Dell has launched a range of workstations offering the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system out of the box.
There are five new computers in the Precision series, and they come with Canonical certification meaning users don't have to worry about incompatibility issues.
The Precision 5720, sports a 27-inch screen and comes with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS support. Along with an AMD Radeon Pro WX graphics card, you can choose between Intel Xeon, 6th Generation and 7th Core processors.
The city of Munich will spend €49.3m (€£43.9m/ $58.4m) going all-in on Windows after local politicos agreed to call time on the failing 15-year open source project.
The city council voted 50 to 25 to migrate all of its remaining Linux computer systems to Windows 10 in 2020 as part of a €89m IT overhaul, Social Democrat councillor Anne Hübner told The Register.
Hübner said the Windows move would take about half a decade and would not require staff retraining. The majority of the €49.3m will go toward technical infrastructure, with €9m towards licensing over six years. The cost includes 6,000 Office licences.
The city of Munich also plans to migrate their LibreOffice instances to Microsoft Office, but this is still something undecided at the moment because it's a delicate matter due to the fact that they rely on a custom templating system called WollMux and LibreOffice macros, which means someone needs to migrate thousands of templates.
Containers are all the rage, and with good reason. As discussed previously, containers allow you to quickly and easily deploy new services and applications onto your network, without requiring too much in the way of added system resources. Containers are more cost-effective than using dedicated hardware or virtual machines, and they’re easier to update and reuse.
Best of all, containers love Linux (and vice versa). Without much trouble or time, you can get a Linux server up and running with Docker and deploying containers. But, which Linux distribution is best suited for the deployment of your containers? There are a lot of options. You could go with a standard Ubuntu Server platform (which makes installing Docker and deploying containers incredibly easy), or you could opt for a lighter weight distribution — one geared specifically for the purpose of deploying containers.
Not only is AMD Stoney Ridge audio (finally) being supported by the Linux 4.15 kernel, but it also looks like Raven Ridge audio should now be working too.
Normally I don't bother mentioning new Linux kernel point releases on Phoronix unless there are some significant changes, as is the case today with Linux 4.14.2.
If you get stuck using a Linux tool, the first port of call shouldn’t be to Stack Overflow, but rather its “man pages.” Man — which is short for manual — retrieves documentation for a given program. Unfortunately, this can often be dense, hard to understand, and lacking in practical examples to help you solve your problem.
TLDR is another way of looking at documentation. Rather than being a comprehensive guide to a given tool, it instead focuses on offering practical example-driven instructions of how something works.
Developers are often accused of not thinking about security, but Linux kernel founder Linus Torvalds has had enough of security people who don't think about developers and end-users.
After blasting some kernel developers last week for killing processes in the name of hardening the kernel, Torvalds has offered a more measured explanation for his frustration with security myopia.
While he agrees that having multiple layers of security in the kernel is a good idea, certain ways of implementing it are not, in particular if it annoys users and developers by killing processes that break users' machines and wreck core kernel code. Because ultimately, if there are no users, there's not much point in having a supremely secure kernel, Torvalds contends.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released stable kernels 4.14.2, 4.13.16, 4.9.65, 4.4.101, 4.4.102, and 3.18.84.
While Mesa 17.3 is imminent and should be released as stable within the next few days, Mesa 17.2.6 is being prepped for release as the current point release.
While the massive AMDGPU DC infrastructure has been merged for Linux 4.15, the flow of improvements to this display code continues and it looks like the next few kernel cycles at least could be quite busy on the AMD front.
A Mozilla engineer has put out a prototype library in working on the Vulkan Portability Initiative for allowing low-level 3D graphics support that's backed by Vulkan / Direct3D 12 / Metal.
With Apple sticking to their own Metal graphics API and Direct3D 12 still being the dominant graphics API on Windows 10, The Khronos Group has been working towards better 3D portability for where Vulkan may not be directly supported by the OS/drivers or otherwise available. They've been working to target a subset of the Vulkan API that can be efficiently mapped to these other native graphics APIs and to have the libraries and tooling for better compatibility and code re-use of these different graphics APIs.
For those using the NVIDIA 387 "short-lived" driver series, the 387.34 release is now available with just three changes noted.
Oracle recently updated their VirtualBox open-source and cross-platform virtualization software with initial support for the latest Linux 4.14 LTS kernel series.
VirtualBox 5.2.2 is the first maintenance update to the latest VirtualBox 5.2 stable series of the application, and it looks like it can be compiled and used on GNU/Linux distribution running the recently released Linux 4.14 LTS kernel. It also makes it possible to run distros powered by Linux kernel 4.14 inside VirtualBox VMs.
The Oracle developers behind VM VirtualBox have released a new maintenance build in the VirtualBox 5.2 series that is a bit more exciting than their usual point releases.
I have been working quite some time on a new front end for the TeX Live Manager tlmgr. Early versions have leaked into TeX Live, but the last month or two has seen many changes in tlmgr itself, in particular support for JSON output. These changes were mostly driven by the need (or ease) of the new frontend: TLCockpit.
Mailspring is a fork of the now discontinued Nylas Mail client. It does, however, offer a much better performance, and is built with a native C++ sync engine instead of JavaScript. According to the development team, the company is sunsetting further development of Mailspring.
Mailspring offers virtually all the best features housed in Nylas Mail, and thanks to its native C++ sync engine it uses fewer dependencies which results in less lag and a reduction in RAM usage by 50% compared to Nylas Mail.
Are you a fan of 2048 game? Here is the good news. We can now play 2048 game in Terminal! Yes, meet terminal2048, a 2048 game clone written in Rust using the termion crate that runs in the terminal. For those who don’t know, 2048 is a single-player sliding block puzzle game. It is developed by an Italian web developer Gabriele Cirulli in 2014. Within a week, this game went viral and received over 4 million visitors. This game is free to play. You can directly play it from the official site. Also, there is an app for Android and iOS platforms. If you’re heavy CLI user, you can use terminal2048 to kill your free time.
The Wine development release 2.22 is now available.
Wine 2.22 is now available as the latest development release of this program to run Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems.
Changes with this bi-weekly development release include a source selection dialog for scanners, improvements to ARM64 (AArch64 / 64-bit ARM) support, float audio formats with more than two channels in XAudio, fixes for DLL injection handling, input method improvements, and bug fixes.
Wine 2.22 is now officially available as the latest development release on the road to the official Wine 3.0 release.
More and more people are switching to Linux. Why? Perhaps they’re seeking refuge from the flawed Windows operating systems. And Linux is becoming more accessible, partly because it can now provide much of what Windows can offer.
Many apps have Linux alternatives. Microsoft Office, for example, can be replaced by LibreOffice. There are also 1,000s of games now available for Linux on Steam, and this number is increasing all the time.
Yet every now and then, Windows users might still need an app that isn’t available on Linux or want to play a game that doesn’t have a Linux version. In these cases, they can use Wine to run whatever Windows programs they still need.
The free and open source racing game SuperTuxKart [Official Site] has officially released 0.9.3 which comes with a number of improvements.
The Release Candidate was out at the end of October, but now they've officially launched it ready for the wider public to enjoy. This new release adds in three new Karts along with one that was updated, reduced RAM & VRAM use, loading time improvements, two new tracks, various physics improvements and bug fixes, high quality mipmap generation, a built-in screen recorder and Karts now have exhaust fumes and headlights when it's dark.
Tannenberg [Steam, Official Site], the WWI FPS from Blackmill Games and M2H who developed Verdun is now running quite nicely on Linux.
Disclosure: Copy personally purchased.
If you've been holding out on the latest horror game from Bloober Team and Aspyr Media due to it being Steam only, prepare your pants as it's now on GOG. GOG don't tend to make a big splash when they put up a Linux version and I'm surprised they didn't email me directly this time (they usually do). It seems they mentioned it on their forum here.
You can get indie space shooter ‘Sanctum 2‘ for free — but only for the next two days.
The hybrid FPS and tower defense game is the latest ‘you snooze, you lose’ offer from the fine folks over at the Humble Store.
They’re giving a free copy of ‘Sanctum 2’ to literally anybody that wants it. The game usually costs around $14.99.
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War [Steam] is a new 4X turn-based strategy game from developer Proxy Studios and publisher Slitherine, seems it's coming to Linux too!
If you're unfamiliar with Proxy Studios, they previously developed the 4X game Pandora: First Contact which also supported Linux. It's entirely possible they're using a similar engine, probably updated for this next game.
While not advertised on the Steam store, Battle Chef Brigade [Steam, Official Site] does actually have a Linux version available.
Just a few days after the release of KDevelop 5.2.0, we today provide a stabilization and bugfix release with version 5.2.1. This is a bugfix-only release, which introduces no new features and as such is a safe and recommended update for everyone currently using KDevelop 5.2.0.
You can find the updated Windows 32- and 64 bit installers, the Linux AppImage, as well as the source code archives on our download page.
Kdenlive has become one of the main free software tools for audio-visual editing. Although complaints about earlier versions continue to dog its reputation — especially about syncing — the latest releases soon make clear that Kdenlive is now a mature and reliable tool. However, one thing it lacks is a general overview that helps new users navigate its complexity.
Admittedly, the information users need is available. Yet finding it when you need it can be time-consuming, and add to the difficulties of learning a new application.
Having just completed my first video — “Preparing Labels in LibreOffice” for WorldLabel — I think I have learned enough of the basics that my next effort should go far more efficiently. As a guide to myself, and to anyone else who might be starting to use Kdenlive, I present the following in the hopes of saving everyone some time and distraction.
Qt 3D has a flexible and extensible architecture that allows us to easily add our own new functionality to it without disrupting the existing features.
In preparation for the 17.12 release we will be holding a mini bug squashing day on the 1st of December, between 10:00 and 15:30 (CET time). Community members are invited to submit their bug suggestions. For developers interested in contributing to the project we have a set up a list of low hanging bugs for them to cherry pick and get acquainted with the code base. Note that this is a great opportunity for prospective participants in the Season of KDE.
Today we released new BlackArch Linux ISOs. For details see the ChangeLog below.
We started filing bugs around September 9. That means roughly 11 weeks, which gives us around 8 packages fixed a week, aka 1.14 packages per day. Not bad at all!
While Canonical abandoned their work on the Unity desktop environment in favor of the Unity-inspired customized GNOME Shell that debuted in Ubuntu 17.10, some within the community have remained interested in maintaining Unity 7 and even getting it into an official spin/flavor of Ubuntu.
Posted today to the community.ubuntu.com was a Unity maintenance roadmap, reiterating the hope by some in the Ubuntu community for Ubuntu Unity to become an official LTS distribution of Ubuntu. They are hoping to make it an official flavor alongside Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Xubuntu, and others.
I must say I'm a bit sad. Xubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark is nowhere near as good as its predecessor. It comes with a slew of bugs and regressions inherited from Ubuntu without any validations or checks. The experience is flawed, with middling hardware support, although the rest of the stack is quite reasonable. You get blazing performance, good looks, and decent overall out-of-the-box experience with media and gadgets.
However, that on its own means nothing - because when you compare to Zingy Zorba, this is a release that does everything slightly less well, and it comes with problems and issues we did not have before. Do we really need these hope-killing releases that undo all that's gone before? Xubuntu was really doing well, and then, wham, regressions. Seriously? Why? Anyway, 6/10. Worth testing - better than Ubuntu or Kubuntu of the autumn stock, but still not as good as what we've seen, known and love. Take care, fellow Tuxians.
FriendlyElec’s $75 “NanoPC-T3 Plus” SBC runs Linux or Android on an octa-core -A53 Samsung SoC, and features 2GB DDR3, 16GB eMMC, and -40 to 80ââÆ support.
FriendlyElec announced the original NanoPC-T3 SBC in April 2016, back when the company still called itself FriendlyARM. The community backed board, which was a processor and RAM upgrade to the NanoPC-T2, has now been further enhanced with a new NanoPC-T3 Plus model.
iWave’s “iW-RainboW-G23S” SBC runs Linux on a Renesas RZ/G1C, and offers -20 to 85€°C support and expansion headers including a RPi-compatible 40-pin link.
iWave’s iW-RainboW-G23S is the first board we’ve seen to tap the Renesas RZ/G1C SoC, which debuted earlier this year. It’s also the first Renesas based SBC we’ve seen that features the increasingly ubiquitous Raspberry Pi 85 x 56mm footprint, layout, and RPi-compatible 40-pin expansion connector. The board is also notable for providing -20 to 85€°C temperature support.
Retro, handheld game consoles are all the rage these days, primarily due to affordable hacker boards and Linux-based operating systems that act as a great companion to the hardware. Clockwork’s GameShell is one such retro console.
These TVs obviously run Tizen TV OS in its core so you’re not left out of any of the smart features available on other Samsung premium TVs. But what it does more is Samsung has added a special service which lets you display art curated by international organizations at a subscription fee of $5 per month.
However, projects are not the only way of funding and organizing software development. For instance, many companies that sell software as a product or a service do not fund or organize their core product/platform development in the form of projects. Instead, they run product development and support using near-permanent teams for as long as the product is sold in the market. The budget may vary year on year but it is generally sufficient to fund a durable, core development organization continuously for the life of the product. Teams are funded to work on a particular business problem or offering over a period of time; with the nature work being defined by a business problem to address rather than a set of functions to deliver. We call this way of working as “product-mode” and assert that it is not necessary to be building a software product in order to fund and organize software development like this.
It is true that some of you guys can build a tool in a hackathon, but maintaining a project is a lot more difficult than building a project. Most of the time they are not writing code, but [...]
There are an increasing number of events for free software enthusiasts to meet in an alpine environment for hacking and fun.
In Switzerland, Swiss Linux is organizing the fourth edition of the Rencontres Hivernales du Libre in the mountain resort of Saint-Cergue, a short train ride from Geneva and Lausanne, 12-14 January 2018. The call for presentations is still open.
When Firefox was introduced in 2004, it was designed to be a lean and optimized web browser, based on the bloated code from the Mozilla Suite. Between 2004 and 2009, many considered Firefox to be the best web browser, since it was faster, more secure, offered tabbed browsing and was more customizable through extensions than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. When Chrome was introduced in 2008, it took many of Firefox’s best ideas and improved on them. Since 2010, Chrome has eaten away at Firefox’s market share, relegating Firefox to a tiny niche of free software enthusiasts and tinkerers who like the customization of its XUL extensions.
According to StatCounter, Firefox’s market share of web browsers has fallen from 31.8% in December 2009 to just 6.1% today. Firefox can take comfort in the fact that it is now virtually tied with its former arch-nemesis, Internet Explorer and its variants. All of Microsoft’s browsers only account for 6.2% of current web browsing according to StatCounter. Microsoft has largely been replaced by Google, whose web browsers now controls 56.5% of the market. Even worse, is the fact that the WebKit engine used by Google now represents over 83% of web browsing, so web sites are increasingly focusing on compatibility with just one web engine. While Google and Apple are more supportive of W3C and open standards than Microsoft was in the late 90s, the web is increasingly being monopolized by one web engine and two companies, whose business models are not always based on the best interests of users or their rights.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Firefox 57 is awesome — so awesome that I’m finally using it as my default browser again.
But there is one thing it the Linux version of Firefox sorely needs: client-side decoration.
As OpenStack has continued to mature and move from the first stages of adoption to use in production clouds, the focus of the OpenStack community has shifted as well, with more focus than ever on integrating OpenStack with other infrastructure projects. Today's cloud architects and engineers need to be familiar with a wide range of projects and how they might be of use in their data center, and OpenStack is often the glue stitching the different pieces together.
One of the most powerful features of Django is its Object-Relational Mapper (ORM), which enables you to interact with your database, like you would with SQL. In fact, Django's ORM is just a pythonical way to create SQL to query and manipulate your database and get results in a pythonic fashion. Well, I say just a way, but it's actually really clever engineering that takes advantage of some of the more complex parts of Python to make developers' lives easier.
"The new scholarship programme is in tandem with Google's aim to train two million developers in India. The country is the second largest developer ecosystem in the world and is bound to overtake the US by 2021," William Florance, Developer Products Group and Skilling Lead for India, Google, told reporters here.
On what appears to be a quest to dump Linux, Google is allegedly developing a new mobile OS called “Fuchsia”. We don’t know much about the OS. We don’t know if it will replace Android, Chrome, or turn out to be some other kind of animal. We have been told it could potentially run computers as well as smartphones.
Her own family believed she died without telling her full story; obituaries devoted scant space to her inventions. Ms Dean was determined to try and correct that and make Lamarr the narrator of her own story. After some tenacious digging, that became possible: Fleming Meeks, a staff writer at Forbes in the 1990s, said that he had been “waiting 25 years for someone to call me about Hedy Lamarr, because I have the tapes.” In these audio recordings, Lamarr laments the lack of recognition that her invention, and her intellect generally, received. It provides the backbone of the film, and brings to life Lamarr’s beguiling persona.
Neutrinos are one of the most plentiful particles out there, as trillions pass through you every second. But they're incredibly hard to work with. They're uncharged, so we can't control their path or accelerate them. They're also nearly massless and barely interact with other matter, so they're hard to detect. All of this means that a lot of the predictions our physics theories make about neutrinos are hard to test.
The IceCube detector, located at the South Pole, has now confirmed a part of the Standard Model of physics, which describes the properties of fundamental particles and their interactions. According to the Standard Model, neutrinos should become more likely to interact with other particles as their energy goes up. To test this, the IceCube team used neutrinos thousands of times more energetic than our best particle accelerators can make and used the entire planet as a target.
One more thing is coming to add to the capabilities of the recently released Firefox 57 aka Firefox Quantum.
Mozilla is working on a new feature for Firefox, dubbed Breach Alerts, which will warn users when they visit a website, whether it was hacked in the past or not.
Uber claims to have paid $100,000 to secure 57 million accounts exposed in a breach last year, but the UK's spy agency, GCHQ, suggests consumers don't place too much faith in Uber’s claim.
The GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on Thursday published guidance for Uber users, reminding those affected by the firm’s just revealed 2016 breach they should take precautionary action even if their personal details may not have been compromised.
The agency warned that Uber drivers and riders should “immediately change passwords” that were used for Uber.
Indeed, hardly any time elapsed after Uber came clean Tuesday about the year-old breach it had concealed before crack teams of social engineers unleashed appropriately themed phishing messages designed to bamboozle the masses (see Fast and Furious Data Breach Scandal Overtakes Uber).
Multiple investigations prompted by Uber's admission that it concealed a hack could join together for one big mega-probe into the incident.
An EU working group which has responsibility for data protection will decide next week whether to co-ordinate different investigations taking place in the UK, Italy, Austria, Poland and the Netherlands.
For nearly eight years, the chip maker has been turning a deaf ear on security warnings about the wisdom of Intel Management Engine.
The Internet's biggest spam botnet Necurs has been spreading a strain of Windows ransomware known as Scarab over the last two days, security companies say.
"In opting to not only cover up the breach, but actually pay the hackers [sic], Uber has directly contributed to the growth of cyber crime and the company needs to be held accountable for this.”
The UEFI Class 3 system will remove support for this software module, thereby ending support for any non-64-bit operating systems or software. As noted by Anandtech, it'll also mean that any non-compliant older hardware, such as graphics cards, network cards and some storage adaptors, would also stop working.
The downsides of the Intel ME chips have already alarmed the security community. The recent addition to the threat was revealed in the security advisory published by Intel earlier this week.
After doing an in-depth security review of their products, Intel found a pool of eight critical privilege escalation vulnerabilities affecting Intel Management Engine (ME), Trusted Execution Engine (TXE), and Server Platform Services (SPS), the company said.
HP has issued firmware patches to fix a security flaw which allowed attackers to perform remote code execution attacks on enterprise-grade printers.
FoxGlove Security researchers issued an advisory disclosing the technical details of the bug, CVE-2017-2750, earlier this week.
This year saw dozens of massive data breaches — and 2017 isn’t over yet. It also saw record investments in security startups, with at least 20 in the $40 million and up range. Older IT giants like Cisco and IBM boosted their revenues from newer security businesses as well. With the size and scope of attacks expected to increase exponentially, security spending probably won’t drop anytime soon. Cybersecurity Ventures puts it at a $1 trillion market from 2017 to 2021.
Aid agencies said Saudi Arabia had not fulfilled its promise to reopen humanitarian aid corridors into northern Yemen on Thursday, leaving the main aid lifeline closed for tens of thousands of starving people.
Following intense pressure from western governments, Saudi Arabia agreed on Wednesday to lift a fortnight-long blockade of the port of Hodeida from noon (9am GMT) on Thursday, but more than eight hours after the deadline, aid agencies said no permissions for humanitarian shipments had been given.
A UN source in Yemen said: “We have submitted the request to bring in aid, as we have every day, but there has been nothing. At this stage, we do not know the reason for the delay.”
All of these reports were 36–48 hours after the Post broke the story that the targeting of Iranian nationals was a deliberate political ploy by Trump to single out their alleged crimes for the entirely unrelated purposes of stoking a war panic, imposing harsher sanctions, and doing what the administration has long—and quite openly—wanted to do: get out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran Deal. But none of these reports mention this crucial piece of context, context that would put the sensational headlines about Iranians hijacking our precious pop culture assets into proper perspective.
Most of the articles had a throwaway line explaining that Justice wasn’t technically implicating the Iranian government, but it was heavily implied they were involved, with citations of the defendant’s “links” to the Iranian military, and one or two paragraphs devoted to previous Iranian and North Korean government hacks.
After noting the alleged hacker had “previously worked as a hacker for the Iranian military,“ and spending roughly 100 words on historical examples of government’s hacking, LA Times’ Ryan Faughnder did note in paragraph 11 that “the indictment did not say the Iranian government was behind the HBO hack.”
The Daily News skipped the caveat all together and strongly suggested the defendant was working on behalf of the Iranian government, writing he was a “member of the Iran-supported Turk Black Hat Security team” and “had worked on behalf of the Iranian armed forces to attack military and nuclear software systems, as well as Israeli infrastructure.” The DoJ’s reluctant admission that he had no connection to the government didn’t merit a mention.
The British Transport Police said it received reports of gunfire on the westbound Central Line platform, at Oxford Circus.
"This caused a significant level of panic which resulted in numerous calls from members of the public reporting gunfire," the force said.
Police said additional officers will remain on duty in the West End to reassure the public.
BBC reporter Helen Bushby said she had seen a "mass stampede" of people running away from the station in the panic.
It would be more accurate to say that only a fool would be so quick to take all of this at face value. I don’t see the news value in having a prominent columnist working as a foreign leader’s publicist, but it is extremely useful for the crown prince to be given a major platform to deliver his spin to someone who will uncritically endorse it. There is practically nothing in the long profile that might displease its subject, whose assurances are taken as proof that he is the zealous “reformer” that his cheerleaders say that he is. Friedman tells us that he couldn’t find anyone with a bad word to say about MBS’ purges, as if anyone there would feel free to do so after the dramatic mass arrests that the crown prince has orchestrated.
At the U.N. Climate Summit in Bonn, Germany, a number of U.S. senators, mayors and governors staged a defiant anti-Trump revolt. The lawmakers were part of a coalition of cities, universities, faith groups and companies who attended the U.N. climate summit to reject Trump’s vow to pull the U.S. out of the Paris deal and instead proclaim “We Are Still In.” We spoke with Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.
As Americans celebrate a fairly tale about the relationship between Native Americans and settlers, actual Native Americans are mourning the pollution of more of their land, and lives, by fossil fuels. The November 16 spill of more than 200,000 gallons of oil from the Keystone pipeline occurred adjacent to the South Dakota reservation of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe. The inevitability of such spills is, of course, only one of many reasons millions of people resist pipelines.
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected a bid by the Donald Trump administration to dismiss a lawsuit that challenges a presidential permit for the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada.
U.S. District Judge Brian Morris in Great Falls, Montana, dismissed U.S. Justice Department arguments that the court had no authority to second-guess the cross-border permit that was issued by the State Department.
Morris also rejected motions by TransCanada Corp., the company behind the project, to dismiss the suit.
With petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch paying many of the GOP’s bills these days, it’s no wonder conservative policymakers are pushing hard to protect dirty fossil fuels against competition from clean, renewable energy. But entrepreneurial capitalists whom conservatives claim to worship are fighting back, slashing costs for wind and solar power to the point where few customers can refuse them.
But the politicians don’t. They see fire as an opportunity for plunder. Sonny Perdue and his wrecking crew at the Agriculture Department, which through a bureaucratic quirk controls the Forest Service, are portraying old-growth trees as standing weapons of mass destruction. Taking the Vietnam approach to the National Forests, which Perdue calls the “woodbasket of the world,” Perdue intends to save the forest by clearcutting it, without any restraint from troubling environmental laws. “We’re not going to roll over at every ‘boo’ from the environmentalists,” he vowed in Montana in July. How convenient for the timber industry.
All 12,000 or so REI employees are given a paid holiday on Black Friday and encouraged to “opt outside” — which is also the name of the campaign REI started in conjunction with the Black Friday closure.
Park districts are encouraging what has become a movement of people seeking respite in the outdoors over indoor shopping trips. The East Bay Regional Park District has made the day after Thanksgiving its annual free park entrance day — dubbing it “Green Friday.”
Unions said in a statement more than 500 Amazon workers at the Piacenza site in northern Italy had agreed to strike following a failure to negotiate bonuses with the company.
Investigation conducted by DNA, which included attending several meetings where cryptocurrency was being hard-sold, especially as an investment option, shows that cryptocurrency is fast replacing the cash — read black — component in real estate deals.
London's public parks are worth a combined €£91 billion and living near a green space can boost the value of home by as much as €£500,000, according to a new report published today.
A fifth of Greater London is designated as public parkland, but there are huge disparities over access to green spaces across the capital’s 33 local authorities. Richmond is the greenest borough with 41 per cent of it classified as public green space, followed by Merton (29 per cent), Hounslow (28 per cent), and Hackney and Waltham Forest (both 26 per cent).
The UK is in a mess thanks to an ill-defined ‘Leave’ option in the Brexit vote. More genuine popular sovereignty could have prevented the mess – and could yet get us out of it.
A shadowy network of lobby groups work hard to keep the City of London at the heart of global finance. But has Brexit spoiled the party?
A frequent criticism of Jeremy Corbyn and the revitalised, principled, post-Blair Labour Party is their lack of clarity on Brexit -- some speculated that Corbyn felt that Brexit would, at least, allow for re-nationalisation of privatised industries, something the EU might block -- but at Wednesday's Prime Minister's Questions, Corbyn shredded Theresa May and the Tories with a series of relentless, devastating questions about the slow-motion train-wreck that is the Tories' bungling handling of Brexit.
Polly Toynbee's postmortem on the Prime Minister and Exchequer's humiliating performances and Corbyn's sea-change sounds very plausible to me: noting that the EU was sold in part by guaranteeing neoliberal financial deregulation and the essential role of the EU in imposing brutal austerity to working people in order to ensure capital flows to bondholders (in Greece, Spain and elsewhere), Toynbee hypothesises that Corbyn has an instinctive "'capitalist club' Euroscepticism", but that this has been overriden by the views of Corbyn's base in the party's youth wing and the trade unions.
Following the footsteps of Bitcoin, Ethereum cryptocurrency has been increasing at a rapid pace in the past few days. As a result of this rise, Ethereum has crossed the $400 mark to reach an all-time high price of $414.90.
Governments all over the world are being forced to pay attention to cryptocurrency all of a sudden. With officials scrambling to draft regulatory guidelines, we may see some interesting developments in the coming months. Over in Morocco, things are not looking all that great, as the country’s government may soon move to ban cryptocurrency. As is usually the case, enforcing such a ban will be pretty difficult.
By equating Kosovo with Catalonia, Spanish leaders reveal themselves as unable to distinguish between legitimate aspirations for self-rule and destabilizing separatism.
Most of the American public have been successfully deceived by the ‘news’media, and by the ‘history’-books (likewise published by agents for the aristocracy), to believe that the U.S. Government serves the public-interest, and not the interest of the centi-millionaires and especially billionaires, who finance political campaigns.
Bannon, for example, was supposed to sell his $1 million to $5 million stake in the company Cambridge Analytica while he served in the administration as part of his ethics agreement but it’s unclear whether he sold the stake.
A former business associate of Michael Flynn has become a subject of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation for his role in the failure of Flynn's former lobbying firm to disclose its work on behalf of foreign governments, three sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.
Federal investigators are zeroing in on Bijan Kian, an Iranian-American who was a partner at the now-dissolved Flynn Intel Group, and have questioned multiple witnesses in recent weeks about his lobbying work on behalf of Turkey. The grand jury convened for the investigation will soon have a chance to question some of those witnesses, the sources say.
A lawyer for former national security adviser Michael Flynn has told President Donald Trump’s legal team that they are no longer communicating with them about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.
The decision could be a sign that Flynn is moving to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation or negotiate a deal for himself.
The decision was communicated this week, said a person familiar with the decision who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
The Trump White House tried to block public access to visitor logs of five federal offices working directly for the president even though they were subject to public disclosure through the Freedom of Information Act. Property of the People, a Washington-based transparency group, successfully sued the administration to release the data and provided the documents to ProPublica.
Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google's parent company Alphabet, says the problem is largely down to Russia Today and Sputnik, and that the company is "trying to engineer the systems to prevent it". Speaking at an event in Halifax, Canada, he said that Russia's disinformation strategy should prove easy to tackle as it hinges on "amplification around a message", and that such patterns can be detected and therefore "taken down or deprioritised". He firmly denied simply banning the news sites, saying the focus is on using Google's skill in algorithms and ranking. "We don't want to ban the sites. That's not how we operate. I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It's what we do."
In October 1978, the New Mexico Museum of Art was to host its first exhibition of installation art — titled, simply, Installations — as part of the citywide Santa Fe Festival of Arts. But the exhibition, curated by MaLin Wilson-Powell, never opened. During the installation process, Bradford Smith’s piece — a pair of humanoid rubber figures connected by a long rubber hose to a separate installation by Doris Cross — was deemed obscene by the powers that be, and Smith was asked to remove it. An uproar ensued, with some of the artists pulling their work from the show in protest and others getting caught in the middle. One proposed solution by the museum’s administration was to display Smith’s work in the men’s basement restroom, with a sign to warn museumgoers about the potentially objectional viewing material behind the door. The artist said no, and the show was canceled.
Censorship is not just for cinema but literature too in contemporary India, National Award-winning actor Rohini said on Friday, while also claiming that the chaos following protests against "Padmavati" was also being used to divert attention from "real" crises in the country.
Censorship is not just affecting cinema but literature as well in contemporary India, National award-winning actress and filmmaker Rohini said on Friday.
She said the chaos following protests against Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmavati was being used to divert attention from real crises in the country.
A poet, jailed for his words, uses iCloud to share his banned verse across social media, in a timely comment on freedom, creativity and censorship.
Judge Richard Leon of United States District Court of the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction in December 2013 and described the technology used for the NSA program as “almost Orwellian.” But twice, in 2014 and 2015, the federal appeals court in the same circuit sent the lawsuit back to the district court, asserting plaintiffs did not meet the “burden of proof” necessary to sue. Each time the appeals court avoided key constitutional issues.
In recent months, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has emerged as the government’s top crusader against strong encryption.
"We have an ongoing dialogue with a lot of tech companies in a variety of different areas," he recently told Politico Pro. "There [are] some areas where they are cooperative with us. But on this particular issue of encryption, the tech companies are moving in the opposite direction. They’re moving in favor of more and more warrant-proof encryption."
Most of you might be knowing that the websites you visit use third-party analytics scripts to record your visits and the pages you open. This anonymous statistics collection is pretty standard stuff. However, in recent past, there has been an increase in the number of sites using “session replay” scripts, which can record your keystrokes, mouse clicks, scrolling, etc., and send them to third-party servers. This data is used to record and playback of individual browsing sessions.
The intersection of Islam and education is a fragile, difficult place. On the one hand is a great and humane educational tradition, stretching back to world centres of learning in Baghdad, Cairo, Fes, Nissapur, Qum, Samarkand and Herat, among many other cities that flourished while Rome was a dangerous, sheep-infested ruin and London a small, unhygienic port. On the other is the contemporary phenomenon of terrorism and the widely shared sense that in some way education is one of its motors, and one of several keys to understanding, confronting and defusing it.
Conservatives have a new court-packing plan, and in the spirit of the holiday, it’s a turducken of a scheme: a regulatory rollback hidden inside a civil rights reversal stuffed into a Trumpification of the courts. If conservatives get their way, President Trump will add twice as many lifetime members to the federal judiciary in the next 12 months (650) as Barack Obama named in eight years (325). American law will never be the same.
The women accusing the Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct have faced doubt and derision. Other women, who have alleged sexual assault or harassment by powerful men in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and elsewhere, have become targets for online abuse or had their careers threatened. Harvey Weinstein went so far as to hire ex-Mossad operatives to investigate the personal history of the actress Rose McGowan, to discourage her from publicly accusing him of rape.
There are many reasons for women to think twice about reporting sexual assault. But one potential consequence looms especially large: They may also be prosecuted.
This month, a retired police lieutenant in Memphis, Tennessee, Cody Wilkerson, testified, as part of a lawsuit against the city, not only that police detectives sometimes neglected to investigate cases of sexual assault but also that he overheard the head of investigative services in the city’s police department say, on his first day in charge: “The first thing we need to do is start locking up more victims for false reporting.” It’s an alarming choice of priorities — and one that can backfire.
The reports started trickling out in May, in the weeks after the Federal Communications Commission had begun soliciting public comments on a proposal to repeal net neutrality rules that govern the flow of information on the Internet.
A large number of messages lambasting the Obama-era regulation began appearing on the FCC's public forum with the same text. While it is not unusual for commenters to use form letters provided by activist groups, people began complaining they hadn't submitted the comments that carried their names and identifying information.
The Committees of Advertising Practice (CAP) announced on Thursday that, from next year, ISPs will only be able to advertise "average" download speeds if at least 50 per cent of customers are able to receive them during the peak times of 8pm and 10pm.
Exactly what form MegaNet will take - and more importantly, what sort of security will be implemented, is still unknown at this stage but Dotcom has revealed that it'll be a non-IP based system.
The FCC is determined to repeal US net neutrality rules. If this happens, Internet providers will have the freedom to restrict or charge for access to certain sites and services, if they please. It also means BitTorrent throttling and blocking could become commonplace again, which would set us back a good ten years.
This seemingly internal fight overflows US borders in a number of important ways. Here are the two key aspects that trouble me, as someone who doesn’t reside in the US but interacts with a panoply of its internet services as a matter of daily and professional routine
Unlike the United States, Canada has emerged as a world leader in supporting net neutrality with clear endorsements from both political leaders and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Navdeep Bains, the federal Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, responded to the U.S. developments by affirming that "Canada will continue to stand for diversity and freedom of expression. Our government remains committed to the principles of net neutrality."
The FCC has managed to turn net neutrality into a dinner table issue: 200,000 people have called Congress in the past 24 hours.
AT&T and Comcast have convinced a federal judge to nullify an ordinance that was designed to bring more broadband competition to Nashville, Tennessee.
The Nashville Metro Council last year passed a "One Touch Make Ready" rule that gives Google Fiber or other new ISPs faster access to utility poles. The ordinance lets a single company make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself, instead of having to wait for incumbent providers like AT&T and Comcast to send work crews to move their own wires.
AT&T and Comcast sued the metro government in US District Court in Nashville, claiming that federal and local laws preempt the One Touch Make Ready rule. Judge Victoria Roberts agreed with AT&T and Comcast in a ruling issued Tuesday.
By itself, the paper's clever and provocative argument likely would have earned it a broad readership. But the really remarkable thing about the paper is who wrote it: four engineers at Microsoft whose work many expected to be at the foundation of Microsoft's future DRM schemes. The paper's lead author told Ars that the paper's pessimistic view of Hollywood's beloved copy protection schemes almost got him fired. But ten years later, its predictions have proved impressively accurate.
The paper predicted that as information technology gets more powerful, it will grow easier and easier for people to share information with each other. Over time, people will assemble themselves into what the authors called the "darknet." The term encompasses formal peer-to-peer networks such as Napster and BitTorrent, but it also includes other modes of sharing, such as swapping files over a local area network or exchanging USB thumb drives loaded with files.
Popular instant messaging service Telegram has for the first time blocked access to an entire channel following pressure from Google and Apple. It's understood that following complaints from Universal Music, that the channel was offering illegal downloads of the Taylor Swift album Reputation, the companies ordered Telegram to take action.