Linux has come a long way since Linus Torvalds announced it in 1991. It has become the dominant operating system in the enterprise space. And, although we’ve seen improvements and tweaks in the desktop environment space, the model of a typical Linux distribution has largely remained the same over the past 25+ years. The traditional package management based model has dominated both the desktop and server space.
However, things took an interesting turn when Google launched Linux-based Chrome OS, which deployed an image-based model. Core OS (now owned by Red Hat) came out with an operating system (Container Linux) that was inspired by Google but targeted at enterprise customers.
Yodel an aloha to the Slimbook Curve — an all-in-one Linux PC with an alluring curved edge-to-edge display.
Call me old fashioned but I’m (still) a huge fan of desktop computers. I like having something big and bulky on my desk, purring away, helping me crunch through whatever workload I’m trying to avoid tackle.
So all-in-one PCs are very much up my street — and when they run Linux out of the box, even better!
Spanish computer company Slimbook, who make the KDE Slimbook pre-loaded with KDE Neon, has pulled the shrink wrap off of its new all-in-one desktop Linux PC.
When Google announced a few years ago that it would offer at least 5 years of software updates for Chromebooks and Chromeboxes, that seemed like good news. After all, most Android phones only get updates for a year or two, if that.
But compared to Windows and OS X, that 5 year lifespan is pretty short… especially since the clock starts ticking the day a Chromebook is released, not the day that you actually buy it.
I love the operating systems revolving around the Linux Kernel. I think it’s amazing that something so good comes to the world so cheap or mostly free. You can do tremendous work on this platform, so it begs the question: Why aren’t more people using it? Here are the known benefits:
Last month I wrote how Ubuntu 18.04 began enabling "automatic suspend" by default on new installations where after 20 minutes systems were suspending without notice and in some cases still causing issues trying to resume with modern x86 hardware in 2018... Fortunately, Ubuntu developers are reverting that behavior when on AC power.
With Linux suspend/resume support still sometimes being problematic, it's great to hear Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has a team working on continuing to improve the Linux support for this power-saving functionality.
Zhang Rui and Yu Chen of the Intel OTC Kernel Power team has published a brief whitepaper about their work and methodology to testing Linux suspend/resume performance.
With all the fuss about Ubuntu 18.04 and it’s many children coming along, you may be wondering if you should upgrade. Let’s chat about it.
Full disclosure; this is an edited version of a live broadcast. You've heard me say it, and warn you about it. On this occasion, I decided it would be fun to take you through a tour of Linux based music player applications. To get said music on my system, I was also going to show you how to rip music from CDs using various applications. That's when things fell apart and my desktop lost track of the CD hardware. I do recover however and the whole thing does make for an interesting exercise in trying to figure out just what the heck went wrong so I can fix it before I submit to the growing panic. Because things went horribly wrong, at least for a while, I had to reboot my system which meant the show was suddenly in multiple parts. In assembling said parts into a semi-coherent whole, I may have added things here and there.
Facebook Data Collection. Should we stop using it? If we continue to use Facebook, what can be done to minimize the privacy impact – does it even matter? We discuss.
David Howells recently published the latest version of his kernel lockdown patchset. This is intended to strengthen the boundary between root and the kernel by imposing additional restrictions that prevent root from modifying the kernel at runtime. It's not the first feature of this sort - /dev/mem no longer allows you to overwrite arbitrary kernel memory, and you can configure the kernel so only signed modules can be loaded. But the present state of things is that these security features can be easily circumvented (by using kexec to modify the kernel security policy, for instance).
Why do you want lockdown? If you've got a setup where you know that your system is booting a trustworthy kernel (you're running a system that does cryptographic verification of its boot chain, or you built and installed the kernel yourself, for instance) then you can trust the kernel to keep secrets safe from even root. But if root is able to modify the running kernel, that guarantee goes away. As a result, it makes sense to extend the security policy from the boot environment up to the running kernel - it's really just an extension of configuring the kernel to require signed modules.
The patchset itself isn't hugely conceptually controversial, although there's disagreement over the precise form of certain restrictions. But one patch has, because it associates whether or not lockdown is enabled with whether or not UEFI Secure Boot is enabled. There's some backstory that's important here.
David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates today for the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window.
Darrick Wong has submitted the XFS file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.17 kernel. It's a bit lighter than 4.15 and 4.16 that brought "great scads of new stuff", but there still is a fair amount of feature work taking place.
It's been just about twenty-four hours that Linus Torvalds has been accepting new material for the Linux 4.17 mainline kernel and it's looking indeed like it will be another very busy kernel update.
Aside from the prominent pull requests issued so far among other early Linux 4.17 coverage on Phoronix, below is a collection of a few other pulls worth pointing out from yesterday but weren't large enough to each warrant their own article.
With the Linux 4.17 kernel the s390 architecture updates include more mitigation work around the Spectre Variant One and Two vulnerabilities.
The kernel lockdown feature further restricts access to the kernel by user-space with what can be accessed or modified, including different /dev points, ACPI restrictions, not allowing unsigned modules, and various other restrictions in the name of greater security. Pairing that with UEFI SecureBoot unconditionally is meeting some resistance by Linus Torvalds.
This thread is what has Linus Torvalds fired up today.
The Linux 4.17 kernel is bringing further improvements to USB Type-C support.
USB Type-C work queued for entering the Linux 4.17 kernel includes the promotion of more code from staging to the kernel tree proper, alert and status message handling within the Type-C Port Manager "TPCM" code, various improvements to the Rockchip Type-C driver, new Type-C switch/mux and usb-role-switch functions, a Pericom PI3USB30532 cross switch driver, an API for being able to control USB Type-C multiplexers, and other improvements.
The Linux 4.17 kernel cycle is in full swing with many large pull requests pending.
Just over a week ago, Linus Torvalds said that the release of Linux 4.16 could take place on Sunday April 1. Ignoring the fact that April Fool's day is a terrible day to do just about anything, he made good on his promise.
As predicted, there was no RC8 of the kernel, and Torvalds notes that the final release is very similar to RC7. In a post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, he also said that the merge window for 4.17 is open, but for now, the focus is on 4.16.
The initial RISC-V architecture support landed in Linux 4.15 and now this open-source, royalty-free processor ISA is seeing further improvements with the Linux 4.17 cycle.
Improvements for RISC-V with the newly in-development Linux 4.17 kernel include support for dynamic ftrace, clean-ups to their atomic and locking code, module loading support is now enabled by default, and other fixes.
The complete list of RISC-V patches for Linux 4.17 can be found via today's pull request.
While the Linux 4.17 kernel is getting much larger in some areas like the sizable additions to DRM this cycle, when it comes to the kernel's staging area where new/experimental code gets vetted before being officially mainline, it's lost tens of thousands of lines of code this cycle.
For the 4.17 merge window, the staging area adds in 27,014 lines of code but drops 91,104 lines of code -- or a net loss of about 64 thousand lines of code. This loss comes with some old code being deleted include the CCREE crypto, FSL-DPAA2, IRDA, and other bits. The FSL-MC code meanwhile was promoted out of staging and the MT7261 platform has staging support for DMA, DTS, ETH, GPIO, PCI, PINCTRL, and SPI.
The Linux Foundation and Nitrokey have announced a program whereby anybody who appears in the kernel's MAINTAINERS file or who has a kernel.org email address can obtain a free Nitrokey Start crypto card. The intent, of course, is that kernel developers will use these devices to safeguard their GnuPG keys and, as a result, improve the security of the kernel development process as a whole.
The Linux Foundation IT team has been working to improve the code integrity of git repositories hosted at kernel.org by promoting the use of PGP-signed git tags and commits. Doing so allows anyone to easily verify that git repositories have not been altered or tampered with no matter from which worldwide mirror they may have been cloned. If the digital signature on your cloned repository matches the PGP key belonging to Linus Torvalds or any other maintainer, then you can be assured that what you have on your computer is the exact replica of the kernel code without any omissions or additions.
ONAP and Kubernetes, two of the fastest growing and in demand open source projects, are coming together at Open Networking Summit this week. To ensure ONAP runs on Kubernetes in any environment, ONAP is now a part of the new Cross-Cloud CI project that integrates, tests and deploys the most popular cloud native projects.
In this briefing, DP Ayyadevara, Savithru Lokanath and Vinay Rao from Juniper Networks provide an update to the Juniper Contrail and OpenShift integration. We discussed an application build environment use case along with support for Network Policies leveraging Contrail Security integration. Contrail Security helps minimizes risk to the applications that run in multi-cloud environments. It discovers application traffic flows and drastically reduces policy proliferation across different environments. Contrail Security can also be used for easy monitoring and troubleshooting of inter- and intra-application traffic flows. We also touched on the re-branding of OpenContrail to Tungsten Fabric and the road ahead for the open source project itself.
The open-source-focused Linux Foundation is teaming with TM Forum, a communications technology industry group that has upped its open standards game in recent years.
With a new partnership, the world of telecom is jumping into the world of open source with both feet.
Last month, TM Forum, an association that represents communications service providers (CSPs) as they interact in the digital supply chain, announced it would team with the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit best known for shepherding its namesake, the open-source operating system on which the modern internet is largely built.
The foundation is also known as a key steward of major open-source projects, and with the partnership, TM Forum will boost its open-source game, a change advocated by the CSPs it represents.
Last week David Airlie sent in the big DRM feature update for Linux 4.17 prior to going on holiday. For those wondering whether there was going to be any drama with the DRM updates increasing the size of the Linux kernel by another one hundred thousand lines of code, in large part due to Vega 12 header additions, Linus pulled it in without any fuss.
The latest batch of AMDGPU DC display code patches were posted last night on the mailing list. These 32 patches touching around three thousand lines of code have more fixes and also work on the FreeSync module.
When it comes to the FreeSync module they have been reworking it to better jive with the atomic mode-setting model. Unfortunately though no word on when all of the FreeSync bits will be settled in full for allowing users a pleasant out-of-the-box open-source experience if having a modern Radeon GPU paired with a FreeSync-capable monitor. At least the big item is now in place with Linux 4.17 where AMDGPU DC is enabled by default for all supported GPUs, so hopefully it won't be much longer before the remaining bits are squared away.
In NIR we have a couple of patches to fix a crash when unrolling loops, as well as a fix for per_vertex_output intrinsic.
For those waiting until v18.0.1 before upgrading to the Mesa 18.0 series, Mesa 17.3.8 is now available as the latest release off this stable series from the end of 2017.
It's roughly once a week that AMD updates their external and public facing AMDVLK/PAL source tree for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver while following last week's significant update with Wayland support and more, they have quickly issued another update to this RADV driver alternative.
The Mesa-based RADV Vulkan driver has landed initial support for out-of-rasterization support, but it's currently disabled by default.
Back in 2016 AMD developers introduced the VK_AMD_rasterization_order extension for out-of-order rasterization handling. This VK_AMD_rasterization_order extension has been present since Vulkan 1.0.12 and has already been supported in AMDGPU-PRO.
For several days we've had remote access to one of the brand new Raptor Talos II Workstations that is powered by POWER9 processors and open-source down through the firmware. For those curious how these latest POWER processors compare to AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors, here are some benchmarks comparing against of the few other systems in house while all testing was done from Debian GNU/Linux.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 165.
Nowadays, the kids are spending more time using Computers than the text books. So, ultimately, as parent and a teacher, you must keep an eye on them how much time they are spending on Computers, and you should limit their computer usage when it’s not necessary. There are plenty of parental control applications available to get this job done. The one today we are going to discuss is Timekpr-revived. It is originally known as Timekpr. The developer has renamed it to timekpr-revived and added some features in the new version.
Timekpr is a parental control application that can be used to control the Computer usage. We can set time limit for the Computer for the Kid’s user account, and prevent them to use Computer for a very long time. We can set time duration, and at what time the Kid can able to login to the Computer. In layman terms, you can easily limit their daily usage based on a timed access duration and configure periods of day when they can or cannot log in.
Gerbera is a feature-rich and powerful UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) media server with a pleasant and intuitive web user interface, which allows users to stream digital media (videos, images, audio etc..) through a home network and consume it on different types of UPnP compatible devices from mobile phone to tablets and many more.
After a few evenings of coding and testing, I rolled out a new version of Little Backup Box. It is one of the most significant updates in the project’s life, and it introduces new functionality and a wide range of improvements.
The Steam OS, used in Steam Machines, was a Linux-based operating system. Though the machines were not a huge success, the endeavour has encouraged Valve to continue to support Linux. How? By continuing support for Vulkan.
The feature, they're calling Run-Ahead will run core logic one or more frames ahead and then load the state back to reduce input lag. You can even do a "Two-Instance mode" which will essentially load multiple instances of a core (they call emulators and games cores), which apparently helps with some games having a buzzing sound as some cores don't leave audio emulation in a clean state. You can see an example of the difference in this tweet, which has a comparison between a real NES and RetroArch using Run-Ahead. You can also see a little more info in a reddit post here.
Depth of Extinction [itch.io] is a retro-inspired turn-based tactics game, it's a little like XCOM with some rogue-lite features thrown in and it's getting better all the time.
The latest release with build 40 has added in quite a lot in terms of mission content. There's new facility interior layouts, which the developer says are more closed and complex. They've also split rooms up with doors you actually need to open, so you don't get to see into each room as soon as you're near it, creating a little more tension. They've also added in new facility types to explore including Farms, Reactors and Hospitals.
The latest Rocket League [Steam] update is out, adding in a new tournaments feature so everyone can run their own.
The game released back in May of 2017, sadly one we completely missed here and it seems to have released with same-day Linux support as well.
I've recently taken quite a liking to KeeperRL [Official Site], a surprisingly good mix pulling in features from dungeon building, exploration and roguelikes to make quite an engrossing game. The developer also recently put out Alpha 24.
Full Metal Furies [Humble Store, Steam], the action RPG from Cellar Door Games (Rogue Legacy) is now officially on Linux, although it does have some issues.
While there was a lot of hoopla recently about Valve removing the "Steam Machines" link from their main navigation on their website, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais has written a public post to reaffirm the company's commitment to Linux and SteamOS.
While he acknowledges that Valve dropped the "Steam Machines" link as it wasn't getting much traffic, they are still committed to their Linux goals. "We're still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications. We think it will ultimately result in a better experience for developers and customers alike, including those not on Steam."
It seems my recent article about Valve removing the link to the Steam Machines page caused quite a stir, so Valve have now confirmed their continued support for Linux gaming.
Truthfully, I wasn't expecting my article to do anything, however I seem to have vastly underestimated just how many eyes there are on us now. Many larger tech and gaming sites picked it up from us like PC Gamer, Ars Technica (who amusingly called us a "fan site"), VG247 and so on. Many more sites then picked up the news from them (some claiming it was originally reported by others—oh well, can't win them all) and so it ended up as a much bigger story.
We've had quite a lot of emails and notifications about this, including a Valve rep emailing us directly to link us to this post by Pierre-Loup Griffais, where they state that the removal of the Steam Machines link was part of a "routine cleanup" where it was removed based on "user traffic".
We've noticed that what started out as a routine cleanup of the Steam Store navigation turned into a story about the delisting of Steam Machines. That section of the Steam Store is still available, but was removed from the main navigation bar based on user traffic. Given that this change has sparked a lot of interest, we thought it'd make sense to address some of the points we've seen people take away from it.
While it's true Steam Machines aren't exactly flying off the shelves, our reasons for striving towards a competitive and open gaming platform haven't significantly changed. We're still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications. We think it will ultimately result in a better experience for developers and customers alike, including those not on Steam.
Valve has addressed the exaggerated disappearance of the Steam Machines section from the Steam Store that some users noticed last week, confirming Steam Machines, nor SteamOS and Linux support.
Valve said that the Steam Machines section was delisted from the Steam Store navigation after a routine cleanup, but the page is still available here for those who want to purchase a gaming console powered by SteamOS, Valve's Debian-based GNU/Linux operating system for Steam Machines.
User traffic has to do with the removal of the Steam Machines section from the main navigation bar of the Steam Store, and while it doesn't look like Valve plans to enable it again in the Steam Store navigation due to sluggish sales, it confirms their continued support for Linux gaming and SteamOS.
A few days ago, Valve ended up removing the Steam Machines section from the main navigation page of Steam. Many users noted of this change, and have wanted answers as to why it was removed. Today, Valve’s Pierre-Loup A. Griffais gave a small statement on why their Steam Machines were de-listed from the main navigation bar.
A Steam Machine is an entertainment system built around SteamOS, an operating system based on Ubuntu Linux. Steam Machines were designed to not only serve as a gaming rig, but to also be the center of entertainment in a living room rather than a proper desk setup, and be intuitive for programmers and designers. While these machines can play games, they are not as beefy as their gaming-built counterparts. Due to their average performance with modern AAA games, high price relative to building or buying a gaming PC, lack of future hardware upgrades, and technical issues, Steam Machines have not had the best track record with sales.
Griffais writes, “While it’s true Steam Machines aren’t exactly flying off the shelves, our reasons for striving towards a competitive and open gaming platform haven’t significantly changed. We’re still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications. We think it will ultimately result in a better experience for developers and customers alike, including those not on Steam.”
Late last week, Valve quietly removed the Steam Machine from Steam’s front page. Today, Valve coder Pierre-Loup Griffais decided to respond in a blog post to rumors that Valve was giving up on Steam OS, and in turn Linux and Mac OS which were sparked by the project’s disappearance.
Tiling window managers have several advantages over their more popular cousins such as Gnome, KDE, XFCE, or Fluxbox. The feature of this post, dwm, takes these advantages to their most extreme.
While most tiling managers strive to be lightweight, dwm keeps itself on a starvation diet of 2000 lines of code or fewer. All its configuration is done when it’s compiled, so it doesn’t read a runtime configuration file. It uses tags (the numbers 1 through 9), rather than arbitrarily-named window spaces, to group programs together. It can also be run entirely with keyboard commands, though it does incorporate mouse support for selecting and dragging windows when appropriate.
Since my first blog post we got an huge amount of feedback and it’s amazing to see that you are as excited about KDE Connect as we are. This way I want to say “Thank you” for all your kind words and tell you that this kind of positive feedback is what keeps us going.
I would also like to share some tips and tricks about KDE Connect that you might not know yet, but first I would like to clear up a common misconception.
Not related per se to the fall-out of last weekend’s update to the icu4c and poppler packages, my qbittorrent package for slackware-current had stopped working sometime ago – caused by an update in -current of the boost package on which the torrent library depends.
I needed to update qbittorrent too therefore, after having taken care of the icu4c/poppler breakage. The thing is, I had tried to delay the switch in qbittorrent from Qt4 to Qt5 for as long as possible. The ‘new’ 4.x series of qbittorrent have a hard dependency on Qt5, and Qt4 is no longer supported. So I bit the bullet and made packages for bittorrent-4.0.4 and its dependency, libtorrent-rasterbar-1.1.6. Since the program uses Qt5 now, the dependencies have changed. If you were running qbittorrent 3.x on slackware-current previously then you have to ensure that you have libxkbcommon, qt5 and qt5-webkit packages installed now.
I am happy to announce the release of the stable Kraft version 0.80 (Changelog).
Kraft is desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well choosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local.
After more than a dozen years of life time, Kraft is now reaching a new level: It is now completely ported to Qt5 / KDE Frameworks 5 and with that, it is compatible with all modern Linux distributions again.
KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5 are the best base for modern desktop software and Kraft integrates seamlessly into all Linux desktops. Kraft makes use of the great KDE PIM infrastructure with KAddressbook and Akonadi.
While thinking of design, i looked on biggest “competitors” on mobile OS market – Android and iOS. Mainly i am taking design ideas from Android, since i am thinking it has good proportion between usability and functionality, while i am studying/following KDE Human Interface Guidelines, https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/HIG and as recommended i am using Kirigami 2 framework, which implement most of HIG rules by itself.
Several things: MATE 1.20 looks way better on Bionic than my early test. A little bit of customization goes a long way, and there's still more room for improvement. Then, Munity, with its Dash and HUD and whatnot, is a smart and practical nod toward Ubuntu and Unity, and it's way better than Gnome 3. Brings MATE up to modern levels, and it easily achieves parity.
I am quite happy with what MATE is going to bring us, and the 18.04 LTS test might actually prove to be a very sensible and fun distro, with goodies, practicality, speed, and efficiency blended into one compact and solid package. Bugs are to be ironed, for they are Devil's work, and MATE can benefit from extra bling bling. But then, from a bland sub-performer to a nifty desktop, with tons of options and features. Takes some fiddling, and not everything is easily discoverable, but the road to satisfaction is a fairly short and predictable one. Munity is a cool, cool idea, and I'm looking forward to Bionic's official release. Take care.
If you have been a Phoronix reader for any decent amount of time, you have likely seen how well Intel's Clear Linux distribution continues to run in our performance comparisons against other distributions. The developers behind this Linux distribution have begun a new blog series on "behind the magic" for some of the areas they are making use of for maximizing the out-of-the-box Linux performance.
Their first post in their "behind the magic" series is on transparent use of library packages optimized for Intel's architecture... While they are optimizing for their own hardware as one would expect, let's not forget, Clear Linux does run on AMD hardware too; they are not doing any voodoo magic, which is why it pains me that more Linux distributions have not taken such a stance for better out-of-the-box speed. In fact, it runs on AMD hardware darn well as we have shown with our Ryzen and EPYC benchmarks. Obviously Intel tweaks their software packages for their own x86_64 CPUs, but even when testing on the AMD hardware Clear Linux tends to perform the best in terms of out-of-the-box performance and that Intel isn't doing anything to sabotage the performance otherwise.
This section lists the release notes for each stable version of NixOS and current unstable revision.
Arch Linux is one of the most popular Linux operating systems (also known as distributions) around, as are the easier-to-install distros that are based on Arch, such as Manjaro and Antergos.
Whether you’re thinking of installing each component manually or downloading a pre-built Arch-based desktop, here are ten reasons to embrace the Arch ecosystem.
The open source stalwart’s culture of transparency, openness and collaboration has been instrumental to its success as one of the world’s most successful software companies
So a friend of mine said that I needed to look at the graph data a bit more closely. I decided to look at a 7 week average (49 days) and a 29 week average (203 days). What I found interesting was how noisy the data was still at 49 days. Here we see a comparison between different EPEL-6 curves using 7, 49 and 203 day moving averages:
Eariler this year, PackageCloud published a blog post on “attacks against GPG signed APT repositories”. Currently, Fedora uses several ways to ensure that packages from the Fedora repositories are delivered to you securely. This article provides a high-level insight in to how the Fedora Project secures our update delivery. Note, however, that the following analysis only applies to the default Fedora Project repositories as shipped with Fedora.
Web assets are any static files provided by a website to a browser that are required in order to render the site properly. Such files can be for example images, fonts, javascript and CSS code and so on. In this article we are going to focus on third-party assets like frontend frameworks or icon fonts and talk about how we usually ship them, explain why it is not a good idea and see how it can be done better.
The announcement was highlighting all the ways in which you can try it out: there are isos for Workstation, Server and Atomic Host. One thing it forgot to point out is that you can also try Fedora 28 Beta in the form of the Atomic Workstation.
According to the security advisory, a total of 22 security vulnerabilities were patched in this new kernel update, including several use-after-free vulnerabilities in Linux kernel's ALSA PCM subsystem, network namespaces implementation, a race condition in the OCFS2 filesystem implementation, as well as a race condition in loop block device implementation.
Issues were also fixed Linux kernel's KVM implementation, HugeTLB component, HMAC implementation, netfilter component, keyring implementation, the netfilter passive OS fingerprinting (xt_osf) module, the Salsa20 encryption algorithm implementation, the Broadcom NetXtremeII Ethernet driver, Reliable Datagram Socket (RDS) implementation, and the usbtest device driver.
One of the proposed new features in Ubuntu 18.04 was the brand new Community Theme, called Communitheme. As the name suggests, the Community Theme is being developed by the community i.e. volunteers across the globe.
This new Communitheme uses Adwita theme (GNOME’s default theme) as its base and looks similar to Ubuntu’s own Ambiance theme. Ubuntu Touch inspired Suru is the icon theme here.
The highlight for this week is the release of LXD, LXC and LXCFS 3.0!
Those 3 releases are LTS releases and will be supported for the next 5 years.
A couple of months ago, I reflected on "10 Amazing Years of Ubuntu and Canonical". Indeed, it has been one hell of a ride, and that post is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg...
The people I've met, the things I've learned, the places I've been, the users I've helped, the partners I've enabled, the customers I've served -- these are undoubtedly the most amazing and cherished experiences of my professional career to date.
System76's engineers worked with the elementary OS team on the new Pop!_OS Linux installer, which is now finally available for public testing. Today we take a first look at the new graphical installer in Pop!_OS Linux 18.04, so we can show you how it stands compared to other GNU/Linux distributions.
Pop!_OS Linux 18.04 LTS is available to download only for 64-bit systems with either Intel/AMD or Nvidia GPUs. The live ISO images can be either installed on your local disk drive or used as is, directly from the bootable medium. When running the ISO, you'll first be asked to select the system language and keyboard layout.
For the past few years, Linux Mint has been unstoppable in terms of attracting new users. I honestly never really understood its appeal over Ubuntu MATE. However, the fact remains that the Cinnamon desktop seems to be a large part of its appeal.
Recently I had the pleasure of discovering another desktop distro that is aimed at newer uses. It's lightning fast, and offers fantastic support for features that newer Linux users are usually looking for. This distro is called MX Linux and it's latest release is called MX 17.
Octavo’s open source, $199 “OSD3358-SM-RED” SBC is a BeagleBone-like development board with GbE and 4x USB ports for prototyping its Debian/AM335x based OSD335x-SM SIP modules.
Octavo Systems has developed its first self-branded SBC based on one of its SiP (system-in-package) modules. The open-spec OSD3358-SM-RED SBC uses the same OSD335x-SM SiP module found on BeagleBoard.org’s COM-like, 56 x 35mm PocketBeagle USB key-fob SBC. The 21 x 21mm SiP module, which packs a 1GHz Texas Instruments Sitara AM3358 SoC and nearly all the functions of a BeagleBone Black SBC into a BGA form factor, is 40 percent smaller than the original 27 x 27mm OSD335x SiP, which drives BeagleBoard.org’s BeagleBone Black Wireless SBC.
After the last, exciting, MWC18, we can finally announce the winners of the Jolla Winter Ambience Contest, made in collaboration with Jolla. The winners will get an email in the following days with instructions on how to redeem their prizes.
Intel announced 18 new 8th Gen “Coffee Lake” chips, including up to hexa-core Core H-series and Xeon M-series CPUs, which are appearing in Linux-ready COM Express Type 6 modules from Seco and Congatec.
Technology-oriented websites tend to focus only on the latest smartphones (and that includes us), but a large number of users choose not to upgrade their devices for one reason or another. Perhaps for financial reasons, there are hundreds of thousands of users who stick to older devices. Custom ROMs such as the now-defunct CyanogenMod have kept older smartphones alive for ages, but there comes a time when even unofficial support must end—for most devices, at least. The legendary HTC HD2 was launched in 2009 with Windows Mobile 6.5 at a time when Android 2.1 Eclair was the latest Android release, but the device has received ports of every version of Android up to Android 7.0 Nougat (not to mention multiple other operating systems.) Now, it appears that the HD2’s torch will be passed on to the Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II.
Some flags are symbols of countries, and some are easily recognizable, such as the flags of Canada and Japan. Others are more obscure, such as those of Sierra Leone and Andorra. But who owns the copyright to flags of the world? According to Wikipedia, “national, governmental, or historical flags are … in the public domain because they consist entirely of information that is common property and contain no original authorship.” Of course, there are flags for states, provinces, cities, and so forth. It is assumed that geographically representative flags are in the public domain and can be used freely.
Serverless computing is increasingly popular because it eliminates infrastructure concerns. However, a new report raises worries about its security.
According to an audit by serverless security company PureSec, more than one in five serverless applications has critical security vulnerabilities.
An evaluation of 1,000 open-source serverless projects conducted by the PureSec threat research team finds that 21 percent of them contain one or more critical vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, which could allow attackers to manipulate the application and perform malicious actions. Six percent of the projects even had application secrets, such as API keys or credentials, posted in their publicly accessible code repositories.
A technology conference titled Open Source 101 is planned for April 17, and will host representatives from the world’s top tech companies.
According to Todd Lewis and and Sergio Aparicio, Microsoft, IBM, VM Ware, Red Hat, GitHub, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, Lending Tree, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (technology division), the Walt Disney Company, Linux Foundation, and many more will have a presence at the day long conference.
When we say that a something is "open," we generally highlight its transparency or visibility. But openness is also inherently linked with collaboration and, as such, with the way people work together. Collaboration involves dealing with issues such as the organization of work and the allocation of decision rights—in a nutshell, all that we normally call a "governance model."
For open communities and other organizations, making these governance models explicit is key for several reasons. First, it helps promote an organization's sense of transparency. One could know how much time a group takes to consider an issue, the chances contributions have of making an impact on the organization, or who is going to hear their voices when they speak up. Second, explicitly defining a governance model may also help one better understand and classify how open organizations are driven. In other words, governance models reveal clues about the particular distributions of power and authority inherent to an organization (e.g., democracy, meritocracy, (benevolent) dictatorship, etc.). For instance, the study of specific governance models could shed some light on the definition of meritocracy in the context of open source (a controversial topic still under discussion).
ITRS has released a set of six fully-supported integrations to monitor key big data technologies used in financial services today including Kafka, Hadoop, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra and Elasticsearch.
This means ITRS Geneos clients will now have the ability to troubleshoot, analyse and optimise the performance of applications running on a big data stack.
AT&T has led the charge in contributing inhouse developments to open source processes, in a bid to accelerate adoption of new software-driven network technologies, and increase its own influence over the whole ecosystem.
So by now, you all know that Mozilla turned twenty. What was March 31, 1998 in California, for this news was April 1st in France when we arrived at the office. The April fool day is not a very trustable day in term of news (which is kind of ironic where the expression fake news took another meaning.); Meanings are fluid.
So I sent an email to an alumni mailing-list of work colleagues from our previous workplace (A French Web agency where we all started to code websites in between 1995 and 1997. There are stories) on April 1st, 1998.
We’ll use this survey to understand how we can better support and advocate for you and your personal information online.
Bonsoir ! WebRender’s seventeenth newsletter is here. The biggest highlight of this couple of weeks is without hesitation the landing of Jeff’s blob image invalidation work. Months of hard work went into what grew into a reimplementation of a decent portion of FrameLayerBuilder for blob images and will improve SVG rendering performance quite a bit in WebRender as soon as it will be enabled by default. See the first item in the list of Gecko changes for more details.
The Rust team is happy to announce that we’re running our Increasing Rust’s Reach program again this year. Increasing Rust’s Reach is one of several programs run by the project to grow Rust’s community of project collaborators and leaders.
We’re looking for people inside and outside Rust’s current community from groups and backgrounds that are underrepresented in the Rust world and the technology world more generally. We want to partner with you to make Rust a more inclusive, approachable, and impactful project, while supporting your success on personal goals.
This program matches Rust team members from all parts of the project with individuals who are underrepresented in Rust’s community and the tech industry for a partnership of three (3) months, from mid-May to mid-August. Each partnership agrees to a commitment of 3-5 hours per week collaborating on a Rust project.
Mozilla has today announced Firefox Reality as "a new kind of web browser that has been designed from the ground up to work on stand-alone virtual and augmented reality (or mixed reality) headsets."
Mozilla says this is the first cross-platform/device browser and also one that is open-source. Among the headsets initially supported are the GearVR and Oculus Go, Qualcomm glasses, and the HTC Vive Focus. The Google VR Daydream is also in testing form.
Built from the ground up for VR and AR (or mixed reality, as Mozilla refers to it), Firefox Reality is intended to provide an open, accessible and secure way for people to use the internet when donning a standalone headset.
Standalone headsets, by the way, are devices that don't require a PC or smartphone to run. Current devices include the HTC Vive Focus, a China-exclusive product that is launching worldwide later this year, and the not-yet-available Oculus Go.
The browser-baker has named its new effort “Firefox Reality” and said its interest in an AR/VR/MR browser is inspired by the same reasons it makes Firefox: a belief the world needs an open-source browser to keep the web open. Mozilla’s Sean White has also explained the outfit’s belief that digitalised realities are going to become widespread, further making an open browser a handy way to keep such platforms accessible.
The Mozilla Foundation on Tuesday unveiled its plans for Firefox Reality, a browser designed specifically for mixed reality headsets.
The browser combines the beneftis of Mozilla's existing Firefox browser -- most notably the robust performance of its Firefox Quantum technology -- with Servo, its experimental Web engine.
Using Servo, Mozilla plans to experiment with entirely new designs and technologies for seeing and interacting with the immersive Web.
Recently we’ve seen how WebAssembly is incredibly fast to compile, speeding up JS libraries, and generating even smaller binaries. We’ve even got a high-level plan for better interoperability between the Rust and JavaScript communities, as well as other web programming languages. As alluded to in that previous post, I’d like to dive into more detail about a specific component, wasm-bindgen.
Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro. Socorro collects and saves the crash report, processes it, and provides an interface for aggregating, searching, and looking at crash reports.
Mozilla has revealed that it is developing a web browser to work with standalone virtual and augmented reality headsets.
The open-source software company said its new browser, Firefox Reality, will use existing Firefox web technology combined with Servo, its experimental web engine.
Mozilla on Tuesday unleashed a new version of its popular Firefox Web browser that is designed to be used with VR and AR headsets. Called Firefox Reality, the browser is built from the ground up to be used with virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, instead of being on the computer or smartphones. The new browser is said to be cross-platform, privacy-friendly, and open source with a special interface for headsets. Mozilla, known for its work in virtual and augmented reality with WebVR, WebAR, and A-Frame, says that the new mixed reality browser has been built tackle "new opportunities and challenges of browsing the immersive Web."
Recently we’ve seen how WebAssembly is incredibly fast to compile, speeding up JS libraries, and generating even smaller binaries. We’ve even got a high-level plan for better interoperability between the Rust and JavaScript communities, as well as other web programming languages. As alluded to in that previous post, I’d like to dive into more detail about a specific component, wasm-bindgen.
Various speakers give lightning talks at LibrePlanet 2018 - GFDL 1.3
Various speakers give lightning talks at LibrePlanet 2018 - CC BY-SA 4.0
GnuCash 3.0 is now available for those looking for a free and open-source accounting program with a focus on personal and small business accounting.
With the 3.0 release of the GNU's accounting program, the shift was finally made from using the GTK2 tool-kit to now using GTK+ 3.0! GTK+ 3.14 or newer is what's now required of the program. GnuCash has also migrated to using the WebKit2Gtk API.
The free and open source accounting software, GnuCash has released its version 3.0. It now uses Gtk3 Toolkit, WebKit2Gtk API and boasts of a new CSV importer tool.
Supervisor Malia Cohen has announced she now supports a state-level effort to provide matching funds to develop an open source voting system in San Francisco after hearing from thousands of residents backing the effort.
Cohen’s support comes after the San Francisco Examiner reported Sunday that she was not willing to commit to sending a letter to Sacramento representatives backing the funding plan to help cities like San Francisco develop an open source voting system.
Cohen said she changed her mind and sent a letter in support Tuesday after hearing from “thousands of our citywide constituents over the last 24 hours” supporting open source voting.
Mayor Mark Farrell, however, has yet to support the effort and his position hasn’t changed since he told the San Francisco Examiner Friday he wouldn’t until he figures out if it’s a priority for San Francisco.
Techdirt has written many stories about the publisher Elsevier. They have all been pretty negative: the company seems determined to represent the worst of academic publishing. It's no surprise, then, that many academics loathe the company. Against that background, news that the EU "Open science Monitor" will use Elsevier as a subcontractor is surprising, to say the least.
[...]
The fact that Elsevier will be paid to help monitor the dysfunctional publishing world it has helped to create and strives to sustain seems an insensitive decision. Moreover, the contract specifically calls for the "socio-economic impacts" to be evaluated in order to "facilitate policy making". This means that Elsevier will be providing data to guide EU policy decisions that it stands to gain from materially in significant ways. The obvious conflict of interest here should have disqualified the company immediately. But the main contractors seem to have no issues with ignoring this glaring problem, or with the fact that many EU researchers will regard Elsevier as the last organization on the planet that should be involved in any way.
The University of Maryland's SGA voted 29-0 with one abstention on Wednesday night to support national legislation that could expand open textbooks on college campuses across the country.
The Affordable College Textbook Act, which has been brought before both houses of Congress, would expand funding and projects supported in its recent open textbook pilot resolution.
The pilot, provided through the fiscal 2018 omnibus appropriations bill, grants $5 million from Congress for fiscal 2018 and is aimed to encourage open textbook projects at higher education institutions. The measure lists student savings as one of its primary purposes.
The latest feature release Git v2.17.0 is now available at the usual places. It is comprised of 516 non-merge commits since v2.16.0, contributed by 71 people, 20 of which are new faces.
For April Fools day, lobste.rs turned into an phpBB-like forum. This also allowed for setting external images as forum signatures, which i did make use of. After the whole thing was over, i grabbed the webserver logs and [...]
Nine years after Intel announced it was acquiring Wind River Systems for $884 million, the chipmaker quietly sold its software subsidiary to investment firm TPG for an undisclosed sum. Although in recent years, Intel had begun to integrate the Wind River into its Open Source Group, the subsidiary is returning to its status as an independent software company, this time backed by TPG. Current Wind River President, Jim Douglas, and his executive management team will stay on, and Intel says it will continue to collaborate with Wind River once the acquisition is closed later this quarter.
As Gurman reports, Apple hopes to replace the x86 Intel architecture that its Macs have used for over a decade with ARM-based chips, like those that power the iPhone. That transition would pose at least two hurdles, both fairly high.
A major new study published in the The Lancet journal this week restarts discussions in international organisations over how to address non-communicable diseases (NCDs) worldwide. The study found that taxing soft drinks, alcohol and tobacco can lead to significant health gains among the poorest in society.
WordPress 4.9.5 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release for all versions since WordPress 3.7. We strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.
Richard Stallman writes "A radical proposal to keep personal data safe" in The Guardian: "The surveillance imposed on us today is worse than in the Soviet Union. We need laws to stop this data being collected in the first place."
WordPress 4.9.5 was released yesterday. This is a security and maintenance release, and it fixes 28 bugs, so be sure to update right away. To download or view the changelog, go here.
Given the booming popularity of Linux containers, it's little surprise but unfortunate that Linux file-systems are having to protect against specially-crafted file-system images by malicious actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the code.
Ted Ts'o today sent in the EXT4 Linux file-system updates and it's mostly mundane maintenance work with no major features this cycle. He did note of the bug fixes to protect against potentially malicious EXT4 file-system images.
U.S. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) has asked the head of The Linux Foundation to explain the nonprofit’s efforts around securing the open source software (OSS) ecosystem against vulnerabilities that could make the sensitive information of hundreds of millions of users vulnerable to cyber attacks.
“As the last several years have made clear, OSS is such a foundational part of the modern connected world that it has become critical cyber infrastructure. As we continue to examine cybersecurity issues generally, it is therefore imperative that we understand the challenges and opportunities the OSS ecosystem faces, and potential steps that OSS stakeholders may take to further support it,” wrote Rep. Walden, chairman of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, and U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), chairman of the panel’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
A decision to keep third party listeners out of communications on the internet taken by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) at their recent meeting in London elicited an alarmist message from the US financial industry. The premier internet standardisation body would provide “privacy for crooks,” and practically prohibit “bank security guards from patrolling and checking particular rooms” online, BITS, the technology division of the Financial Services Roundtable, argued in a press release last week. Has standardisation gone rogue?
Intel has published a microcode update guidance that confirms that it won’t be patching up the Spectre and Meltdown design flaws in all of its processors — mostly the older ones.
The company has rolled out microcode updates to fix the Spectre v2 vulnerability for many of its processors going back to the second generation Core (Sandy Bridge).
The woman who shot 3 people at YouTube and took her own life was a disgruntled user of the social platform who claimed the company censored and discriminated against her.
Aitkenhead’s PR skills were clearly thought sufficient to get across the government’s key propaganda points, and his struggle to do this throughout the Sky interview is telling. Aitkenhead has been in an extremely difficult position for the past three weeks, standing between his scientists who are adamant they will not say the substance was made in Russia, and the government who have been pushing extremely hard for them to do so.
As Porton Down now confirm, here is a straightforward lie from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a lie that British diplomats around the world have been promoting to foreign governments.
[...]
We have learned nothing from the Iraq War experience, and what is most disheartening is that officials within the FCO and security services still do not see it as their job to prevent lies rather than to propagate them when asked by a Minister.
Here is a screenshot of a FCO video showing Laurie Bristow, British Ambassador to Russia, in Moscow telling outright lies to gathered diplomats at a briefing there. The subtitle is accurate.
EFF along with 93 civil society organizations from across the globe today sent a letter to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland. The letter requests transparency and meaningful civil society participation in the Council of Europe’s (CoE) negotiations of the draft Second Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime (also known as the “Budapest Convention”) —a new international text that will deal with cross-border access to data by law enforcement authorities. According to to the Terms of Reference for the negotiations, it may include ways to improve Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) and allow “direct cooperation” between law enforcement authorities and companies to access people’s “subscriber information”, order “preservation” of data, and to make “emergency requests”.
The upcoming Second Additional Protocol is currently being discussed at the Cybercrime Convention Committee (T-CY) of the Council of Europe, a committee that gathers the States Party to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime and other observer and “ad hoc” countries and organisations. The T-CY aims to finalize the Second Additional Protocol by December 2019. While the Council of Europe has made clear its intention for “close interaction with civil society”, civil society groups are asking to be included throughout the entire process—not just during the Council of Europe’s Octopus Conferences.
Celebrities and political activists have rallied in solidarity around WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose internet access was abruptly suspended by the Ecuadorian government last week, by signing an open letter demanding that it be restored.
The signatories not only include prominent intellectuals, like Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek, and journalists, but also famous artists. Rapper M.I.A. added her name to the list, alongside filmmaker Oliver Stone, musician Brian Eno, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, and actress Pamela Anderson.
“If it was ever clear that the case of Julian Assange was never just a legal case, but a struggle for the protection of basic human rights, it is now,” the letter reads.
Unavoidable as it seems, though, this approach has two problems. First, getting that sample ‘right’ is very hard, and beset by all sorts of conceptual challenges. But second, even if it’s a successful sample, it’s still a sample.
President Donald Trump sits atop a sprawling executive branch, with thousands of hand-picked lieutenants across dozens of agencies who make sure his agenda is pursued and his priorities are followed.
Presidential appointees have historically wielded a significant amount of power, playing dealmaker on Capitol Hill and handling billion-dollar budgets in federal offices.
With all of this hiring going on, it’s important that the public gets a chance to know who these new power players are and what conflicts of interest they may have. Figuring that out can be difficult, requiring painstaking, laborious research and public records sleuthing.
This week, we’re doing a couple of things differently on “Trump, Inc.” Instead of focusing on President Donald Trump’s businesses, we’re looking more broadly at business interests in the Trump administration. We’re also giving you, our listeners, homework.
Last month, ProPublica published the first comprehensive and searchable database of Trump’s 2,684 political appointees, along with their federal lobbying and financial records. It’s the result of a year spent filing Freedom of Information Act requests, collecting staffing lists and publishing financial disclosure reports.
Remember when 318 people were shot in Chicago on Halloween 2015 and former President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency in the city? Or when Hillary Clinton ran a child sex-trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor? Or when first lady Melania Trump used a body double in public appearances?
All these events received news coverage. All were fake.
It’s troubling how much traction false news can get. Like when major news sources splashed headlines over the Trump administration’s claims that Chicago’s gun violence was occurring in a “city with the strongest gun laws in our country.” Not true, either. Local media have countered that claim time and again. The nonpartisan political fact-checker PolitiFact called President Donald Trump’s comments about this “Pants on Fire!” the worst rating on its Truth-O-Meter.
It’s heartening to see, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, growing skepticism about how Facebook handles data and data privacy. But we should take this opportunity to ask the bigger, harder questions, too — questions about discrimination and division, and whether we want to live in a society where our consumer data profile determines our reality.
In the spring of 2016, a Facebook executive gave a presentation about the success of Facebook’s then-new “ethnic affinity” advertising categories. Facebook had grouped users as white, Black, or Latino based on what they had clicked, and this targeting had allowed the movie “Straight Outta Compton” to be marketed as two completely different films. For Black audiences, it was a deeply political biopic about the members of N.W.A. and their music, framed by contemporary reflections from Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. For white audiences, it was a scripted drama about gangsters, guns, and cops that barely mentioned the names of its real-life characters. From the perspective of Universal Pictures, this dual marketing had been wildly successful. “Straight Outta Compton” earned over $160 million at the U.S. box office.
When we saw this news in 2016, it immediately raised alarm bells about the effect of such categories on civil rights. We went straight to Facebook with our immediate concern: How was the company ensuring that ads for jobs, housing, and employment weren’t targeted by race, given that such targeting is illegal under the civil rights laws? Facebook didn’t have an answer. We worked with officials from the company for more than a year on solutions that, as it turned out, were not properly implemented. Facebook still makes it possible for advertisers to target based on categories closely linked to gender, family status, and disability, and the company has recently gotten sued for it.
Unlike Joel Rubinoff, I'm not going to tie labels on anyone (that's a liberal thing). But I'd like to remind him of two sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; free speech and the right to be presumed innocent. Apparently, he doesn't agree with either of them.
Much of the criticism of the new Roseanne reboot has had less to do with how it works as a traditional sitcom, and more with the ideology behind it. Some are upset that the character of Roseanne Conner is a Trump supporter. Some are discomfited by the way the show sanitizes and whitewashes that support. For others, the problem lies with Roseanne Barr herself, and the fact that ABC gave such a prominent, lucrative platform to a hateful, transphobic woman obsessed with rightwing conspiracy theories.
Four Maryland residents sued the Republican governor in a US District Court in August 2017, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland. The ACLU announced yesterday that a settlement has been finalized, requiring Hogan to implement a new social media policy within two weeks. The state is also required to pay $65,000 to the plaintiffs.
In the fall of 2015, James Laurenson of Maryland was so upset that his governor, Larry Hogan, was opposed to the Obama administration's plan to allow Syrian refugees to resettle within the U.S. that he did something he never had before: He aired his grievances on the governor's public Facebook page.
As part of comments that were also emailed to the governor's office, Laurenson wrote that he was "ashamed to be called a Marylander" and believed that Hogan, a Republican, was "aiding and abetting" the Islamic State.
No one replied to Laurenson's email, but someone overseeing the Facebook page deleted his comments and then blocked him from posting further, according to a federal lawsuit filed last August on behalf of Laurenson and three others who say they were similarly gagged by the governor's office.
In the fall of 2015, James Laurenson of Maryland was so upset that his governor, Larry Hogan, was opposed to the Obama administration’s plan to allow Syrian refugees to resettle within the U.S. that he did something he never had before: He aired his grievances on the governor’s public Facebook page.
Derflinger: For me censorship is like the limiting of ideas, whether that is words, thoughts, actions … it could be written, it could be spoken, it could be whatever kind of limitations there are, limiting people to express themselves and their ideas and their beliefs.
Earlier this year, he wrote a controversial Facebook post, which said that teenage blogger Amos Yee - who had been convicted for derogatory remarks about Christians in a YouTube video - "has all the traits that we want in our youth", drawing criticism online.
Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, Zendaya and Demi Lovato all have two things in common. They are all advocates for the “Me Too” campaign, and two, they were all on the cover of Cosmopolitan in 2017. Is this for their own publicity or is it because they are also advocates for the female empowerment mission Cosmo stands for?
On the other hand, Walmart has a different opinion about these magazines. At the end of March 2018, one of the biggest stores in the country, Walmart, decided to move Cosmopolitan magazines from the checkout aisles to the back of the store behind barriers, according to the New York Times. Walmart stated that they did not want the customers to be exposed to the sexual content that Cosmopolitan delivers.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) partnered up with Walmart to decrease publications of Cosmopolitan in hopes that the sex magazine will stop degrading women and painting them as sex objects to males, according to the Huffington Post.
We already pointed to a ruling in Massachusetts showing that victims of sex trafficking don't need SESTA/FOSTA to get around CDA 230 and go after Backpage when Backpage is an active participant, and now another court has found something similar. Found via Eric Goldman, a court in Florida has rejected a motion to dismiss by Backpage on CDA 230 grounds. The full order is here (and embedded below).
As with other cases (including the Massachusetts case) the real issue here is whether or not Backpage was just a service provider, or if it crossed the line into being a content provider itself, and did so in ways that broke the law. To be clear, the court here does seem... confused about CDA 230 and how other courts have ruled, and basically rejects plenty of existing caselaw and the nature of 230:
One of the most vocal groups in opposition to SESTA/FOSTA were sex workers, who spoke out about how the bills would put their lives at risk and how it would put the lives of trafficking victims at risk, often making it more difficult for victims to find information on how to get help or to protect themselves. Indeed, there are already reports of information sites shutting down entirely.
Social media’s a great place — unless you’re a sex worker.
Sex workers claim they’re being marginalized by Twitter and Instagram, Vice reports.
Melody Kush, a veteran camgirl, was iced from Twitter in 2017. Despite an earlier tussle over an exposed nipple, she can’t figure out what led to her getting booted, and says she’s also been kicked off Instagram for no obvious reason.
Last week, the trial of two journalists and two businessmen accused of plotting to overthrow the government began in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Breaking with past precedent, the trial has been open to press and human rights organizations. As such, it has become a test case for the limits of Uzbekistan’s reforms under President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, particularly as they apply to domestic politics and matters of free speech.
Bobomurod Abdullaev, a freelance journalist, blogger Hayot Nasriddinov, and businessmen Ravshan Salaev and Shavkat Olloyorov have been charged with “conspiracy to overthrow the constitutional regime.” The charge is rooted in a series of articles published under the byline Usman Haqnazarov, a pseudonym reportedly used by more than one individual. The articles were critical of the regime of Uzbekistan’s first president, Islam Karimov, who died in the fall of 2016.
The Royal Court theatre pulled a play about Tibet after the British Council privately advised that it would coincide with “significant political meetings” in China and could jeopardise the theatre’s ability to work there.
The West End venue – which had been criticised by the play’s award-winning Indian author, who claimed the play had been shelved – said in February it had had to postpone and then withdraw the production for “financial reasons” in 2017 and that it was now committed to producing the play in spring next year.
Correspondence released under the Freedom of Information Act now reveals details of discussions about the play, Pah-La, between the theatre and the British Council, the UK government’s cultural diplomacy arm.
The play’s scheduled West End run, from October to November last year, would have had an impact on a joint arts programme being run in China as well as coinciding with “significant political meetings” in China, the theatre was told by a high-ranking British Council official serving as a first secretary in the UK’s embassy in Beijing.
Pah-La deals with life in contemporary Tibet, drawing on personal stories of Tibetans with whom the playwright, Abhishek Majumdar, worked in India, which is home to a substantial community of Tibetan exiles including the Dalai Lama.
Sample of the pages banned by Facebook, which it says did not violate any of its content guidelines / Facebook / Supplied for media use Moscow has chided Facebook and demanded an explanation from the US State Department, after the social media giant banned media and personal accounts that violated no rules but are purportedly linked to a Russian “troll factory.”
The aftermath of Facebook CA scandal has attracted several comments and criticism from common people and prominent figures alike.
Now Richard Stallman, the man behind GNU project and free software movement, has shared his views in a column on The Guardian on restoring privacy through stricter regulations for data accumulation.
Many of those appear more than once, with different prefixes. I've also left off variants of google, doubleclick, facebook, twitter and other familiars.
Interesting: when I look a second, third or fourth time, the list is different—I suppose because third-party ad servers are busy trying to shove trackers into my browser afresh, as long as a given page is open.
When I looked up one of those trackers, "moatads", which I chose at random, most of the 1,820,000 search results were about how moatads is bad stuff.
The world hasn’t even recovered from the user data breach following the Facebook CA scandal, meanwhile Google and Amazon’s virtual assistants are getting smarter at a scary speed by adopting advanced data spying methods.
Recent patent filings of Google and Amazon “outline an array of possibilities” for how their smart devices could observe what users say and do.
The company publicly announced last week that it was shutting down its Partner Categories program to “help improve people’s privacy on Facebook.” What it didn’t mention was that the move is actually part of the company’s efforts to comply with the GDPR, the new EU data protection law going into effect in May, which imposes consent requirements that make using third-party data more difficult.
While it’s nice to see Facebook deciding to implement this EU-mandatory privacy change across the globe, it would be missing some of the larger picture to interpret this as a completely voluntary, privacy-protective measure taken wholly in response to Cambridge Analytica. Beyond the stark fact of legal compliance, this isn’t even a move that is likely to affect Facebook’s bottom line: the company may actually stand to benefit from this, in terms of boosted profits and solidified market dominance.
Today we're proud to announce the launch of a new version of HTTPS Everywhere, 2018.4.3, which brings with it exciting new features. With this newest update, you'll receive our list of HTTPS-supporting sites more regularly, bundled as a package that is delivered to the extension on a continual basis. This means that your HTTPS-Everywhere-protected browser will have more up-to-date coverage for sites that offer HTTPS, and you'll encounter fewer sites that break due to bugs in our list of supported sites. It also means that in the future, third parties can create their own list of URL redirects for use in the extension. This could be useful, for instance, in the Tor Browser to improve the user experience for .onion URLs. This new version is the same old extension you know and love, now with a cleaner behind-the-scenes process to ensure that it's protecting you better than ever before.
As the details continue to emerge regarding Facebook's failure to protect its users' data from third-party misuse, a growing chorus is calling for new regulations. Mark Zuckerberg will appear in Washington to answer to Congress next week, and we expect lawmakers and others will be asking not only what happened, but what needs to be done to make sure it doesn't happen again.
As recent revelations from Grindr and Under Armour remind us, Facebook is hardly alone in its failure to protect user privacy, and we're glad to see the issue high on the national agenda. At the same time, it’s crucial that we ensure that privacy protections for social media users reinforce, rather than undermine, equally important values like free speech and innovation. We must also be careful not to unintentionally enshrine the current tech powerhouses by making it harder for others to enter those markets. Moreover, we shouldn’t lose sight of the tools we already have for protecting user privacy.
Code for enforcing security and privacy is tangled up with other code, making it hard for both developers and auditors to look at a code base and determine which policies are being enforced.
The bug was first reported last week after users discovered videos they had never posted were being stored by the company. The storage was only uncovered when those users attempted to download all the data the company had on them, and were startled to find that Facebook had stored unused draft videos for years.
Facebook has no plans to extend the user privacy protections put in place by the far-reaching General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, law to users of its social network around the globe, according to Reuters. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the news agency in an interview that Facebook would like to make such privacy guarantees “in spirit,” but would make exceptions. Zuckerberg declined to explain those exceptions, according to Reuters.
Zuckerberg told Reuters in a phone interview that Facebook was working on a version of the law that would work globally, bringing some European privacy guarantees worldwide, but the 33-year-old billionaire demurred when asked what parts of the law he would not extend worldwide.
As Klein points out, Facebook’s failures have consequences on par with government failures. The integrity of elections is threatened; violence is incited; and key communication channels are jammed by bad actors. In America and many other countries, much of this activity goes unregulated by the government. So, what recourse does the average person have? As Klein puts it [...]
As we set ourselves to the task of dooming Facebook to the scrapheap of history, it's worth considering the many ways in which Facebook has anticipated and planned for this moment, enacting countermeasures to prevent the rise of a competitor focused on delivering things that help users (making it easy to find people to form interest groups with), rather than focused on "maximizing engagement" and spying on us.
But Facebook’s nearly 2 billion users have nowhere else to go. That’s because, with a few exceptions, Facebook has managed to squash its competitors, either by cloning or acquiring them—a tactic it’s used to remain relevant and irreplaceable. For the past 14 years, since its inception, Facebook has been preparing for this very moment. And now that it’s here, the company continues to monopolize the way humans interact online.
There’s no need to start from scratch. In 2012, President Barack Obama proposed a privacy bill of rights that included many ideas for giving people more control over their information, making data collection more transparent and putting limits on what business can do with the information they collect. The bill of rights fizzled out when Congress showed little appetite for it. But the European Union has used a similar approach in developing its General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect on May 25.
InternetLab, the Brazilian independent research center, has published their third edition of “Quem Defende Seus Dados?" (Who defends your data?"), an annual report which evaluates the practices of their local Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and how they treat their customers’ personal data when the government demands it.
This years' report expanded the number of ISPs covered, and shows Vivo taking a strong lead, followed by Tim and then Claro and Oi close behind. The Brazilian ISPs still have plenty of room for improvement, especially on transparency reports, law enforcement guidelines, and notification to users.
The State Department has alarmingly declared that it wants to collect social media information from all visa applicants. This appears to be an expansion of a 2017 program that sought social media information only from a subset of initially suspicious visa applicants. This is also the latest effort in a troubling trend of conducting social media surveillance both domestically and abroad that began with President Barack Obama’s Administration and has continued during President Donald Trump’s Administration.
The State Department issued two Federal Register notices last week seeking public comments on its proposal to ask all visa applicants—those seeking both immigrant and non-immigrant visas to the United States—for social media information for the past five years. “Social media information” includes the online platforms that visa applicants currently use—or have used in the past—and their account identifiers or handles. This means that visa applicants will have to disclose their use of websites and apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest. The State Department also wants to ask all visa applicants for the phone numbers and email addresses used for the past five years, among other information.
This questioning invades the free speech and privacy rights of foreign visitors to the U.S., as well as the rights of their American friends, families, and professional associates. As with other similar programs, EFF opposes this collection of personal information.
A couple of months ago I did a performance comparison between some of the top free DNS Resolvers available. It was just after Quad9 had launched and I was trying to decide which one to use and recommend to families and friends. Google, OpenDNS, Quad9, .. some many options… I love options …
Whatever you think about the Facebook Cambridge Analytica kerfuffle, it's pretty obvious that the scandal is causing a long overdue reassessment of our traditionally lax national privacy standards. While most companies talk a good game about their breathless dedication to consumer privacy, that rhetoric is usually pretty hollow and oversight borders on nonexistent. The broadband industry is a giant poster child for that apathy, as is the internet of very broken things sector. For a very long time we've made it abundantly clear that making money was more important than protecting user data, and the check is finally coming due.
While it may only be a temporary phenomenon, the Cambridge Analytica scandal is finally causing some much-needed soul searching on this front. And given how deep our collective privacy apathy rabbit hole goes, being sloppy with consumer data may actually bear witness to something vaguely resembling accountability for a little while. Case in point is gay dating site Grindr, which this week was hammered in the media after it was revealed that the company was sharing an ocean of data with app optimization partner companies, including location data and even HIV status.
Many people who have shopped online have had the experience of looking for something to buy, and then being followed by ads for that thing for days (or weeks, sometimes months!) afterwards. This is known as behavioral retargeting in the ad industry. The premise for this is as follows: the advertiser is looking for consumers who are interested to buy a product, such as a shirt. They would like to show ads for their shirt to people who would be a good target audience for buying a shirt. In the offline world, if the advertiser were to place such an ad looking for a custom target audience, they would probably look for print magazines specializing in fashion, attire and such, based on the assumption that a subset of people who would buy and read such magazines would probably be interested in buying a shirt. In the online world, however, the online ad industry offers a more lucrative option: showing ads for the shirt to people who have before shown real interest in buying a shirt, possibly a shirt of the same kind, color, size, etc. as the one the advertiser is looking to promote! What could be better than this?! The way the online ad companies do this is typically by tracking users from their online shopping carts through everywhere else on the Web as they browse, so that they can detect who abandoned a shopping cart without buying the products in it, what was in the cart, where that user is going now, which advertisers are interested to show ads for those abandoned products, and match up the two.
When it was reported last week that the New York City Commission on Human Rights was investigating The Wing, the co-working space for women, over its women-only membership policy, its members and advocates rushed to the company’s defense. The inquiry has generated controversy given the heightened awareness, resulting from the #MeToo movement, that sexual harassment is still rampant in far too many workplaces.
Judging by The Wing’s success as both a business venture and a place for women to gather, it has undoubtedly met a real need. Yet the commission’s job is to respond to reports of discrimination it receives, as in this case. By limiting its patrons to women only, The Wing may not be in compliance with New York’s public accommodation law — a law that exists for good reason and furthers gender equality.
New York, like nearly every state and many cities, provides that places of public accommodation can’t discriminate against members of the public based on characteristics including race, religion, disability — or sex. Antidiscrimination laws like New York’s are why we have the freedom to go about our daily lives without fear of being turned away from retail stores, banks, and hotels simply because of who we are.
The massive turnout for the March for Our Lives demonstration in Washington on March 24 has given rise to hope that a new youth movement can spur a social transformation in the United States, write Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the preeminent leader of the black liberation movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Millions of people engaged in the struggle against America’s shameful apartheid system but King was the most influential. His actions are remembered, his words are quoted by activists, politicians, and pundits. His birthday is a national holiday. Only the worst and most retrograde racists dare to speak ill of King.
But the lionizing is mostly a sham. In fact there are very few people who remember the importance of what King said, what he did or why and how they should replicate his work. His legacy has been subverted and is now understood only by the most conscious students of history.
Nothing illustrated this state of affairs more clearly than the use of King’s words in a Ram truck commercial broadcast during the 2018 Super Bowl football championship. Viewers were told that Ram trucks are “built to serve.”
The voice over is provided by King himself speaking exactly 50 years earlier, on February 4, 1968. The Drum Major Instinct sermon was a call to reject the ego driven desire for attention in favor of working for more altruistic pursuits. “If you want to say that I was a drum major say that I was a drum major for justice.”
On April 4, 1968, I was 11 and growing up in Memphis when the news came that Martin Luther King had been murdered. My parents couldn’t hide how bad it was – they were angry. They were afraid. And most memorably to my childhood self, they were crying. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I know now that I was afraid that killing the dreamer could kill the dream.
Exactly one year earlier, in a speech at Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. King said, “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now… Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.” A year later, his call for civil rights and racial justice was answered by an assassin’s bullet.
King understood the urgency of now.
He graduated from divinity school in 1955 and six months later he was leading the Montgomery Improvement Association during the now-famous Montgomery bus boycott. For the next 12 years he was a tireless public spokesperson for racial justice. He endured being shot at, stabbed, beaten, surveilled and harassed by the government, arrested more than 30 times, subjected to unrelenting media scrutiny, outpourings of hate speech, and death threats.
As news of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis spread, despondent crowds gathered in the heart of Washington’s business section along 14th street. Orderly at first, the crowds became surly and started breaking windows, looting stores and setting fires.
I reported immediately to the ABC News bureau on Connecticut Ave. The news editor said, “Good timing Don, we can use a reporter with combat experience. There’s a crew leaving for the riots in a few minutes. There’s room in the car for you.”
When Bethany Webb’s sister, Laura, was killed in a mass shooting in 2011, she couldn’t imagine things getting worse. But then-District Attorney Tony Rackauckas of Orange County, California, took the case.
In his zeal to impose the death penalty — over Webb’s objection — Rackauckas employed jailhouse informants to elicit damning statements from the defendant, Scott Dekraai, while Dekraai was in jail. These informant-defendant interactions violated the Constitution’s right to counsel — no one is allowed to interrogate defendants without their attorneys present. Rackauckas knew that what he was doing was illegal, but he did it anyway. And it wasn’t the first time Rackauckas had broken the law in pursuit of a conviction.
In fact, Rackauckas and Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens had overseen a systematic, methodical program of using jailhouse informants for years. Their era of impunity ended only in 2014, when Dekraai’s attorney uncovered their illegal jailhouse informant program. Remarkably, even after their unlawful acts were discovered, Rackauckas, Hutchens, and their employees denied it, going so far as to lie about it under oath to Orange County judges and juries.
Rackauckas’ and Hutchens’ illegal acts corrupted the entire system, making it impossible for crime victims to achieve closure, defendants to receive due process, and the community to trust those charged with protecting them. When law enforcement cheats, we all lose.
Now, seven years after Laura Webb was killed, Bethany Webb, the sister of a murder victim, has joined forces with the ACLU, the ACLU of Southern California, People for the Ethical Operation of Prosecution and Law Enforcement, and the law offices of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, to end this illegal and destructive informant program.
The Orange County informant program has three primary components, all of which violate the law. First, Orange County deputy sheriffs cultivate relationships with professional jailhouse informants. These informants are facing serious jail time themselves, and therefore have a strong incentive to enter the employ of law enforcement.
A police department's retaliatory arrest of a citizen journalist has dead-ended with a courtroom loss. Priscilla Villarreal -- better known as "Lagordiloca" to her thousands of Facebook fans -- was arrested after she published information given to her by police officer Barbara Goodman. The info included the name of Border Patrol agent who had committed suicide -- info never officially released by the Border Patrol.
While the proper target for Texas prosecutors would have been the officer leaking sensitive info, they decided to pursue Villarreal instead, issuing an arrest warrant for "misuse of official information." Publishing leaks has never really troubled the courts before, usually falling well within the confines of the First Amendment. But prosecutors argued the "misuse" occurred when Villarreal "profited" from it by "gaining popularity" with her exclusive leak.
"Lagordiloca" operated outside the mainstream, publishing and streaming interactions with officers live to her Facebook page. It's apparent many officers didn't care for her reporting, and this misuse of a "misuse" law seemed like a quick and dirty way to shut her up. It didn't work. As Jason Buch reports for the San Antonio Express-News, a judge has tossed the charges against Villareal, finding them unconstitutional.
A judge in Laredo on Wednesday threw out the charges against the social media personality known as La Gordiloca.
State District Judge Monica Z. Notzon ruled that part of the law police used to arrest Priscilla Villarreal is unconstitutionally vague.
With net neutrality rules currently on the chopping block, Comcast's top lobbyist is once again trying to sell people on letting giant ISPs pick winners and losers on the internet. The FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules explicitly banned "paid prioritization," or letting one company (say, Disney) buy itself a network advantage over more cash-strapped competitors. While the FCC's 2015 rules carved out vast exceptions for legitimate prioritization (VoIP, medical services), they made it clear that anti-competitive paid prioritization deals of this kind distorted the traditionally level playing field, letting the wealthiest companies buy an unfair edge over competitors.
And while Comcast used to promise that it would never consider such deals, those promises have slowly but surely evaporated the closer we get to the net neutrality repeal the company has spent millions on. As we get closer to a country without real net neutrality protections, Comcast's promises to avoid such pay-to-play schemes have been not-coincidentally mysteriously disappearing from the company's website.
Now, Trump's FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, wants to force Lifeline users to buy access from the big telcos, a move even those very same telcos think is bananas. And as a group of US 10 US senators have pointed out, Pai offered no evidence to support his contention that MNVOs strangle broadband investment (the FCC is only allowed to act on the basis of documented evidence), and Pai's proposal would eliminate the plans used by more than 70% of Lifeline recipients.
In response to the rollback of federal network neutrality protections, this year more than 20 states have taken up the mantle of protector of a free and open Internet. Washington has already passed a law and Oregon’s waits to be enacted. Not to be outdone, California has three bills pending that, if all passed, would create the most comprehensive net neutrality defense of any state while promoting community broadband.
Those bills, S.B. 420, S.B. 822, and A.B. 1999, will face hearings and votes this month and hopefully make it to the governor’s desk towards the end of the year. If Governor Brown signs all three, California’s would not only restore the ban on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization the FCC recently repealed, but also secures more protections and options for Californians while making it easier for local governments to engage in community broadband projects to give their residents choice and competition in the ISP market.
More than 300 electric cooperatives across the US are building their own internet with high-speed fiber networks. These locally owned networks are poised to do what federal and state governments and the marketplace couldn’t. First, they protect open internet access from the internet service providers (ISP) that stand to pocket the profits from net neutrality rollbacks that the Trump administration announced last November. Second, they bring affordable, fast internet access to anyone, narrowing the digital divide that deepens individual and regional socioeconomic disparities.
In Detroit, for example, forty percent of the population has no access of any kind to the internet. Because of Detroit’s economic woes, many Big Telecom companies haven’t thought it worthwhile to invest in expanding their network to these communities. Internet connectivity is a crucial economic leveler without which people fall behind in schools, health, and the job market.
In response, a growing cohort of Detroit resident has started a grassroots movement called the Equitable Internet Initiative, through which locals are build their own high speed internet. It started with enlisting digital stewards—locals who were interested in working for the nonprofit coalition. Many of these stewards started out with little or no tech expertise, but after a 20-week-long training, they’ve become experts able to install, troubleshoot, and maintain a network from end to end. They aim to build shared tools like a forum and a secured emergency communication network—and to educate their communities on digital literacy so people can truly own the network themselves.
Detroit isn’t the only city with residents who aim to own their internet. Thirty of the 300 tribal reservations in the US have internet access. Seventeen of these tribal reservation communities in San Diego County have secured wireless internet access under the Tribal Digital Village initiative. Another local effort, Co-Mo Electric Cooperative, which was originally established in 1939 to brings electrical power to central Missouri farms, has organized to crowdfund the money necessary to establish its own network. By 2014, members enjoyed connection speeds in the top twenty percent of the US, and the fastest in Missouri. By 2016, Co-Mo’s entire service area was on the digital grid.
called Intel Runtime BIOS Resilience."
Intel Authenticate, a "multifactor authentication solution that verifies identities in hardware for added protection below the software layer, now includes support for facial recognition with Windows 10. This enables an intuitive user experience across leading business devices from Dell*, HP*, Lenovo* and more, while also supporting specific IT policies and management consoles."
"Right out of the box, new Intel vPro platform-based PCs from Lenovo and HP will begin to take advantage of Intel Runtime BIOS Resilience – a hardware enhancement that minimises the risks of malicious code injection. As part of Intel’s commitment to continually advance cybersecurity, this new firmware feature locks BIOS when software is running to help prevent planted malware from gaining traction."
On March 29, 2018, the United States Patent and Trademark Office published an application in the name of Intel Corporation, which puts the famous microprocessor company back in the spotlight of crypto mining.
The US Government (USPTO/DOJ) has petitioned for en banc review of the decision – arguing that the immoral/scandalous prohibition should stand. Notably, the US argues that limiting registration of disparaging marks in Tam was more suspect because it was directed toward a particular viewpoint (e.g., disparagement of people …). On the other hand, the prohibition on registering scandalous marks is viewpoint neutral. Despite that difference, the Federal Circuit applied a strict scrutiny test. The Federal Circuit argues that strict scrutiny should not apply here but rather that the Federal Circuit should develop a separate and new test for “the constitutionality of viewpoint-neutral limitations on registrability.”
Once again, the Constitutional exceptionalism of the DMCA has reared its ugly head. Thanks to the way it has been interpreted we have already enabled it to become an unchecked system of prior restraint, which is anathema to the First Amendment. And now yet another court has allowed this federal law to supersede states' ability to right the wrongs that misuse of the DMCA's censorship tools inevitably causes, even though doing so arguably gives this federal law more power than the Constitution allows.
The two problems are of course related. Prior restraint is what happens when speech is censored without ever having being adjudicated to be wrongful. That's what a takedown demand system does: force the removal of speech first, and sort out whether that was the right result later. But because the Ninth Circuit has taken the teeth out of the part of the DMCA that is supposed to punish bogus takedowns, that second part very rarely happens. Section 512(f) was supposed to provide a remedy for those who have been harmed by their content being removed. But in the wake of key rulings, most recently Lenz v. Universal, that remedy is rarely available, leaving online speakers everywhere vulnerable to the censoring whims of anyone inclined to send a takedown demand targeting their speech, no matter how unjustifiably, since there is little ability to ever hold this wrongdoer liable for the harm their censorship causes.
It's no secret that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is a mess. Originally written by a confused and panicked Congress in the wake of the 1980s movie War Games, it was supposed to be an "anti-hacking" law, but was written so broadly that it has been used over and over again against any sort of "things that happen on a computer." It has been (not so jokingly) referred to as "the law that sticks," because when someone has done something "icky" using a computer, if no other law is found to be broken, someone can almost always find some weird way to interpret the CFAA to claim it's been violated. The two most problematic parts of the CFAA are the fact that it applies to "unauthorized access" or to "exceeding authorized access" on any "computer... which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communications." In 1986 that may have seemed limited. But, today, that means any computer on the internet. Which means basically any computer.
I'll forgive you since it's been two years, but hopefully you will remember our posts about a crazy copyright lawsuit back in early 2016 between a company called Solid Oak Sketches and Take-Two Software. At issue were Take-Two's faithful depictions of several NBA stars in its NBA 2K series of games, including LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. The problem is that Solid Oak claims to have copyrights on several tattoos appearing on the skin of these players, all of which show up in the images of the game. Of course, Take-Two negotiates the rights for player likenesses with the NBA Players Association, meaning this lawsuit has the odd smell of a third party bickering over branded cattle. While Solid Oak is asking for $1.2 million in damages, Take-Two has pointed out that these sorts of statutory damages shouldn't apply as the company only registered its copyrights in 2015. This fact leads a reasonable observer to wonder why the copyrights weren't registered much earlier, were Take-Two's use so injurious.
That question is of course tangent to the most central concern of why in the world any of this isn't obvious fair use? Take-Two has First Amendment rights, after all, and its use of the eight tattoos in each iteration of the game is a hilariously small portion of each work. On top of that, the whole enterprise of the game is to faithfully depict reality with regards to each player whose likeness it has properly licensed through the NBAPA. None of this should strike anybody as a million dollars worth of copyright infringement.
Hosting provider Steadfast is not liable for the copyright-infringing activities that took place on the server of a customer. A California District Court has dismissed all copyright and trademark infringing claims filed by ALS Scan, concluding that the hosting provider did enough to curb copyright infringement.
New data published by broadband management company Sandvine reveals that while BitTorrent traffic is dropping off in Canada, video piracy remains a significant problem. The data was released as part of the ongoing debate around website blocking, something Sandvine is familiar with.
French research organizations and universities have cancelled their subscriptions to Springer journals, due to an impasse in fee negotiations between the publisher and Couperin.org, a national consortium representing more than 250 academic institutions in France.
After more than a year of discussions, Couperin.org and SpringerNature, which publishes more than 2,000 scholarly journals belonging to Springer, Nature, and BioMedCentral, have failed to reach an agreement on subscriptions for its Springer journals. The publisher’s proposal includes an increase in prices, which the consortium refuses to accept.