I have to say I use Ubuntu less these days, but I still love Linux and Ubuntu in particular and I would love to install the next version and see a light, modern UI, it would truly kick some asses!
As many of you know, adoption of containers has skyrocketed over the last year or two. Thus far, containers have been used mostly by early adopters, yet over the next several years we can expect widespread enterprise adoption. In fact, I expect the rate of adoption to exceed that of cloud (IaaS services), or virtualization before that. While it took enterprises perhaps a decade to fully plan and implement their virtualization initiatives, we can expect many enterprises to have production container deployments within three to five years. I fear that many of these implementations will have serious problems. Worse still, container technologies, when misused, inherently force us to own bad solutions for far longer.
Geek News Radio will be a new show from Sixgun Productions, who, in the past, have brought you Linux Outlaws. Unlike that show, GNR won’t focus on a relatively narrow topic like Linux and open source software but will instead cover anything remotely geeky that the hosts want to talk about. Despite the name — yes, it’s an obvious Fallout reference — we expect this will be less of a news show and rather have the feel of a few friends shooting the shit over a beer in the pub. Think of it as going back to the very basics of LO, the early years before we started with all the interviews and segments and recurring topics.
I've released man-pages-4.03. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
Alex Deucher on Friday sent out the latest patches for implementing ASoC support for AMD APUs. These patches provide i2s audio support via a new driver and integrates with the AMDGPU DRM.
For those curious about the performance of the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, here are some benchmarks I've just finished up for this low-end, low-power ARM development board compared to other ARM, MIPS, and x86 hardware.
Thanks to all of the contributors that helped make a new release of supernova possible! Version 2.2.0 is available on GitHub or PyPi.
One of the neat things about writing a book about Linux is that it has “forced” me to try out some software I haven’t otherwise gotten around to trying.
I recently finished up a chapter on customizing the terminal, and it includes a section on alternative terminals. This was the chance for me to spend some time with Guake, the roll-down terminal based upon the beloved first-person shooter’s windowshade menu.
Fotoxx is an open source photo editing program, working on Linux. It has support for the most important image formats, including JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and RAW. Fotoxx is mostly used for cropping, resizing or retouching photos, without using layers, like Photoshop.
As you may know, Stellarium is an open-source planetarium application, providing a realistic and accurate sky image in 3D, as if the users were looking through a telescope.
The latest unstable (developer) version available is Opera 35 build 35.0.2064.0, which brings a few changes, including mute tab improvements and Simple Settings updates.
The original plan was to write a blog post about LVM Thin Provisioning because that is a technology and in the same time a feature of LVM that deserves a lot more attention and a much bigger number of deployments than it currently gets. However, while I was thinking about the contents of such blog post and while I was talking to my colleagues and some other people about LVM Thin Provisioning I realized that I’d be jumping on a train that goes really fast in the middle of its way. While thin provisioning is absolutely a great thing, its benefits and features are most visible when compared to traditional 1 LVM. But based on my experience that quickly goes to wondering about why LVM hasn’t been doing things that way from the very beginning and then about how traditional LVM actually works.
The racing game ‘Grid Racing‘, which was released in 2014 for Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, will arrive on December 10 to OS X and Linux. There will be support for cross-platform multiplayer, allowing gamers with different platforms online to compete against each other.
Last year we caught wind of a project called OpenMW — an effort to build a new, open source client for Bethesda’s open world RPG Morrowind, with the potential for co-operative play. Unfortunately, while the project is still going, multiplayer is still on the “would be nice, but really hard” list.
Ruzar - The Life Stone is a well reviewed first person dungeon crawler (think Legend of Grimrock if you need a comparison) now on SteamOS & Linux.
How do you feel about the Linux versions of Garry's Mod and Rust?
As you may know, Warsow is an open-source, multi-platform, first-person shooter game, being somehow similar to the good old Quake 3 game, but it provides a cartoonish look and feel.
Marbles have fascinated the population of the blue marble for centuries. Today, we take a look at three digital variants that are open source and playable cross-platform.
And that’s going to be celebrated with some free tutorial videos. Over to Nathan!
It’s Tuesday today, so it’s time for a new Krita tutorial. In this video, you will get an overview of the new features added in Krita since version 2.9.5. It covers all of the smaller, yet very useful workflow improvements brought to the application over the past few months.
I won't say much more in this post, my topic here is to announce that application bundles are available again!
These prebuilt archives are now hosted on KDE infrastructure, and contain the latest code (files generously prepared by MLT dev are still KDE4 version, and hosted on a private space)...
You’re all invited to join John’s monthly drawing challenge again. It’s fun, it’s friendly and helps with the all-important goal of keeping drawing. This month’s theme is “Complementary”.
And last (in the last few days of the month) I’ve started a new project. SVN-branch is a utility that helps whoever still uses SVN switch between branches with more ease. We still use SVN at work, and the KDE translations system still uses SVN. So this came in handy for me.
Exactly one month ago I blogged about a new KDE application for music education named Minuet. Since it was only a few days until featuring freezing KDE Applications 15.12 at that time, we postponed the first release of Minuet to 16.04. The plan is to move it in a couple weeks to KDE review and make the final adjustments for having our newly KDE-Edu baby out in the wild.
The GTK+ developers have announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the fourth development milestone towards the GTK+ 3.20 GUI toolkit for the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.
Matthias Clasen has announced the release of GTK+ 3.19.4, the latest development snapshot for the toolkit in the road to GNOME 3.20.
Thanks to GNOME I’m attending the content apps hackfest. Today started with some introductionary some discussion on the individual applications, Documents, Books, Videos, Photos and Music. GNOME contributors also attended through hangouts and we managed to cover quite some ground in terms of what the content apps needs and their scope. We are around 13 in total sitting at Medialab, typing away on the keyboards now.
Zorin OS 10 is ever so slightly better than its predecessor, which is how it should be really. It's a nice, simple, elegant, incremental update and improvement of the ninth release, and it gives a well-rounded, Windows-like experience to the user, with only a bit too much color contrast for its own good.
On the software side, most of the stuff works well, there are some silly issues here and there, but the core of it is available for immediate and satisfactory consumption. The big problem is probably Bluetooth. A few other key areas need fixing like updates, search, visual placement of GUI elements, some additional software choices, and alike. But nothing too major really. I'm being picky. 9.53/10. A decent one, worth testing. Enjoy.
The Solus Project is happy to announce the release of a new Daily ISO, 0.201549.3.0.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the December 2015 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
Pentoo 2015.0 RC4.6 is a free and open-source Linux system based on the good old Gentoo Linux, ideal for network engineers and hackers.
Among others, Pentoo 2015.0 RC4.6 has received a new installer, tested by the team in real-life scenarios, usability improvements have been implemented and a lot of bugs have been squashed as well.
While this is only a pre-release system, the Pentoo team is prepping for a major release, which should get interesting new features and tools.
Fedora produces new releases approximately every six months — targeted at May and October. We always have two currently-supported releases, the latest and “n minus one”. We also have a one-month overlap after a new release comes out where “n minus two” is supported for a month. That lets you skip a release, if you like, and upgrade only once a year. I can’t believe this year has gone so fast, but the time has come to say goodbye to Fedora 21, which reached end of life status on December 1st, 2015. No further updates will be produced, even for security issues. If you’re still on F21 (or something older!) now’s the time to upgrade. Check out the upgrade instructions here.
One of the tasks websites team had for the final F23 release were the two week atomic images. In fact, for the past two Fedora releases, we’ve included an Atomic Host cloud image as a non-blocking deliverable. However, upstream Atomic is moving very fast — by the end of the alpha, beta, final stabilization cycle Fedora uses, the released artifact is basically obsolete. Additionally, the Project Atomic team at Red Hat wanted to do their ongoing development work in the Fedora upstream, and the six-month release cycle does not lend itself to that.
This week, I was attending the first Reproducible Builds World Summit in Athens. A while ago, I have fixed some reproducibility bugs in the Haskell compiler GHC (parts of #4012), and that got me a ticket to this fully sponsored and nicely organised event.
We reported earlier this week that Canonical has pushed a new kernel update in the default software repositories of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system, patching two security flaws discovered in the upstream Linux 3.13 kernel.
à Âukasz Zemczak, one of the Ubuntu Touch developers has announced that they have to update a lot of packages and so, the development takes more time.
You know who would make a great Santa, however? Clement Lefebvre, the leader of Linux Mint. Actually, I have no idea what the guy looks like, but he is delivering presents to people all over the world. What is this gift he is distributing? Well, it is better than any toy train or video game -- it is the awesome Linux Mint 17.3 'Rosa'. Yes, the latest version of the wildly popular Linux-based operating system is ready to be unwrapped.
Clement Lefebvre announced the releases of Mint 17.3 Cinnamon and MATE Friday evening with lots of improvements and tweaks. Being a long term support release, users can get updates until 2019! Elsewhere, the Free Software Foundation is having a donation drive and the Linux Foundation is urging all Website to get encrypted. Additionally, Robert Cringely cringed at the thought of his appliances spying on him and Dedoimedo said Zorin OS 10 is "looking even better."
After a 3-day delay due to website-related issues, the Linux Mint development ream has finally made the official announcement – Linux Mint 17.3 has been released for you to download, use and enjoy.
ISO installation images (32- and 64-bit) for the Cinnamon and MATE desktops were made available for download.
On the first day of December 2015, Softpedia was the first to announce the immediate availability for download of the final release of the Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" computer operating system, despite the fact that no official announcement was made.
Linux Mint 17.3 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
Google released a preview of its Cloud Vision API for tasks like identifying objects and faces, plus a Linux demo that runs on a Raspberry Pi-based robot.
Some of the image analysis wizardry used by Google services, such as Google Photos, is now available to developers. Google is offering a free limited preview of its Google Cloud Vision API, which is available as an “easy to use” REST API, says the company. Google also released demo code using the API that turns the Raspberry Pi-based Dexter Industries GoPiGo robot or any other camera-enabled robot based on the Pi into an image recognition and analysis bot.
The package includes three sensors, two battery-powered wireless boards, and a powerful IoT hub, providing the hardware components required to quickly prototype IoT wireless devices. In addition, every kit includes a free subscription to FlowCloud, a robust cloud platform for connecting embedded devices to the Internet.
I am a fan of the small computers, and personally love a combination of Raspberry Pi’s and android boxes. Different computers for different tasks.
Released back in 2009, HTC's legendary HD2 smartphone simply refuses to die. Although the device shipped with Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional, it has seen ports of several major mobile OS' including Windows Phone 7, MeeGo, and of course Android - v2.1, Jelly Bean, KitKat, and Lollipop. And now, Marshmallow has also been ported onto the handset.
Every year toward December, Google releases a list of the best apps it recommends from the Play Store. It's a great way for Android newcomers to discover interesting apps they might want to install on their devices and for platform veterans to find apps that might have flown under their radar. This year's list is out, divided in 8 categories of 5 apps each, with a few added at the top, but the choices are if anything, a little weird.
This week, a rumor going around stated that the Pixel C would be available for sale starting on December 8th. Beyond a brief Twitter mention and the knowledge that the product would be launching in time for the holiday season, we have not heard much about Google’s productivity-focused tablet. However, the launch rumor is gaining credence as the device has been spotted on a GFXBench and Geekbench benchmark.
Today, we have some further forecasts from IDC, which includes estimates of how the major operating systems will do this year. The guys at IDC whipped out their trusty abacuses and figured out that when the final seconds of 2015 are over, there will have been 1.16 billion Android handsets shipped over the year for a 9.5% increase from 2014's figure. That will give Google's open source OS a whopping 81.2% of the global smartphone market.
The IoT-focused “LinkIt Smart 7688” SBC from MediaTek Labs and Seeed runs OpenWrt on a WiFi-enabled, MediaTek MT7688AN SoC.
MediaTek Labs and hardware partner Seeed Studio have unveiled a LinkIt Smart 7688 development platform aimed at Internet of Things (IoT) applications and with an aim to “extend the LinkIt family of development platforms to the open-source and web developer communities.” The platform offers a choice of Seeed’s LinkIt Smart 7688 ($12.90) or LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo ($15.90) development boards, both of which run OpenWrt Linux on MediaTek’s 580MHz MediaTek MT7688AN system-on-chip. Like Qualcomm’s popular Atheros AR9331, the MT7688AN has a MIPS architecture and integrates 802.11n WiFi.
It's the weekend, so we're continuing our fun "Watch" series of articles with a very interesting one, where you will see the Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Chromium OS operating systems running on Raspberry Pi 2.
A few weeks ago, Tehnoetic also started selling devices pre-installed with Replicant and was featured on the FSF’s Ethical Tech Giving Guide.
Since joining GigaSpaces a few months ago, I thought it would be interesting to write down some thoughts about my experience on the journey from the closed-source, enterprise world to the open source, startup mentality of getting work done, both internally at the office as well as from a client-facing perspective.
Intel's latest move in its "Cloud for All" initiative -- which it says will accelerate enterprise adoption of public, private and hybrid clouds -- is an open source tool called snap, which helps organizations understand the telemetry of their clouds.
One of the many benefits of the Web is the ability to create unique, personalized experiences for individual users. We believe that this personalization needs to be done with respect for the user – with transparency, choice and control. When the user is at the center of product experiences everyone benefits.
OpenStack and Docker are both open source technologies with a lot of excitement and momentum behind them. But where is the intersection between Docker and OpenStack? And why isn't Docker Inc part of the OpenStack Foundation?
In a video interview, Ben Golub, CEO of Docker Inc. the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source Docker engine, explains where it all fits together.
At a high-level, OpenStack is a popular widely deployed Infrastructure-as-a-Service open source platform, while Docker provide an open-source container technology to build, deploy and manage containers. Golub noted that organizations are using Docker together with various flavors of OpenStack from different vendors including HP, Red Hat and Mirantis.
While digging through the Internet, we've discovered that there's now a LibreOffice application for the ownCloud open-source self-hosting cloud server, which lets users edit all sorts of LibreOffice documents online.
WordPress has updated its fully hosted version WordPress.com with one of the biggest features ever.
The update, which has been codenamed Calypso, brings all new abilities to this platform.
At JSConf in Florida today, Microsoft announced that it is open sourcing Chakra, the JavaScript engine used in its Edge and Internet Explorer browsers. The code will be published to the company's GitHub page next month.
Version 0.9 of the Guix package-management system was released on November 5. Since the previous major release in 2014, the Guix project has evolved to include not only the package manager itself, but the Guix Software Distribution (GuixSD) as well. With the large set of packages it supports, Guix already provides, in essence, a full operating-system layer that can be deployed and maintained on top of a minimal core Linux distribution. GuixSD goes one step further, and provides a Linux kernel and core OS components as well. Regardless of whether one uses GuixSD or simply installs individual packages with the Guix tools, the new release adds quite a bit of interesting new functionality, including automatic container provisioning, new tools for graphing package dependencies, and a mechanism for users to verify reproducible software packages.
We are excited to announce the first development release of GIMP in the 2.9.x series. It is another major milestone towards making GIMP a state-of-the art image editing application for graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and scientists.
Years—no, decades—ago, I lived in Emacs. I wrote code and documents, managed email and calendar, and shelled all in the editor/OS. I was quite happy. Years went by and I moved to newer, shinier things. As a result, I forgot how to do tasks as basic as efficiently navigating files without a mouse. About three months ago, noticing just how much of my time was spent switching between applications and computers, I decided to give Emacs another try. It was a good decision for several reasons that will be covered in this post. Covered too are .emacs and Dropbox tips so that you can set up a good, movable environment.
For thirty years, the Free Software Foundation has been seen as a guiding light for the free software movement, fighting for computer user freedom worldwide -- but we can't continue this work without your support.
I posted a few weeks ago about the difficulty of providing device-side verification of firmware updates, at the same time remaining OpenHardware and thus easily hackable. The general consensus was that allowing anyone to write any kind of firmware to the device without additional authentication was probably a bad idea, even for OpenHardware devices. I think I’ve come up with an acceptable compromise I can write up as a recommendation, as per usual using the ColorHug+ as an example. For some background, I’ve sold nearly 3,000 original ColorHug devices, and in the last 4 years just three people wanted help writing custom firmware, so I hope you can see the need to protect the majority is so much larger than making the power users happy.
Given the negative connotation of the term today, I recall my surprise when I first read (alas, the source has long been forgotten) that in the world of mainframe computer in the 1960's, where the principal revenue stream were licensing fees for the hardware, "hacker" referred to a person who was encouraged to tinker with the software to improve its performance. After all, there was no or little money to be made in the software per se, so that any improvements in performance would only serve to enhance the value of the mainframe itself. Hacking appeared to be a beneficial activity in support of the hardware.
Until fairly recently, Jonathan Lundgren enjoyed a stellar career as a government scientist. An entomologist who studies how agrichemicals affect the ecology of farm fields, he has published nearly 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals since starting at the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service laboratory in Brookings, South Dakota, in 2005. By 2012, he had won the ARS's "Outstanding Early Career Research Scientist" award, and directorship of his own lab.
Multiple recent reports on serious security vulnerabilities in cable modems and routers paint a dire picture of the state of security of the devices that millions of users depend upon to connect to the Internet. Such vulnerabilities can be exploited to disable our access, snoop on our personal information, or launch malicious attacks on third parties. Other devices that are equally important for our security, or even to our physical health and safety—such as home alarm systems and, terrifyingly, a cardio server used in hospitals—have also been the subject of recent vulnerability disclosures.
It does no dishonor to those killed in Paris last month to acknowledge that at least 200 people were killed in that city on October 17, 1961. It was nearly seven years into the war for Algeria’s independence from French colonial rule, and some 30,000 Muslims demonstrated in central Paris against a curfew imposed solely on Muslims. They were met by a police force led by prefect Maurice Papon, who would later be charged with crimes against humanity for his collaborationist role in the World War II Vichy government.
Airstrikes carried out yesterday by the Saudi-led coalition hit a clinic in southern Yemen run by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and wounded nine people, including two MSF staff members.
According to local sources, at 11:20 a.m. local time on December 2, three airstrikes targeted a park in Taiz city's Al Houban district, about two kilometers from MSF's tented clinic. The MSF team immediately evacuated the Al Houban clinic and informed the Saudi-led coalition that their jet planes were mounting an attack nearby. The clinic itself then came under attack.
Future historians — if there are any future historians — will almost surely say that the most important thing happening in the world during December 2015 was the climate talks in Paris. True, nothing agreed to in Paris will be enough, by itself, to solve the problem of global warming. But the talks could mark a turning point, the beginning of the kind of international action needed to avert catastrophe.
Then again, they might not; we may be doomed. And if we are, you know who will be responsible: the Republican Party.
O.K., I know the reaction of many readers: How partisan! How over the top! But what I said is, in fact, the obvious truth. And the inability of our news media, our pundits and our political establishment in general to face up to that truth is an important contributing factor to the danger we face.
Official documentation submitted by Indonesia to the UN climate talks in Paris this week dramatically underestimates deforestation and emissions in the archipelago, according to an analysis by Greenpeace. However, not everyone agrees with Greenpeace’s assessment.
The documentation’s omissions include 10 million hectares of deforestation, millions of hectares of peatland degradation and emissions from the annual farm and plantation fires, threatening to undermine Indonesia’s prospects for receiving international assistance for peatland protection and REDD+ schemes, according to the NGO.
“The people of Indonesia deserve to know the truth about how much forest and peatland has been destroyed,” Greenpeace Indonesia forest campaigner Annisa Rahmawati said. “Only from a truthful foundation can we build a solid climate plan for Indonesia.”
This afternoon, I went along to a fringe event in central Paris put on by the UK climate denier brigade. There were about 15 people – all older white men but for one woman, me, and Brendan Montague, editor of DesmogUK, with whom I'd arrived.
Among the small number at PCC15, as they called their event, were a number of prominent figures from the movement against the scientific consensus on climate change. Patrick Moore, the controversial former director of Greenpeace who has questioned both whether global warming is man-made, and whether it is dangerous, was leaving as we arrived. UKIP MEP Stuart Agnew was there, as were Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate change denier, and Canadian Tom Harris, executive director of the “International Climate Science Coalition” – and former operations director of the “High Park Group”, a Canadian lobbying company. I was told we'd missed the journalist James Delingpole and Piers Corbyn (MD of WeatherAction and brother of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn)..
After more than five years the Department of Justice has released the Torrent-Finder.com domain, which is now back in the hands of the original owner. The authorities had a very weak case and decided to accept the torrent site's “offer in compromise."
All of this begs the question of what is fair use. It's complicated, and there is no bright-line rule. "In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and 'transformative' purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work, according to Stanford University. "Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner. In other words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copyright infringement. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not be considered an illegal infringement."
There is no presumption of privacy riding in a tour bus, so it probably isn’t illegal to listen-in. Bus security cameras and their footage have been around for years now and appear regularly on TV news after bus crimes. But there’s something about this idea of not only our actions being recorded but also our words that I find disturbing. It’s especially so when we consider the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT). What other devices will soon be snitching on us?
Every time we talk about mass surveillance, privacy or the security services’ powers we and our supporters find ourselves at the other end of that familiar phrase, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”. It's time to challenge that.
After Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of spying being carried out around the world by the NSA and its Five Eyes friends, there have been a number of attempts in other countries to find out what has been going on. One of the most thoroughgoing of these is in Germany, where there is a major parliamentary inquiry into NSA activities in that country. As Techdirt reported back in May, a surprising piece of information to emerge from this is that Germany's secret service has been carrying out spying on behalf of the NSA, which sent across various "selectors" -- search terms -- that it wanted investigated in the German spies' surveillance databases.
We are running late to the Facebook Data Center. I keep checking my watch, as if the seconds might start moving backwards if I stare hard enough. This is not a particularly safe way to drive. I am, apparently, more concerned with being late than I am with possibly totaling a car. Being late is far more heinous act.
The tragic shootings in San Bernadino earlier this week have created a political field day for the usual idiotic partisan arguments -- which tend to have little to nothing to do with whatever actually happened. You have people on one side using it to call for gun control and folks on the other side using it to spark fears of "domestic terrorism." And, of course, it didn't take long for someone to pop up with using it as an excuse to call for greater surveillance. That was the argument that former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer took on MSNBC yesterday when asked what should be done in response. MSNBC Kate Snow asked if this could lead to bipartisan support for gun control (ha ha!) and Fleischer turned it around to say the answer is more surveillance.
No sooner had the NSA's bulk collection of phone records for millions of U.S. citizens come to an end, then members of Congress swung into action to dilute even that small step toward reform. Meanwhile, other programs that have much greater implications for privacy survive and thrive in the NSA's sprawling surveillance system.
The USA Freedom Act passed overwhelmingly in June, but its reform banning the NSA from scooping up more phone data only went into effect last weekend. Metadata already collected can be kept by the NSA until Feb. 29, and your phone data will continue to be collected by telecom companies, but the NSA must now go to the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance) court for permission to gain access. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed it was the secret FISA court that gave the NSA permission to indiscriminately collect Americans' phone records in the first place.
Deciphering the meaning of Neo-liberalism as a historical force and societal form requires the energies and know-how of a sagacious sleuth like Hercule Poirot. Wendy Brown, a philosophy professor at UCLA (Berkeley) and author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, has a Poirot intellectual sensibility and acuity that sees what most of us cannot.
Those of us who have written on neo-conservative politics and neo-liberalism as an economic form have illuminated many dimensions of “something new” that has emerged out of the collapse of welfare state liberal democracy in the West over the last five decades.
Earlier this week, Hunter Moore -- the guy who basically invented the concept of revenge porn with his "Is Anyone Up" site -- was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail along with a $2,000 fine... and he has to pay $145.70 in "restitution" to a single victim. Moore was arrested for violating the CFAA, and as we noted at the time, it may be one of the few legitimate uses of the CFAA. He didn't just run a revenge porn site, he hired a guy, Charlie Evens, who got a similar sentence a week ago, to hack into the computers of unsuspecting women, and swipe naked photos of them to put on his site. The sickening bit: that "$145.70" in "restitution"? That's how much Moore paid Evens (also, Evens is jointly liable for that money, meaning that Moore might not even pay it). It's difficult to understand why the $145.70 makes any sense at all as the "harm" caused to the anonymous woman "L.B." whose computer got hacked into.
Sharia courts in Britain are locking women into “marital captivity” and doing nothing to officially report domestic violence, according to an academic who gained unprecedented access to Islamic divorce hearings.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion rejecting the government’s attempt to hold an employee criminally liable under the federal hacking statute—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”)—for violating his employer-imposed computer use restrictions. The decision is important because it ensures that employers and website owners don’t have the power to criminalize a broad range of innocuous everyday behaviors, like checking personal email or the score of a baseball game, through simply adopting use restrictions in their corporate policies or terms of use.
The court also ruled that the government cannot hold people criminally liable on the basis of purely fantastical statements they make online—i.e., thoughtcrime.
The arguments are quite easy to summarize: The meritocracy party proposes that “One’s contribution should only be evaluated based on the content and the quality”, while the SJW party asserts that in case the submitter as from a minority group, in particular everyone outside the white straight group, the contribution has to be accepted with higher probability (or without discussion) to ensure equality.
The US government's landmark net neutrality policy faces a crucial test Friday when advocates and opponents of the new rules face off in federal court. The Federal Communications Commission, along with a coalition of public interest groups, is battling some of the biggest cable and telecom interests in the country over whether the agency has the authority to enforce a policy it says is necessary to protect internet openness.
The Federal Communications Commission will head to court on Friday to defend its net neutrality rules against opponents who want to overturn the broadband regulations, a hearing that may help determine how consumers get access to content on the web.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the F.C.C. has twice appeared in front of the same federal court to argue over net neutrality policies, in particular a set of regulations aimed at preventing favoritism on the Internet. In both cases, the F.C.C. argued that it had the authority to regulate high-speed Internet providers, while opponents argued the agency was overstepping the mandates of Congress. Both times, the agency lost.
Hoping that the third time will be the charm, the F.C.C.’s lawyers will tell a panel of judges at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that its most recent version of net neutrality rules is on firmer legal ground. With all the twists and turns of the F.C.C.’s yearslong net neutrality push, we offer this guide on the latest developments and what they may mean for you.
In this March 17, 2015 file photo, Federal Communications Commisison (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on net neutrality, on Capitol Hill in Washington. A long-running legal battle over government rules that require Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally is back for another round before a federal appeals court. Cable and telecom industry groups will urge a three-judge panel on Dec. 4 to throw out regulations that forbid online content from being blocked or channeled into fast and slow lanes
Internet providers suing the Federal Communications Commission to overturn net neutrality rules got their day in court today as oral arguments were heard by a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC.
A decision might not come for months, but net neutrality supporters said the judges’ questions indicate that a ruling may defer to the FCC’s determination on the crucial question of whether Internet providers can be reclassified as common carriers. Opponents of the net neutrality rules believe the judges are skeptical about some of the FCC’s arguments, however.
The FCC’s decision to impose common carriage restrictions on Internet providers hinges on whether they can be considered “telecommunications services,” as opposed to more lightly regulated “information services.” ISPs argue that Internet access is properly defined as an information service, but ultimately the FCC may have the discretion to make that decision.
Techdirt has written a few times about the pharmaceutical industry's use of "evergreening", whereby small, sometimes trivial, changes are made to drugs in order to extend their effective patent life. It turns out the technique is applied to one of the most widely-used drugs of all, insulin...