Often, when issues of accessibility and assistive technology are brought up among people with disabilities, the topics center around the usual issues: How can I afford this device? Is it available for me? Will it meet my needs? How will I receive support?
Open source solutions, including any Linux-based operating system, are rarely, if ever, considered. The problem isn't with the solution; instead, it is a result of lack of information and awareness of FOSS and GNU/Linux in the disability community, and even among people in general. Here are six solid reasons people with disabilities should consider using Linux.
Google's Chromebooks have been bestsellers on Amazon for ages, and now Chrome OS has been updated to version 42. Chrome OS 42 brings Google Now and Material design to Chromebook users.
Appcito's Cloud Application Front End (CAFE) doesn't deliver coffee to enterprise IT, but it serves a similar purpose to caffeine in that it can help stimulate and accelerate applications. Siva Mandalam, VP Product and Strategy at Appcito, told Enterprise Apps Today that CAFE is essentially a front end for cloud services, providing infrastructure support.
VMware has created its very own Linux distribution, dubbed 'Project Photon', as part of an effort to create a stack for what it's calling “Cloud-Native applications”.
One month ago I wrote about the Library Operating System for Linux (LibOS) and initial reaction to that independent project led to an interesting range of responses. A month later, LibOS is still being worked on for Linux.
The Library Operating System (LibOS) for Linux is trying to build the Linux kernel's network stack as a shared library so that user-space programs can access it directly, simulations be easily done by researchers, etc. See the earlier article for more details.
Turbostat, the open-source Intel program for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics along with other Intel-specific CPU information, will see a few improvements with Linux 4.1.
Zefan Li announced on April 19 the immediate availability for download of a new maintenance release for Linux 3.4 kernel, an LTS (Long Term Support) version that is still used in many Linux kernel-based operating systems.
Axiomtek launched a Bay Trail Celeron-based “CEM841ââ¬Â³ COM Express Type 2 Basic module and tipped two similar Type 6 COMs with Celeron and Atom E3845 SoCs.
David Airlie has sent in the big pile of DRM subsystem updates for the Linux 4.1 kernel that includes significant work to the Radeon, Intel, and Nouveau drivers along with the DRM ARM drivers and the introduction of the new VGEM driver.
For users of the open-source Midori web-browser, a new release is available.
Fotoxx, a free, open source Linux photo editing application that can be used by beginners and advanced users alike has been upgraded to version 15.04.1 and is now ready for download.
Kdenlive is one of the few free multi-track video editors for Linux that supports DV, AVCHD and HDV editing. The developers have reminded the community once more that a new major version has been released, 15.04.0, and that the project is now part of the KDE Applications suite.
Tomahawk is a music player capable of using both local and cloud libraries. A new update has been released for this application and it comes with a few interesting changes.
There are not many podcast tools I can mention, in the years spent spinning through console-based software. In fact, I can think of only about four. But here’s one you can add to your list, if you’re keeping one: PodcastXDL.
Gnome Pie 0.6 (and 0.6.1 quickly after, to fix a nasty bug) was released recently, bringing new features such as half and quarter pies, a new simple theme along with other interesting changes and bug fixes.
This is mainly a bugfix release with two minor new features. The first one is a new page in a pairing wizard. Instead of closing the wizard when it finishes, a success page is now shown to the user to indicate device setup was completed.
I've released man-pages-3.83. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
Instant messaging in Fedora Workstation is suboptimal. The current default IM client – Empathy – doesn’t work very well. It’s an app that was designed for GNOME 2 and is not a good citizen in GNOME 3. Mainly because of its multi-window nature. Having a separate roster window makes sense if the app uses a status icon, and when you close the roster window, it stays online, and you can always bring it back from the status icon. Empathy used to work that way, but in GNOME 3 status icons were declared deprecated. Empathy now doesn’t have the status icon and if you close the roster window, it goes offline, so if you want to stay online, you need to have a roster window floating around all the time.
David King announced on April 19 the immediate availability for download and testing of EasyTAG 2.3.6, one of the best open-source audio tag editor applications for MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis files, supported under GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows computer operating systems.
After announcing the second maintenance release of LibreOffice 4.4 at the beginning of April, the Document Foundation seeded this past weekend to testers worldwide the first Release Candidate of upcoming LibreOffice 4.4.3, the third point release of the acclaimed open-source office suite.
Following in the foot steps of Wine 1.7.41, Wine-Staging 1.7.41 has been released as the re-based version of this version of Wine with various testing/experimental patches.
At the beginning of the year was the announcement of the C4 Engine dropping Linux support with its lead developer referring to Linux as "Frankenstein OS" and citing numerous difficulties with Linux. However, quietly this game engine seems to be back to supporting Linux.
Chroma Squad is a game I've been following for a while, and the release is nearly upon us. Will you be grabbing a copy?
The Battle for Wesnoth, a free, turn-based tactical strategy game with a fantasy theme, featuring both single-player, and online/hot seat multiplayer combat, has been upgraded to version 1.13.0.
Noufal, even though not a KDE user, did an amazing job of showing how powerful, small & reusable utilities can be, when combined creatively.
Approximatelty three days after announcing the first point release of GNOME Builder 3.16 integrated development environment utility for the GNOME 3.16.1 desktop environment, Christian Hergert presents a second maintenance release that contains more bug fixes.
While many of you are still enjoying the recently released GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, the GNOME developers have started working on the next major version, GNOME 3.18, due for release at the end of September 2015.
GNOME developers are busy working on the 3.17/3.18 series following last month's successful release of GNOME 3.16. As usual, developers are planning to have this next release out in late September.
4MRescueKit is a relatively new Linux operating systems Linux distro that is comprised of various tools that can help users make changes from outside of another OS. A new update has been released for 4MRescueKit.
KaOS is a Linux distribution built from scratch that makes use of a customized KDE desktop environment and that is developed according to a rolling release model. A new version has been made available, and it's ready for download.
We discussed last week the possibility of removal of Empathy, a multi-protocol instant messaging client used by default in the GNOME desktop environment and many popular GNU/Linux operating systems, from the GNOME Project because of lack of development progress.
Our Easter present this year from Linus Torvalds was Linux kernel 4.0, a release that brought the new Linux kernel patching infrastructure everyone talks about these days. Also known as live patching, the new functionality won't require users to reboot their systems each time the kernel packages were updated.
The third release candidate for the installer of Debian 8.0 "Jessie" is now available for last minute testing.
The Debian project has a new Project Leader, Neil McGovern, and he was elected just like any politician. He presented a list of promises about what he would do or try to do if he becomes a leader and one of those is about PPA support.
The OnePlus One Ubuntu Touch port is doing great, and a lot of work is being put into it. In fact, it looks like this platform will soon be supported MultiROM Manager, a powerful application that allows users to install easily the operating system from Canonical.
In a recent article entitled "Tendering with Ubuntu," Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, revealed the fact that the world's most popular free operating system now counts over 20 millions of user, as well as that the Ubuntu Linux is adopted by more and more people each day.
Ubuntu Touch users are reporting significant battery improvements after the last major update that was released by Canonical at the end of last week.
A fresh Ubuntu Touch update was made available just a few days ago, and it was received very well by the community, but Canonical also introduced a new feature called phased updates.
Christian Dywan announced on April 20 that Midori, a web browser used in several lightweight distributions of GNU/Linux, including elementary OS, reached version 0.5.10, a maintenance release that resolved numerous issues reported by users since the previous version of the application, Midori 0.5.9.
There has been some great work done with getting Tizen running on different development boards, and today I am pleased to see that its the time for the Raspberry PI 2 Dev Board to get some Tizen love courtesy of the Samsung Open Source group. Tizen is an Important Operating System (OS) within Internet of Things (IoT) and therefore it made sense for Tizen to come to the Raspberry Pi, which is the most popular single-board computer with more than 5 million sold.
Details on pricing and availability are now official for Sony's 2015 televisions, and the company is focusing on 4K and charging a mint for many models. New for many sets is Android TV, while HDR arrives on the flagships.
If you are a user of the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and the Galaxy Note Edge having subscribed to US Cellular's wireless network services, then do check your devices for the Google Android Lollipop OS update, which is now on an active roll-out in the US.
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.
The Google Play Store today introduced a new section to highlight haptic games, titled “Games You Can Feel” according to an article on ThaiVisa. The Google Play section currently features 15 games from various developers including Angry Birds Friends and several Grand Theft Auto offerings. Every game in the featured section was designed using haptic technology Touchsense Engage, from California company Immersion. Touchsense Engage launched officially on March 31 and was announced in a press release from Immersion.
Fossdroid changes that, and presents all these open source applications in a much clearer and nicer fashion. It also adds popularity and what's new lists, making it just a little easier to find the open source application you're looking for. There's still some things to be addressed, it's a well-done website.
Google’s wearable-friendly Android Wear OS is bound to get a new important update in the upcoming weeks. It’s high time Google revamped its platform, since the previous major update rolled out back in October.
Finding new software is a breeze for Linux users. The Linux desktop offers powerful, easy-to-use open-source applications for everything you need, just a few clicks away in your Linux distribution’s package manager. The programs are free, too—and you don’t have to dodge the installer crapware you do on Windows.
But which of those programs are right for you? We have answers. The applications highlighted here are the pick of the litter for the average Linux user looking to stock up on software. Heck, these particular applications are so good that almost all of them are available on other platforms and are popular even among Windows users.
Say what you want about the Linux desktop—it’s a much more capable, mature environment than the WinRT environment in Windows 8. Chrome OS and its Chrome apps still can’t match Linux's power, either.
Communities can be as simple as a person having a campfire and someone else joining them. If you're a commerce-minded campfire owner, it's about what other people need to trade to sit beside it. If you're a government-minded campfire owner, it's about when you need to implement a firewood tax so that you can maintain the fire. And social structures manifest in very straightforward ways. Every village has its idiot. Every playground has its bully.
As you may have noticed, a lot of software has a lot of bugs. Even open source code has them, but the main damage tends to come from certain well-known, widely-used proprietary programs - not forgetting well-known, widely-used open source programs with proprietary layers like Android. In fact, some estimates put the annual damage caused by serious software flaws in the hundreds of billions of pounds range, which probably means that many trillions of pounds' value has been destroyed thanks to buggy, flawed software over the years.
There’s a dark underside to open source culture. Chris Kelly from GitHub says because anyone can take part in open source, the door is open to assholes (he’s American, I’d prefer to say arseholes). That includes bullying white men with a sense of entitlement. Things often end up argumentative.
He says this culture can frighten off outsiders, only a few women coders work in open source and the movement is missing out on the benefits of diversity. There’s a clear need to deal with this and to improve communications between people working in open source.
We're working on ways to make the code smaller, less work to bug fix, and related things to keep the project fun.
Last week in Columbia, South Carolina, the developers’ conference POSSCON went through something of a reboot. Last year the conference was cancelled to allow It-oLogy, the organization behind the event, to put its energy behind launching the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. This year, with last year’s successful premiere of the Hotlanta event under its belt, IT-oLogy pulled-out all the stops to reestablish POSSCON.
This conference is open to the public, and registration is free. Libre Graphics Meeting is four days of talks, workshops, and hack sessions about free/libre and open source software for software developers, artists, designers, users, and other contributors. This year, the conference will be held in Toronto from April 29 to May 2.
The newest Chrome Beta channel release includes Web MIDI support, new features to improve security and compatibility and a number of small changes to enable developers to build more powerful web applications. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS.
Big data leaders are really converging around the Open Data Platform, recently announced by Pivotal, which we covered here. Hortonworks, IBM and Pivotal have announced that they are essentially harmonizing their Hadoop and data analytics strategies.
RethinkDB is an open-source scalable database for what its makers call "the real time web", but what does real time data supply mean in terms of the way web-centric applications function today?
The Gnuastro webpage ( http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/ ) was activated and the documentation is now available. There is still a lot of work to do until it is ready for release though.
The latest version of GNU HURD is out. If you're asking, "What is GNU HURD?" you're probably in good company. But as the open source kernel that was supposed to do what Linux ended up doing—provide the core for a cross-platform, Unix-like operating system whose code would be freely shared—the HURD is important. That it is still being actively developed three decades after its launch is worth remarking.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, the Unified School District Board of Education told its attorneys that they should consider litigation against Apple and Pearson. (Pearson developed the iPad curriculum as an Apple contractor.) District counsel David Holmquist said that Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines “made the decision that he wanted to put them on notice, Pearson in particular, that he’s dissatisfied with their product.” In a letter to Apple, the school district wrote that it won't continue to pay for the Pearson curriculum or services. And board members are calling for a refund.
Emergency crews responded to a structure fire in Canyon County Friday night that caused some confusion.
Paul Haggis, the filmmaker and prominent ex-Scientologist whose story formed the backbone of Alex Gibney’s Scientology expose “Going Clear,” has alleged that a spy from the church pretended to be a Time reporter in order to get an interview with him.
According to Haggis, on April 7th he received an email from someone named Mark Webber, who claimed to be a Time magazine reporter seeking to interview Haggis for a piece about the “golden age of film.”
Surely only a modern-day Luddite would disagree. Well, maybe not. Because it seems to me that the march of progress doesn’t always keep everything in step.
While many things are gained by any great leap forward, other things are lost. When the CD was introduced in 1985, music fans were in raptures.
Albums would never again get scratched, and CDs were so much better to play in the car than those cassettes on which the tape was liable to stretch or snap. What’s more, CDs were easier to store than those large pancakes of vinyl we used to love.
But 30 years on, as Record Store Day showed at the weekend, those pancakes are making a comeback, with two million expected to be sold in Britain this year. Apparently, while CDs may be handier, the good old LP offers a warmer sound than the compressed noise we get on digital.
And there’s a 50:50 chance of a Three Mile Island-scale disaster in the next 10 years, according to the largest statistical analysis of nuclear accidents ever undertaken.
A life-like android robot marked her first day at work as a receptionist at a major department store in Tokyo, Japan on Monday, greeting customers as they walked in.
United Airlines stopped a prominent security researcher from boarding a California-bound flight late Saturday, following a social media post by the researcher days earlier suggesting the airline's onboard systems could be hacked.
Chris Roberts will have a lot to say next week at RSA Conference 2015 where he is scheduled to present a talk “Security Hopscotch” after his experience this week being hauled in by the FBI, apparently for tweeting about “playing with” the onboard communications systems of the plane he was traveling on.
At least 26 people were killed by a Saudi-led bombing in Yemen's capital, including a journalist at a nearby television station headquarters.
Oxfam has vehemently condemned yesterday's Coalition airstrike on one of its storage facilities in Saada Governorate in northern Yemen.
Grace Ommer, Oxfam's country director in Yemen said: "This is an absolute outrage particularly when one considers that we have shared detailed information with the Coalition on the locations of our offices and storage facilities. The contents of the warehouse had no military value. It only contained humanitarian supplies associated with our previous work in Saada, bringing clean water to thousands of households. Thankfully, no one was killed in this particular airstrike although conservative estimates put the death toll in the country as a whole, since the conflict began, at around 760 - the majority of which are civilians."
Dozens of people were feared dead after an airstrike on Monday morning by a Saudi-led military coalition set off a huge explosion that flattened homes in the Yemeni capital, according to witnesses.
The explosion shattered windows and shook buildings miles from the site of the attack, in the Faj Attan area of the capital, Sana. The wounded were taken to a nearby hospital in a stream of ambulances and trucks, and medical workers called for blood donations.
Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz received Britain’s special envoy for the Middle East quartet and former Prime Minister Tony Blair in his palace in Riyadh on Sunday, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported.
Despite a decline in military spending since 2010, U.S. defense expenditures are still 45 percent higher than they were before the 9/11 terror attacks put the country on a seemingly permanent war footing.
And despite massive regional buildups spurred by conflict in the Ukraine and the Middle East, the U.S. spends more on its military than the next seven top-spending countries combined, according to new figures compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler has written an excellent law-review article on the need for a whistleblower defense. And there’s this excellent article by David Pozen on why government leaks are, in general, a good thing. I wrote about the value of whistleblowers in Data and Goliath.
Way back in June 2013, Glenn Greenwald said that “courage is contagious.” He seems to be correct.
This year is turning out to be a banner one for flawed proposals that would allow businesses to share information about Americans’ online activity with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the name of cybersecurity. First came the White House plan in January, then the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) — which passed the Senate Intelligence Committee on a 14-1 vote earlier this month — and on Tuesday, the House introduced the Protecting Cyber Networks Act.
When asked whether he would have supported working with the producers of Zero Dark Thirty, Department of Defense’s Director of Entertainment Media said he would not have recommended working with screenwriter Mark Boal and director Katherine Bigelow, because he was not happy with the way their movie Hurt Locker had presented the military. But he was not given a choice. “These senior people do whatever they want,” the Director told DOD’s Inspector General, according to a draft of the IG’s report on the leaks of classified information to Boal and Bigelow.
The Project on Government Oversight released the draft this week.
The Director’s comments are all the more telling given how much more centrally this draft of the report — as compared to another POGO obtained and released — point to the role of then CIA Director Leon Panetta and his Chief of Staff, Jeremy Bash, in leading the government to cooperate on the movie.
In recent years, we have seen The Guardian consult itself into cinematic history—in the Jason Bourne films and others—as a hip, ultra-modern, intensely British newspaper with a progressive edge, a charmingly befuddled giant of investigative journalism with a cast-iron spine.
The Snowden Files positions The Guardian as central to the Edward Snowden affair, elbowing out more significant players like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for Guardian stablemates, often with remarkably bad grace.
"Disputatious gay" Glenn Greenwald's distress at the U.K.'s detention of his husband, David Miranda, is described as "emotional" and "over-the-top." My WikiLeaks colleague Sarah Harrison—who helped rescue Snowden from Hong Kong—is dismissed as a "would-be journalist."
An oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been continuously flowing into the sea for more than 10 years after a hurricane – however the amount that has been leaking was grossly understated.
An investigation by The Associated Press found evidence showing that the spill is much worse than the authorities and company who owns the site initially believed.
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico five years ago today, killing 11 men and sending nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the sea. After the well was finally plugged, the national media went home, but the story is still very much unfolding everywhere from federal courtrooms to Louisiana backyards.
The dispersant most often used during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill might cause damage to cells in human lungs and in the gills of fish and crabs, according to a study published Thursday in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Running Sergey Brin’s family affairs is a full-time job—and it takes dozens of people. The Google co-founder, who’s worth about $30 billion, has ex-bankers and philanthropy experts working at his family office, Bayshore Global Management. Brin also has employed a former Navy SEAL for security, a yacht captain, a fitness coordinator, a photographer, and an archivist, according to profiles on LinkedIn.
For Americans who like to eat out occasionally, the full-service restaurant industry is full of relatively affordable options—think Olive Garden, Applebees, or Chili's. But these spots aren't exactly a bargain once a hefty hidden cost is factored in: The amount of taxpayer assistance that goes to workers earning little pay.
Food service workers have more than twice the poverty rate of the overall workforce, and thus more often seek out public benefits. A new report published last week by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), a restaurant workers' advocacy and assistance group, calculated the tab and found that from 2009 to 2013, regular Americans subsidized the industry's low wages with nearly $9.5 billion in tax money each year. That number includes spending from roughly 10 different assistance programs, including Medicaid, food stamps, and low-income housing programs like Section 8.
So now we have deserving and undeserving migrants. Police in Sicily arrested 15 Muslim boat people rescued from a leaky rubber dinghy after other survivors accused them of having thrown 12 Christian passengers overboard in a dispute about religion. Perhaps this new moral category may help ease European consciences over the 22,000 desperate people who have died crossing the Mediterranean from Africa since the year 2000. We now have innocent migrants to contrast with guilty ones, good migrants and bad, or perhaps we should say bad migrants and worse migrants.
We can add that to our existing hierarchy of moral culpability. Refugees are somehow accorded an ethical superiority over economic migrants because they are escaping persecution, rather than merely wanting a better life. Yet, in Africa, the migrant is celebrated as a contemporary hero, the daring risk-taker.
WikiLeaks has published all the Sony emails that had been hacked last November, and made them searchable by keyword. In 2014, a senior executive emailed an Ivy League vice-president of philanthropy: he’d like to endow a scholarship, anonymously, ‘at the $1mm level’. In another email, he tells a development officer that his daughter is applying to the college as her first choice. It’s all very decorous. The development staff arrange a ‘customised’ campus tour for his daughter and a meeting with the university’s president; but he asks for no favours and nothing is promised. An email from the president says that his daughter’s application will be looked at ‘very closely’. She gets in. He writes to his sister: ‘David… called me. he is obsessed with getting his eldest in Harvard next year.’ She replies: ‘If David wants to get his daughter in he should obviously start giving money.’ Obviously.
There were a lot of bad days during the Cold War, but 54 years ago this weekend was one of the worst, at least for the United States. President John F. Kennedy sent an army of anti-Castro exiles backed by the CIA onto the beach at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs to suffer bloody, catastrophic defeat. It was “the beating of our lives,” the despondent Kennedy would say a few days later as he wondered aloud why nobody had talked him out of it.
One of the piquant questions of Cold War history is, could the Miami Herald have done that — talked him out of it? In a little-known collision of journalism and national security, the Herald, seven months before the Bay of Pigs, had prepared a news story saying that the United States was planning to launch a military operation against Cuba. But the paper’s top management killed the story after CIA Director Allen Dulles said publishing it would hurt national security.
Like most online services, GitHub occasionally receives legal requests relating to user accounts and content, such as subpoenas or takedown notices. You may wonder how often we receive such requests or how we respond to them, and how they could potentially impact your projects. Transparency and trust are essential to GitHub and the open-source community, and we want to do more than just tell you how we respond to legal notices. In that spirit, here is our first transparency report on the user-related legal requests we received in 2014.
Holy moly, ACCAN has issued a submission on the Copyright Amendment Bill 2015 regarding VPNs, website blocking, whack-a-mole and more.
ACCAN, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, has made a 10-page submission on the Copyright Amendment (Online Infrigement) Bill 2015.
HBO has started to crack down on paying customers who access the HBO Now service from outside the United States. Subscribers from countries including Canada, the UK, Germany and Australia who use VPNs and other unblocking tools are now being threatened with account terminations.
The National Security Agency had released a mascot (?) for Earth Day (??) and it’s an anthropomorphized and oddly buff recycling bin named Dunk (???).
Earth Day is this Wednesday, and the NSA apparently forged Dunk from the ether of our collective nightmares as part of its STEM education partnership with Maryland schools.
The German government backed away on Monday from a steadfast refusal to use the term "genocide" to describe the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces 100 years ago after rebellious members of parliament forced its hand.
In a major reversal in Turkey's top trading partner in the European Union and home to millions of Turks, Germany joins other nations and institutions including France, the European parliament and Pope Francis in using the term condemned by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.
The Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (EDA) and the Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM) have initiated the Geneva Internet Platform (GIP), which fulfils the mission of an observatory, a capacity building centre (online and in situ), and a centre for discussion. The GIP is hosted by DiploFoundation.
On 3rd March 2015, the Council of the European Union voted a text endangering Net Neutrality in Europe, despite European Parliment's position adopted a year ago. Negotiations between the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union (trialogue) started on 11 March in order to settle an agreement on the final version. It is crucial that the European Parliament remains firm on the preservation of Net Neutrality, that ensure equal treatment on the data network and on prices. Infringing Net Neutrality means infringing fundamental rights and liberties of any European citizen. This is why, in order to remind our representatives their responsabilities, La Quadrature du Net sends a letter to Members of European Parliament calling them to reject Council's propositions and to come back to a real protection of everyone's rights and liberties.
Mark Zuckerberg's Internet.org project bribes corrupt, non-neutral carriers in poor countries to exempt Facebook and other services of its choosing from their data-caps, giving the world's poorest an Internet that's been radically pruned to a sliver of what the rest of the world gets for free.
Internet.org characterizes its goals as charitable and development-oriented. In their framework, poor people either face severe data-caps that limit their access to the Internet to almost nothing, or they get unlimited access to some of the Internet, thanks to Internet.org's largesse.
Sky customers are continuing to report difficulties cancelling their contracts despite a crackdown by the regulator and a promise from Sky’s senior management last year that it would make it easier for customers to leave.
Net neutrality has become a raging issue in the country and over the last one month everybody has been talking about it. Net neutrality is the concept that makes it mandatory for all service providers to offer access to consumers to all content on the internet including websites and applications, irrespective of the source and no special favors or blocking of any applications or websites.
As many as 300 protesters took to the streets of Warsaw to voice their disapproval of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Broadcast media has not devoted much air time to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, an agreement that will greatly impact 40 percent of the global economy. But hacked emails from Sony reveal that media industry executives have been engaged in active discussions about the agreement behind closed doors.
MSNBC TV personality Joe Scarborough pled “guilty” to not giving the major Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal enough coverage when I spoke to him about the issue over the weekend.
I caught up with the Morning Joe cohost at the First in the Nation conference in Nashua, New Hampshire, a gathering of potential Republican presidential candidates and local activists. Scarborough spoke onstage about the importance of media diversity, encouraging his audience to listen to all sides of the ideological spectrum.
An attorney for Sony Pictures Entertainment is demanding media outlets ignore a new WikiLeaks database of internal documents obtained during a high-profile hack last year. The searchable archive, published Thursday, contains more than 200,000 documents and emails from a cyberattack that created a public relations nightmare for the studio, and which the U.S. government linked to North Korea.
Lawyer David Boies sent a warning letter regarding use of the database to news outlets on Friday. The Hollywood Reporter said that it received the letter, and Bloomberg News reported it had reviewed the letter as well.
British Prime Minister David Cameron met with representatives from Sony Pictures just ten weeks before the Scottish independence referendum to discuss the release of a TV show based on Scotland's repression under British rule, documents released by WikiLeaks have revealed.
Top Hollywood bosses enjoy a strong relationship with the Israeli government and various pro-Israel lobbying groups across the United States, according to a cache of Sony internal emails leaked to Wikileaks and published for the first time last week.
The emails reveal a dinner between Sony executives and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; the presenter of American X-Factor chiding actress Natalie Portman aggressively for her views on Israel; meetings between top entertainment chiefs and the Israeli consulate-general; close ties between Sony's Co-Chairperson and various pro-Israel lobbying groups; and film chiefs planning, in detail, a new documentary about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, about which the emails also reflect rising concern.
Dr. Mehmet Oz often appears on his popular show to promote new health products and devices. Most viewers are likely under the impression that he's doing this because he's closely considered their merits and decided the products are widely beneficial.
But newly leaked emails suggest that business considerations — not health or science — can be a driving factor in which products Oz decides to promote.