Years ago, when I was a GNU/Linux newbie, I found LinuxQuestions.org to be the site where I could find out just about anything about GNU/Linux in a rapidly growing on-line community. It’s still going strong so many years later.
Wouldn’t you like the cost of IT to drop 80%? You can have that with GNU/Linux. It is a cooperative project of the world to provide IT at minimal cost and it works for you and not for some supplier converting monopoly into a licence to print money. It’s not magic. If your software is designed to work for you instead of to generate licensing revenue, you have lower costs all around.
It’s that time of year again — when all of the pundits, bloggers, and Max Headroom-like “voices of the future” spout off their thanks for all things tech and nerdy. Not one to jump on every bandwagon that comes along — I wanted to point out the things that the open source and Linux community have to be thankful for.
It's been about 3 years since I left Windows XP and became a full-time Linux user.
In this time, I can proudly say that I've learned more than during my 15+ years of using Windows...all the way from 3.11 to XP.
A few years ago, Brazilian developer Daniel Neis Araujo couldn’t imagine building open source health care equipment that could compete with traditional and respected proprietary solutions. But recent advances in Linux and the open hardware movement have allowed a faster development pace and a lower cost of entry for startups in the telemedicine field, in particular, he said.
The document sent on October 14th 2011 by the Italian National Police to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other national security forces, such as the Carabinieri, Polizia Stradale and Polizia Ferroviaria, reveals the organization of a task-force to control and inhibit the massive demonstration that was going to take place one day after in Rome.
Recently, we've been reporting on how Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, and the cloud-centric operating system is arriving on machines that are not only low priced, but Google is offering free incentives worth more than the computers running Chrome OS. We covered the arrival of Samsung's new Chromebook portable computer running Google's Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249. And now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook that sells for only $199 (seen here). Interestingly, noted open source advocate Simon Phipps, writing for InfoWorld, says he has ditched his MacBook for a Samsung Chromebook.
Ubuntu is known for many things: ease of use, regular updates, widespread community support, and more. One thing it is not known for is gaming. This is changing, however, with Steam heading to Linux in the near future. System76ââ¬Â²s new Bonobo Extreme is Ubuntu-powered and aimed at gamers, boasting some impressive hardware and a hefty price tag.
Selling PCs with Linux preinstalled is hard enough. Doing it without paying attention to the latest hardware trends makes it nigh impossible. That’s probably why two major Linux OEMs, ZaReason and System76, have debuted “all-in-one” (AIO) desktop PCs powered by open source operating systems. Will their initiatives pay off?
In a sense, AIO computers — the kind where the monitor and central hardware are integrated into a single case — go back quite a long time. Many of the old, old Macintoshes used this format, as did machines such as the Commodore PET 2001 (which, despite its name, first debuted in 1977). But the contemporary implementation of the all-in-one PC, exemplified by the modern iMac, is a newer idea.
Ubuntu hardware re-sellers System76 have today unveiled their product: the Bonobo Extreme laptop.
Google recently launched the Samsung Chromebook that for $249 USD features an 11-inch display, a 16GB SSD, a promise of 6.5-hour battery life, and is backed by a Samsung Exynos 5 SoC. The Samsung Exynos 5 packs a 1.7GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor with ARM Mali-T604 graphics. With using this new ARM Cortex-A15 chip plus the Samsung Chromebook not being locked down so it can be loaded up with a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or openSUSE, it was a must-buy for carrying out some interesting Cortex-A15 Linux benchmarks. The Exynos 5 Dual in this affordable laptop packs an impressive performance punch.
It may still be a bit early for the ubiquitous end-of-year story looking back at 2012, but even now, it seems safe to say that the “Linux preloaded” trend will surely go down in history as a big part of what has characterized this year in desktop computing.
Meraki builds cloud managed wireless and wired access points as well as providing network acceleration and security capabilities. Meraki's hardware appliances are based on a hardened Linux operating system and includes a subscription based service for cloud management.
A recently introduced systemd enhancement allows programs to add a unique identifier to log messages sent to systemd's Journal, which lets it retrieve extra information about the logged event from a message catalogue. Developers could, for example, add some further details and internet links concerning an error message to the information in the catalogue; the information could also explain the log data in a user's local language if a suitable translation exists.
Linus Torvalds created Linux, which now runs vast swathes of the internet, including Google and Facebook. And he invented Git, software that’s now used by developers across the net to build new applications of all kinds. But that’s not all Torvalds has given the internet.
He’s also started some serious flame wars.
Over the past few years, Torvalds has emerged as one of the most articulate and engaging critics of the technology industry. His funny and plainspoken posts to Google+ routinely generate more comments and attention than most stories on The New York Times — or even Wired.
From an SSD-backed Lenovo ThinkPad W510 with an Intel Core i7 720QM CPU and a 160GB Intel SSD, the XFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems were benchmarked. For reference, the Linux 3.5 kernel was also benchmarked on the same system with the three Linux file-systems. Unfortunately, the Linux 3.6.x kernels failed to properly boot on this particular system so there are only Linux 3.5 and 3.7 Git results.
Oh boy! It’s good to see someone with his eye on the road at the wheel sometimes… We all make the mistake of thinking too locally or not considering consequences of our actions but Linus whips such failings back into shape. Good for him.
Security researchers have discovered what appears to be an experimental Linux rootkit designed to infect its highly select victims during a classic drive-by website attack.
Posted anonymously to Full Disclosure on 13 November by an annoyed website owner, the rootkit has since been confirmed by CrowdStrike and Kaspersky Lab as being distributed to would-be victims via an unusual form of iFrame injection attack.
A new Linux rootkit has emerged and researchers who have analyzed its code and operation say that the malware appears to be a custom-written tool designed to inject iframes into Web sites and drive traffic to malicious sites for drive-by download attacks. The rootkit is designed specifically for 64-bit Linux systems, and while it has some interesting features, it does not appear to be the work of high-level programmer or be meant for use in targeted attacks.
Linux now supports network address translation (NAT) for IPv6. Other new features include server-side support for Google's TCP Fast Open (TFO) acceleration trick and a tethering driver for the iPhone 5.
Another season, another Linux kernel. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes as kernel developers churn out new releases every two or three months. Within the next few weeks, Linux 3.7, the latest version of the code at the core of most mainstream open source operating systems — on Android phones as well as PCs and servers — will likely see its official release. And unlike some kernel updates, it will introduce a host of new features that end users may want to know about.
We don’t cover Linux kernel development too frequently on The VAR Guy because it’s not something most end users are likely to care about or understand. Unless you’re deeply interested in how your computer works “under the hood” — and kudos to you if you are — chances are you don’t want to read about the latest innovations in Linux memory management or file systems.
The first point release of Wayland 1.0 is now available for those interested in this next-generation display server environment.
Kristian Høgsberg announced the Wayland 1.0.1 release on Monday. It's been just shy of one month since the release of Wayland 1.0 while today's update provides some fixes for the recent release that marked the point of API/protocol stability and a guarantee on backwards compatibility with future releases.
Improvements to Twitter and IRC support are the highlights of the latest update to the open source Instantbird instant messaging (IM) client. When using Twitter in Instantbird 1.3, the user's own description is now displayed above the timeline and can be easily edited. All users mentioned in a Tweet when replying are now included in the reply, making Instantbird work in the same way as the Twitter web site.
Game developer and distributor Valve has ramped up Steam for Linux by adding three more game titles. Steam for Linux was originally released with 24 titles and now the count stands at 27. You can see all the games supported in Linux platform in this page.
The company is also inviting more and more beta testers to test their software and report bugs. Steam is currently in closed beta phase now and only few selected individuals will be able to test it. Despite amazing response of 60,000+ users, Valve is keeping the beta limited and inviting people based on hardware configuration and graphics card on a daily basis.
Today, the always innovative Humble Bundle launched yet another great new project. This time they've teamed up with Tim Schafer, whom some may remember as the founder of Double Fine and the creator of their insanely successful Kickstarter campaign (and others may remember him as the creator of several classic adventure games). The project is a twist on the standard Humble Bundle system: instead of paying what you want for a collection of existing games, contributors get to vote on various game ideas from the Double Fine team to decide which ones get prototyped. The whole development process will then be live-streamed, and contributors will be able to download the prototypes at the end. The ideas themselves come from a feverous internal brainstorming process called the Amnesia Fortnight, the secrets of which are being revealed to the public, as best (and most entertainingly) explained in the video:
KING Art and Nordic Games have announced that The Critter Chronicles, the prequel to The Book of Unwritten Tales (BoUT), will be released in December for Linux, PC, and Mac.
The Critter Chronicles is the first chapter in the journey that actually started before the beginning of The Book of Unwritten Tales.
The original game was released initially in 2009, but it was promoted again in July 2012. This is a beautiful tale that allows players to travel back to the very beginning when Nate Bonnett first met his hairy sidekick Critter and the adventurers can assume the role of either character.
The much hyped Gnome's file manager Nautilus 3.6 has made its way to the upcoming version of Ubuntu, Raring Ringtail. This version was earlier not adopted in Quantal due to many of its controversial changes. The whole desktop was upgraded to Gnome 3.6 while the file manager remained of 3.4 branch. Linux Mint developers on the other hand made their own fork of file manager called Nemo. This is similar to the earlier attitude taken by the developers, i.e. bring their own fork of Gnome as they did for Cinnamon.
With computers and applications becoming more and more smarter everyday, one is coming more close to security breeches and loopholes. Security issues today are more complex and harder to detect than they were five years ago. Developers are becoming more and more aware of this situation and they are finding out way to make computing more secure, fast and relaible.
A new version of the Gnome Desktop, Gnone 3.7.2 is out. This version includes several stability and performance improvements along with bug fixes theta will make the Gnome desktop more stable, secure and reliable. Among the many changes in this release, the most important is the support for remote search providers. Now not only you will be able to search Wikipedia and Google from Gnome, but also will be able to search files, folders and documents from the single Gnome search bar.
For the first time since Linux Mint 11, the development team was able to capitalize on upstream technology which works and fits its goals. After 6 months of incremental development, Linux Mint 14 features an impressive list of improvements, increased stability and a refined desktop experience. We’re very proud of MATE, Cinnamon, MDM and all the components used in this release, and we’re very excited to show you how they all fit together in Linux Mint 14.
Tresys Technology, a provider of technology and engineering services for customers with high-security requirements, today announced that the company has updated CLIP to support RHEL 6.2. The new release will be used by developers leveraging Linux to build appliances or systems with confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability requirements for U.S Intelligence and Department of Defense (DoD) agencies as well as for critical infrastructure and other communities that manage sensitive or classified information. The enhancements to the platform enrich integration features available in previous releases and include adding DCID (Director of Central Intelligence Directive) 6/3 Protection Level 4 (PL4) high-availability and high-integrity requirements support, a custom SELinux policy, and a new build system for generating installable media.
Today, there’s a lot of cloud choices, and at their core, all major cloud platforms can provide the same kind of functionality with a vendor’s personal flavor. But when it comes down to mission-critical business applications that measure effectiveness down to the second, making a cloud choice may be a more difficult task when important variables are in play.
Fedora 18 is still at least two months away from hitting a download mirror near you, but if you have read the articles on pre-stable versions that have been published on this website, you’d know that Anaconda, the Fedora system installer, will be a completely different beast on Fedora 18.
For those curious about the state of Ubuntu 13.04's development, there is a convenient status page to reflect the overall condition of this forthcoming Ubuntu Linux that is codenamed the Raring Ringtail.
The Ubuntu development team have published a nice status page where you can readily monitor the development of upcoming versions of Ubuntu. From that status page, we learned that around 13% of the proposed work for Raring Ringtail is complete. One of the chief aims of Ubuntu 13.04 Raring, i.e. porting it to embedded and mobile devices is complete. However, only 1% of work is complete for Kubuntu 13.04.
Write this down: Ubuntu 12.10, the late-year arrival from Canonical's six-month standard release factory, marks the first new release within the company's current long-term support cycle. Got it? Good, because it may be the best takeaway from the latest Ubuntu release, codenamed Quantal Quetzal. After that, it's a bit of a rocky ride.
Welcome to the third part of my Xubuntu 12.10 review. The purpose of this set of articles is to take the base Xubuntu installation and show how easily it can be improved to make the best Linux operating system of them all.
In the first part of the Xubuntu 12.10 review I reviewed the base install. In the second part of the Xubuntu 12.10 review I looked at how it is possible to customise all the aspects of the XFCE desktop to make it look the way you want it to look.
For years I’ve been dreaming of a streaming media device that could just be stuck to the back of a television. Since XBMC has been far and away my favorite set-top box software, I’ve closely monitored hardware developments that can run that package. Now I think it’s time to declare that the Raspberry Pi has achieved the base specifications to be branded the XBMC device that rules them all.
Global smartphone shipments are expected to grow 30% to 865 million units in 2013, accounting for 43.9% of total handset shipments in the year, Digitimes Research has estimated.
Android 4.2 is now part of Google’s AOSP, making the source code available to everyone
Sony has launched an indie-focused portal for developers that includes access to the now-out-of-beta PlayStation Mobile software development kit.
The PlayStation Mobile SDK has been available in beta form for quite some time, but Sony has now officially given it the green light and slapped on a $99 (€£62) annual usage fee.
After months of working hard to bring Replicant to the next upstream release, we are proud to announce the release of the Replicant 4.0 0001 images. This new release comes with support for both new devices, such as the Galaxy Nexus or the Galaxy S2 and devices that were already there in Replicant 2.3, like the Nexus S and the Galaxy S.
A teardown by iFixit reveals that Google's flagship phone Nexus 4, manufactured by LG does have an LTE chip in it. It's a Qualcomm 7-band LTE chip also found on LG's Optimus phone, which is in some ways identical to this device.
It's unclear why the phone doesn't support LTE service despite the presence of the hardware. There can be many wild guesses -- one is that the chip is there only due to ease of assembly as it is the same board used in LG Optimus G and LG wants to cut down the cost by using the same assembly for this device.
Google's release of Android Jelly Bean 4.2 has come at a time when somewhere around 50 manufacturers now support the open source mobile-focused operating system.
Looking across the market there are now thought to be over 500 types of Android device and this of course now includes both tablets and smartphones.
Google eventually plans to roll-out the service on a cross-platform basis with multiple hardware partners, according to reports.
The search giant introduced the first phase of this new technology on YouTube last week, enabling users to Beam content from their Android smartphones to Google TV-connected HDTVs. But this is just the first step along the road to a bespoke open-source wireless streaming client.
Google's Android mobile software platform, as we know, has caused quite a conflict with Oracle, given Oracle's failed lawsuit that claimed Java-like Android infringed on Java patents and copyrights. But now, might Oracle and Google, or even just one of them, decide to formally develop an open source implementation of Java especially for Android?
It was appropriate then that several Valley players took part in Silicon Valley Comes To The UK events last week. But Musk was not there to sing their praises, but merely to expand on his general worldview. Interviewed by Number 10 special adviser Rohan Silva, Musk opened up on a number of issues, some he’s touched on in the past, and others he expanded upon more fully.
The Nexus 7 from Google and the iPad mini from Apple are two of the hottest small tablets. Here are both of these capable tablets in a photo spread showing how they compare in size and with popular apps running.
Remember when mobile hardware manufacturers like HTC and Motorola promised to help customers unlock the bootloaders on their Android devices, paving the way to the promised land of rooting, mods, and custom firmware? Here’s a quick update: it's not going so well.
In the past year, we’ve seen HTC, Motorola, Sony, and others come out in support of unlocking, setting up special websites dedicated to safely open devices for custom ROMs and other “unofficial” uses. But those efforts have been sabotaged at nearly every turn as one flagship phone after another is sealed shut under the mandates of major carriers like Verizon and AT&T.
Music, film, gaming or sports nut? Xperia Lounge has something for everyone, with exclusive content from Sony and our partners added every week – videos, imagery, competitions and VIP offers.
As if it were any surprise, HTC looks to be readying an international version of the recently announced Droid DNA. A tweet from often-accurate @evleaks tells us the 5-inch smartphone will be released as a global edition and will be called the HTC Deluxe.
If the Deluxe name sounds familiar it is because that was one of the code names tossed around in the months leading up to last week's announcement. Some readers may recall recently hearing the phone tied to rumors of a HTC DLX moniker.
We have heard dual-booting in PCs, Macs and Laptops. The amazing technology allows one to oot into two OSes in a single computer. User has to specify different partitions for the OSes he wants to boot and is provides with options during booting. Dual booting was unknown in tablets and mobile phones until lately. Innovators have come out with PengPod, that will be able to boot Android as well as Linux in a single tablet.
With its little brother having already spilled its guts, it was always going to be interesting to see how the new 9-inch Fire compared. Turns out it owes an awful lot to Samsung.
Powerbook Medic has torn the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 apart for the world to peer inside. It seems Samsung has done well out of the tablet, as it's supplying—at the very least—the display, RAM, and flash memory. The processor is courtesy of Texas Instruments, though.
It's a general matter of course in any given year that as Thanksgiving draws ever closer here in the land of stars and stripes, more than a few Linux bloggers begin to wax sentimental about their favorite operating system, often recounting all the many reasons they're thankful it exists.
It is the start of the season of thankfulness, after all.
Well, perhaps it's the recent presidential elections or -- even more so -- perhaps it's the fact that a sizable part of the country is preoccupied by a desire to divorce Uncle Sam. In any case, this year, the usual pattern doesn't seem to have happened.
Identity management specialist ForgeRock has launched a 100% open source software stack intended to secure applications and services across enterprise, cloud, social and mobile environments.
Boasting claims of more than 250,000 downloads in less than 24 months, the ForgeRock Open Identity Stack is positioned (in theory) as a community of global companies working to deploy identity management infrastructures more economically via the open model.
After Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, its lack of interest in maintaining OpenSolaris as an open source operating system drove a group of dedicated developers to pick up where Sun left off. The Illumos Foundation has created a new distro that builds off of OpenSolaris, but calling it a form might not exactly be accurate.
The latest release of the RabbitMQ messaging platform, RabbitMQ 3.0, includes plugins that support Web-STOMP, which allows the text-oriented STOMP protocol to run over WebSockets, and MQTT, the machine-to-machine/"Internet of Things" connection protocol.
The Open World Forum is the best place to meet and talk about the present and the future of open source forges, as seen back in 2010 at the first Open Forges Summit, and again in 2011 to talk about interoperability among forges.
Mozilla released its annual report last week, with a PDF available at the bottom of this page, and the organization's finances are clearly in order as it moves toward the next chapter in its story: the delivery of Firefox OS. It's become clear that the next frontier for Firefox is on smartphones, especially in emerging markets. Even though the operating system hasn't arrived in a version for smartphones and tablets just yet, it is available as a prototype module that you can run on Windows, Mac or Linux computers. You can try it here.
Mozilla on Monday announced it has made Firefox for Android available to “millions” of more phones by adding support for ARMv6 processors. While the open source browser has been out for Android 2.2 and up for a while now, it only worked on phones equipped with ARMv7 processors. You can download the latest version now from the Google Play Store.
Back in September Mozilla included a experimental build in its Firefox for Android beta to support more Android devices and called in people to help them test the new beta release. Now, after two months Firefox for Android supports devices running on the older ARMv6 processors. This will mean that the browser will now be available for download in millions of many more devices.
Mozilla Firefox 17.0 was released today and it provides the first stable implementation of their Social API along with the Facebook Messenger.
When people evaluate software for their own need and run X vs. Y checks, they always do it from their own perspective, placing their own needs at the forefront. They are of course doing the one sensible thing, but they are wrong. When you test software, you must ask yourselves how many people will be affected by that use?
If the answer is one, then you can proceed with your own evaluation. If the answer is more than one, then the scale changes instantly and completely, and it's no longer a question what everyone needs or things, it's the simple of matter what the weakest link in your user pool needs. Let me elaborate.
Acquia is expanding globally in its support of the open-source web content platform, Drupal. The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company said the expansion means it is the first Drupal hosting provider offering high-performance hosting on four continents — Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
Kaltura provides a framework for building enterprise level video applications. Developers can peruse a marketplace of “off-the-shelf” video apps, select the type of deployment and delivery, and include features such as sharing, rating, commenting, and integrations with social networks. The open source platform includes hundreds of APIs, and has a global developer community of more than 40,000 members.
GhostBSD is a FreeBSD derivative that aims to make BSDs easier and bring GNOME to BSD users, although LXDE and OpenBox are also available. The third and last release candidate for upcoming 3.0 was recemtly released for final testing.
Breaches occur. That's reality.
One month on and the GCC sources are now in a lot better shape. The cause for most of the problems last month was that a new register allocator pass has been brought in to GCC. This pass - LRA or Local Register Allocator - is meant to be simpler, easier to debug, and provide a better job of register allocation. It is still rather new however, which is why there were so many problems last month. A lot of these have been sorted out now, which is good news as the 4.8 branch will be happening soon.
A study is to be jointly conducted by the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), Trivandrum, and the Indian Institute of Management - Bangalore on the use of free and open source software in e-governance.
The study, set to be completed in 18 months, will cover the states of Kerala, Karnataka, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
I am a technology practitioner and promoter of open source software (OSS). It ismy job to speak about the open source model in order to facilitate its adoption, to discuss its relevance and viability with regards to the strategic and economic needs of our time.
When I began my career, I spent several years working with closed source and proprietary software. It was then that I was first introduced to open source software. At first, it seemed rebellious, but I soon realized it was just the tip of iceberg. I could sense this was a revolutionary idea capable of a paradigm shift, representing deep topics: sustainable innovation, broader collaboration, and sharing of intellectual outcomes.
The participatory ethic of open source software has become so widespread these days that it is migrating into some unexpected places... like musical instruments, tractors and ecological technology.
Are you an academic, scientist, health policy junkie... or just a person who goes to see your doctor every now and then? Well, listen up: a new project by Fred Trotter and Not Only Development was recently granted protection under the Freedom of Information Act and met it's crowdfunding effort on MedStartr to move ahead with plans to generate an open data set that promises to alter the healthcare landscape and have drastic implications on how we navigate it.
Wikidata is one of the biggest technical overhauls of Wikipedia in its history and the ripples of change will reach far beyond its own shores. Dr Karl Beecher investigates…
You know your programming language is a hit when it becomes the subject of a children’s book — or, at least, a book written for kids. Python, the popular open source programming platform, can now claim that title, with the recent release by No Starch Press of Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming. Will the book assure your kid’s success as the next prodigy of the computer world?
While the LLVM compiler infrastructure is primarily developed around Subversion, a poll was recently conducted that found LLVM developers overwhelmingly prefer Git over SVN for version control.
Secret trials and withholding evidence are reminiscent of "repressive regimes and undemocratic societies", the legal profession warns in a letter opposing the government's justice and security bill.
Ken Clarke's plans will erode core principles of justice and "fatally undermine the courtroom as an independent and objective forum", according to the organisations representing solicitors and barristers. The UK's international reputation for "fair justice" will be significantly damaged, they say.
Nobody believes more fervently than the Mail in the importance of protecting members of the security services who risk their lives for our country.
Nor is anyone more appalled to see terrorist suspects granted huge compensation payments, agreed out of court because the Government believes contesting their claims in public would put witnesses or their contacts in danger.
But as this paper has passionately argued, security considerations can be no justification for the draconian clampdown on open court hearings proposed in a Bill now going through the Lords.
The folks at Denver’s ABC-affiliated 7News last night ran a story about the David Petraeus sex scandal, his “mistress,” Paula Broadwell, and her biography of Patraeus, All In.
Except instead of pulling an actual copy of the book cover, somebody just ran a Google search and pulled in the first thing they found. Which, unfortunately for 7News, was an altered copy of the book cover.
It's a well known fact that many people mistake Google's image search for a license-free stock photo repository. Of course, many people are unaware (or simply uninterested) in the nuances of copyright law, making liberal borrowing of images the norm, rather than the exception.
On the other hand, members of industries that rely on the protection of copyright laws shouldn't have to be reminded that "running an image search" is not even in the same neighborhood as "properly sourcing a photo." This distinction is even more important if you're in a business that relies on integrity, along with various IP laws. Having a staffer just grab an image from "The Internet" for use during a news broadcast could, at the very least, put you in the situation of having to pay up and apologize publicly for using someone else's photo without permission. At worst, you could find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
David Cameron has axed standard assessments used to gauge how policies affect different social groups as part of a drive to get rid of the "bureaucratic rubbish" that gets in the way of British business.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini Will Retire This May After 40 Year TenureAt this point, there aren't that many people who've worked at Intel as long as CEO Paul Otellini has. But after 40 years at the 45-year old chip maker—the last eight of them as CEO—he's hanging up his stirrups this May. His timing couldn't be better.
Paul Otellini this week resigned his position as CEO of Intel as I’m sure you’ve already heard or read. Analysts and pundits are weighing-in on the matter, generally attributing Otellini’s failure to Intel’s late and flawed effort to gain traction in the mobile processor space. While I tend to agree with this assessment, it doesn’t go far enough to explain Otellini’s fall, which is not only his fault but also the fault of Intel’s board of directors. Yes, Otellini was forced out by the board, but the better action would have been for the board to have fired itself, too.
Living in areas of high air pollution can lead to decreased cognitive function in older adults, according to new research presented in San Diego at The Gerontological Society of America's (GSA) 65th Annual Scientific Meeting.
This finding is based on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Health and Retirement Study. The analysis was conducted by Jennifer Ailshire, PhD, a National Institute on Aging postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Biodemography and Population Health and the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California.
THE RED Cross was nowhere to be found after Hurricane Sandy hit on October 29 and New Yorkers most needed the best-known private humanitarian and disaster relief organization.
Republicans have accused her of making misleading statements by referring to the assault as a "spontaneous" demonstration by extremists. Some have suggested she used the terminology she did for political reasons.
This actually seems to me to be one the central lessons of the disaster in Benghazi.
This argument seems persuasive enough to me. Its soundness, however, depends on the validity of that estimate: that collateral damage ranges from seven per cent to 15 per cent, and that that US military authorities really are seriously attempting to minimise civilian casualties. I would like to know a little more about the figures, though: how do we actually know that “these strikes have killed 1,618 to 2,769 combatants, about 153 to 192 civilians and another 130 to 268 persons whose identities were unknown”? Who says that so many of those killed were in fact combatants?
A few months ago, MuckRock and the EFF teamed up to start a drone watch effort, in which they send Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) -- or the local equivalent -- requests to local governments and police departments, seeking to find out information on local law enforcement using drones. At last count, over 200 such requests have been made. You can track them here. As you might imagine, they're getting very varied responses, with some saying that there are no responsive documents. In many cases, it's likely that this is true.
Later this week will see the start of a legal action against police chiefs who have been accused of attempting to hide away their embarrassing secrets.
Eight women who say that they were duped into having long-term relationships with undercover police officers are suing police chiefs. Two other women and one man have also launched a similar legal action.
...a new report questioning the morality of drones against the backdrop of another Israel-Palestine war.
In a new report, “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” they outline concerns that these Killer Robots would lack the human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. Also the obstacles to holding anyone accountable for harm caused by the weapons would weaken the law’s power to deter future violations.
Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch, said. “Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far. Human control of robotic warfare is essential to minimizing civilian deaths and injuries.”
In the summer of 2011, Cameron Munter, the US ambassador to Pakistan, met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington and asked her to intercede with the White House to give him greater control over the CIA’s use of drones along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and to let him speak openly to the Pakistani people - who viewed drone warfare as a gross violation of national sovereignty - about the rationale for the strikes.
MPs are to conduct an inquiry into Britain’s deployment of drones to target militants. Scrutiny of the use of the unmanned weapons could shed light on the “secret war” being waged remotely by the US against terror suspects in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, it is thought.
America’s former ambassador to Pakistan talks about his battle with the CIA over drones.
A MAN has told judges that he heard his friend screaming on a daily basis as he was being abused in police custody.
He was testifying in the trial of two National Security Agency (NSA) officers accused of causing the death of businessman Abdulkarim Fakhrawi, 49, in April last year.
Obama’s use of drone warfare is a key conflict in any progressive support for the president
I have yet to meet a climate scientist who does not believe that global warming is a worse problem than they thought a few years ago. The seriousness of this change is not appreciated by politicians and the public.
François Hollande has slammed the door on the exploitation of France’s big oil and shale gas deposits using “hydraulic fracking”, risking further tensions with business leaders anxious not to lose access to what they see as a potentially vital energy asset.
Mr Hollande said he had ordered the rejection of seven applications to open up the country’s shale deposits, citing “the heavy risk to health and the environment” of fracking, which injects water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into rock to release oil and gas.
There’s a war going on that you know nothing about between a coalition of great powers and a small insurgent movement. It’s a secret war being waged in the shadows while you go about your everyday life.
In the end, this conflict may matter more than those in Iraq and Afghanistan ever did. And yet it’s taking place far from newspaper front pages and with hardly a notice on the nightly news. Nor is it being fought in Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, but in small hamlets in upstate New York. There, a loose network of activists is waging a guerrilla campaign not with improvised explosive devices or rocket-propelled grenades, but with zoning ordinances and petitions.
Americans always feel charitable around the holiday season, giving some $300 billion to a diverse array of charities in 2011 alone. Now there is new way Americans can help their neighbors in need, by purchasing and forgiving their debt.
This is the idea behind the "Rolling Jubilee" being organized by "Strike Debt", an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Since November 15, 2012, they have raised over $350,000, enough to abolish over $7 million in debt.
The only real crises is one of a failing economy and growing economic inequality in which only the needs of the few are served, and also one of lack of political desire or will to solve these real problems. MMT policies can help to bring an end to the first economic crisis; but not if progressives, and others continue to believe in false ideas about fiscal sustainability and responsibility, and the similarity of their Government to a household. To begin to solve our problems, we need to reject the neoliberal narrative and embrace the MMT narrative about the meaning of fiscal responsibility. That will lead us to the political action we need to solve the political crisis and eventually toward fiscal policies that achieve public purpose and away from policies that prolong economic stagnation and the ravages of austerity.
And yet, we are now supposed to believe that many things that went wrong leading up to the financial crisis were caused by a handful of junior bankers and traders supposedly acting on their own. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and the Securities and Exchange Commission continue to blame Fabrice Tourre, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, for the botched manufacturing and selling of the Abacus 2007-AC1 synthetic collateralized debt obligation.
oday, Hostess Brands inc. — the company famed for its sickly sweet dessert snacks like Twinkies and Sno Balls — announced they’d be shuttering after more than eighty years of production.
But while headlines have been quick to blame unions for the downfall of the company there’s actually more to the story: While the company was filing for bankruptcy, for the second time, earlier this year, it actually tripled its CEO’s pay, and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent.
The numbers reveal the deadening effects of inequality in our country, and confirm that tax avoidance, rather than a lack of middle-class initiative, is the cause.
The Gates Foundation continues to fund Teach For America, Stand For Children, The Media Bullpen, the National Council for Teacher Quality, Teach Plus, The New Teacher Project, and literally scores of other groups which carry on campaigns to undermine due process for teachers, and actively lobby for coercive legislation that forces public schools to use faulty test scores for the purposes of teacher evaluation, against the best judgment of administrators and academic experts.
Contraception will not help reduce deaths in childbirth or infant mortality: it is just a population control tool.
"Security is a function of the resources your adversary is willing to commit," said Julian Sanchez, a policy expert with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
"If you've been flagged as a high-priority target by the NSA [National Security Agency] and are under active observation," Sanchez said, "then no, you can probably never have 'total confidence' that your communications won't be traced."
But for the rest of us, it’s definitely a possibility. With the right tools, some vigilance and a little bit of Web savvy, you, too, can best General Petraeus, Hamas, al-Qaida and the Taliban with communiqués so virtually untraceable that they would make James Bond blush.
Americans are still reeling from the cacophony of secret money and negative ads that was the 2012 election. Much of the money spent on the congressional and presidential campaigns came from undisclosed sources, underscoring the continued need to fight for reforms to promote transparency in elections.
The Hungarian government was forced to awkwardly rebuff some rare international praise this weekend, following some approving comments about the country on Friday by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. According to a report from Belarusian state news agency Belta entitled “Lukashenko: Western society changes views on democracy and market economy”, the Belarusian president – who has often been dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” – said the following during the appointment of new Belarusian envoys to Hungary and France:
“Hungary used to be a socialist country. We used to be good friends with them. We used to have very close relations. After they became fed up with ‘democracy’ and market economy… they got sober.”
Lukashenko then went on to say that Belarus needs to build relations with Hungary, as it “cannot lose this country.”
Quite a week for random governmental retractions. Back in February, when we first warned about the upcoming "World Conference on International Telecommunications" (WCIT) meeting of the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU), we noted that the thing to be most afraid of was countries like Russia and China using the process to take over control of aspects of the internet, in part to allow greater control for the sake of censorship, but also to set up questionable "tariffs" on internet traffic, designed to basically divert money to state owned or "closely associated" telcos. While much of the focus over the past few months was on the EU telcos proposal, you had to know that even worse was coming.
A year and a half ago, we wrote about a lawsuit from a lawyer in Texas, John Gibson, who is an expert in workers' comp issues in the state. He -- quite reasonably -- set up a blog at the URL TexasWorkersCompLaw.com. Shouldn't be a big deal, right? Wrong. It seems that Texas has a law that you can't use the words "Texas" and "Workers' Comp" together. Seriously. The law explicitly says that anyone advertising Texas Workers' Comp law help "may not knowingly use or cause to be used... any term using both 'Texas' and 'Workers' Compensation' or any term using both 'Texas' and 'Workers' Comp';"
WSJ: Google Planted Cookies on iPhones Without Anyone's Permission (Updated)A report from the Wall Street Journal suggests that Google has been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of Safari users by installing cookies that could track the browsing habits of people—even if they thought they had blocked them.
Throw Away All Your Electronics Because They're All Turning Into NarcsWe already know that Microsoft's been looking at ways to turn Kinect into a snitch, but now, Big Brother is taking his talents to the nation's students with a shiny new line of merciless, whistle-blowing e-books.
The FBI gained access to Broadwell's anonymous e-mail account. Inside, they found evidence that Broadwell and Petraeus had exchanged racy messages by storing them in Gmail's "drafts" folder.
[...]
To conceal her identity, Broadwell avoided accessing the account from her home Internet account. Instead, she accessed it from publicly available WiFi connections.
Yet these steps proved insufficient to hide her identity. A source told NBC that it "took agents a while to figure out the source. They did that by finding out where the messages were sent from—which cities, which Wi-Fi locations in hotels.
This week we’ve all read how General Petraeus was forced out of his position because the FBI was able to read his emails. I’ll leave the moral question about affairs for you to determine on your own, however, from a technology perspective, he did many things wrong.
FOIA seeks details of agency's 'authority to invade civilian Internet networks'
Back in September, we wrote about how Senator Patrick Leahy had introduced a really good bill for ECPA reform. ECPA (the Electronic Communications Privacy Act) is an incredibly outdated bill concerning (as it says) the privacy of electronic messages. It was written in a time (the mid-1980s) before everyone had email, let alone everyone used web-based, cloud-stored email. And thus, it has weird provisions, such as considering that messages stored on a server for more than 180 days are "abandonded" and thus subject to very little privacy protections. And that's just one of many, many problems with ECPA, which treats all kinds of messages differently.
At least two activists died in custody before or during China's Communist Party congress and tens of thousands had their movements restricted, rights groups said Monday.
The action was part of the government's "maintenance stability" campaign aimed at preventing any sign of unrest during the party gathering in Beijing, which ended last week, the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) said.
The congress ushered in a once-a-decade leadership change, with President Hu Jintao stepping down from his top party post to make way for Xi Jinping, who is due to be named state president in March.
We've pointed out that while we're told that intellectual property is supposed to be about the incentive to create, the reality is that it tends to be a protectionist tool to attack the competition. If you want to see an amazing example of this and how some companies will use any and all possible IP claims, look no further than the ongoing legal battle between the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the International Securities Exchange. Now, you might think that financial markets wouldn't need "intellectual property protection" in order to incentivize their creation and continued innovation. And you'd be right. But, if you wanted to use those tools to annoy the hell out of competitors, well, you've stepped up to the right window.
Copyright and patent monopolies can be reformed to be less terrible, but in the long-term they need to be reformed into smithereens with a sledgehammer. Politically, this may be impossible. Practically, doing nothing to encourage creativity and innovation may not even be desirable. Erik Zoltan and I have a new alternative: the Payright System.
Very soon the six strikes anti-piracy program will kick off in the United States but the RIAA isn’t just sitting back and presuming that it will be an anti-piracy cure-all. Since early November the recording industry group has massively upped the number of DMCA notices it issues to make content harder to find. From an average of between 200,000 and 240,000 URL requests sent every week to Google, the RIAA has just posted 463,000 and 666,000 in successive weeks.
Back in October, we noted that in the latest triennial DMCA exemption review, the Copyright Office/Librarian of Congress refused to say it was legal for you to rip your own legally purchased DVDs so that you could watch them on a computer or tablet. That seems fairly ridiculous, especially given that similarly ripping your CDs is recognized as legal. Rep. Darrell Issa has apparently recognized how silly this and is planning a bill to fix the Copyright Office's mistake.
I've always had a bit of a soft spot for DRM in my heart, mostly because it makes me laugh. If you think about it, it's generally rather funny in its uselessness. Pirates don't care about it as they simply route around any DRM. Customers can certainly be annoyed, but they always end up with the same tools the pirates use to break the DRM on their purchased products. There's a question of legality in doing so, obviously, but generally nobody really seems to care all that much and software developers just end up in a DRM arms race against nobody, which is inherently funny. All the while, we get wonderful gems like Ubisoft's vuvuzela DRM, which was hysterical. Now, don't get me wrong, DRM sucks, but upon reading stories about its effects my range of emotions tends to be anywhere between annoyance and raucous laughter.
Neelie Kroes has emerged as perhaps the most Net-savvy politician in the European Commission, with her repeated calls for a new approach to copyright in Europe that takes cognizance of the shift to a digital world. That's one measure of how mainstream the idea has become. Another is the fact that even copyright hardliners like Michel Barnier, the Commissioner responsible for the Internal Market in Europe, are starting to frame the discussion in a similar way.
The Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives has issued an extremely interesting (though rather clumsily written and clumsily titled) Report on “Three Myths About Copyright Law, and Where to Start to Fix it.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who has been one of the few leaders in Congress when it comes to pushing for real copyright reform and pushing back against the bad proposals of Hollywood, is apparently looking to use Reddit to crowdsource a new bill concerning internet freedom. Earlier this year, we noted that Lofgren had introduced two good bills -- one on ECPA reform (pushing for more privacy for your communications) and one called the Global Internet Freedom Act to create a task force designed to ensure internet freedom. It will be interesting to see how well this works.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) is taking to the social news website Reddit on Monday to crowd source ideas for legislation that would provide new protections for websites accused of copyright theft.
Lofgren wants to craft a bill that would stop the government from shutting down a website accused of copyright violations until the owners are given notice and a chance to defend themselves.
In this bold era of copyright trolling, calmly (ir)rational takedown bots, baseless legal threats and ridiculous statutory damages, it's a true rarity to see a copyright holder deal with infringement, especially non-commercial infringement, with a reaction that's actually in line with the "crime" committed.
A few years ago, people always referred to the Beatles as the biggest holdouts in terms of releasing their music for sale as MP3s online (mainly iTunes). However, the Beatles finally came around in November of 2010. After that, people started putting together lists of who was left and AC/DC and Kid Rock seemed to top most of those lists.
In 2009, I attended Midem for the first time. It's an event that the music industry has put on for decades. Over the past few years, they've really embraced the idea that the music industry needs to adapt and modernize and have continuously brought in a stream of speakers and participants showing that there are ways for the industry to thrive. In 2009, they invited me to present a case study on Trent Reznor, which remains one of the most popular presentations I've ever given. Four years later I still get at least an email a week about it, and sometimes more.
While there's been plenty of attention paid over the weekend to the fact that the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the conservative caucus of House Republicans, pulled its report on copyright reform after some entertainment industry lobbyists hit the phones/emails late Friday/early Saturday (and, no, it wasn't directly to RSC, for the most part, but to "friendly" members asking them to express their "displeasure" with the report to the RSC leadership). But we shouldn't let that distract from the simple fact that the report was brilliant -- perhaps the most insightful and thoughtful piece of scholarship on copyright to come out of a government body in decades. You can still read the whole thing as uploaded to Archive.org.
As you likely know by now, the Republican Study Committee published a briefing paper critical of copyright, but then later pulled it down claiming the memo had not received adequate review. Some have suggested that IP-industry pressure may have led to the reversal. I hope we will find out in due time whether the paper was indeed reviewed and approved (as I suspect it was), and why it was removed. That said, I think what this take-down likely shows is a generational gap between the old, captured, and pro-business parts of the Republican Party and its pro-market and pro-dynamism future.
I also hope that this dust-up sparks a debate within the “right” about our bloated copyright system, and so it’s propitious that in a couple of weeks the Mercatus Center will be publishing a new book I’ve edited making the case that libertarians and conservatives should be skeptical of our current copyright system. It’s called Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess, and it is not a moral case for or against copyright; it is a pragmatic look at the excesses of the present copyright regime and of proposals to further expand it. The book features:
Jared Leto is perhaps best known to the general public for his work as a film actor, most notably in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). However, in recent years he has devoted his attention to the world of music, as the lead singer of Thirty Seconds to Mars.
Artifact, directed by Leto himself, under the pseudonym Bartholomew Cubbins (of Dr. Seuss fame), revolves around major record label EMI’s decision to sue the band for $30 million in August 2008. The film was screened November 8 as part of the New York City documentary festival DOC NYC and previously, in September, at the Toronto film festival.