Linux operating systems (known as “distributions” or “distros”) have constant releases and updates, with some more substantial than others. Updates usually bring minor fixes and tweaks, but occasionally new distro releases or iterations can yield major changes.
Picking the right distro depends on several factors. Whether it’s a fresh release or major update, check out these new Linux operating systems and who should try them.
"The last Superfan event was a resounding success, bringing together a wide range of Linux enthusiasts doing neat stuff with their System76 computers. Attendees included those working on Linux gaming content, a System76 Android app, tree-planting drones, and an open source personal assistant. During their time at the System76 headquarters the winners shared their feedback on current and future products, as well as joined the team for fun and games," says System76.
Dell love Linux. That’s not a bit of marketing fluff designed to look good writ large on a conference banner, but actual, tangible fact.
Today the company announced the immediate availability of the Dell Precision 3520 mobile workstation (that’s “professional laptop” to you and I).
Better yet buyers can save over $100 by choosing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS pre-loaded instead of Windows 10 — now that’s what you call a deal!
I didn't debate this for days, I installed the latest available Ubuntu right away as it was the distribution I was using before moving to OSX (I even contributed to a book on it!). I was used to Debian-based systems and knew Ubuntu was still acclaimed for its ease of use and great hardware support. I wasn't disappointed as on the X1 everything was recognized and operational right after the installation, including wifi, bluetooth and external display.
I was greeted with the Unity desktop, which was disturbing as I was a Gnome user back in the days. Up to a point I installed the latter, though in its version 3 flavor, which was also new to me.
I like Gnome3. It's simple, configurable and made me feel productive fast. Though out of bad luck or skills and time to spend investigating, a few things were not working properly: fonts were huge in some apps and normal in others, external display couldn't be configured to a different resolution and dpi ratio than my laptop's, things like that. After a few weeks, I switched back to Unity, and I'm still happily using it today as it has nicely solved all the issues I had with Gnome (which I still like a lot though).
The FDPIC investigations revealed that data processing in connection with Windows 10 did not conform in every respect with the data protection legislation. The page layout and content on the ‘Quick access' und ‘Customize settings' pages failed to meet the transparency requirements in full. There was a lack of information on how long the transmitted data would be stored, on the content of browser data and on the content of feedback and diagnostic data. In addition, the users found it difficult during individual data processing operations to look up further information, e.g. from the relevant passages of the data privacy statement.
In response, Microsoft made proposals to the FDPIC for rectifying these and other shortcomings, which the FDPIC assessed and amended. The modifications that have now been agreed will ensure that more precise information is provided on data processing. In addition, the new settings page will make it clear to users during the installation process that they must decide on and give their consent to the processing and transmission of data.
Arguably, CoreOS Linux could be called the first Linux-based operating system designed for cluster computing, containers/microservices. Even if CoreOS Linux (since renamed “Container Linux“) had its roots in the traditional Linux OS, it offered a new approach towards operating systems: One of the most significant features of Container Linux is transitional upgrades that keep the system up-to-date without user intervention.
The market for application containers, largely led by the open-source Docker container engine, has been a hot area in recent years, at least in terms of mindshare - but how much money is there in the container market? A new forecast from 451 Research aims to answer that question.
According to 451 Research, the market for application container technologies in 2016 generated $762 million in revenue. Looking forward to 2020, 451 Research is forecasting that 2020 revenue will reach $2.7 billion for a 40 percent compound annual growth rate.
The upward revenue growth trajectory for application containers is not a surprise given some of the current adoption trends. 451 Research conducted a study in April and May 2016 that found 14 percent of surveyed organizations were using Docker containers in production. Additionally nearly 31 percent of surveyed organizations indicated they were piloting or evaluating Docker containers.
Comcast cable is undergoing a major technical shift. The company is moving away from an always-on transmission of every single channel to every single customer, with the signal converted on either end by a piece of proprietary hardware, which is how cable has worked for decades. The new system is IP-based, on-demand streaming model where channel signal is sent only when requested by the user, explained Erik St. Martin, a systems architect at Comcast, at CloudNativeCon in November.
The Central Office Re-Architected as a Data Center (CORD) combines network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) to bring data center economics and cloud agility to the telco central office. CORD 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. And non-telcos have joined the open source group, including Google and Comcast.
Greg Kroah-Hartman is on a roll, and he shows no signs of stopping delivering new maintenance updates for latest Linux kernels. After announcing the end of life for the Linux 4.8 kernel series, he's now reporting on the Linux 4.4.41 LTS kernel.
Linux 4.4 is a long-term supported branch, currently used by Canonical in its Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system (sadly, it will be replaced by Linux 4.8 when Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS launches on January 19, 2017), as well as various other operating systems, including the popular Alpine Linux and Arch Linux distributions.
The Linux kernel is seeing a lot of improvements lately, yes again, and the newest stable Linux 4.9 series has already received its second point release, two days after Greg Kroah-Hartman's announcement for Linux kernel 4.9.1.
With the availability of Linux kernel 4.9.1, users are now finally able to migrate from other kernel series to Linux 4.9, which is the most advanced version available on the market. But do not bother do attempt a compilation of Linux kernel 4.9.1 because Linux kernel 4.9.2 is already here, bringing lots of improvements.
In addition to Mesa's "ANV" Intel Vulkan driver getting Float64 shader support this week, another important addition has made it into the latest Mesa Git code.
Tessellation control and evaluation shaders are now supported within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver. Obviously the Intel Mesa OpenGL driver had been supporting tessellation shaders for a while now, but up until now they weren't supported by the company's open-source Vulkan driver.
While a lot of OpenGL improvements, Vulkan driver advancements, and performance optimizations can be found in Mesa Git for the forthcoming release as Mesa 17.0, one big feature that's still missing as of today is the OpenGL on-disk shader cache.
X.Org Server 1.19.1 was released today with a couple regression fixes.
X.Org Server 1.19 was released last November as the first xorg-server major release in one year. Arriving today is the first point release, but it's on the lighter side even with two months having passed.
First stable 1.19 release, including a few regression fixes. Thanks to all who contributed!
Collabora's Emil Velikov is officially announcing today, January 11, 2017, that the upcoming Mesa 13.1.0 branch of the widely-used 3D graphics stack will change its versioning scheme to Mesa 17.0.0.
Those of you bleeding-edgers who are using the Mesa 3D Graphics Library from Git, a.k.a. the development (unstable) branch of the graphics stack used in numerous GNU/Linux distributions to provide various open-source drivers for Intel, AMD, and Nvidia graphics cards, should have already noticed the major change.
Mesa 13.1.0 is now known as Mesa 17.0.0 if you pull the latest code from Git, which the Padoka and Oibaf PPA do for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) platforms. It appears that the Mesa people decided to change the versioning scheme at the beginning of a new year, so now being 2017, here comes Mesa 17.0.0.
With word of Fedora switching away from using the Intel X.Org driver in favor of the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver, following in the steps laid by Debian/Ubuntu, there is fresh discussions over features and any performance impact of xf86-video-modesetting vs. xf86-video-intel DDX drivers. As such, here are some fresh 2D and 3D benchmarks.
After ordering a Core i5 7600K Kaby Lake CPU last week, I've been spending the past few days trying it out under Ubuntu Linux. If you happened to pick up an early Kaby Lake CPU and seeing low performance, I wanted to pass along a little PSA while I am still working on additional tests.
According to its website, the RCMES "is designed to facilitate regional-scale evaluations of climate and Earth system models by providing standardized access to a vast and comprehensive set of observations (e.g., satellite, reanalyzes and in-situ) and modeling resources (e.g., CMIP & CORDEX on the ESGF), as well as tools for performing common analysis and visualization tasks (e.g., OCW)."
Last month, we released nanotime, a package to work with nanosecond timestamps. See the initial release announcement for some background material and a few first examples.
If your build depends on a non-exact dependency version (like “somelibrary >= 3.1”), and the exact version gets recomputed every time you run the build, your project is broken.
Right now this is available in my Copr repo, and builds are on their way for Fedora and EPEL.
I have just released QSoas version 2.1. It brings in a new solve command to solve arbitrary non-linear equations of one unknown.
GitHub's Ian Olsen announced a few moments ago the release of Atom 1.13, the newest stable version of the acclaimed open-source and multiplatform hackable text editor, for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms.
Two months in development, Atom 1.13 introduces a new version of the Octicons, GitHub's icons for those unfamiliar with the project, which includes 20 new icons that you can see in the screenshot gallery attached below, as well as improvements to line-weight and sizing normalization.
A new version of the cross-platform customisable Atom text editor has been released.
Atom 1.13 ships with a number of key improvements and new features, including a new benchmarking tool, the ability to quickly reopen projects, and a keystroke resolver API.
Gaming group chats on Linux just levelled up — an official, stable desktop Discord Linux app is now available to download.
The release of the app, which has been available as a ‘canary’ development build for almost a year, was announced on Twitter with (quite possibly) the most amazing bit of Tux-themed artwork ever:
When graphics need to be produced billboard-size, you need nice, crisp vector versions of any logos or illustrations to be printed or else you'll get a pixelated effect like the image above - photos are another story. These days, you can find most common graphics and the logos of large companies in vector format at sites like Seek Logo .
But sometimes, a logo or other graphic is too complex for anyone in the volunteer community to have traced and shared with the public - or the company is not well known enough to have been noticed, so their logo can't easily be found and downloaded. This is where this PDF trick can make you a hero, seemingly pulling the artwork your team desperately needs out of thin air.
Here's a (very) lazy way to verify ISO files without hunting down hashes.
It was bound to happen sooner or later, especially now that Wine 2.0 got its fourth Release Candidate (RC), and you can now test drive one of the last development release of Wine-Staging 2.0.
The Wine Staging team have announced the availability of the Wine-Staging 2.0 RC4, based on Wine 2.0 RC4, but bringing a bunch of various improvements and bug fixes that haven't yet landed in the mainline Wine branch. Among these, we can mention better handling of FlipToGDISurface DDraw.
The Linux community that are fans of "Civilization 6" have something to celebrate about as the game is finally arriving soon on Linux as well as on SteamOS by popopular demand, according to a report by Rock Paper Shotgun. The game already made its way to Mac.
The port will be handled by Aspyr Media which stated that they were checking the feasibility of a Linux port as Linux gamers were left without their version of the game, now the wait is finally over.
Two interesting bits of news for you! First up, Wolfire Games have updated Overgrowth with another alpha build and the Lugaru campaign is now finished. On top of that, Wolfire has made the data files for Lugaru HD fully open now too.
It seems some developers got fed-up with some assets of the FPS game Sauerbraten being restricted, so they have forked it into the Inexor project.
It looks to us like Valve's engineers have decided to make a New Year's resolution to add great improvements to the Steam Client, and they're now shipping two more Beta versions for early adopters.
Among the improvements added since our last report, we can notice that there's now XBox controller rumble support, a new option called "Turn Off Controller" that lets users shut down both the PlayStation 4 Bluetooth controller and the Sony wireless receiver that ships with it, and an updated Web control to Chromium 56.0.2924.10.
It's being developed with Unreal Engine 4, so hopefully with Aspyr Media helping out, Bloober Team should be able to get a polished Linux version sorted.
How about turning your Linux system into an arcade system? Making your computer into an arcade system can make for some interesting fun. Actual arcade games that everyone had to pump quarters into all day and get nowhere, you can now do it at home without the need for quarters.
Discord, the insanely popular chat and VOIP client primarily aimed at gamers is now officially supported on Linux and out of beta.
I was sent in Gearend [Official Site] by a reader, as it not only looks like a pretty good 2D exploration game, but it's also developed on Linux.
Jonathan Riddell is continuing to improve the KDE Neon Linux distribution with the latest Open Source software and GNU/Linux technologies, and he had the pleasure to announce the availability of a new development version of KDE Neon Developer Edition.
Tomorrow, we should be able to get our hands on the Beta release of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment, but KDE Neon users can already test drive it if they download the new KDE Neon Developer Unstable Edition operating system, which also switches to the next-generation Wayland display server.
Recently I got myself a GPD Win, to make it simple it's a PC in a Nintendo 3DS XL form factor, with a keyboard and a game controller. It comes with Windows 10 and many not too demanding games work perfectly on it: it's perfect to run indie games from Steam and for retro consoles emulation.
I really like the polished look of GNOME and its default theme Adwaita, but there is one thing that has been bugging me for some time. By default server side window decorations are light and if an app has a dark UI and uses a server side window decorations, you get a dark window with a light title bar. It doesn’t look every nice and when you maximize the window, it’ll get even worse because you get a nice black-and-white hamburger (black top bar, light title bar, and dark window content).
There were several articles on portable Linux and devices today. Jamie Watson test drove the openSUSE, SUSE, and Tumbleweed for the Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, he didn't have as much fun as anticipated with those tests. Speaking of openSUSE, Adrien Plazas is working on getting openSUSE installed and operative on the GPD Win gaming handheld that looks like a tiny laptop. Joey Sneddon reported today on the availability and price of the newest Dell Ubuntu mobile workstation and Scott Gilbertson reviewed the XPS 13. Finally, Brian Fagioli reported on System76's latest Superfan contest where users can win a trip to company headquarters in Denver.
There were plenty of Tumbleweed snapshots leading up to the holiday season and openSUSE’s rolling release is gliding into 2017 with several new packages on the horizon.
The last snapshot of 2016, 20161226, updated the Linux Kernel to 4.9, which was a good way to end the year. Several packages were updated in the snapshot including Python3-setuptools to version 31.0.0, gnome-online-accounts 3.22.3, NetworkManager 1.4.4 and yast2-network 3.2.17.
We need a ‘fedora-specific’ data-field for events, because some events are Linux-wide, or open source-wide, and some are fedora-specific. We expect that ambassadors are the ones most likely to put non-fedora events into Hubs, since they may be attending/sponsoring, and don’t expect there to be non-fedora events listed without ambassador presence.
A while back Debian has switched to using the modesetting Xorg driver rather then the intel Xorg driver for Intel GPUs.
Last month, Fedora Magazine published an article on how to compile and install FreeOrion. That article sparked some interest in open-source gaming on Fedora, and now FreeOrion is coming to Fedora.
In October last year, Fedora contributor Charles Profitt wrote a tutorial on how to compile and install the FreeOrion open-source turn-based 4X space empire and galactic conquest video game on the latest release of Fedora Linux.
Since then, a lot of Linux gamers using the Fedora operating system showed interest in having an easy-to-install package that would allow them to enjoy the game instead of spending a lot of time compiling it.
Arne Exton informs us about a new release of his Ubuntu/Debian-based ExLight 64-bit Live Linux operating system, bringing us some of the latest technologies and open-source software projects.
Based on Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) and borrowing various components from both the Debian Stable and Testing repositories, ExLight Build 170105 is now the most advanced version of the GNU/Linux distribution, shipping with a custom Linux 4.9 kernel injected with support for all the modern hardware and the Enlightenment 0.20.99.0 desktop.
These days, almost all of Arne Exton's GNU/Linux distributions come pre-installed with the Refracta tools, an open-source utility that lets users create their own live system with few mouse clicks, and ExLight Build 170105 is no different. It allows you to build your own Ubuntu live system in minutes.
Apple’s MacOS has long been the de facto alternative to Windows. But what happens when a MacOS user tires of doing things Apple’s way? He switches to Ubuntu Linux and doesn’t look back. Goodbye Apple, hello Linux!
We’ve shown you how to enable low-graphics mode in Unity 7 on both Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10 — but there’s no denying that this method is far from user-friendly.
Enclustra’s “Mercury+ AA1” COM runs Linux on an Altera Arria 10 FPGA/ARM hybrid with up to 8GB DDR4, up to 8GB eMMC, PCIe Gen 3, and -40 to 85€°C support.
Swiss FPGA specialists Enclustra announced a Mercury+ AA1 computer-on-module built around Intel/Altera’s dual-core, Cortex-A9 Arria 10 FPGA/ARM hybrid SoC. The 74 Ãâ 54mm module is open for pre-orders, and is said to be “already in use,” suggesting it has entered the sampling stage.
Panther Alpha combines full desktop functionality with an ultra-customizable Linux OS that fits in the palm of your hand. Panther says its new device could be possible only now thanks to a culmination of years of industry innovation and development, namely the power of today's ARM chips and an improved emphasis of Linux on ARM.
Tizen smartphones certainly gained further in popularity during 2016. We had the Samsung Z1, Z2 and Z3 models and we are promised more to be released during 2017. During the course of last year, we kept you updated with the Top apps/games that were being downloaded from the Tizen Store, and today we have the Tp 20 most popular Tizen apps and Games in the whole of 2016.
Hi guys, many puzzles game released have been released in the Tizen Store. But, a different type of puzzle game in mind testing game is now available. The game named Genius Test has been added by Amjad Chaudhry and copyright of I Need Play.
Rample Race 2 is a game where you have to drive on a road without crashing. There are different motorcycles that you can buy using virtual money, which you collect by doing various things on the levels.
Huawei has begun sending out "save the date" invites for its Mobile World Congress 2017 press conference, which kicks off on the afternoon of Sunday, February 26 in Barcelona, Spain. The invite promises "the global unveiling of a new flagship device" -- a surprising development perhaps, just a couple of months after the Mate 9's arrival.
It's likely CEO Richard Yu will take the wraps off the Huawei P10, the successor to the P9, which will surely build on the hardware and software platform of Huawei's latest phablet. The rumor mill has yet to conjure up anything particularly convincing on what the P10 will look like. Reports of dubious origins suggest a curved display may be on the cards, along with a spec sheet similar to that of the Mate 9 Pro, along with a glass-backed chassis. We'll have to wait another month or so to find out for sure.
According to the figures, of the 2.3 billion devices shipped in 2016, Windows powered about 260 million. Google's Android mobile operating system was by far the leader.
It looks like Google is working on spring cleaning a little early this year. After removing the remaining Huawei Watch models from the Google Store earlier today, all of Fossil's Android Wear watches are now gone. The company's lineup includes the Fossil Q Founder, Q Marshal, and Q Wonder.
It is a testament (or perhaps indictment?) to the Wild Wild West nature of the mobile industry that, on December 14, thinking it was close enough to the end of the year, I wrote a piece ranking my favorite smartphones of 2016 -- only for the list to be thrown out of wack a week later when I got my hands on the Huawei Mate 9 Pro.
The Mate 9 Pro is now my favorite go-to phone to use, and since it was technically released in 2016, that means it is indeed my new favorite phone of 2016.
With 2016 behind us, we can reflect on a landmark year where open source migrated up the stack. As a result a new breed of open service orchestration projects were announced, including ECOMP, OSM, OpenBaton, and The Linux Foundation project OPEN-O, among them. While the scope varies between orchestrating Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) in a Cloud Data Center, and more comprehensive end-to-end service delivery platforms, the new open service orchestration initiatives enable carriers and cable operators to automate end-to-end service delivery, ultimately minimizing the software development required for new services.
Like many of the previous PyLadies Pune meetups, I took a session in this month’s meetup too. System programming basics was the topic for my session. We did the session for around an hour, but as this month’s session also had a guest session over hangout, we could not go longer. We will do a full day workshop on the same topic in future.
Protecting users’ privacy and security online is a crucial issue for all of us. Security protects elections, economies and our private online and offline lives. And many recent events (cyber attacks, hacks and threats by foreign governments) show that a secure Internet is currently under threat.
I recently wrote about how cybersecurity is a shared responsibility. Governments, technology companies and users need to work together to strengthen cybersecurity. Mozilla knows that even one weak link — be it technical or legislative — can break the chain of security and put Internet users at risk. The chain only remains strong if technology companies, governments and users work together to keep the Internet as secure as it can be.
You can help Mozilla stand up for a more secure Internet. We’re asking readers to pen a Letter to the Editor to their local newspaper in response to this week’s Senate hearings, and support personal security and privacy online. Get started here.
If you're involved with DevOps and web development, you're probably very aware of many of the tools from the open standards and open source arenas that can make your work easier. Still, these are always spreading out at a fast clip and there are some applications and tools that are rarely discussed. Here at OStatic, we try to regularly update our collections focused on them. In this post, you'll find numerous and updated free resources for web development that range from complete online courses available for free to unsung applications.
OpenBSD as WiFi access points look set to be making a comeback in the near future.
With this diff https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=148396652007923&w=2, Stefan Sperling added 802.11n hostap mode, with full support initially for the Atheros chips supported by the athn(4) driver.
"Of course it runs NetBSD." This is the motto that welcomes users when visiting the official website of the NetBSD project, an open-source Unix-like operating system based on the latest BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) technologies and designed to be secure, fast, highly portable, and free.
NetBSD is on the market since April 1993, so after 24 years it is safe to say that it's one of the most reliable operating systems ever made for large-scale server systems, but it can be successfully used on desktops, as well as on embedded and handheld devices. The current stable version of the OS is NetBSD 7.0.2, released last year in October.
Matthew Dillon's latest work on the DragonFlyBSD kernel includes steps towards supporting NUMA-awareness, locking, and other memory allocation related changes.
It has been a busy year for the FSFE. Upholding the principles of Free Software and protecting citizens' from being exploited are ongoing challenges we tackled from a variety of angles. We (and by "we", we mean the staff and volunteers at the FSFE) pored over hundreds of pages of policies and legislations, looking for loopholes through which Free Software could be attacked.
We travelled to events all over Europe, often carrying with us dozens of heavy boxes of merchandising, to explain what Free Software is all about as speakers and attendees. We have organised our own events too including our first international summit.
Whether for budgetary, philosophical, or other reasons, an increasing number of embedded systems are being designed using open source elements. For the most part, these elements are software based, although there are some open source board designs in use as well. Now, the microcontroller that empowers a PCB design is available as an open source design.
A little over a month ago, startup SiFive announced a milestone product in the development of the RISC-V (pronounced risk-five) open source microprocessor instruction set architecture (ISA). Originally developed for research and education, the architecture began moving toward industry implementation with the creation of the RISC-V Foundation in 2015. SiFive advanced that movement by developing a microcontroller design implementing the RISC-V ISA. The company has now proven that design in silicon and donated the RTL code for the design to the open source community.
The automotive industry has always been capital-intensive and therefore, it has often been difficult for startups to carve themselves a space in it. But the electric vehicle revolution is disrupting the industry enough that it is opening up opportunities for startups to accelerate the pace of innovation.
OSVehicle, a company based in Italia, is trying to help them to just that with their new platform.
They released the second generation of the TABBY EVO, an open-source hardware platform to develop electric vehicles and electric vehicle parts. The platform enables companies or individuals wishing to develop parts for electric vehicles, or even full EVs, to leapfrog some of the development and test the parts in an open platform.
The Renault POM represents the first foray by a big automaker into truly open-sourcing its vehicle platform.
The reasons for learning to program are as a varied as the people who want to learn. You might have a program you want to make, or maybe you just want to jump in. So, before choosing your first programming language, ask yourself: Where do you want that program to run? What do you want that program to do?
The first release candidate of Google's Go 1.8 programming language is now available ahead of the official launch expected next month.
Go 1.8 now has 32-bit MIPS LE/BE Linux support, this will be the last release with Linux ARMv5E/ARMv6 support (Go 1.9 will likely still support though the ARMv6K for the RPi1), the Assembler supports more instructions, the new 64-bit x86 back-end is now much more mature, and there are a variety of library changes.
One possibility is that tools like version control systems were not designed to be used in production environments. For example, giving someone permission to push to the testing branch but not the production branch is not possible. The most common objection to this scheme is that if a vulnerability were discovered, you would want to mark certain commits as inaccessible. This would be another case of finer grained permissions; developers would have read access to all commits, but external users would not. We might need some additional engineering for existing tools to support this paradigm, but the features are easily understood and have been engineered into other software artifacts. For example, Linux (or PostgreSQL) implements the idea of fine grained permissions for different users.
Fedora 26 will likely be using GCC 7 as its default compiler.
This shouldn't come as a big surprise since Fedora usually always ships with the latest stable GNU Compiler Collection release. GCC 7.1, the first stable GCC 7 version, should be out in late March or early April while it's just about in the final state of development and could allow GCC 7 being added to F26/Rawhide very soon.
Three weeks from today should mark a new release of the GNU C Library, glibc 2.25, and it's coming with many feature additions.
Singapore’s shipping ports are already among the busiest and most efficient in the world. Now the city-state is exploring a new way to make them run even better: convoys of driverless trucks operating between terminals. The idea is that a lead truck will be driven by a human, with the follower vehicles being automated.
This week, authorities signed agreements (pdf) with two truck makers with strong track records in self-driving technology— Sweden’s Scania and Japan’s Toyota Tsusho—to work on the project. In the first phase, lasting about a year and starting this month, each company will design, develop, and test a truck platooning system in their respective countries. In the second, one company will be chosen for local trials on a 10 km (6.2 miles) stretch of Singapore’s West Coast Highway, hauling cargo between the Brani and Pasir Panjang terminals.
Nurses say conditions in the NHS are the worst they have experienced, the Royal College of Nursing has said.
In a separate move, 50 leading doctors have warned the prime minster in a letter that lives are being put at risk due to mounting pressures on the NHS.
Charities working with elderly people said long-term solutions were needed, with a similar call from a group of Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem MPs.
Health officials said they were investing more in care.
A senior research fellow at the security company ESET has cast doubts on whether a new variant of the KillDisk malware is really ransomware, saying whatever ransomware characteristics it exhibits may just be a "skin" used to mask the real motives of the attackers.
[...]
KillDisk in its earlier form was disk-wiping malware and was used in an attack on a power station in the Ukraine in 2015.
FitzGerald described KillDisk, be it the Linux variant or the older Windows variant, as "the nuclear option".
US OFFICIALS have issued a warning about a brand of pacemaker which can be sent doolally by cyber criminals.
The St Jude Medical cardiac device range uses a feature called "[email protected]" which sends continuous data to ensure the system is working properly.
[...]
The problem isn't a new one. Former Vice President Dick Cheney had communication to his pacemaker deactivated in case of an attempt on his cyborg life with a hack. The plot device was later used in an episode of heavy-breathing real-time drama 24.
Last month, a group of researchers from Belgium and the UK joined forces on a paper warning of the dangers of cardiac meddling, with devices often not regularly patched, a problem it described as "insecurity by obscurity". The team went on to suggest several possible solutions such as permanent signal jamming which is then manually turned off by the user for long enough to download the update.
Businesses and development teams are rushing to embrace DevOps so they can be more agile, deploy code more quickly, and provide more value to their customers. Hallmarks of DevOps initiatives are support for significant automation, flexible provisioning, and cultural support for shared responsibilities. This often makes security teams uncomfortable, and they find themselves on the receiving end of this trend with little power to stop or even slow these changes. But the shift to DevOps does open a window of opportunity for security teams to exert influence and improve the security of applications.
On January 11, Canonical released the first security patches of 2017 to address up to four Linux kernel vulnerabilities in all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems.
These days, Canonical only releases security fixes as a pack, for all Ubuntu releases, and the first one for the new year isn't even all that big. There are two security issues affecting Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), three flaws affecting Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and four affecting Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).
The first vulnerability affected all releases and was discovered by Dmitry Vyukov in Linux kernel's KVM implementation, which couldn't properly initialize the Code Segment (CS) in certain error cases, allowing a local attacker to expose sensitive information from kernel memory. The issue is documented as CVE-2016-9756 for more information, as it affects other Linux distributions.
Hortonworks today announced it is working with Neustar in an open source technology collaboration to develop more effective and easy-to-use Internet-of-Things (IoT) device identification and security solutions
The photos posted on the website of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) show the group's members participating in a boot camp with members of the Indonesian Armed Forces.
The FPI is a hardline group that wants the imposition of Sharia law across Indonesia, and has been campaigning against Indonesian minority groups, like Chinese Christians.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange used data from the blockchain as a "proof of life" during a Reddit ask-me-anything session today.
For months, some of Assange's ardent Internet fans have been theorizing that he had died. However, Assange responded in a livestreamed talk, calling the theories "silly" and confirming that the video wasn't prerecorded by reading off the most recent block hash (a string of letters and numbers, unique to block 447506 on the bitcoin blockchain).
There had been some speculation that Mr. Assange was dead or lost control of his online identity. Instead of holding up today’s newspaper, as might have happened historically, the Australia-native used the blockchain technology to prove he is alive, contained at the Ecuadorian embassy.
This explains how the rough estimates of the area occupied by sheep in the UK were derived.
By George Monbiot, published on monbiot.com, 11th January 2017.
The total average consumption of lamb and mutton in the UK, both in and out of the home, is, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, 5.0kg per person per year.
100g of lamb contains approximately 294kcal.
So approximate annual average calorie intake from lamb is 14,700kcal. Annual average total calorie intake per person in the UK is approximately 1,250,000 kcal. Therefore lamb provides roughly 1.18% of our calories.
Imports and exports are almost exactly balanced.
The UK’s total cropped area is easy to come by. It is given by the government as 4,722,000 hectares. But there are no comparable figures for sheep grazing.
ExxonMobil did business with Iran, Syria and Sudan through a European subsidiary while President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of State was a top executive of the oil giant and those countries were under U.S. sanctions as state sponsors of terrorism, Securities and Exchange Commission filings show.
That business connection is likely to surface Wednesday at a confirmation hearing for ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The sales were conducted in 2003, 2004 and 2005 by Infineum, in which ExxonMobil owned a 50% share, according to SEC documents unearthed by American Bridge, a Democratic research group.
One of the enduring achievements of the coalition government – an achievement that had and has strong all-party support – is the green investment bank. Since its creation in 2012 it has built a reputation for financially sound investments in green projects, and is recognised, inside and outside government, to be a success story that’s being copied elsewhere. Yet it is at risk of being broken up and destroyed, with its green purpose lost.
The idea for the bank was conceived in the wake of the financial crisis, and sought to address the lack of long-term finance for projects that have both commercial and environmental value. David Cameron was at that time passing through a green phase and his ministers were supportive. My Liberal Democrat colleagues were enthusiastic and I was charged with establishing the bank in the Department of Business. The only controversy was the scale of ambition. Some of us wanted the bank to have borrowing powers, but this ran into implacable Treasury opposition, and so the bank was launched with €£2bn of government equity capital, aiming to attract private investment alongside this. Despite some opposition from the London banking community, I made the decision to locate the bank in Edinburgh.
Theresa May has been urged to stop the Green Investment Bank being “killed off” by a sale to private firm Macquarie, amid fears the assets will be stripped and its environmental purpose abandoned.
MPs from across the parties raised concerns about the proposed sale in the House of Commons, after Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green party, called a debate arguing the whole process should be stopped.
From the fancy French-style cafes to the fancy malls of capital city Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire has been a picture of economic stability and rapid growth in recent years. But the political instability that returned to the West African country this month could easily see it lose its position as Africa’s fastest growing economy.
Investors would have been unnerved by a 48-hour mutiny within the fragmented Ivorian army that threatens the economic prosperity the country has built since the 2011 post-election conflict.
There's an important vote by MEPs on the ENVI committee tomorrow about CETA, the trade deal between the EU and Canada. Background on why CETA is so bad for the environment is available, as is a list of all MEPs on the ENVI committee. If one of them is your MEP, please write to them *today* - the vote is tomorrow.
The heir-apparent of Samsung has been pulled into the bribery scandal that sparked the impeachment of South Korea's president.
Lee Jae-yong has been ordered by special prosecutors to answer questions about the enormous donations made by Samsung to a number of foundations run by a close associate of President Park Geun-hye, Choi Soon-sil.
Senator John McCain passed documents to the FBI director, James Comey, last month alleging secret contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow and that Russian intelligence had personally compromising material on the president-elect himself.
The material, which has been seen by the Guardian, is a series of reports on Trump’s relationship with Moscow. They were drawn up by a former western counter-intelligence official, now working as a private consultant. BuzzFeed on Tuesday published the documents, which it said were “unverified and potentially unverifiable”.
Donald Trump and his lawyer on Tuesday night denied allegations in an explosive, unverified dossier that describes a purported Russian operation to compromise Trump.
Trump tweeted that the document, which was referred to in a CNN report and later published in full on BuzzFeed News, was “FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!”
Trump was reacting to allegations in a memo originating from research reportedly compiled by a former British intelligence officer that purports to show that the Russian government has compromising information on Trump.
The much-anticipated Office of the Director of Intelligence (DNI) Report—the combined assessment of the CIA, FBI, DHS and others—on alleged attempts by Russia to influence the 2016 election was released on Friday to a combination of uncritical boosting and underwhelmed perplexity. To many, it was further proof of Russia’s involvement in the DNC and Podesta hacks; to others–even to typically bullish Daily Beast–it was remarkably thin on details and evidence.
The recent hysteria surrounding Russia’s alleged interference with the November presidential elections saw another episode after an intelligence report, jointly elaborated by the CIA, FBI and NSA, was released on Friday, January 6th.
After weeks of bombshell headlines based on statements from anonymous intelligence officials, western media finally had an official intelligence report to support their bombshell headlines. Unsurprisingly, all headlines look very similar, with the Guardian even changing the title of their main story after realising it was not menacing enough.
The outgoing Obama administration apparently isn’t quite finished politicizing intelligence for the purpose of propaganda.
With his final term coming to an end, U.S. President Barack Obama has signed an executive order to address a “national emergency with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities.” The order sanctions Russia’s military and foreign intelligence agencies and their senior officials, three Russian technology companies, and two alleged hackers of Russian and Latvian citizenship. The order also calls for the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats, who were given 72 hours to leave the U.S. The take-home message, dutifully conveyed in the press and now widely accepted as gospel, is that Russia hacked the American election.
On 9 January RT hosted a live streamed debate on its news show about the US intelligence report that attempted to prove that Russia had “hacked” the US election.
Also in the debate were former CIA Director, James Woolsey, and former CIA intelligence officer, Larry Johnson.
President Obama used his farewell speech here on Tuesday to outline the gathering threats to American democracy and press a more optimistic vision for a country that seems more politically divided than ever.
Obama said goodbye to the nation against the backdrop of one of the most corrosive elections in U.S. history and a deep sense that the poisonous political environment has pitted Americans against each other.
It’s hard to put a finger on what the main message coming from the Labour party was on Tuesday. Overnight they released lines from a speech which suggested they were stepping back from their commitment to free movement. Then, when given a chance to clarify his position on free movement and membership of the single market, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn shifted focus to his thoughts on a maximum wage for top earners. By lunchtime Labour seemed to be back in favour of free movement. When the speech was finally made in the afternoon Corbyn said that "Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle, but I don’t want that to be misinterpreted, nor do we rule it out". Well that, as they say, is about as clear as mud.
Is Corbyn toying with following the likes of MPs such as Stephen Kinnock and Emma Reynolds in backing away from a previous commitment to free movement within Europe? If so, that isn’t just profoundly disappointing to those of us who respect his track record of standing up for people no matter where they come from. It is also a gift to the Tories’ march towards a hard Brexit.
The presidency is not going to change Donald Trump. Donald Trump is going to change the presidency.
The president-elect’s chaotic first news conference, two months after his victory shocked the world, unfolded much as his campaign did: defiant, with attacks on his opponents, memorable one-liners (“I’m also very much of a germophobe, by the way”), a deluge of news (he announced a cabinet secretary) and some of the toughest questions elided or ignored, including on his potential ethical and financial conflicts and on new reports of alleged contact between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government.
A majority of Republican voters likely to cast ballots in November want to see Donald Trump's tax returns, according to the results of the latest national Quinnipiac University survey, out Thursday.
Among all likely voters surveyed, 74 percent said the businessman should release his tax returns, while 21 percent said they do not think he should. More than six in 10 Republican voters, 62 percent to 31 percent, said they would like to see their party's nominee do so. The share of Republicans calling on Trump to release his returns is actually the lowest among all demographic and ideological groups, with at least two in three of all other groups expressing a desire to see them.
President-elect Donald Trump was not told about unverified reports that Russia has compromising information on him during last week's intelligence briefing, according to a senior intelligence official with knowledge of preparations for the briefing.
A summary of the unverified reports was prepared as background material for the briefing, but not discussed during the meeting, the official said. During Trump's press conference Wednesday morning, the president-elect said he was made aware of the information "outside that meeting."
At his Wednesday morning press conference — his first since winning the election more than two months ago — Donald Trump, the president-elect, stood beside a pile of paperwork and attempted to explain how he would separate himself from Donald Trump, the brand. Rather than putting his assets into a blind trust, as many have recommended for America’s first billionaire president, Trump said he would turn day-to-day control of his business over to two his children and a longtime Trump Organization executive. He also reneged on a promise that there would be “no new deals” done during his time in office.
Trump’s proposal, arriving nine days before he assumes the presidency, comes after weeks of delays and public feuding with the Office of Government Ethics, the federal office that is supposed to oversee potential conflicts of interests.
On November 30, Trump said he would discuss his potential business conflicts at a “major news conference,” which he subsequently cancelled. On December 12, he broadened the conference’s agenda and put it off until “the near future.” Trump tweeted that same day that “no new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.”
I fear that soon the curtain will finally be brought down on the puppet show that passes for democracy in America, and those who for decades have been pulling the strings will come raging into the light, red in tooth and claw. The illusion that the people really have a choice of president every four years will be irreparably shattered.
The old British truism that “it does not matter whom you vote for, the government always gets in” can also be applied to the US presidency – usually all candidates are approved and massively funded by the modern incarnation of Eisenhower’s infamous “military-industrial complex” and then assiduously supported by cheerleaders in the old corporate media, leaving the electorate with damn little meaningful choice.
This has been true from Reagan to Bush the First, from Clinton the First to Bush the Second and then on to Obama (the First?). It was supposed to have been true in the most recent election, where the elite’s choice pointed towards a contest between Bush the Third or Clinton the Second, either one of whom would have worked to the interests of Wall Street and continued the increasingly dangerous, interventionist, and hawkish global US foreign policy.
The Italian government recently called for the introduction of Internet censorship in their country as political elites struggle to accept last year's historic events, including Brexit and the failure of the Italian referendum, according to independent political commentator Marco Fontana.
As you may have heard, last week we were sued for $15 million by Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims to have invented email. We have written, at great length, about his claims and our opinion — backed up by detailed and thorough evidence — that email existed long before Ayyadurai created any software. We believe the legal claims in the lawsuit are meritless, and we intend to fight them and to win.
There is a larger point here. Defamation claims like this can force independent media companies to capitulate and shut down due to mounting legal costs. Ayyadurai's attorney, Charles Harder, has already shown that this model can lead to exactly that result. His efforts helped put a much larger and much more well-resourced company than Techdirt completely out of business.
So, in our view, this is not a fight about who invented email. This is a fight about whether or not our legal system will silence independent publications for publishing opinions that public figures do not like.
And here's the thing: this fight could very well be the end of Techdirt, even if we are completely on the right side of the law.
When Microsoft launched its new search engine Bing in 2009, it wasted no time in trying to get the word out. By striking a deal with the producers of the American teen drama Gossip Girl, it made a range of beautiful characters utter the words “Bing it!” in a way that fell clumsily on the audience’s ears. By the early Noughties, “search it” had already been universally replaced by the words “Google it”, a phrase that had become so ubiquitous that anything else sounded odd.
And that, right there, is why we have strong defamation laws. Even if you dislike Trump and what he stands for (and if you dislike his petty squabbles on Twitter), you should celebrate this ruling for a variety of reasons: it upholds the First Amendment and supports free expression online and it helps demonstrate to Trump himself how important the protections built into our defamation laws today can be.
A Texas cyberbullying law is running into unexpected opposition. The law [PDF], which would criminalize any "electronic harassment or bullying" of anyone under the age of 18, is intended to give schools more resources to deal with cyberbullying. Of course, the law would also extend schools' reach beyond the confines of the campus, allowing them to take control of off-campus behavior.
It's one thing if this was limited to disciplinary action by the school. It still would be an extension of government power, but at least the damage done would be limited to in-school punishments. (That's still a significant amount of damage, considering school disciplinary actions cover things like extended suspensions and expelling students -- neither of which do much to alter troubled students' futures in any positive way.)
Turning this into a criminal act means schools will become even more instrumental in routing students into juvenile detention centers and local jails. This is what has advocates for the health and safety of children concerned.
A judge refused Tuesday to dismiss a lawsuit claiming the National Security Agency conducted a mass warrantless surveillance program during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
A bid to dismiss a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) over claims they conducted a surveillance programme during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City without warrants has been rejected in the United States.
A judge for the US District Court for the District of Utah [official site] on Tuesday refused [opinion, PDF] to dismiss a complaint against the National Security Agency (NSA) [official website] over allegations of warrantless surveillance during the 2002 winter Olympic games. The case [materials] includes individuals who allege their communication devices were searched and seized by the NSA during the games. The plaintiffs further allege the NSA is currently storing a massive amount of data collected from them and the majority of individuals in the Salt Lake area. The NSA filed the motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs' assertions are implausible and without factual support.
Online messaging services such as WhatsApp, Skype, and Gmail face a crackdown on a "void of protection" that allows them to routinely track the data of EU citizens without regulatory scrutiny—and it could be bad news for ad sales.
On Tuesday, officials in Brussels proposed new measures to curb Silicon Valley players who—up until now—have been largely immune from the ePrivacy Directive, which requires telecoms operators to adhere to the rules on the confidentiality of communications and the protection of personal data.
Tough new rules on tracking users by messaging services, laid out by the European Commission in a revision of its ePrivacy Directive, will affect WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Gmail among others.
The measures proposed will update existing privacy rules that only apply to telecommunications providers at the moment, according to an EC statement.
"Privacy rules will now also cover new providers of electronic communications services, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Gmail, iMessage, or Viber," the EC said.
Twitter has cut off another social media "surveillance" company from using its API. To date, the platform has forced third-party Dataminr to cut off connections to the CIA, DHS/law enforcement "fusion centers," and Geofeedia. All of these denials of service were the result of the company's policy against use of its API for surveillance.
Very little of what was being done could truly be considered "surveillance," since Dataminr's access to basically every tweet produced did nothing but cull data from public accounts. What Twitter seemed to have more of a problem with was the marketing tactics of companies like Geofeedia, which insinuated their products were perfectly suited for keeping tabs on First Amendment-protected activity, like protests.
As for the CIA and DHS, Twitter apparently felt these government agencies were far more involved in surveillance than the FBI, which just signed a contract with Dataminr for access to its every-tweet-ever API.
A girl aged 10 who worked as a maid for a Pakistani judge shows signs of having been tortured, a medical board says.
The girl suffered injuries including burns to her hands and feet, the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences has said.
Police told the BBC the girl had worked for Islamabad judge Raja Khurram Ali Khan for the past two years. He has not yet commented.
The case has caused a furore in Pakistan.
Mumbai: A 55-year-old man’s plan to sleep at night in the quiet confines of a mosque in Airoli on Wednesday went horribly wrong when he was beaten to death for unknown reasons. Police said Istiak Ahmad Roshan Ali Shaikh, originally a resident of Uttar Pradesh, was killed around 1.20 a.m. on Thursday, allegedly by Nabi Abdul Shaikh, 40, who had also come to the mosque to sleep.
Primary investigation by the police revealed that the accused had disturbed the victim, leading to an altercation. In a fit of rage, Nabi hit Istiak on the head with an iron microphone stand, and fled. “We took the victim to hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival. We have sent the body for post mortem and are awaiting reports. The motive is still not clear; prima facie it seems like the murder happened in a fit of rage,” Senior PI Pradeep Tidar, Rabale police station, said.
While Donald Trump and the United States intelligence services argue over who hacked whom, it has been almost forgotten that, for a young British citizen, hacking accusations pack a much heavier punch than political point-scoring. Lauri Love, who has Asperger syndrome, is facing extradition to the US and is now awaiting a date for the appeal hearing that will determine the course of the rest of his life.
Procedure at New York's Rikers Island prison is for visitors to be subjected to a pat-down search, but women who visit their loved ones are suing the New York Department of Corrections because guards there subject them to illegal, violent, humiliating strip and cavity searches, sometimes holding them down while forcibly penetrating them with their fingers.
Visitors are routinely forced to show their vulvas to guards and remove their tampons to "prove they are menstruating" and one woman had a guard forcefully shove her tampon so far into her body that she couldn't remove it.
The New York Department of Corrections has previously settled multiple lawsuits for improper strip-searches of arrestees, paying $50M in one case and $33M in another. The lawyers representing the Rikers visitors say that the humiliating searches they are subjected to are so consistent and routine that they represent a kind of shadow-policy that guards must be trained in, in violation of official DoC policy.
President Obama has put Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst serving a 35-year sentence for leaking classified material, on his short list for a possible commutation, a Justice Department source told NBC News.
A decision could come as soon as Wednesday for Manning, who has tried to commit suicide twice this year and went on a hunger strike in a bid for gender reassignment surgery.
"I have more hope right now than I have the entire time since she was sentenced," Manning's aunt, Deborah Manning, told NBC News.
The joke about asset forfeiture is that it's actually not a joke. Advisors to law enforcement have actually said it's a great way for cops to go shopping for things they want. It's not just cash being taken, although it's primarily that. It's vehicles, too. And when that just doesn't seem to be enough, it's houses. And everything in them.
So, the "going shopping" joke is one very dark punchline. Here's another one: "take everything that isn't nailed down." Except that this actually happens. And it includes things that are nailed down. Reason's C.J. Ciaramella has more details.
It was the first time in Mississippi defense attorney Richard Rehfeldt's long career that he can remember where police seized a client's furniture.
In 2012, Rehfeldt says the Hind County Sheriff's Office raided his client's apartment on suspicion her boyfriend was a drug dealer. Anything purchased with drug proceeds is fair game to be seized by police under civil asset forfeiture laws, and they determined the boyfriend had furnished the apartment, so off went her TV, her table and chairs, her couch, her lamps, and even the pictures on the wall.
Within Karl Bode's post about Verizon's insistence that all of the people who continue to use grandfathered unlimited data plans don't actually exist was a brief note about the company's decision to increase the cost to upgrade the phones themselves. As mentioned in the post, Verizon claimed that the reason to push upgrade costs from $20 to $30 was due to increasing costs. Fleshing that out a tiny bit, a Verizon spokesman commented for Ars Technica.
AT&T continues to try and sell regulators on the company's $100 billion acquisition of Time Warner, making all kinds of promises (few actually being true). Consumer advocates are highly wary of the deal, arguing that a more powerful AT&T (with its rich history of anti-competitive behavior and outright fraud) would be in a perfect position to hinder streaming competitors from licensing the content they need to compete. That's of course when AT&T isn't busy giving its own DirecTV Now service an unfair market advantage via zero rating and usage caps.
But AT&T's path to merger completion just got a bit easier. Outlets had been noting for some time that an FCC review would only be triggered if AT&T attempted a transfer of the two dozen or so Time Warner satellite licenses or the station license for WPCH-TV in Atlanta. Avoid those, and you avoid even a possibility that the FCC could block the deal or saddle it with conditions. And that's precisely what AT&T appears intent on doing according to a new regulatory filing with the SEC...
Last month, we recognized that while it was still a long shot, it was interesting that the Iceland Pirate Party actually had a chance to form the new government there. A few previous efforts had failed and the job had fallen to the Pirate Party. However, it didn't take long for reports to leak out that the Pirate Party was having trouble building a coalition that would form the new government.
Iceland's center-right Independence, Reform and Bright Future parties have agreed to form a coalition government and will give parliament a vote on whether to hold a referendum on joining the European Union.
Together, the coalition will hold 32 of the 63 seats in parliament. The Independence Party will have 21 seats, making it the largest party in the coalition. However, it opposes EU membership while the other two parties both favor it.
The Independence and Reform parties accepted the agreement on Monday, Icelandic media reported. Bright Future said it had backed the deal in a vote overnight. The agreement ends a political impasse since a general election in October.
RÃÅ¡V reports that the joint platform and ministerial positions will be announced tomorrow, but sources say the Independence Party will likely get five ministerial seats, as well as the Parliamentary President position, while the Reform Party will have three ministerial posts and Bright Future will get two.
The President had originally given the mandate to form a coalition to the Independence Party. Coalition talks between the Independence Party, the Reform Party and Bright Future broke down last November, as they could not reach an agreement on a common platform; most notably, regarding the management of fisheries and the question of a public referendum on accession to the European Union.
The Panama Papers came back to haunt Iceland's right-wing parties Monday as they prepare to form a new government, after the candidate for prime minister admitted hiding a report on offshore accounts.
Iceland was rocked in April when the Panama Papers revealed a global tax evasion scandal that ensnared several senior politicians and triggered the resignation of former prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, with snap elections held on October 29.