False. False. And yet again, false. New users today are accustomed to technology. They use smartphones, navigate an endless amount of complicated websites, and so much more. And, surprisingly enough, the Linux UI is just as point and clicky as is Windows.
There are so many more "myths" that can be busted with Linux... but I think you get the point. For those that haven't tried Linux (yet still, oddly enough, complain about it), I highly recommend you give it a whirl. Download an ISO, burn it onto a disk, and boot it up. You'll be pleasantly surprised at just how user-friendly the platform is.
On the other hand, Purism is the only such “ideologically pure” project delivering the latest hardware and it does promise to actually work on these issues. If you do want high-end, current hardware, a Librem laptop offers a better free software experience than a MacBook, a Windows 10 ultrabook, or even Dell’s sleek Linux laptops, which simply plop Ubuntu on popular XPS notebooks designed primarily for Windows. Many people who support the idea of free and open PCs will want the latest hardware, and the Purism Librem offers it—even if it’s less ideologically pure than something like the LibreBoot X200.
Chromebooks are cheap, fast, secure, and work well. Really, what more do you need for your classroom computer?
Supercomputers are serious things, called on to do serious computing. They tend to be engaged in serious pursuits like atomic bomb simulations, climate modeling and high-level physics. Naturally, they cost serious money. At the very top of the latest Top500 supercomputer ranking is the Tianhe-2 supercomputer at China’s National University of Defense Technology. It cost about $390 million to build.
In a move that heralds the coming together of OpenStack and Docker containers, CoreOS and Mirantis today unveiled an alliance under which the OpenStack distribution from Mirantis will be integrated with a Tectonic distribution of Linux from CoreOS optimized for Linux containers.
On August 6, Ben Hutchings announced the release and immediate availability for download of the seventy maintenance release of the long-term supported Linux 3.2 kernel.
A few days after writing about a Linux driver coming for DisplayLink's USB 3.0-based hardware, they've released a binary driver for Ubuntu.
This message was posted to the DisplayLink Forums, "We’re pleased to announce the first version of DisplayLink support for Ubuntu is now available...We intend to maintain Ubuntu support, but have designed the driver in such a way, it should be possible to port the driver to other distributions."
Support for utilizing the new AMDGPU DRM driver found in Linux 4.2 and newer has been added to Mesa's DRM library (libdrm).
The many AMDGPU Libdrm patches just made their way into the mainline Git tree! This is needed for interfacing by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with this new DRM kernel driver supporting the Radeon R9 285 "TONGA", Carrizo, and Fury/Fiji GPUs coming with Linux 4.3.
A number of the patches fix "the current mess of different speeds and add a bit of clarity... [two of the patches] should help greatly here," Peter noted. The other patches further split up the pointer acceleration code as a step towards eventually allowing per-device custom processing.
Earlier this week I ran some Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, the latest AAA game that's been ported to Linux. Those results showed the Linux version of this game running much slower than Windows, so while having a Win10 installation around I decided to also run some fresh OpenGL Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks on some older titles. Here are those results.
Its feature set far exceeds the functionality of traditional plain text note-taking apps for Linux users, such as Tomboy, Xournal, NoteCase Pro and Treeliner.
For those still relying on the Subversion version control system, v1.9 is out for this Apache Software Foundation project.
Subversion 1.9 overhauls its FSFS default file-system format with a new design geared for I/O reduction, FSX as a new experimental repository backend alternative to FSFS, new svn CLI sub-commands, and various server-side improvements.
darktable 1.6.8 arrives for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems with support for new standard color matrices, white balance presets, noise profiles, and raw speed improvements.
Opera Software today announced that it has acquired Brazil-based Bemobi, the maker of Apps Club, a subscription-based marketplace for highly rated Android apps that people in emerging markets can easily access. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Apps Club showcases mobile apps in a way that’s different from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Rather than look the same on all Android or iOS devices, the Apps Club shows up on certain mobile devices as a result of partnerships with mobile carriers and device makers. Partners include Telefonica, Samsung, and Positivo. Device owners don’t pay for apps through the Apps Club. Instead, the system is integrated into carrier billing systems.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - DirectWrite is now good enough for rendering text in Steam. - A number of Direct2D improvements. - Some more OpenMP functions. - Support for namespaces in the IDL compiler. - Various bug fixes.
Paradox Development Studios revealed at Gamescom one of the big secret projects they have been working on. So far, everything looks awesome!
It seems Nvidia are getting more invested in Linux, and this makes me rather happy. At SIGGRAPH 2015 on Sunday Nvidia is doing a number of talks, and two are very interesting for us Linux folks.
Between 9-10AM (LA Time) Nvidia will be hosting a "Vulkan on NVIDIA GPUs" talk, and that's incredibly exciting. I now fully expect them to be the first ones out the door with Vulkan in their official drivers. I know Valve are doing experimental Intel drivers, but this is Nvidia doing it officially.
After a successful campaign on both PC and Mac, Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! is being released on Linux on the 7th of August.
We love horror games here (hi Samsai), and Tangiers looks so freaky that it's exciting me. I'm going to see to it that Samsai (our video specialist) does a nice stream on it for you pleasure too.
Homefront: The Revolution is a FPS game from Crytek built on CryENGINE and published by Deep Silver. A Linux version was announced a long time ago, and it looks like it's still happening.
An improved version of the PS4 version with tutorials, nogore mode, team deathmatch and many other changes
Arma 3 is a massive military sandbox FPS developed and published by Bohemia Interactive on Steam. Developers have said that the Linux version of the game is on the works.
KDE announced a few minutes ago that the Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming KDE Applications 15.08 software suite for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment is available for download and testing.
A Coruña is located on the Atlantic front and on my way there, I encountered rainy spots and the rain was a familiar one for me, after having lived several years in northern France (Paris and Pays de la Loire). But this time I actually found it quite enjoyable, knowing that I left behind a 39€°-heated Lyon. So, yes, A Coruña is warmer than what we could encounter in other parts of Spain. I shared my car with Sandro Knauß, who came to Lyon from Germany by train, so the one full-day trip was quite nice, KDE hacking-oriented. But be assured, we were also able to talk lots of other topics.
One of the outcomes of the survey we did for Evolving KDE was that we need to get more clarity on our vision, strategy and focus. At Akademy we had many discussions to explore more how we all see this topic. We discussed what different contributors think KDE’s vision and focus should be. We tried to clarify what it actually means for KDE to have a vision, strategy and focus. And we talked about ways to get to a vision that would work for KDE.
Intel Bug Bites KDE Plasma 5: From the it’s-KDE4-all-over-again desk, Softpedia reported this week that users of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop — primarily those using Kubuntu 15.04 and OpenSUSE, though on other distributions running KDE as well — may be encountering crashes thanks to a bug outlined by KDE’s Martin Sandsmark on the KDE mailing list. The Softpedia article states that a bug in the Intel graphics stack crashes various OpenGL applications running atop the KDE Plasma 5 desktop, but there is a workaround for the problem which is outlined in both the article and in Sandsmark’s email to the KDE list. Hopefully this will just be a proverbial blip on the radar screen and the folks at KDE will put this behind them.
Eike Ziller announced the release today of the release candidate for Qt Creator 3.5.
The digiKam Team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.12.0. This release is the result of another huge bugs triage on KDE bugzilla where more than 145 files have been closed. Thanks to Maik Qualmann who maintain KDE4 version while KF5 port and GSoC 2015 projects are in progress. Both are planed to be completed before end of this year.
Plasma Mobile is a new project from the KDE developers that is based on Ubuntu Touch, among other technologies. It took everyone by surprise, including the Ubuntu developers who were working on the initial project. Now we have a few new mockups for Plasma Mobile, and they look absolutely stunning.
For those wondering about the latest work done by the KDE Visual Design Group (VDG), they have more beautiful icons coming for Plasma 5.4.
For the Plasma 5.4 release, the Breeze icon set has been expanded from 1,600 icons to 3,000 icons. The Breeze icon set still isn't finished, but is getting into good shape for standard KDE apps plus some GTK applications like Firefox and LibreOffice.
I hope you enjoy the plasma 5.4 release. The VDG investigate a lot into a consistent user experience and therefore we updated the Breeze icon set from 1.600 to 3.000 icons (plasma 5.3 to 5.4).
The GNOME Project released a new milestone of the upcoming GTK+ 3.18 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit that will be used in the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, as well as other OSes, including Mac OS X.
The GTK+ 3.17.6 update, the latest in a string of releases leading up to GNOME 3.18 and GTK+ 3.18 in September, has mostly a random smothering of fixes/improvements.
GTK+ 3.17.6 has fixes for OS X like correcting window maximization, GTK+ on X11 restores support for copy-paste across multiple screens, Wayland display and monitor information is available now from the GtkInspector, more gtk-demos, CSS improvements, and a variety of other changes.
Elementary OS is a really nice Linux distribution and if you are a computer user who has no interest in learning about the command line and you just want to use your computer for playing music, videos and games then it is perfect.
The effort that has gone into the desktop environment really pays dividends as it really is easy to use. Couple this with the ease in which it is possible to set up printers, scanners, audio devices and other peripherals and you have a really good operating system.
After releasing a new stable build of his popular Clonezilla Live project, an open-source disk cloning Live CD utility based on the Clonezilla software, Steven Shiau unveiled on August 6 the stable build of GParted Live 0.23.0-1 project.
Linux Lite 2.6 Beta is now available for testing. After months of dedicated development by the team and outsourced developers, we're proud to announce the release of the Linux Lite Control Center. Linux Lite Control Center aims to provide one central location for everything that you needed to configure your computer. We're also pleased to announce the inclusion of Systemback, a versatile tool that makes it easy to create backups of the system and the users configuration files. Linux Lite is now deployed across large networks and systems, Systemback allows the creation of a custom version of Linux Lite that can then be deployed to multiple machines in a given scenario. See below for more information on both of these new applications in Linux Lite.
Project, through Douglas DeMaio, send an interesting email to the official openSUSE Announce mailing list informing us all about the work done so far for the Tumbleweed and Leap versions of the openSUSE Linux operating system.
The Tumbleweed install media have been broken for the last two weeks. If used from a USB flash drive, the installer cannot be booted in UEFI mode. Apparently it can still be booted with UEFI if it is actually burned to a DVD. However, I prefer to install with a USB, so I decided to give it a try in spite of the problems. I had actually wanted to test whether a UEFI install can be done when the install media is not UEFI bootable. So this was a good time to test that.
More than half of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) developers responding to a recent survey indicated they have no plans to develop Internet of Things applications this year. This was among the findings from an application development survey from TechValidate.
Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) has received a consensus recommendation of “Buy” from the thirty-one analysts that are currently covering the firm, Analyst Ratings Network.com reports.
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS Linux 6.7 and install media for i386 and x86_64 Architectures.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has received a short term rating of hold from research analysts at Zacks with a rank of 3. The company has been rated an average of 1.5 by 21 Wall Street Analysts. 14 analysts have added the shares in their list of strong buys. 3 stock experts have also rated a buy. 4 analysts have advised hold.
For the past two months, I've worked as a field marketing intern at Red Hat. I knew the organization would differ starkly from the rank-centric hierarchy I'd experienced during my nine years in the United States Army, but I still encountered aspects of working in an open organization that I did not expect.
Linux distros have started to phase out support for 32-bit processors a while back, although the big names aren't doing this yet. Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, and most of the big ones still provide support for them, although it's starting to take a toll. Fedora is a good example, and one of the developers has explained why it's actually causing them problems.
There’s less than week until Fedora Flock 2015 in Rochester, New York! This will be my first ever trip to New York and I’m looking forward to it!
Firefox has been criticized by users for not fitting well in Fedora Workstation. Although it improved with the new interface called Australis, it still doesn’t feel as native as GNOME Web (Epiphany). It’s not likely it will close the gap any time soon for two reasons:
Today in Linux news Fedora 23 Alpha is a go for next Tuesday. Clement Lefebvre announced the images for Linux Mint 17.2 KDE and Xfce and Neil Rickert shared results of his latest test install of openSUSE's Tumbleweed. Elsewhere, Jack Germain reviewed MyNotex and Chris Hoffman examined Purism Librem laptops Open Source credentials.
After having a second Fedora 23 Alpha Go/No-Go meeting, the developers behind the popular Fedora Linux distribution announced that the Alpha build of Fedora 23 will be available for download and testing through the official channels on August 11, according to the release schedule.
I am going to look into those troubles within the next work and proceed with the integration. By considering the options given by my mentor Suchakra I am going to implement the links of ALL, UNANSWERED and FOLLOWED links in the header containing the no. of questions. And I am going to implement them as options which would clearly indicate which one is currently selected. I am going to experiment with that also during the next week.
We had a late-breaking problem with the cloud image and some drama with desktop wallpaper and with booting KDE on ARM, but the various groups involved in release logistics wrangled solutions and workarounds, so at today’s “Go/No-Go” meeting, we approved the Tuesday release. If you’re curious, see the meeting minutes for the process that Fedora goes through to make sure the release is ready.
July was the third month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella.
The Debian Project has announced that the DebConf15, an Annual Debian Conference, will take place in Heidelberg, Germany, between August 15 and August 22, 2015, this being the first DebConf event organized in Germany.
The first Release Candidate of Tails 1.5, the amnesic incognito Live CD distribution used by Edward Snowden to browse web sites anonymously and stay invisible online, has been announced on August 6, 2015.
Today, August 6, Canonical, through Adam Conrad, had the great pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the third point release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system.
Aside from the Ubuntu Software Center on the desktop frustrating some users over being slow and outdated compared to other "software stores", some app developers are also unhappy with Canonical's handling of the USC for paid apps.
Ubuntu app developer Michaà â Rosiak wrote a Google+ post last month over "deep frustration related to Canonical’s approach to developers."
As you may already know, Canonical is currently active developing Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Touch, Snappy Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu Desktop Next.
Last week Ubuntu 15.10 transitioned over to GCC 5 and switching over to this major compiler update plus the associated libstdc++6 ABI changes is causing headaches for some developers.
Cards Against Humanity is a new party card game that's become incredibly famous in the past few months. It's been localized to several regions, and now it looks like an app is also available for the Ubuntu Touch platform.
One of the big problems for the Ubuntu phones was that they weren't available for the US market. That problem has been partially fixed now with the release of the Bq Aquaris Ubuntu phones for everyone.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
We have expanded our hardware enablement offering since 12.04, and with 14.04.3, this point release contains an updated kernel and X stack for new installations to support new hardware across all our supported architectures, not just x86.
As the first ever Ubuntu Phone the BQ Aquaris E45 Ubuntu Edition had the potential to wow and prove there's life beyond Apple and Android, but unfortunately it fails.
By simply slapping it on a budget Android handset, both Canonical and BQ missed out on releasing a handset that was tailor-made for the Ubuntu Phone experience and that could show off its full potential.
On August 7, Canonical, the company behind the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, was proud to announce the launch of a brand-new Scope for its Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used in several Ubuntu phones.
A new Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 has been announced for Raspberry Pi 2, and users have been advised to re-flash their systems as soon as possible.
Bodhi is a Ubuntu based Linux distribution, known for being lightweight and highly customizable. It comes with Moksha Desktop Environment and uses lightweight windows manager known as Enlightenment. The installer for this operating system is hardly around 550 MBs in size and it installs pretty fast; because it comes with only minimal set of software applications pre-installed as it claims to give user full control on how to populate their system with their required applications after the installation. The development team is working on completing the next major release Bodhi 3.1.0, so they have made Pre-Release version of this distribution available for download and testing. In this way, dev team will be able to fix any reported bugs and users will be able to get familiar with the look & feel, and working of new operating system.
The final version of Linux Mint 17.2 "Rafaela" KDE edition has been released and is now ready for download. The distribution comes with a large number of changes and improvements, although there is nothing too exciting.
NI unveiled new CompactRIO and CompactDAQ controllers that run NI Linux Real-Time on quad-core Atom SoCs, and also upgraded its FlexRIO and RIO controllers.
NI (National Instruments) has upgraded its line of industrial and data acquisition controllers, which run the company’s hardened NI Linux Real-Time Linux distribution and use its LabVIEW reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture. The new products replace last year’s CompactRIO control system, which combined a dual-core Intel Atom E3825 system-on-chip with a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA, as well as the 2014 edition of the CompactDAQ data acquisition controller, which has the same Atom E3825, but lacks the FPGA.
I have already a script ready that enriches this new big dictionary automatically with definitions from the Edict project, so everyone can now update his own dictionary easily. I will write a blog entry about this soon.
I won a Raspberry Pi Geocache kit and it arrived yesterday, so I decided to go ahead and pursue my wish to have a vlog, and what better opportunity than now.
AirWatch has released the latest edition of their enterprise mobility management platform, AirWatch 8.1. The main areas of Improvements are expanded OS support, administrative and serviceability upgrades, and enterprise readiness features. The new release also encompasses support for the Tizen Operating System and devices.
The man behind one of Twitter's best third-party Android clients has been hired by Twitter itself. Joaquim Vergès (no relation!), developer of Falcon Pro, tweeted today that he is going to work for the company after a somewhat conflicted history.
KIRT MCMASTER has the right stuff to be a successful software boss. He talks a mile a minute with a booming voice. And he projects inevitability: “We’re creating something everybody wants.” But communication skills are not the only reason why his firm may succeed where others, including Amazon and Samsung, have failed: establishing a third mobile-computing platform to compete with Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, which have market shares of 78% and 18% respectively.
Apple’s recent job listing reveals the company’s plans to introduce its products onto the rival operating system in the near future
Apple is one of the most forward-thinking companies in the world. Its products are legendary, and the innovative iPhone revolutionized the smartphone market. Heck, iOS has impacted the entire computer industry arguably for the better.
Unfortunately, Google's Android has been a thorn in the company's side for years, stealing market share and allegedly angering the beloved Steve Jobs in the process. With that said, it is very curious to see Apple hiring Android software engineers. Yup, you are reading that correctly. Could Apple be planning to release apps for the Android platform?
Microsoft might not be the only major mobile player that’s invading other mobile ecosystems, as Apple is also looking to build more mobile apps on platforms other than iOS, a recent job listing reveals.
As it turns out, some iPhone loyalists can't even notice the difference between iOS and Android.
Two pranksters from the Netherlands, Alexander Spoor and Sacha Harland, handed an iPhone running Android to several iPhone users and told them it was running iOS 9.
iOS 9 is Apple's next big iPhone update that hasn't been released yet and is set to launch this fall. The video was posted on their YouTube channel Dit Is Normaal.
The number of new Android manufacturers has exploded in the past three years, but in 2015 growth almost came to a halt.
Check Point has discovered a serious security hole with mobile remote support tools commonly used by hundreds of millions of Android devices.
As recently as March, we were reporting on one of the biggest security holes ever affecting Android. And while Android security breaches don't run rampant, they are part of the reason why some IT administrators don't allow enterprise users to use corporate Android devices.
Eugene Kaspersky – founder of the so named antivirus company refuses to own a smartphone. If anyone should know it is him.
Although the data is a little out of date there were 1.3 million unique types of Android smartphone hacks recorded between January and October 2014. These have mainly focused on stealing data from the phone – personally identifiable information such as name, address, pins, and credit card details.
Last month we saw BlackBerry buying couple of domains - AndroidSecured.net and AndroidSecured.com, but were not sure as to what content the domains would exactly include. The information came right around the rumours when BlackBerry was said to be working on an Android smartphone codenamed Venice. However, the Canadian smartphone maker has finally put the websites to use by launching Android Secured, a website that offers details on management and updates on security of Android handsets.
I can’t remember the last time I only carried one smartphone with me on a daily basis. My main handset has been an iPhone since the device first debuted in 2007, but even then I also had a Nokia or a BlackBerry phone with me at all times. As sleek and exciting as the iPhone was, there was just too much functionality it didn’t include, and I wanted it all.
Fast-forward to 2015, and I still almost always carry two phones with me. Right now my main phone is an iPhone 6, but there’s also typically an Android handset in my pocket waiting patiently to fill in the blanks.
Oracle has included six news versions of Android and new products and services built around the operating system in a proposed supplemental complaint in its dispute over Google’s use in the OS of copyrighted Java material.
A recent report talks about the "fragmented" Android market. We think "diverse" is a more accurate word to describe the state of affairs. Here's why that's a good thing.
The idea of BlackBerry dropping a smartphone that runs Android is one that piques the interest of many, and in the run-up to the all new BlackBerry Passport Silver Edition, it was believed that the Canadian firm might finally take the bait. It wasn't to be on this occasion, with the refined, shiny new handset packing the more predictable BB10 software, but a new clip has offered a tantalising peek at what might have been.
Some projects will continue to grow and become popular and successful while others may morph and change as they progress. Not all Black Duck Rookies are high-profile projects. CodeCombat, OpenBazaar, and Neovim are three projects representing different areas of technology not only in technical scope but in their path to Open Source Rookies of the Year.
It was a slow news day today in Linuxland, which is probably why several Windows 10 headlines jumped out at me. First up, is a paranoid's guide to securing Windows 10 that revealed listens to microphones and collects keystrokes of its users. Users brace for the first forced update and Christine Hall looks at some of gotchas to home and enterprise users. In other news, what's happened to gimp.org?
Mobile SDKs are, for most publishers, a necessary evil. Whether you’re trying to integrate analytics, cross-promotion, tracking, monetization or payments, your first step is most often to inject a third-party SDK into your codebase.
This much-maligned piece of software drives developers, operations and marketers alike up the wall — creating well-defined operational specs that often change to soiling your product code with unspecified external components.
Codemotion is the biggest tech conference in Italy and one of the greatest in Europe, open to all languages and technologies. It’s the hub connecting technologies and coders.
Today, August 6, Mozilla started seeding the first hotfix release of the stable branch of its popular, open-source web browser for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, Mozilla Firefox 39.0.
Canonical announced that the latest Firefox 39.0.3 has been uploaded to the repositories for the users of Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Yesterday morning, August 5, a Firefox user informed us that an advertisement on a news site in Russia was serving a Firefox exploit that searched for sensitive files and uploaded them to a server that appears to be in Ukraine. This morning Mozilla released security updates that fix the vulnerability. All Firefox users are urged to update to Firefox 39.0.3. The fix has also been shipped in Firefox ESR 38.1.1.
Each year, there's a seemingly infinite amount of exciting things happening on the open web. It's hard to keep track of all the new things rolling out, but I'd like to draw your attention to one of them that Mozilla has been quietly working on MozVR. It's a new technology that combines the open web and virtual reality, enabling developers to create virtual worlds that we can step inside.
Today, he posits, variation between Hadoop distributions is actually less than we see in Linux land. ("There's more variation among the Red Hat, Ubuntu, and CoreOS kernels than there is among the core components of the various Hadoop distributions.") I found this a bit surprising given Hortonworks' noise earlier this year that Hadoop standardization was imperative, as it launched the Open Data Platform initiative.
Over the few last weeks, ownCloud founder and company co-founder Frank Karlitschek has published a short series of blogs on the topic of Federated Cloud Sharing, discussing what it is and why it is important. Today, he published a draft of a open API for sharing between different file share and sync clouds. In this post, we’ll quickly recap the concept, talk a little about the Open Cloud Mesh working group, and show how to configure and use it in ownCloud 8.1.
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
The U.K. Cabinet Office has reportedly asked government departments and agencies to try to find ways to end their reliance on Oracle software, but it’s not clear that approach will really solve its problems.
Motivating the request was the large but unspecified number of Oracle licenses currently supported within the U.K. government, The Register reported. Included in that count are apparently licenses covering individual leaders whose departments already pay for licenses of their own as well as separate software versions being supported.
LibreOffice 5.0 was made available by The Document Foundation a couple of days ago, and it's a glorious release. It full of all sorts of new features, and many users have already upgraded to this latest version, but the application will also have an impact on another new platform, Ubuntu Touch.
In one corner, we have Hippo CTO Arjé Cahn, expouding the merits of open source CMS.
In the other, we have Bryan Soltis, Technical Evangelist at Kentico Software, a Web Content and Customer Experience Management provider, espousing the virtues of proprietary systems.
I wanted to share an upcoming open source software event that we are hosting at my campus, at the University of Minnesota Morris. Working with OpenHatch, we are connecting mentors with students and members of the community for a one-day event. We'll talk about what open source software is, and help people get started with their first contribution to open source software projects.
This has been possible because of an open-source software developed by US-based organization Dimagi. A social enterprise that specializes in using technology to empower rural communities across the world, they currently serve in more than 40 developing countries being engaged in over 300 projects. Two members of the Dimagi team were in the city to work on improving the interface that they share with Lata Medical Research Foundation (LMRF).
If you're still relying upon a vintage XGI Volari graphics card or have a XGI integrated GPU on a server motherboard, thanks to the NetBSD folks there are 19 patches for the xf86-video-xgi open-source driver.
One week after the release of the second RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.2 computer operating system, Glen Barber announces on August 7 the immediate availability for download and testing of FreeBSD 10.2 RC3.
Present in GCC 5.x is libgccjit, an embeddable Just-In-Time compiler for the GNU Compiler Collection. While it's still largely experimental and I haven't heard of any projects really utilizing it in a production setting yet, more performance improvements are ahead.
Glibc 2.22 has been tagged and is in the process of going out the door for release while the latest Git code now reflects development for glibc 2.23.
“We are committed to both using open source products and contributing back to the community to improve them based on what we are doing,” the digital service manager claimed.
The changing of the licence of openERP, an open source solution for enterprise resource planning, from GPL to AGPL in late 2009, thwarted development of Hospital, a hospital information system (HIS) written for a paediatric clinic in Thessaloniki (Greece). The clinic stopped a pilot of the software, and its developers moved to other open source-based projects.
On Wednesday, the FDA announced the launch of an open source platform for community sharing of genomic sequencing data called precisionFDA. DNAnexus, the provider of cloud-based genome informatics and data management was awarded a research and development contract by the FDA to build the platform. precisionFDA is the FDA’s answer to its role under the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative is to review the current regulatory landscape and develop a streamlined approach to evaluating next-generation sequencing NGS-based diagnostics.
A comprehensive look at Vietnam’s burgeoning open source movement and the players involved and why you should get in now
It's hardly a secret that the price of new college textbooks has risen 82% in the last decade, forcing students to find cheaper alternatives or forego course materials altogether.
Maker Bench is an open souce CNCed work bench design from 3D drawing company SketchUp, deigned by Eric Schimelpfenig.
The SketchUp community has gone on to modify it for various uses.
Go 1.5 is a huge update with the work to be rewritten in Go itself and many other features like a fully-concurrent garbage collector, new architecture ports, switching to Git, and many other changes. Go developers can find the verbose explanation of 1.5 changes via the tentative release notes.
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.
"The reason we started doing this in the first place is Runa [Sandvik] is from Norway and has a very romanticized vision of the U.S., so loving all things America, we needed to go to a gun show," Augur said.
At to the gun show, Sandvik became interested in the TrackingPoint weapon after learning that it is a Linux-powered device that could be connected to a phone via a mobile app.
At the annual Black Hat conference delegates have been shown a new exploit for Intel and AMD x86 central processor units that has hitherto existed since 1977!
[...]
Christopher Domas, a security researcher with the Battelle Memorial Institute discovered the flaw. “By leveraging the flaw, attackers could install a rootkit in the processors System Management Mode (SMM), a protected region of code that underpins all the firmware security features in modern computers. Once installed, the rootkit could be used for destructive attacks like wiping the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) the modern BIOS or even to re-infect the OS after a clean install. Protection features like Secure Boot wouldn’t help, because they too rely on the SMM to be secure. The attack essentially breaks the hardware roots of trust,” Domas said.
A feature of HTML5 that allows sites to detect battery life on a visitor's device can also be used to track behaviour, a piece of research has revealed.
HTML5 has been billed as the natural, standards-based successor to proprietary plug-ins such as Adobe's Flash Player for providing rich multimedia services on the Web. But when it comes to security, one of Flash's major weaknesses, HTML5 is no panacea.
In fact, HTML5 has security issues of its own. Julien Bellanger, CEO of application security monitoring firm Prevoty, says HTML5 makes security more complex, not simpler. HTML5 security has been a question mark for years, and it has not improved over the stretch, he says.
The attack differs from traditional man-in-the-middle attacks, which rely on tapping data in transit between two servers or users, because it exploits a vulnerability in the design of many file synchronization offerings, including Google, Box, Microsoft, and Dropbox services.
Onie is a small, Linux based operating system that runs on a bare-metal switch. A network operating system is installed on top of Onie, which is designed to make it easy and fast for the OS to be swapped with a different one.
At the Black Hat show, a security expert demonstrates how vulnerable SDN switches that use the ONIE software are open to attacks by hackers.
Black Hat USA is finishing up in Las Vegas. News from its 18th year includes nuclear nightmares, Department of Justice on computer crime and research, Google on the state of Android security and much more.
The NSA has a secret project that can redirect web browsers to sites containing more sophisticated exploits called QUANTUM INSERT. (Do I still need to say allegedly?) It works by injecting packets into the TCP stream, though overwriting the stream may be a more accurate description. Refer to Deep dive into QUANTUM INSERT for more details. At the end of that post, there’s links to some code that can help one detect QI attacks in the wild. As noted by Wired and Bruce Schneier, among dozens of others, now we can defend ourselves against this attack (well, at least detect it).
After my first post about smartcards under Linux, I thought I would share some information I’ve been gathering.
This post is already huge, so I am not going to dive into — much — specific commands, but I am linking to many sources with detailed instructions.
President Obama yesterday spoke in defense of the Iran Deal at American University, launching an unusually blunt and aggressive attack on deal opponents. Obama’s blistering criticisms aimed at the Israeli government and its neocon supporters were accurate and unflinching, including the obvious fact that what they really crave is regime change and war. About opposition to the deal from the Israeli government, he said: “it would be an abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.”
Judged as a speech, it was an impressive and effective rhetorical defense of the deal, which is why leading deal opponents have reacted so hysterically. The editors of Bloomberg News – which has spewed one Iraq-War-fearmongering-type article after the next about the deal masquerading as “reporting” – whined that Obama was “denigrating those who disagree with him” and that “it would be far better to win this fight fairly.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pronounced himself “especially insulted” and said Obama’s speech went “way over the line of civil discourse.” Our nation’s Churchillian warriors are such sensitive souls: sociopathically indifferent to the lives they continually extinguish around the world (provided it all takes place far away from their comfort and safety), but deeply, deeply hurt – “especially insulted” – by mean words directed at them and their motives.
The mayor of Palermo urged EU leaders to respond to “a genocide caused by European selfishness” on Thursday, as an Irish navy ship carrying the bodies of migrants who died when their boat capsized off the coast of Libya docked in the Sicilian port.
Leoluca Orlando spoke as the patrol vessel Niamh arrived with 370 survivors of Wednesday’s disaster and 25 corpses, including the bodies of children.
Residents of the Japanese metropolis of Hiroshima on Thursday solemnly marked the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bomb assault on the town throughout World Warfare II. Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used the event to name for worldwide nuclear disarmament.
Bells tolled, hundreds bowed their heads in prayer and doves have been launched into the sky, at a ceremony attended by 40,000 individuals, together with representatives of greater than 100 nations.
“Seventy years on I need to reemphasize the need of world peace,” Abe stated in his speech, based on a , including that the bomb had not solely killed hundreds of individuals in Hiroshima but in addition brought on unspeakable struggling to survivors.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped a "super weapon" on Hiroshima, Japan, and launched a fundamental shift in the way we wage war.
The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice and a grueling farce. For three years, a police cordon around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost €£12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His "crime" is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.
The persecution of Julian Assange is about to flare again as it enters a dangerous stage. From August 20, three quarters of the Swedish prosecutor's case against Assange regarding sexual misconduct in 2010 will disappear as the statute of limitations expires. At the same time, Washington's obsession with Assange and WikiLeaks has intensified. Indeed, it is vindictive American power that offers the greatest threat - as Chelsea Manning and those still held in Guantanamo can attest.
Pundits have wasted hours guessing which ten of the 17 White House contestants FOX would choose for its version of Donald Trump's Miss USA pageant, featuring Trump as the leading GOP crowd-pleaser for Mr. USA (and, in the eyes of some, for "mis-congeniality").
But there's been too little time spent discussing crucial issues that directly affect the lives of millions of American families.
It didn't happen at what Trump pilloried as Charles and David Koch's "puppet" theatre for five candidates they hand-picked to showcase, an event humorously panned by Jon Stewart. Their production came with "rules" for reporters not to report on the billionaires' buddies who were there for the untelevised bulk of the real show at that exclusive Koch retreat, as Lauren Windsor noted.
Reddit announced more crackdowns on communities deemed to be offensive, and it also announced a quarantining policy for certain communities that will require users to opt-in to see those communities.
Social news site Reddit has banned six forums, or “subreddits”, that form the core of its white-supremacist community.
The banned subreddits included “CoonTown”, “WatchNiggersDie”, “bestofcoontown”, “koontown”, “CoonTownMods”, “CoonTownMeta”, although more have been banned since, as users attempt to recreate them and get shut down in turn.
Porn is still effectively banned in India, since a government directive to unblock it is too vague to implement.
The government banned porn over the weekend, but after vast amounts of criticism quickly undid the block. But it came with a catch — that sites that allow child porn should not be let back online — which has become too difficult for internet providers to implement.
"ISPs have no way or mechanism to filter out child pornography from URLs, and the further unlimited sub-links," Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) said, reports the Times of India.
EFF is excited to announce that today we are releasing version 1.0 of Privacy Badger for Chrome and Firefox. Privacy Badger is a browser extension that automatically blocks hidden trackers that would otherwise spy on your browsing habits as you surf the Web.
Do you have a minute to help us map how police are using handheld devices to collect biometric data, like your facial features or iris patterns? OK, how about 30 seconds? If you type fast enough, we bet you can get it down to 10 seconds.
By the early 1990s, as drug war hysteria fed an unprecedented build-up of the prison system, news organizations were declaring that youth born in the crack cocaine era would grow up to be “superpredators,” a “new breed” of offenders with “absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future.” Hillary Clinton warned of super predators in 1996 while campaigning for her husband.
A British psychologist is receiving sharp criticism from some professional peers for providing expert advice to help the U.K. surveillance agency GCHQ manipulate people online.
The debate brings into focus the question of how or whether psychologists should offer their expertise to spy agencies engaged in deception and propaganda.
Guardian lawsuit reveals overwhelming racial disparity at Homan Square, where detainees are still held for minor crimes with little access to the outside world, despite police denials that site is an anomaly
At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility, newly uncovered records reveal.
Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police.
Despite repeated denials from the Chicago police department that the warehouse is a secretive, off-the-books anomaly, the Homan Square files begin to show how the city’s most vulnerable people get lost in its criminal justice system.
People held at Homan Square have been subsequently charged with everything from “drinking alcohol on the public way” to murder. But the scale of the detentions – and the racial disparity therein – raises the prospect of major civil-rights violations.
The cops who were caught on camera insulting an amputee, disabling security cameras, playing darts and sampling THC-laced edibles during a raid on a pot dispensary are suing to prevent Santa Ana Police Department investigators from using the recording against them. (via Reason)
Remember the Santa Ana, California, cops who were caught on video munching on what seem to be cannabis-infused chocolate bars after raiding an unlicensed medical marijuana dispensary in May? The Orange County Register reports that three officers who were suspended after the incident are trying to stop the Santa Ana Police Department from using the footage in its internal investigation. Among other things, their lawsuit argues that the officers thought they had disabled all of the security cameras at Sky High Holistic and therefore had a reasonable expectation of privacy. The cops complain that the dispensary never got their permission to record them as they searched the premises.
Assailants believed to be Islamist militants entered an apartment building posing as potential tenants and killed a secular blogger in Bangladesh's capital on Friday, in the fourth such deadly attack this year, police said.
Police official Mustafizur Rahman identified the victim as 40-year-old Niloy Chowdhury and said he was hacked to death in his apartment. The motive was not immediately clear.
According to the monitoring group SITE, Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) branch Ansar al-Islam warned of more murders of bloggers to come in the Muslim-majority country: "In a communique issued in Bengali and English, and posted on its Facebook and Twitter accounts on August 7, 2015, Ansar al-Islam declared the attack to be 'vengeance' for the honor of the Prophet Muhammad, and vowed similar operations in the future against its enemies. The group threatened: 'If your ‘Freedom of Speech’ maintains no limits, then widen your chests for 'Freedom of our Machetes.'"
A Northern California police department is reviewing a video showing one of its officers pulling a gun on a man who was recording him on his cellphone.
The video, posted on YouTube, shows a Rohnert Park Public Safety officer driving toward Don McComas as he's filming. As McComas moves in closer to record the license plate number on the officer’s police SUV, the officer stops, gets out and tells McComas to take his hand out of his pocket.
Last night’s FOX News GOP Presidential Debate Extravaganza featured the most riveting two minute political exchange ever heard on national television. During a brief colloquy between Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and Fox moderator Brett Baier, the pugnacious casino magnate revealed the appalling truth about the American political system, that the big money guys like Trump own the whole crooked contraption lock, stock, and barrel, and that, the nation’s fake political leaders do whatever they’re told to do. Without question, it was most illuminating commentary to ever cross the airwaves.
The FCC today imposed new rules on carriers that intend to turn off copper networks and replace them with fiber, but said that carriers should feel free to make the switch as long as they keep providing the same services to customers.
As before, carriers still need approval from the FCC before shutting off copper networks in cases where they intend to reduce or discontinue service. "However, carriers will retain the flexibility to retire their copper networks in favor of fiber without prior Commission approval—as long as no service is discontinued, reduced, or impaired," the commission said in its announcement.
Warnings from the EFF this week that Hollywood is making renewed efforts to obtain SOPA-like powers over Internet companies has touched a nerve, with filmmakers and anti-piracy activists attacking from all angles. The EFF should stop talking about the past, its critics say, and admit that the Internet won't get broken by Hollywood.
Kim Dotcom is on a mission to save the internet. He plans to start by launching a free cloud-storage service -- for the third time. Here, he talks exclusively to WIRED about why no one should trust his second file-hosting service Mega, his optimism for the future of an encrypted web, how a non-profit status will make Mega 3.0 a success, and why Hollywood is the ISIS of the internet…
Last week German-born entrepreneur Kim Dotcom returned to the news in dramatic fashion, warning the world to steer well clear of the file-hosting service he once set up, Mega.
After issuing a stern warning last month which ordered the country's streaming music providers to stop offering unlicensed tracks, the Chinese government is reporting progress. Following the expiration of a July 31 deadline, the National Copyright Administration says that more than two million songs have already been deleted.
The High Court recently overturned private copying exceptions introduced last year by the UK Government, once again outlawing the habits of millions of citizens. The Intellectual Property Office today explains that ripping a CD in iTunes is no longer permitted, and neither is backing up your computer if it contains copyrighted content.
Open Rights Group (ORG) has responded to an Intellectual Property Office (IPO) consultation on proposals to increase the maximum prison sentence for criminal online copyright infringement to 10 years. The would bring sanctions for online copyright infringement in line with those for physical copyright infringement.
New proposals to make online copyright infringement a criminal offence risks punishing users who share links and files online more harshly than ordinary, physical theft.