Apple launched its new butterfly key-switch keyboard with the MacBook, with some usability complaints starting nearly immediately, but it wasn't until its adoption in the MacBook Pro in 2016 that reliability concerns started popping up —and AppleInsider has the hard data on failure rates.
If you've forgotten, Apple was last year forced to admit that it's deliberately throttling the performance of older iPhones running newer versions of iOS. At the time, the firm justified the move by claiming it prevents processors from demanding too much power from older Lithium-ion battery packs, which degrade over time struggle to deliver the peak currents and battery life they could when new.
Microsoft came under fire several times for not making Windows 10 a bloat-free operating system, and despite several updates, this hasn’t changed in a substantial way since the debut of the original RTM build nearly three years ago. Removing the Windows 10 pre-installed apps shouldn’t be such a difficult thing to do since Microsoft itself included uninstalling options, but it’s not a secret that these items come and go with each update.
In other words, even if you delete the pre-installed apps, they could be restored by a future update, not to say that in some cases, it’s much harder than you think to get rid of them in the first place.
The video that you see here was posted on reddit by user drakulaboy and shows just how difficult it is to remove the apps that you don’t want in Windows 10. Uninstalling one game brings back another, and it happens in an infinite loop which for the casual user has no end.
So, earlier today Robby was showing me a Chromium commit that referenced enabling the Crostini UI by default on the Pixelbook. No surprise there as Google’s flagship has been the default testing ground for the Crostini Project and the implementation of Linux app containers for quite some time now.
Since the “Crostini” flag turned up on Chrome OS we have found multiple references to an actual menu item for the feature in the Chrome OS settings but until recently accessing the terminal app has only been possible through some hacking. Just last week, we saw the addition of the terminal app to the Chrome OS launcher but had yet to see Crostini’s front-facing UI in action.
The Librem 13—"the first 13-inch ultraportable designed to protect your digital life"—ticks all the boxes, but is it as good in real life as it is on paper?
I don't think we're supposed to call portable computers "laptops" anymore. There's something about them getting too hot to use safely on your lap, so now they're officially called "notebooks" instead. I must be a thrill-seeker though, because I'm writing this review with the Librem 13v2 directly on my lap. I'm wearing pants, but apart from that, I'm risking it all for the collective. The first thing I noticed about the Librem 13? The company refers to it as a laptop. Way to be brave, Purism!
Now that Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for overseeing software containers, it's all but obligatory for cloud platform vendors to offer the software as a managed service.
Google, which created Kubernetes before turning it into a model open-source project, sells its paid service under the name Google Kubernetes Engine. Microsoft began doing the same last October with its Azure Kubernetes Service. And Amazon last November waded into pool with its Elastic Kubernetes Service and an even more hands-off variant called Fargate.
Not to be left behind, DigitalOcean will test the water on Wednesday by announcing its own take on the open-source dish: DigitalOcean Kubernetes.
The company made the announcement at Kubecon, the conference related to all things Kubernetes going on this week in Copenhagen.
On Wednesday at the KubeCon event in Copenhagen, Denmark, Google unveiled Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring, a new tool that aims to help developers improve their visibility into the health of their applications.
The new tool looks at a Kubernetes environment and pulls metrics, logs, events, and metadata to analyze, helping users better understand how their app is behaving in production, according to a press release.
Google Cloud wheeled out two new features this morning: an open source sandbox with secure isolation for containers and the ability to intercept application system calls, and the beta release of Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring; an out-of-the-box monitoring solution for Kubernetes, the company said in a blog this morning. It also announced expanded collaboration with open-source Kubernetes monitoring solution, Prometheus.
In a traditional deployment, a key responsibility for the security team is making sure that the servers are up-to-date with the latest in security patches. So at first glance, a cloud-native deployment could look like a nightmare to a security professional: thousands of containers, each with their own versions of different operating system files, packages and executables. Doesn’t this multiply the patching problem by orders of magnitude?
Fortunately, some of the main tenets of today’s best practices in DevOps can really help. Let’s see how immutable artifacts and automation simplify the process — and increase the effectiveness — of keeping a cloud-native deployment properly patched.
At the 2018 Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW), which is a yearly gathering of lawyers and technical folks organized by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), attendees got more details on a recent hearing in a German GPL enforcement case. Marcus von Welser is a lawyer who represented the defendant, Geniatech, in a case that was brought by Patrick McHardy. In the presentation, von Welser was joined by Armijn Hemel, who helped Geniatech in its compliance efforts. The hearing was of interest for a number of reasons, not least because McHardy withdrew his request for an injunction once it became clear that the judge was leaning in favor of the defendants—effectively stopping this case dead in its tracks.
Every year, the Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM) brings together 80 or 90 core kernel developers for a few days of highly technical discussions. The 2018 LSFMM was held April 23 to 25 in Park City, Utah. As usual, LWN was there and able to attend most of the sessions.
Each kernel development cycle includes a vast number of changes that are not intended to change visible behavior and which, as a result, go unnoticed by most users and developers. One such change in 4.17 is a rewiring of how system-call implementations are invoked within the kernel. The change is interesting, though, and provides an opportunity to look at the macro magic that handles system-call definitions.
In user space, system calls look like ordinary functions, albeit with the strange convention of returning error codes in the global errno variable. Those functions are indeed just that, in that they are generally wrapper functions defined in the C library (or some other language-specific implementation). Those wrappers are responsible for organizing the system-call arguments properly (placing them into a set of registers defined by the architecture ABI) and triggering a trap into the kernel, where the real work gets done.
The first article in this series described the interface to the "rhashtable" resizable hash-table abstraction in Linux 4.15. While a knowledge of the interface can result in successful use of rhashtables, it often helps to understand what is going on "under the hood", particularly when those details leak out through the interface, as is occasionally the case with rhashtable. The centerpiece for understanding the implementation is knowing exactly how the table is resized. So this follow-on article will explain that operation; it will also present the configuration parameters that were skimmed over last time and discuss how they affect the implementation.
In the performance-conscious world of high-speed networking, anything that can be done to avoid copying packet data is welcome. The MSG_ZEROCOPY feature added in 4.14 enables zero-copy transmission of data, but does not address the receive side of the equation. It now appears that the 4.18 kernel will include a zero-copy receive mechanism by Eric Dumazet to close that gap, at least for some relatively specialized applications.
Packet reception starts in the kernel with the allocation of a series of buffers to hold packets as they come out of the network interface. As a general rule, the kernel has no idea what will show up next from the interface, so it cannot know in advance who the intended recipient of the next packet to arrive in a given buffer will be. An implementation of zero-copy reception will thus have to map these packet buffers into user-space memory after the packets come in and are associated with an open socket.
Earlier this week MIPS Technologies announced their new MIPS I7200 processor core built on the new nanoMIPS ISA. A day after they unveiled their new GCC port to this much-changed nanoMIPS instruction set and now today they sent out their initial Linux kernel patch for bringing up this new MIPS version that is coming with a new/updated kernel ABI.
Given the binary incompatibility to existing MIPS architecture generations, developers at MIPS Technologies took this time to also improve the compiler ABI, modernize the Linux user ABI for nanoMIPS, make more use of generic kernel interfaces, etc.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation€® (CNCF€®), which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes€® and Prometheusââ¢, today announced that Sumo Logic has joined the Foundation as a Gold Member.
NVIDIA has introduced their first stable driver in the 396 driver series for Linux, the 396.24 release.
The NVIDIA 396.24 driver builds off last month's 396.18 beta and its new Vulkan SPIR-V compiler and other changes.
The 2018 Vulkan Developer Day event was held earlier this week at the Ubisoft offices in Montreal, Canada.
The slide decks from this Vulkan Developer Day event are now available. For the most part it's routine material for those familiar with Vulkan 1.1, sub-groups, HLSL interoperability, and other modern Vulkan features.
The Mesa-based RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is enabling out-of-order rasterization by default for a small but consistent performance gain.
Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers today submitted their first batch of feature updates to DRM-Next of new material that in turn they are aiming for the Linux 4.18 merge window.
Among the many changes in this first batch of new Intel i915 DRM driver updates for Linux 4.18 include some GPU documentation improvements, GuC and HuC engine code refactoring is still ongoing, PSR/PSR2 panel self refresh enabling and fixes, NV12 preparations, more enablement work around Icelake "Gen 11" graphics, power management fixes, display fixes, and a variety of other code improvements.
The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver now has patches available for Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) that is also known as Flexible MSAA.
EQAA is designed to deliver better quality anti-aliasing over traditional MSAA with more coverage samples per pixel while keeping the same number of color/depth/stencil samples. The EQAA visual quality is expected to be significant but with only a small performance impact compared to standard MSAA.
X.Org Server 1.19 was released 18 months ago and in the days ahead will finally be succeeded by the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 release.
X.Org Server 1.20 has been a long time coming and this has been the longest duration without a major xorg-server release in more than one decade. Fortunately, release manager Adam Jackson of Red Hat is putting the finishing touches of this next installment.
With the release of the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 finally being imminent, here is a look at the many features that were merged over the past year and a half for this long drawn out release process. While more of the Linux desktop continues moving towards Wayland, X.Org Server continues evolving as shown by the 1.20 release and as part of that is also plenty on the XWayland side.
As of this morning Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver now has 16-bit integer support for shaders (shaderInt16) as one more feature to cross-off the TODO list.
Igalia's Iago Toral Quiroga has landed his patch series wiring up shaderInt16 support for the Intel Vulkan Linux driver. The 16-bit int support for shaders is supported with Broadwell "Gen 8" graphics hardware and newer.
Continuing on with our benchmarking of the recently released Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, here are some reference benchmarks on a total of six systems with AMD and Intel hardware while looking to see how the out-of-the-box performance compares to the previous Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 16.04.
Some months ago Shawn Rutledge blogged about the new QtPdf module, a Qt wrapper around the PDFium library, which allows you to render PDF documents to QImages. Since that blog post we have invested some more work into the module to make it more useful in your day-to-day projects.
GNOME Calendar 3.28.2 was released yesterday.
If you were having crashes and problems, please upgrade immediately. Quite a few crashers were fixed, and a few polishes went in too. Hopefully the experience of using Calendar will be much more pleasant now.
Virtlyst – a libvirt web interface to manage virtual machines has a new release.
This release finishes support to connect to TCP or TLS virtd servers, it also fixes creating new instances from the flavor panel. And a few other fixes.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 167.
Transmission developer Mike Gelfand released today a new maintenance update to the popular BitTorrent client used by millions of computer users on GNU/Linux, Mac, and Windows systems.
Coming more than three months after version 2.93, which probably most of you are using to download torrents, Transmission 2.94 is here today with improved support for latest LibreSSL TLS/crypto stack, as well as the mbed TLS open-source implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols on all supported platforms.
Transmission 2.94 also fixes the erroneous calculation of ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) when downloading torrents, and addresses some cross-compilation issues that were caused by the MiniUPnP configuration test. These improvements are available on all supported systems, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
Do you love strategy games? You might like to take a look at Liberation Circuit [GitHub], a free software (GPL) RTS that includes optional programming elements.
Robocraft [Steam], the surprisingly good robot building and battling game is planning to completely remove loot boxes in favour of a tech tree system.
May is already turning out to be quite a busy month for Linux gaming. It's now confirmed that the group based role-playing dungeon crawler Arakion: Book One [Official Site] will arrive in Early Access on May 15th.
Tales of Maj'Eyal [Official Site], the roguelike RPG that features tactical turn-based combat is set to expand, allowing you to explore horrors that lurk beneath the surface with the Forbidden Cults DLC. It's currently set to release on May 16th.
The highly rated RPG roguelike The Enchanted Cave 2 just got a pretty big free content update along with full gamepad support.
The Nintendo Switch Pro Controller is now supported directly in Steam with the latest Steam Client Beta, Valve announced today.
While the beta client announcement was quite short and to the point, they did make a dedicated post just for the new Switch Pro Controller support.
If you happen to have a Switch Pro controller for Nintendo's Switch gaming system, it's now natively supported by Steam.
Valve has rolled out a new Steam client beta today where the primary change is adding support for the Nintendo Switch Pro controller to Steam Input. Details on this new controller support for Steam can be found here.
Cinnamon 3.8 is now officially out.
Ahead of the upcoming Linux Mint 19 release that's re-based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as well as the upcoming Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 release based on Stretch, the Cinnamon 3.8 desktop environment is now officially available.
This GNOME/GTK3-forked desktop environment has received a number of performance optimizations, support for Elogind, better support for GTK+ 3.22, client-side decorated windows, porting almost all Python components to Py3, backporting various changes from upstream GNOME, look-and-feel/UI/UX enhancements, and various updates to the many Cinnamon desktop applications.
Linux Mint is a pretty good Linux distribution. Many people love it because of the Cinnamon desktop environment. Hell, despite having other DE versions -- such as Mate -- the Linux Mint operating system sort of exists only because of Cinnamon. I mean, look -- Mint is based on Ubuntu, so if you want to use Mate or Xfce environments, for instance, why not just run Ubuntu Mate or Xubuntu?
The thing is, Cinnamon is available to any distro that wants to use it -- it is not only a Linux Mint affair. Since the Mint team both maintains and popularized Cinnamon, however, it will be forever thought of as a Mint DE -- right or wrong. And that is why today's announcement is so puzzling -- Cinnamon 3.8 is now available (yay!), but no Linux Mint users can try it (boo!).
The KDE neon project offers a continually updated rolling Linux-based computer operating system built around the latest KDE technologies. It usually relies on the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, so it's a natural move for the development team to rebase it on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
"With the new Ubuntu LTS 18.04 out it’s time to rebase Neon’s packages on that. This is still work in progress but demand seems to be strong looking at comments around the forums, chat rooms and social media, so we’re aware many people are waiting for this," reads today's announcement.
KDE neon is a project to do continuous integration and deployment of KDE software for easy and quick use by the world. We have three ways of doing that the main one being the archive of .deb packages based on the latest Ubuntu LTS (the other two are Docker images and Snap packages).
People often ask us about if it’s possible to use Qt for software development on microcontrollers (MCU), and if Qt can run without an operating system (“bare metal”). Today we will answer these questions and show you some concrete examples.
Following years of work in bringing the KDE Plasma 5 desktop to FreeBSD, it's getting into shape and the x11/kde5 package is now in the ports tree for easing the process of setting up the modern KDE desktop stack.
On FreeBSD installations, from the ports tree it should now be as easy as fetching x11/xorg x11/sddm x11/kde5 for getting the latest KDE Plasma desktop, KDE Frameworks 5, and KDE Applications going for a desktop environment. Up until now this was only possible if using the "Area51" repository on FreeBSD.
There is no KDE5. There are KDE Frameworks 5 (releasing monthly, now reaching version 5.45) and KDE Plasma Desktop 5 (releasing quarterly, I think, now 5.12) and KDE Applications (releasing semi-anually, called 18.04).
For the FreeBSD ports tree, there is a x11/kde5. It is a metaport, which means it collects other ports together; in this case, x11/kf5-frameworks (metaport for all the frameworks), x11/plasma5-plasma-desktop and a fistful of KDE Applications metaports (e.g. the metaport for KDE games, and the metaport for KDE graphics applications, and the metaport for what-we-consider-essential KDE applications like konsole, konqueror, dolphin, and okular). So, from a bare FreeBSD installation, installing x11/xorg, x11/sddm, and x11/kde5 should get you close to a working modern KDE Desktop experience. Throw in www/falkon and devel/kdevelop for a developer workstation, or graphics/krita for an artists workstation, and you’ve got a daily driver.
Akademy 2018 organisers have published the program for the conference part of the event. This year the event will be held in Vienna, and talks will take place on the 11th and 12th of August.
Kali Linux 2018.2 is the second release in 2018 and the first to incorporate mitigation for the widely mediatized Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities for the x86 architecture (amd64 and i386) through the implementation of the Linux 4.15 kernel, which, unfortunately, reached end of life last month.
Apart from keeping your PC protected against Spectre and Meltdown, the Linux 4.15 kernel included in Kali Linux 2018.2 also improves support for AMD Radeon GPUs and implements support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization, a new technology designed to dramatically limit the access to the virtual machine memory by encrypting it.
Linux plays a huge role in the computing industry. It is an open-source operating system that is widely used in web servers, supercomputers, and the Internet of things. This is a well-known operating system in the fraternity of open source world. Due to its terminal-based user experience, not many people were fans of it. It is a fact that a lot of general PC users don’t like the Linux and uses the GUI-based operating systems such as Mac OS and Windows.
Coming to the programming world, Linux is known to a lot of developers but not all. There are many programmers who use Windows and Mac OS purely because of its GUI compatibilities. And every OS has its own merits and demerits as well. If you think about back-end programming – programmers often choose Mac OS. To code enterprise software Windows is the best in the market. On the contrary, if you come out of these two OSes, you can experience the power of Linux for programming.
This year’s openSUSE Board elections produced the longest election period in the history of the project.
The four phases of the election, which included an application phase for new membership in phase one, lasted almost two months.
The results of the elections ended in the success of 237 out of 400 people voting in this year’s election, which is a record both in participation percentage (59.25 percent) and in actual voters (237).
In case you missed it, Jakarta EE is officially out! Java EE was given a new home at the Eclipse Foundation and on February 26, 2018 Jakarta EE was chosen as the new name for Java EE. Join us at the next online DevNation Live Tech Talk on Thursday, May 3rd at 12pm EDT. The topic is “Jakarta EE: The Future of Java EE” presented by Dr. Mark Little, and hosted by Burr Sutter.
Last year, we asked the question, “what happens when 25 middle school girls get together?” The answer was CO.LAB, presented by Open Source Stories. Since then Red Hat has hosted nearly 100 girls from underserved areas in Boston, New York City, Washington, D.C. and Raleigh, for immersive experiences, underscoring our commitment to empowering the next-generation of open source leaders. Through this initiative, we introduced them to the principles of open source — and to a world of technology and collaboration. Students in our 2017 CO.LAB program built digital cameras from Raspberry Pi computers, then created a multi-city poetry installation — all using the power of collaboration.
Portworx, the solution for running stateful containers in production, announced today it has achieved Red Hat certification for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and that PX-Enterprise is available in the Red Hat Container Catalog. Portworx's certification means enterprises can now run high performance stateful applications like databases, big and fast data workloads, and machine learning applications on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with confidence that the solutions have been tested together. PX-Enterprise enables containers to run hyperconverged with data on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform even in the event of pod rescheduling, enabling ultra-fast IO.
Trilio, the leader in data protection and recovery solutions for OpenStack, is announcing a major update of its flagship product, TrilioVault. The upcoming Version 3 release expands the company’s backup and recovery capabilities beyond OpenStack for the first time and will support Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered virtualization platform. Version 3 is expected to be released this summer, with private demos available by request.
Following last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, the Scientific Linux community is preparing to release their re-based downstream of RHEL.
RHEL 7.5 brings the Permabit Virtual Data Optimizer, better Windows infrastructure integration, full support for Buildah, and various other improvements.
Scientific Linux 7.5 RC x86_64
These are the notes for the "RC" of Scientific Linux 7.5
Please also review TUV's 7.5 Release Notes for major upstream changes.
This will be published as SL 7.5 on May 10 2018 unless any critical bugs are reported.
Amazon has become the poster child for a new kind of business reality: the internet company who partners with you on the one hand, and competes with you on the other, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst tells Business Insider.
As he talks to his CEO customers, which include 90% of the Fortune 500, "everyone is really freaked that Amazon is going to come into their market. And can they really compete?" he said.
They have reason to fear. Amazon's business interests include just about everything from books to original TV shows to cloud computing and enterprise IT to groceries and on and on. And with its scale, it can swoop in and be an instant contender in almost any market, as its acquisition of Whole Foods last year proved.
Whitehurst experienced this phenomenon first-hand about six months ago.
Cloud Computing Concepts, an award-winning provider of technology and communications services to organizations nationwide, today announced that it has fulfilled the requirements to become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider. Recognition as a Red Hat CCSP enables C3 to provide fully supported Red Hat solutions to its rapidly growing customer base.
Twice a year, Red Hat distributes new versions of compiler toolsets, scripting languages, open source databases, and/or web tools, etc. so that application developers will have access to the latest, stable versions. These Red Hat supported offerings are packaged as Red Hat Software Collections (scripting languages, open source databases, web tools, etc.), Red Hat Developer Toolset (GCC), and the recently added compiler toolsets Clang/LLVM, Go, and Rust. All are yum installable, and are included in most Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions and all Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Subscriptions. Most Red Hat Software Collections and Red Hat Developer Toolset components are also available as Linux container images for hybrid cloud development across Red Hat platforms including but not limited to: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project announced the release and general availability of the Fedora 28 Linux-based operating system for desktops, servers, and cloud environments.
Powered by the latest GNU/Linux and Open Source technologies, the Fedora 28 operating system looks to be a great release and the first to introduce long-anticipated modular repository for the Fedora Server edition, allowing sysadmins to choose between different available branches of server-oriented software programs, such as Django or Node.JS. It also ships with the Kubernetes 1.9 production-grade container orchestration tool, and the latest Linux 4.16 kernel.
Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has announced to the Fedora Council members that the Fedora Atomic Workstation is now known as "Team Silverblue", while the name is a bit awkward and abstract, they do have plans for making Silverblue into great shape for the Fedora 29 and 30 cycles.
Clasen with the Fedora Atomic Workstation special interest group have penned a whitepaper outlining "Team Silverblue" with their goals for F29/F30 and what this effort is all about.
While the past couple of days were filled with news about the new version of Windows 10 and its massive list of bugs, Linux users have the opportunity to test a new version of Fedora Linux as well.
Fedora 28 is the new version of the Linux distribution and it is available as a Workstation, Server and Atomic Host release.
New users can head over to the official Fedora website to download their version of choice. You may download an ISO image or use the Fedora Media Writer application for the operating system to download and save the Fedora image to an USB Flash Drive which you may boot from.
First and foremost, the security update again patches Debian GNU/Linux's kernel against both variants of the Spectre vulnerability (CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753). These could allow an attacker that has control over an unprivileged process to read memory from arbitrary addresses, including kernel memory.
While Spectre Variant 2 was mitigated for the x86 architecture (amd64 and i386) via the retpoline compiler feature, Spectre Variant 1 was mitigated by first identifying the vulnerable code sections and then replacing the array access with the speculation-safe array_index_nospec() function.
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Andreas Boll (aboll) Dominik George (natureshadow) Julien Puydt (jpuydt) Sergio Durigan Junior (sergiodj) Robie Basak (rbasak) Elena Grandi (valhalla) Peter Pentchev (roam) Samuel Henrique (samueloph)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Andy Li Alexandre Rossi David Mohammed Tim Lunn Rebecca Natalie Palmer Andrea Bolognani Toke Høiland-Jørgensen Gabriel F. T. Gomes Bjorn Anders Dolk Geoffroy Youri Berret Dmitry Eremin-Solenikov
Congratulations!
The recent long-term-support release of Canonical's Ubuntu (Ubuntu 18.04, code-named "Bionic Beaver"), announced last week, adds features and upgrades designed to make the company's Linux distro a more appealing platform for artificial intelligence (AI) development. Much more.
Among those upgrades: Kubeflow, the Google approach to TensorFlow on Kubernetes, and a range of CI/CD tools were integrated in Canonical's distribution of Kubernetes and aligned with the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for on-premises and on-cloud AI development.
Kubeflow is the open source project focused on making deployments of machine learning (ML) workflows on Kubernetes "simple, portable, and scalable," the project page states.
Maybe you run old and trusted Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and wonder if it's easy to release a Bionic Beaver (18.04) in your PC. So did I! I could wait for the early spring-bugs to be squashed (do beavers eat bugs?), so wait for the point release 18.04.1. But I decided to act like a daring drake, and give the process a try anyway. Now, this could either go horribly wrong, like some Linux-updates I had in the past, it could be a breeze (badger?), or anything in between: Time to share my experience!
[...]
Probably there's some stuff left to configure, for example my dock doesn't auto show if I hover over it, but that's for another day. For now, this big update was pretty painless though not entirely 'unattended'. Although slight unresponsive on this 'old beast left of my knees', Gnome looks really modern, almost more like Android than Windows at this point I guess, and my 'Start' button *) also works, it arranges all my apps; a neat effect. An update gone according to plan, what more to wish for?
Am writing briefly to say that I believe a scam or pyramid scheme is currently using my name fraudulently in South Africa. I am not going to link to the websites in question here, but if you are being pitched a make-money-fast story that refers to me and crypto-currency, you are most likely being targeted by fraudsters.
I recently (re)introduced a simple shell based on Mir: egmde. This shell is just the code needed to illustrate these articles and, maybe, inspire others to build on it but it is not intended to be a product.
At the end of the last article we could run egmde as a desktop and run and start Wayland based applications from a terminal. We could also select the keyboard layout and cusomize the wallpaper.
At the end of March there was the roll-out of EGMDE as the example Mir desktop environment and since then it's continued picking up features as part of a learning exercise for getting new contributors/developers interested in Mir and how to deal with the Mir Abstraction Layer (MirAL).
Lubuntu release manager Simon Quigley announced that the upcoming Lubuntu 18.10 operating system would ship with the LXQt desktop environment by default instead of LXDE.
It's been three long years since the Lubuntu team promised us that they'd drop the LXDE desktop environment in favor of the more modern, Qt-based LXQt, but now it looks like it's finally happening. Lubuntu 18.10 will be the first release to ship with LXQt as default desktop environment instead of LXDE, according to Simon Quigley.
The first release that was supposed to move to LXQt by default was Lubuntu 15.10 a.k.a. the Wily Werewolf. The Lubuntu team from back then announced that Lubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) would be the last release to ship with LXDE as they prepare the migration to LXQt, but it never happened, even to this day.
Google has everyone wondering, is what they're doing going to finally lead to the year of the Linux Desktop? Are we okay with Google being in charge with Linux on the desktop? 18.04 is out and we talk about our initial impressions. Simon Quigley the release manager for Lubuntu joins us this hour to break some exclusive Lubuntu news! As always your calls go to the front of the line.
Linux Mint has warped my brain and now I can’t use any other distribution of Linux.
I recently returned to Elementary OS as my daily driver, and in this video I take a look at some of the high points of the distro, as well as a few things that needed some work.
System76 is primarily known for its Linux-based laptops and desktops, but it’s also the architect of the ambitious Pop!_OS project. This is System76’s attempt to create the perfect Linux-based developer operating system, and today the company is announcing some pretty major updates to it.
Pop!_OS 18:04LTS now comes with a markedly improved installer, heightened security, and new utilities designed to make the developer experience better.
The Budgie desktop lacks the glitz and glitter found in more seasoned desktop environments. Animation is nonexistent.
However, this latest release makes good on Ubuntu Budgie's promise to provide simplicity and elegance along with functionality. It goes further down the development pathway to improve on the simplicity to make Budgie a solid desktop choice.
Elecrow has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a “CrowPi” computer education kit for the Raspberry Pi, featuring a breadboard, servo, stepper motor, LEDs, and more, including a 7-inch touchscreen built into a briefcase.
On Kickstarter, Hong Kong based Elecrow is launching a CrowPi educational kit for teaching the basics of Raspberry Pi hardware hacking for classrooms or informal DIY education. The kit, which is available with or without a Raspberry Pi Zero or new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, is built around a CrowPi Development Board that fits into the bottom of the kit’s briefcase. When you flip up the top of the case, you’ll find the built-in 7-inch HD touchscreen. Different models bundle add-ons including a servo and stepper motor.
Oculus has launched an untethered, 3DOF head tracking “Oculus Go” VR headset for $199. The Go runs Android on a Snapdragon 821 and offers a 5.5-inch 2560 x 1440 display and two-hour plus battery life.
Nexcom’s “vDNA 1160” appliance for 5G vCPE and edge computing runs on an Atom C3000 with Intel VT-x, VT-d, and QAT technologies, and has 2x 10GbE SFP+, 6x GbE, 2x USB 3.0, 2x M.2, and SATA.
It was only in March, we reported about Samsung Gear S4 bearing model number SM-R800. Now a month later, we have more information coming in about the next Samsung smartwatch. Variants of the Gear S4, with LTE (Verizon, AT & T and T-Mobile), have apparently entered development stage in the United States.
Fuchsia also isolates apps from having direct kernel access, adding an extra layer of security, while also avoiding incompatibility issues after a system upgrade, something that has plagued Android OS for years. A new operating system running on a different platform would solve some of these issues, and Google won’t have to go after making pricey patent licensing deals.
Today ACM announced the recipients of four prestigious technical awards. These leaders were selected by their peers for making significant contributions that have had far-reaching impact on the ascendance of computing as an integral part of how we live and work today, opening promising new avenues for research exploration and commercial application in the coming years.
Open source. It's a term that gets heads up from screens and bums moving on seats when it's aired in a telco room with more than one person in it.
Some see it as the key to an automated, orchestrated future. Others see it as a distraction that has held back communications networking virtualization developments during the past few years.
But what's the reality? As ever, somewhere in-between. So where are telcos actually gaining an advantage from open source developments and practices?
mass_archive, a basic Python script, will push a webpage or URL to multiple archive services at once, hopefully making online journalism or research a bit more efficient.
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If the script isn’t successful at getting an archive up on the Wayback Machine, it’ll just move onto Archive.is, and then Perma.cc, another archiving service. For the last one you’ll need to create a free account, which gives you 10 archives a month. If that sounds like a pain, just take the Perma.cc parts out of the script in a text editor. (The bit that handles requests to Archive.is uses a module from Past Pages, an open-source effort to archive the news; thanks to Past Pages for that).
I pinged Florian Rivoal about all of that. Florian is a extremely talented, multicultural, brilliant french engineer (but he also holds a MBA from INSEAD, often ranked #1 MBA in the whole world) based in Japan. He has been a crucial contributor to the CSS Working Group, the Publishign activity and many other areas of the daily W3C activities as a Avisory Committee representative for his various past employers. I do trust him, I like his vision, I like his diplomatic talent, appreciate that he deeply and truely cares for the future of the World Wide Web and the future of the W3C, and I love his technical expertise.
Progressive web apps (PWAs) are a new way of building websites, but are they really all that new? The basic principles of PWAs came out of older strategies for app design such as progressive enhancement, responsive design, mobile-first, etc. Progressive web apps bring together proven techniques such as these with a new set of APIs and other features under one umbrella term; 2018 could be the year of PWA.
With the upcoming release of Firefox 60, we are pleased to welcome the 63 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 59 of whom were brand new volunteers!
Facebook today announced it plans to open-source some of its AI tools, including Translate, which translates 48 languages, and ELF, which teaches machines reasoning through gameplay. Facebook’s AI now conducts more than 6 billion translations a day. An ELF bot has competed with some of the top Go players around the world in recent weeks and currently has a record of 14-0, said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer.
Would it surprise you to know Facebook is working on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)? No. I didn't think it would. Now, Facebook is open-sourcing PyTorch, its deep learning framework.
PyTorch 1.0 provides developers with the power to seamlessly move from research to production in a single framework. PyTorch 1.0 integrates PyTorch's research-oriented aspects with the modular, production-focused capabilities of Caffe2, a popular deep learning framework and ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange), an open format to represent deep learning models.
Go is the go-to game for machine learning researchers. It’s what Google’s DeepMind team famously used to show off its algorithms, and Facebook, too, recently announced that it was building a Go bot of its own. As the team announced at the company’s F8 developer conference today, the ELF OpenGo bot has now achieved professional status after winning all 14 games it played against a group of top 30 human Go players recently.
“At a board meeting last week, we already approved four additional programs,” Gabriele Columbro, executive director at FINOS, told Markets Media.
He declined to go into further details about the new projects that FINOS expects to announce in the coming months than one relates to financial services developer workflow and another addresses the standardization of objects.
Rafael Avila de Espindola is the fifth most active contributor to LLVM with more than 4,300 commits since 2006, but now he has decided to part ways with the project.
Rafael posted a rather lengthy mailing list message to fellow LLVM developers today entitled I am leaving llvm.
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Of the 900+ authors to LLVM, Rafael was the fifth most contributor to LLVM by commit count with 4,344 commits (2.65% of all commits0 and in the process added 157,679 lines of code. He had been contributing since 14 May 2006 and was many times the most active LLVM contributor in a given month while working for the likes of Google and Mozilla. In fact, for 2013 through 2015 he was the most active author each year. His contributions will certainly be missed.
On an unrelated side note, I’m working on consolidating mirsolutios.de (as my business is long defunct) into www.mirbsd.org (as “The MirOS Project” was folded back into “MirBSD”, i.e. my private /usr/src and /usr/ports, this year). This simplifies some stuff, I’ll need no vhosts, and EU-DSGVO conformity should come with less effort (I’m reducing logging alongside).
Often heralded as the best free alternative to Photoshop, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open-source application that relies on a community of volunteer developers who maintain and improve the product. Available for Mac and PC, you get a lot of professional-level editing and retouching tools — perfect for designers who can’t or won’t shell out hundreds of dollars to Adobe.
Once you launch the program, you’ll find a dedicated window that displays the image, and separate windows to organize the toolbox and layers. When using a large display, ortwo displays, you have a nice, big workspace to play with your images. Icons in the toolbox represent actions such as the crop, lasso, paint and brush tools, and you can apply various effects to your photos. It may seemlike Photoshop, but GIMP has its own look and feel.
GCC 8.1 is released
The latest version of the GNU Compiler Collection has been released. According to the team, this is a major release with substantial new features not available in GCC 7.x or previous releases.
GCC 8.1 features significant in emitted diagnostics, such as improved locations, location ranges, and fix-it hints. It features improvements to profile driven optimizations as well. In addition, this release provides link time optimizations as a new way to emit the DWARF debug information, making it easier to debug LTO optimized code.
Version 8.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) was released today as the major update for the year of this important free software compiler.
Under their awkward versioning scheme in place since GCC 5, the GCC 8.1 release today is the first stable version of GCC 8 that has been in development the past year. GCC 8.2, 8.3, etc, will arrive over the coming months as bug-fix/point releases while GCC 9.0.0 is now the version currently in-development on Git/SVN and will arrive next year in the form of GCC 9.1 stable.
In this modern era, in which the Internet and the World Wide Web play such visible roles, a different problem arises. In this version, which I will call "Turing Test 2," a computer program undertakes textual interactions with a human and another computer. The task of the computer program is to distinguish between the human and the computer. If the computer program successfully identifies which correspondent is a human and which is a computer, it has successfully passed Turing Test 2. If it cannot, then it fails the test. One particular form of this test is called a CAPTCHAb (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). These tests take many forms, but a popular variation is to display a distorted image of a word or random string of numbers and characters. In theory, a human interacting with the CAPTCHA will successfully respond with the correct alphanumeric string while a computer program, interacting with the same image will not succeed. There are other variations, for example, in which an image of an equation is displayed and the solution to the equation must be entered in response. Assuming the image is just a set of pixels, the challenge for the computer program trying to appear human is to correctly identify the equation and solve it.
Software development is often described as knowledge work. This label is invariably used as a shorthand for “work that doesn’t involve getting your hands dirty”, “jobs your parents never had and you struggle to explain to them” or, without any apparent irony over the use of fingers on keyboards and screens, “the digital economy”. But step back from these simple substitutions and an obvious yet deeper truth becomes visible: knowledge work is about knowledge. It’s about knowing stuff and, most often, also about how you deal with stuff you don’t know.
Today I migrated the script from Python2 and yum to Python3 and dnf. First of all kudos to Seth Vidal, and secondly, kudos to the dnf team for putting together a worthy successor to yum, and more importantly, usable documentation of same.
Five-step plan focuses on getting more departments publishing on GOV.UK to use the open format
A fresh push is under way to encourage government bodies to publish documents in open formats.
The Government Digital Service (GDS) has produced a five-step plan to inject fresh momentum into a drive that began four years ago.
The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has shown yet again that it’s not afraid to use operator clout to sway the direction of vendors, nor that it’s afraid of acronyms. The latest evidence comes from its newly created Optical Disaggregated Transport Network (ODTN) project.
The project looks to introduce open source for software control over optical transport networks. It follows similar projects like OpenConfig, the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), and the AT&T-led OpenROADM MultiSource Agreement (MSA).
Today, the ONF announced a new community effort to bring the benefits of open networking to the optical domain. The ODTN project is an operator-led initiative to build optical transport networks using disaggregated optical equipment, open and common standards, and open source software. Backed by some of the world’s largest network operators, China Unicom, Comcast, NTT Communications, Telefonica and TIM are collaborating to build this first-of-its-kind open source solution to initiate a transformation within optical transport networking.
This morning, Xiaomi confirmed that it will seek a public listing on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong later this year, in what could be the largest tech IPO since Alibaba’s 2014 debut in New York. It is a moment for which the company, including the IP function overseen by Senior Vice President of Strategic Cooperation Wang Xiang, has been preparing for a long time. Like many businesses in advance of an IPO, Xiaomi has made major splashes on the secondary market for patents; its largest haul coming nearly two years ago as part of a broad business deal with Microsoft.
Loneliness isn't just a fleeting feeling, leaving us sad for a few hours to a few days. Research in recent years suggests that for many people, loneliness is more like a chronic ache, affecting their daily lives and sense of well-being.
Now a nationwide survey by the health insurer Cigna underscores that. It finds that loneliness is widespread in America, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel alone or left out always or sometimes.
Loneliness is a growing problem in the modern world, and it’s easy to blame social media. The truth isn’t that simple.
Cigna, a health insurance company, recently looked into the problem. Their survey shows that loneliness is a growing problem in the USA, and a problem that’s more common among younger generations.
This was created by Japanese researcher and inventor Kentaro Yoshifuji. Since Yoshifuji was in high school, he has developed new technology for electric wheelchairs, and this latest work is for a 13-year-old boy who is wheelchair-bound due to a heart condition.
MIPS Technologies has unveiled a new processor and one that is built on nanoMIPS, a significantly redesigned MIPS instruction set architecture and the first major product launch since Imagination Technologies sold off MIPS last year.
Thanks to a number of new Hepatitis C drugs (Sofosbuvir Ledipasvir, Ladispavir) the disease is curable for many patients. While this is an undeniable victory for patients and payers, the innovators who made this possible have been villainized and undermined. At a time when the public health community should celebrate the tremendous health benefits these breakthrough drugs have brought to patients around the world, they are instead organizing to ensure the destruction of the incentives that made these drugs a reality. A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 2% – 3% of the world’s population is living with hepatitis C. The World Health Organization states that globally an estimated 71 million people have chronic hepatitis C infection and approximately 399,000 people die each year from the disease.
The World Health Organization celebrated its 70th anniversary last month. Since the inception of the organisation, the world has changed, and so have its challenges. The global rise of non-communicable diseases is one example of those challenges, as well as the escalating prices of new medicines and chronic access issues in many countries. The annual World Health Assembly will open on 21 May with an ambitious new General Programme of Work for 2019-2023, which promises 1 billion more people under universal health coverage.
The furor over the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities has calmed a bit — for now, at least — but that does not mean that developers have stopped worrying about them. Spectre variant 1 (the bounds-check bypass vulnerability) has been of particular concern because, while the kernel is thought to contain numerous vulnerable spots, nobody really knows how to find them all. As a result, the defenses that have been developed for variant 1 have only been deployed in a few places. Recently, though, Dan Carpenter has enhanced the smatch tool to enable it to find possibly vulnerable code in the kernel.
CVE-2018-8781 was made public today as a new local privilege escalation vulnerability in the mainline Linux kernel that has been present since the Linux 3.4 kernel release six years ago.
The DisplayLink DRM driver's udl_fb_mmap function is prone to an integer overflow vulnerability that could allow local users on systems using the udldrmfb driver to obtain full read/write permissions on kernel physical pages, thereby allowing code execution in kernel space.
I was recently looking to migrate my passwords to an open source, cross platform password manager that sync passwords but also allows accessing passwords offline, and I discovered Bitwarden, which is advertised as an "open source password management solution for individuals, teams, and business organizations".
After using it for about a week, I can tell you that Bitwarden is probably the best open source alternative to LastPass. It comes with browser support, cloud password (as well as notes and credit card information) synchronization, 2FA, can be self hosted, it's cross-platform, and easy to use.
A severe vulnerability in a widely used industrial control software could have been used to disrupt and shut down power plants and other critical infrastructure.
Researchers at security firm Tenable found the flaw in the popular Schneider Electric software, used across the manufacturing and power industries, which if exploited could have allowed a skilled attacker to attack systems on the network.
It's the latest vulnerability that risks an attack to the core of any major plant's operations at a time when these systems have become a greater target in recent years. The report follows a recent warning, issued by the FBI and Homeland Security, from Russian hackers.
[...]
He explained that the stack-based buffer overflow attack can be leveraged in several malicious ways. First, an attacker can use the vulnerability to trigger a denial-of-service event by crashing the software, locking out remote administrators from their central operations. The bug can also be used to gain a foothold further into the network -- as well as other industrial devices -- or even send instructions to some physical control systems in the plant or unit.
After testing on an Audi A3 Sportback e-tron and the Volkswagen Golf GTE, Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade, security researchers from the Dutch firm Computest, found that the flaws in the IVI system, referred to as the modular infotainment platform (MIB), could be remotely exploited via the [I]nternet.
It seems like only yesterday that Drupal admins waited for security updates to fix April’s notorious Drupalgeddon, and — it’s back. As hackers have already started exploiting that nasty security issue, we’re here to tell you about how the hard working folk at Drupal’s security team have issued yet another security announcement after discovering another vulnerability.
Microsoft has released a patch for a critical remote code execution flaw affecting a Windows service used for importing Docker container images.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-201808115, is due to the Windows Host Compute Service Shim (hcsshim) library not properly validating input from container images while importing them.
A remote attacker could execute malware on a Windows host using a malicious Docker container image if they managed to trick an authenticated administrator to import it in Docker for Windows, which uses the hcsshim library.
There is something tragic about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The harder he tries, the more he fails. That has been the case with many of his attempts to sabotage diplomacy with Iran and push the US to take military action against the country. And that was certainly the case with his underwhelming powerpoint presentation Monday. What was supposed to be a smoking gun to once and for all nix the Iran nuclear deal, inadvertently made a powerful case as to why the the deal must remain in place.
The Israeli government had promised “significant new revelations” about the nuclear program. Yet Netanyahu offered nothing new. The bulk of his presentation focused on what the world already knew: That between 1999 and 2003, Iran had engaged in activities with possible military dimensions.
As I describe in Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy, these past Iranian activities constituted a tricky dilemma during the nuclear talks. If it was revealed that the Iranians had indeed engaged in illegal military research, that could jeopardize the entire agreement, as voices would be raised to have it punished for its past violations. Completely disregarding it without allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to complete its investigation—which the Iranians had not been cooperating with—was also not an option. What it came down to was a choice between punishment for Iran’s past violations and guarantees that those violations would never be repeated in the future.
The still-unscheduled Donald Trump-Kim Jong Un summit offers the opportunity for a denuclearization deal that would avoid a possible nuclear war, but that potential deal remains vulnerable to a hostile corporate media sector and political elites in the United States. At the center of this hostility is national security adviser John Bolton, who’s not just uninterested in selling a denuclearization deal to the public. He’s working actively to undermine it.
Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that he leaked intelligence to a Washington think tank sympathetic to his views in order to generate media questioning about the president’s announced plan to reach an agreement with North Korea’s leader.
Bolton made no secret of his visceral opposition to such a deal before Trump announced that Bolton would become national security adviser, arguing that Kim Jong Un would never let go of his nuclear weapons, especially since he is so close to having a real nuclear deterrent capability vis-a-vis the United States.
Even after meeting Trump on March 6 to discuss joining the administration,
On April 20, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed suit against a host of individuals and entities related to the theft and dissemination of internal emails and computer files. Its 66-page complaint names various defendants that can be grouped into three broad categories: Russians (Russian government operatives and entities), Trump associates (Trump campaign officials and informal advisors) and WikiLeaks (the organization and its founder Julian Assange). The theories of liability range from federal statutory causes of action (racketeering, conspiracy, economic espionage, trade secrets theft, computer theft and illegal wiretaps) to state causes of action (trespass and computer crimes in D.C. and Virginia). The lawsuit accuses Assange and WikiLeaks of crimes related to publication of stolen emails, causing The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald and Trevor Timm, the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, to declare “the DNC’s suit, as it pertains to WikiLeaks, poses a grave threat to press freedom.”
Pamela Anderson—actress, vegan activist and more recently, fringe international political player—has a brand new glamour shot with an very special guest star: Julian Assange.
The former Baywatch star says she and the WikiLeaks leader used to discuss the Bible, but she hasn't heard from him for more than a month.
Actress Pamela Anderson has spoken out about her close friend, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, saying she fears for his life.
Anderson, 50, makes regular visits to Assange at the Ecuador embassy in London, where he’s been holed up for six years.
Pamela Anderson said Julian Assange is in danger, but the actress declined to reveal the nature of her relationship with the WikiLeaks founder, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Antarctic glaciers are melting at dramatic rates, scientists are finding. Antarctica is of course a continent of ice, roughly twice the size of Australia. The retreat of its oceanfront glaciers raises serious concerns about the resulting rise in sea levels. The most severe projections of potential impact are almost impossible to grasp: billions of people displaced? coastal cities disappeared?
Yet the Washington Post was virtually alone among major outlets in reporting the latest findings. Corporate media have, in the main, stopped entertaining denial of human-driven climate disruption, but that’s a long, long way from the serious and sustained attention that would be appropriate to the myriad phenomena involved, and it’s categorically different than actually picking a side in the question of priority our guest’s work invokes: planet or profit?
Dahr Jamail is staff reporter at Truthout. He’s author of, most recently, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. His new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, is forthcoming from New Press, and he is just lately recipient of the 2018 Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, named for passionate, critical journalist I.F. Stone. He joins us now by phone from Port Townsend, Washington state. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dahr Jamail.
Climate change will impact us all, no matter who we are or where we live. But that doesn’t mean it will hit us equally.
Climate change may not discriminate, but people do.
As a reporter at ProPublica, my focus is on environmental justice, how low-income, underserved and disenfranchised people have been forced to bear an unequal burden of pollution. That’s the same focus I’m bringing as one of the hosts of “Hot Mess” — a PBS Digital Studios YouTube series about the complexities of climate change.
People are the most complex variables in the climate change equation. And my first episode, out today, focuses on the nexus of climate change and environmental justice — and how we need to do a better job connecting the two.
Spotify gave guidance for the current quarter that was slightly lighter than estimates. Investors in young tech companies like Spotify tend to have an appetite for growth, and Spotify's could slow next quarter. That's especially important since the company is still losing money, as it invests in research and development staffers, which made up almost half of new hires during the quarter.
A licensing panel announced on Monday that Uber was not a fit and proper company to continue operating in Brighton. Uber will appeal against the ruling.
The company’s Prime service has 100 million paying members. Half of US households are subscribers. More than half of all online shopping searches in the US start on Amazon – not Google – up from 18% less than a decade ago. The company scoops up almost $1 of every $2 US shoppers spend online.
DCMS chief has penned a letter to Facebook once again requesting that Zuck appears before parliament to give evidence as part of the committee's inquiry into the Cambridge Analytica scandal, noting that the Facebook boss is rumoured to be coming to Europe at the end of May.
For casually threatening economic ruin, inciting violence against entire populations, pushing for bombing faceless Muslims, or downplaying racism and child rape, there’s no better outlet than long-time echo chamber of power-serving conventional wisdom, the Washington Post. In the pages of the Post opinion section, you can say the most sociopathic things and get away with it, because you are, by definition, Serious People offering Serious Solutions in a Serious Paper.
The human cost of these extreme, reactionary opinions is of little matter; what matters is packaging calls for violence, sexism and racism in a nice, official-sounding tone.
With the fallout from the White House Correspondent’s dinner still swirling, and as we continue to celebrate Bob Parry’s life, we republish an extraordinary piece he wrote about last year’s dinner and the careerism undermining American professional life.
President Trump’s longtime personal doctor in New York says a trio of Trump associates showed up at his office without notice in early 2017 and seized the president’s medical records.
Things aren’t looking great for the Democratic establishment, which recently admitted that it stacks its primaries against progressive candidates and is currently engaged in a desperate, Hail Mary lawsuit against WikiLeaks for its factual publications about the party. So of course you know what that means.
That’s right! It’s time for Democratic pundits to begin down-punching Jill Stein.
“Jill Stein is on @NewDay right now repeating Russian talking points on its interference in the 2016 election and on US foreign policy,” tweeted CNN Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto today, without shame or self-reflection.
Sciutto was referring to comments Stein made on a CNN interview Tuesday about America’s undeniable, entirely factual and well-documented history of meddling in other countries’ elections, including a citation of an ex-CIA director’s recent admission that the US has interfered in foreign electoral processes and continues to do so to this day.
That’s what constitutes a “Russian talking point” these days: raw, easily verifiable facts.
But there was one key Facebook product that was almost entirely absent from the speeches and announcements by Zuckerberg and other executives: The News Feed.
News Feed sits at the core of the traditional Facebook experience. It's what you see when you open the app, a literal feed of news from all your friends. But it's also a double-edged sword. Though wildly successful, it has created huge issues for the company — including the spread of fake news and the spread of Russian disinformation in the wake of the 2016 US election.
Although FOSTA, or the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017, was just signed on April 11th, the impact of the law has been immediate — and dangerous.
The world today experiences censorship in some form or the other. Information is suppressed, repressed and even twisted to fit a certain narrative, both by governmental and non-governmental agencies and organizations.
Truth is buried and disinformation is released over the masses, which affect the very foundation of critical thinking and free speech. The modern internet, although christened to be free, has become a playground for censorship and propaganda, with information being twisted and turned with every tick of the clock.
To counter censorship and to allow for free flow of information, the blockchain, which is a decentralized web of computers and servers storing their own data and information and which cannot be controlled by any single entity or organization.
The state-run transportation authority blocks whatever speech it deems too controversial for public spaces.
The Center for Investigative Reporting recently conducted an investigation into the disproportionate rate at which African-Americans and Latinos are denied conventional home mortgages compared to their white counterparts. The year-long investigation found that modern-day redlining — the discriminatory practice of denying a service to residents of certain areas based on racial or ethnic characteristics — has persisted in 61 areas across the country, even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan amount, and neighborhood.
CIR hoped to advertise its findings in Philadelphia bus shelters, newsstands, and other spaces where audiences potentially affected by the investigation could explore CIR’s work. Yet when CIR submitted its advertisement to the state-run local transportation authority — Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA — the group received a puzzling response: The advertisement was “political” and expressed “an opinion, position or viewpoint on matters of public debate.” It would therefore be rejected, CIR was told. “Disparate lending is a matter of public debate and litigation,” SEPTA explained, citing the American Banking Association’s criticism of CIR’s report and methodology.
Today, CIR — represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and the law firm Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller — sued SEPTA over its policy, which violates the First Amendment. The policy discriminates against speech that SEPTA deems offensive or controversial, and it gives sparse guidance on how to determine whether an advertisement might be rejected for being “political” or for touching on a “matter of public debate.”
Well, that didn't take long. Over the past few weeks, we have been discussing yet another attempt to introduce a censorious site-blocking program to combat copyright infringement, this time in Japan. While site-blocking is unfortunately now popular in several countries, Japan's attempt at it is interesting in that the Japanese constitution specifically forbids censorship of this kind save for the need to combat very serious, typically deadly instances. What's not arguable is that Japan's constitution intended to allow for a sweeping site-blocking program to combat general copyright infringement. Despite this, and despite the fact that the Japanese government hasn't bothered to actually put any law in place that would institute site-blocking, at least one ISP decided to get a head start and began blocking access to several websites it determined to be "pirate sites." The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., or NTT, did this while saying the government should still get on crafting an actual law for its actions, despite the obvious unconstitutional nature of the whole enterprise.
Because of its actions, it will be NTT that will face the first legal challenge to site-blocking rather than the government, with a private citizen, who happens to be a lawyer, suing the ISP for invading his privacy in order to censor his access to the internet.
Writers and publishers in Burma remain targets of one of the world’s most draconian censorship systems. Early one morning in December 1994, a group of Military Intelligence Services (MIS) officers and police surrounded a house in the northern quarter of Mandalay, Burma’s second city.
The house was a bookshop called Ottaya Lwinpyin (“Northern Plain”), which belonged to Than Htay. Though they had no search warrant, they broke down the door and searched the whole bookshop. After a comprehensive search, they found a lot of pages that had been torn from books, magazines and periodicals. All the pages contained the slogan of the military regime and an official denunciation of the democratic forces, which must be printed on the first page of all materials published in Burma by order of the military.
After the search of his bookshop, Than Htay was arrested and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment by a summary court. Now Ko Than Htay is in Mandalay Prison, where he suffers torture and mistreatment like all other political prisoners.
Chinese feminists are trying to stay one step ahead of censors as they push the country's fledgling #MeToo movement.
The #MeTooInChina hashtag got nearly 4.5 million clicks in two weeks on Weibo, the country's popular Twitter-like platform.
But like anyone who engages in public dissent in China, feminist activists are closely monitored by the government. Posts including the hashtag were swiftly removed by the country’s censors and the term was blocked.
On April 21, Nicaraguan journalist Angel Gahona stood among protesters in the coastal town of Bluefields to report for a Facebook Live broadcast. He approached the town’s city hall, describing a cash machine that had been damaged during the demonstrations.
Seconds later, a gunshot sounded and Gahona fell to the curb. Protesters nearby screamed and attempted to stop the bleeding but Gahona had already passed.
The statement on censorship recently published by the Association of University Presses deserves wide support. It affirms opposition to “all restrictions imposed on the dissemination of [scholarly] work” and raises important questions about censorship in China and the changing nature of researching and publishing. But we must get our facts straight on both of those.
When, last August, Cambridge University Press was asked to remove several hundred articles from back issues of The China Quarterly, most media coverage presented it as a case of “state censorship”. However, it was actually a blunt attempt by the Chinese company that imports the journal to seek the removal of content that it felt might get it into trouble. The material had been identified entirely on the basis of keyword searches for certain “sensitive” terms, but other equally “sensitive” content had been left untouched. The attempt was even more misguided because the articles they were trying to hide were easily accessible through the much more popular JSTOR service, to which many Chinese libraries already subscribe.
The passage of China’s national cybersecurity law in June 2017 has been interpreted as an unprecedented impediment to the operation of foreign firms in the country, with its new requirements for data localization, network operators’ cooperation with law enforcement officials, and online content restrictions, among others. Although the law’s scope is indeed broader than that of any previous regulation, the process through which it was drafted and eventually approved bears similarities to three previous cases from the past two decades of Chinese information technology policy-making. In comparing these four cases, we argue that economic concerns have consistently overshadowed claims of national security considerations throughout laws directed at foreign enterprises.
Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart, who was convicted of helping "terrorist" organisations and sentenced to almost four years in prison, was awarded a top prize on Thursday by the organisation Cartooning for Peace.
The Swiss group hands out the honour, known as its International Editorial Cartoons Prize, every two years.
"The jury has chosen Musa Kart, iconic cartoonist of the Istanbul newspaper Cumhuriyet, for his talent and courage in the defence of freedom of expression," a statement from the group said.
Cumhuriyet - which means simply "Republic" - was set up in 1924 after the Turkish republic was founded in 1923.
It has been fiercely critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and has run front-page stories that have angered the Turkish head of state.
Journalist Chang Ping remembers his first brush with Chinese press censorship. “In early 1998, I sent a reporter in Beijing to interview rock singer Cui Jian, to talk about the difficulty of revolt. The propaganda department was very unhappy about it and chided me harshly; I was criticised for ‘promoting a capitalist view of the press’.”
This was the first of many run-ins the writer and editor had with the authorities while working for the Chengdu Commercial Daily. Eventually, he was sacked and forced into exile, first in Hong Kong, and then, after refusing to bow to intimidation from both governments, Germany, where he continues to write critically about the Communist party’s policies and human rights abuses.
All of which made Chang a natural choice for the Uncensored Playlist, an ingenious joint initiative by Reporters Without Borders Germany (RSF Germany), an NGO dedicated to defending the freedom of the press, and DDB Berlin, its long-time PR agency. While mentoring some university students and brainstorming ways to negate censorship, Patrik Lenhart and Marco Lemcke, creatives at DDB, discovered an interesting loophole. Despite many repressive regimes’ bans on social media sites and search engines, music streaming services – particularly Apple Music, Deezer and Spotify – continued to be freely available.
A couple weeks ago we wrote about the unfortunate decision by Google to stop enabling domain fronting on its AppEngine. As we explained at the time, this was an (accidental) way of hiding certain traffic by using the way certain large companies had set up their online services, such that censors in, say, Iran or China, couldn't distinguish which traffic was for an anti-censorship app, and which was for others. The two largest services that enabled this were Google and Amazon, and a variety of different anti-censorship tools made use of the ability to effectively "hide" within those sites such that an authoritarian government couldn't block their apps without blocking all of Google or Amazon or whatever. Some CDNs have admitted that they don't allow it out of a fear for how it could impact other users on the system, but on the whole it appeared to be a useful, if unintended, way for Google and Amazon to do good in the world.
Cloud-based instant messaging service Telegram has been in the news recently following large-scale censorship of the service by Russia and Iran. The two nations have moved to ban the encrypted messaging service on an unprecedented scale, making headlines around the world. However, few people have paid attention to the struggles of similar messaging service Signal. Signal, run by Open Whisper Systems (OWS), is a highly popular encrypted messenger that has also found itself struggling against censorship – not by governments, but by the tech giants of the world.
The first of May, established in 1886 as International Workers’ Day, is one of the many public holidays Russia has inherited from the Soviet Union. Due to strict limitations on who can assemble in public spaces, where they can gather, and what ideas they can publicly express, it’s also the one afternoon a year when Russian activists are allowed to take placards onto the main streets. The march, an annual event in all major Russian cities, brings together an odd amalgam of protesters: environmentalists and animal rights supporters find themselves wedged between senior citizens toting Stalin nostalgia or ethnic nationalists raging against “parasites in the Kremlin.”
A federal judge has kept alive a lawsuit alleging the National Security Agency spied on everyone in the Salt Lake City area during the 2002 Winter Olympics.
In an order handed down on Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby formally denied a series of motions by both plaintiffs and the NSA until after evidence in the case had been exchanged. He then said motions to either dismiss the case or rule in the plaintiffs favor could then be reconsidered.
Utah Democratic Party activist Josie Valdez, Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, former Salt Lake City Councilwoman Deeda Seed and others (represented by former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson) have sued the NSA and former President George W. Bush, accusing them of carrying out mass surveillance on everyone in the Salt Lake City area during the Olympics, collecting text messages, emails and phone calls. The plaintiffs allege it is a violation of their constitutional rights.
From Amber Rudd’s resignation and the Windrush scandal to GDPR and Cambridge Analytica, today’s headlines relate to digital rights more than ever. We’d like to send a huge THANK YOU to all our supporters who’ve contributed to the growing wave of engagement and action this year.
Facebook certainly deserves ample criticism for its lax privacy standards and its decision to threaten news outlets that exposed them. That said, we've noted a few times now that the uneven press fixation on Facebook obscures the fact that numerous industries routinely engage in much worse behavior. That's particularly true of broadband providers (and especially wireless carriers), who routinely treat consumer privacy as a distant afterthought, with only a fraction of the total volume of media hyperventilation we saw during the Facebook kerfuffle.
Facebook's casual treatment of your data isn't some errant tech industry exception, it's the norm, making #quitFacebook an arguably pointless gesture if you still own a stock mobile phone. In the telecom industry, a disdain for consumer privacy is a cornerstone of their entire business model(s). Companies like AT&T and Verizon aren't just bone grafted to our government's domestic surveillance apparatus, they collect and sell everything from browsing to location data to absolutely anyone and everyone--with little to no real oversight, and opt out tools that may or may not actually work.
Encryption is back in the headlines again, with government officials insisting that they still need to compromise our security via a backdoor for law enforcement. Opponents of encryption imagine that there is a “middle ground” approach that allows for strong encryption but with “exceptional access” for law enforcement. Government officials claim that technology companies are creating a world where people can commit crimes without fear of detection.
Despite this renewed rhetoric, most experts continue to agree that exceptional access, no matter how you implement it, weakens security. The terminology might have changed, but the essential question has not: should technology companies be forced to develop a system that inherently harms their users? The answer hasn’t changed either: no.
Let us count the reasons why. First, if mandated by the government, exceptional access would violate the First Amendment under the compelled speech doctrine, which prevents the government from forcing an individual, company, or organization to make a statement, publish certain information, or even salute the flag.
Second, mandating that tech companies weaken their security puts users at risk. In the 1990s, the White House introduced the Clipper Chip, a plan for building backdoors into communications technologies. A security researcher found enormous security flaws in the system, showing that a brute-force attack could likely compromise the technology.
Third, exceptional access would harm U.S. businesses and chill innovation. The United States government can’t stop development on encryption technologies; it can merely push it overseas.
IronNet Cybersecurity Inc, a startup led by former U.S. National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander, has raised $78 million in additional funding, the company told Reuters on Wednesday, a day ahead of a planned announcement.
The group, which focuses on efforts to reform government surveillance, said in a statement that it continues to advocate for strong encryption, and decried attempts to undermine the technology.
"Recent reports have described new proposals to engineer vulnerabilities into devices and services -- but they appear to suffer from the same technical and design concerns that security researchers have identified for years," the statement read.
A federal judge this week sentenced a man to 27 years in prison for a carjacking that led to a high-speed chase in Anne Arundel County and ended with a crash at a security gate at the National Security Agency, the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar sentenced Dontae Small, 44, in a downtown courtroom Tuesday, 2€½ years after the chase that briefly closed the NSA to non-essential personnel and resulted in overnight search of the agency’s grounds. Small gave himself up to authorities the next morning.
A Baltimore man has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for a carjacking and high-speed chase that ended with him plowing into a security gate at Fort Meade in 2015.
[...]
Authorities said that after crashing into a gate at the NSA at Fort Meade, he hid overnight in a storm drain before being found and arrested.
Earlier this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about his new year resolution. He said that we focus on fixing Facebook’s biggest problems this year. Maybe it was a hint of the fire that was about to spark in the coming months–soon to be followed by apology tours, congressional testimony, and finally big changes to win back people’s trust.
Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, is shutting down following allegations about its misuse of Facebook data and the campaign tactics it pitched to clients.
Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm that was recently embroiled in a scandal over obtaining data from Facebook, has shut down its operations.
The decision was taken because the company was losing clients and looking at growing legal costs, The Wall Street Journal said, citing a person familiar with the matter.
In a press release published on Wednesday, the company said it is “no longer viable to continue operating the business” as “unfairly negative media coverage” has driven away “virtually all of the Company’s customers and suppliers”.
The company formerly known as Cambridge Analytica shocked the media today when it announced an immediate shutdown and liquidation of its business.
That "shutdown," however, may be short-lived as official documents indicate those behind the controversial analytics company will be launching as a new firm with a less-toxic brand.
The surprise announcement came on Wednesday evening, when the UK-based Cambridge Anal., and its parent organization SCL Elections, stated it would enter insolvency proceedings and disband immediately.
Update 2:10pm: Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, SCL Group founder Nigel Oakes confirmed that both Cambridge Analytica and the SCL Group are shutting down.
Update 3:10pm: In a press release, Cambridge Analytica announced that it, SCL Elections, and other affiliate companies have filed for insolvency in the UK, with bankruptcy proceedings in the US to follow.
“Despite Cambridge Analytica’s unwavering confidence that its employees have acted ethically and lawfully, which view is now fully supported by [a third-party audit], the siege of media coverage has driven away virtually all of the Company’s customers and suppliers,” states the release. “As a result, it has been determined that it is no longer viable to continue operating the business, which left Cambridge Analytica with no realistic alternative to placing the Company into administration.”
Update 4:56pm: Asked for clarification, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Oakes said the entire SCL Group—not just subsidiary SCL Elections—was shutting down. We have updated our story to reflect this information
Facebook doesn't think hookups are meaningful and doesn't want you to date your friends — but it's known for a long time that its vast map of human connections could help people find long-term partners. At least that's the takeaway from a new dating feature the social networking giant is launching because, well, why not?
Facebook is adding a dating layer to its main mobile app, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today during the company’s F8 developers conference keynote in San Jose, California. The features are a long time coming for the 14-year-old social network, which has allowed users to broadcast whether they’re single or in a relationship since it first went live in February 2004.
If you want to know how a website shares your personal data, you might be tempted to slog through its online privacy policy. Be prepared for disappointment. Website privacy policies explicitly disclose only a fraction of sites’ data-sharing practices, according to new research that casts doubt on whether users can make informed decisions about their online activity.
Seattle, WA-based e-commerce firm Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is a giant in the world of American retail. A little more than one year ago it was reported that, in 2016, Amazon’s e-commerce platform accounted for 43 percent of all online retail sales for that year. In 2017, Amazon led e-commerce retailers in America with $178 billion in net sales according to the online statistics portal Statista. In mid-April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced in an annual shareholder letter that the company had surpassed 100 million global subscribers to its Amazon Prime membership service; Amazon also shipped more than five billion items to Prime subscribers in 2017.
This week, the South China Morning Post reported that Chinese companies are “mining data directly from workers’ brains” using wireless sensors in hats. The article is full of exciting quotes about employers using technology to monitor their workers’ emotions, but the reality is that these hats probably don’t work very well.
ACLU files suit save the Title X family planning program, which provides affordable birth control to 4 million people.
For nearly 50 years, the nation’s family planning program has provided high-quality contraceptive care to millions of women and men. The program, known as Title X, is the only federal program in the United States dedicated solely to affordable family planning and sexual care. Its core premise for existing — making birth control accessible to all who want it — has been heralded as among the top 10 public health achievements of the 20th century.
Since its inception in 1970, Title X providers have led the effort to carry out Congress’ vision for a national program created to address President Nixon’s assertion that “no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.” As a result, millions of poor, low-income, uninsured, or vulnerable individuals across the country have access to high-quality, affordable family planning and sexual health care, including modern methods of birth control.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration is intent on putting ideology before public health — attempting to undercut the family planning program that provides vital services, like breast and cervical cancer detection, sexually transmitted disease services, and HIV testing. Instead, the administration is favoring participation in Title X by entities that would emphasize its ideologically driven priorities, including promoting abstaining from sex before marriage for all people, regardless of age or the needs and desires of the patient.
Baltimore officials today approved a $9 million settlement — the largest in city history — to James “J.J.” Owens, who spent two decades in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
Owens’ case, and that of another man prosecuted for the same crime, was the subject of an investigation by ProPublica and The Atlantic last September that examined how defendants are pressured into controversial plea deals despite proof of their innocence.
Owens’ payout adds to Baltimore’s growing tab for decades of misconduct by its police force. In November, a jury awarded another wrongfully convicted Baltimore man, Sabein Burgess, $15 million. Like Owens, Burgess had sued, alleging civil rights violations by detectives.
In 2012, billboards appeared around the Republic of Ireland depicting the image of a despairing woman, or a ruptured foetus, and the tagline: “Abortion tears her life apart.” Organisers from Dublin-based groups Youth Defence and the Life Institute claimed that the billboards were seen by more than 2.1 million people – almost half of Ireland’s population.
The Chicago-based director of the Pro-Life Action League stoked speculation as to who paid for the adverts when he told an Irish newspaper that US donors had given “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to Irish anti-abortion groups, including Youth Defence. “They need the money for publicity,” he said. “Abortion is about conversion.”
On May 25, Ireland will hold an historic referendum on abortion. The country’s laws are currently among the world’s most restrictive, denying women and girls access to terminations even in cases of rape or incest. The upcoming vote is attracting worldwide attention.
At long last, one of the stupider defamation lawsuits in recent history is finally over. Last year, the ousted director of a Tennessee culinary school (Tom Loftis) sued over an article appearing in a local paper. The article, written by journalist Jim Myers, insinuated the departure of Loftis signaled a return to quality for the culinary program. It also spoke highly of his replacement, Randy Rayburn.
The article featured few direct quotes from Rayburn. The bulk of it consisted of Myers' take on the program's declining quality while Loftis was at the helm. So, naturally, Tom Loftis decided to sue his replacement, Randy Rayburn, who was responsible for none of the supposedly defamatory content contained in the article.
Loftis argued this was "defamation by innuendo," all the while refusing to target the journalist and paper responsible for the alleged innuendo. He not only lost his lawsuit, but now owes legal fees for that attempt. Rather than accept this loss and cut a check, Loftis appealed. This recent state appeals court decision [PDF], via Randy Rayburn's legal representative, Daniel Horwitz, has nothing positive to say about Loftis' bogus lawsuit.
A Marine took part in the violent assaults in Charlottesville last summer and later bragged about it online with other members of Atomwaffen, an extremist group preparing for a race war. The involvement of current or former service members — often with sophisticated weapons training — in white supremacist groups has long been a concern.
As we've often noted, Comcast has been shielded from the cord cutting trend somewhat thanks to its growing monopoly over broadband. As users on slow DSL lines flee telcos that are unwilling to upgrade their damn networks, they're increasingly flocking to cable operators for faster speeds. When they get there, they often bundle TV services; not necessarily because they want it, but because it's intentionally cheaper than buying broadband standalone.
And while Comcast's broadband monopoly has protected it from TV cord cutting somewhat, the rise in streaming competition has slowly eroded that advantage, and Comcast is expected to see see double its usual rate of cord cutting this year according to Wall Street analysts.
Comcast being Comcast, the company has a semi-nefarious plan B. Part of that plan is to abuse its monopoly over broadband to deploy arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees. These restrictions are glorified rate hikes applied to non competitive markets, with the added advantage of making streaming video more expensive. It's a punishment for choosing to leave Comcast's walled garden.
In California, the bill was approved last month by two Senate committees despite protest from AT&T and cable lobbyists, and it needs to go through one more committee before getting a vote of the full state Senate. Today, a lawmaker in New York said he has teamed up with the California bill's author to introduce an equivalent bill in the New York legislature.
Myanmar is not the only place where Free Basics has quietly ended. The program has been abruptly called off in more than half a dozen nations and territories in the recent months, according to an analysis by The Outline. People in Bolivia and Latin American markets, as well as Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Congo, Anguilla, El Salvador, and Saint Lucia have also lost access to Facebook’s free internet program. Additionally, Facebook was testing Free Basics service in Zimbabwe in mid-2016 in partnership with local telecom operator Telecel. The test program has yet to materialize into a wider roll out.
[...]
“Effectively, Facebook’s Free Basics is shaping the internet experience of users — i.e., the services they can access, the services they cannot access,” Pahwa told The Outline, adding that this creates a filter bubble for users that influences their worldview. “You can see problems crop up in nations where Free Basics is operational and Facebook is dominant.”
Myanmar's government and the state-owned telecom (Myanma Posts and Telecommunications) that Facebook teamed up with to provide free access to the social network apparently worked together to cut off access to all free services.
The excruciating DMCA section 1201 exemption process is upon us again, and the right to repair tractors, cars, and electronics is at stake.
A Federal Court judge in Australia isn't making life easy for lawyers representing Hong Kong broadcasting giant Television Broadcasts Limited. The company wants pirate IPTV services blocked Down Under but complexities surrounding eligibility for protection under Australian law and blocking injunction specifics means that Justice Nicholas won't be rushed into a decision.
Cloudflare and the RIAA have agreed to a tailored process through which the music labels can expand their blocking efforts against the piracy site MP3Skull, if needed. The deal is part of a lengthy legal battle during which both sides dug in their heels, to secure their bottom lines.
According to a new study by Rights Alliance, an anti-piracy group representing local and international rightsholders, Danish traffic to pirate sites increased 67% between 2016 and 2017. Movie and TV show consumption accounts for most of the hits but newer trends such as IPTV services and stream-ripping are growing rapidly.
Julia Reda has reported time and again on the copyright industry’s persistent efforts to get the concept of notice-and-takedown replaced by notice-and-staydown in law: in other words, if you run a platform that accepts any kind of user contributions, you would be required to screen every submission against a list of notices for “staydown” that you’ve received.
Among Techdirt's many stories chronicling the (slow) rise of open access publishing, a number have been about dramatic action taken by researchers to protest against traditional publishers and their exploitative business model. For example, in 2012, a boycott of the leading publisher Elsevier was organized to protest against its high journal prices and its support for the now long-forgotten Research Works Act. In 2015, the editors and editorial board of the Elsevier title Lingua resigned in order to start up their own open access journal. Now we have another boycott, this time as a reaction against the launch of the for-profit Nature Machine Intelligence, from the German publishing giant Springer.
Well, it's official: Naruto, the crested macaque monkey who took photographs of himself while on a reserve on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia in 2011, lacks statutory standing under the US Copyright Act to sue for copyright infringement.
As we had previously reported to you in earlier blogs, a controversy erupted several years ago over who, if anyone, owns the copyright in "selfie" photographs that were taken by a monkey on an unattended camera. It was determined that David Slater, the photographer who left his camera unattended in the Indonesian reserve, did not own the copyright since he did not take the photographs.