People who belong to the free and open source software community have one trait in common: they are extremely sensitive to criticism of any kind of the software that belongs to this genre.
Nothing else can account for the reaction that has been forthcoming after the Washington Post published an article on Linux a few days back, a fairly long and detailed account that in the main cast doubts on the security afforded by the kernel.
The article is the fifth in a series looking at the security of the internet broadly, and the first article was published back in May. The five pieces are being sold as an e-book for US$2.99. Yet many FOSS people did not even bother to note this and assumed the worst.
Leading the way was Jonathan Corbet, editor of a website called Linux Weekly News, that advertises itself as "a reader-supported news site dedicated to producing the best coverage from within the Linux and free software development communities"
From 2008 to 2013, I was heavily involved in the development and use of Koha, which was built on Debian, and whose development is still centered there. Once, just for kicks, I installed Debian and Koha on an ASUS EEEpc 900—half a gig of RAM, 4GB of NVRAM as a disk—just to see if I could. It didn't run well, and only had room for about 20 bibliographic records, but it ran. Since 2013, I've worked for cPanel, and the jump from Debian to CentOS has occasionally tripped me. Still, I've got my feet in both worlds; my personal servers all run Debian, while CentOS rules at work. My personal laptop runs Lubuntu.
The truth is, none of what I or Reglue does would be possible without the GNU/Linux desktop and software. In our case, hundreds of kids have a computer in the home whereas without Linux, we could not have given that computer to them.
And for those of you who have helped us toward making our goal, I cannot thank you enough. And yeah, I've had a couple of rows that were tough to hoe, but no worse than many of you have experienced. The Global Linux Community. We all struggle at times to do the things we love to do. Things we have to do.
Some open-source developers have always been skeptical of the Open Network Operating System‘s ideas of open-source, which makes ONOS’s recent inclusion in The Linux Foundation particularly irksome to them.
Namely, ONOS’s governance isn’t changing, which means one executive director and board member at ON.Lab, Guru Parulkar, still holds the final say for code decisions within ONOS.
The formatting of the laptop depends on its assigned purpose. On the US segment, commanding to the vehicle is done using laptops called PCS (Portable Computer System). They run on a linux operating system and are connected to the vehicle 1553 system as remote terminals. There are usually seven PCS laptops deployed throughout the vehicle.
On the Russian Segment there are about seven equivalent laptops called, simply, “Russian Laptops”. They, too, are linux based, and are used to command the Russian elements. Both the PCS and Russian Laptop use their own graphical interfaces that depict the ISS and the crew click on the module they wish to interact with and the system, and then the specific piece of hardware.
The Curiosity rover has been on Mars since 2012, and it’s been responsible for a lot of the cool and interesting information we got from the Red Planet since then. As it turns out, it’s remotely controlled with a help of a Linux machine from Earth.
Passwords are one of the most main security features used nowadays. It’s very important for you to have secure and un-guessable passwords. Most Linux distributions have passwd programs that won’t allow you to set easily guessable password plus there are many encryption software in the market that can do this. Make sure that your passwd program is always up to date and has such features. An in-depth details of encryption is beyond the scope of this article, so kindly keep reading.
In August 2015, IBM announced LinuxONE (www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47474.wss), anchored by two new Linux mainframe servers that capitalize on best-of-class mainframe security and performance, and that bring these strengths to open-source-based technologies and the Open Source community. The move creates greater choice for Linux applications in enterprises where IT is under constant pressure to provide breakthrough systems in areas where the IBM z System mainframe excels, such as analytics and hybrid clouds.
The mobile world requires agile infrastructure, one that has the requisite business intelligence for analysis, reporting and execution that drives immediate value to the firm, writes Maurice Blackwood, systems executive at IBM.
Our stack is Ubuntu Linux + PostgreSQL + NGINX + PHP5 (primarily) + Redis + Elasticsearch + jQuery + Less
David Airlie sent in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem update today for the Linux 4.4 merge window.
The third episode of the World Without Linux animated series, created by the talented Amelia Lorenz for The Linux Foundation, has been published online, and it is entitled "Can I Follow You?"
Does Linux need better security? Sure.
No one doubts that. At the Seoul Linux Kernel Summit, kernel security maintainer James Morris recently presented a long list of significant strategic security problems. These can and will be dealt with.
I, for one, though, trust Linus's gradual approach towards security fixes rather than radical changes that could potentially damage Linux's performance and features. Perfect? No. Better than any other choices? Yes.
Celebrity programmer Eric S. Raymond has aired a theory that feminist activists are trying to find a way to lay false sexual assault claims against male leaders of the open source community.
Raymond is best known for his seminal tract The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and remains active in the world of open source, which he has championed since the late 1990s.
A few minutes ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed users about the immediate availability for download of new kernel maintenance releases, Linux kernel 4.1.13 LTS, Linux kernel 4.2.6, Linux kernel 3.14.57 LTS, and Linux kernel 3.10.93 LTS.
For today's "Watch" series of articles, we've prepared a very nice video compilation, courtesy of The Linux Foundation, containing several video tours of Linux kernel developer work spaces.
Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.1.13 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the sixth maintenance version of the Linux 4.2 kernel series, and looking at the appended shortlog, it is a pretty important one.
Hey, can I follow you? Out of context that sounds pretty creepy. But in a world with Linux and the Internet infrastructure it enables with services like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and Amazon, we know exactly what that means. And, ironically or not, we're usually more than happy to let people 'follow' us, as it allows connection like never before.
The third episode in our World Without Linux video series attempts to illustrate what a world without our online social connection would be like. Of course Linux isn't responsible for all the successes of Facebook and Twitter but it is certainly the underlying fuel for making these services scalable and responsive. Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, has even credited open source and the "hacker way" for helping build the platform that billions use to connect every single day.
The Linux Foundation regularly awards scholarships as part of its Linux Training Scholarship Program. In the five years that the Linux Foundation has hosted this program, it has awarded a total of 34 scholarships totalling more than $100,000 in free training to students and professionals who may not otherwise have access to these opportunities. In conjunction with this scholarship program, we are starting a series to tell you more about these scholarship recipients. We would like to share their stories in the hope that they will inspire others.
This installment of our series features Eva Tanaskoska from Macedonia, who received a scholarship in the Women in Linux category. Eva has been working with and researching information security for a few years now. She is currently forming a CERT team at her university, where she mentors students on using Linux to perform penetration tests, forensic investigations, and incident response. We asked Eva to answer a few questions about her background and plans for the future.
As you may know, HP Linux Imaging and Printing (HPLIP) is a tool for printing, scanning and faxing for the HP printers.
It's been the better part of the year since the last ALSA update while out today is version 1.1 of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.
Compiling a Linux kernel is a little difficult and takes some time, but the Ubuntu (and derivative) users do not have to worry about that, because Canonical provides deb packages for these systems, via its kernel.ubuntu.com repository.
Does Linus Torvalds fail to take security in the Linux kernel seriously, and is the world doomed because of it? That's what the Washington Post suggests in a recent article about security in the open source OS.
We’re proud to be supporting the launch of the new Linux Foundation collaborative effort for Web APIs: the Open API Initiative (see the announcement here). The initiative will take forward the great foundational work done under the Swagger banner by Tony Tam and others to create a new, more formal description format for Web APIs, provisionally called OADF – Open API Description Format.
As with every other open source community, we have several channels for communication. These include weekly meetings, mailing lists and IRC channels for daily text-based discussions. The Meetings wiki page contains an up- to-date list of meetings, including agendas and all the information required for joining. We use GoToMeeting for voice and also the #opnfv-meeting or project IRC channels on Freenode for meeting minutes. You can join to the development activities, raise topics for discussion or ask questions on the opnfv-tech-discuss mailing list, which like all the other lists, is also archived.
X.Org Server 1.18 was supposed to be a quick release but ended up being drawn out into a longer release cycle than normal. However, today xorg-server 1.18.0 is now available under the "Moussaka" codename.
Just a few minutes ago, Adam Jackson from the X.Org Foundation, the non-profit organization behind some powerful GNU/Linux technologies, had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of X.Org Server 1.18.0.
Published yesterday was a test of Intel Skylake graphics on Ubuntu 15.10 vs. Windows 10 with a focus on the OpenGL performance. In today's article is a similar cross-operating-system comparison but this time being featured are three NVIDIA graphics cards to see how the latest NVIDIA drivers are running.
We’re getting ready to release Wireshark 2.0, which includes a major user interface update. As a comparison, here’s a picture of Wireshark 1.12.8, which is the current stable release:
Linux has become a know how, if you are a system administrator working in a larger environment. Security teams have been deployed by large organizations to keep an eye on vulnerabilities in their systems and take corrective or preventive action as suitable.
In the recent times, many organizations have migrated from Windows, where everything is regulated with a point-and-click GUI. Thankfully, Linux has plenty of GUI tools that can help you keep away from the command line. Linux-based security tools and distributions can be used for penetration testing, reverse engineering, forensics and so on.
A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter that’s interprets the command entered by the user. We enter a command and then it interprets that command and gives us the output of that command. A shell provides a traditional user interface for the Unix operating system and for Unix-like systems that we all are used to. Usually, black screen with a white text color. Users enter commands as plain text or we can create text scripts of one or more commands all together one after another.
As you may know, Linphone is an open-source VoIP service that allows the users to perform voice calls, video calls and text conversations with friends and other Linphone users.
As you may know, Albert is an open-source Launcher for Linux, written in C++ and Qt5, with features similar to Synapse. The user is capable of configuring a hotkey for opening the launcher and can easily find software via the searchbar. It can also search on Google and among Chrome and Chromium’s bookmarks.
HandBrake 0.10.2 has been recently released, bringing important fixes.
HandBrake is an open-source multiplatform multithreaded video transcoder. It is used for converting DVD or Bluray discs to formats like MP4, MKV, H.264, MPEG-4 or other formats. You can also encode audio files like AAC, MP3, Flac, AC3 etc.
The latest version available is HandBrake 0.10.2, which brings only bug-fixes and stability improvements.
The developers of the popular Audacious open-source audio player software for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems have announced the final release of Audacious 3.7.
Audacious is an open-source music player, having the features of a modern music player, including support for audio effects, equalizer, lyrics and plugins, visualization, support for Winamp skins and support for playlists organized in tabs.
LastPass is a cross-platform password management program. For Linux, it is available as a plugin for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. LastPass Sesame is available for Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora. There is also a version of LastPass compatible with Firefox Portable for installing on a USB key. And with LastPass Pocket for Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora and openSUSE, there's good coverage. While LastPass is a highly rated service, it is proprietary software. And LastPass has recently been absorbed by LogMeIn. If you're looking for an open source alternative, this article is for you.
Monday 9th November. London based Honey Tribe Studios have released version 0.22 of their award winning game BFF or Die. Although still in alpha BFF or Die won the Best Multiplayer category in Game On 2.0 earlier this year. It continues to be part of the exhibition that showcases the history of video games in the International Centre for Life, Newcastle UK until Jan 2016.
Bethesda Softworks, the publisher of the famous Fallout 4 that gets a lot of attention these days, is also responsible for another game called Quake Live, developed by id Software and available on Steam. That game went from free to $9.99 (€9.99), and the Linux support was dropped.
After a short beta period Magicka 2 is now officially available for the roll out of Steam Machines, and for those of us on normal Linux desktops too of course. They accidentally pushed it out earlier, removed it again and now it's officially out.
I wonder how many "now on Linux" posts I'm going to be doing today, a few I hope!
It’s been a while since Plasma 5.4 release and we are now approaching feature freeze for Plasma 5.5 so I would like to share with you what news you can expect in plasma-nm. This time we have major changes only in our connection editor although most of you wouldn’t probably even notice them. This is going to be a short list unfortunately given I have less time and less ideas, but at least something, right?
I have been working in system administration on Linux systems for ten years and I have always provided opportunities to each available application, considering not only my sysadmin job, but also my creative side. So, after using Mypaint, I found out that Krita provided a world full of possibilities. I also found artists like David Revoy who exemplified the professional possibilities of the application.
I do Plasma and KDE related stuff since one year and this year was awesome as you can read in my blog posts. Today I want to talk about the future. For the near future I have to work on finalizing my tasks for the plasma 5.5 release. But what should I do next?
It's been nearly three months since the KDE Plasma 5.4 desktop environment has been released, during which it received two maintenance builds, and a third one is about to be unveiled in the next 24 hours or so.
I decided at a certain point to directly port the main components out of KDELibs4Support.
Muon, the Apt package installer UI is in need of a maintainer. It has been split out from Discover and Updater which are application focused and to some extent work with multiple backends. Muon is package focused and covers the surprisingly important use case of technical users who care about libraries and package versions but don’t want to use a command line. It’ll probably move to unmaintained unless anyone wants to keep an eye on it so speak up now if you want to help out.
A new release of digiKam Recipes is ready for your reading pleasure. This version features the Using Album Categories recipe and reworked material on using the tagging functionality in digiKam. As always, the new release includes updates, fixes and tweaks.
The KDE maintainers for Kubuntu 14.04.3 have upgraded the desktop environment to version 4.14.3 and users should now get the newest package.
Plasma 5.5 is due out next month and with this update will come many new features.
For a while now we've been talking about Plasma 5.5 when it comes to suitable Wayland support for early adopters and other new functionality. Published today was a blog post by KDE's Jan Grulich with more details on some of the other Plasma 5.5 changes.
As many of my regular readers will know, I am a big Ubuntu fan. I spent nearly eight years working at Canonical and my love of Ubuntu has not ceased since I left.
One of the fundamental components of Ubuntu is Unity. While Unity ruffled more than a few feathers when it first came out, it has since grown into a comprehensive desktop environment for Ubuntu. Unity is the cornerstone of Canonical's convergence vision in which a single code base can power desktops, phones, tablets, and more.
Right now, though, the Unity story is divided into two pieces. All the exciting new work is going into the next-generation Unity 8. This is where the convergence is happening. Unity 8 is by no means ready yet and is only suitable for tinkerers.
The GNOME developers are preparing to release the second and last maintenance version of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which means that several core components and applications have received improvements and bugfixes.
The GNOME developers are working hard these days to release the second and last maintenance version for the stable GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, as they will continue to concentrate their efforts on the next major release, GNOME 3.20.
We've just been informed by the awesome folks behind the beautiful and modern Arch Linux-based Apricity OS GNU/Linux distribution about the immediate availability for download of the November Beta build, Apricity OS 11.2015.
Solus developers revealed a couple of days ago that they plan to also support GNOME Shell, for the users who want this alternative desktop experience. Now, a series of very interesting screenshots have been published, and it looks like things are shaping up just nicely.
We are delighted to announce that Chakra 2015.11-Fermi is out! As always, this release is a snapshot of our stable repositores and includes all the updates and changes that have happened in Chakra since the last release.
On November 8, Neofytos Kolokotronis from the Chakra project had the great pleasure of informing us of the release and immediate availability for download of the Chakra GNU/Linux 2015.11 computer operating system.
Good news! There’s new release of the Kali Linux which is a reincarnation of the BackTrack. If you work in forensic analysis, network security, and penetration testing, then it’s very important to keep your tools updated, so you will be protected from the latest known threats, as well as you will get the latest tools at your control.
Let me introduce you to Chalet OS. The web site of this operating system says that their main target audience is fresh Linux converts who come to the Linux world from other operating systems. Isn't it the same audience that Zorin OS is aiming at? I was baffled and intrigued!
The latest version of the Chalet OS distribution has the number 14.04.3, which gives us a proper clue that Chalet OS is actually another offspring in the Ubuntu family. This version was released in August 2015.
Softpedia has just been informed by Zbigniew Konojacki, the creator and lead developer of the 4MLinux project, an open-source initiative that aims to develop small GNU/Linux distributions for various purposes, that 4MLinux 15.0 entered development.
4MLinux 15.0 Core Beta was released on November 8, 2015, and it will be the base for the rest of the 4MLinux 15.0 distributions, including 4MLinux and the distros that are part of the 4MRescueKit set, powered by a long-term supported kernel from the Linux 4.1 series.
The awesome folks behind the popular Manjaro project announced this weekend that the first development build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux 15.12 computer operating system is available for download and testing.
One day after Philip Müller announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first development build of Manjaro Linux 15.12, Ringo de Kroon from the Manjaro community was happy to introduce to the world Manjaro Linux MATE 15.12 Pre1.
After a good month of development we are happy to present to you Manjaro 15.12-pre1. This release comes with XFCE 4.12, KDE Plasma 5.4.2, 4.3.0 kernel and all the usual Manjaro and upstream updates. We worked mostly on our tools and the graphical installers.
Manjaro developers have just announced that the sixth update for Manjaro 15.09 (Bellatrix) has arrived, and it is a glorious one.
Microsoft has refused to say openly whether it will be extending the patent-licensing deal that it signed with Novell back in 2006. At that time, SUSE Linux was a part of Novell.
Novell has since been acquired by the Attachmate Group which, in turn, was bought by the British mainframe company Micro Focus.
In July 2011, Microsoft announced that the agreement with SUSE would be extended until January 1, 2016.
iTWire asked Microsoft about the SUSE agreement after Red Hat and Microsoft announced a deal a few days back on cloud installations, wherein Microsoft said it would be making Red Hat the preferred enterprise Linux distribution for installing on its Azure cloud offering.
Both Red Hat and Canonical have free enterprise distributions: CentOS and Ubuntu respectively. Until last week, SUSE didn't have any such offering -- at least not officially.
For Fedora 23 the Red Hat sponsored community Linux distribution was only a week off its' original schedule, which is a remarkable feat as Fedora often doesn't stick closely to release schedules. Fedora 23 is also the first time in two years that Fedora has managed to release two distribution updates in a single year. In 2014, with confusion and mess surrounding Fedora.next and the Fedora 21 update, only one release debuted.
Red Hat has continued to enhance its OpenShift cloud development platform for both containers and cloud-native applications. In doing so, it remains a candidate to supply both the tools and technologies for the next generation of OpenStack and other cloud apps.
Red Hat Inc (RHT): Michael Cunningham , EVP, General Counsel of Red Hat Inc sold 5,000 shares on Nov 6, 2015. The Insider selling transaction was disclosed on Nov 9, 2015 to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The shares were sold at $80.78 per share for a total value of $403,900.00.
Last week our first systemd.conf conference took place at betahaus, in Berlin, Germany. With almost 100 attendees, a dense schedule of 23 high-quality talks stuffed into a single track on just two days, a productive hackfest and numerous consumed Club-Mates I believe it was quite a success!
Red Hat, Inc. RHT, belonging to the Technology sector reported a price of 81.02 today, a change of -0.67%. Red Hat, Inc. predicts a earnings per share growth of over the next five years. Its return on equity is currently and its debt to equity is currently 0.53. Red Hat, Inc. stands at and its gross margin is 84.80%.
In its most recent quarter Red Hat Incorporated had actual sales of $504.148. Among the 11 analysts who were surveyed, the consensus expectation for quarterly sales had been 494.778.
Adam Clater, chief cloud architect in the Office of the Chief Technologist of Red Hat's Public Sector organization, recently answered some questions from FedTech managing editor David Stegon about the evolution of Platform as a Service (Paas).
Systemd.conf, the inaugural systemd conference for developers, has successfully concluded in Berlin.
Last week I pointed out the live video streaming from the systemd conference. Now that the event is over, all of the videos and slides are available to consume on your schedule.
In October I appeared on the 100th episode of The Dave and Gunnar Show, an independent podcast about open source and open government issues hosted by two members of Red Hat's public sector team. We spoke at length about The Open Organization (one of my all-time favorite topics!), and the interview gave me a chance to address an important question.
EVP Michael Cunningham sold 5,000 shares of Red Hat stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, November 6th. The shares were sold at an average price of $80.78, for a total transaction of $403,900.00. Following the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 46,500 shares in the company, valued at $3,756,270. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at this hyperlink.
As many of you might already know, Fedora Project announced the final release of the anticipated Fedora 23 Linux operating system for 64-bit and 32-bit computers earlier this week, on November 3, 2015.
However, the good news for sysadmins who want to deploy the Server or Cloud editions of the Fedora 23 operating system on their company's infrastructure is that the famous GNU/Linux distribution has also been released for AArch64 and POWER.
The developers behind the Fedora-based Korora Linux distribution have had the great pleasure of announcing earlier today, November 8, the immediate availability for download and testing of Korora 23 Beta.
Last month, Fedora Program Manager Jan Kuà â¢ík announced the approval of the Fedora 24 schedule with a current release date of May 17, 2016. Fedora 24 Alpha is slated for release on March 1st, 2016, and the Beta has a release date of April 12th, 2016.
These dates may change as development on Fedora 24 progresses, so always check the schedule for the most accurate version of the Fedora 24 schedule.
The Fedora Linux 23 was officially released on Nov. 3, providing the second major update for Red Hat's community Linux distribution in 2015. The release of two Fedora distributions in the same year puts the project back on track, after only a single release in 2014, when the Fedora Project reorganized under the Fedora Next banner, with specific products for Workstation, Server and Cloud use cases. One of the big new features in Fedora 23 is a capability that can enable an organization to bring a cloud image back down into a server image, with the cloudtoserver tool. The basic premise behind the tool is that cloud images are often ephemeral and not long-lived, while servers are more cared for and applications run for long periods of time. The common analogy used is that of pets versus cattle, where servers are treated as well cared for pets, while cloud images are slaughtered and killed as needed. On the workstation side, Fedora 23 includes the new GNOME 3.18 open-source desktop. GNOME 3.18 offers enhanced features such as an improved calendar, software updating and file management capabilities. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at the highlights of the Fedora 23 Linux release.
Finally! The first-ever official Cinnamon edition of the acclaimed Fedora Linux computer operating system has been announced today, November 10, 2015.
The Fedora distribution is a Red Hat sponsored community project which regularly ships with some of the latest software the open source community has to offer. The most recent release of the distribution, Fedora 23, features GNOME 3.18, LibreOffice 5, version 4.2 of the Linux kernel and the ability to access Google Drive from the GNOME file manager. This release also features packages built with security hardening features like address space layout randomization (ASLR) which makes it more difficult to exploit vulnerabilities in software. In addition, Fedora has almost entirely migrated from Python 2 to Python 3 with all core utilities such as the Anaconda system installer now using Python 3. A full list of changes can be found in the Fedora 23 release notes.
These days, the Fedora distribution is made available in several editions, including Workstation, Server and Cloud. I decided to download the project's Workstation edition which is available as a 1.4GB ISO. The default desktop environment for the Workstation edition is GNOME Shell, but spins of Fedora are available with alternative desktop environments.
Week ago Fedora 23 got released. Also for ARM and AArch64 architectures. But it does not mean that it supports all possible hardware.
Debian Live has passed on. And it has done so in not happy circumstances. (You can search the list archives for more if you are confused.) I have reposted here my response to this one thread because it’s all I really want to say, after all of the years of working with the team.
On November 8, the antiX development team announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the upcoming antiX MX 15 GNU/Linux distribution.
Canonical's Alan Pope informed us this past weekend about the general availability of a preview version of the upcoming LibreOffice DocViewer app for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu Phone devices.
The Ubuntu developers are working on improving the interaction between GTK apps and the Mir display server and it looks like they are finally getting closer to their goal.
Ubuntu developers are working on a new feature for Ubuntu called click lock. This is already present in Windows systems, but it looks like no one figured how to integrate it in Linux systems.
Canonical says that LXD, its container-based virtualization solution for Ubuntu, is now the "world's fastest hypervisor" with the release of Linux Containers (LXC) version 2.0, which appeared a few days ago.
Canonical has just published four Ubuntu Security Notices that detail a recent Linux kernel vulnerability discovered in the kernel packages of all of the supported Ubuntu operating systems.
SolidRun launched a Linux-supported “ClearFog” sandwich-style networking SBC with an Armada 38x-based COM, six switched GbE ports, and MikroBus expansion.
SolidRun, which is known for its Linux-friendly HummingBoard SBCs and CuBox mini-PCs, has launched a 38x-MicroSoM computer-on-module based on a dual-core Marvell Armada 38x system-on-chip, along with an open-spec companion carrier board aimed at networking and IoT gateway duty. The combination, which is available with Yocto Project or OpenWRT Linux, is available as a ClearFog SBC. A Pro version with six gigabit Ethernet ports is available now starting at $170, and a Base version with dual GbE ports, is coming soon
Both models are designed to support Linux-based software including Yocto and OpenWRT.
Applications written for iOS devices have more vulnerabilities than those written for Androids, and this has the potential for security problems in the future as attackers move to application-based threat vectors.
According to a new report from mobile application security vendors Checkmarx and AppSec Labs, the average mobile app has nine vulnerabilities.
Of the iOS vulnerabilities, 40 percent were critical or high severity, compared to 36 percent of the Android vulnerabilities, said Amit Ashbel, product marketing manager at Checkmarx.
The Connected is the first Android Wear watch to retail for over $1,000, and Tag Heuer isn't shy in making comparisons to the Apple Watch, which can cost as much as $17,000 for a tricked out gold model. The Carrera Connected isn't made of gold, but it is comprised of titanium, a metal prized for its high strength to weight ratio compared to steel. Tag Heuer says the watch can be personalized with six different rubber straps. The watch measures 46mm in diameter, putting it on the larger side of the spectrum.
When I was reviewing this phone, I took the Acela train from New York to DC. It's a train filled to the brim with lawyers and lobbyists — and several of them saw the BlackBerry logo atop this beautiful phone and asked me about it. One of them gestured with disdain at his iPhone, practically begging me to give him permission to cast it aside and go back to the BlackBerry. (Obviously the $699 asking price wasn't going to be a problem.)
In truth, I wanted to tell him to do it. But I couldn't. There are enough software bugs and slowdowns that I had to tell him to hold off and see if BlackBerry could finish the job it started here. Take those good ideas and buff off their rough edges, make the software just a little more stable. Because as a first effort at an Android phone, the Priv is remarkable, and I couldn't wait to see what a second push would do for it (assuming, of course, that BlackBerry gets the chance).
The Samsung SM-W2016, thought to be the anticipated Galaxy Golden 3 flip phone smartphone, showed up in GFXBench benchmarks last month. It has now been certified by Tenaa. The listing tips some of its specifications but fails to show images of the handset .
Older Sony smartphones can now get a taste of newer Android software, thanks to Xperia Overlay, which just added more goodies.
KFC doesn’t make a Bluetooth speaker … yet (though it does make a Bluetooth keyboard, oddly enough). But it seems like just about everyone else does, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t too surprised to learn that Mohu, maker of an especially popular line of over-the-air HD antennas, had decided to make a move into the world of wireless audio. From antennas to wireless speakers, just like that? Apparently so. Meet the Mohu BeBox.
The Android Wear companion app received an update to version 1.4 over the weekend, and these 1.x updates to the phone app are usually a sign that a new update is coming to the watch(es) as well. Tomorrow will see the introduction of Tag Heuer’s long-awaited luxury entry, so the stars might be aligning for more than just hardware announcements in the morning…
Norwegian browser maker Opera has struck agreements with 14 Android smartphone makers including Samsung and Xiaomi to embed its data-saving Opera Max app on new devices.
Opera now expects its Max app will have shipped with 100 million Android smartphones by 2017, thanks to the new deals.
Google wants to take Android to the office. The company recently pushed its business-friendly initiative, Android for Work, with a splashy livestream and a tempting offer: a free Nexus 5X for businesses willing to give the service a go.
We chatted this week with Andrew Toy, the product management director of Android for Work. He casts Android as the right operating system for a world that’s quickly transforming from mobile-first to mobile-only.
I'm the first to admit that I spend entirely too much time staring at my Android phone. Unfortunately with heavy usage, errors and mishaps are bound to occur. In this article, I'll share my top tips for troubleshooting, fixing and often avoiding Android phone issues.
Amazon’s Fire tablets run Amazon’s own “Fire OS” operating system. Fire OS is based on Google’s Android, but it doesn’t have any of Google’s apps or services. Here’s what that means, and how exactly they’re different.
It’s not really correct to say that Amazon’s Fire tablets run Android. But, in another sense, they do run a lot of Android code. All the apps you’ll run on a Fire tablet are Android apps, too.
The Unix Philosophy of "Do one thing and do it well" has helped an enormous amount with keeping feature size down and projects focused.
Open-source software has become an important presence in many areas of IT, and now, as storage increasingly becomes software-defined storage, it is storage's turn. The darling of the open-source storage movement – though it is by no means the only viable and popular option – is Ceph.
Google has just announced that it's open sourcing TensorFlow under the Apache 2 license. That awfully nerdy sentence means that part of the software that Google uses to power its machine learning systems — the stuff that can translate words on a sign with your camera or learn what a cat looks like just by looking at a ton of photos — will now be free for anybody to use or alter.
The big question is now: what does this mean for free software, new free software contributors and the overall freedom of the new computing platforms? It’s hard to see how a potential new completely free software project could conquer this new closed platforms. What is needed is a really good go-to-market strategy which makes it possible for the mainstream users to install and use this new alternative software on their devices. Without this it is hard to see how this can ever attract a bigger user base and a relevant contributor community.
This is a hard nut to crack and a real challenge for free software. It will require more than heads-down-and-code. What is certain is that we can’t rely on an open ecosystem anymore because it is possible that the personal computer was an exception and the last one!
Hence TensorFlow, a machine-learning system that Google has used internally for a few years. Today, Google is taking it open source, releasing the software parameters to fellow engineers, academics and hacks with enough coding chops.
TensorFlow — Google released, as open source, their distributed machine learning system. The DataFlow programming framework is sweet, and the documentation is gorgeous. AMAZINGLY high-quality, sets the bar for any project. This may be 2015’s most important software release.
While this line or argument appears to have some logic, I believe it is too simplistic and ultimately wrong for a number of reasons. While it may appear counterintuitive to people that an open source company supplies its products for low-cost subscription fees, in today's technology marketplace it is the open source company that has the greatest long-term strategic resilience. That's because in today's fast-paced technology marketplace, the value of proprietary software products approaches zero at an accelerating rate.
In most big security breaches, there’s a familiar thread: something funny was going on, but no one noticed. The information was in the logs, but no one was looking for it. Logs from the hundreds or thousands of network devices are the secret sauce to problem solving, security alerting, and performance and capacity management. Gathering logs together, analyzing them, reporting, and alerting on them is a basic part of good IT practice.
Eleven years ago, Firefox 1.0 was released with much excitement and anticipation. With the help of volunteers, The Mozilla Foundation placed a two-page advertisement in the New York Times. Over the last 11 years, Firefox has been been used by millions of people worldwide, becoming one of the most popular web browsers available to surf the Internet.
As you may already know, Firefox is being developed on three separate channels. First, the features are implemented in the developer branch, they reach the beta channel when enough tests have been performed and finally, some of the new features from the betas get included in the stable version of Firefox.
MongoDB today announced that Man AHL, a leading quantitative investment firm, has released Arctic, its MongoDB-powered financial tick store, on GitHub as a freely available open source project.
As you may know, the Ubuntu developers have started porting LibreOffice DocViewer App for Ubuntu Touch a while ago, but this past weekend, Canonical’s Alan Pope has announced that a preview version of the LibreOffice DocViewer app for the mobile version of Ubuntu has been released, being integrated with LibreOfficeKit 5.0.3.
One in four websites is now powered by WordPress.
Today is a big day for the free and open-source content management system (CMS). To be perfectly clear, the milestone figure doesn’t represent a fraction of all websites that have a CMS: WordPress now powers 25 percent of the Web.
The latest data comes from W3Techs, which measures both usage and market share: “WordPress is used by 58.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 25.0% of all websites.” While these numbers naturally fluctuate over the course of the month, the general trend for WordPress has been slow but steady growth.
Facebook's story is well documented; Set up by a bunch of students to create a campus community, it has now grown into a 1.5 billion strong network, all in the space of a decade.
Mark Zuckerberg's company now generates over $4bn in revenue, and over the years has acquried two popular web platforms in the form of Whatsapp and photo-sharing site Instagram.
So Facebook has come a long way in the time it takes some companies just to grow beyond startups.
A lot of this is down to the company's strategy of moving from being just a social network into a platform company offering a foundation for developers to build wildly successful apps on, all of which Facebook takes a slice of.
The venture capital train cruising around the analytics ecosystem made its latest stop in the machine learning space to unload $20 million on H20.ai Inc., the startup behind the open-source algorithm development platform of the same name. The funding tops off a record year that saw downloads of the software more than triple from the previous 12 months.
H20 estimates that over 10 percent of the world’s data scientists now employ its platform to help their applications make automated decisions in fields like online advertising, where a new targeting opportunity can come and go much faster than a human is able to react. Handling millions of such events every second the way Google does requires an algorithm that is not only capable of picking the best promotion to serve to a particular user, but also operate parallely on a massive scale.
H2O is an open source platform for data scientists and developers who need a fast machine learning engine for their applications. H2O.ai, the company behind the service, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round led by Paxion Capital Partners (the new firm of GoPro board member Michael Marks) and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Transamerica. New investor Capital One Growth Ventures also joined this round. In total, the company has now raised $34 million.
The FSF has been warning users of the dangers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for many years now. The TPP is an agreement negotiated in secret nominally for the promotion of trade, yet entire chapters of it are dedicated to implementing restrictions and regulations on computing and the Internet. In April of 2015, a leaked draft of the agreement revealed a whole host of problems. From extensions to the term of copyright, confusing provisions on software patents, and spreading the worst aspects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) Digital Restrictions Managment (DRM) provisions beyond the United States, the TPP negotiations were and are an attack on user freedom. In the U.S. at that time, the battle was to stop Trade Promotion Authority, which would fast-track passage of TPP in the U.S. once an accord was reached. We unfortunately lost that battle, and last month the TPP negotiations ended. On November 5th, the secret text of TPP was finally officially released to the public. Because of Trade Promotion Authority, the time we have left to stop TPP in the U.S. is extremely limited. For U.S. residents, there are only 90 days left before this trade agreement locks users in for possibly decades. For users in other TPP member countries, the time frame is not much better. The war wages on and the time to act is now.
After a long wait, this release contains a number of bug fixes and minor cleanups.
Ludovic Courtès presented his vision for future secure operating system distributions using GNU Guix today, including a surprising number of GNUnet references.
As you may know, wxMaxima is an open-source graphical user interface for the computer algebra system Maxima, using wxWidgets. Among others, wxMaxima provides menus and dialogs for maxima commands, autocompletion, inline plots and simple animations.
In a surprising turn of events (or not so surprising, depending upon your point of view), the UK has decided to adopt the open source "GovOffice" office suite (a fork of LibreOffice...sold and supported by Collabora Productivity). This deal is purported to serve in such a way as to compliment or replace existing solutions. Yet, last march UK's Cabinet Office shifted from MS Office to Google Apps (for over 2,000 users)...a clear sign they are done shelling out for MS Office licenses.
One of my very first jobs in Silicon Valley was to try to help an internet startup get a big juicy contract with the US government (specifically the Department of Defense). The whole process was a disaster of epic proportions, in which I learned a ridiculous amount about government procurement, none of it good. At one point, I believe the company I worked for was paying a 5-figure-per-month "retainer" to an ex-high ranking military guy, mainly so that he would go out and drink a lot of bourbon with his DoD buddies and award us a no-bid contract before anyone realized it should be put out to bid. And, of course, as an internet startup, we didn't have a GSA contract, and had to find a sham "partner" who would officially get the contract, under which we'd be a subcontractor. And, of course, we were asking for millions of dollars in government cash, and the technology we had in place wasn't anything like what the DoD was actually looking for. In short, the whole thing was a complete mess. That was two decades ago, so I'd hope that things had changed, but we've heard so many stories of the ridiculousness of government procurement, that I doubt it's changed that much.
The Australian public sector faces a unique combination of severe budget constraints, growing demand, innovation in technology and the mainstream adoption of on-line channels. The scalability, availability, and lower transaction costs offered by digital self-service have become critical to the development of cost effective public services.
As you may not know, I'm a member of Fedora's Perl SIG, the group of people who maintain the Perl ecosystem by providing timely reviews, acting as package co-maintainers and assisting with related security issues.
Here is some benchmark results.
The Doodle can be seen around the world in November 9, except for in the UK, Mexico and parts of the Middle East and Africa.
Administrators of Web servers that were infected with a recently released ransomware program for Linux are in luck: There's now a free tool that can decrypt their files.
The tool was created by malware researchers from antivirus firm Bitdefender, who found a major flaw in how the Linux.Encoder.1 ransomware uses encryption.
Recorded Future threat intelligence analysis of over 100 exploit kits (EKs) and known vulnerabilities identified Adobe Flash Player as the most frequently exploited product. While the role of Adobe Flash vulnerabilities as a regular in-road for criminals and malware should come as no surprise to information security professionals, the scale is significant.
Last week The Washington Post published an article online stating that Linus Torvalds doesn't take Linux security as seriously as he should and causing a bit of a firestorm. Sam Varghese has the best take-down. In other news, a new trojan targets Linux systems and administers to demand a ransom payment and a new "World without Linux" video was posted.
On August 31, 2013, US president Barack Obama announced that he intended to launch a military attack on Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack in that country that the US blamed on the Syrian government. Obama assured the US public that this would be a limited action solely intended to punish the Assad government for using chemical weapons; the goal of US military action would not be to overthrow the Assad government, nor to change the balance of forces in Syria's sectarian civil war.
For that slice of the American public that still depends heavily on major daily newspapers as their main source of news, they might not even know that the on-line publication The Intercept has published a package of alarming drone-assassination articles based on secret military documents provided by an anonymous intelligence whistleblower.
These “Drone Papers” show, among other disclosures, that the U.S. government has been lying about the number of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes in Afghanistan,Yemen and Somalia. For every targeted individual assassinated, another five or six non-targeted individuals are killed — giving the lie to the Obama administration’s long-standing claims of careful, precision killing of specific targets in order to avoid killing civilians.
The Intercept, relying on a cache of slides provided to it by its whistleblower source, posted its package of eight articles on October 15, 2015. Among those picking up on the stories was the Huffington Post (which ran excerpts), and other outlets — including The Guardian, Newsweek, New York Magazine, NPR, the PBS NewsHour, CNN — which generally cited some of The Intercept’s main findings or speculated about a “second [Edward] Snowden” coming forth as a national security whistleblower.
In the full report from their investigation, they detail how staff members who attempted to flee the hospital were actually shot from the planes — lending credence to the observation that it appears the U.S. military was on a complete kill mission.
No real answers have been given from our government as to why this hospital was attacked with such ferocity. What's obvious is this — it was an enormous error. Nothing whatsoever can justify the carnage that our military caused in this attack.
One of Australia's most wanted fugitives, Michael Hand, the co-founder of the Sydney-based international merchant bank Nugan Hand, has been found alive and well and living in small-town America.
Kennedy pressed Pakistan’s leader for help with a sensitive spy operation against China.
According to a report published by The Intercept, a highly classified Defense Department program which dates to 2004, had funded HISG, and it continued functioning until 2012. The program was concocted by Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, a senior Defense Department intelligence official, during the Bush administration. Boykin is considered to be a zealous Christian and has been previously criticized for his statements about Islam. He also developed the unorthodox deceptive method to use NGOs to collect Intelligence since they could get in to North Korea and go to places where access would be denied otherwise.
It’s been 43 years since the CIA cut off support to the Tibetan guerillas that the agency trained and armed to fight a covert war against China. Yet, a monument to the CIA’s secret war in Tibet is still standing in Pokhara, Nepal.
With each passing week, more and more people are beginning to ask the kinds of questions the Pentagon and CIA most assuredly do not want to answer and now, US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is out calling Washington’s effort to oust Assad both “counterproductive” and “illegal.” In the following priceless video clip, Gabbard accuses the CIA of arming the very same terrorists who The White House insists are "our sworn enemy" and all but tells the American public that the government is lying to them and may end up inadvertently starting “World War III.”
Speaking with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Tulsi explains why the US allying with Islamist extremists to overthrow Syrian President Assad is an illegal, counterproductive war that will cause even more human misery in the region and help ISIS and other Islamist extremists take over all of Syria. Instead of once again being distracted by trying to get rid of a secular dictator, Tulsi explains, the US must stay out of counterproductive wars and focus on defeating the Islamist extremists who have declared war on America.
Among the range of munitions and supplies that the CIA has funneled to the various brigades of the Free Syrian Army and other moderate groups through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey are TOW anti-tank missiles.
The U.S. deployment of a team of special operations forces to Syria comes after the first U.S. combat casualty in Iraq in four years. Just last month, President Obama reversed course in Afghanistan, halting the scheduled withdrawal of U.S. troops fighting in the nation’s longest war. In an escalation of the air war in Syria, the United States has also announced plans to deploy more fighter planes, including 12 F-15s, to the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. On top of the wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, the U.S. continues to carry out drone strikes across the globe from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia. "[Obama’s] policy has been one of mission creep," says Andrew Bacevich, retired colonel, Vietnam War veteran, and international relations professor at Boston University. "The likelihood that the introduction of a handful of dozen of U.S. soldiers making any meaningful difference in the course of events is just about nil."
Jeremy Corbyn stayed behind at the Cenotaph on Sunday long after the television cameras had gone to mingle with veterans.
Pakistan has dramatically overtaken Saudi Arabia in the number of executions it is carrying out on an almost daily basis, as it emerged that the Asian country has killed 299 people in less than a year.
Human rights group Reprieve told The Independent Pakistan is expected to pass the grisly milestone of 300 death penalties “by the end of this week” – taking its rate of executions to 0.93 per day.
Last year, Saudi Arabia was behind only China and Iran in the number of its own citizens it was putting to the sword, and the number of its executions has soared under the new King Salman. It killed 102 convicted criminals in the first six months of 2015 alone.
The hackers who breached the CIA director's personal emails are at it again, having published additional data containing names, phone numbers, and email addresses of more than 2,000 law enforcement officers, military officers, and government employees.
Waterlogged cities might seem like stuff of the post-apocalypse, but that post-apocalypse might come as soon as a single generation.
Climate Central put together some sobering visuals of what cities would look like in the year 2100, if our carbon emissions keep climbing. But what’s different from the usual before and after photos is that this one assumes two different futures: one in which temperatures rise 4€º C and one where it only rises 2€º C.
According to estimates released this week by Guido van der Werf on the Global Fire Emissions Database, there have been nearly 100,000 active fire detections in Indonesia so far in 2015, which since September have generated emissions each day exceeding the average daily emissions from all U.S. economic activity. Following several recent intense outbreaks of fires—in June 2013, March 2014 and November 2014—the country is now on track to experience more fires this year than it did during the 2006 fire season, one of its worst on record.
Volkswagen’s recent disclosure that it reported false fuel economy and carbon dioxide readings to European regulators was prompted by an internal whistle-blower, the company said on Sunday.
Volkswagen admitted last Tuesday that it had underreported carbon dioxide emissions on 800,000 diesel- and gasoline-powered cars in Europe. That disclosure added to the automaker’s credibility problems, which began in September when it admitted that it had installed software on millions of its diesel cars in recent years to enable them to cheat on air pollution tests.
In trying to determine who was responsible for the diesel cheating scandal, Volkswagen’s internal investigators have reportedly been hampered by an ingrained fear of delivering bad news to superiors. But in the case of the new disclosure, some employees have evidently been willing to come forward under the company’s new management.
The largest contribution so far to an anti-consumer measure to impede access to solar energy just came from a mysterious new donor.
This new donation comes as the battle over whether consumers in Florida can install home solar is heating up, with rival state constitutional amendments both aiming for the ballot in 2016.
On one side are consumer and environmental groups promoting home solar, and on the other—trying to block consumer access—are major utilities, groups linked to the Koch brothers and a new mysterious funder.
The timing is accidental but impeccable. Just as governments are about to launch an unprecedented effort to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions, one of the biggest carbon-dioxide gushers ever known has erupted with record force. At times during the past several weeks, fires in Indonesia have released as much carbon as the entire U.S. economy, even as they destroyed millions of acres of tropical forest, a natural carbon sink. Neighboring countries, along with economic giants such as the U.S., China and Europe, have to join forces to turn off this tap.
Air pollution from the forest fires in Indonesia may have cast a pall over the region, but one business sector has gotten a boost: travel out of Singapore.
A solid chunk of Singapore's residents looked to escape the worst of the air pollution, colloquially called the haze, in September and October. Travel search website Skyscanner said that searches for outbound travel from Singapore climbed gradually from September 4 - when the city-state's air quality levels started approaching an unhealthy level - and by October 23 were more than 50 percent higher.
Humans can tolerate some extremes of hot and dry temperatures by sweating, which lowers our body temperature via evaporative cooling. However, this ability is greatly reduced when high temperatures are accompanied by high humidity. When people are exposed to a combination of higher temperatures and increased humidity, heat stroke can lead to untimely deaths.
Existing climate models have shown that a global temperature increase to the threshold of human survivability would be reached in some regions of the globe at a point in the distant future. However, a new paper published by Jeremy Pal and Elfatih Eltahir in Nature Climate Change presents evidence that this deadly combination of heat and humidity increases could occur in the Persian Gulf much earlier than previously anticipated.
The former Olympic figure skater and physician made history when she became the first African-American athlete to win a Winter Games medal when she took home the bronze at the 1988 Olympics. She recently revealed she is now broke, unemployed and living in a bed bug-infested trailer.
The IT workers at Cengage Learning in the company's Mason, Ohio offices learned of their fates game-show style. First, they were told to gather in a large conference room. There were vague remarks from an IT executive about a "transition." Slides were shown that listed employee names, directing them to one of three rooms where they would be told specifically what was happening to them. Some employees were cold with worry.
The biggest group, those getting pink slips, were told to remain in the large conference room. Workers directed to go through what we'll call Door No. 2, were offered employment with IT offshore outsourcing firm Cognizant. That was the smallest group. And those sent through Door No. 3 remained employed in Cengage's IT department. This happened in mid-October.
[...]
The employees were warned that speaking to the news media meant loss of severance. Despite their fears, they want their story told. They want people to know what's happening to IT jobs in the heartland. They don't want the offshoring of their livelihoods to pass in silence.
Speaking to Swedish media, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has admitted that he feels "very comfortable" with the choices he made.
Chances are that you have heard about Edward Snowden, the man who started to openly talk about controversial topics relating to US security and intelligence, including CIA torture, mass surveillance and the US’s fight against ISIS.
To put things better into perspective, after blowing the whistle on these secrets, the US Government saw him as a traitor, which is why he decided to flee the country, and seek political asylum somewhere else. He has recently given an interview, and discussed more about the current security status of the US and other regions, while also stating that he is fully comfortable with the choices that he has made.
The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), in partnership with the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace National Program Office, is seeking comments on a new project focused on protecting privacy and security when reusing credentials at multiple online service providers.
Lebanon Public Libraries officials are offering a privacy prize to anyone who attends their screening of the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour at the Kilton Public Library on Tuesday evening.
Information Technology Librarian Chuck McAndrew has downloaded an operating system called Tails, designed to help users browse the web more securely, onto flash drives free for the taking.
When the Home Office and intelligence agencies began promoting the idea that the new investigatory powers bill was a “climbdown”, I grew suspicious. If the powerful are forced to compromise they don’t crow about it or send out press releases – or, in the case of intelligence agencies, make off-the-record briefings outlining how they failed to get what they wanted. That could mean only one thing: they had got what they wanted.
Major technology firms are concerned that the British government is attempting to ban strong encryption with the Investigatory Powers Bill, despite its assurances to the contrary.
A number of companies, both large and small, have expressed their fears to the Guardian that one particular clause of the proposed legislation gives the government the power to force them to weaken their systems, in order to enable the bulk collection aspects of the bill.
Section 189 of the bill, titled “Maintenance of technical capability”, allows the secretary of state to issue orders to companies “relating to the removal of electronic protection applied … to any communications or data”.
The only limits on the power of the Secretary of State to do so are a requirement that they consult with an advisory board beforehand, and that any specific obligation must be “reasonable” and “practicable”. The technical capability notice can even be issued to people outside the UK, and require them to do, or not to do, things outside the UK.
[...]
As a result, the UK government could decide to issue a technical capability order requiring the communications firms to disable their end-to-end encryption, or replace it with a weaker form of encryption, which would leave the communications facilitator able to read messages sent using its service. The only defence the firms would have would be to argue such an order is not “reasonable”.
The powers in section 189 mirror similar powers in Ripa, an earlier piece of legislation which governed investigatory powers. However, Ripa’s equivalent orders only affected traditional internet service providers. Since the orders come with a gag attached, it is impossible to know whether, or how often, they have been used.
Back in December of 2013, DC district court judge Richard Leon shocked many by declaring the NSA's bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to be unconstitutional. Just a few months ago, the DC circuit appeals court overturned that ruling and sent it back to the lower court, saying that the plaintiff, Larry Klayman, failed to prove he had standing to bring the lawsuit -- mainly because Snowden only had revealed that the NSA was scooping up all Verizon Business Network phone records, and Klayman was a Verizon Wireless customer. That it had since been revealed that the NSA also got Verizon Wireless records was basically ignored.
Affirming his previous ruling that the NSA’s telephone records collection program is unconstitutional, a federal judge ordered the NSA to cease collecting the telephone records of an individual and his business. The judge further ordered the NSA to segregate any records that have already been collected so that they are not reviewed when the NSA’s telephone records database is queried. The order comes 20 days before the NSA program is set to expire pursuant to the USA FREEDOM Act.
Today, we bring more judicial follies about the NSA phone spying program. US District Judge Richard Leon of the District of Columbia ruled Monday that a challenge to the program "will likely succeed in showing that the Program is indeed an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment." But in that decision, the judge said the program, because of the legal posture of the lawsuit, could continue unabated—but with a caveat. The authorities have to stop scooping up the telephone metadata on J.J. Little, a Los Angeles trial lawyer, and his boutique firm of a handful of lawyers now at the center of the case that is as old as the Snowden disclosure.
Our nation's federal law enforcement agencies may soon be gazing back wistfully at the Golden Age of Warrantless Surveillance and wondering where it all went so very wrong. (Hint: the "warrantless" part had a lot to do with it.)
One place where the lack of warrants hasn't raised much concern is aerial surveillance. While the FBI may send its "secret" planes out to fly spiders-on-ecstasy patterns over US cities, the courts have generally found that this sort of surveillance doesn't violate anyone's expectation of privacy. In fact, cops pretty much have to land a helicopter in someone's backyard while "ground troops" point guns at the homeowner before the Fourth Amendment comes into play.
Little by little, the government is opening up about its use of computer security vulnerabilities. Last month, the NSA disclosed that it has historically “released more than 91% of vulnerabilities discovered in products that have gone through our internal review process and that are made and used in the United States.” There should probably be an asterisk or four accompanying that statement. But more on that in a minute. First, it’s worth examining why the government is being even the slightest bit forthcoming about this issue.
Since 2014, EFF has been suing under the Freedom of Information Act to get access to what the government calls the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP). That’s the policy that lets the NSA, FBI and others decide whether to tell vendors and software developers about weaknesses in their products or whether to hold onto and “exploit” them.
Facebook plans to appeal an order by a court in Belgium that banned it from tracking people who are not signed on to the social networking website.
Facebook plans to appeal an order by a court in Belgium that banned it from tracking people who are not signed on to the social networking website.
The dispute largely hinges around Facebook's use of a special cookie called 'datr' that the company claims helps it distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate visits to its website.
"We've used the datr security cookie for more than five years to keep Facebook secure for 1.5 billion people around the world," a Facebook spokesman said Monday. "We will appeal this decision and are working to minimize any disruption to people's access to Facebook in Belgium.”
John Key has opened up the spy agencies to public scrutiny in a way which we have never seen in New Zealand.
We know more now about what they do and even how they do it.
We know how the two agencies are managed, in that the GCSB and NZSIS both have top-flight lawyers in charge.
There will always be those who say we don't know enough. For those people, we now have improved oversight of the agencies. This also happened under the Prime Minister's watch as minister in charge of the agencies.
The judge who sentenced a former Defence employee to jail for leaking sensitive material online says he hopes the "clang of prison gates" will deter others considering committing similar offences.
Supreme Court Justice Richard Refshauge sentenced Michael Scerba, 24, to three months behind bars today after he was found guilty of posting two pages of a Defence intelligence report to the infamous anonymous internet message board 4chan in October 2012.
Despite the potential gravity of the breach, which was detected when a former member of the Defence Signals Directorate noticed the post, entitled "Julian Assange is my hero", Justice Refshauge took into account Scerba's early guilty plea and fragile emotional state due to a break-up at the time of the offence.
Scerba was caught when police searched his Canberra home and found the disk he had burned the "Five Eyes only" document to snapped in his bin.
U.S. lawmakers and federal watchdogs took the occasion Tuesday to deride the Transportation Security Administration’s ability, or lack thereof, to adequately detect weapons and other contraband during the passenger screening process at the nation’s airports. And TSA didn’t just miss a few things. Nope, according to auditors from the Inspector General’s Office, posing as travelers, 95 percent of contraband, like weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings.
Concerns about legal opinions being made public under the Freedom of Information Act are leading various parts of the federal government to stop asking for written advice from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, a top Obama administration lawyer said Thursday.
"I think that has served as a deterrent to some in terms of coming to the office to ask for a formal opinion," said Central Intelligence Agency General Counsel Caroline Krass, who spent more than a decade at the Justice Department office that issues legal advice for the executive branch.
The Police Scotland inquiry was initiated in summer 2013 after research that drew attention to the use of airports, including Inverness and Wick, as staging posts by the CIA. The investigation has still to be concluded.
In an interview with Democracy Now!, author David Talbot talks about his latest book, "The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government," a biography of the former director of the CIA during the 1950s. He tells Amy Goodman that the U.S.' current policies surrounding intelligence and security could be traced back to Dulles' reign. "He was a man who felt he was above the law," says Talobot. "He felt that democracy was something that should not be left in the hands of the American people or its representatives. He was part of what the famous sociologist from the 1950s, C. Wright Mills, called the power elite. And he felt that he and his brother and those types of people should be running the country."
The modest, salmon-colored building at 881 Lope de Vega street looks much like any other home in Guadalajara’s middle-class Jardines del Bosque neighborhood.
But behind the whitewashed walls, electric fence and barred windows is the house where one of the most infamous crimes in Mexican history took place.
Having just left the U.S. Consulate building on February 7, 1985, DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was on his way to meet his wife for lunch when he was apprehended by corrupt members of Mexico’s federal security agency.
In a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, the US made systematic torture a staple in its fight against terrorism. This revelation has resulted in international condemnation and lamentation, but nobody has been held accountable for torturing terror suspects — many of whom were released later without any charges having been filed. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) hopes to change that.
In both the Nazi and American examples, the experiments were carried out in the name of "national security." A Nazi doctor whom I (Lifton) interviewed had at first opposed the harmful "research" but changed his mind and participated in typhus experiments with prisoners after being told by a Nazi medical bureaucrat that they were necessary for finding ways to prevent epidemics in German troops.
A Florida man who piloted his one-person aircraft through some of the nation's most restricted airspace and landed on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol in an act he has called civil disobedience has agreed to a plea deal.
Douglas Hughes said Friday in a telephone interview that he has agreed to plead guilty to a felony, operating a gyrocopter without a license, a charge that carries a potential three years in prison.
Even though Tarantino appears to be done talking about this (after recognizing he wasn't dealing with a rational adversary), the Fraternal Order of Police isn't. For whatever reason, The Hollywood Reporter has allowed the national president of the threat-uttering Fraternal Order of Police to post an op-ed against the director on its website.
Chuck Canterbury calls Tarantino a "very strange man" who just doesn't understand the complexities of modern-day law enforcement. (It's only the amount of attention paid to police-involved-shootings that has changed, not the tactics, techniques or number of them.) He admits the boycott will probably have very little effect before going on to blame everything wrong with law enforcement on everyone else.
When a tech company tells you something is unlimited, don’t believe ’em.
Last week Microsoft nixed the unlimited storage option from its OneDrive service. Meanwhile, Comcast started billing users extra in some cities if they gobble more than 300GB of bandwidth per month. Last month Sprint followed the lead of most of its competitors and began throttling download speeds of its “unlimited” data plan for customers who exceed 23GB per month of data usage.
The message is clear: if you want to download or store lots of data, you’re going to have to pay more for it. But why isn’t it possible to offer an unlimited service that’s actually, y’know, unlimited?
Those of us who are concerned about software freedom should prefer completely free formats like Ogg Vorbis (lossy) and FLAC (lossless, compressed). We should particularly avoid file formats that include options for digital rights management (DRM). In theory, one might think that DRM is just a mechanism to prevent the unauthorized use (theft?) of someone's intellectual property. However, certain vendors use DRM to force their customers to use their software, and sometimes hardware. Once again, Wikipedia has a nice detailed article about this whole format business.
In this article, I focus on music in digital formats. Moreover, because I am a Linux kind-of-guy, I'm going to take a Linux kind-of-perspective on this topic.
Most people have heard of the MP3 format. It's an example of two things: First, it is not an open format, as a number of organizations claim patents on it. And second, it is a "lossy" format. Lossy formats compress the original signal by throwing out some of the signal components. The original rationale for this compression was to make music files smaller and more easily distributed. In contrast, there are also "lossless" formats, which can be compressed (without throwing away the original signal) or not. Digital music presented on the Compact Disc (CD) is an example of a lossless format (assuming it's an audio CD, not a data CD with MP3s saved on it).
Tons of people seem (quite rightly) concerned about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. As we pointed out last week after the final text was finally, released, the agreement has a lot of really big problems. But if you want to understand just how bad the agreement is, perhaps you should just look at the industries that like it. Vox notes that Big Pharma and Hollywood love the agreement while The Intercept notes that Wall Street loves it.
It should be noted that, actually, Big Pharma is apparently a bit disappointed that the TPP doesn't go far enough in locking up exclusivity for biologics.
Bob Coons writes, "Jim Balsillie, one of the founders of RIM, has made the headlines in Canada by stating that signing the TPP could be "the worst public policy decision in the country's history."
Globalizationis a positive and powerful force for good, if it is embedded in the right kind of ethical and legal framework. Yet the current draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not worthy of a simple thumbs-up by the Congress. Without jettisoning the purported goals of TPP, the 12 signatories should slow down, take the pieces of this complex trade agreement in turn, and work harder for a set of international standards that will truly support global sustainable development.
The TPP should be judged on whether it guarantees global economic well-being, not whether it gives advantages to the United States to the detriment of other countries. The ultimate goal of economic policy should be to raise the well-being of all parts of society, including the poor and middle class. Agreements that help the rich at the expense of the poor, capital at the expense of labor, or particular sectors at the expense of consumers, should be viewed with skepticism.
IP is full of trolls, but typically those associated with IP, not those online. The IPKat, however, is both a blog and part of the IP community, and therefore can take a wider look a trolls. So, for you delectation, some economics of internet trolls (a person who deliberately provokes, often in an abusive manner, for the sake of provoking):
The MPAA has submitted an overview of international "trade barriers" to the U.S. Government, which they see as harmful to the video and movie industries. Online privacy is listed as a serious problem, as it prevents copyright holders and local authorities from going after online pirates.
Back in January of this year, we wrote about a remarkable report proposing a number of major changes to EU copyright law. Part of an extremely long-drawn out process that aims to update the current 2001 copyright directive, the document was written by the sole Pirate Party MEP in the European Parliament, Julia Reda. In the short time she's been an MEP -- she was only elected in 2014 -- she's emerged as the European Parliament's leading expert on copyright, which means it's always worth taking her warnings in this area very seriously. Earlier this year, Techdirt noted that Reda was worried about moves to restrict outdoor photography in the EU.