For many of us, our introduction to computing is being placed in front of a machine where the only challenge is figuring out the Windows user experience paradigm. Getting started with Linux, on the other hand, requires a bit more effort, a fair amount of trial and error, and perhaps some colorful language along the way.
The first song I heard about the Linux Desktop was Hold On, It’s Coming, released in 1971 by Country Joe McDonald. This was an amazing prediction, considering that Linus Torvalds was only two years old at the time. Is it possible that young Linus heard this piece and it spurred him to create the GNU/Linux operating system? We may never know.
IBM closed out its global partner conference Wednesday by encouraging its channel partners to sell a variety of hardware systems, anchored by Linux and hardened by a comprehensive security portfolio.
Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems, told attendees of the PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Orlando that a number of cutting-edge systems, including the z13s entry-level mainframe introduced the previous day, would empower IBM partners to be the disruptors in the market.
IBM delivers blockchain as a service for developers and commits to making the technology ready for business.
It's nearly impossible to go to any technology conference and not hear the words Docker containers at least once. Containers were an old and decidedly niche technology until Docker emerged with a new use case and changed the game, helping usher in a new era of DevOps by enabling developers to rapidly package and deploy applications.
The Linux community has a lot to shout about. In addition to a seemingly endless choice of distros to suit every taste and need, there's also the highly-prized security. This is helped to a large extent by the open source nature of Linux, but Linus Torvalds has revealed that being open source was not part of the original plan.
The legendary software engineer Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, sat for an interview in which he provided a fascinating glimpse into his psyche. A self-professed non-people person, Torvalds explained that he likes to work alone—a telling statement from the man who did more than anyone to create the open-source software movement. Open source, said Torvalds, allows people to work together, even if they don’t like each other.
After informing the Linux community about the release of the Linux 4.4.2 LTS kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman published a detailed changelog with the new fixes and improvements implemented in the sixty-first maintenance build of Linux 3.14 LTS.
Linux kernel 3.14.61 LTS is a modest point release that changes a total of 70 files, with 776 insertions and 341 deletions. Looking at the appended shortlog, we can notice that most of the changes are updated drivers, in particular for things like ATA, HID, v4l2, Wireless, PCI, remoteproc, SPI, TTY, and USB.
The X.Org project has its latest server embarrassment.
After announcing the availability of a new Beta build for its SteamOS Linux operating system, which brought in a new Nvidia video driver with Vulkan support, Valve pushed just a few moments ago yet another Steam Beta Client.
Just a few minutes ago, Valve pushed a new build to the brewmaster_beta channel of its outstanding, Debian-based SteamOS operating system for gamers that love the Linux platform.
While AMD may not have a Linux driver ready for Vulkan, they are still getting me excited about it with their blog posts.
Cheap smartphones and digital cameras – the principal factor of digital revolution. Every man can create a personal collection with gigabytes or even terabytes of multimedia content, and online services like the Google Photos or Flickr can help to save them. Clouds are good, but sometimes the local work with multimedia is more speedy and effective. Photo manager can organize your chaos and highlight the best or the worst material with tags and rating; some software also have some photo editing features: red eyes, contrast and defects correction, colors and shadows level. If you are working with RAW formats, the photo manager can make your life easier with image processing and converting to popular formats; some photo managers have also video support. In this review I want to tell about the best software that can be run on Linux and other operating system.
The day has finally come again to release a new version of my plotting program, ctioga2.
It is a long time since we've shown you guys how to dual boot a GNU/Linux distribution and the latest Microsoft Windows operating system on your personal computer.
There have been numerous requested recently for a tutorial that presents easy-to-read-and-follow instructions, with screenshots, on how to install the latest Ubuntu Linux operating system alongside Microsoft's recently released Windows 10 OS, which most of you know as dual booting.
Shadwen looks awesome, and I'm going to be honest I hadn't heard of it until it was sent it. Shadwen is a true stealth game where the only rule is to remain unseen. Stay hidden – or the ruthless guards will kill you on sight! Looks like it's coming to Linux too.
Tomb Raider along with other Square Enix games are coming to NVIDIA's SHIELD platform via GeForce NOW, which should be as exciting to you as a Linux gamer.
Linux actually beats Windows in some tests.
RuneScape developers are working on a brand new feature filled engine they are calling "NXT". It will use OpenGL, and Linux support will now be official for this MMO.
Just a heads up, if you play Dying Light you may want to load Steam in offline mode. The game now crashes on the loading screen with the brand new patch.
I have emailed and tweeted the developers, so hopefully they will fix it.
Hi all,
with a little delay, but here it is: GNOME 3.19.90 is now available. Note I had some problems to compile some modules, but hopefully they will be fixed for the next release: - latest vte release tarball seems to not be available - gnome-photos depends on an unreleased version of gegl - glib didn't compile correctly here, so I decided to use the previous glib release
Nevertheless, you should not have any problem is you use the modulesets/jhbuild configuration provided in the releng folder (see below)
Ubuntu developers are trying to prepare the maintainers of the packages in the official repositories for the switch to GNOME Software.
In this post, I will concentrate on Ubuntu GNOME from a newbie/intermediate user perspective and assist in a few thing that you should do after installing Ubuntu Gnome.
You just did a fresh install of Ubuntu Gnome 15.10 and now you are confused why the movies aren’t playing? Don’t you want to install Skype, VLC or Spotify? and don’t you want to play games in Steam? Don’t worry. I will explain what to do post installation to make the distribution even more convenient and user-friendly. Just take a bucket of popcorn, tune in some Beatles songs and enjoy the ride.
With Clutter 1.25.6, swap throttling is now enabled for full-screen windows with the GDK back-end. This change is designed to avoid performance penalties with the GDK back-end for constrained devices where running fullscreen Clutter and Clutter-GTK applicatons.
A few moments ago, Softpedia received an email from Javier Jardón Cabezas of the GNOME Project, informing us about the general availability of the first Beta of the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.
Presenting a nice assortment of lightweight yet fully functional Linux distros for all occasions. All of these are full distros that do not depend on cloud services; four for x86 and two, count 'em, two for ARM hardware. (Updated Feb 2016.)
Dylan Callahan from the Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 project today informs Softpedia, exclusively, about the immediate availability for download of the fourth release of their Chromium OS port for the popular SBC.
To summarize, the very simple point I am trying to make here is that variety and selection are not a problem, they are an advantage! As consumers, we deal with them every day, in nearly every product that we acquire. So why do we hear never-ending complaints about there being too many different Linux distributions? I honestly can't understand it.
In conclusion, the issues I listed above were minor ones and anyone who isn’t planning on having a multiple user setup or cares much about the lock/suspends function can just ignore them. Linux Lite is a damn good distro. It’s not just for low-end hardware, either. Anyone who wants more resources devoted to applications can take advantage of its streamlined design.
A second Release Candidate has been announced for the new Tiny Core Linux 7.0 branch and it is now ready for download and testing.
Instead of reporting what has been included in the latest snapshots released a few days ago for the rolling openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system, Douglas DeMaio writes about the fact that there are not enough workers to get the automated testing of openQA running at maximum capacity.
Based on the aggregate value of the company over its current share price and the total amount of outstanding stocks, the market cap of Red Hat, Inc. is presently reeling at 12115.67. Acting as the blue chip in today’s trade, Red Hat, Inc.’s existing market cap value showcases its prevailing assets, capital and revenues. It also indicates that the share tends to be less volatile and proves to be more attractive than smaller companies because of their stability and the likelihood of higher dividend offers.
CLSA’s Ed Maguire today reiterated a Buy rating on shares of Red Hat (RHT), a distributor of the Linux operating system, as well as other open-source software, writing that investors don’t fully appreciate the company’s “OpenShift,” which is the company’s toolkit for developing cloud computing applications.
The note is based on a conference call Maguire hosted with Red Hat veep Ashesh Badani, who runs the OpenShift effort.
How long will we have to wait for all this goodness? Nottingham said Ansible wanted to get back to more frequent releases, and 2.1 is apparently slated for late April.
The #AnsibleFest London 2016 took place near the O2 Arena and lasted the entire day. The main highlight of the conference was the network automation coming along with Ansible now. Other very interesting talks covered very helpful tips about managing Windows Servers, the 101 on modules, how to implement continuous deployment, the journey of a french bank towards DevOps, how Cisco devices can be managed and how to handle immutable infrastructure. All focused on Ansible, of course.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
We have expanded our hardware enablement offering since 12.04, and with 14.04.4, this point release contains an updated kernel and X stack for new installations to support new hardware across all our supported architectures, not just x86.
Today, February 18, 2016, Canonical's Adam Conrad proudly informs us that the fourth point release of the long-term supported Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) operating system has been released.
Back in 2013, Jono Bacon, then Canonical's Ubuntu Linux community manager, told me the company's goal was to create smartphones that would "be more beautiful than Apple and as powerful as Android but with the open-source legacy of Ubuntu." In 2016, Canonical, along with Chinese smartphone manufacturer Meizu, may have done it with the Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone.
A new long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu is coming out in April, and Canonical just announced a major addition that will please anyone interested in file storage. Ubuntu 16.04 will include the ZFS filesystem module by default, and the OpenZFS-based implementation will get official support from Canonical.
ZFS support was already available "as a technology preview" in Ubuntu 15.10, where it's installable via an apt-get command and has to be compiled from source code first. This is no longer the case in 16.04, though you'll still need to download and install the zfsutils-linux package to create and manage ZFS volumes. Putting an official, installed-by-default, fully supported version into an LTS version of Ubuntu is a big vote of confidence, especially since people running Ubuntu-based servers often stick to LTS releases for maximum stability.
Canonical and Samsung have announced a partnership to bring the power of Snappy Ubuntu Core to the Artik embedded hardware solutions from Samsung.
As reported earlier, Canonical launched the fourth point release of its long-term supported Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system, which is available for download now.
Free software doesn't mean that the software is entirely free of restrictions. While a core aspect is the right to distribute modified versions of code, it has never been fundamental to free software that you be able to do so while still claiming that the code is the original version. Various approaches have been taken to make it possible for users to distinguish modified versions, ranging from simply including license terms that require modified versions be marked as such, to licenses that require that you change the name of the package if you modify it. However, what's probably the most effective approach has been to apply trademark law to the problem. Mozilla's trademark policy is an example of this - if you modify the code in ways that aren't approved by Mozilla, you aren't entitled to use the trademarks.
The Ubuntu folks released an update to their 14.04 long term supported release bringing a new kernel and some updated packages. Speaking of Ubuntu, Matthew Garrett, software developer and social activist, today blogged about Canonical's IP policy and redistribution restrictions. Elsewhere, Bruce Byfield enumerated the advantages of Open Source Software and Douglas DeMaio announced a delay in Tumbleweed development.
With MWC (Mobile World Congress) 2016 just around the corner, Canonical now teases users with the latest preparations for its awesome stand at the number one mobile congress event.
We've already told you what Canonical's plans are this year at MWC 2016, but we will once again remind you that you'll finally be able to taste the latest Ubuntu convergence features, as well as to get your hands on the newest Ubuntu-powered devices.
Flaws in a widely used Android device manager app leave users at risk of phone data hijacking and malicious code execution unless they update their smartphones, security researchers warn.
Flaws in the AirDroid, a free device manager app which allows users to access their Android devices through their computers, leave an estimated 50 million users exposed to potential hacking unless they patch, Check Point warns.
Attacks could take the form of something as simple as a booby-trapped SMS message or contact request. Once exploited, the security flaw would enables attackers to execute malicious code on a compromised device before siphoning off sensitive data or pulling off other hacker attacks.
Once predicted to challenge Apple in the smartphone market, Windows phones have sunk to barely 1 percent of the world's smartphones, according to new data released by Gartner. Meanwhile, Android's market share now tops 80 percent.
Android tablets haven’t been doing well lately. There are simply better options out there that offer more in terms of productivity, features, and usability. But there’s still hope for them, and I think that they could be great with just a few really important considerations.
Crowdfunding isn’t a new concept and while many projects do fail to see the light of day, just occasionally, we’re treated to a project that has the potential to alter the way we use technology. The problem of limited storage is one that affects the growing number of devices that launch without microSD card expansion, but American company Nextbit has a unique solution to this growing problem with its Nextbit Robin smartphone.
After informing us of the availability of a new build for its popular AndEX Live CD distribution, Arne Exton today announced the release of a new build of its custom Android-x86 KitKat 4.4.4 Live CD.
Apache Arrow is a new open-source project that helps data analysts wrestle diverse data sets into a single format. Apache Arrow is a collaborative effort that spans many of the largest providers and users of data infrastructure today including Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Cloudera (Private:CLOUD), Databricks, DataStax, Dremio, Hortonworks (NASDAQ:HDP) MapR, Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), Trifacta and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR). That so many different companies can collaborate on one initiative to improve data analysis industry-wide is a testament to the power of open source to inspire and engender great change.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today is announcing its full schedule of keynote speakers and conference sessions for Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit, taking place April 4-6 in San Diego, Calif. These events are co-located, and one registration provides access to all sessions and activities for both events.
The call for submissions for talks and workshops is also open, and contributors may submit at the same registration site. The deadline for call for submissions is Friday, April 8, 2016. In a change from previous Flocks, talk and workshop selection will be driven by a Flock Scheduling panel. The panel members will work with the Flock staff and the Fedora Council to determine which talks and workshops are accepted.
This year it was even more difficult to decide how to spend my time at DevConf, the annual Fedora, Red Hat, JBoss developers’ conference in Brno. There were several good presentations in parallel, often I wished I could be in two separate rooms at the same time. There were also developers from all over the world, and I have missed quite a few talks due to some very good in-depth discussions about syslog-ng. As a community manager for syslog-ng, I have tried to focus on community-related presentations and on technologies related to syslog-ng: containers, security and packaging.
Chrome is intending to change the behaviour of link rel="stylesheet", which will be noticeable when it appears within body. The impact and benefits of this aren't clear from the blink-dev post, so I wanted to go into detail here.
We recently released the first version of Firefox for iOS. It’s a great browser and we’re excited to bring you more new features today. The latest release of Firefox for iOS brings improvements to make browsing simpler and more fun by taking advantage of the latest iOS hardware and software features.
Firefox for iOS on iPhone 6S and 6S Plus now offers 3D Touch to help you access commonly used features faster than ever before. Simply press the Firefox app icon to open the Quick Access menu which has shortcuts to Open Last Bookmark, open a New Private Tab or a New Tab.
The Apache Software Foundation is rolling out a new top level project this week, and it's one that didn't first have to undergo the typical project incubation phase. Apache Arrow, an effort to build columnar in-memory analytics technology that could dramatically accelerate Big Data analytics, is launching with support from 13 major open source Big Data projects.
The next version of Apache Spark will expand on the data processing platform’s real-time data analysis capabilities, offering users the ability to perform interactive queries against live data.
The new feature, called structured streaming, will “push Spark beyond streaming to a new class of application that do other things in real time [rather than] just analyze a stream and output another stream,” explained Matei Zaharia, Spark founder and Databricks chief technology officer, at the Spark Summit East, taking place this week in New York. “It’s a combination of streaming and interactive that isn’t really handled by current streaming engines.”
Publishers of WordPress sites using the ‘Poll, Quiz & List by OpinionStage’ plugin, might want to check for unexpected advertisements.
Much has been made about a vulnerability in a function in the GNU C Library. And searching far and wide over the Internet, there was little — actually nothing — I could find regarding how this affected BSD variants.
However, you can rest easy, BSDers: Not our circus, not our monkeys.
Dag-Erling Smørgrav, a FreeBSD developer since 1998 and the current FreeBSD Security Officer, writes in his blog that “neither FreeBSD itself nor native FreeBSD applications are affected.”
A lack of understanding of free and open source software is hindering its uptake by Dutch public administrations, writes Minister for the Central Government Sector Stef Blok in a letter to the country’s House of Representatives. Not knowing how to deal with software errors, is a service risk that “multiple organisations have experienced”, the minister says.
Switching over to open source software across all Central departments, as per a policy decision taken by the NDA government last year, could entail substantial savings on the Centre’s software expenses as most open source alternatives are free. Experts, though, caution that the obvious financial advantages of adopting open source notwithstanding, concerns pertaining to security and operational efficiency may have to be addressed concomitantly.
France's ministries are involving free software communities and the public in writing their next multi-year framework contract for services and support on free and open source software. It is the first time that an IT services support contract will be co-written by administration and citizens.
Schools in the city of Tallinn (Estonia) are gradually moving to PC workstations running on free and open source software. A pilot in March 2014 switched 3 schools and 2 kindergartens. Students, teachers, school administration and kindergartens’ staff members are using LibreOffice, Ubuntu-Linux and other open source tools.
Canonical announced that support for the ZFS (Z File System) will be available in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but a lot of users have been asking about a possible license conflict. Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland explained why that’s not a problem.
ZFS (Z File System) is described as a combination of a volume manager (like LVM) and a filesystem (like ext4, xfs, or btrfs), and it’s licensed under CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). Don’t worry if you didn’t hear about it. It’s not something that’s commonly used.
We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry's leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS.
And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses.
It's a safe bet that the people behind the esteemed “Bluebook” find nothing cute about “Baby Blue,” the new online, open source legal citation manual that went live earlier this month.
In a blog post, Google's Andrew Gerrand called the HTTP/2 support "the most significant change" in the release, with the revision bringing the new protocol's benefits to projects like the Go-based Caddy Web server. He otherwise described the upgrade, the seventh major stable release of the language, as more incremental than Go 1.5, which was released last August.
The team has tinkered with garbage collection, featuring lower pauses than version 1.5, particularly for large programs, but programs may not necessarily run faster. "As always, the changes are so general and varied that precise statements about performance are difficult to make. Some programs may run faster, some slower," according to release notes.
So that's why I've personally chosen Mercurial. That said, there's an analogous process in most of these other systems for what I'm going to describe here. So if you'd prefer to use Git or Fossil, I say that's great. At least you're using something. That puts you a step ahead of most other creatives.
Some of you may be familiar with LinuxVoice magazine. They put an enormous amount of effort in creating a high quality, feature-packed magazine with a small team. They are led by Graham Morrison who I have known for many years and who is one of the most thoughtful, passionate, and decent human beings I have ever met.
Well, the same team are starting an important new project called Beep Beep Yarr!. It is essentially a Kickstarter crowd-funded children’s book that is designed to teach core principles of programming to kids. The project not just involves the creation of the book, but also a parent’s guide and an interactive app to help kids engage with the principles in the book.
In the fight against antimicrobial resistance, members of the European Parliament’s Environment and Public Health Committee have advocated banning collective and preventive antibiotic treatment of animals, and supported measures to stimulate research into new antibiotics, including longer data protection.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been working on the update of a European Union law on veterinary medicine. According to a European Parliament press release, MEPs took a vote yesterday on draft plans for legislation on antimicrobial resistance.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s successive emergency managers are now gone from Flint, but the wreckage of their rule there still pollutes many homes. The crisis in Flint is, on the surface, about water. In April 2014, the city switched from the Detroit water system, which it had used for more than 50 years, to the Flint River, ostensibly to save money. The Flint River water made people sick, and is likely to have caused disease that killed some residents. The corrosive water, left untreated, coursed through the city’s water system, leaching heavy metals out of old pipes. The most toxic poison was lead, which can cause permanent brain damage. The damage to the people of Flint, the damage to the children who drank and bathed in the poisoned water, is incalculable. The water is still considered toxic to this day.
The fundamental problem here is that glibc has a bug that could allow a DNS response from an attacker to run the command of that attacker's choosing on your system. The final goal of course would be to become the root user.
It’s not just your browser than can deliver hacked ads, but dodgy ads displayed within Skype could have caused you big problems, too.
The WebKit rendering engine used in many Linux applications is a complete security mess. That’s the takeaway from a blog post by Michael Catanzaro, who works on GNOME’s WebKitGTK+ project. He’s sounding the alarm about a problem the open-source community needs to fix.
Many tools that are open sourced are more readily usable than the closed source alternatives. The visibility of how the code works allows an end user the ability to quickly integrate the open source tool into existing systems. “When we are examining potential new tools, selecting an open source project which satisfies our needs is typically a better option than the alternatives. This is because we are able to rapidly deploy an open source tool without making a financial commitment to another company. It also lets us determine a proof of concept for using the new project,” he said.
Alex Gibney is known for his investigative documentaries that garner a unanimous applause from the critics. During the reporting for his latest cyber warfare-focused film Zero Days, the US government’s secret plan called Nitro Zeus was uncovered. This plan deals with a massive cyberattack on Iran’s infrastructure if the nuclear negotiations with Iran would have fail.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly developed a new way to measure its success in the war on terror: Counting the number of terror threats it has “disrupted” in a year.
But good luck trying to figure out what that number means, how it was derived, or why it doesn’t jibe with any other law-enforcement statistic, most notably the number of terror suspects actually charged or arrested.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seeks to improve its communication to promote its reports, its chair said at a briefing yesterday. Working on its next assessment report expected to be released in five or six years, the IPCC seeks to increase participation of the private sector as a major stakeholders upon which depends the investment to find solutions to climate change he said.
Indonesia will continue opening up its market, making it easier for foreign investors to enter the country.
Speaking to about 300 business leaders and other stakeholders at an ASEAN Economic Community conference in San Francisco on Wednesday (Feb 17), President Joko Widodo said even though Indonesia is doing more to attract investments, and announced a number of deregulation packages, he is still not satisfied.
“I’m not satisfied; please understand we are still only at the beginning," he said. "We will continue to simplify, continue to open up, continue to modernise our rules and regulations. There are still many excessive permits, licenses, and protections."
Mr Widodo gave a key note address at the conference after attending the US-ASEAN Leaders Summit in Sunnylands which ended on Tuesday. He said Indonesia’s investment climate is still not conducive enough and the country needs to deregulate more.
The California State Patrol has arrested two people in connection with the massive methane leak in Southern California’s Aliso Canyon, but many residents who had to leave their homes near the leaking underground gas storage site think the wrong people are in custody. Instead of busting company executives and engineers who are responsible for the massive methane gas leak, the CSP arrested two protesters who draped banners on the headquarters of the California Public Utilities Commission. The protesters draped banners to highlight the lax regulatory environment that enabled the spill — similar to the political culture that enabled the water poisoning in Flint. But unbelievably, the activists are now the ones going to jail.
When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about?
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, if approved, would be the largest trade agreement in history involving 11 countries including the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru Singapore, and Vietnam.
Cultural Survival staff caught up with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, to discuss the trade deal's implications for Indigenous Peoples in these countries, based on her recent research and report on this topic.
Malmstroem’s ICS proposal did not address most of the problems of the extra-judicial redress mechanisms for foreign investors, the study explains in a detailed comparison of ISDS and ICS. Instead, “it arguably grants investors even more rights than many existing investment treaties, which have already led to hundreds of investor-state lawsuits around the world,” the study states.
A specific provision (section 2, article 3.4) of the proposed new system would allow for complaints when investors feel their “legitimate expectations” have been violated by regulatory acts of states. But “explicit protections of investors’ legitimate expectations are generally not part of existing treaties,” CEO and its partners warn.
[...]
Nevertheless, ISDS is expected to be back on the agenda of negotiators next week after the EU Commission’s DG Trade after Malmstroem had taken it off the agenda while the public consultation in the EU was ongoing.
MPs have won access to documents covering controversial and secretive trade talks between Brussels and Washington, but can only take a pencil and paper into the room where the files can be viewed.
Confidentiality rules mean no electronic devices – including phones, tablet and laptop computers, or cameras – are allowed in the room at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in Westminster. This is fuelling concerns about a “cloak of secrecy” surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the EU and the US government.
UK business minister Anna Soubry agreed to provide the room in BIS’s offices on the condition that MPs keep the TTIP documents private. Soubry said pressure on Brussels officials from EU governments had won the concession, but the department was obliged to maintain secrecy.
Jobs offshoring benefitted Wall Street, corporate executives, and shareholders, because lower labor and compliance costs resulted in higher profits. These profits flowed through to shareholders in the form of capital gains and to executives in the form of “performance bonuses.” Wall Street benefitted from the bull market generated by higher profits.
Bernie Sanders has passed Hillary Clinton at the top of a national poll for the first time in the 2016 race.
A Fox News poll of the Democratic presidential race released Thursday shows Sanders with 47 percent support to Clinton’s 44 percent.
That's a gain of 10 percentage points for Sanders a January version of the poll. Clinton's support declined 5 points.
Clinton posted leads as high as 30 points over the summer, but Sanders has been steadily closing the gap. While no other poll of the race going back to 2014 has ever showed Clinton trailing a rival, she led Sanders by just 2 points in the last two Quinnipiac University tracking polls.
A day after it declared a site-wide ban on Tumblr, Indonesia decided Thursday to take a more measured approach to censoring objectionable content on the site.
Busan Mayor Suh Byung-soo stepped down Thursday as the chairman of the Busan International Film Festival organizing committee, amid calls for his resignation following the government and Busan City’s attempt to cancel the screening of a controversial documentary about the Sewol ferry disaster at the 2014 festival.
Students and parents alike feel as though they should be protected against offensive media on campus. Furthermore, administrators work extremely hard to minimize and eliminate politically incorrect or socially unacceptable action. However, I believe such behavior is incredibly important for our collegiate, interpersonal and academic growth.
NEW DELHI: After the unprecedented success of the net neutrality campaign, here is one on censorship. "Save our cinema" is a coalition that is campaigning against "over censorship" and reforms in the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).
Last Tuesday, Feb. 16, Professor Leah Allen, English and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, continued Faulconer Gallery’s newest arts education series. Formatted as short but in-depth presentations, 20 Minutes @ 11 allowed faculty members to interact with art in Faulconer Gallery and share their unique perspectives with the Grinnell community.
Techdirt has been writing about the question of what constitutes personal information in an online context for over half a decade. A recent decision in Australia, reported by the Guardian, suggests that the matter is far from settled around the world. The case concerns a journalist, Ben Grubb, who has been trying to get his personal data from the mobile phone company he uses, Telstra. Initially, the Australian privacy commissioner ruled that Telstra had failed to comply with local privacy laws when it refused to hand over the data, but that decision was overturned on appeal by an administrative appeals tribunal (AAT) on the following grounds...
Intelligence services collect metadata on the communication of all citizens. Politicians would have us believe that this data doesn’t say all that much. A reader of De Correspondent put this to the test and demonstrated otherwise: metadata reveals a lot more about your life than you think.
School lunch lines in the UK can be fraught: students receiving free lunches may not want their peers to know, lost payment cards mean some go without, and code-based payments leave children at risk of “shoulder surfing”, where others spot their number and use it to buy their own meal.
Fingerprint scanners are being presented as one solution for doing away with this stress. They can be linked to online payments, making busy lunchtimes easier and faster, plus it will save schools from printing ID cards.
A typical secondary school in the UK can end up producing more than 400 new payment cards every year to account for lost, damaged and new intake ones, says Nigel Walker, managing director of biometrics company BioStore. “Biometrics can’t be lost or forgotten, stolen or used by someone else. “When students and staff identify themselves on the system, you can be sure it’s them. This improves a school’s safety in terms of access, security and accountability.”
New Hampshire state legislators have introduced a new bill that allows public libraries to run privacy software like Tor.
The bill, crafted by State Rep. Keith Ammon (R) and sponsored by six other lawmakers, emphasizes the role that encryption and privacy tools will play in upholding the long tradition of privacy in public libraries.
“Public libraries ... have upheld and protected patron privacy as one of their core values since 1939,” the bill reads. “In a library (physical or virtual), the right to privacy is the right to open inquiry without having the subject of one’s interest examined or scrutinized by others.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has just made it easier for the state's law enforcement officers to search residents' houses without a warrant. A 4-3 decision overturned an appeals court opinion finding the opposite. In doing so, the Supreme Court expanded the reach of the state's "community caretaker function" beyond simply allowing the retention of evidence discovered in "plain sight" to that found behind locked doors as well.
That’s 45,035 reads yesterday (by humans, not bots).((Big thanks to the tech team for figuring out how to differentiate – not something we could do until fairly recently, at least for public stats!)) That would put it 5th on SSRN’s all-time legal download list, right between William Landes and Cass Sunstein. Not bad company! Or in other words: anything you fix in this article in the next day or two is likely to be the most-read thing you ever write.
Since the San Bernardino attack, the FBI has been trying to read the contents of a cell phone used by attacker Syed Farook, made impossible by encryption. Now Apple CEO Tim Cook is rejecting a federal court order to create software to unlock the device. Gwen Ifill talks to Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security, and Nate Cardozo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Everyone's talking about the big legal fight that magistrate judge Sheri Pym has kicked off by ordering Apple to build a backdoor into an iPhone to get around security tools that would block attempts to decrypt the contents of the phone. As some are noting, if the ruling is not overturned it could force Congress to change the law. Over the last year or so, it had become clear that Congress did not support laws that mandate backdoors. Yes, some in Congress -- including Senators Richard Burr, Dianne Feinstein and John McCain -- have been pushing for such legislation, but most have admitted that there aren't nearly enough votes in support of that, and there are many in Congress who recognize the ridiculousness of such a law. A year ago, a congressional hearing made it clear that there was a ton of skepticism in Congress about ordering backdoors.
But that's bullshit -- and thankfully, at least some in the media are pointing this out.
As FBI Director James Comey has done saying he wants "front doors" rather than "back doors," the White House is playing word games that suggest they're either being deliberately misleading or they don't understand the basics of what's happening. Neither scenario makes the White House look very good.
The application and the order absolutely are about forcing Apple to create a backdoor. It is a specific backdoor, but the whole point is to undermine key security features that protect the users of the devices. The fact that it would just be targeted towards this one phone is basically meaningless in this context. The issue is that a court can order a tech company to deliberately undermine its own security and expose content on a device. That's a backdoor.
Farook burned and destroyed two other electronic devices, so he had opportunity to nuke this one if it had anything incriminating on it.
The device was making iCloud backups until a month and a half before the spree, there was absolutely nothing in them. iCloud backups could have ceased for a number of reasons.
Find my iPhone is still active on the phone (search by serial number), so why would a terrorist use a phone he knew was tracking him? Obviously he wouldn’t.
YESTERDAY, APPLE CEO TIM COOK published an open letter opposing a court order to build the FBI a “backdoor” for the iPhone.
Cook wrote that the backdoor, which removes limitations on how often an attacker can incorrectly guess an iPhone passcode, would set a dangerous precedent and “would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession,” even though in this instance, the FBI is seeking to unlock a single iPhone belonging to one of the killers in a 14-victim mass shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, in December.
It’s true that ordering Apple to develop the backdoor will fundamentally undermine iPhone security, as Cook and other digital security advocates have argued. But it’s possible for individual iPhone users to protect themselves from government snooping by setting strong passcodes on their phones — passcodes the FBI would not be able to unlock even if it gets its iPhone backdoor.
As you may have noticed, we're now deep into the "Crypto Wars 2.0" these days -- especially with the news of the week concerning the FBI's demand that Apple create a special backdoor for iPhones. Thus, I thought it might be worth exploring some books on the original Crypto Wars of the 1990s, so that people can understand a bit of the history here. The one that everyone talks about is Steven Levy's Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age -- though a recent review by Kendra Albert notes, unfortunately accurately, that Levy is horrible when writing about women (and, as an aside, anyone who refers to EFF boss Cindy Cohn as "diminutive" doesn't know a damn thing about Cindy Cohn who is a total badass).
Of all the arguments for the idea that the government should be able to force Apple to whip up a backdoor for law enforcement, the worst hasn't come from the government. Instead, it's been delivered by The Guardian's San Francisco-based technology reporter, Nellie Bowles.
A suicide hotline operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs allowed crisis calls to go into voicemail, and callers did not always receive immediate assistance, according to a report by the agency's internal watchdog.
The report by the VA's office of inspector general says calls to the suicide hotline have increased dramatically in recent years, as veterans increasingly seek services following prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the aging of Vietnam-era veterans.
The crisis hotline -- the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary -- received more than 450,000 calls in 2014, a 40 percent increase over the previous year.
A former primary school teacher who took off her skirt while going through airport security has been fined €£150.
Eimear Ni Ghiallgairrh was arrested by police at London Stansted Airport after she undressed in front of a queue of passengers out of frustration.
The 29-year-old had arrived at the airport just 90 minutes before her flight to Barcelona and said she was among a number of passengers who grew agitated while waiting in the security queue.
After she finally stepped through the body scanner, Miss Ni Ghiallgairrh, who is also a trained architect, was told staff considered her to be dangerous and was accused of being on drugs.
The Federal Communications Commission today approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks to give consumers more choices in the set-top boxes they use to watch cable TV.
The vote was 3-2, with Chairman Tom Wheeler and fellow Democrats Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel voting in favor of the proposal, while Republicans Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly voted against. An NPRM is not a final vote. Instead, this will kick off a months-long public comment period leading up to a final vote that is likely to happen before the end of this year.
The FCC is essentially trying to create a software-based replacement for CableCard. Pay-TV operators from the cable, satellite, and telco industries would have to provide content and programming information to makers of third-party hardware or applications. Theoretically, customers could then watch their TV channels on various devices without needing to rent a set-top box from their cable company and without buying equipment that is compatible with a physical CableCard.
The FCC voted 3-2 today to begin dismantling the cable industry's long-standing monopoly over ye olde set top cable box. As noted previously, the FCC is pushing a proposal that would require cable operators make their programming accessible to third-party set top manufacturers, without requiring the use of a CableCARD. The goal is to create competition in the set top box market, giving consumers a choice of better and cheaper gear, in the same way consumers can buy their own cable modems. 99% of consumers currently pay about $231 annually in rental fees for hardware that's generally worth about half that much.
When AT&T originally announced the company wanted to spend $69 billion on a satellite TV company on the eve of the cord cutting revolution, even M&A bullish Wall Street thought AT&T was a little nuts. After all, AT&T's refusal to seriously upgrade its aging DSL networks to full fiber have left it at a serious disadvantage to faster cable broadband. Given Verizon's FiOS fiber build clocked in somewhere around $24 billion, the $69 billion AT&T spent on DirecTV could have gone a long way toward bringing those customers into the modern fiber to the home era.
For fifteen years now, companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable (and their various PR and policy tendrils) have whined incessantly about the "burdensome regulations" that saddle the U.S. broadband industry. Less regulation, they argue, will pave the path to broadband nirvana, opening the door to immense innovation and more competition in the sector. So Louisville recently set about reworking its city broadband ordinances to streamline both the pole attachment and franchise agreement processes dramatically, something you'd assume would thrill both companies.
Zero-rating has become the bleeding edge of the net neutrality debate. India recently decided to reject zero-rating plans such as Facebook's Free Basics, while in the United States carriers push boundaries with zero-rating experiments such as T-Mobile's Binge-On plan (which led to a public spat with EFF over our criticism of the service, for which Legere has since apologized), as well as AT&T's Sponsored Data, Verizon's FreeBee, and Comcast's Stream TV.
What is zero-rating and why should you worry about it? In a nutshell, zero-rating plans exempt particular data from counting against a user's data cap, or from accruing any excess usage charges. The most dangerous of these plans, such as the AT&T and Verizon offerings, only offer their users zero-rated data from content providers who pay the carriers money to do so. Such “pay for play” arrangements favor big content providers who can afford to pay for access to users' eyeballs, and marginalize those who can't, such as nonprofits, startups, and fellow users.
Imagine traveling back to 1996 in a typical American living room. What's changed? The TV is three feet thick and weighs 150 pounds. There’s a VHS videocassette recorder underneath, but no Internet-connected devices to be seen.
Now, what hasn't changed?
The cable or satellite tuner box. It’s a black or grey plastic slab. You have to lease it from your pay-TV provider for a monthly fee. It doesn’t add much functionality to your living room setup, except that your TV subscription doesn’t work without it.
Carlos Correa, special advisor on trade and intellectual property at the South Centre, said the obligation to disclose the source of genetic resources is necessary if the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity are to be implemented.
Based on a literal interpretation of the Trademark Law’s non-use provisions, the decision appears to have a sound basis in law: while IKEA’s two original applications were registered in October 2006 and 2010, the first IKEA store selling Class 20 and 21 goods did not open in Indonesia until October 2014, with no ‘acceptable reason’ to excuse the non-use. Interestingly, the Supreme Court’s ruling was a 2-1 decision, with Judge I Gusti Agung Sumanatha filing a rare dissent, arguing that because IKEA had proven that it was the owner of a legitimately registered well-known trademark, the non-use provisions should not apply. While not explicitly supported by the Trademark Law’s text, Judge Sumanatha’s dissent speaks more to the spirit and purpose of the Law and is a welcome development. Troubling, however, is that both courts ruled PT. Ratania’s applications for the mark “IKEA INTAN KHATULISTIWA ESA ABADI” were “legitimate” (“sah”). Such a ruling is as unclear as it is unnecessary and ignored clear evidence presented during the trial that PT. Ratania knew about IKEA prior to filing their own applications, strongly implying that the applications were impermissibly filed in bad faith. While the courts’ unclear language and meaning likely lead to the confusion in reporting on this case, neither the Commercial Court nor the Supreme Court said that PT. Ratania is now the true and legitimate owner of the IKEA mark in Indonesia.
Poor Kanye West! This world keeps on making him angry. This time, it’s none other than the notorious torrent website The Pirate Bay. Kanye is furious over his album’s 500,000 illegal downloads on the torrent websites and considering an option to sue them, according to the media reports.
And they would keep doing so, even if The Pirate Bay disappeared off the Internet tomorrow. Even if all torrent sites and BitTorrent clients disappeared overnight, it wouldn’t change much. There was sharing before torrents and there will be sharing after torrents.
In early November, the "final text" of the TPP was finally released. The USTR even posted the thing to Medium, pretending that after years of secrecy it was now being transparent. As we've been told time and time again, the final document is not open to any changes. The only thing left to do was a "legal scrub" which is a final process in which the lawyers comb through the document word by word, basically to make sure there are no typos or out-and-out errors. The legal scrub is not when any substantial changes can be made.