The phrase "year of the Linux desktop" has been uttered for so many years that for some it has lost all meaning. But the creator of the Linux operating system hasn't given up on that dream. And he's right not to give up.
When Docker brought new life to Linux containers at the beginning of 2013, the technology quickly gained popularity among software developers. Today Docker has millions of container downloads, thousands of community contributors, and countless third party projects who are using it. What explains this extraordinary popularity?
Hi all,
I'd like to announce the linux-stable security tree project. The purpose is to create a derivative tree from the regular stable tree that would contain only commits that fix security vulnerabilities.
Today in Linux news Richard Stallman posted a Free Software Foundation statement on ZFS in a GPL2 Linux and Software Freedom Conservancy is pleased with his conclusions. Elsewhere, Eben Moglen discussed the Linux Foundation's role in the Linux community. Sam Varghese today said that Ubuntu may be everywhere, but Canonical is still operating in the red and Clement Lefebvre introduced some of the changes coming in Mint 18. The Fedora 24 supplemental wallpaper selection is in the voting phase and a new Pisi video has Megatotoro scratching his head.
The opinions offered here are my own. I am not expressing the views of any SFLC clients, the Free Software Foundation, or Richard M. Stallman.
There has been much recent controversy concerning the relationship between the Linux Foundation and “community,” or non-commercial organizations in the world of free software. I’ve been somewhat confused by the dynamics of that conversation, which has spilled out from private mailing lists into the public eye occasionally, and I have found it useful in clarifying my own views to state my thoughts on the subject, which I’ve now decided to share.
A video uploaded on Ted.com this month features a question-and-answer session with Linux creator Linus Torvalds recorded in February at TED 2016 in Vancouver.
In the interview with TED curator Chris Anderson, Torvalds talked openly about the personality traits that prompted his unique philosophy of work, engineering and life.
Some highlights from the chat, edited for brevity:
Linus Torvalds transformed technology twice — first with the Linux kernel, which helps power the Internet, and again with Git, the source code management system used by developers worldwide. In a rare interview with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Torvalds discusses with remarkable openness the personality traits that prompted his unique philosophy of work, engineering and life. "I am not a visionary, I'm an engineer," Torvalds says. "I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds ... but I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in."
Much has been written, over and over again, about the fabled (and some would say mythic) year of the Linux desktop. But Linux creator Linus Torvalds has not given up on the idea. Linus thinks that someday Linux could come to dominate desktop computing.
Live kernel patching was accepted into the Linux kernel in v4.0 in February 2015, so we can declare the 2014 LPC Live Kernel Patching Microconference to have been a roaring success! However, as was noted at the time, this is just the beginning of the real work. In short, the v4.0 work makes live kernel patching possible, but more work is required to make it more reliable and more routine.
Additional issues include stacktrace reliability, patch-safety criteria for kernel threads, thread consistency models, porting to non-x86 architectures, handling of loadable modules, compiler optimizations, userspace tooling, patching of data, automated regression testing, and patch-creation guidelines.
Sasha Levin of Oracle has announced the formation of the Linux-Stable Security Tree.
This new tree will be based off the mainline Linux stable tree but focus on just carrying fixes for security vulnerabilities. Other changes normally found in stable Linux point releases wouldn't be integrated.
Daniel Vetter of Intel OTC has sent out an announcement about another round of i915 DRM kernel driver code that's ready for testing by developers and the community.
The latest drm-intel-testing work continues with more atomic-related driver work. One of the more prominent atomic changes in this latest Git branch is making the Intel color manager support fully atomic. Some race conditions were also fixed up in their driver, many small improvements to the GEM memory management code, GuC firmware loading fixes, PLL clean-ups for Cherryview and Valleyview, reworked DisplayPort detection, and various other improvements.
The development team of the MythTV open-source media center has announced today, April 11, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the MythTV 0.28 update.
he developers behind the MPlayer-based MPV open-source video player software have announced today, April 11, 2016, the release of the MPV 0.17.0 update for all supported platforms.
According to the release notes, MPV 0.17.0 is a fairly normal maintenance release and a recommended update from MPV 0.16.0 or previous versions, bringing multiple new features, such as a Direct3D11 Video Acceleration decoder, DCI-P3 colorspace support, a null demuxer, as well as a mediacodec decoder hwdec wrapper.
The HTC Vive headset and Valve’s SteamVR are finally released and shipping! You might expect that the HTC Vive works with Valve’s own SteamOS and Linux, but it doesn’t. It’s Windows-only for now, just like the Oculus Rift.
Paws: A Shelter 2 Game is a standalone, single player, adventure, platformer set in the world of Shelter 2. The Lonesome Fog is a living book that seeks to expand on the concept of storytelling and explores the plight of a young cub trapped in a cycle of fear, cowardice and uncertainty.
ARK: Survival Of The Fittest, the spin off from ARK: Survival Evolved is now available on Linux & SteamOS, it's free too. Completely free that is, no pay for anything here as they are funded by the original ARK.
This appeals to me much more than the original ARK game, as there will be more focus on action and taking down other players. That just seems more interesting than generally surviving to me.
It might take you a while to get into a game, as you have to wait for everyone to either join or create a tribe before the game begins. Prepare to wait a while, as I joined a few with people just standing around doing nothing. I hope they implement a timer for people to join or create tribes so people can't spoil it for others.
I hope to see this project continue on and on, and eventually have it work alongside Steam as well. If you have the driver, you will need to disable it to use it properly inside of Steam, having that issue somehow sorted out by itself would be awesome without user interaction.
Your gender is linked to your SteamID, so what you're assigned to you're essentially stuck with. I'm fine with this, as I understand it's just a game. Others however, are not happy with this change.
I can understand both sides of the argument, people want their character to reflect them as an extension of themselves. I am a male in any game that lets me choose, simply because I also have that view of wanting it to represent me, but it's certainly not a deal-breaker.
The recently released GNOME 3.20 desktop environment is about to get its first point release, but it looks like it just arrives in the main software repositories of the popular Arch Linux distribution.
The GNOME Project is preparing to unleash the first point release of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, version 3.20.1, which should see the light of day sometime around the date of April 13, 2016.
Now that we've told you about some of the features that are coming to the Linux Mint 18 operating system in the next few months, the time has come to get a glimpse of the new features of Cinnamon 3.0.
So now that you are all aware that I’ve been working to modernize Sysprof, you might not be surprised to read that I decided to push things in a bit more interesting of a direction.
This is an animated short video featuring some known characters from Pisi Linux.
There are several approaches to computer security. One method is to try to make every component work as correctly and error-free as possible. This is called security through correctness. Another approach is called security by obscurity and it involves hiding secrets or flaws. A third approach to security is isolation, which is sometimes called security by compartmentalization. This third method keeps important pieces separate so if one component is compromised, the other components can continue to work, unaffected.
These different styles of security might make more sense if we look at an example from the non-digital world. Imagine we have some valuables we want to keep locked away and we decide to buy a safe to store our precious documents, jewels and money. If we buy a high quality safe that is hard to force open, that is security through correctness. If we hide our safe behind a picture or in a secret room, that is security through obscurity. Buying two safes and placing half of our valuables in each so if one is robbed then we still have half of our items is an example of security by compartmentalization.
The developers of the Debian-based HandyLinux distribution have announced the immediate availability for download of HandyLinux 2.4, a maintenance release in the 2.x stable series of the OS.
HandyLinux 2.4 comes only ten days after the release of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 "Jessie" operating system, on which the French distro is now based, offering users new installation mediums that include the latest security patches and software updates pushed upstream.
Quanta Cloud Technology is teaming with Red Hat to produce a ready-to-plug-in package of OpenStack, Linux, and Ceph storage loaded on Quanta servers, storage, and switches.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now available for free to developers who are members of the Red Hat Developers Program.
The idea is to make it easier for developers to carry out serious Linux development for Enterprise Linux. The new non-production developer subscription is unsupported, but gives you a strong development environment for programming enterprise applications.
When you register for the subscription, you get Red Hat Enterprise Linux (as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Suite) along with the entire Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio and the Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK). You also get a number of open source compilers, dynamic languages, development tools, databases, web servers and other middleware. Available software is grouped into software repositories that are used to segregate packages by type, source, or support life cycle.
I'm moving! Today is my first day on the Release Engineering Development team (RED team) of the PnT DevOps organization at Red Hat. After I get my bearings, I'll be working on "Factory 2.0" which, while still quite a nebulous and undefined thing, boils down to focusing on the next-generation build and release pipeline for RHEL and other Red Hat products. What's cool about this is that, since it's future-facing work, I get to focus on how to knit the effort with what's been going on in Fedora releng. We'll have lots to talk about and hack on, I'm sure.
Nearly two months ago, the submission phase for the Fedora 24 Supplemental Wallpapers were opened. Now, the submission phase is closed and the voting phase is now open. If you have a FAS account and are CLA+1 status, you can cast your vote in Nuancier.
Finding nightly Fedora builds has always been a bit of a pain. For quite a while we had this page, which just linked to a couple of canned Koji searches. It kinda worked, but it was terribly slow and the results weren’t the nicest thing to look at; it also couldn’t find you installer images, as they don’t come out of Koji. It doesn’t work any more, as the Koji tasks it searches for are no longer correct; it could easily be ‘fixed’ but it’d still be a bad experience.
As an event sponsor, the Fedora Ambassadors of North America had a table for the event. The Ambassadors offered mentorship and assistance to BrickHack 2016 programmers, gave away some free Fedora swag, and offered an introduction to Linux, open source, and the community. This report is a recollection of some highlights from the event and also focuses on the impact we made as an event sponsor.
As you may well be aware, Canonical will finally allow Ubuntu users to move the Unity Launcher to the bottom of the screen, thanks to an option contributed by the Ubuntu Kylin developers.
That's pretty cool and all that, but the option will remain hidden to the naked eye, as the Ubuntu development team is yet to implement a visual option in the System Setting panel for users to easily switch between bottom and left Unity Launcher placement.
Being hidden, the option will not be so easily accessible to newcomers and non-technical users, but we've already got them covered with our step-by-step tutorial on how to move the Unity Launcher to the bottom of the desktop using nothing but the Dconf Editor graphical utility.
Free Software Foundation president and Gnu Public Licence (GNU GPL) author Richard Stallman has weighed in on the spat over whether Ubuntu can legally include ZFS in Linux, with a resounding “No!”
Stallman has issued a statement he says “.... explains some issues about the meaning and enforcement of the GNU General Public License. The specific occasion for this article is the violation of combining Linux with ZFS”.
As promised, Canonical has released today, April 11, 2016, the first hotfix for the major Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 operating system update announced last week for supported Ubuntu Phone devices.
We reported at the end of last month that Canonical's first ever Ubuntu Tablet device, the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition, is available for pre-order, and deliveries should start in the first week of April.
Just two weeks ago came the announcement of the world’s first Ubuntu tablet – Aquaris M10 from BQ was announced and soon was put up for pre-order.
The expected delivery date was somewhere around the second week of April 2016. We have already entered week two of the month, and now comes in the word that those who had already pre-ordered the device may have to wait a tad bit longer to get their hands on the Ubuntu-powered Aquaris M10.
According to OMG Ubuntu, users who have pre-ordered the device was initially informed for a delivery time at the second week of April. After which, the website changed the expected timing to "second half of April." There seems to be another push back, as the Ubuntu tablet is now expected to come around three weeks to a month as of writing.
After a year and a half of intense work by the LXD team, LXD 2.0 has been released today!
LXD 2.0 is our first production-ready release and also a Long Term Support release, meaning that we will be supporting it with frequent bugfix releases until the 1st of June 2016.
This also completes our collection of 2.0 container tools with LXC 2.0, LXCFS 2.0 and now LXD 2.0 all having been released over the past couple of weeks.
UBUNTU -- Stéphane Graber has announced the release of the LXD 2.0 container hypervisor. LXD was announced at the end of 2014 and today's 2.0 release is now the project's first production-ready release.
National Instruments LINX v3.0 adds Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone support, enabling its LabVIEW IDE. NI’s Digilent is selling LINX 3.0 kits for the SBCs.
National Instruments (NI) sells the science and engineering focused LabVIEW graphical integrated development environment (IDE) as part of its NI Linux Real Time and Windows software stack available on its data acquisition controllers and test equipment. NI’s LabVIEW MakerHub community also offers an open source LINX API library and toolkit to enable lower-end embedded devices to access LabVIEW code via a set of virtual interfaces (VIs).
After long long fight, it seems power management on Nokia N900 works for me for the first time. N900 is very picky about its configuration (you select lockdep, you lose video; you select something else 50mA power consumption... not good). That was the last major piece... I hope. I should have usable phone soon.
The new PHP barcode reader toolkit for Linux supports PHP x64 version 5.3 to 5.6. Both Thread Safe (TS) and Non Thread Safe (NTS) options are provided. The Dynamsoft toolkit works with Linux Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS operating systems.
Google is currently testing an Android app that will let you control some primary functions with only your voice, the company announced today. The accessibility software is called Voice Access, and it's designed to let people with disabilities take better advantage of core Android functions in a hands-free manner. It's in beta right now, and although the application period has ended, the company says it should be released as a free Play Store app at some point in the future.
Remix OS has quickly gained a well-deserved cult following, thanks to its clever way of taking the Android OS and making it work a little bit more like a desktop OS. It offers proper windows, a browse-able file system, keyboard shortcuts, and full access to official Google Play apps. It is in many ways everything that Google ought to be doing wth Android. And now, as 9to5Google reports, it's available for Google's own tablets, the Nexus 9 and Nexus 10.
As Google notes, more than 20 percent of the population will experience a physical disability sometime in their lives. Because of this, it makes sense that the company would want their operating system to cater to this massive slice of the population as much as it can. Although Android has had a variety of accessibility options in the past, Android N is looking to increase these drastically.
CEO John Chen told Abu Dhabi-based The National in an interview the company is working on two mid-range Android handsets, one with a full touchscreen and another with a physical keyboard.
Frustrated at your lack of the latest Android 6 Marshmallow software? Google may have a plan to remedy that.
A new rumor suggests Google is almost ready to expand its Android Beta program - the scheme that brings the latest Android software to the Nexus family first - to other devices not specifically made by Google.
While the prospect of creating a piece of hardware that'd supplant the since-the-beginning biggest tablet ever iPad, Google's next device might be able to do the trick. Google is currently placing itself in a position in which it becomes more singular. The Google Play suite of apps has adopted a more visually standard look. Google's Play return program has become more active in the recent past. But what's that got to do with a tablet? Could Google finally be making a play for the space they've never dominated with a device that's just as powerful as the opposition? If the past couple generations of Nexus device are any indication, Google's in a prime position to finally make the real anti-iPad.
On the other hand, software is still scarce — which is a problem because without software a computer is basically a paper weight. Yes, distributing software is nearly costless. However unlike hardware which involves costly manufacturing processes, the cost of making software consists almost completely of finding intelligent people to write it — and intelligent people are just as scarce as they’ve always been. Luckily, there’s a solution to this dilemma: open source. This idea isn’t new, but I think it’s really important so I wanted to write about it.
Open source software is software that is distributed freely. Now, this may sound like a terrible idea. People are altruistic — but only to a certain point. Why would people contribute to software for no reward? The key is that open source software is not only free, the process behind making it is transparent. You can change it. Open source projects start when people share code they wrote for their individual needs. Many times making this software publicly available is more cost effective than selling it. Since the source code is publically available, people can adapt the code, and fix problems as they arise.
HipChat is a team communications platform that provides 'persistent' one-on-one chat, group chat, video chat, file sharing and integrations.
In the media-saturated world we live in, having an array of top-notch audio-video tools really comes in handy. Trim a file, edit a video, maximize your audio – we all need to feed our social media streams, and companies always need audio-video content to best communicate with users.
This list of audio video apps is potentially a major cost saver. The following open source apps replace expensive commercial AV apps, often with very similar functionality.
If you have addition AV apps you’d like to recommend, please use the Comments section below. Happy downloading!
Human beings are complicated animals. We are packed with ambitions, fears, desires, anxieties, and other nuggets of the human condition. Of course, the extent and manifestation of these different elements varies from person to person, across cultures, and in different environments.
This makes building human systems—such as communities or companies—complicated. To some (typically bureaucrats), it can be tempting to ignore what makes us human and instead create seemingly logical processes, despite the processes not matching our human attributes well, and then convince people to use them. If you want to build engaging communities, don't try to model people in spreadsheets; rarely does it work well.
On 14th – 15th May 2016 in Austin, Texas the Community Leadership Summit 2016 will be taking place. For the 8th year now, community leaders and managers from a range of different industries, professions, and backgrounds will meet together to share ideas and best practice. See our incredible registered attendee list that is shaping up for this year’s event.
This year we also have many incredible keynotes that will cover topics such as building developer communities, tackling imposter syndrome, gamification, governance, and more. Of course CLS will incorporate the popular unconference format where the audience determine the sessions in the schedule.
The software development specialist Chariot adds open source Hazelcast 3.6 to its enterprise portfolio as the two companies announce partnership at the Philly ETE 2016 conference.
Today, April 11, 2016, Mozilla has announced the general availability of the second point release of the Mozilla Firefox 45.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
Dr. Sean White joins the Mozilla leadership team this week as a Vice President of Technology Strategy.
Firefox is too slow. OpenBSD is too slow. The combination is too too slow. This situation was known for some time, but resolution was also slow for quite some reasons.
Many Firefox on OpenBSD users, particularly developers, only use OpenBSD so the extent of the performance gap between platforms went unnoticed. Web browsing would grow ever slower, but the only page that matters would continue to load as quickly as ever, once the slumbering lizard had awoken. Clearly the reason it takes me thirty seconds to view a single tweet was idiot kids and their infernal javascript frameworks.
Productivity on any operating system is without doubt one of the most important things that can make or break a platform however, execution is the key – if done right, enterprise adaptation would be shortly underway.
Linux today is most certainly an ultimate viable alternative to Windows – both in the general consumer and business market.
There are a number of Unix-like operating systems based on or descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) series of Unix variants. The three most notable descendants in current use are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, which are all derived from 386BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite, by various routes. Both NetBSD and FreeBSD started life in 1993, initially derived from 386BSD, but in 1994 migrating to a 4.4BSD-Lite code base. OpenBSD was forked in 1995 from NetBSD. Other notable derivatives include DragonFly BSD, which was forked from FreeBSD 4.8, and Apple Inc.’s iOS and OS X, with its Darwin base including a large amount of code derived from FreeBSD.
Yes of course, we *know* that FreeBSD isn't Linux, but aside from using a different kernel (a big aside of course), there are a lot of common areas between modern BSD and Linux.
This article explains some issues about the meaning and enforcement of the GNU General Public License. The specific occasion for this article is the violation of combining Linux with ZFS, and that concerns specifically GNU GPL version 2; however, most of the points apply to all versions of the GNU GPL and to the GNU Affero GPL as well. "GPL" or "GNU GPL" refers to any version of either of those.
The Free Software Foundation has issued a fresh statement today concerning the recent ZFS file-system efforts on Linux, driven in large part by Canonical's plans for shipping ZFS support in Ubuntu 16.04.
GNU -- As GCC 6 should be officially released soon, here's a quick overview of the improvements and new features for this yearly free software compiler update.
To me -- as a lawyer, a software developer, and a former government technologist -- the question of open source versus closed source when it comes to government software shouldn't even be a question. With a few obvious exceptions for things like national or operational security, if taxpayers fund the creation of software, they should have the right to access that software. This is increasingly true as government agencies automate the traditionally human-based process they use to regulate industry and deliver citizen services each day. When such processes begin to be shielded behind commercial copyright or self-induced bureaucratic necessity, our government quickly becomes a black box.
Open source software seems like a perfect fit for government IT projects. Developers can take advantage of existing code bases and, it's hoped, mold that code to their needs quickly and at less cost than developing code from scratch. Over the last few years, governments in the U.S. and abroad have been more closely embracing open source. However, agencies at all levels of U.S. government are still wary of open source and can be reluctant to adopt it. It's still not easy for government projects to use open source or for developers employed in the public sector to contribute their work to open source project.
We were notified of a very interesting consultation by the European Commission. The European Commission is about to allocate 750 million Euro over the next years on the "future internet", but the really important subjects (like: everything we learned from Edward Snowden) are not on their radar - yet.
However, if we bundle our efforts that is something that is definitely within reach. At the moment we are told there are only a couple of dozens of submissions from mostly the usual suspects, so your response would (at least on paper) count for influencing a few million Euro of this budget. It really makes a difference if you submit something, even if it is really short.
I'm happy to report that the French paperback edition of my project to translate the Free Culture book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on Lulu.com. Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.
This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the dblatex developer Benoît Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation available from the Wikilivres wiki pages and completed and corrected the translation to match the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as coordinated the proof reading of the final result. I believe the end result look great, but I am biased and do not read French. In addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.
Open Government initiatives should be an integral part of Smart Sustainable Cities. They ensure access to government data, stimulate citizen participation, and facilitate innovation. This is one of the recommendations made in the 'Smart Sustainable Cities — Reconnaissance Study' published last month by the Operating Unit on Policy-Driven Electronic Governance at United Nations University (UNU-EGOV).
Last month, Austria published an updated 'Handbuch für Dateneinsteller' (Manual for Data Managers). It provides the country's public administration with all the information needed by agencies to get started using the national Open Government Data portal www.data.gv.at.
The manual explains the OGD Austria initiative, the open data principles, the why, how, and by whom of publishing open data, followed by all the legal, procedural, organisational and technical details.
The 'Handbuch für Dateneinsteller' is written in German and is freely available from the OGD Austria website.
Git is a very popular open source version control system. Many developers use Git on a desktop machine and push their updates to a central server running on a service like GitHub or GitLab. Although such services are great, this may lead some to think of Git as a client-server model with local checkout of code and updates that are always being pushed back to the single central server.
That's better than I expected for the JIT technology.
"Privacy by design" and "security by design" have become common terms to describe the process of building privacy and security into technology at the start, rather than bolting it on after the fact. It may seem perplexing to consider security an afterthought, especially to those of us whose careers are dedicated to information security, but -- based on human nature’s desire for functionality first -- developers have a tendency to wait until a technology has reached maturity before integrating security capabilities. This mentality is changing now that data breaches are making headlines on a regular basis, however. We are finally starting to build security into networks, applications and even chips from the get-go.
The servers were used in a so-called DDoS attack (distributed denial of service) which pounded the websites of US financial institutions, among Citigroup, Capital One and HSBC with overwhelming requests for information.
After weeks of political crisis in Kiev, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk has announced his long-expected resignation.
How do we know whether information is classified? Well, because the government tells us it is. But what does that mean? It turns out it means whatever the government wants it to mean, subject to time, place, personnel involved, etc.
Classified material handed over to movie producers by Leon Panetta? Probably not a big deal. Classified material handed over to journalists by whistleblowers? That's a prosecutin'.
No one explains this slippery approach to classification better than President Obama, who was gamely trying to answer questions about an ongoing investigation (Hillary Clinton and her famous emails) during an interview with Fox News.
We know that the Washington Post editors really hate Bernie Sanders and rarely miss an opportunity to show it. Dana Milbank got in the act big time today as he once again denounced Sanders (along with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz) in his column.
People have long predicted that California could eventually collapse into the ocean following a mega earthquake. Now, an eerily similar true-life scenario is playing out -- but it's thanks to the weather.
The Gold Rush State has sunk more than 45 feet since 1935 – something the U.S. government calls the "largest human alteration of the earth's surface." But earthquakes aren't the cause. It's happening because of excessive groundwater mining brought on by drought, and geologists say all the rain in the world won't reverse cave-ins of dirt and rock in underground aquifers.
New forecast software is allowing the agency to break out of the days when weather reports were sent by “the wire” over teleprinters, which were basically typewriters hooked up to telephone lines. Teleprinters only allowed the use of upper case letters, and while the hardware and software used for weather forecasting has advanced over the last century, this holdover was carried into modern times since some customers still used the old equipment.
The wealth management arm of Rothschild Group set up a trust it handles for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in line with international standards for the treatment of assets of politicians in office, the company said on Thursday.
Poroshenko has had to defend himself repeatedly against accusations he tried to evade tax after the "Panama Papers" data leak on Sunday showed he had placed his Roshen confectionary business assets in an offshore account.
Rothschild said Poroshenko had appointed it as a trustee of a blind trust to hold his shares in Roshen.
"The trust has been modelled on international standards for politicians requiring trusts to hold their assets while they are in office," it said in emailed comments.
I, like most people in the country, view tax havens as dodgy.
Cameron looked after himself by maxing out the taxpayers’ credit card to pay a mortgage on expenses in Oxfordshire and even claimed to cut the wisteria off his chimney.
So I, like most people in the country, think it dodgy he now earns a small fortune renting out a house in Notting Hill while living in Downing Street and Chequers.
The Private Finance Initiative was always a scam. It was yet another way to divert money from ordinary tax-payers to the super rich. Instead of schools and hospitals being built and paid for by the taxpayer, they were built and paid for by the bankers, hedge fund managers and other “financial services” sharks, giving state guaranteed returns averaging 7% from the taxpayer, when we now have negative interest rates. It is such a massive scam that every man, woman and child in the UK owes €£3,000 to PFI financiers. Like so many far right Tory ideas, its most fervent practitioners were Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.
Imagine that — in one of the world’s richest countries, people die simply because we can’t find a way to provide them good healthcare as does the rest of the civilized world.
I had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region in the "red heart" of Australia. The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans who came here, perhaps demented by the heat, imagined a white utopia that was not theirs to imagine; for this is a sacred place, the homeland of the oldest, most continuous human presence on earth.
Rosalie was distressed, defiant and eloquent. Her distinction as one unafraid to speak up in a society so often deaf to the cries and anguish of its first people, its singular uniqueness, is well earned. She appears in my 2013 film, Utopia, with a searing description of a discarded people: "We are not wanted in our own country." She has described the legacies of a genocide: a word political Australia loathes and fears.
One of the more darkly entertaining aspects of the massive Panama Leaks has been watching exposed politicians attempting to reconcile past promises to get tougher on financial wrongdoers with their own tax-dodging efforts.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron has spent several years in crackdown mode, as the New York Times notes. Going all the way back to 2012, Cameron has made a habit of promising better regulation, stricter enforcement and harsher penalties for tax-dodging corporations while selling himself to voters and small businesses. He also singled out individuals, like comedian Jimmy Carr, for his use of "dodgy tax-avoiding schemes." He also promised to close a loophole that allowed wealthy UK residents to avoid paying taxes and suggested those that did should face prison time.
Several people have argued with my reference to “corporate media”, as the consortium includes state organisations such as the BBC. My response to that is that the BBC has become in the last few years a mouthpiece for state propaganda with no effective independence of government, and that the politicians are very much in the pocket of the corporations who fund them. The BBC therefore promotes corporate interests just as much as those outlets directly owned by corporate interests. It is simply a question of direct or indirect control.
By now it should be more than obvious. Republicans continue to push for new voter ID laws, which, of course, they publicly insist are all about weeding out rampant voter fraud, even though the likelihood of significant voter is virtually nil.
Over the last four years, however, one GOP operative after another has proved the adage that you can’t keep a secret among a large group of people. Indeed, they continue to blab about the true motive behind voter ID laws — that it’s all about disenfranchising Democratic voters and keeping turnout low. The fewer Democratic voters, and, yes, the lower the overall turnout, the better Republicans fare.
Steve Inskeep talks to David Bossie, president and chairman of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, about the role of big money in politics in this election year.
When Rammstein aren't "Du Hast"-ing and lighting themselves on fire, they're apparently getting censored in their native land. In 2009, their album Liebe Is Für Alle Da (in English, There’s Enough Love For Everyone,) was on a government agency's watch list and the gang were forced to destroy 85,000 copies of the record. Seven years later, the band wants what's owed to them and are suing the German government for €66,000, roughly $75,000, according to Deutsche Welle.
Rammstein are suing the German government for a 2009 ruling which made it illegal for any retailer to advertise their album Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da in the country.
The band filed a lawsuit against the German government at Bonn Regional Court this week, looking for €66,000 in damages which they say was caused by the Federal Department for Media Harmful To Young Persons 'indexing' the album in 2009.
As previously reported, the Federal Office For The Examination Of Media Harmful To Young People banned the album from being put on public display. The decision was made over concerns that one particular song on it, ‘Ich Tu Dir Weh’, and some photographs within the album’s artwork, were “brutalising” and “immoral”.
Norwegian punk quartet SLUTFACE have revealed they've changed their name to include a slashed o instead of a u, owing the change to social media censorship and being "shut out of certain opportunities as a band".
Norwegian band Slutface has removed its ‘u’ and replaced it with an ‘ø’ in a move to trick social media sites such as Facebook into believing it is not an obscenity.
Cybersecurity is one of this century’s newest and most complex challenges. Data is becoming more and more difficult to protect, but an National Security Administration challenge aims to train the next generation of computer engineers to be able to handle the task.
The NSA Codebreaker challenge gave students around the country a chance to put their coding skills to use in a difficult context with a variety of interesting applications.
The US government is developing a policy that would allow the Justice Department to prosecute criminals based on evidence acquired secretly by the National Security Agency (NSA), Human Rights Watch said in a press release.
In late February, the University of California, Berkeley, announced a hack into a school financial system that compromised the Social Security or bank account numbers of about 80,000 students, alumni and vendors.
For more than two years, suspected Chinese and other nation-state hackers nestled inside computers at Penn State’s engineering school, which happens to develop sensitive technology for the Navy, Bloomberg reported in May 2015.
Multiple government agencies have gone all-in on cybersecurity. CISA was pushed through late last year -- dumped into the back pages of a "must pass" omnibus spending bill. Just like that, the government expanded its surveillance power and cleared its cyberthreat inboxes to make way for all the information non-governmental entities might want to share with it. It promised to share right back -- making this all equitable -- but no one really believed the government would give as much as it would take.
In the aftermath of Apple and the FBI's high-profile battle over an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooter suspects, observers on Capitol Hill have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of new Congressional bill that would force tech companies to provide assistance to police in accessing their customers' data, even if it means building software tools to circumvent their own security measures.
With the world mocking the sheer ignorance of their anti-encryption bill, Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein are doubling down by planning a staff "briefing" on the issue of "going dark" with a panel that is made up entirely of law enforcement folks. As far as we can tell, it hasn't been announced publicly, but an emailed announcement was forwarded to us, in which they announce the "briefing" (notably not a "hearing") on "barriers to law enforcement’s ability to lawfully access the electronic evidence they need to identify suspects, solve crimes, exonerate the innocent and protect communities from further crime." The idea here is to convince others in Congress to support their ridiculous bill by gathering a bunch of staffers and scaring them with bogeyman stories of "encryption caused a crime wave!" As such, it's no surprise that the panelists aren't just weighted heavily in one direction, they're practically flipping the boat. Everyone on the panel comes from the same perspective, and will lay out of the argument for "encryption bad!"
We have more protection for your credit card data than the information someone can use to set up a fake credit card in your name.
If you do anything online, your data is at risk. Always. Every time you open an account somewhere, you provide a bunch of personal information. Some sites don't ask for much more than an email address and a password. Other sites require more data about you. And other sites don't require many details to get started, but you add more anyway.
Some of the other iPhones the FBI tried to pretend weren't going to be the beneficiaries of a precedential All Writs order are apparently not even the beneficiaries of the agency's Break Into an iPhone Using This One Simple Trick! anticlimax in the San Bernardino case.
Director James Comey noted there were still more windmills to tilt at after discovering the still-secret exploit only works on a smallish subset of Apple's offerings. In two other cases, the agency has explored its available options. In one case in Massachusetts, it appears to be on the verge of abandoning its quest to force Apple to break into a phone for it, as Motherboard reports.
The situation is not unlike hundreds of others that have occurred over the years. Colbert and Gragg stopped a motorist, found cash and drug paraphernalia, seized the cash and then proceeded to not file criminal charges against the driver.
Indicted Wagoner County Sheriff Bob Colbert will fight an accusation that he took a $10,000 bribe after a traffic stop, his attorneys said Thursday.
“This money was earmarked for fighting drug trafficking to help protect the citizens,” his attorney, Michon Hughes, said. “The accusations remain politically motivated. We are so sad for the sheriff.”
The state's multicounty grand jury on Thursday indicted Colbert, 60, and Capt. Jeff Gragg, 48, on three felony counts. The grand jury also called for Colbert's immediate suspension and eventual removal from public office on misconduct grounds.
This decision was handed down by the Supreme Court more than a week ago, but it's worth reporting. Late last year, the Court decided to take a look at an issue related to asset forfeiture and the implications it has for the Sixth Amendment.
In this case, the defendant, Sila Luis, argued that the government's seizure of her assets -- pre-conviction -- denied her the right to defend herself fully against its charges. She could still use an attorney, but it would have to be one appointed to her or one willing to work for deferred compensation (in the hopes that assets would eventually be returned).
The problem here isn't a small one. The government has the power to seize assets pre-conviction using nothing more than a grand jury's indictment as the basis. This is done to provide some sort of assurance that the accused can compensate those wronged (as well as pay any fines, fees, etc. associated with the conviction) when the trial is concluded.
In the mean time, tomorrow I am due to give a talk at Bath University on all things Pirate Party UK and how our first "Pirate in Power" is doing.
All in all, I'd say we Pirates have had a pretty successful month. We're already pushed back against the AMs bad call on the environment and immediately represented the constituents while making connections with the investing parties, unions and charites.
On Sunday, the Boston Globe published a mock front page, filled with ominous headlines and half-joking prognostications, to “warn” the GOP against nominating Donald Trump. A accompanying editorial proclaimed that Trump’s “vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American.”
But what’s strange about this “satire” is how most of the things it’s warning about are already underway, or have long existed. Indeed, Trump’s vision isn’t un-American; it’s America on steroids.
Leaflets calling for the killing of members of the Ahmadi sect of Islam have been found in a south London mosque.
A pile of the flyers, which were found in Stockwell Green Mosque, seem to endorse the killing of Ahmadis if they do not convert to mainstream Islam.
It has been speculated that they were printed by Khatme Naubwwat - a group which says on its official website that its “sole aim has been and is to unite all the Muslims of the world to safeguard the sanctity of Prophethood and the finality of Prophethood and to refute the repudiators of the belief in the finality of Prophethood of the Holy Prophet Hazrat Muhammad”.
The Department of Justice has charged at least 137 people in the US with child pornography related crimes, after the FBI used a hacking tool to identify visitors of a large site on the so-called dark web. Many of those people are facing years in prison.
One person caught has avoided any serious jail time altogether though: Brian Haller, a former cybersecurity employee at Booz Allen Hamilton who himself has ties to the government. Haller was sentenced on Friday to time served—two days and one night, according to court documents and local media reports.
Haller pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child pornography, court documents state. Haller was also sentenced to 10 years of supervised release, in which his computer will undergo constant monitoring (except devices that are used as part of his employment), and he was ordered to pay a fine of $1,000.
It’s rare that you hear a positive story about the business practices of American mass media corporation Comcast, and the latest news item doing the rounds doesn’t break from that tradition. Customers are reporting that the company is injecting its own ads into their Web browsers.
On the surface, this might seem like just another addition to the list of frustrations Comcast users are expected to endure on a daily basis. However, the product being advertised and the strategy underpinning this campaign are noxious enough to set this apart from the now-standard tales of the company’s disregard for its customers.
You may recall a story from a few years back involving self-proclaimed "corporate virtue advisor" Dov Seidman and his quest to sue Chobani for using the phrase "How food is made matters" and the social media hashtag #howmatters. Seidman's problem with all of this? He had a trademark registered for the word "how." Yeah, seriously. Seidman claimed that his super-awesome transformational use of "how" as a noun instead of a verb had been trademarked and that this somehow meant that a company that sells yogurt couldn't use the word in any way similar.
The USPTO has suggested 29 pages-worth of changes to Trademark Trial and Appeal Board practice, including to electronic filing, service and electronic communication, streamlining discovery and pre-trial procedures, and making trials more efficient.
The president of the MPAA's European operation says he believes a turning point has been reached on piracy, with service providers and search engines beginning to understand they all have a role to play. However, it's also clear that Hollywood is fearful of opening up content across Europe, which in itself could contribute to piracy.
The U.S. broadband association USTelecom, a trade association representing many ISPs, is taking a stand against abusive takedown notices and a recent push to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. They argue that ISPs are not required to pass on takedown notices and stress that their subscribers shouldn't lose Internet access based solely on copyright holder complaints.
Towards the end of 2014, Google filed for an injunction against Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, whose close ties with the MPAA had led to a sustained campaign of harassment over Google's supposed lack of interest in policing the entire internet for infringing material.
Early in 2015, the district court granted Google's requested injunction against Hood's 79-page subpoena, which the court noted was a "burdensome fishing expedition" that went beyond the bounds of what a state AG could actually demand. Not only that, but the court noted that many of Hood's actions were blocked by Section 230 of the CDA because the content in question had been uploaded by third parties.
Unfortunately for Google, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court has reversed the lower court's decision and vacated the injunction. It's being portrayed as a victory for the MPAA and its kept man, Jim Hood, but those actually reading the decision will find the reversal is just procedural. TL; DR: Google must face additional legal harassment from Jim Hood before it can challenge said legal harassment in a federal court.