06.24.17
Links 24/6/2017: GNOME Music Improves, FreeBSD 11.1 Beta 3
Contents
GNU/Linux
-
EV3DEV Lego Linux Updated
The ev3dev Linux distribution got an update this month. The distribution targets the Lego EV3 which is a CPU Lego provides to drive their Mindstorm robots. The new release includes the most recent kernel and updates from Debian 8.8. It also contains tools needed for some Wi-Fi dongles and other updates.
-
Desktop
-
How Vigo Council migrated to Linux
Firstly, let me introduce the IT part of the Vigo council. They have close to 1000 workstations, and they need to help all the citizen (around 300K). All the people that work in the council are public employees, so sometimes they are not that proactive, something hey made Hugo’s team be aware from the beginning that the change would be difficult.
Over 2007, the IT department had multiple problems, all the workstations were pretty old, all the OS has self-login activated without any central credentials manager, workstations stored all the data, and sometimes user lost work. Besides, the council did not have much money (Spanish financial crisis had just started), and invest in IT was not a priority.
Due to budget problems, the first idea that they had was to start to use OpenOffice, so that they can save money from Microsoft Office licenses. Over three months one guy provided support around custom macros and other issues. After these months all the people were using the OpenOffice suite. To avoid problems they have some Workstations with Microsoft office to deal with non-compatible files, but the small migration was made without much trouble.
-
Libreboot T400: A GNU+Linux laptop that respects your freedom
The Libreboot T400 is certified by the Free Software Foundation, under their Respects Your Freedom hardware certification program. It is now available at a reduced price without any binary blobs or backdoors in BIOS. The Libreboot T400 comes without the Intel Management Engine.
-
Seven Great Ways To Talk About Linux
I asked Twitter how they talk about Linux to the uninitiated. Here are their responses!
-
Advantages Of Using Linux Over Windows
Odds are you may have noticed that the open source nature of Linux is behind many of its advantages, and that is something that Windows simply can’t match. Make no mistake Windows does have several areas where it is stronger than Linux as well, but in some cases Linux is definitely the far superior option. At very least you should now be aware of the reasons why you may want to experiment with Linux or even use it as your primary operating system.
-
Purism Librem 13 / 15 Laptops Hit GA Status
Purism has announced their privacy-minded Coreboot-friendly Librem laptops have reached a general availability state.
Purism will now be holding an inventory of their Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops for quicker shipping rather than everything being made-to-order.
While this means users will no longer need to wait “months” when ordering a Librem 13/15 laptop, it still doesn’t sound like it will be a very quick turnaround time. Their press release announcing the GA state says, “will now arrive in user’s hands a few weeks after purchase.”
-
-
Server
-
The What, Why and Wow! Behind the CoreOS Container Linux
Unlike most Linux distributions, CoreOS doesn’t have a package manager. Instead it takes a page from Google’s ChromeOS and automates software updates to ensure better security and reliability of machines and containers running on clusters. Both operating system updates and security patches are regularly pushed to CoreOS Container Linux machines without sysadmin intervention.
You control how often patches are pushed using CoreUpdate, with its web-based interface. This enables you to control when your machines update, and how quickly an update is rolled out across your cluster.
-
Linux is Running on Almost All of the Top 500 Supercomputers
Linux is still running on more than 99% of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. Same as last year, 498 out of top 500 supercomputers run Linux while remaining 2 run Unix.
-
Alioth moving toward pagure
Since 2003, the Debian project has been running a server called Alioth to host source code version control systems. The server will hit the end of life of the Debian LTS release (Wheezy) next year; that deadline raised some questions regarding the plans for the server over the coming years. Naturally, that led to a discussion regarding possible replacements.
In response, the current Alioth maintainer, Alexander Wirt, announced a sprint to migrate to pagure, a free-software “Git-centered forge” written in Python for the Fedora project, which LWN covered last year. Alioth currently runs FusionForge, previously known as GForge, which is the free-software fork of the SourceForge code base when that service closed its source in 2001. Alioth hosts source code repositories, mainly Git and Subversion (SVN) and, like other “forge” sites, also offers forums, issue trackers, and mailing list services. While other alternatives are still being evaluated, a consensus has emerged on a migration plan from FusionForage to a more modern and minimal platform based on pagure.
-
-
Kernel Space
-
[Older] The trouble with SMC-R [Ed: these used to be behind a paywall, but not anymore]
-
[Older] Revisiting “too small to fail”
-
[Older] Containers as kernel objects
-
[Older] The “rare write” mechanism
-
[Older] Toward non-blocking asynchronous I/O
-
[Older] Improved block-layer error handling
-
[Older] Waiting for entropy
-
[Older] Range reader/writer locks for the kernel
-
[Older] Shrinking the scheduler
-
[Older] A survey of scheduler benchmarks
-
Linux 4.11.7
I’m announcing the release of the 4.11.7 kernel.
All users of the 4.11 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.11.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.11.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…
-
Linux 4.9.34
-
[PATCH 4.4 00/30] 4.4.74-stable review
-
[PATCH 3.18 00/32] 3.18.58-stable review
-
Graphics Stack
-
AMDGPU VRAM Improvements Could Help DiRT Rally, Dying Light
A patch series posted on Friday could help games suffering from visible video memory pressure when using the AMDGPU DRM driver.
Independent developer John Brooks has posted a set of nine patches for improving the driver’s performance when limited CPU-visible video memory is under pressure.
-
Understanding Xwayland – Part 1 of 2
In this week’s article for my ongoing Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project I planned on writing about the basic idea behind the project, but I reconsidered and decided to first give an overview on how Xwayland functions on a high-level and in the next week take a look at its inner workings in detail. The reason for that is, that there is not much Xwayland documentation available right now. So these two articles are meant to fill this void in order to give interested beginners a helping hand. And in two weeks I’ll catch up on explaining the project’s idea.
[...]
In the second part next week we’ll have a close look at the Xwayland code to see how Xwayland fills its role as an Xserver in regards to its X based clients and at the same time acts as a Wayland client when facing the Wayland compositor.
-
-
-
Applications
-
Top 10 best Linux apps of 2017
While everyone knows that most Linux distributions (distros) are free to download, not everybody is aware that you also have access to thousands of cost-free applications through your operating system’s package manager.
Many of the more user-friendly distros will come with a selection of software preinstalled to help you get started, but there are many more apps out in the wild, under continuous development.
In this guide we’ll highlight 10 of the best desktop applications for Linux. All of these programs can be installed either via the command line or by using a graphical frontend to your package manager.
-
7 Awesome ChatOps Open Source Software For Conversation-driven Development and Management
A software bot is nothing but a set of scripts or an independent program that connects to web services or chat services as a client to perform automated functions. Often, bots are deployed from a server. It runs in background and performer various activities such as giving out information, providing an answer to common questions, deleting spam and much more. Here is a list of 7 of them that you must know.
-
Cool-Retro-Term is a great Mimic of old Command Lines, Install in Ubuntu/Linux Mint
Cool-retro-term is a free terminal emulator developed by Filippo Scognamiglio, it mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens. If you are tired of your current terminal than it comes in hand as eye-candy, it is customizable and reasonably lightweight terminal emulator. It uses the Konsole engine which is powerful and mature, it requires Qt 5.2 or higher to run terminal emulator.
-
Calibre eBook Library and Editor and Library Now Support Latest Kobo Device
Calibre is an eBook management software that is almost without equal, on any platform that runs it. A few years ago nobody could anticipate that eBooks will take our lives completely, but the rise of eBook readers and the fact that most books are cheaper in digital form, proves that it was inevitable for someone to take matters in his own hands and develop something that can actually manage an entire library.
-
Are You Using Linux On Laptop? If Yes Then Try this Brightness Controller Program
If you are using Linux on your Laptop then you have been using builtin brightness functionality which doesn’t offer much but to increase and decrease brightness. Brightness Controller offers more functionality than builtin one, it is written in Python programming language and Pyside, it works with Pyton2 version.
It lets you control the brightness, Color temperature of the display and RGB as well. You can control all these values from 1% to 100%, apart from hardware brightness control which lets you control the brightness like 10% 20% 40% and so on. It should be mentioned that it changes the present brightness value set via hardware control of your monitor. For example, if you set your Monitor’s brightness to 50% using hardware buttons, then that will be the 100% value in Brightness controller. It also supports arbitrary number of displays, further more you can save current configuration profile and load them as you need.
-
[Older] What’s new in gnuplot 5.2
This article is a tour of some of the newest features in the gnuplot plotting utility. Some of these features are already present in the 5.0 release, and some are planned for the next official release, which will be gnuplot 5.2. Highlights in the upcoming release include hypertext labels, more control over axes, a long-awaited ability to add labels to contours, better lighting effects, and more; read on for the details.
Most of the examples in this article should work as-is in the 5.2 alpha release when it is available; they should also work with latest development version, the source for which can be downloaded from the repository and compiled. There is also a new stable branch for 5.2 that was established as this article was written; this may be the best choice for users who want the latest features and don’t mind compiling themselves.
For an introduction to gnuplot — what it is, where it comes from, how to compile and install, and how to get started using it — please refer to our earlier article.
-
Nix, the purely functional package manager
The problem of course, is that the current code has not been designed with typing in mind. This code as it stands will probably never type check in any reasonable static type system. But thanks to the wonders of gradual typing, this isn’t a real problem: we just have to gradually type the untypeable part. Furthermore, we had the chance of having Jeremy Siek − the inventor of gradual typing − in Paris for a month, and he provided us some substantial help in designing this.
-
Calibre 3.1 Open-Source Ebook Manager Released with Support for RAR 5.0 Archives
Last week’s major Calibre 3.0 update made a lot of noise among the ebook community with its new support for reading books in-browser on your phone or tablet, and now developer Kovid Goyal announces the first point release to the series.
Calibre 3.1 is out, and among the new features is ships with, we can mention support for reading RAR and CBR files compressed using the latest RAR 5.0 archiving format, a new option in the Tag browser to control the spacing between items, and new buttons to the Edit metadata dialog to easily set and clear the “Yes/No” columns.
-
conjure-up dev summary for week 25
We recently switched over to using a bundled LXD and with that change came a few hiccups in deployments. We’ve been monitoring the error reports coming in and have made several fixes to improve that journey. If you are one of the ones unable to deploy spells please give this release another go and get in touch with us if you still run into problems.
-
Proprietary
-
An alternative to Illustrator and SketchApp: Gravit tops the list
People often state that there are no alternatives to popular applications like SketchApp (for the Mac only) and Adobe Illustrator (for both the Mac and Windows) without digging into the inter-webs enough.
After hours of searching for something that lets me wire-frame like Sketch would and vector and edit images like Illustrator would, I stumbled onto Gravit. And boy, was I lucky.
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Google Summer of Code day 16
-
Google Summer of Code day 17
-
Running virt-controller locally
-
How to install and use Monit on Ubuntu/Debian Linux server as process supervision tool
-
[Older] System monitoring with osquery
-
How To Install WordPress on XAMPP on Ubuntu
-
How to Install Samba on Ubuntu for File Sharing on Windows
-
Coarse Geotagging with Bash and Google Maps
-
Linux clear command tutorial for beginners (3 examples)
-
Linux cksum command explained for beginners (with examples)
-
Debian 9 ‘stretch’ Installation Guide with Screenshots
-
CloudLayar – A Free DNS Protection for Your Website
-
Hybrid cloud from home using DigitalOcean
-
Fundamentals of Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Red Hat on edX
-
Buildah – build your containers from the ground up!
Since I’m relatively new to the world of containers and images, I was excited to learn about the Buildah tool. Especially since I’m a native New Englander and it’s a clever play on how we say Builder in these parts.
Buildah is a newly released command line tool for efficiently and quickly building Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliant images and containers. Buildah simplifies the process of creating, building and updating images while decreasing the learning curve of the container environment. It is easily scriptable and can be used in an environment where one needs to spin up containers automatically based on calls from your application. What’s really neat is there is no requirement for a container runtime daemon to be running on your system chewing up resources and complicating the build process.
-
VirtualBox Tutorial Building Virtual Machines, Snapshots, Import, Export, Mapping USB & More!
-
Build, Test, and Deploy Statically Generated Websites With Hugo
-
Install Docker in Kali Linux – Easy Way
-
Building a NodeJS web server with HAProxy and Let’s Encrypt on Debian Stretch
-
NMAP OS Detection
-
Playing With ZFS (on Linux) Encryption
-
C Build environment in a docker container
-
What I really HATE and drives people CRAZY, OpenSource, Grub 2, LUKS, UUID
-
Linux LUKS encrypted BTRFS online resize JUST WORKS!
-
How to allow root login from one IP address with ssh public keys only
-
How to install tinc VPN on Ubuntu Linux 16.04 to secure traffic
-
Handling quota notifications using netlink sockets
-
Ubuntu Virtual Machine Running on a Synology NAS
-
$Cisco high CPU usage with RPKI enabled validation
-
How to append text to a file when using sudo command on Linux or Unix
-
Accidentally overwrote a binary file on Linux? Here is how to restore it
-
How to create Multi Bootable – Multiboot USB Flash Drive
-
How to find out and show a log of actions taken by the software management on Linux
-
How to ping and test for a specific port from Linux or Unix command line
-
How to use sed to find and replace text in files in Linux / Unix shell
-
How to unzip a zip file using the Linux and Unix bash shell terminal
-
How to login with root password when using Ansible tool
-
How to use the cURL command to do a POST data to fields on Linux or Unix
-
How to list VM images in LXD (Linux Containers)
-
Google Chrome: Clear or flush the DNS cache
-
How to disable ssh motd welcome message on Ubuntu Linux
-
How To Install Nginx web server on Alpine Linux
-
How to count total number of word occurrences using grep on Linux or Unix
-
How to upload ssh public key to as authorized_key using Ansible
-
How to extract multiple tar ball (*.tar.gz) files in directory on Linux or Unix
-
Linux security alert: Bug in sudo’s get_process_ttyname() [ CVE-2017-1000367 ]
-
How to configure Nginx SSL/TLS passthrough with TCP load balancing
-
How to prevent unprivileged users from viewing dmesg command output on Linux
-
Ansible: Could not find aptitude. Please ensure it is installed Error and Solution
-
How to prevent sed -i command overwriting my symlinks on Linux or Unix
-
How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) Stack on Debian 9 Stretch
-
Ubuntu: /dev/xvda2 should be checked for errors
-
How to redirect non-www to www HTTP / TLS /SSL traffic on Nginx
-
How to run cron job every minute on Linux/Unix
-
How to find out if my Ubuntu/Debian Linux server needs a reboot
-
How to run two or multiple networks instance of Tinc VPN on same box
-
How to find and delete directory recursively on Linux or Unix-like system
-
How to add ZIL write and L2ARC read cache SSD devices in FreeNAS
-
Installing a “full” disk encrypted Ubuntu 16.04 Hetzner server
-
-
Wine or Emulation
-
Games
-
Castle Game Engine 6.2 release
We’re proud to announce the release of Castle Game Engine 6.2!
-
-
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
Budgie Desktop User? Here’s 5 Applets You Should Be Using
Are you a Budgie desktop user wanting to add a bit more functionality to your nimble, lightweight desktop? Well you can, by adding Budgie applets.
Budgie applets are like little souped-up mini-apps that live in your panel. They provide additional features and functionality in an accessible and semi-uniform manner.
You likely already have a small set of icons and applets nestled in the far reaches of your Budgie panel right now, such as the simple clock applet, Wi-Fi signal status, and volume control.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Made with Krita: Bird Brains
It’s a children’s nonfiction book, nice for adults too, by Jeremy Hyman (text) and Haude Levesque (art). All the art was made with Krita!
-
GSoC’17-Week #2
-
GSoC 2017 – A New Journey
Since last year i had a great experience with GCompris and KDE in general, i decided to apply in this year’s GSoC as well, only this time, i chose another project from KDE: Minuet.
-
Pilot a Submarine- The Submarine
In this section I will be going through how I implemented the submarine using QML. For handling physics, I used Box2D.
-
Using Compiler Explorer with Qt
One of my preferred developer tools is a web called Compiler Explorer.
-
Create a Qt Application Using QML & Qt Quick (Qt 5.9)
Learn how to use QtQuick and QML to build a simple Qt Quick Controls application that is cross-platform out of the box.
-
Latte Dock Is Working On Wayland Support, New Features
Latte Dock, the desktop dock based on KDE’s Plasma Framework and Qt, is preparing for their next release at the end of August.
Latte Dock 0.7 is expected to be the next major release of this dock and it’s slated for availability by the end of August.
-
Latte Dock accepts donations, what is coming…
to cheer you up a bit for the upcoming 0.7 version which is scheduled for the end of August or maybe earlier
based on the effort…
-
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
GNOME 3.26 Improves Control Center’s Network, Online Accounts & Printers Panels
Development of the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment continues as planned, and, as we reported earlier this week, the third milestone (GNOME 3.25.3) has been released with various updates and bug fixes across multiple components and apps.
GNOME Control Center is an essential part of the GNOME desktop, and the GNOME 3.25.3 development release adds quite a bunch of improvements enhancing the Network, Online Accounts, Printers, and Region & Language panels. While many of these improvements are mostly related to the look and feel, there’s also some new functionality implemented.
-
GNOME Music Should No Longer Be So Sluggish
Georges Stavracas’ latest work on GNOME is making the GNOME Music player less slow.
-
Even faster GNOME Music
This afternoon, I felt an urge to hear some classical music. Perhaps because I’m overworking a lot these days, I wanted to grab a good hot tea, and listen to relaxing music, and rest for a few minutes.
My player of choice is GNOME Music.
-
-
-
Distributions
-
Red Hat Family
-
Q&A: Flying the open source flag
Red Hat’s vice-president and general manager for the ASEAN region, Damien Wong, sheds light on the company’s strategy for tackling a market that is not used to paying for software
-
Coming off a strong quarter, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst talks public clouds and containers
Coming off a quarterly earnings report that shattered expectations, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst believes his company is as well-positioned to capitalize on the shift to cloud computing as it ever has been.
Red Hat is in a very interesting place in 2017, with one foot in two different eras of enterprise computing but thriving in that position instead of feeling trapped. It still makes most of its money selling Red Hat Enterprise Linux to companies running their own data centers, but it has become the de facto leader of the OpenStack cloud computing project and has interesting DevOps products in Ansible (IT automation) and OpenShift (container management).
On Tuesday, the company reported a 19 percent increase in both revenue and net income to $677 million and $73 million, respectively, during its first fiscal quarter of the year. Financial analysts, who peppered Whitehurst with more than their usual share of “Great quarter!” asides during a conference call, were expecting revenue of $648 million according to Marketwatch. The company also raised revenue guidance for its full fiscal year.
-
Fedora
-
Building Design Team Approved Presentations
Throughout the last month I’ve been working on creating an updated presentation template for the Fedora community to use. With Flock coming up quickly, there’s no better time to give these new templates a shot as a vehicle to present your talks!
-
Improving QtWebKit security for Fedora
The Qt port of the WebKit engine was unmaintained for years, until Konstantin Tokarev (also known as annulen) decided to pick it up about ten months ago. Within the last months he did an impressive job on getting QtWebKit up to date again, some days ago he released the second alpha of QtWebKit 5.212.0. As the current state of QtWebkit is really bad in Fedora, we always shipped the latest one from Qt upstream, but they did not do any backports of security fixes from upstream WebKit anymore, the KDE SIG now decided to move to the new community QtWebKit. Qt itself only supports the QtWebEngine based on Chromium, which itself has some issues (hard to maintain as we have to remove codec stuff, always some Chromium releases behind) , but more important: Many applications have not been ported and still use QtWebKit. With Konstantins work on QtWebKit it is possible to use them without all these unfixed security issues again. There are also some reasons to use QtWebKit instead of QtWebEngine, checkout the QtWebKit Wiki.
-
Earn Fedora Badges designing Badges!
Fedora Badges is a perfect place to start if you want to help out the Fedora Design Team. “I’m not a designer!” “I can’t draw!” “I’ve never opened Inkscape” – you might say. And that is totally fine! Everybody can help out, and none of those reasons will stop you from designing your first badge (and getting badges for designing badges).
-
Plex Media Player and MPV with CUDA
The Plex Media Player is now part of the multimedia repository for Fedora 25+. I works as a standalone player and also as the main interface for an HTPC setup, where the “TV interface” starts as the main thing when you power up your system.
Plex Media Player uses MPV in the background, so any compilation option that was added to MPV, is now also part of Plex Media Player by using the same libraries that were already available in the multimedia repository.
-
Fedora Games Spin 25
Fedora Games Spin can be downloaded from https://labs.fedoraproject.org/games/download/index.html. Here, you can choose from the 32- or 64-bit version of the OS. Download the version you need and save it to your hard disk.
-
-
-
Debian Family
-
[Older] Download of The Day: Debian Linux 9 ( Stretch )
Debian GNU/Linux version 9.0 stretch has been released ( jump to download ) after many months of constant development and available for download in various media format. Debian 9.0 is a free operating system includes various new features such as support for mips64el architecture, GNOME 3.22, KDE Plasma 5.8, LXDE, LXQt 0.11, MATE 1.16, Xfce 4.12, Linux kernel 4.9 and more. Debian 9 is dedicated to the project’s founder Ian Murdock, who passed away on 28 December 2015.
-
[Older] All Debian 9 Live Images Are Broken, Developers Working On a Fix
Debian 9 was just released two days ago. Most of us got excited to download the new version and see what’s new. And also to test the new images and whether a safe upgrade can be done at the moment or not.
-
Calibre 3 for Debian
I have updated my Calibre Debian repository to include packages of the current Calibre 3.1.1. As with the previous packages, I kept RAR support in to allow me to read comic books. I also have forwarded my changes to the maintainer of Calibre in Debian so maybe we will have soon official packages, too.
-
Derivatives
-
[Older] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Stretch released
Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Debian derivative aimed at making it easy to administrate a computer lab or a whole school network. Version 9 “Stretch” has been released. “Would you like to install servers, workstations and laptops which will then work together? Do you want the stability of Debian with network services already preconfigured? Do you wish to have a web-based tool to manage systems and several hundred or even more user accounts? Have you asked yourself if and how older computers could be used? Then Debian Edu is for you.”
-
Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspbian OS to Soon Be Rebased on Debian 9 “Stretch”
Raspberry Pi Foundation UX engineer Simon Long is reporting on the availability of a new stable update to the project’s Debian-based Raspbian operating system for Raspberry Pi and x86 computers.
The Raspbian 2017-06-21 images are now available for download, and besides being synced with the upstream Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” repositories to include all the latest security and software updates, they add a couple of big new changes, such as the inclusion of an offline version of Scratch 2.0 and Thonny Python IDE.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Canonical Makes It Easy to Install Unity7 on Ubuntu 17.10, GNOME Remains Default
It looks like Unity 7 is not dead yet, as Canonical’s Will Cooke is now informing the community that the Ubuntu Desktop team has been working lately on making it easier for users to install the Unity 7 session and related packages on Ubuntu 17.10.
-
Ubuntu Server Development Summary – 23 Jun 2017
-
Ubuntu 17.10 Video Acceleration Progress, New Unity-Session Package
We recently reported on Ubuntu planning to finally ship video acceleration by default, at least for Intel hardware, and they have made progress in this area.
Canonical’s Will Cooke reported in the latest Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update that they have a proof-of-concept working with Intel VA-API by making use of the Intel QuickSyncVideo support paired with GStreamer. They are able to enjoy H.264 4K video playback with around 3% CPU usage on Haswell as well as playable 4K H.264/HEVC too, for Skylake and newer.
-
Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: June 23, 2017
We’ve migrated ubuntu-session to a new unity-session package. This means that the default session is GNOME Shell and people can install Unity 7 and it’s related packages via unity-session. The migration is working well so far, but we still have some more work to do in order to make sure everything “just works”.
-
Papirus Icons Updated With Newly Designed Icons, Install in Ubuntu/Linux Mint
Papirus suite is specifically designed for KDE desktop but now the icon theme is available for other desktops as well which includes: Unity, Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon and others. Previously we had a ported version of Papirus KDE icons in the PPA but now it is directly supported and maintained by creator. There are two variants in this icon pack with light and dark panel icons, it has more than 1000 icons for different applications and still counting, if you find any missing icon then directly report it creator via Github page. There was an official PPA but discontinued back in November 2016 and now these icons can be installed via wget method. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool to change themes/icons.
-
MacBuntu Transformation Pack Ready for Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus
MacBuntu (Macbuntu Sierra/El Capitan/Yosemite) transformation pack took a little bit while to get ready for Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty but finally it’s ready for your desktop. In this pack we are offering many GTK themes targeting multiple desktops specifically Unity and Gnome but others are also supported like Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce. First of all we would like to thank Jared for helping us with this pack, our main themes Macbuntu which is for Gnome and other desktops, Macbuntu-Unity is for Unity desktop. We also included dark theme version for those who like to use Mac dark version, also featuring great themes Gnome-OSX and Gnome-OSX-T for Gnome desktop. Now we are providing two cursors themes one is featured from here, and some plank themes are from KenHarkey and erikdubois. Additionally there are two themes for Gnome Shell, two for Cinnamon, and two icon packs.
-
Canonical Releases Snapcraft 2.32 to Support ROS Lunar in the Catkin Plugin
Canonical’s Kyle Fazzari released today a new maintenance update of the Snapcraft tool that lets application developers package their apps as Snaps for distribution across multiple Linux-based operating systems that support the Snappy technologies.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
elementary + GitHub
We’re excited to finally say that elementary has completed our move and now lives on GitHub! We’ve migrated over 70 repositories from Launchpad and bzr. So what does that really mean?
-
Ultimate Edition 5.4
For those who like a visually enhanced form of Linux then Ultimate Edition 5.4 is for you. The graphics are extremely nice compared to other versions of Linux I have seen.
With animated cursors and having a desktop called ‘Budgie’ the Operating System (OS) is visually pleasing.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Devices/Embedded
-
Phones
-
Android
-
Google is making Android’s in-app browser safer to use
-
Google adds a whopping 60 new banks to Android Pay
-
Use the New Picture-in-Picture Mode in Android O
-
Koler Android Ransomware Targets the US with Fake PornHub Apps
-
Android O’s biggest unknown feature might have FINALLY been revealed
-
The trick to sending and receiving iMessages on your Android phone
-
Google Bolsters Security Features in WebView for Android
-
Android O Introducing an Animated Clock Icon, Soon Available in Custom Launchers
-
Deal: Get the Moto G4 Play for $99.99
-
Samsung Galaxy Note 8 rumored to launch in September, for over $1000
-
8 Easy Ways to Make Your Android Phone Less Annoying
-
The 10 best Android apps for Chromebooks
-
-
-
Free Software/Open Source
-
[Older] Andy Rubin says Essential’s Ambient OS will be open source, just like Android
Playground CEO Andy Rubin, whose new company Essential unveiled a new premium Android smartphone and Amazon Echo competitor today, says his company’s Ambient OS smart home platform will be open source. That means that Rubin, who rose to fame in the tech industry for co-founding Android, essentially wants to apply the same open-source philosophy that made Android the most dominant mobile operating system to the smart home.
-
[Older] How to Build Open Source Communities
Seeing programming as a social activity changes how we build communities around programming. We should focus on building a community, and not on building a codebase, argued Ash Furrow at Craft. He suggested using a code of conduct, moving long or heated discussions into a Skype call or Google Hangout, avoiding fixing easy issues yourself, and distributing power and responsibilities.
-
[Older] R3’s open-source distributed ledger platform ‘Corda’ goes into public beta
R3, the financial innovation company that runs blockchain consortium, announced that it’s open-source, financial-grade, distributed ledger platform ‘Corda’ has entered into first public beta.
The release of the public beta represents a step forward in the path of Corda, towards API stabilization for production applications. The announcement was first made by Richard Gendal Brown, Chief Technology Officer of R3, last week.
-
As Blockchain Advances, Developers Look To Open Source As A Solution
As the digitization of financial transactions becomes ever more mainstream, with Bitcoin’s core technology blockchain leading the way, the rapid adaptation raises security concerns at the same time its enhanced efficiency is being exploited. A recent Greenwich Associates survey highlights the conundrum but also points to solutions.
-
Free vs Open
Here’s why. Corporations are not people, and so can’t “behave ethically” — doing so requires consciousness as a minimum. The people they employ can be expected to behave ethically, but a corporation will follow its programming to optimise the objectives stated in its bylaws. The people tending the machine can steer it towards different ways of achieving those objectives and can express their ethical selves through their choices, but they are not free to justify preferences purely on the basis of ethics. As a consequence, most advocacy of Open Source has focussed on helping those corporate employees demonstrate the value arising from it rather than the values motivating the people involved with it.
-
Events
-
The perils of live demonstrations
Yesterday, I was giving a talk at the The South SF Bay Haskell User Group about how implementing lock-step simulation is trivial in Haskell and how Chris Smith and me are using this to make CodeWorld even more attractive to students. I gave the talk before, at Compose::Conference in New York City earlier this year, so I felt well prepared. On the flight to the West Coast I slightly extended the slides, and as I was too cheap to buy in-flight WiFi, I tested them only locally.
-
-
Databases
-
A beta for PostgreSQL 10
PostgreSQL version 10 had its first beta release on May 18, just in time for the annual PGCon developer conference. The latest annual release comes with a host of major features, including new versions of replication and partitioning, and enhanced parallel query. Version 10 includes 451 commits, nearly half a million lines of code and documentation, and over 150 new or changed features since version 9.6. The PostgreSQL community will find a lot to get excited about in this release, as the project has delivered a long list of enhancements to existing functionality. There’s also a few features aimed at fulfilling new use cases, particularly in the “big data” industry sector.
-
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
LibreOffice: Professional Typography Fully Arrives
Three decades ago, StarDivision, the ancestor of LibreOffice and OpenOffice, was designed as an intermediate desktop publisher. However, many LibreOffice improvements are designed for users who insist on using it like a typewriter and entering manual formatting. Unofficially, I have been told that LibreOffice developers feel that, since manual formatting is the way most people use it, development for people who want advanced typography is a low priority. Finally, however, in the 5.3 release, LibreOffice has given advanced users a major feature: the ability to add advanced features automatically — a feature that, after almost a century and a half, gives home typists the ability to do advanced typesetting.
That sounds like an exaggeration, so let me explain. Typewriters were a major advance over handwriting, but still fell short of producing copy that was as polished as what a printing shop could do. To add bold on most typewriters, a typist had to backspace and type over the same letters again, often blurring the letters. Adding italics was even worse, because they could only be indicated by the old copy editing notation of underlining.
Word processors were a significant improvement over typewriters, but still generally fall short of complete professionalism. For instance, Bold and italic were available with a few clicks. However, far too many word processors continue to manufacture their own small capitals, the letters used to improve the look of several upper case letters in a row — and, often, the result was hideous.
-
Locked in by choice: Why the Italian Defence Department is switching to open source office
Italy’s Defence Department began migrating to open source software in September 2015. It aims to replace Microsoft Office on 100,000 desktops with LibreOffice by 2020.
Geneal Camillo Sileo was the man behind the decision to switch to open source. LibreDifesa – the name of his digital migration project – is a success, he says.
“We have conducted a study and we have concluded that Microsoft Office and Libre Office were just as good for our needs.”
The advantage of open source is that the code can be tailored to the needs of each organisation. “There should be a willingness to move towards that.”
-
Locked in by choice: How European governments are handling their Microsoft addiction
In 2012, the then European Union (EU) commissioner for digital agenda, Neelie Kroes, said that not only EU institutions, but all government bodies throughout Europe should implement open standards. Her policy was designed to free public bodies from dependence on proprietary software suppliers.
The UK has made the biggest strides in encouraging large government departments to increase their use of open source software, through initiatives by the Government Digital Service (GDS). Although local authorities and the NHS are still heavily reliant on proprietary software, the message is gradually spreading to smaller government departments in Britain.
But five years on, EU civil servants rely on Microsoft Office and Windows. As a result, the public sector is hooked on a digital dependence on Microsoft that costs billions of any currency. Experts say this inhibits innovation and raises technical, political and security risks.
-
Announcing automatically updating Linux LibreOffice builds
I’m finally ready to announce LibreOffice daily builds for Linux that integrate our new automatic updater. The work on the automatic updater has been going on for nearly a year now and is finally in a shape that we produce builds on TDF hardware that will automatically update using delta updates.
The current builds are 64-bit Linux builds created on SLES 12.2 and should run on most Linux distros. These builds are .tar.gz based archives that you can extract and just run. Note that we can’t update builds that are placed into locations that are not writeable by the current user (and due to missing support for signing executables and libraries on Linux there are no plans to change that).
-
-
Python
-
PyCharm IDE Community And Professional Edition for Ubuntu/Linux Mint
PyCharm is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) specially used for Python programming language. It is cross-platform available for Linux, Mac and Windows, and developed by JetBrains and offers two versions community edition and professional edition. It provides code analysis, a graphical debugger, an integrated unit tester, integration with version control systems (VCSes), and supports web development with Django.
-
The 2017 Python Language Summit [Ed: and "solid kernel reporting"]
This week’s edition contains a fair amount of content from the 2017 Python Language Summit, an event that LWN has been privileged to attend for three years now.
-
The 2017 Python Language Summit
-
The unexpected effectiveness of Python in science
-
Keeping Python competitive
-
Making Python faster
The Python core developers, and Victor Stinner in particular, have been focusing on improving the performance of Python 3 over the last few years. At PyCon 2017, Stinner gave a talk on some of the optimizations that have been added recently and the effect they have had on various benchmarks. Along the way, he took a detour into some improvements that have been made for benchmarking Python.
He started his talk by noting that he has been working on porting OpenStack to Python 3 as part of his day job at Red Hat. So far, most of the unit tests are passing. That means that an enormous Python program (with some 3 million lines of code) has largely made the transition to the Python 3 world.
-
Trio and the future of asynchronous execution in Python
-
Python ssl module update
-
Python 3.6.x, 3.7.0, and beyond
-
New CPython workflow issues
-
The state of bugs.python.org
-
Progress on the Gilectomy
-
Classes and types in the Python typing module
-
Status of mypy and type checking:
-
Lightning talks
-
-
Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)
-
Microsoft Open Source Efforts Foster Collaboration with Rivals, Customers
[Ed: Microsoft openwashing spam by writers associated with it] -
Microsoft Spotlights Open Source Partners in Azure Event [Ed: publication associated with Microsoft]
-
Microsoft and Partners Highlight Open Source Dev Tools for Azure
-
-
Funding
-
Making money with foss
Because we are interested in making money, this post will took us all over the place. On the one hand we have the greedy businesses, and on the other side the diligent developer. Licenses were never discussed in hbo or university, which is interesting because these are the methods corporations use to make money. I think having discussed the overview and shown some concrete examples was a good exercise. I was not aware at all for example of the AGPLv3 practices which are interesting (without passing moral judgment). My blog seems to be really focused on money, but this is a reflection of what I’m worried about these days, having almost graduated.
-
Open-source software may save money, but what about monetization?
While the open-source delivery model has emerged as a highly popular success, the problem remains that free downloadable software does not usually lead to revenue. But a growing number of cloud network entrepreneurs are becoming convinced that focusing their efforts on providing specific services for the enterprise computing marketplace is their path to the promised land.
-
-
BSD
-
FreeBSD 11.1-BETA3 Now Available
The third BETA build of the 11.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
-
FreeBSD 11.1 Beta 3
The third beta for the upcoming FreeBSD 11.1 is available for testing this weekend.
-
-
Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
-
Firefox Focus for Android, Torvalds reflects on Linux, and more news
-
Finnish firm offers €30,000 prize to kick start open-source wood design
Finnish materials firm Metsä Wood has launched the Open Source Wood initiative to encourage architects and engineers to make more use of the material. The idea is to make the company’s own intellectual property freely available to designers, and as an additional incentive, to offer a €30,000 prize for “exceptional designs” that are undertaken as part of the initiative and use one of its product lines.
-
Open Access/Content
-
University of Missouri launches systemwide initiative to adopt affordable and open educational resources
On Wednesday, University of Missouri System President Mun Choi and Chancellors Leo Morton, Tom George, Garnett Stokes and Christopher Maples announced a plan that will save students significant amounts of money on textbooks and other course materials. This effort is designed to reduce the cost of attendance and enhance learning for students. The plan takes advantage of Open Educational Resources, or class materials that are free for students, and AutoAccess, which is a program that makes textbooks and class materials available online at a lower cost than traditional learning resources.
-
Textbook Costs to Drop Under University of Missouri Plan
University system President Mun Choi wants to use more open-source learning material written by experts, vetted by their peers and posted for free downloading. Choi spoke about the effort Wednesday at an event with members of the Board of Curators, administrators, lawmakers, faculty from all four campuses and student representatives, the Columbia Daily Tribune (http://bit.ly/2t2L4HQ ) reported.
-
-
-
Programming/Development
-
Free and ready-to-use cross-compilation toolchains
For all embedded Linux developers, cross-compilation toolchains are part of the basic tool set, as they allow to build code for a specific CPU architecture and debug it. Until a few years ago, CodeSourcery was providing a lot of high quality pre-compiled toolchains for a wide range of architectures, but has progressively stopped doing so. Linaro provides some freely available toolchains, but only targetting ARM and AArch64. kernel.org has a set of pre-built toolchains for a wider range of architectures, but they are bare metal toolchains (cannot build Linux userspace programs) and updated infrequently.
-
D Language accepted for inclusion in GCC
I am pleased to announce that the GCC Steering Committee has accepted the D Language front-end and runtime for inclusion in GCC and appointed Iain Buclaw as maintainer.
-
Is Complexity Bad?
You can essentially think of complexity as a distinction between two different types. Accidental and necessary complexity. Necessary complexity is okay, but accidental complexity will absolutely ruin your day as a programmer.
-
Leftovers
-
Science
-
Assembling the history of Unix
The moment when an antique operating system that has not run in decades boots and presents a command prompt is thrilling for Warren Toomey. He compares it to restoring an old Model-T. “An old car looks pretty, but at the end of the day its purpose is to drive you somewhere. I love being able to turn the engine over and actually get it to do its job.”
Toomey, an Australian university lecturer, founded the Unix Heritage Society to reconstruct the early history of the Unix operating system. Recently this historical code has become much more accessible: we can now browse it in an instant on GitHub, thanks to the efforts of a computer science professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business named Diomidis Spinellis. The 50th anniversary of the invention of Unix will be in 2019; the painstaking work of Toomey and Spinellis makes it possible for us to appreciate Unix’s epic story.
-
Turkey to stop teaching evolution in high school
Turkish high school students will no longer be taught the theory of evolution.
The subject has been cut from the curriculum under changes made to eliminate “controversial” topics, the head of the national board of education, Alpaslan Durmus, announced in a video address.
“If our students don’t have the background, the scientific knowledge, or information to comprehend the debate around controversial issues, we have left them out,” Durmus said.
The new curriculum will go into effect for the 2017- 2018 school year.
-
-
Health/Nutrition
-
You Can’t Debate Health Care If You’re Dead
So why are more people not talking about this? Why is this not the only thing anyone is talking about?
-
Plastic Water Bottles Might Have Poisoned Ancient Californians
To make a Chumash-style plastic bottle, you start by weaving a bottle-shaped basket. Then you combine bitumen and pine pitch in an abalone shell. You have to melt them together, but you don’t place the abalone directly onto the fire. Instead, you roast some pebbles in a fire until they are piping hot. Remove the pebbles, place them in the abalone, and stir them around until the the mixture is wet, hot, and bubbly. Finally, use a stick to paint the molten bitumen over the bottle-shaped basketry.
-
Fukushima’s Radiation Will Poison Food “for Decades,” Study Finds
Three of the six reactors at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi complex were wrecked in March 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami. The destruction of emergency electric generators caused a “station blackout” which halted cooling water intake and circulation. Super-heated, out-of-control uranium fuel in reactors 1, 2, and 3 then boiled off cooling water, and some 300 tons of fuel “melted” and burned through the reactors’ core vessels, gouging so deep into underground sections of the structure that to this day operators aren’t sure where it is. Several explosions in reactor buildings and uncovered fuel rods caused the spewing of huge quantities of radioactive materials to the atmosphere, and the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean ever recorded. Fukushima amounts to Whole-Earth poisoning.
Now, researchers say, radioactive isotopes that were spread across Japan (and beyond) by the meltdowns will continue to contaminate the food supply for a very long time.
-
-
Security
-
Practical waterholing through DNS typosquatting
Typosquatting has been known and abused since the 90’s, mostly for phishing, but is it still profitable for water-hole kind of attacks?
-
Encryption and Firewalls – Unleaded Hangout
-
Windows 10 S security brought down by, of course, Word macros [Ed: By Microsoft Peter (damage control)]
But if that protection is flawed—if the bad guys can somehow circumvent it—then the value of Windows 10 S is substantially undermined. The downside for typical users will remain, as there still won’t be any easy and straightforward way to install and run arbitrary Windows software. But the upside, the protection against malware, will evaporate.
-
Microsoft claims on Windows 10 S security blown away
Microsoft’s claims that no known ransomware can run on Windows 10 S have been blown sky high by a researcher – in just three hours.
-
A Stack Clash disclosure post-mortem
-
Hardened/Gentoo Hardened and Stack Clash
-
[Older] If your home wifi router is on this list, it might be vulnerable to CIA hacking tools
For the past four months, WikiLeaks has been slowly publishing a series of documents that describe a plethora of hacking tools, which the anti-secrecy organization says belong to the US Central Intelligence Agency. The latest release, published June 15, is a batch of documents describing tools that can be used to hack home wifi routers.
The collection of tools, which the documents refer to as “CherryBlossom,” can be used to monitor internet activity on networks that use the routers it infects. CherryBlossom infects routers by identifying their make and model and injecting malicious firmware into them. This kind of hack, when successful, is nearly impossible to detect because it infects the hardware itself and is not something anti-virus software is capable of checking.
-
Under pressure, Western tech firms bow to Russian demands to share cyber secrets
Western technology companies, including Cisco, IBM and SAP, are acceding to demands by Moscow for access to closely guarded product security secrets, at a time when Russia has been accused of a growing number of cyber attacks on the West, a Reuters investigation has found.
Russian authorities are asking Western tech companies to allow them to review source code for security products such as firewalls, anti-virus applications and software containing encryption before permitting the products to be imported and sold in the country. The requests, which have increased since 2014, are ostensibly done to ensure foreign spy agencies have not hidden any “backdoors” that would allow them to burrow into Russian systems.
-
AMD’s Epyc is a major advance in security
AMD’s Zen core has been revealed in detail but with Epyc the company added a few juicy details. SemiAccurate is particularly interested in the security aspects on the new CPU line which is what we will discuss here.
-
32TB of Windows 10 beta builds, driver source code leaked [Updated] [Ed: Microsoft has long hidden holes rather than disclosure/patch them. It admitted this, too. What happens now that source code is leaked? Article by Microsoft Peter, i.e. damage control.]
-
Sudo or Sudo Not, There Is No (4th) Try
If you’ve been using Linux for any length of time, at some point in some tutorial or troubleshooting guide you’ve more than likely encountered Linux’s magic word: “sudo”. A casual observer probably can tell you that it’s used to access restricted functions on your computer, but there is much more to it than that.
-
-
Defence/Aggression
-
Invisible Empire Beneath the Radar, Above Suspicion
When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, it did so in a media environment of “yellow journalism,” that played no small part in the advent of the Spanish-American War. Yellow journalism was basically the use of sensationalism and poorly researched reportage to stir up excitement and pad the bottom line. In February on that year, the mysterious sinking of the American cruiser Maine on a quiet night in Havana harbor was seized upon by western media outlets like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World to create an atmosphere rife with tension, accusation, and defamation. War fever was loosed upon the population. The McKinley administration was soon ensnared in combat, which it won in ten weeks across the Caribbean and Pacific theaters, effectively erasing the Spanish imperial footprint from the Philippines and Caribbean, and delivering American control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. American author Mark Twain wasn’t fooled by the jingoistic broadsheets, nor by the administration’s claims of support for Cubans, nor by its claims to want to bring democracy to the Philippines, a former Spanish colony. Twain said, “…we have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.”
-
ISIS-themed fake Lego sets exported globally from China
Counterfeit ISIS-themed Lego sets complete with beheading figurines are being produced in China and have been discovered on sale in Malaysia.
A mother noticed the Islamic State terrorist figures inside a ‘Falcon Commandos’ set that had been bought for less than $2 by her youngest son from a store in Taiping, north of Kuala Lumpur.
The serial number on the box has been traced back to a manufacturer in China, Berita Harian reports.
-
-
Transparency/Investigative Reporting
-
Britain wants a ‘way out’ of the Julian Assange standoff, says Ecuador
“The United Kingdom wants a way out, but evidently that is in the hands of the UK justice system, they have their procedures, their ways,” the minister, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, told reporters on Thursday. “This opening has been there, and we are working on it.“
-
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature
-
An offer Finns can’t refuse? Helsinki woos car owners to give up their autos.
“If the need for cars in the Helsinki region could be lessened by only 25 percent,” Mr. Lehmuskoski continues, “it would mean 100,000 fewer cars. If the average value of the car is €10,000 [$11,150], that would mean €1 billion [$1.1 billion] could be freed to speed up the economy in a more effective way, or otherwise benefit the society.”
-
Ophir Energy likely to start exploration drill in West Papua IV
Ophir has a 49.9% operated interest in the West Papua IV Block and a 60% operated interest in the Aru Block covering a gross area of 5,701 km2.
-
-
Finance
-
Why Aren’t More Employees Suing Uber?
One current engineer told WIRED that Uber’s arbitration agreement has kept at least two people from suing the company for sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Although signing the agreement does not preclude employees from filing suit, the engineer believes that Uber recognizes the chilling effect of mandatory arbitration.
-
This guy sued Uber and won after a driver stole $4k of his stuff
Wilcox ended up taking Uber to court, and after two hearings, he won. Uber was forced to send him a check for $4,000.
-
Beneath Red Hat’s and Oracle’s Earnings Reports
There are probably a lot of smiles in Raleigh and Redwood Shores this week. Both Red Hat and Oracle turned in quarterly earnings reports that greatly beat expectations. Wall Street blessed both companies for the news, as the value of Red Hat’s stock rose by 10.6 percent in early trading after the announcement and Oracle saw a 9 percent spike.
Although Red Hat’s gains were unexpected insofar as they beat both the company’s and Wall Street’s estimates by a long shot — they weren’t that much of a surprise. The open source company has been on a roll for a long while now.
-
[Old] Forfeit Your Bitcoin? Congressional Bill Draws Fire Over Border Check Rules
This means if a person trying to enter the country has more than $10,000 worth of bitcoin in their possession, under the proposed legal change, they would need to inform the relevant authorities.
-
The academic evidence regarding immigration is overwhelmingly positive
The immigration debate continues to rage and obsess the UK. The issue of immigration has managed to level with economic concerns and produces fireworks not only from UKIP but from a similarly infatuated Conservative camp. Unlike the political discourse which has stuck into “immigration is probably good, but” mode, the academic evidence remains almost unequivocally positive. The general public worries that there are many aspects of migration that could go awry and researchers have tried to address them in a similarly detailed fashion.
Take, for example, the concern over unskilled migration waves, and the danger to the welfare system that migrants with little transferable human capital can present. Several recent academic papers have demonstrated that these fears are overstated (see here, here and here, for example). Immigrants to the UK tend to be highly-skilled on average compared to immigrants in other EU member states. In particular, Dustmann and Frattini show that the average level of education, as well as the share of individuals with a tertiary education, has been consistently higher in the UK’s immigrant population than among natives and that this difference has accelerated with the arrival of new immigrants since 2000.
-
-
AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
-
With cameras banned, CNN sends sketch artist to White House briefing
Press secretaries for Democratic and Republican presidents have held on-camera briefings on a regular basis for the past quarter century.
But the Trump White House has been cutting back on the frequency and the length of on-camera briefings.
-
Trump’s Lies
Many Americans have become accustomed to President Trump’s lies. But as regular as they have become, the country should not allow itself to become numb to them. So we have catalogued nearly every outright lie he has told publicly since taking the oath of office.
-
Prominent Democratic Fundraisers Realign to Lobby for Trump’s Agenda
After President Donald Trump’s upset election victory, Democratic insiders who worked on Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid weren’t necessarily relegated to the sidelines. Many, in fact, are cashing in as lobbyists — by working to advance Trump’s agenda.
Lobbying records show that some Democratic fundraisers, who raised record amounts of campaign cash for Clinton, are now retained by top telecom interests to help repeal the strong net neutrality protections established during the Obama administration.
-
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, and the UK’s Socialist Surge
Labour Party membership is defined by dues, which start as low as 3 pounds, the rough equivalent of $5. Dues paying members elect the party leader in a model similar to that Bruce Dixon and Howie Hawkins advocate for the Green Party. In 2015, Labour Party membership tripled, to 550,000, largely due to new members who paid three pounds to join and vote for its leader. This is a good part of the reason Corbyn surprised himself and everyone else with his hugely successful campaign to lead the party.
His victory was also made possible by the elimination of Labour’s variation on the Democratic Party’s super-delegates, elected officials and party big wigs who are free to vote for whatever presidential candidate they prefer at the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating convention, regardless of how their constituents have voted in the primary. Prior to 2015, the votes cast by sitting members of Parliament had greater weight than those of rank and file members, but in 2015, the party adopted a one member-one vote system. Fifty-one Members of Parliament and/or Members of the European Parliament still have to sign to put a candidate on the ballot for the party’s leadership—unless the candidate is incumbent—but the system is far more populist than before.
-
Remote and grim, No 10 mirrors its lonely leader
Theresa May arrived back from Brussels last night and headed straight for Sonning, the village near Maidenhead where she has her constituency residence.
Since her election humiliation she is said to be spending more time in the house she regards as home. Even on weekdays she is avoiding the private Downing Street flat, choosing instead to be driven in to London early in the morning with her husband, Philip.
-
-
Censorship/Free Speech
-
[Old] How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression
We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. [...] Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future — and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent.
-
Chinese media told to ‘shut down’ talk that makes country look bad
Weibo and two other sites were hit with an order from the Chinese government to block any “negative talk” about the country’s affairs.
-
Medical records join revenge porn, credit card numbers for Google removal
-
-
Privacy/Surveillance
-
UK Law Enforcement Telling Citizens To ‘See Something Say Something’ About Dark Web Use
What an “education” campaign like this has the potential to do is turn any deviation from normal web use into something inherently suspicious. If law enforcement likes chasing down worthless tips, depicting things non-terrorists do as terrorist-centric is a good way to get that ball rolling.
I don’t doubt the public can play a part in preventing terrorist attacks, but the leaflet asks citizens to become intrusive extensions of the government. Most citizens aren’t going to know whether their friends and neighbors surf the dark web, much less have any idea if they’re “carrying out suspicious transactions on their bank account.” The upshot will be a generalized heightened level of suspicion that will most likely manifest itself as expressions of citizens’ inherent biases and bigotry.
-
Cops Sent Warrant To Facebook To Dig Up Dirt On Woman Whose Boyfriend They Had Just Killed
Everything anyone has ever said about staying safe while interacting with the police is wrong. That citizens are told to comport themselves in complete obeisance just to avoid being beaten or shot by officers is itself bizarre — an insane inversion of the term “public servant.” But Philando Castile, who was shot five times and killed by (now former) Officer Jeronimo Yanez, played by all the rules (which look suspiciously like the same instructions given to stay “safe” during an armed robbery). It didn’t matter.
Castile didn’t have a criminal record — or at least nothing on it that mattered. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been allowed to own a weapon, much less obtain a permit to conceal the gun. Castile told Yanez — as the permit requires — he had a concealed weapon. He tried to respond to the officer’s demand for his ID, reaching into his pocket. For both of these compliant efforts, he was killed.
-
California Finally Releases Wiretap Dataset
In 2016, California investigators used state wiretapping laws 563 times to capture 7.8 million communications from 181,000 people, and only 19% of these communications were incriminating. The year’s wiretaps cost nearly $30 million.
We know this, and much more, now that the California Department of Justice (CADOJ) for the first time has released to EFF the dataset underlying its annual wiretap report to the state legislature.
-
Restoring Privacy Protections for Californians
Earlier this year, Congress narrowly voted to repeal federal privacy rules that kept your ISP from selling information about who you are and what you do online without your permission. Today, California legislators are introducing new state legislation—the California Broadband Internet Privacy Act, A.B. 375 (Chau)— that would effectively reinstate those rules for Internet users in California.
ISPs are our gatekeepers to the Internet, and we shouldn’t have to sacrifice our privacy to these companies just to get online.
-
EU proposes banning encryption backdoors
The European Union might want it to be easier for police to obtain data, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy for officers to read that data. The European Parliament has proposed amended regulation that would not only require end-to-end encryption when available, but forbid backdoors that offer guaranteed access to law enforcement. EU residents need to know that the “confidentiality and safety” of their data is “guaranteed,” according to the draft, and backdoors risk “weakening” that privacy.
-
Banning VPNs and Proxies is Dangerous, IT Experts Warn
In its fight to restrict access to copyrighted content and blocked websites, the Russian government wants to ban the use of anonymization technology including VPNs, proxies, and [Tor]. In a discussion in parliament this week involving prominent IT experts, the message was clear. Blocking these technologies simply won’t work.
-
In terror fight, tech companies caught between US and European ideals
Since terms of service apply globally, this has the effect of making EU speech norms apply to everyone, even though in many cases their definitions of hate speech and extremist speech are very broad – so broad that Professor Citron says they can “easily encompass political dissent” and turn into what she calls “censorship creep.”
-
Scroogled no more: Gmail won’t scan e-mails for ads personalization
Google has announced it will no longer scan e-mail messages for ad personalization. Previously, in the consumer version of Gmail, Google’s computers would scan the contents of every e-mail message to determine a relevant ad to show. The scanning “feature” has been turned off for Google Apps for Education and GSuite accounts for some time, but now Google says that “consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.”
-
Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads
Google is stopping one of the most controversial advertising formats: ads inside Gmail that scan users’ email contents. The decision didn’t come from Google’s ad team, but from its cloud unit, which is angling to sign up more corporate customers.
[...]
Ads will continue to appear inside the free version of Gmail, as promoted messages. But instead of scanning a user’s email, the ads will now be targeted with other personal information Google already pulls from sources such as search and YouTube.
-
Facebook Near Deal to Lease Extra Office Space in Dublin
The world’s largest social network plans to lease about 75,000 square feet (7,000 square meters) of space near East Point Business Park, where Google and Cisco Systems Inc. have offices, the people said, asking not to be identified because the deal isn’t public. That’s enough space for about 600 workers, based on modern office standards. The firm agreed to rent about 110,000 square feet of office space in the East Wall district earlier this year.
-
Mark Zuckerberg just unveiled Facebook’s new mission statement
It was an almost quaint euphemism for the company’s more capitalistic goals of vacuuming up the attention of billions of humans and selling boatloads of advertising.
-
DOJ applies to take Microsoft data warrant case to Supreme Court
The case, U.S. v. Microsoft, concerns whether data stored in a foreign server is under the jurisdiction of a U.S. warrant. A lower court had ruled that it was not – that law enforcement agencies would have to follow the same rules to obtain extraterritorial data as it would with physical evidence and seek the cooperation of a foreign government.
-
Does US have right to data on overseas servers? We’re about to find out
The Justice Department on Friday petitioned the US Supreme Court to step into an international legal thicket, one that asks whether US search warrants extend to data stored on foreign servers. The US government says it has the legal right, with a valid court warrant, to reach into the world’s servers with the assistance of the tech sector, no matter where the data is stored.
-
Guarding personally identifiable information
There is no viable way to prevent data from being collected about us in the current age of computing. But if institutions insist on knowing our financial status, purchasing habits, health information, political preferences, and so on, they have a responsibility to keep this data—known as personally identifiable information (PII)—from leaking to unauthorized recipients. At the 2017 Strata data conference in London, Steve Touw presented a session on privacy-enhancing technologies. In a fast-paced 40 minutes he covered the EU regulations about privacy, the most popular technical measures used to protect PII, and some pointed opinions about what works and what should be thrown into the dustbin.
-
-
Civil Rights/Policing
-
Grenfell Tower fire: police consider manslaughter charges
Police have said they are considering manslaughter charges in relation to the deadly Grenfell Tower blaze as they revealed that both the insulation and tiles at the building failed safety tests.
-
Employees say they’re forced to work amid bed bug infestation
Employees told 11Alive the bugs are all over the three floors – and they’re biting. But employees are being told they still must go to work.
-
Man Shot by Deputy in Burien Was Carrying Pen, Not Knife
A man who was fatally shot by a King County Sheriff’s deputy in Burien around midnight June 13 was carrying a pen and not a knife as initially reported, the sheriff’s office said.
-
ACLU releases video of brutal beating of motorist by enraged cop
-
Charleena Lyles Was Killed by a Police Department Under a Consent Decree
The untimely death of a 30-year-old woman demonstrates the obvious need for more scrutiny, not less.
-
Woman assaulted on crowded bus ‘for wearing shorts during Ramadan’
She said the slap caused her jaw hit the window of the bus.
-
Female Democratic senators ignore 2 women activists at hearing on Islamism, pose questions only to male witness
On Wednesday, Democratic senators appeared to ignore Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Nomani after they gave brief testimonies on the ideology of Islamism at a U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing, sparking a social media outcry.
-
EFF to the SEC: Get a Warrant
If the federal government wants to compel an online service provider, like Yahoo or Google, to turn over your email, they need a warrant. That’s the industry-accepted best practice, implemented by nearly every major service provider. More importantly, it’s what the Fourth Amendment requires.
-
In the Blink of an Eye, Police Officers Turned This Traffic Stop Into an Unnecessarily Violent Encounter
In a heartbeat, Anthony Promvongsa’s sunny summer day in Worthington, Minnesota, turned from ordinary to a nightmare.
Shortly after encountering an agitated motorist driving in front of him on July 28, 2016, Anthony found himself confronted by the police. Within seconds of exiting his vehicle after pulling Anthony over, Agent Joe Joswiak of the Buffalo Ridge Drug Task Force opened the door of Anthony’s car, screaming, “Get the fuck out of the car, motherfucker!”
Without hesitation, Agent Joswiak pulled, punched, and elbowed Anthony several times in the back while Anthony was still restrained by his seat belt. Agent Joswiak then yanked Anthony out of the car, threw him to the ground, and pressed his knee to the back of Anthony’s neck to pin Anthony facedown on the pavement while he and Sgt. Tim Gaul of the Worthington Police Department applied handcuffs.
It turns out the agitated motorist Anthony encountered before being assaulted by Agent Joswiak was an off-duty police officer who called Joswiak to go after Anthony for tailgating him. The officer reports regarding the incident make no mention of any suspicion that Anthony was committing a drug offense.
-
Far-right activists detained at UK border before Britain First rally
Prominent far-right activists from Europe who were planning to attend an anti-Muslim rally in Birmingham have been detained at airports hours before they were due to speak.
Jacek Międlar, 28, an antisemitic priest, and his fellow activist Piotr Rybak were among three Polish nationals stopped on Saturday morning, according to Polish media and social media posts. They were due to speak at the rally organised by far-right group Britain First.
-
Majority of terrorists who have attacked America are not Muslim, new study finds
Most of the designated terrorist groups in the US are right-wing extremists, not Muslim, according to a new report.
A joint project by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, a nonprofit media centre, and news outlet Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting took a look at the 201 designated terrorism incidents within the US from 2008 to 2016.
The results: “right-wing extremists were behind nearly twice as many incidents” as terror acts associated with those identified as “Islamist domestic terrorism”.
-
-
Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
-
Comcast sued for allegedly digging up rival’s cables when it refused to sell up
It is alleged that Mr Luna was offered a purchase of his telecoms system at below market value, and when he refused, Comcast began planting its own system and then went rogue.
-
Frontier Communications Caught (Again) Ripping Off West Virginia Taxpayers
So (for good reason), we keep noting that if you want to see how the American broadband market really works, you should take a close look at West Virginia. As in most states, a lack of competition keeps broadband prices high and speeds slow, with far too many consumers forced to pay a tidy sum for DSL speeds circa 2002. But the state has also been embroiled in scandal after scandal involving Frontier Communication’s mismanagement of taxpayer subsidies that were intended to try and resolve this problem.
Local Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre has quietly done an amazing job the last few years chronicling West Virginia’s immense broadband dysfunction, from the State’s use of broadband stimulus subsidies on unused, overpowered routers and overpaid, redundant consultants, to state leaders’ attempts to bury reports supporting allegations that Frontier engaged in systemic, statewide fraud on the taxpayer dime.
-
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Trademarks
-
King Has ‘Crush’ Trademark Opposed By Dr. Pepper
App-maker King, of Candy Crush fame, has built up a reputation for itself as a trademark bully. The company has previously attempted to threaten pretty much any game or mobile app that utilizes the words “candy” or “saga.” And if that sounds insane to you, you’re not alone, as there have been several instances of severe backlash against how King goes about “protecting” its trademarks.
-
-
Copyrights
-
Court Suspends Ban on Roku Sales in Mexico
A federal judge in Mexico has suspended the ban on sales and imports of Roku media players, at least temporarily. Roku is happy with the decision and says it will continue to work with entertainment industry stakeholders on a variety of anti-piracy measures.
-
Kim Dotcom Opposes US’s “Fugitive” Claims at Supreme Court
In an effort to regain control over millions of dollars in seized assets, Kim Dotcom’s legal team has filed a brief at the Supreme Court, countering the US Government’s position. The US uses the fugitive claims as a coercive weapon, which offends due process and fundamental fairness, according to the Megaupload founder.
-
Scientific research piracy site hit with $15 million fine
The operator of a searchable piracy site for scientific research papers has been ordered to pay $15 million as fallout from a US copyright infringement lawsuit brought by one of the world’s leading scientific publishers, New York-based Elsevier.
-
-