, and using psilocybin, a powerful hallucinogen. As the job title implies, launch officers are entrusted with the keys for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles.
If you can keep your gaze off the hilltops, imagine away the pylons and forget the occasional tractor of an uncertain vintage coughing along the narrow roads, little appears to have changed in the valleys of north-eastern Portugal for decades, perhaps even centuries.
The gnarled alvarinho vines have been relieved of their fruit to make vinho verde, an old woman in black herds her sheep through a hamlet and hungry eagles hover over the fields, scanning the land for lunch.
But look up, past the villages, the clumps of stout ponies and the wolf-haunted forests of pine, oak and eucalyptus, and the harbingers of an environmental revolution are silhouetted against the December sky.
The loss of Arctic sea ice has already been shown to be part of a positive feedback loop driving climate change, and a recent study published in the journal Nature puts the spotlight on what appears to be another of these feedback loops.
It has to do with soil, currently one of Earth's carbon sinks. But warming may lead to soils releasing, rather than sequestering, carbon.
As study co-authorJohn Blair, university distinguished professor of biology at Kansas State University, explained, "Globally, soils hold more than twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, so even a relatively small increase in release of carbon from the Earth's soils can have a large impact on atmospheric greenhouse gases and future warming."
For the study, the researchers took data from over four dozen sites across the globe representing a variety of ecosystems and heated them approximately one degree Celsius.
I’d like to reframe what happened in early November as the opposite of tragedy. Instead of looking at the election results through a lens of doom and gloom, let us view this moment in history as a leverage point, one that has the ability to unite people across the country and the world.
A few weeks ago, a federal judge in Oregon made headlines when she ruled that a groundbreaking climate lawsuit will proceed to trial. And some experts say its outcome could rewrite the future of climate policy in the United States.
The case, brought by 21 youths aged 9 to 20, claims that the federal government isn’t doing enough to address the problem of climate change to protect their planet’s future — and that, they charge, is a violation of their constitutional rights on the most basic level. The case has already received widespread attention, even garnering the support of well-known climate scientist James Hansen, who has also joined as a plaintiff on behalf of his granddaughter and as a guardian for “future generations.”
In 2015, Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr., David Hasemyer and Lisa Song of Inside Climate News spent close to a year producing “Exxon: The Road Not Taken” -- a comprehensive portrait of four decades of the oil giant’s relationship with climate science. The reporting showed, among other things, how Exxon lobbied against action on greenhouse gases.
The work won an array of awards and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service, and the hard-won reporting has renewed relevance now that Exxon’s chairman and chief executive officer, Rex Tillerson, has been picked by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the State Department.
The project on Exxon was just the latest triumph for Inside Climate News. The news organization, founded in 2007, has become widely respected for its in-depth journalism. Its team of reporters pursue both news and investigative breakthroughs related to human-driven global warming and efforts to move beyond fossil fuels.
The renewable energy future will arrive when installing new solar panels is cheaper than a comparable investment in coal, natural gas or other options. If you ask the World Economic Forum (WEF), the day has arrived.
Solar and wind is now the same price or cheaper than new fossil fuel capacity in more than 30 countries, the WEF reported in December (pdf). As prices for solar and wind power continue their precipitous fall, two-thirds of all nations will reach the point known as “grid parity” within a few years, even without subsidies. “Renewable energy has reached a tipping point,” Michael Drexler, who leads infrastructure and development investing at the WEF, said in a statement. “It is not only a commercially viable option, but an outright compelling investment opportunity with long-term, stable, inflation-protected returns.”
Finland has followed the European Union’s lead and reformed its laws to grant citizens the universal right to open a bank account and receive online banking access codes, regardless of their place of residence in the union. How the change, which will come into effect on 1 January 2017, will affect foreigners from outside the EU's access to bank services in Finland remains to be seen.
Why did executives from 11 of America’s biggest technology companies obediently show up when they were summoned by the president-elect to meet at Trump Tower?
Some might suspect it has something to do with the $560 billion in profits those companies have stashed overseas — and refuse to bring back until the U.S. government gives them an enormous tax break.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has now confirmed that that was indeed part of his motivation to attend the tech summit with Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, TechCrunch obtained Cook’s response on Apple’s internal network to a question from an employee about the Trump meeting.
Two private firms have earned more than €£500m in taxpayers’ money for carrying out controversial work capability assessments.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) paid Atos and Capita €£507m for the “fit-to-work” tests between 2013 and 2016, despite fierce criticism of their services by MPs.
Figures up until September this year reported by the Daily Mirror suggest that 61% of the 90,000 claimants who appealed against personal independent payment (PIP) decisions surrounding their benefits by the DWP, based on these companies’ assessments, won their case at tribunal. The DWP said it was unsure where this figure came from.
Denial of the broad scientific consensus that human activity is the primary cause of global warming could become a guiding principle of Donald Trump’s presidential administration. Though it’s difficult to pin down exactly what Trump thinks about climate change, he has a well-established track record of skepticism and denial. He has called global warming a “hoax,” insisted while campaigning for the Republican nomination that he’s “not a big believer in man-made climate change,” and recently suggested that “nobody really knows” if climate change exists. Trump also plans to nominate Republicans to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department who have expressed skepticism toward the scientific agreement on human-caused global warming.
The BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg has admitted that she was told that the Queen backed EU but decided not to report.
21st Century Fox – the Murdoch family’s entertainment conglomerate – is bidding for the 61% of satellite broadcaster Sky it does not own. Predictably, alarm bells are ringing? What is at stake?
For more than a century, the state of Florida has presided over one of American history’s single most effective and enduring efforts to disenfranchise voters. By far the most populous of the three states that strip lifelong voting rights from people with felony convictions, Florida is home to some 1.5 million residents who can never again cast a ballot unless pardoned by the state’s governor, according to a calculation by The Sentencing Project.
Florida’s legions of disenfranchised voters are disproportionately Democrat-leaning minorities — including nearly a quarter of Florida’s black population — numbers that advocates say amount to a long-standing and often ignored civil rights catastrophe. This racial skew means that the state’s mass disenfranchisement could have changed the outcome of some particularly important elections — such as Bush v. Gore — and thus the direction of modern American history itself. Most recently, after the state’s Republican governor clamped down on the ability of ex-felons to have their rights restored, Donald Trump won the crucial swing state by a margin less than a tenth the size of the state’s disenfranchised population, leading some to question the effect that felony disenfranchisement may have had on the size of Trump’s Electoral College win.
After the infamous “grab her by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape, many expected footage of Donald Trump’s hundreds of hours in “The Apprentice” boardroom to yield something just as incendiary. But outtakes from the show were never leaked. One of the plausible reasons why this footage hasn’t seen the light of day is that, simply put, many of the employees with access to the footage feared the end of their careers.
It’s a concern that highlights the dangers of working in an industry without job security or union representation.
On a Seattle radio show this week, comedian Tom Arnold claimed the existence of an old edited video of Trump “saying every dirty, offensive, racist thing ever.” Explaining why “The Apprentice” staffers who made the reel never tried to release it, Arnold said, “They were scared to death. They were scared of (Trump’s) people. They’re scared they’ll never work again.”
President-elect Trump’s attack on the U.S. abstention to a U.N. vote condemning illegal Israeli settlements raises doubts about his vow to be a “neutral guy” on Palestinian issues, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
Three weeks after the election of Donald Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke at the Free Library of Philadelphia as part of his "Our Revolution" book tour. He spoke harshly about the corporate media. "What media does and what media loves is conflict and political gossip and polls and fundraising and all that stuff," Sanders said. "What media loves is to focus on the candidates. What the American people, I believe, want is for us to focus on them, not the candidates, not anymore."
If there is any upside to the U.S. presidential election, it could be that progressive causes around the country are reporting an "unprecedented" surge in donations, the Guardian wrote on Sunday.
In the wake of the election that vindicated Donald Trump's racist, sexist, and xenophobic campaign, many Americans are turning their despair into action, supporting a range of organizations that fight for equality and civil rights.
Planned Parenthood, which has quickly become a target of the newly emboldened Republican party, has received more than 300,000 donations since November 8, which is 40 times higher than its normal rate, the Guardian's Joanna Walters reports.
When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ascended to power in 1999, almost no one in the West, in Asia and even in most of the Latin American countries knew much about his new militant revolutionary anti-imperialism. From the mass media outlets like CNN and the BBC, to local televisions and newspapers (influenced or directly sponsored by Western sources), the ‘information’ that was flowing was clearly biased, extremely critical, and even derogatory.
A few months into his rule, I came to Caracas and was told repeatedly by several local journalists: “Almost all of us are supporting President Chavez, but we’d be fired if we’d dare to write one single article in his support.”
In New York City and Paris, in Buenos Aires and Hong Kong, the then consensus was almost unanimous: “Chavez was a vulgar populist, a demagogue, a military strongman, and potentially a ‘dangerous dictator’”.
In South Korea and the UK, in Qatar and Turkey, people who could hardly place Venezuela on the world map, were expressing their ‘strong opinions’, mocking and smearing the man who would later be revered as a Latin American hero. Even many of those who would usually ‘distrust’ mainstream media were then clearly convinced about the sinister nature of the Process and the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’.
History repeats itself.
Now President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is demonized and ‘mistrusted’, ridiculed and dismissed as a demagogue, condemned as a rough element, mocked as a buffoon.
In his own country he is enjoying the highest popularity rating of any president in its history: at least well over 70 percent, but often even over 80 percent.
Now the process to discredit the rebellious President of the Philippines is already in full swing. Would Duterte’s liberal Vice-President Leni Robredo (recently expelled from the cabinet), be elevated by the Western establishment to stardom? She is pro-Washington, she is against all Duterte’s ‘wars,’ and, above all, she is against his increasingly close relationship with China. She could soon join the band of the ‘Color Revolutions’ leaders, as she leads the “yellow” Liberal Party.
The US seems to be embedded in a colonial mindset when it comes to the Philippines, something along the lines of “we’ve been selflessly looking after the Philippines for a century, and that thug Duterte won’t be allowed to screw that up during his brief (maybe curtailed) presidency.”
Duterte was right to be agitated. Typically, the United States calls attention to the deficiencies in a country’s human rights record as a prelude to invasion.
Duterte cannot plead innocent in the matter of extrajudicial killings. Before he became President at the end of June, Duterte had been mayor of Davao, the Philippines’ third-largest city. During Duterte’s 22 years as mayor one thousand people were killed by the so-called Davao Death Squads. The victims are people suspected of selling or even just using drugs.
A political action committee that backed Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency is continuing to flout campaign finance laws.
Earlier this month, ProPublica reported that the America Comes First PAC had violated the rules by not disclosing the source of its funding before Election Day and by exceeding caps on contribution amounts.
America Comes First gave $115,000 to Trump Victory, a group that raised money for the Trump campaign and for national and state-level Republican groups. It now ranks as the second-biggest PAC contributor to Trump Victory, according to a list compiled by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics — behind GEO Group, a private prison company.
After the ProPublica article was published, the treasurer of the PAC, David Schamens, said the group’s filings with the Federal Election Commission were inaccurate, and that they would be amended. Last week they were — but the amended filing includes new irregularities.
In the final hours before the Christmas holiday weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday quietly signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law—and buried within the $619 billion military budget (pdf) is a controversial provision that establishes a national anti-propaganda center that critics warn could be dangerous for press freedoms.
The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, introduced by Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, establishes the Global Engagement Center under the State Department which coordinates efforts to "recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United Sates national security interests."
Further, the law authorizes grants to non-governmental agencies to help "collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda" directed at the U.S. and its allies, as well as "counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability" of the U.S. and allied nations.
On his RT show “On Contact,” Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges explores the rise of a new McCarthyism with Yeshiva University professor Ellen Schrecker, author of “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America.”
Hedges and Schrecker examine the role of President-elect Donald Trump and the impact the suppression of dissent has had on higher education.
Millions of people may be disenfranchised by the government’s plans to trial asking for ID in order to vote, Labour has said.
Cat Smith, Labour’s shadow minister for voter engagement, raised concerns that 7.5% of the electorate may not have the right kind of identification in order to exercise their right to vote.
“Labour supports measures to tackle electoral fraud and will be backing a number of the reasonable proposals planned by the government,” she said on Tuesday. “However, requiring voters to produce specific forms of photo ID risks denying millions of electors a vote.
“A year ago the Electoral Commission reported that 3.5 million electors – 7.5% of the electorate – would have no acceptable piece of photo ID. Under the government’s proposals, these voters would either be denied a vote entirely, or in other trial areas, required to produce multiple pieces of ID, ‘one from group A, one from group B’.
President-elect Donald Trump is joining the cavalcade of Republicans who are denouncing the United Nations over its Friday resolution to stop Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
ist movement known as the alt right are rumbling early discontent at the prospect of President-elect Donald Trump not doing their bidding.
“In January Trump will start governing and will have to make compromises,” said Holocaust denier and Taki magazine writer David Cole in an interview with The Guardian on Tuesday. “Even small ones will trigger squabbles between the ‘alt-right.’ ‘Trump betrayed us.’ ‘No, you’re betraying us for saying Trump betrayed us.’ And so on. The alt-right’s appearance of influence will diminish more and more as they start to fight amongst themselves.”
Jared Taylor, the creator of so-called “race-realist” magazine American Renaissance, denounced Trump for rolling back one of his core campaign pledges on immigration.
“At first he promised to send back every illegal immigrant,” Taylor said to The Guardian. “Now he is waffling on that.”
Shiv Sena workers on Monday covered a painting, which showed Hindu god Hanuman wearing western clothes and sporting gadgets, with a piece of white cloth inside the campus of Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) in Powai as they felt it was a mockery of the Hindu god.
The painting, which was a part of Mood Indigo -- IIT-B's annual cultural festival -- was deemed "inappropriate" by Shiv Sena who stormed into the campus and demanded that the painting be removed. They felt that it could cause an outrage among people and, therefore, it was necessary to remove it. The party has also sought an apology from the organisers of the event.
On one side is a Bluff City Middle School mother, calling for removal of seventh grade social studies textbook she believes is slanted toward Islam and amounts to Islamic indoctrination.
On the receiving end of the request is the Sullivan County Board of Education, which has not yet formally responded to her submitted form that is making its way through a procedure at the school level, as outlined by board policy.
However, some national groups have lined up on both sides of the issue, one supporting the mother’s call and the other, a coalition of six groups, urging the BOE to keep the textbook and citing court rulings.
We realised that what will and will not be blocked under the Digital Economy Bill is becoming increasingly hard to understand. So here is a handy guide.
Lany, Central Bohemia, Dec 26 (CTK) - Czech President Milos Zeman rejected any attempts to apply censorship to the Internet in his Christmas speech on Monday and said he does not wish the Interior Ministry to become a modern Konias, probably in reaction to a new unit for fighting disinformation in cyber space.
The ministry reacted saying that the unit, which will start operation in January, will not apply censorship to either the media or the Internet.
Konias (1691-1760), a Czech priest, preacher and religious author, was an infamous protagonist of censorship, including the spectacular burning of "heretic" non-Catholic books, which the Jesuit Order practiced within its Catholic missionary efforts in the Czech Lands.
Some historians consider this portrait of Konias, mainly promoted by the early 20th-century historical fiction author Alois Jirasek, as exaggerated and unilateral.
A Hamburg court has ruled that certain links were illegal when they were pointing at photos that were posted in violation of copyright. This ruling follows the worst fears of a previous ruling by the European Court of Justice, and creates many problems for the future.
The court in Hamburg has ruled that the operator of a website was violating the distribution monopoly known as copyright when they posted a link to an image, an image which was posted under Creative Commons, but where the posting did not comply with the license terms. Not only was the website operator unaware of the infringement of the original post, but the original poster was also unaware.
Ongoing efforts in the U.S. to censor the internet in response to a liberal outcry over “fake news” follow in the footsteps of a country notorious for its internet censorship practices.
There is a growing controversy in the U.S. over the issue of “fake news.” The discussion has taken on very partisan political overtones, with some critics using the “fake news” label to condemn legitimate news sources and articles that present information inconsistent with their particular political views. For instance, many left-wing critics blame the intentional spread of disinformation for President-elect Donald Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Netflix has a nifty new China strategy: Skip it.
In January 2016, the video-streaming service announced an ambitious global expansion. The goal was to beam American hits such as “House of Cards” around the world including, eventually, in China.
“Today you are witnessing the birth of a new global Internet TV network,” said chief executive Reed Hastings at a large tech conference.
Figures from the local industry have got behind a boxing biopic that the producer claims is the first Venezuelan film to be pulled from screens in 25 years.
Last week Venezuelan judge Salvador Mata García ordered El Inca be suspended from cinemas after nearly three weeks of release following a complaint by family members of the late Edwin ‘El Inca’ Valero that the film violated their honour and right to privacy.
A proposal requiring Virginia schools to notify parents annually of sexually explicit materials and allow students to receive alternate assignments has revived the censorship debate and raised questions of transparency.
Along with the annual notice, the proposed change in the Virginia Department of Education’s regulations also directs school systems to have clear procedures for providing “non-explicit” material, should any parents request alternatives.
The amendment is nearly identical to the so-called “Beloved” bill vetoed earlier this year by Gov. Terry McAuliffe. In his veto message, McAuliffe indicated that he believed that school boards are best positioned to ensure that students are exposed to appropriate literary and artistic works.
Censorship comes in many forms. Most often, when we talk about it at EFF, we’re talking about the measures that governments take to restrict their citizens’ freedom of expression or access to information. Online, that can mean blocking websites, restricting the right to anonymity, or shutting down the Internet, among other things.
But as our speech increasingly takes place on social media platforms—like Facebook or Twitter—so has our thinking about censorship. And while we still believe that companies have a right to restrict content on their platforms, we also believe that they have a moral obligation to consider the implications of doing so. Companies should do their best to uphold the spirit of free expression and minimize harms that their policies might have to innocent users.
Making and selling risqué goods online is a recipe for censorship. Not only are works depicting pubic hair or nipples a no-go on many e-commerce sites and social networks, last year Etsy infuriated the witch community by banning the sale of spells. Few people know this better than Kate Dwyer and Penelope Gazin, who repeatedly felt limited by what they were allowed to post online. “Can’t we create something cool, interesting, and weird without worrying about offending someone?” they asked. “Where is there a place where you can post things to sell and people aren't complete narcs?”
In 2015, the duo decided to take matters into their own hands and start their own platform for artists selling their own work. Taking its name from Etsy’s spell-ban, Witchsy is their curated e-commerce platform for artists, hawking a wide range of products, from clothes, home goods, and zines, to weirder, less categorizable items. “We just found it so ridiculous that [other e-commerce and social sites] found a need to actively go out of their way to block these people who are just trying to make money,” Dwyer says.
Cause journalist Kirsten Han alerts readers to fake news circulating regarding teen blogger Amos Yee who is being detained in the United States of America (US). He is seeking political asylum there. She flagged States Times Review for publishing the fake news.
The States Times Review recently published the article, “US Immigration accept and process Amos Yee’s application for asylum“. Ms Han pointed out that Yee’s asylum has not been accepted and that he is being merely detained while while proceedings are initiated. She said that it may be years before he is considered for asylum.
“Amos is now waiting for a credible fear interview – the first stage in the asylum process,” Ms Han said.
A teenage blogger from Singapore has applied for political asylum in the United States after being detained last week at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.
Gail Montenegro, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, released a statement Saturday saying Amos Yee, 18, was in federal custody while awaiting federal immigration court proceedings.
Yee, detained Dec. 16, was at the McHenry Adult Correctional Facility, an hour away from Chicago. His U.S. attorney, Sandra Grossman, said Yee was arrested because he entered the country on a tourist visa despite his intention to apply for asylum.
Rights group Human Rights Watch called on Washington to recognize Yee's asylum claim, saying Yee had been consistently harassed by the Singapore government for publicly expressing his views on politics and religion and criticizing Singapore's leaders.
Fake news has always been around for humor purposes, but the real “fake news” scares happen when the establishment is so used to getting away with lying, that any alternate narrative is demonized as factually false, irresponsible, and dangerous.
“The Onion” was next to “The Economist” in the newspaper stands for almost two decades. “Weekly World News”, which one-ups most British tabloids with regular Elvis sightings and vivid descriptions of two-mile fish orbiting in the rings of Jupiter, is still next to “Foreign Policy” in the same newspaper stands. This was never considered problematic in the slightest. Why, then, is a unified establishment screaming bloody murder about “fake news” all of a sudden?
The NSA will have to satisfy itself with being the most powerful intelligence agency in the world. President Obama, rushing through some last-minute presidential business before handing over the title to an aspiring plutocrat, has split up the nation's cyberware command. This siloing prevents Cybercom from being run by the same military officer who oversees the NSA.
[...]
The offensive end of the nation's cyberwarfare will now have its own leader, which points towards an increase in offensive efforts, rather than tighter handling of the reins.
Sticking the NSA with defense doesn't make it happy, considering the wealth of offensive weapons it has at its disposal. But having a new singular focus may help it refine its pitch for a cut of some unfiltered domestic data. The NSA would rather be in on the ground floor of the information sharing forced on private companies by the recent passage of cybersecurity legislation. If it can defend the government's most sensitive networks, surely it can be trusted handling the civilian side as well?
Obama's approval of the defense spending bill may be putting different hats on different individuals, but his letter also notes that the more things change, the more things aren't really going to change for the foreseeable future.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Thursday unveiled its full 37-page report on its three-year investigation into Edward Snowden, drawing even more criticism for conclusions that have been called biased by supporters of the former NSA contractor.
The report, released just days before a holiday weekend, is an extended version of a highly acerbic — and disputed — unclassified summary the committee published in September, describing the former NSA contractor as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator.”
Snowden and other critics have vehemently denied the report’s conclusions.
The House Committee authors allege Snowden’s concerns had more to do with petty workplace spats than moral uncertainty, citing interviews with his coworkers as well as his superiors — and suggest that he is not legally a whistleblower because he did not take advantage of internal channels available for formal complaints such as Congress and the inspector general.
Snowden quickly derided the report, which delves into his personal and professional life, often citing seemingly petty workplace grievances. He tweeted to his more than 2.5 million followers that the document is “rifled with obvious falsehoods” — citing reporting by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Barton Gellman, who has also criticized the report.
The extended report, according to U.S. News & World Report, actually addresses some factual concerns critics had about the summary published in September. The original report argued Snowden overstated his injuries and lied about his education, while the full investigation includes contrary evidence.
Here’s our quick overview of what the CJEU has told the UK and Sweden they must do to fix requirements for data retention.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on stage wearing a virtual reality headset, feigning surprise at an expressive cartoon simulacrum that seemed to perfectly follow his every gesture.
The audience laughed. Zuckerberg was in the middle of what he described as the first live demo inside VR, manipulating his digital avatar to show off the new social features of the Rift headset from Facebook subsidiary Oculus. The venue was an Oculus developer conference convened earlier this fall in San Jose. Moments later, ZuckerbergÃâ and two Oculus employees were transported to his glass-enclosed office at Facebook, and then to his infamously sequestered home in Palo Alto. Using the Rift and its newly revealed Touch hand controllers, their avatars gestured and emoted in real time, waving to Zuckerbergâ€Ã¢â¢s Puli sheepdog, dynamically changing facial expressions to match their ownerâ€Ã¢â¢s voice, and taking photos with a virtual selfie stick — to post on Facebook, of course.
The internet of really broken things is raising no limit of privacy questions. As in, companies are hoovering up personal data on smart-device usage, often transmitting it (unencrypted) to the cloud, then failing to really inform or empower consumers as to how that data is being used and shared. Though this problem applies to nearly all IoT devices, it tends to most frequently come up when talking about the rise of smart toys that hoover up your kids' ramblings, then sell that collected data to all manner of third parties. A company named Genesis toys is facing a new lawsuit for just this reason.
Since your toys, fridge, tea kettle and car are all collecting your data while laughing at your privacy and security concerns, it only makes sense that your sex toys are doing the same thing.
Back in September, a company by the name of Standard Innovation was sued because its We-Vibe vibrator collected sensitive data about usage. More specifically, the device and its corresponding smartphone app collect data on how often and how long users enjoyed the toy, the "selected vibration settings," the device's battery life, and even the vibrator's "temperature." All of this data was collected and sent off to the company's Canadian servers. Unlike many IoT products, Standard Innovation does encrypt this data in transit, but like most IoT companies it failed to fully and clearly disclose the scope of data collection.
It’s no secret that state and local law enforcement agencies have grown more militarized in the past decade, with armored personnel carriers, drones and robots.
But one item in their arsenal has been kept largely out of public view, to the dismay of civil liberties advocates who say its use is virtually unregulated – and largely untracked.
The device is a suitcase-size surveillance tool commonly called a StingRay that mimics a cellphone tower, allowing authorities to track individual cellphones in real time. Users of the device, which include scores of law enforcement agencies across the country, sign a non-disclosure agreement when they purchase it, pledging not to divulge its use, even in court cases against defendants the device helped capture.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has – once again – ruled that data retention (storage of data on everybody’s phone calls, text messages, e-mails, Internet connections, mobile positions etc.) is in breach of fundamental human rights.
Nevertheless, politicians in several EU member states are trying their hardest to ignore the court. For them, Big Brotherism carries more weight than human and civil rights.
The large number of new users coming from Yahoo Mail is not very surprising given that ProtonMail’s core focus is email security and privacy. We first noticed the trend on social media when a large number of Tweets began appearing mentioning ProtonMail as a Yahoo Mail replacement. Starting on December 15th, the day the Yahoo breach was announced, ProtonMail’s growth rate effectively doubled as can be seen in the above chart.
While there have been similar statutes enacted in other cities, these have generally been targeted at businesses already subject to extra regulation, like pawn shops, gun stores, and pharmacies. There has been some mission creep in recent years, leading to other businesses being ordered to install surveillance systems, like cellphone resellers and scrap metal dealers.
On top of that, many of these ordinances also allow for on-demand law enforcement access, allowing the government to extend its surveillance reach without having to pay for the equipment. The specifics of Madison's new statute haven't been made available yet, so it's unclear whether the collection of footage from businesses will be voluntary and tied only to investigations requested by business owners, or whether law enforcement will just be able to show up and demand to see recordings.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) -- at least partially responsible for recent surveillance reforms -- is dead. The first hints of its demise were tucked away in the annual intelligence budget, which gave Congress direct control of the PCLOB's investigative activities.
The last vestiges of the board's independence have been stripped away and it seems unlikely the incoming president is going to have much interest in restoring this essential part of intelligence oversight. Congress now has the power to steer the PCLOB's investigations. A new stipulation requiring the PCLOB to report directly to legislators means intelligence officials will be less forthcoming when discussing surveillance efforts with board members.
At best, the PCLOB would have limped on -- understaffed and neutered. That was back when the news was still good (but only in comparison). The Associate Press reports that Donald Trump is being handed the keys to a well-oiled surveillance machine, but with hardly any of the pesky oversight that ruins the fun.
With looming threats of an open cyber war with Russia, U.S. President Barack Obama has moved to split the leadership of the NSA and the United States’ cyber warfare command. Obama supported made the following statement.
SELF PROMOTION, AND ADVERTISE TO ME PORTAL Facebook, has seen a 27 per cent increase in the number of government demands for its data in the first half of this year.
If there are two things that the INQUIRER does not much like they are government data demands and Facebook. A combination of the two just before Christmas is ill-timed but we can't help that.
Twitter Inc. discovered a software bug that overstated how often video ads were viewed on Android phones, the latest snafu to shake faith in the measurement of digital advertising.
The company issued refunds to some clients who ran video ads on the Twitter Android app from Nov. 7 to Dec. 12. The bug caused views to be overstated by as much as 35 percent, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Alisher Usmanov and his partners are set to pocket $740 million from moving a stake in internet company Mail.ru Group Ltd. to MegaFon PJSC, as the Russian billionaire consolidates his technology holdings into the wireless carrier.
MegaFon plans to buy 33.4 million shares, equal to an almost 64 percent voting stake in the web company, from Usmanov’s USM Holdings, according to a statement Friday. The price is $640 million on completion plus $100 million after one year, which MegaFon said implies a premium of about 24 percent on Thursday’s closing price.
With the fallout of the Brexit referendum and the Trump election dominating the news, one important story of 2016 did not receive the attention it deserved: in late November, the British parliament adopted a law with an obscure name but far-reaching implications for citizens in the UK and, potentially, beyond. The ‘Investigatory Powers Act’ is a comprehensive legislative framework that regulates the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies and other public authorities.
While the government has maintained that the new law is "world-leading", critics have pointed out that it allows for some of the most extensive and intrusive surveillance practices in the world, and have asked: “What part of the world are we leading exactly: North Korea, Cuba, China and Saudi Arabia?”
The Foreign Office has come under fire for ordering victims of forced marriage to repay the government the costs of their repatriation.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, a Muslim women’s charity has written to the Foreign Office on behalf of a British woman who arrived at the UK embassy in Islamabad in 2014, aged 17, seeking help to escape a forced marriage.
She was required to sign a loan agreement and surrender her passport before she was flown back to the UK. She was then issued a bill for €£814, the cost of her repatriation from Pakistan, and will not have her passport returned until she repays the money.
A women’s basketball tournament in Somalia was denounced and declared “un-Islamic” by the Somali Religious Council Thursday, a tremendously influential force in the East African nation that is more than 99 percent Muslim.
The female competition, which was to begin Thursday, is the first-ever national women’s basketball tournament in Somalia, local reports said. The games will feature teams from each of the Somalia’s five administrative regions, along with some from the capital, Mogadishu.
The first game was scheduled for the northeastern town of Garowe Thursday, roughly a 13-hour car ride from Mogadishu.
Getting hold of independent information on funding is extremely difficult, however. Federal or cantonal statistics are non-existent.
“The Confederation has no data on the funding of Muslim associations and mosques – it is not its competence – except in exceptional circumstances when national security is threatened,” the Swiss government wrote in June in reply to a recent parliamentary question by Christian Democrat Ruth Humbel.
“It is however of public knowledge that governmental organisations and private individuals send donations from abroad. But the Federal Intelligence Service has no intelligence to suggest that the external funding of mosques could have a consequence for state security," the cabinet told Fiala in July in answer to another parliamentary question.
"Mamma, mamma," 12-year-old Kristine Joy Sailog said, moments before a stray bullet struck her heart as she stood with her family at the gate of a Catholic church on the outskirts of the Philippine capital Manila.
Kristine died in her mother's arms, one of the latest innocent victims of President Rodrigo Duterte's crackdown on drugs.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte's rhetoric on a number of issues has zig-zagged during his six months in office.
He has vacillated on his stance toward US-Philippine ties, alternately repudiating the Obama administration and embracing the incoming Trump administration.
Domestically, he has gone back and forth on the issue of martial law, repeatedly suggesting imposing it before backing off.
Duterte returned to the subject this week, bemoaning the constitutional limits on how the Philippine president could deal with security threats like war.
"If you have martial law, only one person should be in control," Duterte said during a visit to the northern Philippines on Thursday.
It's so often the poorest, least powerful people they fund their departments through, by seizing cash as supposed illicitly earned -- without proof it actually was. (In the Orwellian-named "civil asset forfeiture," citizens must prove their money innocent -- which often would mean hiring a lawyer who will cost them more than the money that was seized.)
[...]
Some of you may know that I've been friends for a long time with a guy who's been homeless. He is in Illinois now, with a roof over his head, and I receive mail for him and send it to him. Though he is a very hard worker when he gets work and a talented artist, we all have our issues, and he just hasn't been able to maintain a bank account or do things that many of us find easy.
Personally, with ADHD, I find certain tasks that others find simple really overwhelming -- yet, I can spend a day researching science to get a single line correct and then throw the whole thing out the next day, because it makes some paragraph of the column too long -- and yes, ventral tegmental area, I mean you!
Korean Air Lines said it will allow crew members to "readily use stun guns" to manage violent passengers, and hire more male flight attendants, after coming in for criticism from U.S. singer Richard Marx over its handling of a recent incident.
The new crew guidelines, announced on Tuesday following the Dec. 20 incident, will also include more staff training, use of the latest device to tie up a violent passenger, and the banning of passengers with a history of unruly behavior.
Men account for about one-tenth of Korean Air flight attendants, and the carrier said it will try to have at least one male on duty in the cabin for each flight.
"While U.S. carriers have taken stern action on violent on-board behavior following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 (2001), Asian carriers including us have not imposed tough standards because of Asian culture," Korean Air President Chi Chang-hoon told a news conference.
"We will use the latest incident to put safety foremost and strengthen our safety standards," he said.
In South Korea, the number of unlawful acts committed aboard airplanes has more than tripled over the past five years, according to government data.
[...]
The incident came to light when Marx said on Facebook and Twitter that he helped subdue "a psycho passenger attacking crew members and other passengers," accusing crew members of being "ill-trained" and "ill-equipped" to handle the "chaotic and dangerous event".
There's no question that this has been a big year for government hacking. Not a day has gone by without some mention of it in the news. 2016 may forever be remembered as the year when government hacking went so mainstream that Stephen Colbert cracked jokes about Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear on The Late Show. The Obama administration has publicly blamed the Russian government for a series of compromises of U.S. political institutions and individuals in this election year, including the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee, and John Podesta, former Chairman of the Hillary Clinton election campaign. Political espionage is nothing new, but what distinguishes this series of attacks is the element of publication. This election cycle was dominated by news stories stemming from DNC and Podesta emails leaked to and published by Wikileaks, which has repeatedly said that it will not comment on sources but denies that the source of the documents is Russian.
Families are not supposed to be in immigration detention at all — and certainly not for more than a few days — but these children have been locked up with their mothers for more than a year. They are fleeing violence in Central America and asked for asylum in the United States. They got caught in legal limbo while their lawyers press for the Supreme Court to hear their case.
Traditional U.S. history downplays Native people who settled the land and Africans enslaved to cultivate it while glorifying European whites and ignoring when the “other side” won, as on Christmas Day 1837, writes William Loren Katz.
In 2004, Leopoldo Zumaya was working as an apple picker in Pennsylvania when he fell from a tree, breaking his leg and leaving him with permanent nerve damage and chronic pain. A treating physician said Zumaya’s injuries were among the worst he’d ever seen. Most workers in Zumaya’s position would have received workers’ compensation benefits. But instead of disbursing his rightful worker’s compensation, his employer reported his immigration status to the insurance company, which then refused to pay his benefits, leaving him unable to access medical care.
People who take to the streets to protest should not be subject to a different form of justice than everyone else. But lawyers for the NYPD are doing exactly that when they selectively step in and act as prosecutors in cases that involve demonstrators, reportedly to keep those protesters from suing the department for false arrest.
The eyebrow-raising agreement between the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the NYPD, in which the district attorney allows NYPD lawyers to prosecute certain criminal summons cases, was revealed by the New York Daily News earlier this year. Police officials told the Daily News that the arrangement came about after the NYPD grew frustrated with paying out settlements to protesters who sue after their summonses are dismissed. It’s important to note that the NYPD gets sued a lot. Over the last five years, the city shelled out $837 million in lawsuits brought against the police.
Earlier this week, President Obama broke his own remarkable clemency record, granting an unprecedented 231 commutations and pardons in a single day. Headlines and tweets broadcast the historic tally; on the White House website, a bar graph tracks Obama’s record to date, which has dramatically outpaced that of his predecessors. With a total of 1,176 recipients, the White House boasted, Obama has granted clemency “more than the last 11 presidents combined.”
The president certainly deserves credit for making clemency a priority before leaving office. His efforts are especially laudable in contrast to the lazy rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump, who has cluelessly condemned clemency recipients as “bad dudes.” In reality, to use language Trump might understand, all successful applicants go through a process of extreme vetting: only a fraction of people in federal prison are eligible in the first place, and selections rely on a careful review of each candidate’s history and behavior behind bars. A record of violence, including as a juvenile, is disqualifying.
After vowing to run a transparent government, President Obama oversaw an unprecedented legal assault on whistleblowers, only now offering up a modest concession, as Linda Lewis explains.
The principal of a high school in northern Taiwan has resigned following widespread criticism over an event staged by students that featured Nazi-themed costumes and swastika banners.
Taiwan’s official Central News Agency reported this week that Cheng Hsiao-ming, principal of Kuang Fu High School in the city of Hsinchu, apologized for the incident as he announced his resignation.
Journalists investigating national security agencies have faced unprecedented threats, alongside government employees and contractors who come forward to reveal fraud, waste, and abuse. Conscientious public servants—people who have risked (and often resigned) their careers in order to do the right thing—have been thanked for their public service with criminal prosecutions for espionage, as if they were subverting the U.S. rather than performing their constitutional function or fulfilling their oaths of office.
Under the Obama administration, more federal employees faced accusation of espionage based on their public interest whistleblowing activities than during the entire preceding history of the U.S. put together.
For instance, military whistleblower Chelsea Manning filed an appeal in May, noting that her 35-year sentence in military prison is “grossly unfair” since “no whistleblower in American history has been sentenced this harshly.” Manning revealed documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks, including a video revealing a U.S. military coverup following the assassination of Reuters journalists and evidence that the Pentagon suppressed accurate data about civilian casualties that were in fact higher than those officially acknowledged.
EFF submitted a brief to the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals, arguing that her conviction for violating the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act was inappropriate since the law was designed to punish people for breaking into computers systems, which Manning never did.
Informed by Manning’s treatment and due process violations pervading her prosecution, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden continued to seek refuge internationally. Meanwhile, a domestic coalition petitioned the Obama administration to pardon Snowden, given the public interest in his revelations and failure of congressional oversight to expose policymakers to the unconstitutional surveillance programs—including PRISM and upstream collection, which Congress will examine in 2017—that Snowden uncovered.
In 2016 we won one battle in the fight for the Open Internet – but several others are well underway and we expect Team Internet will have to mobilize once again to protect our gains and prevent further efforts to undermine network neutrality.
Almost two years ago, thanks in large part to a massive mobilization of Internet users, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally issued an Open Internet Order to protect net neutrality. While far from perfect, the new Order was on strong legal footing, with some limits in place to help prevent FCC overreach. Before the year was out, however, the battle for the Internet moved to the courts, as broadband providers tried to get a judge to derail the new rules. After months of wrangling, in June 2016 a federal appeals court instead approved the Order – a crucial win for Team Internet.
Back in May, we wrote about a draft report by Australia's Productivity Commission on how Australia's copyright and patent laws could be reformed to foster domestic production and innovation. That report is back in the news this week, after it was released in its final form, and a consultation seeking public feedback was opened.
The most important proposed change would introduce a fair use right into Australia's copyright law. Currently Australia's copyright flexibilities are narrowly pre-defined; for example, it is lawful for Australians to backup their computer software and to digitize their video tapes (remember those?), though there is still no similar exception allowing them to back up their iTunes downloads or to rip copies of their DVDs. This approach has made Australia's copyright law a complicated and anachronistic mess.
The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has just released another edition of its periodic Notorious Markets List, a spotlight on websites and physical markets that it claims facilitate copyright or trademark infringement, and a supplement to its regular Special 301 Report on countries that allegedly do the same.
Here are just a few of the problems we've identified in this year's list, illustrating the overreach of the USTR's single-minded enforcement agenda.
Back in 2015 this blog reported and commented [here and here] on the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in C More, a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Swedish Supreme Court seeking guidance on whether - among other things - the unauthorised live streaming of broadcasts of ice hockey matches could be regarded as an act of making available to the public within the meaning of the Swedish implementation of Article 3(2) of the InfoSoc Directive and, if so, a potential copyright infringement.