For years, the classical desktop has been the main interface for interacting with computers. Consisting of a menu, a panel, and an area to display widgets and open windows, its main virtue was originally its easy access to applications and files. It remains popular today, featured in at least five of the seven major Linux desktop environments. Increasingly, though, it is becoming inefficient -- a trend that is not helped helped by experimental designs that decrease access to resources rather than increasing it.
When the classical Linux desktop emerged years ago, it was a marked improvement over the command line for the casual user. Icons on the desktop and menu items ensured that executables were always one or two clicks away, and that users spent more time on productivity than in interacting with the desktop.
Windows is infamous for the "blue screen of death" that millions of users have encountered over the years. But I've never heard of a Linux user getting one...until today. Yes, a Linux user actually got a blue screen of death. This may be the first time in history that we've seen something like this in Linux.
System76 has announced the immediate availability of Sable, a powerful desktop computer powered by the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux.
An “Endless Computers” Kickstarter project is pitching a Celeron-based PC for emerging markets starting at $169, featuring a new “Endless OS” Linux distro.
A San Francisco based startup called Endless Computers, is close to its $100,000 goal on Kickstarter. Funding packages for its Linux-based Endless Computer start at $169 with 32GB, moving to $189 when you add WiFi and Bluetooth. The price goes to $229 when you also add a 500GB HDD. There are also options to give computers away to poor schools and students around the world. The project closes May 15, with shipments due in June.
Today we bring good news for Linux users, especially for the Ubuntu lovers. Nimbini mini-PC is the youngest and smallest member of the cirrus7 mini-PC family. As you may know, Cirrus7 is a Germany-based company which received Red Dot Product Design Award last year. Just like its big brother Cirrus7 Nimbus, the Nimbini is completely fan-less and as a result is a quite, compact desktop for everyday usage.
A couple weeks ago I bought the Lenovo T450s, this is my first laptop-upgrade in about three years and I have to say... I am so glad that I did upgrade. Over the last two weeks I've been using the T450s as my daily-driver and its been working almost perfectly under Fedora Linux.
Docker has shot to prominence as a developer tool but version 1.6, available today, shows further evidence of efforts to make life easier for the ops teams that put containers into production.
The latest iteration of the open-source platform that first appeared in early 2013 also offers a rewritten, backwards-compatible registry, an improved engine, and new features for the orchestration technology launched in December at the DockerCon EU conference in Amsterdam.
Linus Torvalds this week released the Linux 4.0 kernel -- a relatively small release that still holds some interesting new features. It's also a milestone for the project in a few unintentional ways, which Torvalds spells out in his 4.0 release notes.
First, rather than rollover the kernel version from the previous release, 3.19 to 3.20, Torvalds in February polled the community and determined that a slim majority favored pushing the new version to 4.0. (The same poll in which the community voted in the 4.0 release code name, “Hurr Durr I'ma Sheep.”)
The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration to advance the Internet of Everything (IoT) through an open source software project, today announced 10 new members are joining the initiative. Through collaborative development, Alliance members are looking to leverage their broad industry expertise to advance a common platform for devices, services and applications within the Internet of Everything. Back in February, we interviewed the Alliance's senior director of IoT, Philip DesAutels (shown), who said, “We are building out an open source software project that delivers code that will help people build interoperable tools and devices.”
Takashi Iwai sent in his sound driver updates for Linux 4.1, which includes major modernization with the standard bus for ALSA in the sequencer core and HD-audio code.
The live kernel patching support was one of the big additions to what became Linux 4.0, but with Linux 4.1 there aren't many improvements to show for the past cycle.
While full DynTicks support has been part of the mainline Linux kernel for quite a while, it's now become possible to use it with KVM guest virtual machines.
Rafael Wysocki of Intel sent in the ACPI and power management updates for the Linux 4.1 kernel. As usual, there's a lot of new code part of this big pull request.
With the new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) versioning where they're going to be bumping the major version number every year, Linux kernel developers are now re-working the way they handle the compiler's quirks/changes within the kernel.
Ingo Molnar sent in the perf subsystem updates for Linux 4.1 on Tuesday and one of the biggest changes is the ability to attach eBPF programs to KProbes. This means that there's support for user-defined, sandboxed instrumentation running on a live kernel that at the same time can't cause the kernel any harm.
Earlier this week I wrote about how it looked like KDBUS would be included in the Linux 4.1 kernel given the pull request sent to Linus Torvalds by Greg Kroah-Hartman. However, since that pull request, KDBUS is taking a lot of heat and there's calls for it to be postponed from mainlining.
Linux users have long had a love-hate relationship with Nvidia. On the one hand, Nvidia’s proprietary graphics drivers have always been the best-performing ones for Linux gaming. On the other hand, Nvidia has been so hostile to the open-source community that Linus Torvalds literally gave it the middle finger a few years ago. Torvalds also called them “the single worst company” the Linux developer community has ever had to deal with.
To the dismay of linux die hards, the Linux 3.19 kernel only has basic support for the new Nvidia Maxwell GPUs. This includes only the basic mode-setting without hardware acceleration (Phoronix via Fudzilla) in Nouveau. Just in case you don’t already know, Nouveau is the beloved reverse-engineered, open source driver used by the Nvidia-Linux community as an alternative to the proprietary linux driver.
Open sourcers are furious that while Nvidia's GeForce GTX 900 series is a dominant card for Linux gamers it is about as open source friendly as an Apple fanboy who has been queuing for two months for the latest pointless tool he cant use.
The NVIDIA 349 driver series has been stabilized today for Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux with the debut of the NVIDIA 349.16 update.
While the GeForce GTX 900 series are in garbage shape with the open-source driver, Nouveau on Linux 4.1 does bring some improvements for the original Maxwell GeForce GTX 750 series along with the GK20A Tegra K1 graphics processors.
It looks like AMD might finally be close to publishing the code to their new AMDGPU kernel driver that's key to their new unified Linux driver strategy where their open-source stack and Catalyst share a common, open-source kernel driver.
Windows users this week saw the release of an AMD Catalyst 15.4 Beta driver, but if you're looking out for the equivalent Linux build, sadly it has yet to surface.
All of the continuous Linux benchmark results from these systems aren't part of the routine flow of new Linux performance data published on Phoronix.com, but will be available at LinuxBenchmarking.com in the near future. These systems are still all powered by the Git code of the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. The final piece left to code of the project is to export all of the data in real-time to an external server from the local Phoromatic Server with having a read-only results viewer similar to what's been done at OpenBenchmarking.org. I hope to have that done in the near future or if you would like to help out or test there is the Phoronix-Test-Suite on GitHub.
Calibre, a complete application to edit, view, and convert eBook files, has been updated yet again, and the developer has added a number of new features and various other fixes.
I released 3.16.0 a couple weeks ago without much fanfare. Despite many months of 16-hour days and weekends, it lacked some of the features I wanted to get into the "initial" release. So I didn't stop. I kept pushing through to make 3.16.2 the best that I could.
The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 5.0.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.
In an operating system, logs are all about keeping track of events, be it critical system errors, resource usage warnings, transaction history, application status, or user activities. These logs, which are stored as (text or binary) files in the system, are useful for system auditing, debugging and maintenance. However, with so many different system entities generating log files, and even at growing rate, the challenge as a system admin is to how to "consume" these log files effectively.
Production-ready Open Source Puppet 4 is now available! We’re excited to announce new features and enhancements that will extend your use of Puppet for faster, more consistent management of server configurations. We’ve added capabilities to help you save time, reduce errors, and increase reliability.
textprint takes a flat data file as input, and arranges it graphically to fit the terminal without distorting the image. From there, textprint goes from zero-to-60, in about two seconds.
Age of Wonders III has been highly requested by Linux fans, and now that it’s fully released I decided to take a look.
The developers graciously gave me a copy to test, so many thanks to them for this.
The Linux (and Mac) versions came alongside a new patch, and a brand new expansion. You can see their official news post on Steam linked here.
The Banner Saga has been highly sought after from Linux users, and the day has finally come. The new update also adds controller support.
It’s a great time to be a fan of space combat games, and the latest release for us is Gratuitous Space Battles 2 which I’ve taken a look at.
The game was ported to Linux thanks to Ethan Lee, who has done quite a number of ports for us now. He’s much like Ryan Gordon in the way that he ports a lot of other people’s games. His ports are usually good too.
Qt 5.5 is a very exciting release for new features and functionality being added to this open-source toolkit, but it's continuing in the Qt5 tradition of running behind schedule.
When we were porting Kamoso to Qt5/KF5, at some point I realized that it was about time we came up with whatever we’d want to do with sharing. Kipi is definitely an interesting technology, but no matter how I looked at it I found that it missed an iteration in the concept. In some aspects it’s very specific, in some others very broad. In fact, I already tried to improve it, back in 2009.
In the last Qt on Android episode we learned the basics of JNI on Android in a Qt way. In this episode I’d like to focus on tools that will help us to be more productive when we extend our Qt on Android applications.
The Kdenlive team is happy to announce the release of Kdenlive 15.04.0. While there are very few new features in this release, it is a huge step towards a bright future!
As you might know, Calligra now also started porting to Qt5/KF5. We are currently reaching the end of stage 1, where everything is readded to the build (“links and installs? done!”), with next stage then to fix anything that broke or regressed (see screenshots!1!).
This is fairly straightfoward: These plugins were still using the old .desktop plugin manifest files. Now they are using the embedded JSON manifests. This isn’t something user visible, but it’s needed as the old .desktop method is now deprecated.
The Gnumeric open source spreadsheet editor used in numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, including Xubuntu and Lubuntu, received a new maintenance release today, April 17, as part of the GNOME 3.16.1 desktop environment.
The GNOME development team has announced the first point update for the GNOME 3.16.x branch, which comes with a fair number of changes and various improvements.
GNOME 3.16.1 -- like other GNOME point releases -- is mostly about fixing bugs and further polishing of the 3.16.0 release that came out last month. All major developments meanwhile are now focused on GNOME 3.18, which will be released in September.
Here comes our first update to GNOME 3.16, it has many fixes, various improvements, documentation and translation updates, we hope you'll enjoy it.
I am following the discussion caused by Greg Kroah-Hartman requesting that kdbus be pulled into the next kernel release. First of all my hat of to Greg for his persistence and staying civil. There has already been quite a few posts to the thread at coming close to attempts at character assassination and a lot of emails just adding more noise, but no signal.
I’ve been an advocate of change on the Linux desktop for some time—at least until Ubuntu Unity came around. Once I started using Canonical’s entry into the desktop space, the race (for me) was over. Unity was my choice. I was fairly certain it would take a massive improvement on the desktop to get me to move away from my default.
That improvement might have come along—with the number 3.16. I’m talking about GNOME. The latest iteration of what was once the ruling king of the Linux desktop has made a strong case for wooing me away from Unity.
With that said, I wanted to take a moment to not just introduce you to the GNOME 3.16 desktop, but show you how to get a few things done with it. But first … what’s new?
Elementary OS Freya is the latest release of Elementary OS. This release based on ubuntu 14.04 LTS featuring the latest version of pantheon desktop as the main desktop enviroment. Powered by kernel version 3.16, Gtk 3.14, and Vala 0.26.
Chrome 42 is released. Big jump: a major version change. Mostly changes under the hood again it seems. The Chrome binaries for this version contain a new version of the PepperFlash plugin, which I have extracted for use with the chromium browser – see my earlier blog. The packages for Slackware 14.1 and -current are available for download so that you can enjoy the latest Chromium browser (and its optional Widevine plugin) in your trustworthy Slackware environment.
Note I compiled the packages on Slackware 14.1 which is the cause of one bug in the package if you use it on Slackware-current: the ProjectM visualisation plugin does not work because of a libGLEW library version error. I have not yet been able to find a fix for it, but the impact is fairly minor so I let it pass.
So Red Hat are now formally a member of the Khronos Groups who many of probably know as the shepherds of the OpenGL standard. We haven’t gotten all the little bits sorted yet, like getting our logo on the Khronos website, but our engineers are signing up for the various Khronos working groups etc. as we speak.
Red Hat has announced Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.2 has been awarded the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ – the highest level of assurance for a commercial middleware platform.
In an article last month, I talked about a software company that had surged more than 11% following its solid fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report. On the other hand, I also talked about how near-term upside would be a little harder to come by given the impressive pop.
RPM of PHP version 5.6.8 are available in remi repository for Fedora ââ°Â¥ 21 and remi-php56 repository for Fedora ââ°Â¤ 20 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).
Early this week, Linus released version 4.0 of the Linux Kernel. Now, this updated version of the Linux Kernel is available in the official Fedora repositories for users running the alpha release of Fedora 22.
The major version change wasn't done because of any major feature or change in process or really anything exciting at all. Linus Torvalds changed it because he felt the minor version number was getting a bit large and he liked 4.0 better. It was really a whim more than any thing contained within the kernel itself. The initial merge window builds of this kernel in Fedora were even called 3.20.0-rc0.gitX until the 4.0-rc1 release came out.
In what I first thought was a joke, GNU Hurd 0.6 was released yesterday. GNU Hurd is the GNU project's answer to the Linux kernel and this release brings bug fixes and enhancements. Elsewhere, Jaroslav Reznik today announced that the Fedora 22 Beta is a Go and Josh Boyer said Final will ship with Linux 4.0.
As reported by Softpedia last week, the Fedora devs decided to delay the release of the Beta version of Fedora 22 by a week. The Fedora 22 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting took place on April 16, and the distribution received green light for the April 21 release.
Flock to Fedora is our yearly conference where Fedora contributors from all around the world gather to discuss the past year, talk about where we’re headed, hack on various projects, see old friends, and meet new faces. This year, we’ll converge on Rocheseter, NY, where I went to college. I’m excited to take a trip back east, and hopefully see some friends who are still living in the area. The event will take place from August 12-15, and is sure to be a good time.
One of the new features in upcoming Fedora 22 will be Django-1.8. Django project released its most recent version earlier this month, and it's going to be a long term supported version after Django-1.4 became a bit ancient nowadays. Fedora had release 1.6 in which is now deprecated by Django upstream.
For Debian GNU/Linux users wishing to have ZFS file-system support and libdvdcss (for DVD playback) without having to use third-party package archives, that should soon be a reality.
Neil McGovern was this month elected the 2015 Debian Project Leader. Lucas Nussbaum, the former Debian Project Leader for the past two years, today posted his final remarks as the DPL. His final message went over his accomplishments as the leader of this popular distribution and he ended with talking about the ZFS and libdvdcss packages soon in Debian.
McGovern, who lives in England, is an engineering manager at open-source consultancy and development firm Collabora, and has been a Debian developer since 2005. He ran unsuccessfully for project leader last year.
Canonical's efforts are going in a single direction, and developers are focusing on an important task: to make a single operating system that can run on any platform. It might seem like an impossible goal, but the truth is that they are getting closer with each new release.
Ubuntu Touch has received quite a few fixes in the past few weeks, and now Canonical has decided to make the changelog much clearer for regular users.
According to The Inquirer, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, has confirmed that the recently announced Linux kernel 4.0 will be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 operating system in October 2015.
Ubuntu developer Stéphane Graber announced the final freeze for Ubuntu 15.04. The first candidate images of Ubuntu 15.04 are expected while new package uploads now should just be about release critical fixes.
Canonical, through Stéphane Graber, has announced today that the forthcoming Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) computer operating system is now in Final Freeze and will be released to the public next Thursday, April 23, 2015.
Last week, the first Ubuntu phone to ever be commercially available came out on BQ's website. Although there is just one Ubuntu device on the market right now, and it hasn't been out for long, Canonical has already released an update.
This development should show, both to consumers interested in Ubuntu phones as well as OEMs who might consider another open source alternative to Android and Firefox OS, that Canonical is serious about supporting its mobile operating system.
Canonical has announced that a few NTP vulnerabilities were found and corrected for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) has hit final freeze, and users will now be confronted with an important choice, to upgrade or not to upgrade.
Canonical has finally released a third OTA update for Ubuntu Touch, and users should start receiving them in the next few hours.
Ubuntu 15.04 “Vivid Vervet” entered its Final Freeze period on 16 April 2015, which means the release is locked down and it is unlikely new features will be added before it launches on 23 April.
During Final Freeze, only critical bugs or exceptional circumstances will be considered for alteration.
A number of significant changes made it into Vivid, including a change in the initialisation system, a new version of the Linux kernel, upgrades to the Unity desktop manager, and updated applications.
Among others, Elementary OS 0.4 Loki will bring support for Wayland, Red Hat’s new display server, support for HiDPI high resolution displays will be implemented, AppCenter (a new Software Center) will replace the existing one.
Also, an elementary Account will be created for connecting the users with the elementary services and other elementary users, new user account pictures, improved icons and smarter audio management will be implemented, support for synchronizing system settings will be added, while automatic driver detection during installation, smarter software updates, AppArmor integration are also planned.
The Apple II holds a special place, not just as a piece of computing history, but also in the hearts of lots of the people that used it back in the day. Alongside machines like the TRS-80 and, at least over here in Britain, the BBC Model B — which was one of the inspirations behind the Raspberry Pi — it’s one of the machines we grew up with, and for a lot of us, it’s the machine we cut our teeth on when we were kids.
iWave unveiled a Qseven COM with 1080p support that runs Linux on TI’s DSP-enabled DaVinci DM8168 SoC. iWave also updated an i.MX6 Qseven COM with 2GB RAM.
Like the idea of a TV box that runs Android and has access to thousands of apps including Netflix, Hulu Plus, and XBMC, but don’t want to buy one unless it can also handle desktop apps like Office or LibreOffice?
Smart TV boxes may not have yet caught the imagination of mainstream consumers the same way smartphones have, but that hasn’t meant that vendors and OEMs are not trying to do something about it. Smart TV boxes are essentially devices that let you access thousands of apps including Netflix, Hulu Plus, XBMC etc. that allow you to stream content over the internet, in essence, turning your old TV into a ‘smart’ one. Now, some enterprising OEMs are finding ways to attract would-be buyers by promising them what Roku or Apple TV won’t, for now at least – the ability to handle desktop apps like Office or LibreOffice! They do it by adding a desktop Operating System to their devices in addition to Android, thereby giving users the flexibility to use the device either as a smart box or as a regular PC.
Ambarella has announced the availability of a reference design for battery-powered IP cameras, supported with a Linux board support package (BSP). The design showcases the company’s recently announced, Cortex-A9 based S2Lm system-on-chip, which is specifically designed for battery-powered full HD security cameras suitable for consumer entry-level commercial security applications, says Ambarella.
Tizen is an Open Source Linux project and therefore we encourage developers to join and contribute to the Tizen project and the Tizen Community, and to show you how Philippe Coval has created a webinar session. You can see the Tizen development process and what can be done with Tizen community repos. Learn how packaging is done with Tizen development tools such as git & gerrit and also find out about the duties of maintainers including how to track and maintain your patches.
Google has announced a new version of Chrome for Android is hitting the stable release channel, and this one is a rather big deal for a few reasons. There are some interesting features, but it's also the last release for Ice Cream Sandwich. At least there's some good stuff.
Long story short, if you’re lazy and you value convenience over getting top dollar for your phone, Apple’s Android trade-in service is a terrific option — just like carrier trade-in services. If you want to make twice as much money selling your used phone, look elsewhere.
Ready for more Material Design in your life? These 30 Android apps make Google's latest design standards look amazing -- and they have the functionality to match.
Console favorite WWE 2K is now available on iOS and Android. Priced at $7.99, the new mobile game puts all the craziness of WWE wrestling in the palm of your hand, with a playable roster of superstars including Hulk Hogan, John Cena, Sting, Triple H, Undertaker, Daniel Bryan, Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose, and Bray Wyatt.
Amazon’s own Android phone may have been an absolute bust, but the company’s Android app store is an entirely different story. The Amazon Appstore is accessible on all Android smartphones and tablets, and it offers a solid alternative to Google’s Play store. In fact, we recently called it the one app every Android device owner needs to install immediately thanks to Amazon’s promotions that offer one new paid app for free every day.
Echoing others' sentiments, Luke Wallace, who leads Android development at software developer Bottle Rocket Studios, told an audience at a technical conference in San Diego Wednesday that it probably should not use the popular Eclipse IDE anymore for building Android apps. Android Studio is now the way to go; Eclipse represents the old method of development for Android, Wallace said, during his presentation on mastering Android development tools at the Mobile Dev + Test conference.
Apple CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto let you use your car to have your phone make calls, send and receive texts, handle emails, and even control some apps without ever having to pick up your handset.
When Google first previewed Android Auto, its Android-based in-car system last year during Google I/O, many wondered if Waze would eventually make its way to the platform.
Google has published Android for Work, its BYOD app for older Android smartphones that allows users to carve out a secure space for their business apps.
The LG G3 is a pretty great device, but the Verizon model had been left out of the Android Lollipop parade.
The wait is finally over, with this device joining several Sony phones in finally seeing the most recent version of Android. They join a list that includes most flagship devices in getting their taste of all those new Android 5.0 features.
Recon has shipped its Android-based “Jet” eyewear for $699. The sports-focused Jet integrates a WQVGA display, 720p camera, Bluetooth, WiFi, ANT+, and GPS.
Performance analysis to optimize HPC applications is challenging at many levels, not the least of which is the availability of adequate performance analysis and measurement tools. Underappreciated at best, most organizations rely on vendor-supplied tools included as part of a machine procurement. While generally good for analysis on a single node, such performance analysis tools typically do not provide the capabilities needed to analyze heterogeneous systems containing accelerators and/or distributed applications running across large numbers of nodes. As a result, most programmers are stuck having to guess at performance issues. The patchwork nature and lack of consistency amongst performance tools available across various HPC centers also means that many programmers lack proficiency in using the performance tool(s) provided at a new site or installed on a new machine.
As a quick update to the initial Veyron motherboards being added to Coreboot, Google has now added more Veyron boards to mainline Coreboot.
A similar line of reasoning predates Raymond's rise to prominence, and even the introduction of Linux. As far back as the early 1980s, Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project and the man some authorities have called the "last true hacker," declared that the source code of software should be freely shared because "the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it."
So, from an early date, advocates of open source development argued that open code is essential for two reasons: First, it's simply a superior way to program; and second, there's a moral imperative to share.
That all sounds grand. And it's certainly true that both the functional and moral dimensions of open code are key motivations for many open source programmers today.
Catalyst IT founder Don Christie says one argument in favour of open source is that coding isn’t difficult.
Most of the time that means others can quickly replicate closed software. He says: “They are going to replicate it anyway. It can be better to make it open source and get the benefits of better code.”
In a blog post this week and in an interview with Light Reading, Rice says there are several reasons being an active contributor is beneficial. But he admits with a laugh that AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) doesn't have the same methods to make money on open source as software vendors, who can release a "free" version of their open source software for customers but then sell upgrades or back-end support.
So, you're about to start a new company and you want to make open-source software the driving force behind all technology decisions. Outside of it being an incredibly noble and honorable cause, what are the key data points you need to fully understand before implementing this strategy?
Google today announced the Chrome/Chromium 42 web-browser reaching the stable channel and with it comes many improvements.
Today's Chrome 43 Beta release brings Web MIDI support for connecting to MIDI devices like synthesizers, DJ decks, and drum machines from the web browser. Aside from supporting the Web MIDI API, thre's also now a Permissions API to let developers query permissions for Geolocation, Push, Notification, and Web MIDI APIs.
This week, immediately following startup company AtScale coming out of stealth mode to show its tools for making data stored in Hadoop's file system accessible within Business Intelligence (BI) applications, Think Big launched its Dashboard Engine for Hadoop, designed to make it easy for business users to cull insights from Hadoop data stores. And now, Pepperdata, which develops Hadoop cluster optimization software, announced that it has secured more than $15 million in strategic and venture financing to scale to serve enterprises who rely on Hadoop in production.
While we've been looking forward to the new features of LibreOffice 4.5 as the leading open-source office suite, version 4.5 is no more. The next version of LO is now going to be LibreOffice 5.0.
To some surprise, this morning in Git, the version was bumped to 5.0 (5.0.0.0.alpha0+). There was no branching of LibreOffice 4.5 as it seems LibreOffice 4.5 is itself being renamed to LibreOffice 5.0.
Our Parisian web agency and software company, Lp Digital, is open sourcing its content management system, BackBee CMS. In this article, I'll explain the tools that helped us release BackBee as open source software and measure the results.
The government's govCMS project will make its own Drupal distribution publicly available for download, it announced today.
The distribution will be a fork of the aGov distribution, which was developed by local development shop PreviousNext and is the building block for govCMS sites.
aGov was released in 2013 after a beta period involving a number of federal and state government agencies. High profile end users include the NSW government's 'one stop shop' for services, Service NSW.
This will also pave the way for other FLOSS like GNU/Linux on the desktop instead of That Other OS. Altogether this could save half the cost of desktop IT or permit more/better IT for the same money in Hungarian universities. What about your local university? This is yet another indication that this is the Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop. Hungary as a whole is not doing badly on GNU/Linux desktops (1.48%). It’s time the universities pulled their share up.
Released at the beginning of the month, Chef Delivery is already getting some purchase in the fast growing DevOps market with the help of some blue-chip IT companies like HP. With Chef Delivery, the company says it "has captured success patterns of its most innovative customers and distilled them into a product".
pfSense, a free open-source customized distribution based on FreeBSD designed to be used as a firewall and router, has advanced to version 2.2.2 and it's now available for download.
The GNU Hurd, the free open source replacement for the Unix kernel, has a new release that is still not suitable for production environments. There are also new releases of GNU Mach and GNU Mig, both of which have reached version 1.5.
Key congressional leaders have just agreed on a deal to fast track the fast-tracking of TPP. While the threat of TPP has persisted for years, now is the time to fight back!
Version 0.6 of GNU Hurd was released today. Before getting too excited about GNU Hurd, it's still bound to x86 32-bit and doesn't offer any compelling new features.
The Wine development release 1.7.41 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - More Known Folders supported in the shell. - Some more support for kernel job objects. - More MSI patches improvements. - Some theming fixes. - Various bug fixes.
Alexandre Julliard announced the immediate availability for download and testing of a new maintenance release of Wine 1.7.41, which brings better support for kernel job objects, improves MSI patches, enhanced support for Known Folders in the shell, and fixes theming issues.
For its Summer of Code open source development traineeships, the European Space Agency (ESA) is looking for sponsors to increase the number of students and projects and to help with promotion. “We would like the major firms in the space industry to participate”, says Maxime Perrotin, coordinating the Summer of Code for ESA.
The Dutch government’s lack of vendor independence is too high a cost for society, the Dutch Parliament concludes. The government should enforce its policy on open standards in ICT procurement and should also devise exit strategies - to reduce its dependence on ICT suppliers.
[...]
Member of Parliament Astrid Oosenbrug (Pvda), one of the two MPs who authored this week’s open source resolution, says the BIT will help public administrations to require open standards and determine strategies that result in a level playing field for open source.
The Dutch Parliament has determined that vendor dependency is a much greater risk, and they have voted on a resolution that would encourage the government to also look at open standards in ICT procurement.
The primary goals of developing the open source Forge.mil community were to create a more open and transparent development process that could remove barriers to reuse, encourage collaboration, and discourage proprietary or closed systems. Build such an extensive, collaborative community required a powerful and adaptable Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform to enable code reuse and quality improvements, as well as improve of time to market for new applications. Ultimately, the DoD chose CollabNet’s TeamForge ALM platform as a foundation on which to build Forge.mil.
Wipro said the rapidly increasing pace of adoption of open source software and methodologies led by advancements in analytics, cloud computing and the Internet of Things ( IoT) have catapulted open source into a core technology asset for enterprises across the globe.
The company further said that Wipro has identified open source as a core technology initiative and the company's investments in building a large cadre of skilled personnel, including world class open source industry veterans and community experts, were beginning to reap dividends as reflected by the increasing customer interest.
As you may have noticed, this column is pretty keen on opening things up - whether that's open source, open access or open government. But what about open-sourcing your body - releasing as open data the most intimate aspects of your physical existence? That's what the Open Humans Network is asking.
I didn't pay anything for the USB keyboard and USB optical mouse that I use with this tiny computer, because they were donated to the public library where I work. Two weeks ago someone dropped of 10 new USB keyboards and 10 new USB mice; they were surplus from a computer upgrade cycle at a nearby office. To be sure, the value of the $35 USD Raspberry Pi 2 computer is extended when free USB keyboards and mice are available. There is a role, then, for schools, libraries, and makerspaces to collect these donated items in order to redistribute them to those who need them.
So what’s new? Well, basically one thing: we now have a related standard for formulas in ODF spreadsheets! This is something that obviously occurred 5-10 years too late, but better late than never. The Wikipedia article on OpenFormula is a fairly amusing example of the need to justify and rationalize mistakes that seems to surround the OpenDocument standard.
Nicola Sturgeon was ahead of the Labour leader by 7 points in the question of who had the best personality: 30% of the liked her over Nigel Farage (23%), Ed Miliband (21%) and the Leader of Plaid Cymru Leanne Wood (16%).
Change the world. Power. Influence. Innovation. Hand gestures. Literal self-comparisons to royalty. Slides. Rosenstein's keynote at this week's TechCrunch Disrupt conference has it all. There's a banal, pseudo-do-gooder theme ("Do great things"). There are several venn diagrams. There are repeated tone deaf calls to "have your cake and eat it too," an exhortation for all techies to embrace their Stanford dropout privilege and remake the world as they desire.
ARM, the leading designer of mobile processors, announced the launch of ARM Cordio, a portfolio of low-power wireless communications technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT).
ARM Cordio is comprised of the intellectual property (IP) from two acquisitions, Sunrise Micro Devices and Wicentric, also announced on April 16. The terms of the deals were not disclosed.
The Cordio name originates from Sunrise Micro Devices' sub-volt Bluetooth wireless radio technology. A year ago, Sunrise Micro Devices and Wicentric, a maker of Bluetooth Smart software, announced an alliance to develop software for the Cordio BT4 radio core for IoT sensors and devices.
When you’re strapping on the latest smart watch or ogling an iPhone, you probably aren’t thinking of Moore’s Law, which for 50 years has been used as a blueprint to make computers smaller, cheaper and faster.
Earlier this year, WalMart became one of several corporate heavyweights to lift wages for its meagerly compensated workers, around 500,000 of which are now set to receive at least $9/hour and $10/hour by Q1 2016 (that of course assumes they make it on $9 an hour for another 12 months and don’t seek out other employment by sheer necessity).
That the battlefield of tomorrow will be abuzz with death is clear. Say hi to America's drone cannons.
A new era in autonomy and unmanned systems for naval operations is on the horizon, as officials at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) announced April 14 recent technology demonstrations of swarming unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - part of the Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) program.
Were people’s lives and livelihoods not at stake, it would have been an almost sublime piece of parody. During the trial of four teenage Israeli settlers who set fire to a Palestinian-owned cafe in the West Bank town of Dura, which concluded on Monday, the defendants’ attorneys – as reported by Ynet – brought forth the claim that because the arson was an act of revenge, their clients were not guilty of breaking the law.
Earlier this week, Russia announced it was ending its five year ban on selling S-300 defensive missiles to Iran. There’s no indication yet Iran is even going to buy any, but Israel was immediately furious, predicting doom and gloom over the possibility.
One of the first measures taken by Saudi Arabia, when announcing its war against Yemen, was a full-scale naval blockade. For a nation that imports over 90% of its food, that was a devastating move, and one Saudi officials assured wouldn’t keep the food out of the country.
The world of private defence contractors, the modern version of the fabled Condottiere without the flags and the city-state veneration, received a blow with the handing down of stiff sentences on four former Blackwater operatives. Last year, the four in question, part of Blackwater’s Support Team Raven 23, were convicted in the Washington, D.C. federal court for killing 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour square in 2007.
Almost half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide. It’s the ultimate violation of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address warning that “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded. … The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”
The Obama administration's explicit policy is to capture suspected terrorists, not drone them. So why is there so much droning and so little capturing?
More than seven years after his nine-year-old son, Ali, was killed by contractors working for the American security firm Blackwater Worldwide, Mohammed Kinani says he’s finished his mission “to push these people to the law.”
Four former Blackwater employees were given long sentences yesterday for killing 14 unarmed Iraqis, including Kinani’s son, and wounding many others, when in 2007 they shot at a crowd in Baghdad’s Nisour Square with machine guns and grenade launchers.
The US Secretary of State expressed appreciation for Russia's action in evacuating Americans from Yemen, after the United States refused to engage in evacuation efforts for its citizens.
Some cover-ups are scandalous. Others, like those surrounding the First Gulf War, suggest an official callousness that shocks and awes.
During and immediately after the war, 200,000 of 700,000 U.S. troops were exposed to nerve gas and other chemical agents. The Department of Defense (DOD), fully aware of the chemical hazards and the troop exposure, deployed a litany of lies. After this, it concocted a cover-up. That cover-up continues to this day.
Don Riegle, the senator who presided over Senate committee hearings in 1993-1994 about the veterans’ illnesses, recently told me: “Every effort was made for years to hide the truth and deny the medical research needed to fully treat the U.S. troops suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.”
American Anwar al-Awlaki has been dead for over four years now, but The New York Times is still giving substantial ink to the U.S. government's self-serving meme that Awlaki was an "operational" terrorist," even though we still don't know whether ISIS or AQAP is responsible for the recent attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.
I called out New York Times reporter Scott Shane for carrying the government's water by pimping the "Awlaki was operational" narrative last year. Yesterday, Shane penned another lengthy article rehashing the U.S. government's post hoc justification for targeting and assassinating Awlaki without due process.
By the time four former Blackwater security guards were sentenced this week to long prison terms for the 2007 fatal shooting of 14 civilians in Iraq, the man who sent the contractors there had long since moved on from the country and the company he made notorious.
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, a former member of the Navy SEALs and heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune, has spent the last few years searching for new missions, new fields of fire and new customers.
He has worked in Abu Dhabi and now focuses his efforts on Africa, with ties to the Chinese government, which is eager for access to some of the continent’s natural resources. Mr. Prince’s current firm, Frontier Services Group, provides what it describes as “expeditionary logistics” for mining, oil and natural gas operations in Africa, and has the backing of Citic Group, a large state-owned Chinese investment company.
The lawyer for Julian Assange says his client has agreed to be questioned in the Ecuadorian embassy over sex crime allegations.
Russia's pledge to deliver anti-aircraft missiles to Damascus at a time when world powers are trying to end Syria's civil war is consistent with a pattern of using the weapons system as a bargaining chip in its power struggle with the West.
While the 2013 operation to evacuate whistleblower Edward Snowden from Hong Kong, where he faced impending arrest, involved a degree of subterfuge, no Chinese or Russian intelligence agents were involved in it, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange said.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that Russian special services were not involved in former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden's arrival in Russia.
As hopeful US investors buy everything oil-related on the back of a lower than expected crude build this week (after the biggest build in 30 years the week before), The Kingdom has stepped up overnight and ruined the dream of supply-restrained price recovery as it announced a surge in production output in March to yet another record high. The nation boosted crude output by 658,800 barrels a day in March to an average of 10.294 million a day, which as Bloomberg notes, is about half the daily production from the Bakken formation. WTI Crude prices have slipped by around 2% from yesterday's NYMEX Close ramp highs as it appears Saudi Arabia is not willing to just let this effort to squeeze Shale stall.
California is in its fourth year of an unprecedented drought, with no end in sight and water reserves dwindling. It’s exactly the type of scenario climate scientists have warned about, and new research sees global warming’s fingerprints on the drought. But a new FAIR study shows that, rather than investigating this connection, network news is largely ignoring it.
That probably should have been the headline of a Politico article (sorry, behind paywall) on a letter signed by 13 former Democratic governors urging Congress to approve fast-track trade authority to facilitate the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP). The most newsworthy aspect of the letter is that the governors apparently do not understand the basic economics of trade.
Former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Clinton has formally entered the 2016 race for the White House in a second bid to become the first woman U.S. president. We host a roundtable discussion with four guests: Joe Conason, editor-in-chief of The National Memo, co-editor of The Investigative Fund, and author of "The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton"; Michelle Goldberg, senior contributing writer at The Nation; longtime journalist Robert Scheer, editor of Truthdig.com and author of many books; and Kshama Sawant, a Socialist city councilmember in Seattle and member of Socialist Alternative, a nationwide organization of social and economic justice activists.
It’s “just politics,” said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street, explaining that some of Clinton’s Wall Street supporters doubt she would push hard for closing the carried-interest loophole as president, a policy she promoted when she last ran in 2008.
“The question is not going to be whether or not hedge fund managers or CEOs make too much money,” said a separate Clinton supporter who manages a hedge fund. “The question is, how do you solve the problem of inequality. Nobody takes it like she is going after them personally.”
Indeed, many of the financial-sector donors supporting her just-declared presidential campaign say they’ve been expecting all along the moment when Clinton would start calling out hedge fund managers and decrying executive pay — right down to the complaints from critics that such arguments are rich coming from someone who recently made north of $200,000 per speech and who has been close to Wall Street since her days representing it as a senator from New York.
“Why don’t you tell me what Hillary Clinton is campaigning on, do you know?” he said on MSNBC’s “Live with Thomas Roberts,” when asked if he believed her campaign message that she’s running to represent the “little guy."
Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bête noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party.
Four years before the financial collapse, Goldman Sachs executive George Herbert Walker IV had much to be thankful for. "I've been fortunate to be a small part of teams leading U.S. restructurings, European privatizations, global pension management and now hedge fund and private equity investing,” he said in the annual report of a banking colossus that would soon be known as the “great vampire squid” of Wall Street.
“The world,” said Walker, “just keeps getting more interesting."
As the head of Goldman Sachs’ alternative investment unit, Walker’s ebullience was understandable. At the same time he was raising $100,000 for his cousin George W. Bush’s successful presidential re-election effort, the administration of another cousin, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, returned the family favor, delivering $150 million of Florida pension money to an alternative investment fund run by Walker’s firm. Like other executives whose companies received Florida pension money, Walker is now renewing the cycle, reportedly attending in February a high-dollar fundraiser for Jeb Bush’s political committee.
Hillary Clinton’s announcement that she’s stepping down from her family foundation’s board of directors while running for president was well received, but that won’t shield her from the roiling controversy over the foundation’s acceptance of tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments.
The boards of the Clinton Foundation and the affiliated Clinton Health Access Initiative are scheduled to meet this week to consider additional actions as a result of her candidacy, possibly including new curbs on foreign donations.
Among the bottomfeeders of the Internet ecosystem are “news scrapers”–websites that automatically harvest posts from actual news sites and repackage them in hopes of snagging some search engine hits and the accompanying online ad revenue.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative, the agency responsible for negotiating two massive upcoming trade deals, is being led by former lobbyists for corporations that stand to benefit from the deals, according to disclosure forms obtained by The Intercept.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade accord between the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim countries; the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a similar agreement between the U.S. and the E.U.
Throughout 2012, numerous American factions were pushing for U.S. intervention in Syria to bring down the regime of Bashar Assad, who throughout the War on Terror had helped the U.S. in all sorts of ways, including torturing people for them. But by then, Assad was viewed mostly as an ally of Iran, and deposing him would weaken Tehran, the overarching regional strategy of the U.S. and its allies. The prevailing narrative was thus created that those fighting against Assad were “moderate” and even pro-western groups, with the leading one dubbed “the Free Syrian Army.”
Whether to intervene in Syria in alliance with or on behalf of the “Free Syrian Army” was a major debate in the west through the end of that year. Then-Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry was openly discussing ways for the U.S. to aid the rebels to bring about regime change. Senator Joe Lieberman was saying: “I hope the international community and the U.S. will provide assistance to the Syrian Free Army in the various ways we can.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while ruling out direct military intervention, said: “[W]e have to redouble our efforts outside of the United Nations with those allies and partners who support the Syrian people’s right to have a better future.”
NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel is re-reporting a key detail of his December 2012 kidnapping in Syria after new information surfaced suggesting he may have been misled about the identities of his captors, according to sources familiar with the matter.
But wait a second–isn’t Voice of America itself a propaganda outlet? Not in the New York Times stylebook, apparently. The piece, by Ron Nixon, describes VOA as “the government agency that is charged with presenting America’s viewpoint to the world.” Later on, the Times refers to what it calls “America’s public diplomacy.”
The US’s enemies, on the other hand, have “sophisticated propaganda machines that have expanded the influence of countries like China and Russia and terrorist groups like the Islamic State.” The difference between “propaganda machines” and “public diplomacy” is never explained in the article, but the former appears to be what “they” do while the latter is what “we” do.
The only source quoted in the article who’s not directly connected to the government is Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, described as “a Washington think tank.” (“We are getting our butts kicked…. Countries like Russia are running circles around us,” Howard says.) Not mentioned is the fact that Jamestown was founded with the help of then-CIA Director William Casey to provide financial support for the Agency’s spies (Washington Post, 1/10/05).
The April 4 viral video of a South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing suspect has cost the cop his job and his freedom. But there's now another cost attached to the video, perhaps in the $10,000 range or more. A publicist for the man who captured the footage—which led to homicide charges against North Charleston officer Michael Slager— says news outlets must pay a licensing fee to carry the footage.
Australian publicist Max Markson, the chief executive of celebrity management firm Markson Sparks, told The New York Times that “I think that the people who might be put off by this are the media outlets that had it for free. Now they will have to pay.” Markson did not respond to Ars' requests for comment.
Open Rights Group, Privacy International and a group of internationally acknowledged experts have filed amicus curiae briefs with the Hungarian Constitutional Court. The case has been brought by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) against two major service providers, in an attempt to force the Hungarian Constitutional Court to repeal the Hungarian Electronic Communications Act.
With about 45 days remaining before a major post-9/11 surveillance authorization expires, representatives of the National Security Agency and the FBI are taking to Capitol Hill to convince legislators to preserve their sweeping spy powers.
The report dutifully examines how hard it is for the federal government to hire and keep top cybersecurity talent when the private sector pays so much more.
Its very sensible recommendations include modernizing the creaky civil service hiring system and making compensation more competitive.
But in a eye-popping bit of irony — even by Washington standards — the report was written by Booz Allen Hamilton, the giant “Beltway Bandit” government contractor known for regularly raiding the National Security Agency and other government organizations for its best and brightest cyber talents, especially after they’ve gotten valuable government training and security clearances.
WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange believes SNP supporters were not being “paranoid” that their communications were being spied on during the independence referendum.
Speaking via videolink at the Commonwealth Law Conference in Glasgow on Wednesday, Mr Assange said the “full capacities” of the British intelligence services were deployed during in the run-up to last year’s vote.
The Australian expert in espionage believes independence amounted to a "national security threat" to the UK, justifying the mobilisation of the "full capacities" of the British state's surveillance network.
In a rare public appearance, the Wikileaks founder, who has spent the past 34 months in the building after claiming asylum, will discuss how intelligence gathering abuses privacy in the internet age.
An Arkansas lawyer is seeking sanctions after his computer expert found malware on an external hard drive supplied in response to a discovery request.
Lawyer Matthew Campbell of North Little Rock says he became suspicious when he received the hard drive by Federal Express in June 2014 from a lawyer for the Fort Smith Police Department, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports. Previous evidence in the police whistleblower case had been provided by email or a cloud-based Internet storage service, or had been shipped through the U.S. Postal Service.
“I thought, ‘I’m not plugging that into my computer,’ ” Campbell told the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “Something didn’t add up in the way they approached it, so I sent it to my software guy first.”
The technology expert found four Trojans on the hard drive. “These Trojans were designed to steal passwords, install malicious software and give someone else command and control of the infected computer,” Campbell says in a brief supporting his motion for sanctions (PDF).
The security expert said in an affidavit that the Trojans were in a subfolder rather than the root directory, indicating they were “more likely placed in that folder intentionally with the goal of taking command of Mr. Campbell’s computer while also stealing passwords to his account.”
An Arkansas lawyer representing current and former police officers in a contentious whistle-blower lawsuit is crying foul after finding three distinct pieces of malware on an external hard drive supplied by police department officials.
Australia has passed data retention laws that force telecommunications companies to retain some types of phone and web metadata. This data can be requested by government agencies and has been used to investigate leaks of government information to journalists.
It now takes a warrant to access a journalist’s metadata to identify a source, but this offers limited protection. Government agencies can still seek data from suspected sources without a warrant. This game shows how a whistleblower can still be identified.
The German domestic secret service is setting up a new department to improve and extend its internet surveillance capabilities, investing several million Euros. We hereby publish the secret description for the new unit named ââ¬Å¾Extended Specialist Support Internet“. More than 75 spies are designated to monitor online chats and Facebook, create movement patterns and social network graphs and covertly ââ¬Å¾collect hidden information.“
Often forgotten in the new reporting on the DEA dragnet is the story of Shantia Hassanshahi, the Iranian-American accused of sanctions violations who was first IDed using the DEA dragnet. That’s a shame, because his case may present real problems not just for the allegedly defunct DEA dragnet, but for the theory behind dragnets generally.
As I laid out in December, as Hassanshahi tried to understand the provenance of his arrest, the story the Homeland Security affiant gave about the database(s) he used to discover Hassanshahi’s ties to Iran in the case changed materially, so Hassanshahi challenged the use of the database and everything derivative of it. The government, which had not yet explained what the database was, asked Judge Rudolph Contreras to assume the database was not constitutional, but to upheld its use and the derivative evidence anyway, which he did. At the same time, however, Contreras required the government to submit an explanation of what the database was, which was subsequently unsealed in January.
The examination of French Intelligence Bill ended this Thursday at the National Assembly. After 4 days of debate, very few enhancements were made to a text that was denounced by an incredibly large number of groups for its dangerous, intrusive and liberty-infringing nature and whose control dispositions are totally inadequate. La Quadrature du Net calls on French representatives to listen to the citizens' demands to reject this text during the final vote on 5 May.
Last week, Facebook was forced to admit that it tracked the online activity of people who do not even have an account with the social network, which is a pretty egregious violation of most people’s assumptions of online privacy. After all, the people who are not on Facebook in 2015 have most likely made a very explicit decision not to be on Facebook.
The admission came in response to a report commissioned by the Belgian data protection authority, which found Facebook in breach of European data privacy laws, but the social networking giant claimed the tracking only happened because of a bug that is now being fixed, while disputing many of the details of the report.
A pair of Internet providers who defied TV company demands to switch off their VPN services will be sued in the coming days. CallPlus and Bypass Network Services face legal action from media giants including Sky and TVNZ for allowing their customers to use a VPN to buy geo-restricted content.
Nearly all of the main parties at this General Election have now published their manifestos. Where do the parties’ manifestos stand on surveillance?
Secret documents reveal New Zealand’s electronic eavesdropping agency shared intelligence with state security agents in Bangladesh, despite authorities in the South Asian nation being implicated in torture, extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses.
Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, has conducted spying operations in Bangladesh over the past decade, according to the documents. The surveillance has been carried out in support of the U.S. government’s global counterterrorism strategy, primarily from a spy post in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, and apparently facilitated by the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Director of Public Prosecutions has decided that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute serial paedophile Greville Janner, for many years the leader of the Zionist lobby in the UK. I presume that his convenient senility is the reason for non-prosecution.
But the facts of Janner’s activities in Leicester care homes have been known for decades, and there was overwhelming evidence in one particular case. The failure of the state to act against Janner when he was a Labour MP and Chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is another example of the disgraceful impunity of the powerful in this country. In a pattern that has become familiar to us, police investigating the case were in 1989 warned off by their superiors.
CPS says evidence against Labour peer would have warranted trial but the severity of his dementia means he is not fit to take part in any proceedings
The Jewish institutions in the UK are acting precisely like the Catholic Church of twenty years ago on this issue. Where is the openness? Where is the angst? Where is the admission? Above all, where is the apology?
Adam Werritty’s friend and long term contact, the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, accompanied Greville Janner to visit a kindergarten in Israel in 2012, which was named in Janner’s honour. I wonder if the government of Israel will now change the name?
Torres isn’t an all-American guy. He’s an FBI informant, one of more than 15,000 domestic spies who make up the largest surveillance network ever created in the United States. During J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations, the bureau had just 1,500 informants. The drug war brought that number up to about 6,000. After 9/11, the bureau recruited so many new informants — many of them crooks and convicts, desperate for money or leniency on previous crimes — that the government had to develop software to help agents track their spies.
Since the “no fly” list was formalized in 2001, the only way to know if the U.S. government would allow you to get on a plane was to show up at the airport and try to board a flight. The government would generally neither confirm nor deny that you were on the list, let alone tell you why.
On April 14, the government announced a new procedure for blacklisted travelers to try to clear themselves. Passengers who are denied boarding can lodge a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security, which will provide confirmation of their “No Fly List status,” and an unclassified summary of the reason why — unless providing that information would go against “national security and law enforcement interests.” The passengers can then appeal their status.
The Lord President of Scotland’s judges, Lord Gill, has made a complete fool of himself by leading British judges in a walk-out from the Commonwealth Law Conference. The action is in protest against Julian Assange’s participation by video-link in a panel discussion on surveillance and the role of the security services.
The walk-out happened after Julian’s talk, not before it, which rather gives the impression that what Lord Gill and his fellow judges objected to was the content of Assange’s talk, rather than the fact of it. Assange stated among other points that nationalists were right to believe that MI5 were active against them in the referendum campaign.
Got a hot tip about federal waste, fraud or corruption? You should think twice about using the government’s own online systems for collecting such complaints.
Many of them promise confidentiality but for years have sent sensitive data – including names, addresses and phone numbers of whistleblowers, as well as the details of their allegations – across the Internet in a way that could be intercepted by hackers or snoops. Or, perhaps worse still, by the agencies named in the complaints.
This week, the ACLU submitted a letter to the U.S. Chief Information Officer at the White House alerting him to serious cybersecurity lapses by numerous federal agencies. We identified dozens of inspectors general, including those at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, who do not use encryption to protect online whistleblower complaints of waste, fraud, and abuse. The State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” online terrorism tip line also does not use encryption.
The Justice Department eventually determined that the FBI had retaliated against Kobus for reporting misconduct.
Former Pirate Bay operator Fredrik Neij can't play games on his Nintendo 8-bit console in prison. The prison denied the request because there's no way to open the box to check it for concealed items, a decision the Pirate Bay operator is now appealing before the administrative court.
Local Tulsa station KTUL reports that police responded to reports of an altercation at the Evergreen Apartments complex at 1 a.m. on Friday morning. Police learned that two roommates who lived in one of the apartments had been drinking and arguing over which popular smartphone platform was superior. Eventually they smashed their beer bottles and began stabbing one another with them. One roommate also smashed a beer bottle across the back of the other man’s head.
Why are we still talking about Net neutrality -- didn't that fight end in a victory dance for advocates?
Perhaps in a parallel universe ISPs graciously conceded defeat and an open Internet was secured for the ages, but in this reality, it's not over until telecom companies have unleashed a full fury of lawyers. Gear up for another summer sequel, Net Neutrality Wars: The Lawyers Strike Back.
The advent of smartphones and the mobile Internet has lead to a collision of both these worlds. In a world where bandwidth is abundant and cheap, the concept of metering based on distance will fade away. This is the reason that telcos are mortally scared of services like Skype, Whatsapp and others that take away their voice and SMS revenues. The death of distance is a consumer friendly evolution that the telcos will keep resisting till their last breath.
Netflix says that the company is pushing down piracy in countries where illegal sharing is prevalent. Part of its strategy is to determine the price of its service based on local piracy rates, so it can better compete in places where piracy is rampant.
In the new Wikileaks archives of leaked Sony documents (Link here), there is a memo (https://wikileaks.org/sony/docs/05/docs/DECE/DECE%20CP1%20-%20ss.doc.pdf), which describes Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) concern over the proposed WIPO treaty for copyright exceptions for persons who are blind or have other disabilities.
Today, 16 April 2015, WikiLeaks publishes an analysis and search system for The Sony Archives: 30,287 documents from Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and 173,132 emails, to and from more than 2,200 SPE email addresses. SPE is a US subsidiary of the Japanese multinational technology and media corporation Sony, handling their film and TV production and distribution operations. It is a multi-billion dollar US business running many popular networks, TV shows and film franchises such as Spider-Man, Men in Black and Resident Evil.
Today, WikiLeaks published a new searchable archive containing the leaked email inboxes of top Sony executives. Disturbingly, it shows that months after the hack, we’ve still only just begun investigating the close ties between Sony and the US government.
"This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation,” WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said in a statement. “It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geopolitical conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there."
A search through the WikiLeaks Sony archive for “state.gov” email addresses—WikiLeaks reports that there are nearly 100 government email addresses in the archive—reveals an exceedingly cozy relationship between Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton and US government officials including the State Department, various international ambassadors, and the president.
Top Hollywood executives including James Murdoch have been recruited to help the United States counter Islamic extremist propaganda, according to hacked Sony Pictures emails published by WikiLeaks.
The searchable archive shows employees at the studio discussing new releases and arranging meetings with top politicians
Just when Sony Pictures thought it was done with the devastating hacking attack that brought the studio to its knees last winter, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks published thousands of internal documents and correspondence — totally blindsiding the studio and its public relations team early Thursday.
WikiLeaks has republished the Sony data from last year’s hacking scandal, making all the documents and emails “fully searchable” with a Google-style search engine.
The move provides much easier access to the stolen information. Searching the name of, for example, former Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal, whose controversial comments were revealed by the hack, immediately yields nearly 5,700 results.
WikiLeaks published more than 200,000 internal Sony Pictures Entertainment documents and e-mails, opening a new chapter in the hacking saga that enveloped Sony Corp.’s Hollywood studio late last year.
The release includes 30,287 documents and 173,132 e-mails, sent from or received by more than 2,200 Sony Pictures e-mail addresses, according to a WikiLeaks statement Thursday. The material is searchable, giving legions of journalists and Sony competitors access to the information that was quickly taken down after it was first posted by hackers tied to North Korea.
Whistleblower site WikiLeaks on Thursday put hundreds of thousands of emails and documents from last year’s crippling cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment into a searchable online archive. It’s the latest blow for the entertainment and technology company struggling to get past the attack, which the company estimates caused millions in damage.
The website founded by Julian Assange said that its database includes more than 170,000 emails from Sony Pictures and a subsidiary, plus more than 30,000 other documents.
Sony Pictures blasted WikiLeaks for creating the archive, saying the website was helping the hackers disseminate stolen information.