You're walking down a dark alley, late at night, when suddenly someone jumps out at you and forces you to hand over your passport, your credit cards, and the keys to your car. This is a decent analogy of what using the internet is like.
Around every corner lurks danger, and given today's always-on connections, you may have the internet equivalent of burglars without even realising. For ultimate computer security, a firewall is similar to having a big, burly bodyguard walking down the street with you, keeping you safe. Most modern routers come with firewalls to help protect you, but if yours doesn't then a firewall distro should be able to help you, whether we're talking about a home or office network.
2015 was a wonderful year for computers, especially for Dell, whose XPS 13 laptop we recognized as the best of the year. And fortunately, the company is back for seconds with the “Project Sputnik” Developer Edition of the beloved notebook lineup — this time featuring the cult favorite Ubuntu Linux-based operating system.
Dell has started offering a discount on the XPS 13 Developer Edition laptops, in preparation to release the newer version, with Ubuntu Linux and Intel Skylake processors, according to Computerworld.
The upcoming Docker 1.10 open-source container engine will include a default seccomp profile, providing improved security controls. The open-source Docker container engine technology is set for a major boost this week. The expected release on Feb. 4 of Docker 1.10 includes new features and a strong focus on security, particularly with the integration of secure computing (or seccomp) and user namespace technology.
The Wayland 1.10 beta (v1.9.92) is now available.
Wayland 1.10 Beta ships with a few fixes over the recent Wayland 1.10 Alpha release. While already part of the previous development release, Wayland 1.10 is bringing the drag and drop actions API, frame events group allow grouping pointer events together for features liek diagonal scrolling, a new buffer damage request to let applications communicate about areas of a surface that should be re-rendered, shared memory buffer changes, other new API additions, and other changes.
This bugfix release improves on the 0.20.3 release and resolves a number of issues. NOTE: Wayland compositor support now requires EFL >= 1.17.0. Previous E20 releases will not work with EFL >= 1.17.0.
With the Enlightenment folks back from FOSDEM, Enlightenment 0.20.4 was released today as the latest bug-fix release.
Longtime free software developer Carsten Haitzler, better known as Rasterman, presented at last weekend's FOSDEM conference about Enlightenment on Wayland. As part of that, with Samsung's Tizen environment using Enlightenment, they too are after Wayland as being the superior solution to X11.
While Haswell processors have been available for a few years now, finally work is materializing on supporting the hardware's Observation Architecture.
The Observation Architecture is a set of performance counters for Haswell and newer. Developers interested in all the technical details on these new performance counters can see this public documentation.
Following this morning's article about Russian Super-Computing Users Get Tired Of Catalyst, Start Looking At Open-Source AMD, I decided to run some fresh Radeon open-source OpenCL benchmarks on my own using the Gallium3D Clover state tracker with the HPC researchers also being curious how this very latest open-source AMD graphics stack is performing. Here are some initial results with Mesa 11.2-devel Git built against LLVM 3.9 SVN (thanks Padoka!) and using the Linux 4.5 Git kernel.
A Google Chromium engineer has interestingly provided patches for Qualcomm Adreno 430 display support within Freedreno's MSM DRM driver.
The OpenChrome driver for open-source VIA graphics on Linux isn't quite dead yet... There's a new developer wanting to step up and take over maintainership of the X.Org driver.
Well, this is interesting. The Intel Quark X1000 SoC now has very basic support within Coreboot.
The Quark X1000 SoC has been available for more than two years already as a single-core 400MHz x86 processor designed for wearable devices and other tiny, low-power applications. The Intel Galileo developer board is one of the many public devices utilizing an X1000. Back in 2014 we shared some Quark X1000 Linux benchmarks and Intel Edison benchmarks for those interested.
With the falling prices of solid-state storage, it's becoming increasingly affordable to build a RAID array of SSDs. I have delivered many Btrfs RAID benchmarks on Phoronix over the years while today I have some fresh RAID0 and RAID1 numbers for Btrfs atop the latest Linux 4.5 development kernel when using two low-cost SSDs that retail for just around $40 USD a piece.
Poppins is an open-source project that builds on the SSH and rsync programs to create an incremental backup system that is simple, fast and reliable. Tons of other backup programs are available, but Poppins doesn't try to be a full-blown system; rather, it's a simple one-liner that will do file rotation, snapshots and more. It can be automated with cron, or you can run it manually from the command line. (But you should really, really make a cron job!)
It's been quite a while since last having anything major to talk about with the MythTV open-source DVR software, but at least today they have put out a new point release.
MythTV 0.27.6 is the new point release available this morning, but it's not a feature release, rather just aimed at fixing bugs. MythTV 0.27 itself was released more than two years ago.
I’m happy to announce coala 0.4.0 eucalyptus – the pre-FOSDEM release of the code analysis framework that truly works for any language.
The ownCloud community today announced the release of the third milestone in the development of the ownCloud Mail application for the ownCloud self-hosting cloud server software.
FFmpeg is a complete suite of tools used to record, convert and stream audio and video. A new update has been released for the main branch and developers have also made an interesting announcement regarding the removal of support for two external AAC encoders.
MythTV is a powerful Digital Video Recorder and home media center that comes with a wealth of features. The developers have published a new update for it, after a long hiatus.
Today we are going to take a look at one of the most mature / robust application written in Elementary and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries - Terminology. For those who are unfamiliar with Terminology:
“Terminology is a terminal emulator for Linux / BSD / UNIX etc. systems that uses EFL and has a whole bunch of bells and whistles. Use it as your regular vt100 terminal emulator along with all the usual things like 256 color support (we attempt to emulate Xterm as closely as possible in most respects).”
I don’t like the size of title bars in the stock Gnome 3. They are big and take to much space on my tiny 12ââ¬Â³ screen! But I’ve found an easy solution to this.
With many Phoronix readers being curious about reverse-engineering graphics drivers for open-source enablement, along the same lines you may also be curious about how reverse-engineering is done with video formats / video decoding by multimedia applications.
Now, we happen to know a thing or two around here about terms that get dubbed an "effect", especially when the revolve around exposure through internet channels. The Wheaton Effect is essentially a noticeable jump in sales for games that are featured on Table Top. As the original Reddit poster implies, the exposure generated by the game being featured on the show is a boon for sales. I would think this is an intuitive idea, in which an otherwise unaware public becomes aware of the fun to be had through these games and then goes out and buys them.
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And, to be fair, much of the gaming industry has come around to this idea. You can see the evolution not only in the stance of the publishers, who often times go so far as to work with sites to unblock Let's Play videos that were automatically nabbed by ContentID, but also in video game hardware itself. The latest generation of consoles, specifically the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, are both designed specifically with ways for gamers to record gameplay and share those recordings. But Nintendo and some other lagging studios are more restrictive and I can't imagine why. Sales are what's important and exposure brings with it sales. The Wheaton Effect is an example of this, but this concept isn't in any way limited to the realm of table top games. Give up just a little bit of control, it seems, and you spur on sales.
The weird and wacky space adventure game is available for Linux on Steam, via Humble Bundle, and via itch.io.
Freeciv is a free and open source turn-based multiplayer strategy game that resembles and is inspired by the original Civilization series. A new update bringing quite a few fixes has been released for it.
It's now possible to play old games from the SNES era on SteamOS, thanks to an application named Ice, which has been made to work with this operating system.
Ice had already been available for Steam, but a couple of developers made sure it would also work with SteamOS. The initial release has been marked as 0.1.0 and it shows the state of the development. It works, but installing it and figuring out how it can be used will take some time.
The idea that you can play this kind of games in Steam is not a bad one, especially since emulators are already working on this platform, and there is even controller support. Why not take advantage of a collection of thousands of games that can be downloaded and used for free, and which in many cases are just as good as the ones released today?
While at first using open-source drivers to play XCOM 2 on Linux looked bleak, after some more trials, the latest Mesa Gallium3D code can work for Intel and Radeon.
After the original article, I heard from the Linux game porters at Feral Interactive that the game should actually run with Intel and Radeon if using new enough Mesa, "We have completed the entire game on an AMD machine with mesa during development so it is pretty playable on R7/9 series cards it however is release quality due to some issues with the mesa drivers we are investigating."
As covered already, for launch Feral Interactive is only supporting NVIDIA graphics on Linux using their proprietary driver for launch day -- but, of course, that could change as new drivers are released in the future. AMD and Intel graphics (regardless of Catalyst or open-source for the Radeon hardware) are not supported for launch. Sadly there isn't any benchmark mode in the Linux version of XCOM 2, but given the hype around this game on Linux, I was curious to see what the graphics driver situation is really like... So no performance tests in this article, but just some initial impressions when trying different drivers and graphics processors.
Feral Interactive, the publisher and studio that ports XCOM 2 for Linux and Mac OS X, announced the system requirements for the game and has some bad news for Intel and AMD users.
XCOM 2 launches in a couple of days and Feral Interactive has been working for a while on this title. They will be able to release the game on Linux and Mac OS X along with the Windows platform, which is a great achievement. They also published the system requirements for XCOM 2, and they aren't all that demanding.
XCOM 2, the turn-based tactical video game developed by Fireaxis Games off Unreal Engine 3, is set to be released this Friday! However, come 5 February, hopefully you are a NVIDIA Linux gamer using the proprietary drivers otherwise you may have a hard time running the game.
Publisher 2K Games released the PC/OSX/Linux system requirements yesterday while the actual Linux port continues to be done by Feral. To not much surprise, only NVIDIA is listed in terms of the Linux graphics requirements.
The Linux and Mac OS X ports of Batman: Arkham Knight has been canceled, a developer revealed today on Steam.
Fantastic news, looks like Mad Max is actually coming to Linux if new information from SteamDB is to be believed. Another AAA game to join the ranks on Linux.
Endless Computer, the company designing Linux-powered computers -- and using a modified GNOME desktop -- for emerging markets, has joined the GNOME Advisory Board.
Endless develops "computers designed for the entire world" with their Endless PC retailing for $189 USD and The Endless Mini for $79 USD. The Endless Mini is ARM-powered while the more expensive unit features an Intel Celeron CPU.
We’ve just released the 0.7 series which should be the first version that is somewhat stable to use (think of it as alpha) and as we speak is under review for inclusion with Fedora 24.
For the last year I have been massaging the prototype we had at GUADEC in Strasbourg into a reliable product, and recently Oliver Gutierrez has joined the team to help with the web development affairs, I would like to summarize some of my work here so that you guys know what’s all about and what are the future plans.
Clonezilla Live and GParted Live developer and maintainer Steven Shiau was proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of Clonezilla Live 2.4.5-20.
We’re excited to finally announce the release of Zorin OS 11 with the availability of the Zorin OS 11 Core and Ultimate editions.
On February 3, the Zorin OS team was excited to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the Zorin OS 11 operating system, which is currently being distributed as Core and Ultimate editions.
Linux Lite known is a simple, sleek and stable Linux distribution based on Ubuntu's Long Term Support (LTS) releases. Linux Lite is especially for Windows users. It aims to fulfill everyday computing needs by providing the complete set of applications. Jerry Bezencon and the team recently announced Linux Lite 2.8, the final release of 2.0 series. Let's see what is new in this release.
All good things must come to an end, and so SUSE and the openSUSE Linux community today, February 3, 2016, announced that they will no longer support the openSUSE 13.1 operating system.
Today in Linux news "openSUSE 13.1 has gone Evergreen" and Bryan Lunduke was elected to its board. Clement Lefebvre reported on the first two Mint X-Apps and Dedoimedo found a distribution he likes. Rory Dear argued today against migrating to Linux and FOSS Force is back with their most difficult quiz yet.
The Slackware community has announced that the second Beta build of the upcoming Slackware 14.2 Linux operating system is now available for download and testing from the usual channels.
The company reported a $1.79-billion revenue in its fiscal year ending February 2015. Mr. Wong said the Philippine market’s contribution is “growing” but did not release figures.
“The Philippines is one the fastest-growing economies in Asia and we see a lot of investment in enterprise IT (information technology). We expect many companies to adopt Red Hat technologies,” Mr. Wong said. “The awareness is growing, there is a pent-up demand.”
Red Hat is targeting to strengthen its hold on corporate clients, especially mid-market companies, in the telecommunications, banks, transportation, manufacturing and service sectors, as well as government agencies.
Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) was upgraded by equities research analysts at Cowen and Company from a “market perform” rating to an “outperform” rating in a research report issued to clients and investors on Thursday, Analyst Ratings Net reports.
Although macro concerns have increased, the experts believe near-to-medium term spend with the company will probably remain relatively strong, helping set up a favorable overall landscape for fiscal 2017. In fact, they commented, they expect the company “should minimally be able to grow billings mid-teens over the NTM.”
A Red Hat employee, who goes by the rap name "Totty," performed a 4-minute video called "We Love Raleigh."
More of the proposed Fedora 24 changes were mailed out this morning to the Fedora development list for discussion ahead of FESCo officially deciding on whether the changes will make the cut for the next Fedora Linux release.
The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the 2016 Flock conference, coming August 2-5, 2016 in Krakow, Poland. At Flock, Fedora contributors gather to promote and discuss ideas to improve our distro, community, and userbase, and promote our core values: Freedom, Friends, Features, First.
Hello everyone, this year I've been to FOSDEM again. Here is a quick report of what I did, saw and liked during the event.
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Accidentally I met Martin Sivak - a former Anaconda developer whom I've worked with in the past. He is now at the Virtualization Development team at Red Hat and we briefly talked about the need for more oVirt testing. I have something in mind about this which will be announced in the next 2 months so stay tuned.
Justin W. Flory is a student majoring in systems administration and networking at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). His minor is in Free and Open Source Software. He has professional training as a barista and supports direct trade coffee. “I am also a coffee fanatic,” Flory said. “I can make some pretty fantastic espresso with the right equipment.” Justin has been fascinated with computers since a young age. He credits Minecraft with changing his life. “Minecraft is a game that has changed my life, beginning with my own early experience with entrepreneurship and later my experience with the Spigot community, which landed me the opportunity to go to London this past July to attend the annual Minecraft convention, MINECON. It also indirectly introduced me to Linux and Fedora.”
Another version od DNF and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE has been released. Recently released DNF adds socks5 proxy support and repoquery has new --unneeded and --recent switches available. Additionally a a lot of bugs have been fixed. For more information see DNF and plugins release notes.
Canonical is already preparing for the next Ubuntu Online Summit, which should arrive soon after the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
The recently ended UbuCon Summit that just ended last week was the first one that gathers developers from all over the community under the same physical roof. The Ubuntu Online Summit does the same thing, but the developers sit at home behind the webcam.
The dates for the next Ubuntu Online Summit have been finalized and will take place two weeks after the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Mir 0.19 was quietly released at the end of last week while Mir 0.20 is now officially under development with the latest Bazaar code.
The Mir 0.19.0 changes can be found via this change-log page from their Bazaar repository. As can be seen from the list, Mir 0.19 is mostly about bug fixing. Additional details can be found from Mir on Launchpad.
Ubuntu developers have released Snapcraft 2.1, their tool for building packages as a snap for their new Snappy package management system.
Snapcraft 2.1 is described by the Canonical developers as a "risky and ground breaking release" as it introduces the concept of "skills". Snapcraft 2.1 also now allows uploading of snaps via the Snapcraft client. Snapcraft 2.1 also drops a number of its base dependencies.
Canonical's Snappy team, through Sergio Schvezov, announced the release of Snapcraft 2.1, the latest and most advanced Snappy creator tool for the Ubuntu Snappy Core series of operating systems.
Today, February 4, 2016, is a sad day for all users of the Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system, as Canonical has stopped feeding the software repositories with the updates for select packages and security patches for the kernel.
On February 3, 2016, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak sent his daily report to inform all Ubuntu Phone users about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch development team on the upcoming OTA-9.5 hotfix.
Today, February 4, 2016, Canonical, the company behind the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, was excited to unveil the first ever converged device in collaboration with the Spanish mobile manufacturer BQ.
Today, Ubuntu project member Nathan Haines has informed the Ubuntu community that the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase contest is open to submissions from artists who want to contribute their awesome artwork to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
After nine months swinging in the wild, the sun finally sets on official support for the Vivid Vervet.
Ubuntu 15.04 desktop users will receive no more security notices, critical fixes, or updated packages from the main Ubuntu archives as of February 4th, 2016.
Seriously, Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa Xfce is a blistering good distribution. If not for the issues I had on my G60 laptop, I'd be one super-ultra-happy bunny. But my faith is being restored by the moment. First, a smooth, flawless upgrade from Rafaela. Then, this fabulous experience today.
Honestly, I can't think of anything bad except for a couple of tiny glitches, and they are so irrelevant in the overall scheme that there's nothing to worry or even consider. Everything worked. Everything. There were no warnings, errors, stutters, doubts. No matter what I tried, Rosa Xfce handled it gracefully, with speed and elegance. This warrants a perfect score. It's been a while, but we're back in the game. 10/10. Rosa Xfce, YOUR next distro.
We reported last week the fact that the Linux Mint developers bragged with a new project called X-Apps for the upcoming Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" computer operating system.
In preparation for Linux Mint 18, a new project called “X-Apps” was started, which goal is to provide default and generic applications for traditional GTK desktop environments (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce…).
I think Linux Mint isn't just a great desktop, it's a great replacement for Windows. With Microsoft pushing Windows 10 on existing users, people are starting to explore alternatives to Windows.
Hardkernel unveiled its first 64-bit hacker SBC. The Odroid-C2 has the same layout as the C1+, but has a quad-core, 2GHz Cortex-A53 SoC and a $40 price.
The Odroid-C2’s $40 price may not be as dramatic as that of the similarly 64-bit, ARMv8 Pine A64, which will start shipping to Kickstarter backers later this month starting at $15. However, it’s more affordable than Qualcomm’s $75 DragonBoard 410c, which has a quad-core, 64-bit Snapdragon 410. Clocked at 2GHz, the quad-core, Cortex-A53 Amlogic S905 SoC is likely faster than the 1.2GHz Snapdragon 410 or Pine64’s quad-core, 1.2GHz Allwinner A64. The Odroid-C2 SBC also offers more features, especially compared to the Pine A64.
Hardkernel’s next single-board computer features a quad-core ARM Coretx-A53 64-bit processor, 2GB of RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet.
The Geocode API can be used as an add-on to your apps, that allows developers to create Tizen 2.3 or 2.4 native applications that can send your location and also receive co-ordinates from a server. You need to add permissions in your Tizen project for the app to use your phone’s map service, Internet and network.
Malwarebytes says it will take about a month to deploy a patch to fix vulnerabilities found by Google's Project Zero bug hunters.
Embattled smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry has announced that it will be launching its first Android-powered smartphone, the Priv, in Australia on Thursday, to be made available exclusively through Optus.
According to BlackBerry, the Priv combines the Canadian company's security and privacy features with the Android operating system and Google Play apps.
Google’s Android operating system for mobile devices has over a billion users. But the first company in Google’s alphabet isn’t stopping there. The search company that recently surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable wants to add even more users to Android. Mainly by taking back control of the operating system by making its own smartphones.
The Eclipse IoT community had great momentum in 2015. Benjamin has done a nice summary of 2015. However, I often get asked where I see IoT and open source going into the future. Below are some of the trends I’d like to see within the Eclipse IoT community for 2016.
Orson Charts is Open Source software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3.
How many employees in your organization contribute to open source projects? Earlier this year, The New Stack asked this question to companies in the container ecosystem.
Among the 36 responses we received, the median response was ten employees, which is a lot, but even more significant if we look at the size of the companies involved. Taking this into account, we found that the median company actually said 47 percent of their employees were contributing to an open source project.
How well do you know the people behind the different FOSS communities? Do you know the names of the people who are behind the software we use daily? Would you recognize the faces of the people who fight to keep free software free by helping enforce the GPL or by working on software patent reform? How much do you know about the people who diligently work to support free and open standards so that the digital age belongs to all of us instead of to a handful of corporations?
Would you like to test your knowledge of the people of FOSS? Take our quiz. We have eighteen questions, each concerning a person considered to be a leader in the FOSS world. Have we left anyone out? You betcha — starting with you. The way we see it, each and every one of us, whether we merely use FOSS at home, work to keep FOSS software maintained or fight the good fight to keep free tech free, is equally as important.
The platform was written in Go and has been posted to GitHub where it's had more than 300 commits at the time of writing. It differs from some other anti-phishing platforms in part because it is hosted on premise rather than in the cloud, “There are many commercial offerings that provide phishing simulation/training [but] unfortunately, these are SaaS solutions that require you to hand over your data to someone else,” the GoFish team says.
Too often web apps and the frameworks they're built on support only the privileged—the always-online users and development teams with both front-end and back-end expertise. In open source, this support of privilege is usually reflected in the contributor community.
Hoodie, a new web app architecture, does things a little differently. Simply put, Hoodie is a back end for front-end people. Started in 2013 as a spinoff of CouchDB, Hoodie provides a fast, easy, and accessible way for developers to focus on the front end of a project without getting caught up in the time sink of back-end administration.
MidoNet, Midokura's SDN platform, was open-sourced back in November 2014. Midokura CTO Pino de Candia explained that the new MEM 5.0 release is based on MidoNet (MN) 5.0, which was first released in October 2015. Midokura's product roadmap has MEM updates set to be released every 6 months, with MN updates every 3 months.
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Looking forward, the next MEM release is version 5.2, currently scheduled to debut in July. Among the features that de Candia expects to be included are: Kubernetes and vSphere integration. Additionally, MEM Insights will likely benefit from integration with physical switches, starting with Cumulus Linux and other platforms in later releases. Another big item on the release roadmap is support for multi-site workloads.
International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) will organise an open forum on FOSS transition policy and strategies for government officials here on Saturday.
The venue will be Padmam Hall, Institute of Management in Government, Vikas Bhavan. The Centre had released its open source software policy in March, 2015, that made it mandatory to explore use of FOSS in government organisations.
Google has released the Chrome 49 beta today for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, OS X, and Windows.
Chrome 49 is bringing support for CSS custom properties to make it easy to define property variables in CSS, background sync support with service workers, improved ECMAScript 2015 support, the keygen element to generate a key-pair as part of an HTML form, a new MediaRecorder API for recording a user's audio and video without the use of any plugins, WebAudio API additions, and a variety of other enhancements.
Can you shame website administrators into making their sites more secure? That's what Google will soon start doing through its Chrome browser, which now prominently identifies sites that are not secured with HTTPS encryption.
Google has updated the Safe Browsing feature in Chrome to protect your PC against the social engineering techniques that trick you into clicking the fake download buttons.
Midokura has released Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) 5.0, a network virtualization product designed for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. MEM 5.0 builds on Midokura’s open source, highly scalable, network virtualization system -- MidoNet -- to support network virtualization deployments with enhanced tools for OpenStack operators.
According to the announcement, “MEM 5.0 offers an intelligent, software-based network abstraction layer between the hosts and the physical network, allowing operators to build isolated networks in software overlaying pre-existing, hardware-based network infrastructure.”
It's official: There is now a significant fork of the CloudStack cloud computing platform. If you don't know its history, CloudStack had more momentum a few years ago as an open cloud platform than OpenStack has now. Citrix, which owned it, passed the open source CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, and CloudStack continues to advance and is widely used.
The conversation around the adoption of OpenStack, the open source cloud technology platform, continues to gain momentum. Analysts at Forrester recently declared it “enterprise-ready” while many enterprise companies have taken the leap and deployed it. One thing that seems to be a dominant theme is that there are not enough professionals with OpenStack skills to keep up with demand.
But cost and complexity woes remain as public cloud adoption easily surpasses private cloud sales.
In case you've missed the trend, LinkedIn has become very central to how many people get hired these days, and it can be a conduit for upgrading your current job. LinkedIn also organically gathers a lot of job- and industry-related data, and that's why it's notable that according to the company's newly published analysis of the 25 Skills That Could Get You Hired in 2016, cloud and distributed computing ranked as the most in-demand skill globally last year.
Here are some of the related findings, and some tips on how you can pick up OpenStack skills to better your job-seeking fortune.
Today, Gammu 1.37.0 has been released. As usual it collects bug fixes. This time there is another important change as well - improver error reporting from SMSD.
This means that when SMSD fails to connect to the database, you should get a bit more detailed error than "Unknown error".
It's been more than five years since the launch of Illumos as the concerted, community-based effort around the OpenSolaris code-base. This truly-open Solaris stack continues to be at the heart of OpenIndiana, SmartOS, Dyson, and other operating systems.
If you looking for an open source alternative of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs, Kolab Systems and Collabora are working to address this issue. Known as CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition), this office suite is basically a cloud version of LibreOffice.
Like the idea of having a cloud office suite, but not crazy about being locked into Microsoft Office 365 or Google Docs software-as-a-service (SaaS) ? Two open-source companies, ownCloud and Kolab Systems, are working on enabling an office suite for your own private cloud.
Kolab, like ownCloud, is using Collabora’s cloud version of the open-source LibreOffice office suite, Collabora CloudSuite. The desktop version of LibreOffice is my favorite office suite.
Among the features coming for next week's LibreOffice 5.1 release is a much faster start-up time (up to twice as fast!), improved Microsoft Office file format support, PNG export support in Calc, OpenGL transition support for Impress, menu improvements, auto-accelerator in GTK has been enabled, faster Calc performance, and many other enhancements developed over the past several months.
When we first took a look at the top open source CRM systems back in 2014, there were many promising options. Now, let's take a quick look at six of the top open source CRM systems of today. While this is by no means a definitive list, each CRM system covered in this article has been selected based on its rich or unique feature set.
Unicef, the children's charity run by the UN, is steering more than $9 million into startups based on venture capital-style investing, and the funds will go toward numerous open source efforts. UNICEF is inviting technology start-ups developing solutions with the potential to improve the lives of the world’s most vulnerable children to apply for funding, and there are already signs that open source blockchain efforts and other open development initiatives will benefit from the funding.
“The purpose of the UNICEF Innovation Fund is to invest in open source technologies for children,” said Christopher Fabian, UNICEF Innovation Co-Lead. “We’ll be identifying opportunities from countries around the world including some that may not see a lot of capital investment in technology start-ups. We are hoping to identify communities of problem-solvers and help them develop simple solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing children.”
IBM is expanding its Cloud Data Services portfolio with the addition of more than 25 services.
The services, which will be available on the company's cloud platform Bluemix, are being aimed at helping developers and data scientists to build and move data into the cloud.
Microsoft has been using deep neural networks for awhile now to power its speech recognition technologies bundled into Windows and Skype to identify and follow commands and to translate speech respectively. This technology is part of Microsoft's Computational Network Toolkit. Last April, the company made this toolkit available to academic researchers on Codeplex, and it is now opening it up even more by moving the project to GitHub and placing it under an open source license.
Landing last month in the LLVM SVN/Git code-base was the SI machine scheduler for the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. This scheduler has the potential to improve the performance for some hardware/workloads, but not by the wide margins originally reported by some early testers.
While the SI machine scheduler has been in the LLVM back-end, landing in Mesa Git a few days ago was an option for easily enabling it.
I have to confess that I am still tying up loose ends from SCALE14X — the expo doesn’t end when the doors close for those of us who work the show. However, one interesting development popped up on my BSD radar this week that bears mentioning.
Ed Maste gives a detailed report on it in the FreeBSD Foundation’s newsletter, reporting that Bjoern Zeeb gets the nod for a project grant “to finalize and integrate the work done to make the VIMAGE network stack virtualization production ready.”
Guile 2.1.2 is the second pre-release in what will eventually become the 2.2 release series.
Released GnuTLS 3.3.21 and GnuTLS 3.4.9 which are bug fix releases in the previous and current stable branches.
Copyright is copyright, and open source licenses are just another license. What this case illustrates is the need for judges and lawyers to understand what open source software is: not just software made available under a license, but software that has an accompanying ethos.
Names of the latest discovered files are similar to Android subsystem from Project Astoria, i.e. ADSS.Sys. Where “LX” can only be taken for one thing, and that is LINUX.
Open Source, normally referred to within the domain of computer software, also pertains to the availability of the inner workings of physical operations and technology in the modes of hardware and sociological being with my focus here in view of agricultural life and design. There is a wide variety of literature available online providing information on agricultural methods, but where food production is concerned, the most informative pathways towards gaining an understanding of farming is to see, firsthand, how farmers and ranchers operate in their seasonal tasks. I have visited several farms in the past couple of years that have operated in such a way that have allowed for guest study of their daily procedures and thus exist as open source sites of agriculture, with one in particular ringing out as the most appropriate to mention as an open source agricultural operation I have had personal experience with.
There are advantages to living in the age in which we can carry an entire library in our pockets. Much as the MP3 player revolutionized music consumption by making it possible to keep a jukebox on hand, so too has the e-reader ushered in a brave new world of reading. With this freedom to have the entire collected works of Alice Walker (or all seven Harry Potter books) with us at all times, however, have come concerns about digital rights management.
We get a lot of emails from public relations folks at Tech Insider. But one stood out today: a pitch from a group of roboticists in Poland working to turn the Hasbro toy Furby into an open-source robot for tinkering. That means anyone with a little coding knowledge can program a Furby to do and say basically anything. (We posted some examples below.)
Irish 3D bioprinting startup Ourobotics has just introduced their second ‘revolution’ to the bioprinting industry: an entirely open source 3D bioprinter called the Renegade that can be assembled for under $900. The Renegade 3D bioprinter was designed specifically to open up 3D bioprinting technology to the educational and biomaking communities, and the free, DIY instructions are now available to download via Ourobotics and 3Ders.org.
This article is the third part of a four-part series that examines some of the changes in 3D printing that have occurred in the past three years since my first articles on the subject. Because this is Linux Journal, instead of discussing the entire 3D printing world, I'm focusing on the sections of the topic most relevant to open source and open hardware. In the first article, I gave a general overview on the current state of 3D printing. In the second, I covered what's changed in 3D printing hardware during the past three years, including the shift away from open hardware and which printers still hold onto their open hardware roots. In this article, I discuss the changes in 3D printing software, and then in the final piece, I'll walk through setting up OctoPrint on a Raspberry Pi to control your printer remotely.
Build2 was announced today by Code Synthesis with an alpha release of this new cross-platform toolchain for building and packaging C++ code-bases.
Jesse Toth says that upgrading an Internet service is like building a new bridge across San Francisco Bay.
In building the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, engineers didn’t tear down the old one and erect the new one in its place. They built the new span alongside the old one, before making sure the new bridge could handle the same traffic. Only then did they switch all the cars over and start tearing down the old span. As Toth explains, when it comes time to rebuild software that underpins a service like Google or Facebook or Uber, the process should work in much the same way. “You battle-test this new bridge—this new code path—while the original one is still being used,” she says.
Go developers are warning that with the upcoming Go 1.7 release the compiler could be as much as two times slower, but will yield better quality -- and hopefully faster -- generated code.
For the upcoming Go 1.7 development cycle, they plan to merge their SSA compiler back-end for their x86_64 platform. Their Static Single Assignment back-end is currently running much slower than their current back-end, but will yield better generated code.
Industrial Internet Consortium works with Object Management Group and other bodies to open up the world's devices to communication and data exchange.
A. First of all, who do you know who’s complaining about Techdirt?!? But, more seriously, that’s a really good question. I will say, however, that I *try* to make sure that if I’m ripping apart something, it’s their ideas, statements or actions, rather than them as a person. We may not always succeed at that, but it’s something I strive for. As an example, when talking about a musician, I’m pretty careful not to, say, make fun of their music. Because something like that is a taste thing, and if lots of people like it, even if I don’t, well, that’s a cheap shot to make fun of that. But if they say something I think is dumb about copyright or the internet, well that’s fair game.
I’ve met some of the people that I’ve criticized and it can be an interesting experience. I once had the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company call me up and lecture me for an hour where I couldn’t get a word in edgewise (which was weird). A few years back someone actually engineered something of a surprise dinner between me and a well known author whom I’ve criticized repeatedly, and it was a pretty intense conversation, though it made me realize that much of what that guy wrote was to play the role of a character (i.e., he would raise a point from his book, and I would point out multiple examples of why his argument was wrong, and he’d immediately back down saying “well, you know more of the details about that than I do…” — and I kept thinking “but you’re the one who wrote the book!”). I once met a Congressional staffer whom I had written not very nice things about, and I recognized the name, but couldn’t place why I recognized it. And she told me that a committee she was on had been trying to call me to testify before Congress and “people” (never identified) had refused to give her my contact info (though I’m pretty easy to find). I gave her my card and only later realized who it was and how I’d basically gone sentence for sentence in attacking some comments she’d made (that, to be fair, were really dumb), and that the idea of having me testify was probably designed to make me look bad. But, whatever.
Copy.com, the cloud storage service that offered near-unlimited space and huge bonuses for referrals, announced today they’re shutting down on May 1st, 2016—leaving more than a few people with dozens or hundreds of gigs of data to migrate.
If you’re looking for the definitive guide on how to empower women in engineering, then this book won’t immediately have all the answers. By being on GitHub, Square wants it to be crowdsourced — and what better way to reach engineers than by hosting it on one of the industry’s popular services?
The book is organized into four main areas: introducing new hires to the group and ensuring that they feel welcome; growing the community internally; expanding the network beyond your company; and creating a presence at conferences.
For as long as there have been data centers, they have been designed around the CPU. Now, thanks to speedy non-volatile flash storage, that topology is changing, and it may have major repercussions to the IT industry, warned an article in the Association for Computing Machinery’s flagship publication Queue.
“The arrival of high-speed, non-volatile storage devices, typically referred to as Storage Class Memories (SCM), is likely the most significant architectural change that data center and software designers will face in the foreseeable future,” wrote Mihir Nanavati, Malte Schwarzkopf, Jake Wires, and Andrew Warfield. “Piles of existing enterprise datacenter infrastructure—hardware and software—are about to become useless (or, at least, very inefficient).”
Google boosts local SSD storage to 3TB per virtual machine and persistent disk to 64TB per virtual machine on its Cloud Compute Engine.
Less than one month after the attacks of Sept. 11, a senior FBI official, Ronald Dick, told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, “Due to the vital importance of water to all life forms ... the FBI considers all threats to attack the water supply as serious threats.” In 2003, a UPI article reported that an al-Qaida operative “(does not rule out) using Sarin gas and poisoning drinking water in U.S. and Western cities.’” Where the terrorists have failed to mount any attack on a water supply, the Michigan state government has succeeded. In the city of Flint, lead-poisoned water has been piped into homes and offices since 2014, causing widespread illness and potentially permanent brain damage among its youngest residents.
Michigan has one of the most severe “emergency manager” laws in the country, allowing the governor to appoint an unelected agent to take over local governments when those locales or institutions have been deemed to be in a “financial emergency.” Republican Gov. Rick Snyder pushed for and obtained two bills that strengthened the law, and has used it aggressively to impose his version of fiscal austerity on cities like Detroit, Benton Harbor, several large school districts and, now most notoriously, on Flint. In every case but one, the emergency manager has taken over cities that are majority African-American. The emergency manager is granted sweeping powers to override local, democratically elected governments and to make cuts to budgets, sell public property, cancel or renegotiate labor contracts and essentially govern like a dictator.
The information leak has long been known to careful administrators who take the time to read Tor documentation, but that hasn't prevented some Tor hidden services from falling victim to it. To plug the hole, darkweb sites that run Apache must disable the mod_status module that by default sets up a server status page displaying a variety of potentially sensitive information about the servers. Details include the number of requests per second sent to the server, the most recent HTTP requests received, CPU usage, and in some cases the approximate longitude of the server.
Automatic updates that patch the two flaws and fix 17 bugs are now rolling out to users of the open-source WordPress CMS. A new update to the WordPress open-source blogging and content management system (CMS) has been released that patches a pair of security vulnerabilities and includes 17 bug fixes that improve functionality.
Open source is becoming more popular in the enterprise. But so are open-source vulnerabilities. Here is how you can prevent open source-related mishaps in 2016.
Use of open-source software is ubiquitous across the Web, cloud, containers, enterprise apps, mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT). Analysis from Black Duck, an IBM Security partner, showed that open-source code comprises about 30 percent of the average commercial software application; this figure can jump even higher for in-house applications. According to Gartner, open source will be included in mission-critical applications within 99 percent of Global 2000 enterprises by the end of 2016.
Who even remembers the moment in mid-February 2003, almost 13 years ago, when millions of people across this country and the planet turned out in an antiwar moment unique in history? It was aimed at stopping a conflict that had yet to begin. Those demonstrators, myself included, were trying to put pressure on the administration of George W. Bush not to do what its top officials so visibly, desperately wanted to do: invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, garrison it for decades to come, and turn that country into an American gas station. None of us were seers. We didn’t fully grasp what that invasion would set off, nor did we imagine a future terror caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but we did know that, if it was launched, some set of disasters was guaranteed; we knew beyond a doubt that this would not end well.
The good news for anti-interventionists out of Iowa is that Bernie Sanders has defied the conventional wisdom and effectively delayed the coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton. In spite of a ramped up effort to isolate the Vermont socialist from the Democratic mainstream, Hillary is in for a bruising fight that will only get bloodier when Sanders smashes her in New Hampshire, as seems likely.
Culling numbers from media reports, Antiwar.com found that 931 people, mostly Iraqis, were killed, and 580 more were wounded. The Islamic State, Naqshbandi Army, and other militant groups lost 3,478 in fighting or by execution. Another 261 were reported wounded.
The United Nations also released its casualty figures for January. They estimate that 849 Iraqis were killed and 1,450 were wounded. At least 490 of those killed and 1,157 of the injured were civilians. They do not count casualties in Anbar nor among the militants. However, the numbers from Anbar province’s health department are 56 killed and 248 injured.
North Korea likes to call South Korea a land of “political filth” and its leaders, including President Park Geun-hye, “human trash.” Now, apparently to highlight its contempt, it has begun sending balloons into the South loaded with an unusual payload, the police here said on Thursday: cigarette butts.
North and South Korea have escalated their propaganda war across their heavily armed border since Jan. 6, when the North conducted its fourth nuclear test.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the “Soviet threat” was replaced with the “Muslim threat” and the “War on Terror” took over from the Cold War. Despite a succession of false flag attacks and warnings of a “thirty years war,” a few thousand lightly armed jihadists were an insufficient replacement for the Soviet Union and its thousands of nuclear ICBMs. It was an uncomfortable notion that the “world’s only superpower” could not dispose of a few terrorists.
The US Senate Committee on the Judiciary has passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act 2016, which included amendments that were suggested in hearings in December
A UN panel has ruled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is being "arbitrarily detained", the BBC understands.
Mr Assange claimed asylum in London's Ecuadorean embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex assault claims, which he denies.
The Met Police said he will still be held if he does leave the embassy.
He earlier tweeted he would accept arrest if the panel ruled against him, but called for his arrest warrant to be dropped if the decision went his way.
Here is an interview I did for RT today as the news broke that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention would announce tomorrow the findings of its report into the Julian Assange case.
Cloud services make storing and accessing large amounts of information easier and cheaper. This gives in-house IP counsel the perfect opportunity to refresh their trade secrets strategy, argue Mark Ridgway and Annsley Merelle Ward
West Virginia Senate President Bill Cole's spokesman said Monday that Cole "will travel throughout West Virginia and beyond...." to talk about his legislative agenda that limits workers' rights.
The picturesque hillsides and vibrant blue waters of northeast Puerto Rico and nearby Culebra Island are home to marine and terrestrial ecosystems that make it a truly special place.
This corner of Puerto Rico is NOAA's only Habitat Blueprint Focus Area in the Caribbean. NOAA's Habitat Blueprint is a national framework to improve habitat for fisheries, marine life, and coastal communities.
Tomorrow, the European Parliament will vote on what recommendations to offer the European Commission as the latter continues its negotiations with 22 countries around the world on the Trade in Services Agreement—TISA. This is a key opportunity for MEPs to lay down what their "red lines" will be—the things that they will not accept if and when it comes to a TISA ratification vote. Wednesday's vote is therefore a critically important moment for the European Parliament to influence the European Commission, and for EU citizens to influence their MEPs.
Last week, one of the European Parliament's most important committees, the one dealing with international trade (INTA), published its report on TISA. The recommendations, drafted by MEP Viviane Reding, were approved by a large majority—33 votes to six, with one abstention. Two parties, the Greens and GUE/NGL, nonetheless hope to make amendments to the text during Wednesday's vote.
One of the most problematic aspects of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations is their lack of transparency. Although the European Commission, to its credit, has made available many of its initial offers and background papers, the key consolidated documents that show what's really happening in the negotiations -- and what deals are being cut -- are reserved for the inner circle. Even national politicians within the EU have been denied access to these, and that has really rankled, particularly in Germany. In an effort to defuse the anger there over this manifestly anti-democratic approach, a special reading room has finally been set up in the German Ministry of Economy.
FEC filings released Sunday provide an illustration of how dramatically the contributions of mega-donors eclipse those of normal citizens.
For example, billionaire George Soros gave $6 million to the pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA last quarter. By comparison, the average donation to the Bernie Sanders campaign — the only one mostly funded through small donors — was $26.28, according to a spokesperson for the campaign.
That means Soros gave as much money as a small city’s worth of small donors — 222,000 people, slightly larger than the population of Des Moines.
The famous URL loser.com is currently redirecting to the Wikipedia page entry on Donald Trump. Donald Trump lost in recent Iowa Republican caucuses. This has given an iconic and ironic blow to Donald Trump, who in the recent times has identity off calling people losers.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of "religious liberty." When running for president he said that Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis, who didn't want to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, should be allowed a "reasonable accommodation." He has stated that pharmacists should be allowed to refuse birth control prescriptions on religious grounds, and sponsored such a "conscience clause" bill as a state legislator.
Walker's commitment to religious liberty, though, is being tested as one of his top allies is accused of religious discrimination against Muslim workers.
Across America, corporate interests are taking aim at local government.
It is a plutocracy where 85 people own the same wealth as the other 50% of the population of the entire world, and the wealth gap still grows at astonishing pace. A reaction from the people who actually create that wealth is inevitable. The extraordinary concentration of capital has only been possible because of the existence of state mechanisms designed to promote it, and a popular movement to end that state bias was bound to happen. It was also predictable that it would be dominated by the young. To see youth mobilise for Scottish independence, for Corbyn or for Sanders has been life-affirming for me.
The policing of hatred represents one of the greatest threats to freedom of speech in the 21st century. From coddled campuses, where student leaders ban speech they deem to be ‘hatemongering’, to the public sphere more broadly, where hate-speech laws govern what we can say about race, religion and sexuality, various ways of thinking have been rebranded as ‘hatred’ and are shamed or silenced into oblivion. It can be hard to stand up to this war on hatred; who wants to be known as ‘pro-hate’? But it is essential that we do, for the control and punishment of hatred represents an alarming intrusion of the state and others into the realm of ideas, and even emotions.
The exhibit by the Chinese artist and dissident, which was also expected to show portraits of Palestinians by Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman, was delayed repeatedly until being nixed.
We've written a few times now (including just recently) about the Spanish firm Ares Rights, whose sole purpose and job in this world appears to be to abuse any and all systems to take down content to try to hide content that either Ares Rights or its clients dislike. Mainly, the takedowns seem to focus on the interests of what appears to be its main client, the government of Ecuador, and its main tool is totally bogus DMCA notices, that too many companies follow without looking at the details.
However, Ares Rights also has a history of abusing takedowns to try to hide negative information about itself. And apparently, it will abuse other tools as well, such as Twitter's policy on shutting down accounts for abuse.
Pakistani journalists and media houses during the year 2015 saw dramatic increase in censorship and silent, but potent crackdown on dissent and freedom of expression during the incumbent democratic setup which was never seen in previous civilian set ups.
While the civil and military leadership boasts of tireless devotion to the cause of promoting democracy day and night, it has proceeded with a tyrannical regime of inaudibly silencing all opposing voices. After the onerous struggle to overcome the draconian censorship that had engulfed the public discourse for decades, Pakistan had only in recent years begun to breathe a sigh of relief when another round of dilapidating blows have been struck against freedom of speech. The very questions with their unadulterated veracity that sting those in power, are the ones most needed for a thriving democratic system. Unless these questions are raised, crucial debates will not be triggered, and consequent conclusions imperative for betterment will never be reached. Historically and currently, a free press remains a necessary condition for the success of any democratic state and society. This style of governance needs to be revisited, because if hijacking the nation’s liberties does not backfire, the denial that this self-aggrandising narrative has pushed the leadership into certainly will.*
Should a company be allowed to use its own contractual fine print to take away its customers’ free speech? What fundamental rights should not be waivable?
We’ve written in the past about companies putting clauses in their form contracts that ostensibly forbid customers from posting online reviews of those companies’ products and services. Members of the Maryland House of Delegates have introduced a bill (MD H.B. 131) seeking to end the practice in Maryland. The bill’s sponsors are Dels. Jeff Waldstreicher, David Moon, Benjamin Kramer, and C.T. Wilson.
The Russian block party continues. The government agency in charge of censoring the internet is still working its way backwards, hoping to erase the collective memories of the web… or at least, keep Russian citizens from seeing certain bits of the archived past.
Last summer, Russia blocked the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine," an extremely useful tool that allows users to see historical snapshots of websites. The government may only have intended to block a single page, but because the Internet Archive utilizes HTTPS, the only practical way for ISPs to block the targeted pages was to block it at the domain level.
After years in the back room, Oscar has finally found his way onto the Oxford English syllabus,” says Merlin Holland, with both pride and indignation.
Most of us in this noisy cafe off Carnaby Street wouldn’t be on first name terms with Oscar Wilde, but as his only living grandson and the sole executor of his estate, Holland has a greater claim than most.
I just returned from two weeks of traveling in mainland China and Taiwan. I saw a lot of fascinating things — the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors, the Forbidden City. Yet of everything I saw, our visit to Tiananmen Square was the most impactful.
The Square is huge and some of the buildings are stunning. We saw Mao’s tomb and his infamous portrait on the wall of the Forbidden City, but something was lacking — it was the stuff the group didn’t talk about that interested me.
A former deputy editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily, a Communist Party newspaper, has criticized Beijing for exerting too much control over its media (link in Chinese).
Zhou Ruijin’s comments are noteworthy because, as a writer in the 1990s, he was closely aligned with Deng Xiaoping, China’s then-leader and whom is still highly respected. Often writing under the pen name Huang Fuping, Zhou’s commentaries directed the government to support Deng at a time when the party was divided over its direction.
An influential voice for reform on the mainland says propaganda chiefs are overreaching and their intervention runs counter to rule by law.
The commentary by Zhou Ruijin in Ifeng.com, an online news arm of Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV, came as authorities further tighten their grip over the media and intensify political ideology across the spectrum. The piece was taken from a collection of his commentaries published on the mainland last month.
Zhou agreed with President Xi Jinping that propaganda work needed to be stepped up but said censorship chiefs had gone too far, saying it was now “a mismatch to the whole picture of reform”.
At South China Morning Post, Nectar Gan reports a newly published warning from former People’s Daily deputy editor Zhou Ruijin that excessive censorship is “a mismatch to the whole picture of reform”.” Zhou supported Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the early 1990s under the group pen name Huang Fuping.
If you’ve been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Fire Emblem Fates on the 3DS next month, you may have noticed a veritable shitstorm that has boiled over in the community regarding the exclusion of certain content from the North American (and likely European) release. This is not the first time that this subject has been up for not-so-friendly debate; when the game was released in Japan last June, there was a similar controversy over the revelation that this content existed in the first place. Some are declaring the changes “censorship” and even vowing not to purchase the game, while others are expressing relief and deeming the game better off this way. Censorship has become a very pervasive subject within the gaming community, especially in the last few years, and so I really wanted to take a moment to address what censorship means and how it may or may not pertain to this particular franchise, which admittedly is dear to my heart.
When Malaysian police warned activist and graphic designer Fahmi Reza that his Twitter account was under surveillance after he posted an image of the prime minister, Najib Razak, as a clown, they probably hoped such behaviour would stop.
Instead, an artists collective that Fahmi belongs to, Grupa has responded with even more clownish images of the premier to express their solidarity with him and to champion the ideal of free speech.
But when people tried to post stories about these topics on Facebook, they were blocked.
"The content you're trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe," read one notification.
What gives? That's what nonprofit OnlineCensorship.org is trying to understand.
Change of approach in the military censorship; No more monitoring of Facebook texts following their publication: from now on account holders are required to pass on to the censorship any text regarding the security establishment; Blogger Yossi Gurvitz: I will not comply with the decree, I will apply to the court system.
A Techdirt reader has sent us a copy of former DHS head/current University of California President Janet Napolitano's official response to the outcry over the secret surveillance of UC staffers -- surveillance she personally approved.
Napolitiano's letter to UC-Berkeley employees immediately ties the secretive surveillance implementation to the UCLA Medical Center cyberattack, just in case anyone (and it's a lot of anyones) feels the effort was unwarranted.
The coming reorganization of the National Security Agency may be a smart move for the agency but it'll hurt America's long-term national security interests.
At a recent talk at the Washington think tank Atlantic Council, NSA director Adm. Michael Rogers said he wanted to better integrate the agency's Information Assurance Directorate – its defensive arm that protects US systems and information – and the Signals Intelligence Directorate – the offensive branch that carries out spying operations.
The reorganization is needed, he said, because with these two separate divisions "we created these two amazing cylinders of excellence and then we built walls of granite between them."
Nearly 200 organisations, companies and others from 42 countries have signed an open letter to the international community demanding that stronger encryption tools be allowed to be developed and used. The letter describes encryption tools and services as vital components of maintaining a secure digital environment, where if users are allowed to use the strongest forms of encryption it can allow for the safest and most efficient ways to communicate across borders.
A new initiative has been launched to uncover what really went on behind-the-scenes during the government’s high profile prosecution of Thomas Drake, a decorated National Security Agency whistleblower who disclosed details about a government domestic surveillance program.
The James Madison Project filed a Freedom of Information Act suit before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Jan. 22 that sought documents about Drake’s highly unusual prosecution.
Mark Zaid, executive director of the project, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the Drake case represented an attempt by government officials to send a chilling message to other national security whistleblowers, especially those concerned about domestic surveillance programs.
There is gulf between how people believe law to work (from watching TV shows like Law and Order) and how law actually works. You lawyer people know what I'm talking about. It's laughable.
The same is true of cyber: there's a gulf between how people think it works and how it actually works.
So says the disembodied voice of documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras to visitors of Astro Noise, her new solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Before Poitras introduced the world to Edward Snowden and made Citizen Four, the documentary about NSA surveillance, she had spent years being detained and searched at airports because of time she spent in Iraq making a documentary about an Iraqi family.
Edward Snowden has shown that he’s still an almighty pain in GCHQ’s backside by leaking a document that describes the spy agency’s approach to data-collection. The ‘Data Mining Research Problem Book’ is essentially a top secret manual designed to help spies, well, spy.
While there’s too much online information for GCHQ to properly sift through -- meaning that the vast majority of content simply needs to be discarded -- the doc explains that all metadata can be retained. That essentially means that GCHQ is pulling in absolutely everything it can pull in, because who's going to stop it?
GCHQ has defended its controversial MIKEY-SAKKE phone encryption protocol against criticism that it leaves a backdoor into systems that support the technology.
The CESG assurance arm of the UK government’s signal intelligence agency has taken the unusual step of publishing a background document and FAQ in defence of the technology, summarised in a statement by a government spokesman.
Former DHS boss Janet Napolitano -- who once stated she "doesn't use email" (for many reasons, but mainly to dodge accountability) -- is now showing her underlings at the University of California why they, too, might not want to "use email": someone might be reading them over their shoulders.
UC professor Christopher Newfield has the inside details of the recently-exposed monitoring system secretly deployed by the University of California (and approved by school president Napolitano) to keep tabs on the communications, web surfing and file routing of its employees. The SF Chronicle has an article on the secretly-installed spyware behind its paysieve [try this link], but Newfield has the internal communications.
One of the many Zuckerberg stories is about his legendary business card, “I’m CEO, Bitch”. The Social Network story is very real and the screenwriter Aron Sorkin took the original transcript from Zuckerberg’s LiveJournal blog which was used word-by-word, except the name of his girlfriend which was changed to Erica Albright in the movie. But that doesn’t play any of the roles in Zuckerberg’s “I’m CEO, Bitch” story.
The House of Commons Science and Tech Committee has published its report on the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, influenced by comments submitted by 50 individuals, companies, and organizations, including EFF. The report is the first of three investigations by different Parliamentary committees. While it was intended to concentrate on the technological and business ramifications of the bill, their conclusions reflect the key concern of lawmakers, companies, and human rights groups about the bill’s dangerously vague wording.
The Investigatory Powers Bill, as written, is so vague as to permit a vast range of surveillance actions, with profoundly insufficient oversight or insight into what Britain’s intelligence, military and police intend to do with their powers. It is, in effect, a carefully-crafted loophole wide enough to drive all of existing mass surveillance practice through. Or, in the words of Richard Clayton, Director of the Cambridge Cloud Cybercrime Centre at the University of Cambridge, in his submissions to the committee: “the present bill forbids almost nothing ... and hides radical new capabilities behind pages of obscuring detail.”
With its well-known habit of uncompromising surveillance, the NSA has earned itself something of a poor reputation among internet users. But while the spying side of the agency is what it is most famous for, it is actually made up of two different divisions: offensive and defensive.
Rand Paul is dropping out of the race for the White House. With him goes the most substantial critic of the NSA in the Republican field.
Paul's libertarian position often put him at odds with other GOP candidates, who, during debates and public statements, tried to out-hawk other candidates on national security issues. In one particularly memorably debate, he traded jabs with Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor who proudly said that he was "the only person on this stage who's actually filed applications under the Patriot Act." Paul responded by saying he wanted "more records from terrorists, but less records from innocent Americans."
Three of the Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse (*Revenge Porn not included) are being targeted by Utah legislator David Lifferth with a package of amendments to the state's cybercrime statutes.
[...]
Considering it's tied to "intent to annoy, alarm, intimidate, offend, abuse, threaten, harass, frighten, or disrupt the electronic communications of another," the amended statute could be read as making the publication of personal information by news outlets a criminal activity -- if the person whose information is exposed feels "offended" or "annoyed." Having your criminal activities detailed alongside personally identifiable information would certainly fall under these definitions, which could lead to the censorship (self- or otherwise) of police blotter postings, mugshot publication or identifying parties engaged in civil or criminal court proceedings.
NY’s current mayor, Bill Blasio, promised in April of 2014 to dismantle the so-called NYPD Demographics Unit, which was responsible for singling out one religious group among all others, apparently based on the twisted post-9/11 logic of “Muslim –> Likely Terrorist –> Spy on all Muslims.”
BT's broadband network has crashed across the UK. The communications firm confirmed that its website and customer service platforms were also affected by the glitch, which it was yet to explain. After social media users reported problems, BT released a statement via Twitter that said: "Sorry if your are [sic] experiencing network problems. We will keep you updated." A spokesman later said: "It is true that we are down at the moment. We are aware of the problems and are working on them as fast as we can." BT later said it had restored services some three hours after the crash and added there was no indication it had been subjected to a "malicious attack".
With the administrative functions for the world's web traffic still under US jurisdiction, ICANN is urging Asia-Pacific nations to take a more active role in "facilitating the development of multi-stakeholder internet governance".
They also question whether accepting the role represents a conflict of interest, given that ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is under contract to the US government for the critical IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) functions.
Back in December, Chehade surprised and infuriated the internet governance world when he agreed to head up a new "high-level advisory committee" that will develop the agenda for future World Internet Conferences, held in Wuzhen, China, as well as "contribute ideas for the development of the Internet."
The quality of a country's mobile network is often decided by a recipe that's two parts economics, and one part geography. While small, developed nations like South Korea and Hong Kong can easily provide complete coverage and fast speeds to their dense populations, larger, poorer countries often struggle to deliver full bars to all of their territory. Countries that are big and rich, like America, tend to get networks that are somewhere in the middle — good on coverage, for example, but not so great on speed, as a report into LTE in the US by OpenSignal showed earlier this week. Now, the network-testing company has released its worldwide report for Q4 2015, allowing us to see how America stacks up with the rest of the globe.
World Health Organization members are expected to meet this spring to assess progress and discuss potential solutions to the lack of financing for research and development for diseases affecting primarily developing countries.
The WHO Executive Board last week discussed and noted a report by the WHO secretariat for the preparation of the open-ended meeting. The exact date of the meeting is not certain, according to WHO officials, but would likely be in March or April.
That NYT article also, for the first time, names the guy who has the tape: Troy Haupt, whose father went into his office and recorded (most) of the game, believing such a tape might be valuable some day. For the past few years, all anyone knew was that a lawyer named Steve Harwood claimed to represent an anonymous client whose father had taped the game. The game itself had been shown on both CBS and NBC, but back in those days, archiving stuff wasn't a big deal, and neither broadcaster kept a copy of the tape. It wasn't that long before people realized that might be a mistake and by then there was nothing left (as far as anyone knew), and many argued that it was one of the great "lost treasures."
The Copyright Board and the Federal Court of Appeal had previously found that the Copyright Act required CBC to have a separate licence for incidental copies of works made to facilitate broadcasting as had been argued by the Society for Reproduction Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers in Canada (Sodrac).
In the recent past the NFL has submitted takedown requests to Twitter over allegedly-infringing GIFs, although some commentators have concluded that - even if likely to fall within the scope of copyright protection - under US law GIF-providers would be likely shielded from liability for copyright infringement thanks to the 'fair use' doctrine.
We've written many, many words on the ridiculousness of publicity rights, and how they're frequently abused to stifle perfectly reasonable activities. But this latest example really takes it up a notch. The owner of a horse in the UK is apparently demanding some of the prize a man won in a "selfie" contest, because the horse made a key "photobombing" appearance in the background, that likely contributed to the victory...
Are tattoos covered under copyright law? Yeah, probably. But also, hey, maybe not. But if yes, how much control does the artist get to exert over depictions of the copyrighted tattoo? After all, it's on somebody's skin. And, hey, that somebody might be famous, like an athlete, who might then be depicted in video games about that sport. If so, then we get to find out if depictions in artistic works, such as video games, would fall under fair use and/or First Amendment provisions. It seems nobody is actually sure how to answer these questions, because what few cases have been brought before the court all appear to have ended in settlements and low-level court rulings.
Popcorn Time has made a comeback with the launch of its new Web version – Popcorn Time Online – that allows users to stream all of the movies and TV shows it offers (illegally) directly in their browser using a new plugin called Torrents Time.
Previously, if you wanted to stream anything from Popcorn Time you had to install the native app.
The new version comes not long after the team behind the streaming service lost some of its key developers, coinciding with three separate lawsuits taken out by the Motion Picture Association of America against the group.