Linux is everywhere these days. It runs our phones, the web servers that underpin everything from Facebook to Google, even our cars. That means there’s a bigger demand for people who know how to work with the operating system than ever before, and those jobs often pay good money.
Our friends at CompuLab have come out out with their most interesting design yet: the Airtop. CompuLab told be about the Airtop a few days ago and I've been very excited and can't wait to try one out soon. They describe it as, "Airtop is a small and silent desktop with very high performance. The key word is silent. Not 'with a specially designed fan that is very quiet'. Airtop has no fans at all, yet it can dissipate 200W – enough to cool a Xeon CPU and a professional (or gaming) graphics card. Airtop cools itself by generating airflow using no moving parts, just the waste heat from the CPU and the GPU." Yes, a Xeon-powered system with a discrete graphics card and can be all cooled without any fans?!?
After being released for download at the end of last week, the long-term supported Linux 3.12.52 kernel has been officially announced by its maintainer, Jiri Slaby, on January 11, 2016.
The Linux Foundation’s Training Scholarship Program has awarded 34 scholarships totaling more than $100,000 in free training to students and professionals during the past five years. In this series, we are featuring recent scholarship recipients with the hope of inspiring others.
Vaishali Thakkar is a scholarship recipient in the Kernel Guru category. She lives in India and recently completed an Outreachy internship on project Coccinelle. The goal of her project was replacing out-of-date API uses and deprecated functions and macros in the Linux kernel with more modern equivalents. She began contributing to the Linux kernel almost a year ago, and her first contribution was running a Coccinelle semantic patch over staging directory files. She says the excitement of having that first patch accepted was amazing, and she hopes some day to have her dream job of “Linux Kernel Engineer.”
Linux 4.4 has dropped, and despite the usual humility of founder Linus Torvalds, its new features have won the kernel lots of accolades. "The changes since rc8 aren't big," wrote Torvalds in his release notes, "there's about one third arch updates, one third drivers, and one third 'misc' (mainly some core kernel and networking), but it's all small." What the update does include, however, is some new support for processors like Intel's new Skylake family, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820, and a handful of improved graphics processor support. The update also includes a beta driver to improve graphics support for Raspberry Pi.
As expected, AMD today finally released the Opteron A1100 "Seattle" SoC but sadly the 96Boards HuskyBoard or other lower-cost A1100-powered products have yet to be announced.
The F2FS file-system pull request is quite exciting while the XFS churn for the Linux 4.5 merge window isn't as meaty.
With the XFS file-system updates for Linux 4.5 there is now better CRC validation during log recovery, log recovery fixes, DAX support fixes, an AGFL size calculation fix, code cleanups, project quota ENOSPC notification via netlink, and tracing/debug improvements. Details on the XFS changes for Linux 4.5 can be found via this pull request.
For those relying upon the out-of-tree ZFS or Reiser4 file-systems, they have each been updated now to work with this week's release of the Linux 4.4 kernel.
Last weekend ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.4 was released. ZOL v0.6.5.4 brought support for the Linux 4.4 kernel while continuing to support older kernel versions going all the way back to Linux 2.6.32. This ZFS On Linux update also brought a number of stability fixes, better support/stability for NFS-exported snapshots, and a variety of other fixes.
Nvidia has released a new update for the Linux drivers, but it’s a small upgrade that only brings support for a couple of new GPUs.
Good news open source GPU driver users, Mesa 11.1.1 has launched and it even includes some patches for GRID Autosport.
If you use Mesa and play GRID Autosport, please let us know how it runs for you now.
Emil Velikov of Collabora has has announced earlier today, January 13, the general availability of the first maintenance release for the 11.1 stable series of the open-source Mesa 3D Graphics Library.
Christian König of AMD's open-source driver team landed some improvements this week into Gallium3D's video acceleration state tracker.
For those using Gallium3D video acceleration via the VA-API or VDPAU acceleration APIs with the RadeonSI/R600g or NVC0, there are some state tracker additions and to the Gallium3D VL code to report on: BOB deinterlacing, NV12 post-processing, the code is now thread-safe to avoid potential crashes with MPV, improvements to the motion adaptive deinterlacer, and other improvements/fixes.
Bryce is planning for the 1.10 Alpha in one week on 19 January, the 1.10 Beta on 2 February, the first Wayland 1.10 release candidate on 9 February, and for the official Wayland / Weston 1.10 release on 16 February. The Wayland 1.10 feature freeze would be next week.
On January 13, 2016, the development team of the Scribus open source, free and cross-platform desktop publishing software was happy to announce the release of Scribus 1.4.6 for all supported operating systems.
The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 5.6.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.
Opera Software, through Aneta Reluga, has announced today, January 13, 2016, the availability of the first development build of the upcoming Opera 36.0 web browser in 2016.
Just a few minutes ago, January 13, 2016, the CodeWeavers company announced the release of the first maintenance build for the CrossOver 15.0 series, proprietary software that lets Linux and Mac users run Windows software and games.
For you Wine lovers who also support Codeweavers and Wine development, a new version 15.0.1 is now available.
The major change is that this release brings in the actual final Wine 1.8 release.
They do say they should be able to do it eventually, and they should be able to get a DRM free Linux build on their website. One of our editors 'flesk' also got clarification that they should have a Linux build up on some DRM free stores too like GOG, Humble Store and possibly Itch.
We shouldn't go with pitchforks to OUYA, as the developers are as much to blame for either not reading their agreement properly, or simply not caring enough to argue their case.
Either way, I'm personally quite annoyed by Linux gamers getting treated like this. With no word before release that this was happening, I think the developers need to learn to communicate a lot better. I personally messaged them to no reply, but I imagine they have been pretty busy to message everyone back. Still, an official note to backers would have been the right thing to do, not make people wait.
The good thing is that this game is no way near as complicated as some of the others, and that keeps my simpleton brain very happy. The tutorial is quite short and to the point, and sets you up nice and easy for the battles to come.
Valve has just launched the complete Steam Link SDK, making way for developers and the community to build native apps for this piece of hardware.
The idea behind the Steam Link is a really good one. Users can connect their gaming machines to the TV, via the network. This means that you don’t need a new and shiny Steam Machine if you already have a powerful computer at home. Valve wants to dominate the living room, but it doesn't care how it’s going to achieve that.
Valve has finally released the SDK for their Steam Link device that began shipping late last year for playing Steam games on any TV in a house as long as there is a computer running Steam on your network.
Valve's release of the Steam Links SDK has support for the OpenGL ES 2.0, Qt 5.4, and SDL 2.0 APIs. Apps can be loaded onto the Steam Link via copying them to a USB drive in a steamlink/apps folder and then power cycling the hardware. Valve also revealed there is SSH support for the Steam Link if wishing to debug any apps on the device.
The latest release of Kdenlive brings many bugfixes to the 15.12.0 version. More than 20 issues were fixed and we encourage all users to upgrade. You can find more details about the fixed issues in our information page.
As those in the Linux and open source communities know well, long before Apple's App Store appeared on the scene, openDesktop.org offered applications, tools, wallpapers, sounds, icons, themes and other artwork and stuff for the Linux desktop.
openDesktop.org was started ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek, and yesterday I learned that he has sold the network of sites. I interviewed Frank over Google Hangouts about the sale of openDesktop.org; following is an edited version of that interview.
The Tiny Core developers were happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core piCore 7.0 operating system, a special edition of Tiny Core Linux designed for Raspberry Pi single-board computers.
openSUSE is pleased to announce a call for papers for the openSUSE Conference 2016 (oSC16) taking place in Nuremberg, Germany.
Yup folks, thanks to the new bluetooth stack in slackware-current (brought to you by BlueZ 5.x) we have introduced a dependency on PulseAudio. Bluetooth audio no longer accepts ALSA as the output driver.
Legendary investor Warren Buffett advises to be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. One way we can try to measure the level of fear in a given stock is through a technical analysis indicator called the Relative Strength Index, or RSI, which measures momentum on a scale of zero to 100. A stock is considered to be oversold if the RSI reading falls below 30.
In trading on Thursday, shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) entered into oversold territory, hitting an RSI reading of 28.8, after changing hands as low as $74.48 per share. By comparison, the current RSI reading of the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is 32.4. A bullish investor could look at RHT’s 28.8 RSI reading today as a sign that the recent heavy selling is in the process of exhausting itself, and begin to look for entry point opportunities on the buy side.
Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “buy” rating reaffirmed by stock analysts at SunTrust in a report released on Monday, AnalystRatingsNetwork.com reports. They currently have a $73.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock. SunTrust’s price target would suggest a potential downside of 4.70% from the stock’s current price.
Leading provider of open source solutions Red Hat's mobile maturity survey, said that 85 per cent of organisations are using KPIs to measure mobile app success, while nine per cent use other means and the remainder are not measuring mobile success at all.
Petabyte-scale eMedLab consortium opts for private cloud on Red Hat Linux OpenStack with hybrid Cinder and IBM Spectrum Scale storage, and rejects object and cloud storage
Brian has been involved with Linux for a long time. In the summer of 1999, he was asked to write a book about Sun StarOffice 5.1 for Linux. This was a challenge for Brian as he had never run Linux before. “I got a hold of a Caldera OpenLinux CD set and installed it on a friend’s spare PC.” He was hooked on Linux when he was able to play an in-memory game of Tetris while the operating system was being installed.
Most users are interested in Fedora upgrades. Each release brings improvements, and frequent releases are a hallmark of open source software. Releases of Fedora happen twice a year, and many users take advantage of improvements by upgrading to each new release. There are several methods to do this in Fedora, as outlined on the project wiki.
As you may have heard, there was some tragic news a few weeks back, when the founder of Debian Linux, Ian Murdock, passed away under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Without more details, we didn't have much to report on concerning his passing, but Gabriella Coleman put together this wonderful look at how Murdock shaped the Debian community, and why it became such a strong and lasting group and product.
David Bremner uploaded dh-elpa/0.0.18 which adds a --fix-autoload-date option (on by default) to take autoload dates from changelog.
Lunar updated and sent the patch adding the generation of .buildinfo to dpkg.
Even though Freexian is located in France and requires you to provide invoice in EUR, there are no conditions on your nationality or country of residence. For contributors outside of the Euro zone, Freexian is using Transferwise to pay them with minimal currency conversion costs (Paypal is also possible if nothing else works).
Details about quite a few Thunderbird vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems were revealed today by Canonical.
Manx-based Canonical software says it’s signed a contract with an American telecoms giant to power its network using its Unbuntu Linux distro.
While Linux's share of the desktop pie is still virtually nonexistent, it owns two arguably more important markets -- servers and smartphones. As PC sales decline dramatically, Android phones are continually a runaway market share leader. In other words, fewer people are buying Windows computers -- and likely spending less time using them -- while everyone and their mother are glued to their phones. And those phones are most likely powered by the Linux kernel.
Speaking of smartphones, one of the largest cellular providers is the venerable AT&T. While it sells many Linux-powered Android devices, it is now embracing the open source kernel in a new way. You see, the company has partnered with Canonical to utilize Ubuntu for cloud, network, and enterprise applications. That's right, AT&T did not choose Microsoft's Windows when exploring options. Canonical will provide continued engineering support too.
Today, January 13, 2016, Ben Howard of Canonical's Cloud Image team has been proud to announce that, starting with the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) release, they will provide Vagrant cloud images as well.
Just a few moments ago, January 14, 2016, Softpedia received an email from Canonical's Adam Conrad, informing us that the Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system would reach end of life in approximately three weeks from today, on February 4, 2016.
In the first minutes of January 14, 2016, Ã Âukasz Zemczak of Canonical sent in his daily report to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-9 software update, due for release on January 27.
The top story in today's Linux news must be Canonical's announcement of a big AT&T contract. One headline said AT&T chose Ubuntu over Windows. Elsewhere, blogger Megatotoro today remembered MEPIS and Adam Williamson discussed Fedora's upgrade process. Hackaday.com's Brian Benchoff said Stallman messed up in the open hardware department and KDE-look.org and friends have a new owner.
A new Ubuntu-powered tablet from MJ Technology is going to be available for preorder really soon, and a new crowdfunding campaign will be started.
The UbuCon Summit is getting closer, and it will take place on January 21-22, 2016. Here is what’s going to happen on those two days.
Linux Mint 17.3, recently released, will be the last release of the Mint 17 line.
It is the culmination of work that began two years ago, and the final edition of Mint based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS .
With the stability of an Ubuntu LTS release as the base system, Linux Mint has had eighteen months of development time to focus on the things that make Mint, Mint.
CES 2016 reflected the hottest recent trends in gizmos and gadgetry: winged and wheeled drones and bots, with most running some form of embedded Linux.
At last week’s CES show in Las Vegas, some of the most intriguing new gadgets were flying about within mesh fabric cages, crawling around robot pens, or ready to roll off their pedestals to cruise the Strip. And a growing number of these frenzied fiends run Linux.
Compulab’s compact, rugged “Airtop” PC uses 5th Gen Xeon and Core CPUs, supports four simultaneous displays, has dual GbE ports, and accepts PCIe GPU cards.
Yokneam, Israel-based CompuLab is well known for its rugged Linux-friendly computer-on-modules (COMs) and single-board computers (SBCs), as well as for several lines of rugged, fanless Intel and AMD based mini-PCs, including its Fitlet-PC, Fit-PC, Intense PC, and uSVR systems, plus a Mint Box created in collaboration with the Linux Mint project. Now, the company has added a higher-end, 7.5 liter, fanless PC called “Airtop,” aimed at workers, gamers, and servers, and based on Intel’s 5th Gen Xeon and Core processors of the Broadwell variety, running at turbo clock rates up to 3.8GHz.
Java runtime solutions company Azul Systems has announced that Zulu Embedded is now available to download on the Wind River Marketplace.
According to a Digital Times Korean report, Samsung Electronics is still planning on expanding on the number of countries that the Samsung Z3 Tizen Smartphone will be offered in. We have previously reported on the Z3 being available in Russia for the business to business corporate and government customers, due to it attaining the Security Certification for Russian Government and Corporate use.
Google is positive about the road ahead for Android Auto, saying it will come to 40 car models and support more apps this year.
Android Auto brings messaging, mapping, entertainment, media playback and other apps to cars, but via a smartphone. The apps run on an Android smartphone, which plugs into an in-car display via a USB port.
As we move into the digital future, we're experiencing a significant shift in what employees and customers expect from their mobile interactions. These days they expect a highly-engaging experience that's immediate and always available. They want a responsive and attractive interface. And they want their mobile experience to be integrated into their work lives smoothly.
There are lessons here for companies like Apple, Samsung and Google that have made hay from the smartphone boom. PCs were a great business until the world changed and once-successful companies had to scramble for new money-making ideas. Already some people are urging Apple to shift its business model to sell a collection of software, hardware and services, rather than trying to sell more and more iPhones every year. That is exactly what Microsoft is trying to do now with its Windows franchise. Let the present struggles in PCs be a guide to today's tech winners: No empire is invincible forever, and new business models are inevitable.
Red Hat recently concluded a mobile development measurement survey which polled the views of IT decision makers from 200 private sector companies with at least 2,500 employees across the U.S. and Western Europe. The survey was completed in October 2015, and was carried out online.
Even as users remain excited about receiving the latest Android 6 Marshmallow updates on their smartphones and tablets, Google is gearing up for the launch of Android 7.0 or Android N version expected in the latter half of the year. With Google announcing the dates for the Google I/O address — from 18 to 20 May — it is one step closer to the latest Android OS as I/O is normally where the first look or the developer's version is showcased. The full version will only be launched somewhere around September or October.
CEO Sundar Pichai took to Twitter this week to announce that Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, will be taking place in Mountain View on May 18-20. The only thing we know for certain is that we’ll get our first look at Android N, the mobile operating system’s next big update.
Sure, part of the fun of I/O is hearing about all those far flung ideas, but before we get into autonomous cars, drone delivery, and other moonshots, here’s a modest, here-and-now wishlist for Android in 2016.
For the desktop Linux user, 2015 was a great year. There were major updates for nearly every single desktop available, launches of brand new desktops, even an impressive new distro that's forging its own path.
Popular software packages also saw impressive updates – like GIMP, Inkscape and LibreOffice to name just a few – and new applications continue to emerge seemingly everyday.
Remix OS, which came out yesterday, is a killer Android variant that brings a slick desktop-style interface to Android. Now, you can install it on a USB stick and try it out on your computer.
Android isn’t exactly built for a keyboard and mouse, but that hasn’t stopped some of us from trying. RemixOS, from developer Jide, wants to change that by adding a desktop, windowed apps, and more to Android. Here’s how to try out the very experimental alpha.
ZeroTurnaround has announced the first stable release of JRebel for Android, the Android version of their popular plugin to modify running applications without having to redeploy or restart. JRebel for Android is available for Android Studio from the JetBrains plugin repository, and supports all phones and tablets running Android 4.0 or later. ZeroTurnaround offers a 21-day free trial, with prices beginning at $49/year.
An update to the Google Now Launcher has brought some nifty new features to Android's home screen. Google is reining in unruly app icons to make everything a consistent size and adding auto rotate support to the launcher.
Google's icon design guidelines give developers the tools to create a consistently sized icon in many different shapes. Many developers totally ignore the guidelines in favor of just creating the biggest icon possible, which often leaves Android's app drawer and home screen an inconsistent mess. The recent launcher update fixes this problem by ignoring the app developer's wishes and normalizing all the icon sizes—big icons get shrunken down.
If you long for the days of 2011, when 5.3-inch smartphones were enormous outliers rather than the norm, Sony has some news that may interest you: its flagship Xperia Z5 smartphone and its smaller-but-still-high-end sibling the Xperia Z5 Compact are coming to the US on February 7, 2016.
As usual, Sony's small footprint in the US smartphone market means that it doesn't have any distribution deals with major carriers. You won't be able to buy these phones on an installment plan from AT&T or T-Mobile—you'll have to get them at Amazon, Best Buy, B&H, or another retailer, and you'll pay the full unlocked price of $599.99 for the Z5 or $499.99 for the Z5 Compact. Both phones support GSM networks, so Verizon and Sprint customers need not apply.
Keeping track of physical items, suppliers, customers, and all of the many moving parts associated with each can greatly benefit from, and in some cases be totally dependent on specialized software to help you manage these workflows. In this article, we'll take a look at some free and open source software options for supply chain management, and some of the features of each.
The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is a Linux-based groupware system designed to provide your staff with unified email, calendar, contacts and basic file-sharing. Both commercial and open source versions are available. We've looked at the open source version as a cost-effective alternative to commercial server-based products such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) systems such as Google Apps for Work.
At SCaLE 14x, we will give a talk focused on helping speakers provide a more positive experience for their audiences. But there are many different facets of conference organizing that could use improvements, each facet with its own audience. In this article, I will focus on just one of those: How conference organizers can make the event more positive for the attendees.
First is Jen Krieger talking about DevOps engineer. This one will hopefully open eyes of those engineers who haven't realized that the world of individuals hacking on their cool tool is not how to get work done on evolving projects where communication and open collaboration is a key to success.
The 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) has announced its Call for Microconferences. LPC will be held in Santa Fe, NM, USA on November 2-4, co-located with the Kernel Summit. "A microconference is a collection of collaborative sessions focused on problems in a particular area of the Linux plumbing, which includes the kernel, libraries, utilities, UI, and so forth, but can also focus on cross-cutting concerns such as security, scaling, energy efficiency, or a particular use case. Good microconferences result in solutions to these problems and concerns, while the best microconferences result in patches that implement those solutions."
On January 12, 2016, the support clock ran out for Internet Explorer (IE) 8, 9 and 10. True, there are a few exceptions, IE 9 on Vista and Windows Server 2008, and IE 10 on Windows Server 2012 still live. But for most Windows users the time has come to to switch to a new browser.
Details about quite a few Thunderbird vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems were revealed today by Canonical.
Two years after giving it up to be a community project, Mozilla is now shutting its Persona Web authentication operations down entirely, due to low adoption.
Designed as Apple’s replacement to Objective-C, Swift’s adoption has grown rapidly since its introduction in June 2014. Apple’s Swift programming language began as an exclusive to Apple platforms but was open sourced in December 2015, bringing with it support for Linux-based environments. This opening of the language has accelerated its rise and attracted new contributors to the language’s development.
FOSS Force is run by Christine Hall, a long-time journalist whose experience is not mainly in tech — or FOSS. Her lack of IT reporting experience in general is not as important, in the journalastic context, as a lack of FOSS reporting experience; Christine started using Linux in 2002 but didn’t start FOSS Force until 2010.
First things first: Were I to give an award for Best Presentation Title for SCALE 14X, it would clearly go to iX Systems’ Community Manager (and all-around BSD documentation queen) Dru Lavigne for “Doc Like an Egyptian” — she wins hands down, without question. Dru speaks at SCALE on Saturday, Jan. 23, at 3 p.m.
OpenBSD 5.9 won’t be out for a little while, but it may be helpful to plan ahead, especially since there’s been some considerable progress on hardware support. Here are some notes about what works in general and a few particular models.
For months we have been covering the HSA patches for GCC and their hopes of getting the code merged for GCC 6. Feature development on GCC 6 is over, but there still is the possibility of release exceptions and this HSA support would be new functionality that can be optionally enabled.
Free software is built by a community of hackers and activists who care about freedom. But forces outside that community affect the work done within in it, for good or ill. While we at the FSF regularly deal with GNU General Public License (GPL) violators (who we always hope are just community members waiting for a proper introduction) , there is another force that can have a substantial effect on user freedom: governmental policy.
Laws, regulations, and government actions can have a lasting impact on users. The GNU GPL is based in copyright but uses its power in a "copyleft" way to actually protect users from the negative impacts of copyright, patents, and proprietary license agreements. While we can sometimes turn a law on its head to make it work for users like this, other times we are forced to push back in order to guarantee their rights. In order to achieve our global mission of promoting computer user freedom and defending the rights of software users everywhere, we must often take action to petition and protest governing bodies and their regulations. For the Licensing and Compliance Lab this is particularly relevant to our work, as these rules can affect how the licenses published by the FSF protect users. 2015 was a year filled with such actions, and 2016 will see much of the same. While our work this past year often involved issues with the U.S. government, the scope of our work is global. As our worldwide actions on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other international agreements demonstrate, bad laws in the U.S. have a tendency to spread around the globe. We work to educate the U.S public about problematic laws and regulations here, and we also work with supporters and partner organizations in countries around the world to achieve the same goals in their countries.
We want to take a moment to look back on the work we've done on the licensing team pushing for policies that protect users, and fighting to stop laws and regulations that would harm them.
Supply and demand. These two are always coupled in economics, the yin and yang of capitalism. Too much of one without enough of another disrupts industry. Every industry in the world is currently either on the brink of or in the midst of disruption. Why? Supply. Lots of supply. 'Mountains' of food being artificially held back and destroyed, plenty of clean, renewable energy giving oil firms a rush to sell off their reserves before the price of oil hits zero, and information that is in infinite supply as soon as it is created. Let me say that again:
Though a four-year college degree is still the gold standard, it won't necessarily guarantee success, especially in the IT industry, where new technologies and, thus, new skillsets, are needed to help drive innovation and growth. MOOCs, bootcamps, nanodegrees and other alternative education options are critical both for IT workers and IT companies, both of whom need to quickly and cost-effectively add new technology skillsets.
The New York Public Library (NYPL) has released 180,000 copyright-free images into the public domain.
The high-resolution collections were uploaded to the NYPL website on January 6 and can be viewed, downloaded and shared for free.
I believe Mattix when she says the sex with her rock star partners was consensual on her behalf, and I also believe David Bowie and the others committed acts that are exploitative, and illegal for good reason. Age 15 is young, no matter what, and they were the adults with all the power in this dynamic, and that is not what healthy, normal sexual relationships for teenagers look like. I also believe it’s important to say this is different from the horrific decades worth of rape allegations brought forth against Bill Cosby, and different from Roman Polanski’s rape of a drugged girl. It is not the same as the lawsuits against R. Kelly over his alleged sexual abuse of young girls, though the conditions that made all of these stories possible stem from the same terrible old root: powerful men, young women, and a whole lot of people who looked the other way — or in the case of these teen groupies, even romanticized the tales. Say, wasn’t “Almost Famous” great?
Dubbed "America’s most exciting punk band" by Rolling Stone, Downtown Boys is a self-described "bilingual political dance sax punk party" from Providence, Rhode Island. They are known for their electric, politically charged performances. Downtown Boys joins us to perform four songs and discuss the political message behind tracks like "Wave of History." The music video for that song takes viewers through history, from the theft of Native American land, to slavery and police brutality today.
After the packages are handed over to Indian custom offices, things are left in God’s hands. Researching more, I found that staff at the Indian customs offices opens the packages arbitrarily to ‘verify’ the contents. Due the same issues related to customs and security, we have refused to accept multiple products for reviews in the past.
We've had some fun with our North Korean friends around these parts in the past, mostly revolving around the Pyongyang regime's adorable attempts to bolster its already nefarious reputation through its propaganda efforts. While the nation's Orwellian policies are both stark and serious, and it certainly does have troubling weapons in its arsenal, so many of its threats have amounted to bad propaganda devised through the liberal use of video game footage, music and bad attempts at Photoshop. Well, the arms race doesn't end, of course, which is why North Korea is pleased to display its latest weapon: bad attempts at video editing!
The new HDD uses advanced caching algorithms to help cloud data centers manage the increasing volume of data more quickly. Seagate on Jan. 13 unveiled its highest-ever capacity enterprise hard drive, a 10TB helium-filled model that competes directly with similar drives manufactured by HGST and Samsung.
Dean, a longtime supporter of single-payer, seemed to be changing his tune, a point made by host Chris Hayes during the segment.
This evolution of Dean, known within many circles for his spirited critique of the Iraq War during the 2004 Democratic primary, comes as he has settled into a corporate lobbying career.
Dean, though he rarely discloses the title during his media appearances, now serves as senior advisor to the law firm Dentons, where he works with the firm’s Public Policy and Regulation practice, a euphemism for Dentons’ lobbying team. Dean is not a lawyer, but neither is Newt Gingrich, who is among the growing list of former government officials and politicians that work in the Public Policy and Regulation practice of Dentons.
The Dentons Public Policy and Regulation practice lobbies on behalf of a variety of corporate health care interests, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a powerful trade group for drugmakers like Pfizer and Merck.
There are 800,000 employees in the public sector. The same number of people live off of the system. There are 1.2 million retirees. But there are only 1.6 million people in the private sector to pay for it all.
Public job activation programmes cost somewhere between 15 and 30 billion kroner a year, but create no jobs.
Doctors and nurses use up to half of their time recording and reporting information - that hardly gets used. In return, there are waiting lists for treatment and patients sleeping in the hallways.
The City of Copenhagen has a communications staff of several hundred, while there are waiting lists for daycare institutions and a shortage of teachers.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s top Midwest official said her department knew as early as April about the lack of corrosion controls in Flint’s water supply — a situation that likely put residents at risk for lead contamination — but said her hands were tied in bringing the information to the public.
Starting with inquiries made in February, the federal agency battled Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality behind the scenes for at least six months over whether Flint needed to use chemical treatments to keep lead lines and plumbing connections from leaching into drinking water. The EPA did not publicize its concern that Flint residents’ health was jeopardized by the state’s insistence that such controls were not required by law.
Lord Coe is the right man to lead the crisis-hit IAAF according to the author of a report that claims "corruption was embedded" within the organisation.
Coe, 59, became boss of the body that governs world athletics last August after eight years as a vice-president.
Lord Coe is facing renewed pressure on his position as IAAF president after a new report ruled that the IAAF Council and his right-hand man Nick Davies must have been aware of the scale of doping in athletics.
The second report compiled by an independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency into the Russian doping scandal said the IAAF Council - which included Coe at the time - "could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in athletics".
It adds that Davies, who stepped aside from his position as IAAF chief of staff last month, was "well aware of Russian 'skeletons' in the cupboard".
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today released a survey showing that $271 billion is needed to maintain and improve the nation’s wastewater infrastructure, including the pipes that carry wastewater to treatment plants, the technology that treats the water, and methods for managing stormwater runoff.
The survey is a collaboration between EPA, states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other U.S. territories. To be included in the survey, projects must include a description and location of a water quality-related public health problem, a site-specific solution, and detailed information on project cost.
Subject: Important SSH patch coming soon Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2016 07:05:36 -0700 To: misc@openbsd.org, tech@openbsd.org
Important SSH patch coming soon. For now, every on all operating systems, please do the following:
Add undocumented "UseRoaming no" to ssh_config or use "-oUseRoaming=no" to prevent upcoming #openssh client bug CVE-2016-0777. More later.
Canonical has published details about a DHCP vulnerability that has been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04.
It was inevitable. Trend Micro says it has spotted crooks abusing the free Let's Encrypt certificate system to smuggle malware onto computers.
The security biz's fraud bod Joseph Chen noticed the caper on December 21. Folks in Japan visited a website that served up malware over encrypted HTTPS using a Let's Encrypt-issued cert. The site used the Angler Exploit Kit to infect their machines with the software nasty, which is designed to raid their online bank accounts.
As automotive cybersecurity has become an increasingly heated concern, security researchers and auto giants have been locked in an uneasy standoff. Now one Detroit mega-carmaker has taken a first baby step toward cooperating with friendly car hackers, asking for their help in identifying and fixing its vehicles’ security bugs.
Perhaps one of the most explosively discussed subjects of 2015 was the compromise and data dump of Hacking Team, the infamous Italian spyware company.
For those who are not familiar with the subject, Hacking Team was founded in 2003 and specialized in selling spyware and surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies. On July 5, 2015, a large amount of data from the company was leaked to the Internet with a hacker known as “Phineas Fisher” claiming responsibility for the breach. Previously, “Phineas Fisher” did a similar attack against Gamma International, another company in the spyware/surveillance business.
In response to the creation of the mobile forces of NATO, Russia can dispatch heavy military equipment in a Western direction.
The beginning of 2016 marked a new escalation in military tensions near the borders of Russia. Yesterday in Lithuania, as part of operation "Atlantic Resolve", alongside the standard armaments, the main part of the American battalion of NATO troops from the 2nd cavalry regiment of the US army, stationed in Germany, arrived. The Northern Atlantic Alliance does not hide the fact that the military presence in the Baltic states will grow.
The strenuous efforts to whip up Cold War-like hysteria in the face of an otherwise preoccupied and essentially passive Russia seems out of all proportion to the actual military threat Russia poses. (Yes, volunteers and ammo do filter into Ukraine across the Russian border, but that's about it.) Further south, the efforts to topple the government of Syria by aiding and arming Islamist radicals seem to be backfiring nicely. But that's the pattern, isn't it? What US military involvement in recent memory hasn't resulted in a fiasco? Maybe failure is not just an option, but more of a requirement?
For the past two weeks, first the Western-backed Syrian “activists” and then the mainstream media reporting their every rumor as gospel truth, began spreading stories about the “Assad regime” deliberately starving some 40,000 civilians inside Madaya, a former resort town 25 miles northwest of Damascus. Sordid stories splashed across the front pages of the Anglophone press and social media, claiming the government in Damascus was deliberately withholding food from innocent civilians “for months.”
It may not be surprising to careful readers that the headchoppers described above are not the self-proclaimed Islamic State, a fiercely Wahhabi Sunni Muslim inspired nation, but rather the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As recently as News Years Day 2016 (Western Calendar) the Saudi Kingdom lopped off at least 47 heads in what was described as anti-terrorist punishments for the “guilty”, though public trials were not held in most instances. A prominent Saudi Shia cleric, who was never accused of any violent acts, was among the first to feel the blade, for angering the ruling Sunni royal family by complaining about discrimination against the large but minority Shia Saudi population, centered mostly in the eastern part of the country.
Over the past year or so, there has been some people questioning if merely tweeting could be considered "material support for terrorism." Taking things to another level altogether, Tamara Fields, whose husband (a government contractor for DynCorp International) was tragically killed in an ISIS strike late last year, has now sued Twitter for providing "material support" for ISIS.
Let's be clear on a few things: I can't even imagine the horrors of having your loved ones killed that way. It is horrible and tragic, and the pain must be unfathomable to those who have not gone through it. But, at the same time, that's not Twitter's fault no matter how you look at it. The full lawsuit, filed in California by lawyers who should know better, makes a number of ridiculous assertions, including the idea that the rise of ISIS would have never happened without Twitter.
Swedish prosecutors have requested permission to question Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London over rape allegations and are waiting for a response, the Prosecution Authority said on Wednesday.
"It is not possible to estimate when we will receive an answer," the prosecution authority said in a statement. It said the request was submitted recently, but did not specify when.
Questioning will be carried out by Chief District Prosecutor Ingrid Isgren and a police investigator.
Police are to invoke secrecy laws to seek to withhold dozens of documents relating to the possible murder of a Russian whistleblower living in Britain, who may have been poisoned on Moscow's orders, from the forthcoming inquest into his death.
Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed and died outside his luxury home on a gated Surrey estate in November 2012 after he had given evidence to Swiss prosecutors implicating Russian officials and mafia figures in a $230m (€£150m) tax fraud. His death was initially declared non-suspicious but traces of chemicals linked to a rare poison known to be used by Russian assassins were later found in his stomach.
A tanker crashed and shed part of its chemical load on the M56 in Greater Manchester, causing rush-hour delays.
Donald Trump’s slippery slogan is delusional.
[...]
He’d get around this inconvenience wrought by America’s capitalist system by giving ExxonMobil the job, and backing the corporation up with “a ring” of U.S. troops.
Chinese coal use peaked back in 2013, as Climate Progress first reported in May. Since China was responsible for some 80 percent of the growth in global demand since 2000 — and since the United States and most of the industrialized world have also started cutting coal use — the key remaining question for the dirtiest fossil fuel was, “Will a handful of developing countries, particularly India, see enough growth in coal consumption to overcome that drop?”
Reflections on the Paris climate talks from members of the Corporate Watch collective.
“If this mine opens, Romania would lose both a historic monument unique for the gold it contains while the site would have turned into a moonscape,” he said.
“This is an important step, we must now make sure this classification is respected,” said Eugen David, head of the Alburnus Maior Association which has been fighting the project for years.
Gabriel Resources, which holds an 80% stake in the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, declined to comment on the move.
Last July, the company filed a request for international arbitration to obtain compensation from Bucharest over the delays to the project.
Initially in favour of the mine, Romania’s former leftwing government abruptly changed its position in 2013 following a wave of unprecedented protest across the country.
Millions of low-paid Americans rang in 2016 with a raise, as a handful of state minimum wage increases went into effect on the first day of January.
Many of those raises are a barely noticeable 15 or 20 cents an hour — little comfort to people struggling to make ends meet. But workers in the cities and states that voted for more robust wages last year saw much more significant gains.
Four specialists discuss the social and environmental impact and the perspectives of the partnership between China and Latin America in 2016.
Joshua Wright, whose term as a Republican commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission ended in August, has joined the antitrust practice of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati — the law firm that represented Google before the FTC.
Being on Google’s payroll is nothing new for Wright. Before he joined the FTC, Google helped fund his academic research at George Mason University, where he will continue to teach while working for Wilson Sonsini. George Mason received $762,000 in donations directly from Google from 2011 to 2013.
Supporters of TPP generally insist it's absolutely worth doing, despite any infelicities it might contain, because of the huge overall economic benefit it will bring to participants. But when challenged, they are unable to cite any credible evidence for that claim. That's because there isn't any: despite the impact that TPP's measures will have on how the US and other countries do business, there are astonishingly few studies on whether it will indeed have a positive impact overall. Just over a year ago, we wrote about one of the rare attempts to model TPP, commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture, which came up with the following result for countries like the US and Australia...
Al Jazeera America launched in the summer of 2013, a spin-off of the Doha-based channel’s English version to specifically target a United States audience. For the last decade, Al Jazeera had built what some might consider the one of the most coveted of journalistic reputations: It was considered anti-American and anti-Zionist in the US, while Arab governments saw its stories as pure Western propaganda. By the time of the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera English became indispensable for anyone in the United States who wanted to know what was going on.
In 1980, Bowie released Scary Monsters, after which every album he released was doomed to be described as his best since Scary Monsters. In the album opener “It’s No Game,” he alluded to the themes of charismatic dictatorship, martyrdom and the power of corporate media that obsessed him from the beginning of his career:
Draw the blinds on yesterday, And it’s all so much scarier Put a bullet in my brain, And it makes all the papers
Media blogger Richard Prince (Journal-isms, 1/11/16) quoted from Jim Naureckas’ review of David Bowie’s media criticism (1/11/16) in his roundup of reactions to Bowie’s death...
New survey shows Clinton losing frontrunner status as Vermont senator gains among crucial voting blocs
Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of remoulding Labour have been boosted by a detailed Guardian survey into the party at grassroots level that shows overwhelming support for him, a decisive shift to the left and unhappiness with squabbling among MPs.
Jeremy Corbyn appears to be reshaping the U.K. Labour Party, with a survey showing “overwhelming support for him [and] a decisive shift to the left.”
The Guardian “interviewed Labour secretaries, chairs, other office holders and members from more than 100 of the 632 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales,” and found that “almost every constituency party across the country we contacted reported doubling, trebling, quadrupling or even quintupling membership, and a revival of branches that had been moribund for years and close to folding.”
Executives of Al Jazeera America (AJAM) held a meeting at 2 p.m. Eastern Time to tell their employees that the company is terminating all news and digital operations in the U.S. as of April 2016, resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs. The announcement marks a stunning and rapid collapse of what, from the start, has been a towering failure.
Photographer Jennifer Rondinelli Reilly has filed a lawsuit against Twitter, claiming that the social network failed to remove infringing copies of her work. In a complaint filed at a federal court in California, Reilly demands a permanent injunction against the social network and compensation for the damage she suffered.
Pope Francis once described the internet as a “gift from God”. But on Friday he is due to meet with someone who may believe the internet has more to do with his own company than divine intervention: Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google.
The pope, who more than a billion Catholics believe is God’s representative on Earth, will meet with the powerful Silicon Valley executive and philanthropist for 15 minutes at the Vatican in Rome.
The lawsuit follows challenges to similar anti-speech laws in Idaho and Wyoming.
Laws in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and Utah are backed by big agricultural entities and are designed to cover up unsafe or illegal farming practices. Activists said that the North Carolina measure, which was approved over the governor's veto, is perhaps the most restrictive and could bar undercover investigations of all private entities, including nursing homes and daycare centers.
"The Anti-Sunshine Law's legislative history confirms that the statute's aim is to keep whistleblowers from exposing employers' and property owners' hidden conduct to the public," according to the lawsuit. "In the words of one of the bill's supporters, the law's goal is to allow employers and property owners to engage in activities of public concern without fear of an 'expose.'"
The censoring of information online is one of the greatest dangers to free speech on the Internet today, as many countries filter a wide variety of information of social and political significance, sometimes under the guise of 'national security'. This problem is on the rise as the methods being used by governments have become more sophisticated and more resources are being allocated to the practice of censoring content.
SEEING your name inscribed on Islamic State’s hit list would be anybody’s worst nightmare, with heightening fears of terrorism.
But that’s exactly what happened to one Victorian MP, who saw their name in black and white on the organisation’s hit list in August.
The hit list named eight Australians and joining the MP on the list were defence officials and public servants.
Former Melbourne man and IS fighter Neil Prakash urged his followers to attack those named.
The government's control over Internet censorship and import of pornographic films will not be affected under the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), International Trade and Industry Minister Mustapa Mohamed said.
Although he shares the frustrations about video on demand services like Netflix, Cogeco's chief executive says he's opposed to government intervention that could open the door to tighter supervision of the Internet.
Although he shares the frustrations about video on demand services like Netflix, Cogeco's chief executive says he's opposed to government intervention that could open the door to tighter supervision of the Internet.
Several cable companies have accused the U.S. company of reaping significant revenues in Canada without paying taxes and investing in telecommunications infrastructure.
If you’ve ever experienced the frustration of having your Facebook account disabled after posting a nude work of art, mark January 14 as your new favorite holiday: Facebook Nudity Day. The event, organized by art historian Kathy Schnapper and artists Stephen Pusey and Grace Graupe-Pillard, calls for Facebook users to post an artwork depicting the naked body to protest the social media website’s “continuing censorship of artists, curators and critics who have been censored for posting art and images that depict the nude human body.” The flooding of Facebook with photographs, paintings, drawings, and all other forms of art represents an action of solidarity against an absurd form of censorship that pretty much occurs on a daily basis.
SilverPush is an Indian startup that's trying to figure out all the different computing devices you own. It embeds inaudible sounds into the webpages you read and the television commercials you watch. Software secretly embedded in your computers, tablets, and smartphones pick up the signals, and then use cookies to transmit that information back to SilverPush. The result is that the company can track you across your different devices. It can correlate the television commercials you watch with the web searches you make. It can link the things you do on your tablet with the things you do on your work computer.
Employers should not routinely snoop on their employees communications at work, after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that a company in Romania did not breach the privacy rights of an employee by monitoring their personal online communications, the Institute of Directors (IoD) has said.
The ECHR ruled that a company in Romania didn’t breach the privacy rights of a worker after it monitored his Yahoo Messenger account. The man’s employer confronted him with 45 pages of messages that he had exchanged with his brother and fiancee using a work computer during work hours. He set up the Yahoo account at his employers’ request to talk to professional clients, according to the Financial Times.
Along with fixes for a number of older vulnerabilities in Cisco IOS and IOS XE software, the Cisco IOS Software Common Industrial Protocol, and the OpenSSL package incorporated in multiple company products, Cisco Systems has pushed out security updates that plug unauthorized access and default account/static password vulnerabilities in some of its offerings.
The most serious of these are CVE-2015-6323, a bug in the Admin portal of devices running Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) software, which could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain unauthorized access to an affected device and effect complete compromise of it; and CVE-2015-6314, a same type of vulnerability affecting devices running Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) software.
The fast-growing ride-sharing company leased large chunks of “plug-n-play” wholesale space in three major markets during 2015, according to a new report from a data center real estate specialist. The burst of leasing comes just six months after Uber purchased a small data center from Microsoft, along with other assets that supported its mapping infrastructure.
As the year drew to a close, the cybersecurity industry was abuzz with a sensational disclosure whose geopolitical ramifications largely went ignored. With India so typically caught in the seasonal slumber, the global hacker community, which has never seen a dull day, tore into the networking hardware giant Juniper (its components power and protect the core of the Internet in many nations, facilitating the efficient routing of packets across networks).
The National Cybersecurity Institute (NCI) at Excelsior College today announced a collaboration with the NSA Day of Cyber, a nationwide effort to raise awareness of cyber issues and encourage students to pursue STEM-related careers.
Back in 2011 we noted how a group of Falun Gong members filed suit against Cisco in San Francisco, alleging that Cisco held some culpability for the Chinese government's crackdown on dissidents, critics, and others. According to the lawsuit at the time, Cisco "competed aggressively" for the contracts to design China's Golden Shield system, "with full knowledge that it was to be used for the suppression of the Falun Gong religion." The full, amended complaint (pdf) accused Cisco CEO John Chambers and two other senior executives of working with the CCP to find, eavesdrop on and track Falun Gong members.
In an interview with reporters this week, retired General Michael Hayden explained why he thinks companies and the government are ill-prepared to deal with cyberattacks: They both refuse to acknowledge hacks when they happen.
"The government hideously over-classifies it," Hayden said. "And the private sector, for fiduciary reasons, is reluctant to share it."
NSA talking about the data privacy? Does not look absurd? But this is how it was. Now you might want to stop accusing NSA for violating the data privacy. Or maybe not.
Debate is raging over tech companies' use of encryption software to secure their users' data - and the former head of the NSA isn't on the side you might expect.
Michael Hayden, who ran the secretive US spy agency between 1999 and 2005, told a panel on Tuesday that he doesn't support efforts to force companies to include "backdoors" for law enforcement in their products.
Someone going by the moniker "Cracka," claiming to be with a group of "teenage hackers" called "Crackas With Attitude," told Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchiarai that he had gained access to Clapper's Verizon FiOS account and changed the settings for his phone service to forward all calls to the Free Palestine Movement. Cracka also claimed to have gained access to Clapper's personal e-mail account and his wife's Yahoo account.
In October, Crackas With Attitude claimed responsibility for hacking CIA Director Brennan's personal e-mail account and gaining access to a number of work-related documents he had sent through it—including his application for a security clearance and credentials. The group also apparently gained access to a number of government Web portals and applications, including the Joint Automated Booking System (a portal that provides law enforcement with data on any person's arrest records, regardless of whether the cases are ordered sealed by courts) and government employee personnel records. The group published a spreadsheet of personal contact details for over 2,000 government officials. The Twitter account used to post the information was suspended shortly afterward.
The Islamic State is known to use messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp to communicate the messages to its followers. To avoid the surveillance of government agencies like FBI, ISIS has now developed its own messaging apps. These apps aren’t as sophisticated as WhatsApp or Telegram, but they have the advantage of being independent of any third-party organization that could be compromised by government agencies.
Back in October, I wondered whether companies would be able to claim they had chosen not to participate in CISA’s voluntary data sharing in their transparency reports. While CISA prohibits the involuntary disclosure of such participation, I don’t know that anything prohibits the voluntary disclosure, particularly of non-participation.
A related question is playing out right now over a shareholder resolution filed by Arjuna Capital asking AT&T to reveal its voluntary sharing with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The resolution asks only for a report on sharing that is not legally mandated, and exempts any information that is legally protected.
This new strategy is based on the government’s firm belief that the real cause of radicalization is because some suburban kid reads a Tweet and then poof! skips Spring Break for jihad. The idea that the roots of radical actions lie deep and involve complex motivations, including being torqued off at bloodthirsty U.S. foreign policy, meh, let’s blame social media and that damn rock ‘n roll you kids like and use it all as a way to clamp down on political speech the government doesn’t like.
[...]
I especially love the bit in Item C about providing “metrics to help measure our efforts to counter radicalization to violence.” Exactly how does one gather metrics to prove a negative, i.e., how many people allegedly don’t join ISIS because of something they read online?
The Don’t Spy On Us coalition, which Big Brother Watch are a member of, have written to the Home Secretary calling for any plans to weaken encryption in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to be scrapped.
The indication that the draft Bill will require companies to hand over encrypted data have raised concerns amongst academics, industry experts and civil society groups. These proposals, it is believed, would undermine cyber-security in the UK, putting us at odds with a number of our allies, including the United States and the Netherlands, who have both declared their intentions to protect encryption.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the Department of Education today to protect university students’ right to speak anonymously online, warning that curtailing anonymous speech as part of anti-harassment regulations would not only violate the Constitution but also jeopardize important on-campus activism.
“Battling gender and racial harassment and threats on college campuses is vitally important,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “But some are calling for blanket bans on the use of platforms that allow anonymous comments, and that’s a counterproductive strategy. Online anonymity is crucial for students who fear retaliation for their political and social commentary. It helps many people avoid being targets of harassment in the first place.”
EFF’s letter to the Department of Education comes after a number of groups pressed for new federal guidelines for fighting online harassment. EFF agrees with the majority of the recommendations, including ensuring prompt reporting and investigation of all reports of harassment, and disciplining and/or prosecuting perpetrators. However, preemptively removing access to anonymous online speech platforms violates all students’ First Amendment rights—threatening projects like the USG Girl Mafia at the University of Southern California, where students anonymously map locations of assault reports on campus. Anonymity was also essential for student activists at Guilford College in North Carolina, who used an online form to collect anonymous testimonials about racial violence from those who felt unsafe revealing their identities.
An activist investor is pressing AT&T for more details about how it handles government data requests.
Arjuna Capital said it will ask at the next shareholder meeting for investors to vote on a proposal [PDF] requiring AT&T to issue detailed reports of the company's policy on providing customer information to the NSA in light of recent revelations of AT&T's handover of information to the NSA.
The Arujuna proposal calls on the company to provide shareholders with a one-time report detailing "to the fullest extent possible" its policies regarding NSA requests for user information.
The Defense Department inspector general is initiating an investigation into measures by the National Security Agency to control computer users with access to sensitive information.
Whether or not you care that the NSA has archived your personal information in a server farm somewhere and whether or not you live in America, the future of U.S. national security strategy will effect you. And that future will be governed to no small degree by the technologies employed by the NSA, which doubles as a skunkworks for out there monitoring projects and creates patents at an almost industrial pace.
No one will ever accuse the National Security Agency of being champions of privacy. But General Michael Hayden, a former Director of the NSA, does see some value in preserving secure end-to-end encryption on the web without giving government agencies their own “backdoors” they can use to break it in the name of intelligence gathering. Per CNN, Hayden told a cybersecurity conference in Florida this week that breaking encryption would not make Americans safer even if encrypted communications do pose new challenges for intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Ross Ulbricht, convicted last February of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road darknet marketplace, has filed his appeal brief. It’s a 170-page whopper that revisits several of the evidentiary arguments that Ulbricht's lawyer made at trial. It also focuses on allegations of government corruption that didn’t come out until afterward.
The brief reprises the central elements of Ulbricht’s defense: namely, that he didn't do it. Ulbricht still says he wasn’t “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or DPR, and that “there were multiple DPRs over the course of Silk Road’s existence.”
As to the digital mountain of evidence that the feds found on his computer—including Silk Road logs and thousands of pages of chats with Silk Road admins—Ulbricht answers with a kind of vague “the Internet is scary” story. His attorney, Joshua Dratel, writes that “vulnerabilities inherent to the Internet and digital data,” like hacking and fabrication of files, made “much of the evidence against Ulbricht inauthentic, unattributable to him, and/or untimely unreliable.”
The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma’s book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.
A 12-year-old Penn Township girl died Monday morning after a bullet fired at her father by a constable during an eviction went through her father's arm and hit her, state police said today.
The bullet was fired at Donald Meyer, 57, by Constable Clarke Steele, 46, after Meyer confronted Steele at the door of the Meyers' apartment with a rifle.
A 12-year-old girl was fatally shot by police in Pennsylvania when an officer served an eviction warrant to her family.
Ciara Meyer was accidentally killed in her home on Monday after Constable Clarke Steele fired a single shot at her father Donald Meyer, 57, who was allegedly armed with a rifle, Pennsylvania State Police said according to Penn Live.
The bullet passed through Mr Meyer's arm, striking Ciara, and the young girl was pronounced dead at the scene.
Rebekah Brooks is facing a legal battle over new allegations that phone hacking was “endemic” when she was editor of The Sun, a court has heard.
Lawyers for News Group Newspapers, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s UK print business, told a High Court hearing that a “new flank” of hacking claims had been opened against Rupert Murdoch’s daily tabloid.
Are you kidding me?
I recently returned from the Consumer Electronics (CES) trade show in Las Vegas, and that question has been on my mind. The question doesn’t refer to any of the technologies vying to be the next big thing — although I do wonder how many Bluetooth controlled vibrators does one really need? No, what has me wondering is the big announcement ahead of CES about much tighter security restrictions. I wrote before the show that it would be a disaster with never-ending lines and disgruntled attendees, but that wasn’t exactly how it turned out. It was certainly chaotic, but it was a general surrender even before the event opened.
CES is among the world’s biggest conferences, with 170,000 people shuffling into Las Vegas for a week. This year, attendees were warned that new security practices would be in place. Among the guidelines were: “Bags will be searched. We suggest you use clear bags (mesh, plastic, vinyl, etc.) to expedite this process”; “Bags and backpacks with many pockets are not helpful. Pockets slow search time”; and “Everyone will be subject to metal detector screening and body pat downs upon entering show premises.”
David Fry told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he drove from Ohio to join the occupation because he knew that the other militants “were pretty good people.”
“It was (a) miracle, that I got here,” Fry said. “I’ve had quarrels with the government myself, and I feel there has to be some point where people have to put their foot down against the problems.”
Earlier this week, Fry recorded a video from one of the government buildings that militants are using as a computer and media center. He explained that he had created a website for the occupation.
Taking over a federal building at the point of a rifle gives protest a bad name.
The raids have provoked protests across the country. Last Friday, seven people were arrested in New York City in front of the local ICE headquarters, chaining themselves together and blocking traffic. Among those arrested was Claudia Palacios. Her story is remarkable. She was born in Texas and served for five years in the U.S. Marines, with two years in Okinawa and several years around the world deployed with a Marine Expeditionary Unit. Even though she served her country honorably, this U.S.-born military veteran has documentation issues of her own.
Stories from the Macedonian refugee camps in Gevgelija bordering Greece, and Tabanovce bordering Serbia, tell of kindness, of the shock and powerlessness of being "othered", and of loving Shakespeare.
This is frustrating, though not totally surprising: Industry insiders had been fretting about a repeat of an all-white acting slate for a while now. But it’s a bad look for an awards show already clinging to relevance like Leonardo DiCaprio clinging to hope that someday he’ll actually win an Oscar.
Some say that the post has come at an interesting time when Facebook is trying hard to make a case for its Free Basics (internet.org) services in India and other developing countries. However, this initiative is facing a huge challenge from the advocates of net neutrality. Maybe, that’s why Mark is trying to befriend people with his emotional post.
For a few years now, HBO has turned a blind eye to users that decide to share their passwords for HBO Go (the streaming app for existing cable providers) and HBO Now (the standalone streaming app for cord cutters). Last year HBO CEO Richard Plepler said the company keeps a close eye on the company's password sharing stats, but said the sharing isn't a huge phenomenon.
Today the European Commission has published a public consultation on the evaluation and modernisation of the legal framework for the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR).
With this consultation the Commission seeks views from all interested parties, in particular rightholders, the judiciary and legal profession, intermediaries, public authorities, consumers and civil society, on the question if the legal enforcement framework is still fit for purpose.
The main goal of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled is to establish set mandatory limitations to ensure access to printed material for the benefit of the visually impaired.
Two researchers for Kaspersky Lab, Costin Raiu and Anton Ivanov, have published an absolutely fascinating tale of how they successfully tracked down a zero day exploit in Microsoft Silverlight. The story is totally worth reading, and it stems from the researchers trying to find an exploit that was described in an Ars Technica article by Cyrus Farivar, concerning a hacker selling exploits to Hacking Team, which was revealed last summer when Hacking Team got hacked and had all its emails (among other things) released.
Metallica, in some circles, will always be known as the band that sued Napster and promised to go after the band's own fans that used the platform. For some former fans of the band, nothing the band has done since can redeem it. And I'm assuming the latest move probably won't help much either: various reports note that a Canadian Metallica tribute/cover band called "Sandman" showed up at a gig recently, only to discover a 41 page cease and desist letter from the band's lawyers, claiming that they were unfairly profiting off the Metallica name and logo.
[...]
No one's getting confused. No one thinks that it's actually Metallica. Everyone recognizes what a tribute band is. And the reason they go see and support tribute bands (hell, the reason people create tribute bands in the first place) is because they love and support the original band. None of this is done to be unfair to Metallica, but to celebrate the band, and how does the band react, but with a giant legal threat.
That's pretty messed up.
Update: And... of course, now that the band is getting lots of bad publicity over this, it's suddenly blaming "an overzealous attorney" and insisting that neither the band nor its management had any idea about this. Maybe time to find better lawyers.