Bootlin has this week taken to the Kickstarter crowdfunding website to raise €£15,000 to take their new open source VPU driver into production. Designed to provide support for hardware-accelerated video playback on devices with Allwinner processors. Watch the demonstration video below to learn more about the Allwinner VPU that will offer support in the official Linux kernel.
Even though Allwinner ARM processors are very popular in a large number of hobbyists development boards, one key feature that is missing from the support in the official Linux kernel is support for the VPU (Video Processing Unit). Bootlin is now looking to rectify this issue. The development team at Bootlin are currently finalising the solution to provide complete Linux support for the Allwinner VPU for hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding.
Interim info on Meltdown/Spectra mitigation
Arguably the most interesting keynote at this year's FOSDEM event was Red Hat's Jon Masters talking about the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities on an interesting technical level.
While Jon Masters is mostly known for his involvement with Fedora/RedHat on ARM hardware, he was the lead for Red Hat's mitigation efforts around the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that rocked the world last month.
This post is based on a whitepaper I wrote at the beginning of 2016 to be used to help many different companies understand the Linux kernel release model and encourage them to start taking the LTS stable updates more often. I then used it as a basis of a presentation I gave at the Linux Recipes conference in September 2017 which can be seen here.
With the recent craziness of Meltdown and Spectre , I’ve seen lots of things written about how Linux is released and how we handle handles security patches that are totally incorrect, so I figured it is time to dust off the text, update it in a few places, and publish this here for everyone to benefit from.
The OverlayFS union mount file-system of the Linux kernel gains a big new feature in Linux 4.16.
Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Vitess as the 16th hosted project, alongside Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary, TUF and Rook. Vitess has been accepted as an incubation-level project, under the CNCF Graduation Criteria v1.0.
The TOC’s Graduation Criteria provides every CNCF project an associated maturity level of either inception, incubating or graduated. As an incubating project, Vitess must document it is being used successfully in production by at least three independent end users, have a healthy number of committers and demonstrate a substantial ongoing flow of contributions.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) accepted its second cloud-based storage project, Vitess, just a week after voting in its first storage project Rook.
The second storage project — and CNCF’s 16th hosted project — is a database orchestration system for horizontal scaling of MySQL. YouTube originally developed Vitess in 2010 as a better way to scale massive amounts of traffic.
announced intention to buy CoreOS might affect the rest of the container ecosystem. Container runtime development will go forward, with perhaps more emphasis on the Kubernetes container runtime interface (CRI-O) project. However, the engineers at Docker, CoreOS and Red Hat continue to make contributions to other container runtime projects, such as containerd, rkt and Atomic. CoreOS’ Container Linux appears to be end-of-life in favor of Red Hat’s offering. CoreOS-led etcd and Flannel are already core components of many Kubernetes stacks and that will likely continue. Red Hat may also take the container registry Quay and bundle it into their larger container offering.
[...]
Our analysis of a Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey provides some answers. Out of the 34 CoreOS Tectonic users identified, five also use Red Hat’s OpenShift. Thus, the combined entity would still have just 14 percent of respondents using it to manage containers. Only 4 percent of Docker Swarm users said they also used Tectonic.
As an alternative to traditional integrated networking equipment, AT&T last week said it will donate the Disaggregated Network Operating System (dNOS) project, putting the OS purposely built for white-box hardware under the direction of The Linux Foundation. "We think white box will play a big part in the future of our industry," AT&T said when touting the white-box approach last summer. "Our goal is to help this ecosystem grow in a way that benefits everyone."
Intel Coffee Lake CPUs began shipping in October and while their UHD Graphics are effectively re-branded Kabylake graphics, it's taken until today to get mainline support for Coffee Lake OpenCL support on Linux with Beignet.
For years AMD has had the AMD_gpu_shader_half_float extension for supporting half floats in shaders and based on the NV_gpu_shader5. The AMD_gpu_shader_half_float_fetch extension is extending that AMD_gpu_shader_half_float functionality to allow drivers to support half-precision floating-points in both shader texture functions and shader image memory functions.
Last week I provided some benchmarks showing how the RADV and RadeonSI performance changed with Mesa 18.0 while in this comparison is a look at how the Mesa 18.0 performance has evolved since Mesa 12.0 for Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance.
In addition to Igalia developers being at FOSDEM 2018 to talk about their work on Chromium porting for Wayland, Alejandro Piñeiro of this Spain consulting firm talked about their contributions towards SPIR-V support within Mesa and particularly for the Intel i965 OpenGL driver.
Red Hat's Lyude Paul has been spending the past number of weeks working out clock-gating support for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs with the open-source Nouveau DRM kernel driver.
Clock-gating can drop the GPU power consumption by several Watts but isn't being enabled by default until more testing has been done. The support can be enabled via the nouveau.config=NvPmEnableGating= kernel module parameter. There's also Fermi support in progress but Kepler1/Kepler2 (GTX 600/700 series) is where the support is currently best positioned.
An initial Kickstarter campaign to raise $7,500 to begin development of a XenServer clone has already pulled in over $32,000.
Docker is a cutting-edge software used for containerization, that is used in most of IT companies to reduce infrastructure cost.
By default docker comes without any GUI, which is easy for Linux administrator to manage it and it’s very difficult for developers to manage. When it’s come to production then it’s very difficult for Linux admin too. So, what would be the best solution to manage the docker without any trouble.
GRV is an opensource tool to display git repository on Linux terminal. This tool provides screens to view refs, branches and diffs in separate tabs. The behaviour and style can be customized through configuration. A query language can be used to filter refs and commits. In this article, I will show GRV features and installation steps on Ubuntu 16.04.
We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 19 (“Filters, Blending, Clipping, and Masking”) of CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition by Eric Meyer and Estelle Weyl, available now from O’Reilly.
If you’ve installed Steam on Linux through Flathub, chances are that Steam Auto-Cloud — Steam’s free game progress synchronization service — won’t work for many of your games that are built with the markets most popular game engines. I have dug into why it isn’t working, and discuss two possible solutions to fix the problem.
Disclaimer: The Steam for Flatpak package on Flathub is a third-party community effort and isn’t endorsed nor supported by Valve Corporation.
I’ll need to establish quite a bit of context regarding where games and applications store their configuration files and user data, and how they decide on where to store it. If you’re already familiar with the XDG Base Directory specification, you can glance at the tables and skip straight to the third section.
The full release of Godot 3.0 is now available, bringing VR support to the engine via a lightweight, 3DoF, ‘Cardboard-like’ solution, and OpenVR support through a GDNative-based plugin. The multiplatform Godot Engine is an open source, non-profit project available to download for free via the official site or through Steam.
Apparently, Windows 10 S can be upgraded to a "normal" version of Windows 10 Home for free, but the problem is that Microsoft has said around 60% don't even bother to do the upgrade keeping them locked into the Windows Store.
The rather fun turn-based tactics game Depth of Extinction [itch.io, Official Site] recently had an update to revamp the character classes and it's looking good.
If you don't really care for realistic or flashy graphics, Rusted Warfare [Steam] is definitely an RTS game to take a look at. This huge update is fantastic too! While it's not amazing to look at, it does feel like an extremely modern strategy game features lots of little touches I've come to expect from a good RTS.
Haarlem, The Netherlands – Publisher Iceberg Interactive and developer Zoetrope Interactive announce that their highly praised Lovecraftian PC horror game Conarium is now also available for Mac and Linux.
The Unreal Engine 4 powered Lovecraftian horror game 'Conarium' [Steam] has today officially launched for Linux.
Originally released for Windows back in June 2017, it was actually confirmed to be getting a Linux version way back in July of 2016. It sure took a while, but the main thing is they delivered when so many fail to do so.
I'll be honest, I'm not too bothered about Project Contingency [Official Site] deciding not to support Linux because I've only just heard of it, it's still in the early stages and Installation 01 [Official Site] will support Linux.
Good news everyone! Event[0] [Official Site, Steam], the sci-fi narrative exploration game where you build a relationship with a lonely spaceship computer now has a rough Linux beta.
I had sadly forgotten about Dead Cells [Official Site, Steam] since covering it in January last year, but thankfully the developer hasn't and it now has an approximate date for the Linux version.
Full Metal Furies [Official Site, Steam], the cooperative action RPG from the creator of Rogue Legacy now has a Linux test build on Steam.
The Swords of Ditto [GOG, Steam, Official Site] is a rather colourful action RPG that actually looks really great! We have it confirmed that it's coming to Linux too.
The game is being developed by onebitbeyond with a publishing hand from Devolver Digital. They don't seem to have an exact release date yet, other than sometime this year.
Linux is all about what you want and having it from the ocean of free and open source software. The same applies while performing a comparison of desktop environments as they comprise of different applications and a GUI via which the user interacts with the operating system. Just like a plethora of Linux-based free operating systems, are many options available and our list of best Linux desktop environment and their comparison includes the likes of KDE, Cinnamon, Xfce, GNOME, etc.
The Linux world is full of open source software. You have the option of choosing from hundreds of distributions and customize them as per your will. No one slaps you with a copyright even if you change the source code of a distro to fork your Linux distro and release it with a new name. That’s the beauty of free software and open source. Only one thing the creators may ask you is to give them proper credits because they have also invested their efforts and time. Well, that’s a different story.
For the last decade, the mobile market has been under complete lockdown. Unless you were Android or iOS, you didn't stand a chance at making much of a run at success. Canonical failed miserably with the Ubuntu Phone. Blackberry had to resort to their own take on Android. Firefox OS couldn't even get off the ground.
And yet, thanks to the Purism Librem 5, there's another attempt at creating an open source mobile platform on the horizon. Many of us prognosticators and pundits have been ansty to see what's to come for this platform, and finally someone has made some headway, and that's KDE. The platform is Plasma Mobile. From the looks of it, KDE is on to something.
Today i want to talk about my experience with the WikiToLearn migration.
The problem of every migration is getting your hands on the data in a way such that you can work on it.
Starting from the mysql backend and trying to have everything into a versioned object storage (python eve is the one we are tring now) is not an option.
The solution is to use a temporary database to keep the data, process the data in this temporary storage and afterwards uploading everything in the destination.
After some tries we managed to have the pipeline that reads all the MediaWiki pages, parses the structure and uploads everything in eve, using mongodb as a temporary storage.
Hello. I’m Maria, more often I use my nickname: Owly Owlet. I have a youtube channel, where I make video tutorials (in Russian) about how to use art software, mostly Krita.
As some of you may know, we had a GTK+ Hackfest on February 1st and 2nd in Brussels, Belgium. Matthias has already blogged and blogged again about the two days and detailed notes about all the things we discussed can be found here and here. He also has some nice pictures.
From everything we discussed I'm mostly looking forward to migrating to GitLab so I can file a few GTK+4 bugs and mark quite a few of them as blockers for a 4.0 release. I hope this will happen as soon as possible since there are quite a few usability regressions in current gtk+ master compared to gtk3 and those need time to get ironed out.
Released in time for this week's GNOME 3.28 beta milestone is the WebKitGTK+ 2.19.90 release as the GNOME platform port of the WebKit layout engine.
WebKitGTK+ 2.19.90 has several notable changes ahead of its upcoming WebKitGTK+ 2.20 stable release. WebKitGTK+ 2.19.90 now has WebSockets communication respecting system proxy settings, the context menu is now shown via a long-press gesture, and there is support for Shift + mouse scroll for scrolling horizontally. There is also a zoom gesture fix.
After adding the Mir back-end for the GTK+ 3.16 cycle, GTK+ 4.0 is dropping this back-end for the Canonical-developed display server.
The Mir back-end has been removed from the latest GTK+ code. This clears out about 6,500 lines of code from the tool-kit's codebase. The removal of the Mir back-end is coming since Mir has been focusing on Wayland protocol support to which GTK+ has more mature Wayland support than Mir. Since Mir's change of focus last year and the work the past number of months, the Wayland support on Mir has become more viable.
Today I decided to tell how I reported a bug (then ended up fixing it) on a non-GIMP related project. Well I do regularly this kind of stuff, and this could have just been one more of these silent commits to a random project as I did many times in my life. But since I decided recently to post more articles, well… I may as well tell a story as one-time contributor (as opposed to “regular contributor”) for once!
Also I think the whole process of reporting a bug on projects you don’t know at all — worse! A whole stack of software you don’t know much! — is quite interesting for people wondering how they should report bugs happening to them.
It’s been a long time I don’t write here. These past months were excruciatingly busy and intense, and lots of things happened but I didn’t manage to keep up with the blog posts. I’ll try to condense everything that happened and is still happening and will happen here.
Before I started my trial I was under the impression that Freespire and Linspire were quite different from stock Xubuntu. The Linspire blog, for instance, talks about binary blobs in "our" kernel and proprietary packages provided by vendors to Linspire. As I quickly learned, Linspire doesn't have its own repositories (let alone a custom kernel) and the proprietary packages are provided via the ubuntu-restricted-extras package. Similarly, the lead developer recently wrote on his blog that people who claim that Linspire is just a Xubuntu respin should "mind their own business" because they have no idea how much work has gone into customising Linspire over the last 18 months. When I asked the company if they could give some examples of how Linspire is different from Xubuntu I was told that, actually, their aim is to stay as close to Xubuntu as possible.
It would be unfair, however, to dismiss Freespire and Linspire as Xubuntu clones. The distros have two interesting selling points. Firstly, PC/OpenSystems can legally ship certain patent-encumbered codecs. Of course, anyone can install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package but in some jurisdictions doing so may be illegal. It is probably fair to say that few people care about such legalities but if you prefer to play by the rules then Linspire is worth a look.
Secondly, Linspire's main feature is the support license. You don't pay $79.99 for Xubuntu with a Linspire sticker - you buy a year's worth of support. Linspire might be an attractive option for small businesses and organisations that want to run Linux with a support contract. Similarly, I reckon many home users will like the idea of being able to get professional support for their Linspire box(es). That said, it is disappointing that the only real customisations (as in code changes) are regressions: the installer is far from a finished product. It is also unfortunate that Freespire lacks direction. The new Freespire was presented as an almost fully libre distro, yet the initial release clearly was the exact opposite. Only after pointing this out did PC/OpenSystems quietly release a new ISO.
The main issue I had with the distros was something else though: the marketing/PR/spin. I have already mentioned various examples of dubious claims. I would like to add one more example, just because it nicely illustrates my gripe: the Freespire page claims that, unlike Freespire, Linux Mint is difficult to install. PC/OpenSystems arrived at that conclusion based on its own research: a whopping three people were asked to install Freespire, Ubuntu and Linux Mint and the "sample group" apparently struggled to install Mint.
This type of marketing is needlessly negative. I would rather see the company work with, say, the Trisquel developers, who have already solved the issue with the checkbox in the Ubiquity installer and who may also be able to help Freespire become an FSF-approved distro. I would love to see a proper bug tracking tool so that I would have an easy way to report issues. And I think it would also be nice if PC/OpenSystems would start sharing the code it claims to produce.
In short, I think both Freespire and Linspire are on to something. I like the idea of a fully libre Xubuntu spin and I am sure there is demand for Linspire. I just hope history won't repeat itself.
A new version of elementary OS arrives in the spring, and when it does it’ll have a number of significant new features and changes on offer.
Among them a small yet appreciable bump to the version number. Yes elementary OS 0.5 Juno will actually be elementary OS 5.0.
Previous releases of elementary OS are numbered 0.1, 0.2 and so on, with 0.4 being the most recent release. That trend won’t continue hereon-in; the next elementary OS release will in fact be version 5.0, and not 0.5 as many had expected.
Why the switch?
Team Peppermint are pleased to announce the latest iteration of our operating system ISO images Peppermint 8 Respin-2. This is a security refresh of the Peppermint 8 ISO images to include all updates to date (as of 3rd Feb 2018), including the Meltdown and Spectre mitigations such as the new HWE kernel 4.13.0-32 and the latest Chromium web browser version 64. The new ISO also contains bug fixes for flash content in ICE SSB’s, and Chromium not remembering user selected xdg-open preferences for magnet and mailto links.. There is no need for Peppermint 8 or Peppermint 8 (first) Respin users to reinstall this version, the mitigations and bug fixes have already been pushed as automatic updates to the earlier Peppermint 8 versions.
Germany-based Linux vendor SUSE Linux has launched live patching for its enterprise Linux distribution that runs on IBM Power Systems and also a service pack for its real-tine enterprise distribution that will enable systems running it to handle both real-time and non-real-time workloads on a single virtual machine.
The development version of openSUSE Leap 15 has reached its beta phase builds and snapshots are available for testers.
As a free and open source (FOSS) operating system, Leap is derived from the source code of SUSE Enterprise Linux (known not as SEL, but SLE) and so is positioned in much the same space as CentOS (from Red Hat) and Ubuntu (from Canonical).
This week there was quite a bit of news from the Kubernetes community, highlighted by Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS, and some new entrants (Cisco, Heptio) into the Kubernetes market. The three announcements showcased a broad range of approaches into the market, from open-source-centric to hardware-integrations to new business models for support.
The original date of this post marked 25 years since Linus Torvalds shared the first iteration of a free, hobby operating system that he had developed via a short Usenet post. Of course, what became known as Linux is now far, far more than a hobbyist’s OS and spawned a wave of innovation that significantly changed the IT landscape. Bigger than just Linux (which is pretty big by itself), however, this movement birthed the open source movement, where like-minded communities of individuals could freely develop and share what would become the IT foundation of the future.
As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the term open source, the underpinnings of open source, from transparency and collaboration to freedom and broad dissemination, have spilled out well beyond the confines of enterprise technology to greatly impact both the world of consumer technology as well as the global business climate at large.
The momentum behind OpenEBS - a novel open source containerized storage project sponsored by MayaData - continues to accelerate.
Red Hat and Mycom OSI recently announced they are joining forces as part of an initiative to provide automated assurance across hybrid network functions virtualization (NFV) networks. The collaboration could help MyCom OSI boosts its presence in the telco cloud market.
I've created a new program, with a silly name, that solves a silly problem with devicetree overlays. Seem that, alhough there's patches to fully support overlays, including loading them on the fly into a running system, it's not in the mainline kernel, and nobody seems to know if/when it will get mainlined.
So easy-peasy-devicetree-squeezy is a hack to make it easy to do device tree overlay type things already. This program makes it easy peasy to squeeze together the devicetree for your board with whatever additions you need. It's pre-deprecated on release; as soon as device tree overlay support lands, there will be no further need for it, probably.
[...]
It supports integrating into a Debian system so that the devicetree will be updated, with your additions, whenever the kernel is upgraded.
This was my forty third month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
I finally found the time today to update my notes on how I package for Debian using Git. They're rather long (even after dropping my beginner Git tutorial, which seemed pointless given how many good ones there are now), so I'm not including the full text here. Take a look if you're curious.
Another interesting development that’s been coming along over the past two weeks is a conversation centered around an overhaul of the entire boot process. The goal is to reduce the amount of time we get to the desktop by optimizing the boot sequence from the moment you turn on your computer. Instead of using grub to load the kernel and the initramfs on UEFI systems, we’re going to be using systemd-boot, the modern incarnation of gummiboot. But to make this work, we need a mechanism to copy the kernel and initramfs images to the EFI System Partition(ESP) where systemd-boot expects them to be in order for the boot to initiate. Since the Ubuntu kernels do not have an existing mechanism to these operations, we use kernelstub. Kernelstub, when it runs, copies the kernel image and initramfs image onto the ESP and configures systemd-boot with the entries for the copied files. If you need to change kernel parameters, kernelstub has a manual mode that will allow you to do so in case your machine needs additional parameters. The general use is that kernelstub can copy the kernel and the generated initramfs when a new kernel becomes available. This current work is still in the experimental phase and part of the new installer and initial login work that is ongoing.
System76's Pop!_OS started off mostly as a re-branded spin of Ubuntu for the company's pre-loaded Linux laptops/desktops, but lately they have been venturing to more interesting changes at varying levels of the stack.
Aside from various desktop and theming changes, they have been working on reworking the installation process, possible disk encryption by default, and better HiDPI support. The latest is they are planning to use systemd-boot as their bootloader.
ADL’s rugged “ADL120S” SBC runs Linux or Windows on 6th Gen Core CPUs, and offers dual 4K DP ports, 4x GbE ports, 4x USB 3.0 ports, and expansion via 2x M.2 slots and 8x stackable PCIe slots.
Got an old Raspberry Pi lying around? Hate seeing ads while browsing the web? Pi-hole is an open source software project that blocks ads for all devices on your home network by routing all advertising servers into nowhere. What's best is it takes just a few minutes to set up.
Pi-hole blocks over 100,000 ad-serving domains, blocks advertisements on any device (including mobiles, tablets, and PCs), and because it completely blocks ads rather than just hiding them, this improves overall network performance (because ads are never downloaded). You can monitor performance and statistics in a web interface, and there's even an API you can use.
Earlier this month, AT&T cancelled a smartphone sales agreement with Huawei just moments before it was to be unveiled at CES. Why? Several members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees had crafted an unpublished memo claiming that Huawei was spying for the Chinese government, and pressured both the FCC and carriers to blacklist the company. AT&T, a stalwart partner in the United States' own surveillance apparatus was quick to comply, in part because it's attempting to get regulators to sign off on its $86 billion acquisition of media juggernaut Time Warner.
As Vaishali Thakker, a 23-year old open source programmer looked over the hall filled with around 200 people, she didn’t know how to react to what she had just heard. Thakker was one of the five women on the stage at PyCon India 2017, a conference on the use of the Python programming language, in New Delhi. The topic of the discussion was “Women in open source.”
Over the past 20 years, the people who make open source software have helped to create a bold new world and enabled some of our most important online infrastructure. Here’s to the next twenty!
Twenty years ago, on Feb. 3, 1998, in a conference room in Palo Alto, Calif., the term “open source” was coined. Michael Tiemann (now vice president of open source affairs here at Red Hat), Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson of Foresight Institute, John "Maddog" Hall and Larry Augustin, both with Linux International, Sam Ockman with Silicon Valley Linux User's Group and Eric Raymond were reacting to the announcement by Netscape that it planned to “give away” the Netscape source code by releasing it to the public. From there, adoption of both the term and concept moved quickly and today, the open source community has tens of millions of members and contributors.
The Open Source Initiative was formed in following days. People like Tim O’Reilly, Bruce Perens, and others played a pivotal role in popularising the term. Perens also adapted his Free Software Guidelines for Debian GNU/Linux to serve as Open Source Definition (OSD).
Over the next 20 years, the open source movement must move beyond software into the realm of social justice, poverty alleviation and sustainable human development that leaves no one behind.
That's the view of Nnenna Nwakanma, an open data, open government and the open Web across Africa advocate and co-founder of The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa, and an Open Source Initiative (OSI) board member.
Commenting on the 20th anniversary of the official recognition of open source software - as opposed to free software - Nwakanma said that "open" notion, practice and vision of open source had not only become mainstream, but had been a game changer.
"Beyond software, hardware or processes, the fundamental ideology of openness is the most valuable for me, in vision, in meaning and in impact. The hundreds of tech hubs across the world and thousands of tech communities cannot be overlooked. We owe those to open source.
Besides talking about GNU Hurd in 2018 one of the other interesting talks in FOSDEM's micro-kernel track this year was on an Intel GPU resource multiplexer being developed by the Genode project.
Thanks to hardware-based features for isolation on Intel Broadwell "Gen 8" graphics and newer, Genode OS has been working on GPU resource multiplexing for their operating system framework.
As the leader of an open source foundation, I have a unique perspective on the way open source technologies are catalyzing the digital transformation of enterprises around the world. More than half of the Fortune 100 is using Cloud Foundry. If you’re wondering why, there are two main reasons: one is the allure of open source, and the other is the strength of the platform itself.
Hackers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the lousy stock firmware your routers shipped with.
Apart from smartphones, routers and wireless base stations are undoubtedly the most widely hacked and user-modded consumer devices. In many cases the benefits are major and concrete: a broader palette of features, better routing functions, tighter security, and the ability to configure details not normally allowed by the stock firmware (such as antenna output power).
At this weekend's FOSDEM event in Brussels, Martijn Kaijser of the Kodi project provided an update on their current activities for 2018.
After going over their successful Kodi 17 release, the focus turned to talking about Kodi 18 "Leia" that they have been working on since the end of 2016. Their design goals with Kodi 18 are to improve the architecture and implementation of this open-source, cross-platform media player. As part of improving the code-base they are focusing on C++11 support, improving the code quality, dropping unmaintained features/code, and other cleanups. They are also working on moving non-core features out to add-ons.
I am on my way back from FOSDEM and thought I would share with yall some impressions from talks in the Networking devroom. I didn't get to go to all that many talks -- FOSDEM's hallway track is the hottest of them all -- but I did hit a select few. Thanks to Dave Neary at Red Hat for organizing the room.
The Free Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2018 just happened over the weekend. You can watch the recently uploaded videos on the official YouTube channel.
Earlier last year I announced last year that I was partnering up with the Linux Foundation to create the Open Community Conference as part of their Open Source Summit events in North America and Europe.
Well, the events happened, and it was (in my humble opinion) an enormous success. We had 120+ papers submitted to the North American event and 85+ papers submitted to the European event. From there I whittled it down to around 40 sessions for each event which resulted in some fantastic content and incredible discussions/networking.
That’s the idea behind the first-ever INDEX community event coming up February 20-22 in San Francisco, which will feature a keynote presentation from The Linux Foundation’s executive director, Jim Zemlin. Harnessing the power of shared innovation is crucial to remaining competitive in today’s markets, and Jim will discuss building sustainable open source projects to advance the next generation of modern computing.
We have opened the LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen China (LC3) 2018 call for proposals, and we invite you to share your expertise in this exploding open source market. Proposals are due March 4, 2018.
Open Networking Summit (ONS) is the industry’s premier open networking event gathering enterprises, cloud and service providers, from across the ecosystem to share learnings, highlight innovation and discuss the future of Open Source Networking.
Hear from industry visionaries and leaders on the latest updates and the future of Networking beyond SDN/NFV including 5G and IoT; cloud networking (Kubernetes & Cloud Foundry); AI and ML applied to networks; and the use of networking in industry verticals like FinTech and Automotive.
GFX-RS has been the Rust programming language project for a high-performance, portable graphics API that can map to Vulkan, Apple's Metal, Direct3D, etc from a single Rust API.
Dzmitry Malyshau of Mozilla and Markus Siglreithmaier talked about this portable graphics abstraction project at the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting in Belgium. GFX-RS has been in development since 2013~2014 but is currently undergoing a "total rewrite" in trying to better this single Rust API that supports backends for all major graphics APIs.
The open-source LibreOffice office application suite has been the standard office productivity suite in Linux distributions since 2010, when it was forked from the Oracle OpenOffice Suite.
Jahia has kicked off 2018 by releasing Jahia DX 7220 — the latest edition of its digital experience platform.
Jahia DX 7220 boasts a new user interface (UI), code-named ‘Anthracite’ which, “reflects feedbacks gathered from customers focus groups carried out along the development phase.”
Open Banking, which came about as a result of the result of the PSD2 rules around opening customer data, promises customers a better service experience. The concept has spread and is now a global trend, albeit in different guises. But as night follows day, Open Banking, with its emphasis on open source technologies, brings challenges.
As financial firms position themselves for success in this rapidly evolving environment, open source technologies play a key role in industry organizations. According to Axel Winter, former global head of enterprise architecture at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore and currently CTO at Thai business conglomerate Central Group.
Albert Chu of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the release this weekend of FreeIPMI, the GNU project implementing Intelligent Platform Management Interface v1.5/2.0 support.
This in-band/out-of-band IPMI software features many improvements with its v1.6.1 milestone.
Yesterday at FOSDEM 2018 Hurd developer Samuel Thibault talked about the work done on this GNU kernel for a PCI arbiter to allow different user-land drivers to access PCI devices concurrently. During this PCI arbiter talk he also went over the current state of the hardware support and recent achievements for GNU Hurd.
Sadly, the hardware state is pretty much the same as what he summarized two years ago at FOSDEM. GNU Hurd remains mainly focused on i686 kernel support, their 64-bit kernel can now boot but overall is in rough shape, their layer for getting network cards working remains based off the Linux 2.6.32 drivers, there is IDE and AHCI driver support for SATA, preliminary sound support through the userland Rump, etc.
Ring that joined the GNU project in late 2016 to focus on decentralized, multi-device communication has high hopes for 2018.
GNU Ring is still striving as a "free universal distributed communication platform" and to offer similar functionality to say Skype or WhatsApp but while being open-source and respecting the privacy of its users in part by being decentralized.
SiFive has opened pre-sales on a “HiFive Unleashed” SBC that runs Linux on its new RISC-V-based, quad-core, 1.5GHz U540 SoC, with 8GB DDR4, a GbE port, and an FMC connector.
SiFive followed up on its October announcement of the SiFive Freedom U540 — the world’s first Linux-driven RISC-V processor SoC — with a Crowd Supply campaign to launch a HiFive Unleashed SBC that showcases the U450. The board is available for a steep $999 for a June 30 shipment, or $1,250 if you want the few remaining first-run boards that ship by Mar. 31.
For roughly a decade, x86-64 has held hegemony over the desktop and server market. In the mobile space, ARM is the popular platform—for which a glut of cheap ARM processors have led to the rise of mass-produced single-board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi and competitors. However, proprietary "binary blob" drivers make using these devices somewhat more cumbersome, particularly for developers attempting to learn how devices work or ensuring complete device control.
Palmer Dabbelt who maintains the RISC-V ports of GCC, Binutils, Linux, and glibc while working at RISC-V company SiFive spoke at FOSDEM 2018 this weekend about the software/hardware state of this royalty-free open-source CPU ISA.
Palmer's presentation covers the RISC-V instruction set, the origins of it, a brief comparison to other CPU architectures, and the Linux state.
The South Korean government is expanding an investigation into researchers who named their children as co-authors on papers. The extended probe, announced on 1 February, comes after a government report last week identified 82 academic papers on which authors had named their children or relatives — many of them in middle or high school — as co-authors on the publications.
What happens when you combine DNA origami techniques with conventional lithography? You get a novel lithography technique dubbed DNA-assisted lithography (DALI) that has the resolution of electron beam lithography with the speed of conventional lithography.
In research described in the journal Science Advances, an international team of scientists from Finland, Denmark, and the United States have combined the programmable and accurate shapes made possible with DNA origami with conventional lithography to fabricate structures that are accurate below 10 nanometer resolution and are tens of nanometers in size.
A fundamental barrier to scaling quantum computing machines is "qubit interference." In new research published in Science Advances, engineers and physicists from Rigetti Computing describe a breakthrough that can expand the size of practical quantum processors by reducing interference.
Matt Reagor, lead author of the paper, says, "We've developed a technique that enables us to reduce interference between qubits as we add more and more qubits to a chip, thus retaining the ability to perform logical operations that are independent of the state of a (large) quantum register."
The search and manipulation of novel properties emerging from the quantum nature of matter could lead to next-generation electronics and quantum computers. But finding or designing materials that can host such quantum interactions is a difficult task.
"Harmonizing multiple quantum mechanical properties, which often do not coexist together, and trying to do it by design is a highly complex challenge," said Northwestern University's James Rondinelli.
But Rondinelli and an international team of theoretical and computational researchers have done just that. Not only have they demonstrated that multiple quantum interactions can coexist in a single material, the team also discovered how an electric field can be used to control these interactions to tune the material's properties.
Apple shocked the world when the iPhone 8 was benchmarked and it was found to be faster than a Core-i5. Well, Apple has long been reducing their reliance on other manufacturers for things like modems, graphics processors, RAM, and NAND flash storage. Apple’s dependency on third-party products results in more expensive manufacturing costs and less control over components. But the CPU is hailed as one of the most difficult components to produce, at least, when you have to compete with the performance of Intel and AMD. Does Apple have what it takes to take on x86? All signs seem to indicate that, at least they think, they do. Let’s dive deeper into this discussion.
Broadcom Ltd. sweetened its takeover offer for Qualcomm Inc. in a deal that would be worth more than $121 billion, turning up the pressure on the target in what would be the largest-ever technology deal.
The craze for smartphones, social media, and universal connectivity is generating immense wealth but also deep unease in South Korea, source of a large share of the computer chips that make them work.
Soaring demand for microchips used in smartphones, computer servers, and data centers is driving profits for chip and smartphone maker Samsung Electronics and its smaller rival SK Hynix sky high, helping sustain growth in Asia's fourth largest economy.
Samsung reported Wednesday that its annual net profit rose 84 percent to a record 41.3 trillion won ($38.6 billion) in 2017 on annual sales of 239.6 trillion won ($223.7 billion), up 19 percent from the previous year.
Let’s say you hear a juicy rumor that you just can’t keep to yourself. You hate rumormongers, so you compromise by telling only one person and then keeping your mouth shut. No big deal, right? After all, if the person you tell adopts the same policy and only tells one other person, the gossip won’t spread very far. If one new person hears the rumor each day, after 30 days it will have spread to only 31 people, including you.
The International Generic and Biosimilar medicines Association has launched an information campaign on biosimilar medicines in order to raise worldwide understanding and acceptance of biosimilar medicines.
Biosimilar medicines are similar to already authorised reference biotherapeutics, with the same indications and effects. In a press release [pdf], the International Generic and Biosimilar medicines Association (IGBA) announced its information campaign, based on the IGBA biosimilar medicines public slide deck.
The World Health Organization (WHO) held its 142nd session of the Executive Board (EB) meeting on 22-27 January 2018 in Geneva. During the week, country delegates discussed a draft resolution text on the preparation for a High-level Meeting at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on ending tuberculosis (TB).
You don't have to be a germophobe to want to slip on rubber gloves when you enter an airplane cabin.
A new study confirms once again that various surfaces in the cabin of a commercial plane have many times the amount of bacteria than an average kitchen counter. But the latest study found that surfaces in airport terminals can have even higher germ counts than those in the planes.
The highest number of colony-forming units of bacteria per square inch were found on those increasingly popular self-serve ticketing kiosks that are popping up in terminals around the country, including Los Angeles International Airport.
The folk at OpenWall have called for assistance to create a security module to watch Linux kernels for suspicious activity.
In the company's explanation, the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) is described as a module that “attempts to post-detect and hopefully promptly respond to unauthorised modifications to the running Linux kernel (integrity checking) or to credentials (such as user IDs) of the running processes (exploit detection).”
Developed by Adam Zabrocki (@adam_pi3) and now championed by OpenWall, the first cut of the code landed last week.
Security firm Bitdefender says it has been monitoring a complex custom-built piece of Windows malware, that it has named PZChao because of the name of the domain at which its command and control server resides.
In a growing development, attackers have leveraged an exploit found in almost all generations of Microsoft Windows. EternalBlue is a security vulnerability that allowed WannaCry to run rampant in over 150 different countries and took down parts of the National Health Service (NHS), as well as Petya/NonPetya (a strain of ransomware that inspired NATO to assemble an entire cyber operation to combat it).
Microsoft Windows servers around the globe are playing host to a mining botnet known as Smominru Monero, which may have made as much as US$3.6 million for its operators based on the current value of the Monero cryptocurrency.
Different kinds of malware are targetting cryptocurrency owners and trying to steal their valuable digital coins by employing different techniques. This new and lucrative affair is attracting experienced and novice malware creators alike. Just recently, Japanese police arrested a 17-year-old teenager boy for creating malware that targetted cryptocurrency wallets.
Japanese authorities say that at least one man —a 31-year-old from Tokyo— downloaded and installed the teen's app. This man later discovered that 170 Monacoins (around $500) went missing from his wallet. He said he saw other users' warnings on the forum regarding the suspicious software, but it was too late at that point.
South Korea said on Monday that North Korea last year stole cryptocurrency from the South worth billions of won and that it was still trying to hack into its exchanges.
“North Korea sent emails that could hack into cryptocurrency exchanges and their customers’ private information and stole (cryptocurrency) worth billions of won,” said Kim Byung-kee, a member of South Korea’s parliamentary intelligence committee.
The NetBSD project has issued an update concerning recent security efforts for this popular BSD operating system.
NetBSD has landed "Separate Virtual Space" (SVS) within their development repository as their mitigation effort for the Meltdown CPU vulnerability. SVS unmaps kernel pages when running in user-space. Initially only the PTE area is being unmapped. After tuning the past month, NetBSD developers now consider SVS to be stable but at the moment has not yet been back-ported to their stable branches. SVS for now is only supported on x86 64-bit.
Oh, good, three NSA exploits previously leaked by The Shadow Brokers have been tweaked so they now work on all vulnerable Windows 2000 through Server 2016 targets, as well as standard and workstation counterparts.
Before this, EternalSynergy, EternalRomance, and EternalChampion had partially been used in the NotPetya cyber attack. However, they had not been used by malicious actors nearly as much as EternalBlue because they didn’t work on recent Windows versions. That has now changed thanks to RiskSense security researcher Sean Dillon, aka @zerosum0x0, who ported the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) exploits to work on Windows versions released over the past 18 years.
A trio of NSA exploits leaked by hacking group TheShadowBrokers has been ported to work on all versions of Windows since Windows 2000.
The EternalChampion, EternalRomance and EternalSynergy exploits were made public by the group last year, and now a security researcher has tweaked the source code so they will run on nearly two decades' worth of Microsoft operating systems -- both 32- and 64-bit variants.
The government of the United States is clearly in demonic hands. We are overflowing with proof. Take today (2-2-18) for example. A report from the House Intelligence Committee was released that is proof that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice (sic), and the Democratic National Committee are engaged in a conspiracy against American democracy and the President of the United States with the full support of the presstitute media.
As if that is not enough, also released today is the Pentagon’s new Nuclear Posture Review. A nuclear posture review specifies a country’s attitude toward nuclear weapons and their use. In past posture reviews, nuclear weapons were regarded as unusable except in retaliation for a nuclear attack. The assumption was that no one would use them. There was always the possibility that false warnings of incoming ICBMs would result in the nuclear button being pushed, thus setting off Armageddon. There were many false warnings during the Cold War. President Ronald Reagan was very concerned about a false warning resulting in mass death and destruction. This is why his principal goal was to end the Cold War, which he succeeded in doing. It did not take successor governments long to resurrect the Cold War.
The only thing that has ever been faithful to the Kurds is history: it has faithfully, without fail, betrayed them. The Kurds have been cast in the role of the pawn in powerful countries’ games of chess. They do much of the hard work only to be sacrificed when checkmate is in sight.
The US Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is missing documentation for how it spent hundreds of millions of US dollars, a new audit finds. The firm Ernst and Young found the agency could not account for $800m (€£572m), according to Politico. The money was reportedly used for military construction projects and computer systems. DLA confirmed failure to properly track its spending, but said there was no "loss of accountability". "DLA concurs with Ernst and Young's assessment of our failure to properly account for and track funding to specific construction projects," a DLA spokeswoman told the BBC.
Recent policy directives raise concerns over new U.S. postures towards great power conflicts and developing “tactical” nuclear weapons, underlining the need for a revival of the U.S. antiwar movement, write Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers.
Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror involving 76 countries or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors Russia and China (as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America’s new National Defense Strategy), the U.S. military is engaged globally. A network of 800 military bases spread across 172 countries helps enable its wars and interventions. By the count of the Pentagon, at the end of the last fiscal year about 291,000 personnel (including reserves and Department of Defense civilians) were deployed in 183 countries worldwide, which is the functional definition of a military uncontained. Lady Liberty may temporarily close when the U.S. government grinds to a halt, but the country’s foreign military commitments, especially its wars, just keep humming along.
A British judge is scheduled to rule Tuesday on Julian Assange’s bid to force Britain to drop a warrant for his arrest, a development that would remove a substantial legal hurdle to his leaving the Ecuadorean Embassy in London that has been his refuge for more than five years.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tore into Republicans for their promotion and release of the Nunes memo — which purported to demonstrate surveillance abuses by the FBI and DOJ — but for the Morning Joe anchor is little more than a weak attempt to run interference for President Donald Trump.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said he has been let down by "stooges" and people he used to respect in conservative media because of their reaction to the recently released FISA memo. On Monday's edition of Morning Joe, Scarborough said that the FBI argument that 'we can't tell you' the information that justified the FISA warrant should be trusted because it's "classified information."
German chancellor Angela Merkel has an eco-friendly reputation. She’s been hailed for supporting international climate agreements and backing renewable energy technologies. On closer inspection, however, the chancellor’s renown has always been based more on fairytale than fact.
A popular myth, for instance, is that Merkel is the mother of Germany’s Energiewende—that is, its transition to renewable energy. This couldn’t be further from the truth. To the contrary, Germany’s signature energy policy was invented by her political opponents.
The leaders of four opposition parties have written to Jeremy Corbyn urging him to “rethink” his stance on Brexit and work with them to keep the UK in the EU single market and customs union.
In a joint letter, the SNP, Liberal Democrat, Green Party and Plaid Cymru leaders called on Mr Corbyn to join forces with them “in opposing the Tories’ damaging plans”.
The Labour leader has previously refused to engage with other parties that are campaigning against the Government’s plans for a hard Brexit.
This weekend, House Speaker Paul Ryan touted a story of a woman whose paycheck increased by $1.50 cents a week as a major benefit to middle-class workers. On Saturday, Ryan tweeted a link to an Associated Press report, writing, “A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week … she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year.” After a deluge of ridicule and outrage, Ryan deleted the tweet hours later. For more, we speak with Richard Wolff, emeritus professor of economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and visiting professor at The New School. He’s the author of several books, including, most recently, “Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown.”
The S&P 500 was down 113 points, or 4.1 percent Monday in its worst day since August, 2011. The futures, which typically match the spot market's decline, fell even more in the earlier session, off by 5.3 percent.
Recent months have seen the colour green added enthusiastically to the red, white and blue Brexit once boasted by Theresa May. An interview with Green Party peer and Leave voter, Jenny Jones, explores the thinking.
Stein supporters unexpectedly had donated millions over the Thanksgiving holiday, after her legal team could not convince Hillary Clinton’s campaign to enlist some of their donors. That grassroots response was completely unexpected. Like much of America, Stein’s donors questioned 2016’s official results. They were part of 2016’s grassroots surge seeking real change, especially millennial youths. They wanted to know what happened. I’d seen the Greens file for a recount in 2004 in Ohio. That effort did not change its outcome. But it did help expose a spectrum of tactics in the fine print of voting that confirmed the GOP was committed to strategically targeting and sup€ pressing known Democratic Party blocs. I other words, the voting process had been turned against its rightful participants.
[...]
[...]The answer to Michigan’s seventy-five thousand under-votes was not computer science. It was examining the vote: looking at individual ballots to see if a vote was there or not. That is straightforward. That was not the same as bringing in cyber detectives to hunt for code-altering fingerprints in voting software to see if the count is being tweaked to one side’s benefit. That’s what the Greens wanted to do in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But that wasn’t to be, either.
All of this is known. Yet the House Intelligence Committee and the White House released the “Nunes Memo” without pointing out that it was already confirmed by the FISA court itself and by NSA Director Adm. Rogers. Why?
One consequence of this continuing Republican incompetence is that it allows the presstitutes, who also know about the FISA court memorandum, to ignore that confessions validating the “Nunes Memo” are in the hands of the FISA court. Consequently, the presstitutes, such as the CNN whores, are at their dirty dishonest work of misrepresenting the documented facts in the House Intelligence Committee report as “Nunes’ allegations,” “Nunes’ assertions,” “a disputed GOP intelligence memo that alleges FBI abuses,” and so forth. See, for example, https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/02/politics/republican-intelligence-memo/index.html
I am a supporter of Biss because he is one of the rare Democratic candidatesââ¬Å —ââ¬Å Beto O’Rourke is another—who puts reform at the front. He’s a strong and clear progressive, and makes no apologies for those views, but he makes it completely clear that we won’t fix anything until we fix this democracy first. Biss is running against a bunch of rich and famous people. The current governor of Illinois is a state-level version of Donald Trump: A billionaire who knows nothing about governmentââ¬Å —ââ¬Å and who has proven that in his inept and failed administration. Yet the other leading Democrats are not much better. The shoo-in party favorite (and don’t think about Hillary Clinton here) is a Chicago billionaire, JB Pritzker. And challenging him is another rich and famous Democrat, Chris Kennedy. “Everyone knows” against this money and fame, no one else could ever have a chance.
Aleksey German Jr.'s biopic on Russian journalist and writer Sergey Donatovich Dovlatov has its world premiere in competition in Berlin.
Forget the Mueller investigation. If you want a real look at Russian fake news and Moscow's political meddling, check out the trailer for Dovlatov, the new drama from Russian auteur Aleksey German Jr.
Posited as six days in the life of writer and reluctant journalist Sergey Donatovich Dovlatov, it traces his struggles to write, and publish, under the censorious strictures of the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
“Former CIA director John Brennan has become the latest member of the NBC News and MSNBC family, officially signing with the network as a contributor,” chirps a recent article by The Wrap, as though that’s a perfectly normal thing to have to write and not a ghastly symptom of an Orwellian dystopia. NBC reports that the former head of the depraved, lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency “is now a senior national security and intelligence analyst.”
The world has survived the first year of United States President Donald Trump’s reign. He has not yet destroyed the world with a major war, whether against Iran or North Korea. He has not wrecked the foundations of the world trade and financial systems. These he has not done.
But, in this brief year, he has certainly emboldened elements of the hard Right, which had previously existed at the edge of the political sewer. He has pushed to the forefront socially toxic attitudes that had previously been hidden from public sight by a veneer of politeness. It is not clear whether Trump is the author of these maladies or if, as is more likely, he is merely one more illustration of them. Hatred has made its appearance as an acceptable political force. Trump is merely one more manifestation of this toxicity.
But during his first year, Trump pushed through a tax reform package that will make the rich richer and the poor more vulnerable. That was perhaps his most important achievement. Others have been blocked one way or the other. He could not start his war against Iran, nor could he move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He was not able to dismantle the U.S. health care system, nor was he able to fully end the mild U.S. commitment to refugees. Much that Trump has done will be unpleasant for the country, but little of it is dramatically different from what has come before.
You’re reading this, so you probably follow political punditry. And if you follow political punditry, you’ve been hearing the usual corporate suspects predict that one of two things will happen in this fall’s midterm elections: either the Democrats will win big (win back the Senate), or they’ll win really big (the House too). Outta the way, Congressional Republicans: here comes the Big Blue Wave!
Of course, these are the same clowns who called it big for President Hillary. Yet on and on they yammer, and we have to listen to them since big-money political media won’t hire anyone who has a clue.
Interestingly, there are early warning signs — just as there were throughout the 2016 presidential race — that Democrats may be counting their electoral chickens before they’re aborted.
This is remarkable stuff. In some of our most esteemed universities, supposed citadels of free thinking and scientific endeavour, administrations are demanding that debate about transgenderism be shut down and courses be cleansed of un-PC material. How any course about, say, biology, can coexist with this is unfathomable.
And it’s not just in relation to trans issues, that most testy and inflamed subject in politics today. We also found that 48 per cent of institutions have policies which warn against insulting faith groups or offending religious sensibilities. One students’ union insists that ‘the religious sensibilities of the union’s members must be respected’. Shelley must be turning in his grave.
The Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association is dismayed and angered by the decision of MultiChoice not to renew the contract of ANN7. This decision by MultiChoice – a white monopoly capital owned media company – firmly rooted in our unsavoury apartheid history through their owner Nasionale Pers, is not contractual it is political.
It is a political act of censorship to silence, and in fact totally remove, a television news channel whose reporting about the continuing control of White Monopoly Capital, and their ruthless exploitation of the black (especially African) majority, does not suit the plans of White Monopoly Capital and their black sell-out surrogates who want to continue strengthening their grip on our economy.
The Knox County Public Library hosted a panel discussion on the history and implications of censorship at Lawson McGhee Library on Sunday.
The discussion featured speakers from the Knox County School system and the University of Tennessee, as well as playwright Kenneth Jones, whose “Alabama Story” began its run at UT's Clarence Brown Theatre on Wednesday.
Jones was joined by Cindy Welch, a professor at UT's School of Information Science, and Sarah Searles, the library and media services specialist for Knox County Schools.
Zhen is the executive director for Human Rights Campaign in China, a non-profit organisation which spreads information about – and advocates for – human rights activists. He is also the executive editor and founder of ATGFW.org, a website which works against internet censorship and provides technical advice to help people circumvent internet restrictions.
He was taken from his home in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai on September 1 last year on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power,” according to US-backed Radio Free Asia.
Internet freedom in Russia has continued its downward spiral over the past year with over 115,000 recorded cases of censorship, according to an internet and media freedom report published Monday.
The report by the Agora international human rights group was published half a year before new anti-terror legislation comes into force, which will greatly expand state powers of surveillance over internet correspondence. Under the "Yarovaya Law," Russian telecom and internet providers will be forced to store all user communication data for 3 years.
China is to block all websites related to cryptocurrency trading and initial coin offerings (ICOs) – including foreign platforms – in a bid to finally quash the market completely.
“To prevent financial risks, China will step up measures to remove any onshore or offshore platforms related to virtual currency trading or ICOs,” said an article published on Sunday night by Financial News, a publication affiliated to the People’s Bank of China (PBOC).
Bitcoin latest: prices, policies and politics
The article acknowledged that recent attempts to stamp out digital currencies by shutting down domestic exchanges had failed to completely eradicate trading.
In September, Kenya was praised by many after its Supreme Court -- citing irregularities -- nullified the election of the country's sitting president. But nearly six months on it appears this applause from observers was premature. As the Court ordered a fresh election for October, President Uhuru Kenyatta, bitterly disappointed by the judges' decision, declared with grace, "I don't agree with the decision, but I respect it." It was seen as an example of how Kenya's rule of law actually held sway.
Two Kenyan television channels shut down by the government over their coverage of the political opposition resumed partial broadcasting on Monday, although a third channel remained off the air.
The unprecedented act of censorship sparked a local and international backlash against the government of President Uhuru Kenyatta, who won an election in October.
It also reinvigorated an opposition that had appeared unsure of its next step after a highly publicised rally last week at which leader Raila Odinga symbolically inaugurated himself as president.
Steph Hickling Beckman, managing artistic director for Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective, doesn’t hold back when describing the relevance of Alabama Story, her company’s first production for the current season. “It’s a play about books and censorship, right when Trump tries to ban seven words from the CDC,” she says, referring to reports that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff members were recently discouraged from using language such as “transgender,” “diversity” and “evidence-based” in budget documents.
The Blue Lives Matter movement has traveled overseas. Here in the US, we've seen various attempts to criminalize sassing cops, although none of those appear to be working quite as well as those already protected by a raft of extra rights would like. Meanwhile, we had Spain lining itself up for police statesmanship by making it a criminal offense to disrespect police officers.
Over in Hong Kong, the police chief -- while still debating whether or not he should offer an apology for his officers' beating of bystanders during a 2014 pro-democracy protest -- has thrown his weight behind criminalization of insults directed at officers.
Manchester Art Gallery’s decision to temporarily remove John William Waterhouse’s 1896 work, Hylas and the Nymphs, has undeniably succeeded in its stated aim to “prompt conversation about how we display and interpret artwork”.
The painting, which usually hangs in a gallery full of 19th-century works entitled In Pursuit of Beauty, has been temporarily removed, according to the gallery’s curator of contemporary art, Clare Gannaway. The painting was replaced by a notice telling visitors that the decision to take down the painting is itself an artistic act which will feature in a solo show by the artist Sonia Boyce which opens in March. Post-it notes were provided for people to leave their reactions.
An art gallery in England turned a 19th-century painting into a commentary on contemporary culture last month by removing it altogether.
The Pre-Raphaelite painting, “Hylas and the Nymphs,” by the Victorian artist John William Waterhouse, is now back on display at the Manchester Art Gallery. It shows Hylas, a companion of the mythological hero Heracles, being lured into a lily pond by seven naked young women.
The way platforms develop content moderation rules can seem mysterious or arbitrary. At first glance, the result of this seemingly inscrutable process is varying guidelines across different platforms, with only a vague hint of an industry standard -- what might be banned on one platform seems to be allowed on another. While each platform may have nuances in the way they create meaningful content moderation rules, these teams generally seek to align with the platform's/company's purpose, and use policies and guidelines to support an overarching mission. Different platforms delivering unique value propositions to users' accounts for variations in content moderation approaches.
This is, apparently, the first use of that law -- which has remained controversial in Israel for a damn good reason. Even if you are against the BDS movement, basic civil liberties concepts around free expression should find this whole thing dangerous and ridiculous. The idea that Lorde choosing not to perform in Israel would constitute "damage" on Israel seems ridiculous on its face. The fact that these ticket buyers think that the proper response to someone saying something they don't like and persuading a famous person to do something they don't like is to sue rather than to try to persuade people in the other direction seems like an indictment of their own ability to make their case.
House intelligence oversight leader Devin Nunes released his supposed bombshell Friday. The Nunes memo was supposed to contain info showing the FBI had engaged in a questionable, politically-motivated investigation of Trump staff. How this news was supposed to be shocking was anyone's guess. Anyone who has followed the FBI's activities since the days of J. Edgar Hoover already knows the FBI engages in questionable, politically-motivated investigations. The only new twist is the FISA court's involvement and the use of secretive surveillance powers to collect domestic communications.
The FBI responded by noting the memo [PDF] contained "material omissions of fact." What's contained in the memo likely provides rhetorical ammo to those who believe Trump and his advisors did nothing wrong during the run-up to the election. But it will only provide limited support. What's contained in the memo are accusations the FBI sought (and obtained) FISA warrants to surveill one-time Trump advisor Carter Page. The FBI -- according to the memo -- used the dubious Christopher Steele dossier to buttress its allegations. It apparently continued to do so even after it knew the Steele dossier had been paid for by the Democratic National Committee.
The memo notes this interception was not performed under Title VII, which covers the recently-renewed Section 702 collection powers. This surveillance was performed under Title I -- a more "traditional" FISA process in which the government seeks probable cause-based warrants from the FISA court, much like law enforcement officers seek warrants from magistrate judges.
A group of Silicon Valley technologists who were early employees at Facebook and Google, alarmed over the ill effects of social networks and smartphones, are banding together to challenge the companies they helped build.
The cohort is creating a union of concerned experts called the Center for Humane Technology. Along with the nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense Media, it also plans an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort and an ad campaign at 55,000 public schools in the United States.
The campaign, titled The Truth About Tech, will be funded with $7 million from Common Sense and capital raised by the Center for Humane Technology. Common Sense also has $50 million in donated media and airtime from partners including Comcast and DirecTV. It will be aimed at educating students, parents and teachers about the dangers of technology, including the depression that can come from heavy use of social media.
Facebook appears to be developing an "online system" that can algorithmically predict its users' socio-economic status without knowing their incomes.
Such a system would allow Facebook to more accurately target users with content and advertising tailored to their social class, the company said.
According to a patent application filed in the US last July, the system will use classifiers to predict which socio-economic group users belong to.
Europe's General Data Protection Regulation kicks in this May, and it enforces a user-first, privacy-centric set of rules for the internet that is totally incompatible with the adtech industry and the ad-supported web in general (though much rides on a potentially humungous loophole).
But these rules won't just affect Europe, but all the companies that want to trade with the world's largest, richest trading block: to sell products and services in Europe, these businesses will have to adhere to European rules. [...]
The new regulations offer EU citizens sweeping new powers over how their data can be collected, used and stored, presenting global leaders outside the 28-country block with a stark choice: bring their domestic laws in line with the EU’s new rules, or risk being shut out of a market of 500 million well-heeled consumers.
In order for AVs to work, they have to snag all kinds of data about the world around them: where precisely other objects are at any given moment and how fast they are moving. That data can seemingly be kept forever.
Under current law, all of that data can be obtained relatively easily by federal law enforcement. In other words, if you're a privacy-minded citizen, your threat model just changed.
The ruling on Lauri Love’s extradition appeal will be handed down at 11am on Monday, 5 February 2018, at Court 4, Royal Courts of Justice in London. The High Court’s decision could determine the future of the forum bar, in addition to Lauri Love’s personal fate.
In a major victory for Lauri Love, the High Court has approved his appeal and quashed his extradition. As Courage Case Director Naomi Colvin said, “This ruling is a massive victory for free expression online, for the fair treatment of neurodiverse people and for those of us who have drawn attention to the dire treatment of hackers and information activists in the United States.”
The High Court judges disagreed with the District Court on whether the forum bar should apply in Lauri’s case and on the prospect of proper medical care to treat the likely risk of suicide should Lauri have been sent to a US prison.
Regarding the forum bar, the judges found compelling the argument that if extradited, Lauri’s mental and physical health would deteriorate such that he could become unfit to plead. The judges also emphasized the absence of an argument from the UK prosecutor as to whether Lauri could be tried in the UK. Where the District Judge found this lack of argument to be neutral, the High Court saw it in Lauri’s favor: “In view of the fact that the CPS did not express any view adverse to the prosecution of Mr Love in the United Kingdom on any of the grounds potentially available to it, this silence is a factor which tells in favour of the forum bar, though it may readily be outweighed by other factors.”
The decision delivered by the lord chief justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon, is highly critical of the conditions Love would have endured in US jails, warning of the risk of suicide.
Lawyers for the 33-year-old, who lives in Suffolk, had argued that Love should be tried in Britain for allegedly hacking into US government websites and that he would be at risk of killing himself if sent to the US.
Last week, the tech giant’s new patents were published, as Geekwire first reported, covering wristbands that can track the location of hands and movement relative to inventory bins via radio transmissions and ultrasonic sound pulses.
A smarter justice system isn’t just good policy. It’s good politics, too.
It has taken decades, billions of dollars, and thousands of laws to turn the United States into the largest incarcerator in the world. This system also imposes on millions of people harsh, unfair, and long-lasting consequences for having a criminal record. But it’s within the power of local prosecutors to start dismantling this machine – even without changing a single law.
San Francisco’s District Attorney, George Gascón, is showing the way. Last week, he announced that his office would erase thousands of marijuana convictions from people’s criminal records and automatically review thousands more dating back to 1975 to see if those convictions should be downgraded.
Explaining the decision, Gascón said, “We want to address the wrongs that were caused by the failures of the war on drugs for many years in this country and begin to fix some of the harm that was done not only to the entire nation but specifically to communities of color.
“Black people are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana use as compared with whites, despite similar rates of usage. Steps like this one are essential as we work to combat the perverse racial disparities in our criminal justice system.
In 1973, I was a struggling young teacher working in inner city Brooklyn when I discovered Jonathan Kozol’s National Book Award-winning Death at an Early Age. It became my young teacher’s bible on understanding the nature of the school system and the pervasive racism at its core. It’s subtitle, “The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools” is as relevant now as it was when it was published some 53 years ago.
Meanwhile, on Friday, chaos broke out inside the courtroom during a sentencing hearing for Larry Nassar. Randall Margraves, a father of three daughters who were molested by Nassar, attempted to lunge at the doctor in the courtroom.
The reputation management tactic of filing bogus defamation lawsuits may be slowly coming to an end, but there will be a whole lot of reputational damage to be spread among those involved by the time all is said and done.
Richart Ruddie, proprietor of Profile Defenders, filed several lawsuits in multiple states fraudulently seeking court orders for URL delistings. The lawsuits featured fake plaintiffs, fake defendants, and fake admissions of guilt from the fake defendants. Some judges issued judgments without a second thought. Others had second thoughts but they were identical to their first one. And some found enough evidence of fraud to pass everything on to the US Attorney's office.
China has made a significant foray into the Arctic with the creation of a data “silk road”. Strongly supported by a newfound closeness with Russia, preliminary planning of a Chinese and Finnish–led trans-Arctic cable along the Arctic’s Northeast Passage in partnership with Japan and Norway is underway. But the project, essentially a relaunch of a stagnated Russian initiative, presents stark risks in affording Moscow and Beijing potential influence over global telecommunications.
The Tunis Agenda calls for enhanced cooperation to address issues related to the Internet and its governance. However, there was no clear agreement on how to implement enhanced cooperation, so a Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC) was convened to discuss that matter and to prepare recommendations. A first WGEC group failed to find agreement, so a second group was formed.
The Super Bowl is here and this Sunday many of us will bear witness to the spectacle that is million dollar advertising spots mashed together over four hours with a little bit of football thrown in for intermissions. As we've discussed before, this orgy of revenue for the NFL is, in some part, propagated by the NFL's never ending lies about just how much protection the trademark it holds on the term "Super Bowl" provides. While the league obviously does have some rights due to the trademark, it often enjoys playing make believe that its rights extend to essential control over the phrase on all mediums and by all persons for all commercial or private interests. This, of course, is not true, and yet a good percentage of the public believes these lies.
Why? The NFL, pantheon of sports power though it may be, is not so strong as to be able to single handedly confuse millions of people into thinking they can't talk about a real life event whenever they want. No, the NFL has been helped along in this by members of the media who repeat these lies, often in very subtle ways. Ron Coleman of the Likelihood Of Confusion site has a nice write up publicly shaming a number of these media members, including Lexology's Mitchell Stabbe.
Have you ever wondered why it can be hard to find out what some old paintings look like? Why there seem to be so few pictures of artistic works available from many countries even though they're filled with public sculptures and murals? Or why prices for books and movies can be so wildly different in different countries? The answer is that copyright law is different all over the world, and these differences can make figuring out what to do with these works so difficult or risky that most websites are not willing to have them around at all. This essay talks about a few of these works and why they add a major challenge to content moderation online.
The failure of snippet taxes/Google taxes is well documented, but never seems to deter further legislative efforts in the same direction. Google reacted to the initiative by dropping snippets from German news agencies, a move that produced a noticeable drop in traffic. German publishers called it "blackmail," but the simplest way to comply with bad laws is to opt out. Similar things happened in Spain with its snippet tax. Google nuked its local Google News service, resulting in affected publishers demanding the government force Google to re-open the service and start sending them traffic/money.
The evolution of the music industry's response to the fact that copyright infringement exists on the internet has been both plodding and frustrating. The industry, which has gone through stages including a focus on high-profile and punitive lawsuits against individual "pirates", its own flavors of copyright trolling, and misguided attempts to "educate" the masses as to why their natural inclinations are the worst behavior ever, have since settled into a mantra that site-blocking censorship of the internet is the only real way to keep the music industry profitable. All of this stems from a myopic view on piracy held by the industry that it is always bad for every artist any time a music file is downloaded for free as opposed to purchased off of iTunes or wherever. We have argued for years that this view is plainly wrong and far too simplistic, and that there is actually plenty of evidence that, for a large portion of the music industry, piracy may actually be a good thing.
Well, there has been an update to a study first publicized as a work in progress several years ago run by the Information Economics and Policy Journal out of Queen's University. Based on that study, it looks like attempts to shut down filesharing sites would not just be ineffectual, but disastrous for both the music industry as a whole and especially new and smaller-ticket artists. The most popular artists, on the other hand, tend to be more hurt by piracy than helped. That isn't to be ignored, but we must keep in mind that the purpose of copyright law is to get more art created for the benefit of the public and it seems obvious that the public most benefits from a larger successful music ecosystem as opposed to simply getting more albums from the largest audiences.
It is no secret that the estate of Martin Luther King Jr. have a long and unfortuate history of trying to lock up or profit from the use of his stirring words and speeches. We've talked about this issue going back nearly a decade and it pops up over and over again. By now you've probably heard that the car brand Dodge (owned by Chrysler) used a recording of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech in a controversial Super Bowl ad on Sunday. It kicked up quite a lot of controversy -- even though his speeches have been used to sell other things in the past, including both cars and mobile phones.
Last week’s BMG v. Cox decision has gotten a lot of attention for its confusing take on secondary infringement liability, but commentators have been too quick to dismiss the implications for the DMCA safe harbor. Internet service providers are still not copyright police, but the decision will inevitably encourage ISPs to act on dubious infringement complaints, and even to kick more people off of the Internet based on unverified accusations.
This long-running case involves a scheme by copyright troll Rightscorp to turn a profit for shareholders by demanding money from users whose computer IP addresses were associated with copyright infringement. Turning away from the tactic of filing lawsuits against individual ISP subscribers, Rightscorp began sending infringement notices to ISPs, coupled with demands for payment, and insisting that ISPs forward those notices to their customers. In other words, Rightscorp and its clients, including BMG, sought to enlist ISPs to help coerce payments from Internet users, threatening the ISPs themselves with an infringement suit if they don’t join in. Cox, a midsize cable operator and ISP, pushed back and was punished for it.
We've been following the BMG v. Cox lawsuit from the very beginning, through all its very odd twists and turns, including having a judge in the district court, Liam O'Grady, who made it quite clear that he didn't much care about the internet, and didn't see why it was a problem if people lost their internet access completely based on merely a few allegations of copyright infringement. The 4th Circuit appeals court has now overturned the lower court ruling and sent the case back to the district court for a do-over. While the initial decision was awful (as we discuss below), this new ruling makes a huge mess out of copyright law and will have serious, dangerous, and long-lasting consequences for the internet as a whole.
If you don't recall, the case involved BMG suing Cox Communications, though much of the case really hinged on the actions of another company, Rightscorp, who has been trying (and mostly failing) to build a business model around a form of mild copyright trolling. Rather than the aggressive "sue 'em and settle," strategy employed by others, Rightscorp would send DMCA takedowns to ISPs, with a settlement offer, and hope that the ISPs would pass those notices on to subscribers accused of infringing.
Last October, Russia passed legislation which allowed rightsholders to have 'pirate' clone and mirror sites blocked by ISPs without the need for court intervention. According to Russia's Deputy Minister of Communications the months since have been extremely busy. A total of 500 sites have been blocked, which is more than the last two years of court-ordered blockades combined.
One of the best ways to beat piracy, according to many copyright industry groups, is to "follow the money." This is the reason why advertising agencies are encouraged to cut their deals with pirate sites. One such agreement was facilitated by the European Commission, but according to new research, its effects are minimal.