In the end I decided to put openSUSE on the laptop as it worked the best for me. I installed Arch Linux and couple of other distros in VirtualBox so I can play with them. I can run two VMs at the same time without any compromise on speed.
As far as the laptop goes, I love it. And I'll give it serious consideration when it comes time to replace my MacBook. The only issue that may hold me back is the lack of HiDPI support by many apps. But that will change with time.
Linux has grown in popularity due to its more flexible and customisable nature compared to its more popular counterparts Windows and Mac.
Today, June 16, 2016, Jide Technology, the creators of the well-known Android-x86-based Remix OS, have announced an official partnership with Android-x86's founder as well as the availability of multiple new Android PCs powered by Remix OS.
Jide Technology has grown a lot in the last couple of years, and today they are proud to announce that the company is already capable of making partnerships with various hardware manufacturers to ship Android PCs and 2-in-1 tablets with Remix OS pre-installed. What this means is that they will thus allow users to run Google's Android operating system on more devices as their primary desktop environment.
With the availability of CoreOS Linux in a new region, the distributed systems community as well as small and large organizations across continents will benefit from running their applications in software containers on a consistent platform globally. Current CoreOS Linux users can take advantage of a cloud-native platform to reach one of the world’s largest markets.
Collabora's Emil Velikov has announced the release and general availability of the third and likely the last RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Mesa 12.0.0 3D Graphics Library.
Mesa 3D Graphics Library 12.0.0 Release Candidate 3 arrives more than a week after the second RC version, bringing a total of 111 changes to most of the included graphics drivers and components. The full changelog has been attached at the end of the article just in case you're wondering what's new in this update.
I would love to run some Windows 10 tests in comparison, but Windows wanted to update which slowed everything down, Steam kept going to a 0b/s download for Dota 2 and it's just...so slow. I will hopefully do a Windows 10 comparison when Windows actually plays nicely. I was on it for half an hour and it only got to 40% done on updates, so it would probably take all night to do that + the tests.
I can't be the only person who imagined the office of the future, free from the confines of the eight and a half by eleven sheet (or A4, for my international friends), would have long since arrived. Instead, we've managed to land in an intermediate state of not paperless, but less paper.
Just a few moments ago, June 16, 2016, the Wine developers have announced the release of the third maintenance update in the stable Wine 1.8 series of the open-source software used for running Windows apps and games on Linux.
Wine 1.8.3 comes as an unexpected released, after less than a week from the announcement of Wine 1.9.12, the most advanced development snapshot of the project, to fix a total of 54 issues that have been reported by users since Wine 1.8.2 released in back in April 2016.
Repositories have long been an important tool for most Linux users. But what happens when a repository is no longer available to support your system? A writer at Network World examined this issue and wondered if repositories were ultimately a very bad idea.
For those of you who aren't sure how to benchmark Dota 2 on Linux, here's a small guide. It frustrated me there wasn't one, so after getting help I'm sharing it with you all. One thing a lot of websites miss when doing benchmarks, is easily detailing how others can do their own.
I’m very happy to announce that Qt 5.7 is now available. It’s been only 3 months since we released Qt 5.6, so one might expect a rather small release with Qt 5.7. But apart from the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, we have managed to add a whole bunch of new things to this release.
Today we are delighted to announce that KDE e.V. is joining the advisory board of The Document Foundation, the foundation backing LibreOffice and the Document Liberation Project. The Document Foundation also joins KDE e.V.'s group of advising community partners as an affiliate.
The KDE Community has been creating Free Software since 1996 and shares a lot of values around Free Software and open document formats with The Document Foundation, and brings the experience of running a Free Software organization for almost two decades to their advisory board. Both organizations are working in the OASIS technical committee for the OpenDocument Format. We also collaborate on common aspects of development of office software, such as usability and visual design. The affiliation of KDE e.V. and The Document Foundation on an organizational level will help to move forward with the shared goal of giving end users control of their computing needs through Free Software.
Some of you may know that Qt 3D is going strong almost entirely due to the work of the KDAB team, led by Dr. Sean Harmer and Paul Lemire. You can read all about its near demise and ultimate rescue here – it’s quite a story, and started with the release of Qt 4.
Now we are approaching another major chapter in the Qt 3D story, as Qt 5.7.0 is released along with a fully supported stable Qt 3D module. Qt 3D offers a high-level facility for 3D graphics, paving the way for making 3D content a first class citizen in Qt applications. This is big news!
New thoughts are being expressed about Gtk+ versioning.
There is something about numbering. Whatever. The numbering of Gtk+ versions is a problem I do not have. A problem I do not expect to have. Hence “whatever”.
But there is also a message about stability and it is a scary one.
The record (in terms of commit history) seems to not support your position — as much as you think everyone else is “delusional” about it, the commit log does not really lie.
The 2.24.0 release was cut in January, 2011 — five and half years ago. No new features, no new API. Precisely what would happen with the new release plan, except that the new plan would also give a much better cadence to this behaviour.
For the internship, we have been following a schedule where we research topics about usability testing. After that "research" phase, we'll start building our usability tests. And we are almost finished with that "research" phase.
In case you use GNOME, the GUADEC conference is also for users. In case you’re wondering if you’ll fit in: Everyone is usually super friendly. First year you go you go to see talks and maybe a few drinks (alcohol is optional). Second year you talk more with the people you met from last year. Third year onward the talks are an excuse to go and the only talks you see are the ones where the speakers asked you to please attend :P
I loved attending the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC). I want to go back, but travel to Europe is a bit expensive. And it's hard to get away for such a long trip. So I'm not to make it for this year's GUADEC.
For example, Pisi 2.0 is said to bring two features that I've always appreciated: a live disk (it was about time!) and an iso image writer to USB.
The Salix Xfce 14.2 GNU/Linux operating system is in development, and it looks like a public Beta version has just been released into the wild, allowing the community to see what's coming in the Slackware-based OS.
Salix Xfce 14.2 Beta 1 arrives on June 15, 2016, three months after the Alpha milestone, bringing many enhancements and new features, among which we can mention an improved boot menu that lets users choose in which language to install Salix, and a boot prompt is no longer available on the ISO image.
The top story in Linux news today was the release of Slackware Linux 1.1.0 featuring the latest Slackware-current and Plasma 5.6.5. Elsewhere, Christopher Tozzi penned a history of Open Source licenses and the Free Software Foundation published their first in a series of licensing resource guides. Douglas DeMaio blogged some of the latest news from Tumbleweed and Swapnil Bhartiya rounded up the best lightweight distros for your older PC.
It’s that time of the month again, where the three main software collections of the KDE community have had new releases. Time to package and release for Slackware!
ISO images for Slackware Live Edition based on the liveslak 1.1.0 scripts and using Slackware-current dated “Wed Jun 15 06:13:17 UTC 2016” are available as of now (I missed the 3rd update Pat made to slackware-current today but I think that’s acceptible). The Plasma5 variant contains the latest packages which I made publicly available earlier today.
Softpedia has been informed today, June 16, 2016, by Alessio Fattorini, that the final release of the NethServer 6.8 server-oriented, open-source, and free GNU/Linux operating system is now available for download.
I'm a member of two non-profits in my city. One of them is a sporting league, the other a community initiative to save a bit of land from commercial development. Both organizations are member-run. No one is paid to participate and external funding is minimal; in fact volunteers pay membership dues each year. Neither has a "CEO" or "board chair" position (other than those members arbitrarily give). These small non-profits barely have web presences—let alone a connection to the open movement.
Traditional business models function through rigid hierarchies, while open organizations use flexible teams to ensure maximum efficiency. We often associate "open" with "online" because certain technologies seem integral to remaining flexible in diverse communities. My offline communities have taught me four lessons about the ways open organizational principles don't necessarily rely on the digital technologies we tend to associate with them.
Systemd, the “bag of bits” that originally started as an init system but has since taken over a lot of the lower-level plumbing of GNU/Linux, has a controversial history. Some distributions were quick to take it up, whereas others were more hesitant, arguing that it was subject to feature-creep and violated some long-standing Unix principles.
Yesterday I was fixing an issue with one of the servers behind kallithea-scm.org: the hook intended to propagage pushes from Our Own Kallithea to Bitbucket stopped working. Until yesterday, that server was using Debian’s flavour of System V init and djb’s dæmontools to keep things running. To make the hook asynchronous, I wrote a service to be managed to dæmontools, so that concurrency issued would be solved by it. However, I didn’t implement any timeouts, so when last week wget froze while pulling Weblate’s hook, there was nothing to interrupt it, so the hook stopped working since dæmontools thought it’s already running and wouldn’t re-trigger it. Killing wget helped, but I decided I need to do something with it to prevent the situation from happening in the future.
Backstabbing banter, unconfirmed fact swaps and low blows are all fair definitions of the word “gossip”.
So workplace gossip is a HR nightmare, right?
Not necessarily, says Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst.
“Rule of thumb when it comes to office gossip: If you have more truth telling at the water cooler than in meetings, you’ve got a problem,” Whitehurst told Business Insider.
“You want to get to a place where people feel safe to share their thoughts, feelings, and opinions about a situation, beyond the water cooler.”
In a research note issued today, Pacific Crest Securities opined that Red Hat Inc. (NYSE:RHT) will report solid first quarter of fiscal 2017 (1QFY17) results, although seasonality is likely to bring in fewer large deals. The sell-side firm reaffirmed its Overweight rating on RHT stock, with an $88 price target.
If you work with Phabricator, by engaging with Kolab (for example), you may be interested to know about our Infrastructure and Tools repositories.
These contain Phabricator’s stable branches for Phabricator itself, arcanist and libphutil.
The Fedora Cloud Working Group met on June 7 and 8 in Raleigh to work on deliverables for Fedora 25 and beyond. As it turns out, we had a really productive set of discussions and have some good ideas for the Cloud Working Group going forward.
This doesn't just apply to side projects. Even with my work in the Fedora Project, I bounce between projects. Some days you'll see me spend time hacking on Infrastructure projects, helping with updates to servers, fixing services that go down randomly at 3am (I'm a night owl, so I'm up anyway). Other days you'll see me working on the packages I maintain, keeping them updated or fixing bugs that people report on them. Other days I'll work on Fedora's plethora of web applications, fixing bugs or writing Haskell clients to interact with them (finding and reporting bugs as I go). Still other days you'll see me work on the Websites team and pretend to be a designer. If I didn't have this freedom to move around between projects, I would not have lasted very long in the Fedora community. It is this freedom to move between projects that makes Fedora so interesting to me.
I didn’t have high hopes as there obviously are many more talented peers around me who understand FOSS and Debian at a much more fundamental, philosophical as well as technical level than me. Much to my surprise though, about a month (and around two or three weeks just before the event was about to take place) I got the bursary/sponsorships for food, accommodation as well as travel. I was unsure that the remaining time was enough to get a visa hence declined that time around.
We had a quick chat today with Marius GripsgÃÂ¥rd from UBports.com, a group of independent developers trying to port Canonical's Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system to as many devices as possible, about an upcoming port to OnePlus 3.
Yes, you're reading it right, OnePlus 3 is about to become an unofficial Ubuntu Phone, as Mr. GripsgÃÂ¥rd informs Softpedia today that he already ordered the device and will start development, porting of Ubuntu Touch, as soon as it arrives.
On June 15, 2016, Canonical's David Callé proudly announced the availability of an updated version of the snapd tool for Snappy Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating systems.
snapd 2.0.8 is now live, coming one month after the release of snapd 2.0.3 to bring various improvements to the technology Canonical uses to interact with the Snappy infrastructure of Ubuntu Core, a variant of the Ubuntu Linux OS designed for embedded and IoT devices.
Over the last 12 years since he started the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical, has made many efforts to bring about what he has characterised as unity in the Linux community.
Of course, whenever he has suggested such initiatives — like universal release schedules, for example — he has always had a vested interest in them himself. Nothing wrong with that, if the initiatives were also benefitting the Linux community at large.
But given that he has rubbed up far too many people the wrong way, his initiatives have generally failed to gain acceptance. And his latest move, to have a single packaging format for Linux packages, something he calls snap, has already brought out opposition.
If all goes according to the UBports team’s plans, OnePlus 3 may unofficially be powered by Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu developer, Marius GripsgÃÂ¥rd from UBports.com told Softpedia that they had acquired a OnePlus 3 and would soon be porting Ubuntu Touch onto it.
Granted, this was no deep dive into the belly of the beast, but it was a positive first step in introducing me to the world of Linux on a machine that was otherwise gathering dust in my closet. In comparison to how it ran with Windows XP, I was impressed with how quickly everything responded in Ubuntu MATE — though cautiously optimistic because I know that’s how it tends to go with newly installed operating systems. It’s only been a week so far since the installation, so I’ll see if it still plays nicely after being shackled to my habitually unreasonable human demands for a little longer.
Xilinx unveiled a dual-core “CG” version of its Cortex-A53/FPGA Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, and Mentor Graphics announced Android 5.1 and Linux support.
Back in Feb. 2015, Xilinx announced its next generation Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC (multiprocessor system-on-chip) follow-on to its popular Zynq 7000 hybrid ARM/FPGA system-on-chips. The 16nm, quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC, which features a faster FPGA, a GPU, and two Cortex-R5 MCUs, has reached production, and now Xilinx has revealed a dual-core “CG” version of the SoC due to ship in the first half of 2017.
Monohm has relaunched its disc-shaped, open source “Runcible” mobile device, which runs an Android-based OS on a Snapdragon 410, and has a 2.5-inch display.
The Runcible received a lot of media attention when it was originally announced running Firefox OS in Feb. 2015. But it also left a lot of questions. Was the rounded, disc-shaped gizmo a phone, a pocket smartwatch, or a hippie talisman for warding off mean people?
Thanks to open source software, Powering Potential and the Raspberry Pi Foundation are able to bring computers and a library of digital education content to rural schools in the East African nation of Tanzania. Recently, the Foundation funded a project that is now distributing Raspberry Pi computers with uploaded educational content alongside portable projectors and screens to 56 schools across the Zanzibar archipelago and two mainland regions of Tanzania. The Segal Family Foundation also provided matching funds, which enables the project to reach twice as many schools.
With a five-fold increase in the number of students in the decade following 2003, Tanzania is struggling to provide more schools, classrooms, teachers, desks, and textbooks. Yet whenever you visit rural secondary schools in Tanzania, you will find eager girls and boys in roughly equal numbers outfitted in uniforms with ready smiles.
I spoke with Janice Lathen, founding director and president of Powering Potential, to learn more about the program and its use of open source software.
Custom ROMs are fun. More than that, they offer ways to significantly extend the software life of phones. Manufacturer decides it no longer wants to support hardware? Hopefully someone out there will take up the mantle. But to do that, they need the kernel source code for a given device.
OnePlus has already made those files available for the OnePlus 3. Developers and tinkerers can snag the goods from Github.
Andy Rubin -- one of the people who invented the Android platform -- left Google in 2014, but he's still helping shape the future of technology. At Bloomberg Technology Conference, he revealed that one of the startups his hardware incubator is backing has a pretty lofty goal: finding a way to commercialize quantum computing devices with the manufacturing processes we use today. Rubin said new computing platforms "happen every 10 to 12 years." He believes it's time to start building quantum computers and using them to run AI.
Jide Technologies, a Chinese company that's known among Android fans as the developer of the PC-style interpretation of Android called the Remix OS, has launched a new tablet. The new Jide Remix Pro 2-in-1 follows Jide's two previous productivity-oriented Android devices, the Remix Mini PC and the Remix tablet.
Much like Microsoft's Surface tablets, the Jide Remix Pro comes with a keyboard dock accessory that transforms the slab into a notebook. However, unlike most other productivity-centered Android tablets, the Jide Remix Pro has a unique advantage.
While many Android manufacturers have attempted to create Android-based competitors to the Microsoft Surface, all of these attempts have been muffled by Android's multitasking limitations. Jide's Remix OS is an Android implementation that focuses on solving this struggle by allowing users to open multiple apps. Better still, these apps can be freely resized according to preference.
Chinese phone manufacturer Meizu showed off its m3s yesterday, and wow it sounds a lot like these phones from Xiaomi. What a day for Chinese Android phones! Like Xiaomi’s Redmi 3S, the m3s has two variations, one with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage and another with 3GB of RAM with 32GB of internal storage. They even have the same price of $106 for the 2GB version and $136 for the 3GB. Are these the exact same phones? Are you intrigued? Do you want an answer? Great. Here are some specs:
Despite the things I feel are missing from Android, I believe it remains the best mobile operating system for my needs. It's got the apps I want, allows me control over my phone and I get to choose my default applications. Perhaps best of all, I get to choose my user interface thanks to launchers like Nova. Toss in the fact that I get to choose my phone hardware vs having it dictated to me and I can't fathom returning to iOS – ever. My needs have simply outgrown it.
Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO of cloud computing services company Mirantis, wrote a blog post today sending a dire warning to the software industry. In his words: "numbered are the days of any company whose core business is pinned to selling licenses or subscriptions to infrastructure software bits."
Splice Machine, the startup behind a dual-engine relational database management system (RDBMS) powered by Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, last week announced that it would release that technology to open source.
Splice Machine uses resource isolation — separate processes and resource management for its Hadoop and Spark components — to ensure that large, complex online analytical processing (OLAP) queries don't overwhelm time-sensitive online transaction processing (OLTP) queries. The hybrid architecture allows you to run analytical workloads and transactional workloads concurrently — a boon for use cases ranging from digital marketing to ETL acceleration, operational data lakes, data warehouse offloads, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, web, mobile and social applications and operational applications.
Open source is a great career direction for newly minted computer science and IT graduates. Here's why.
The Holberton School got its start in 2015, offering the promise of a new way to teach students how to code. Now the school is expanding further, with a new partnership with PagerDuty, an IT incident management firm, that aims to teach students the reality of modern IT.
Netflix is hoping to open source a system it built to orchestrate the machine learning workflows that improve recommendations to users on what to watch next.
Being Open Source provides another great advantage to Arastta Cloud users: freedom of leaving. If you are not satisfied with the Arastta, then you can leave it with all your data because you can access all the files and database. But this is not possible with other cloud platforms since they only allow access to limited areas of your store.
Arastta Cloud brings all advantages of being an Open Source platform to its users but at the same time that doesn’t cost them. Whole structure is built as single-tenant, thus all stores are isolated from each other. In case of an attack or hack, it doesn’t affect other stores and accounts.
In the 7 years since ZFS development halted at Apple, they’ve worked on a variety of improvements in HFS and Core Storage, and hacked at at least two replacements for HFS that didn’t make it out the door. This week Apple announced their new filesystem, APFS, after 2 years in development. It’s not done; some features are still in development, and they’ve announced the ambitious goal of rolling it out to laptop, phone, watch, and tv within the next 18 months. At Sun we started ZFS in 2001. It shipped in 2005 and that was really the starting line, not the finish line. Since then I’ve shipped the ZFS Storage Appliance in 2008 and Delphix in 2010 and each has required investment in ZFS / OpenZFS to make them ready for prime time. A broadly featured, highly functional filesystem takes a long time.
For more than sixteen years, James Passingham, Chief Technical Officer at Foehn, has pioneered the development of communication systems using open source software. Here, James explains where government policy encouraging the use of open source is bearing fruit.
It was some four years ago, with the founding of the Government Digital Service (GDS), that open source software first came into the public sector limelight. Under the direction of Liam Maxwell, Government CTO at that time, the ‘Better for Less’ report that he co-authored set out the policies that gave government IT management the remit to pursue the advantages of two specific technologies – cloud and open source software.
Open source software development projects and public administrations have similar concerns about software support. The two also share an approach to classify software requirements, concludes the EU-FOSSA project, a software security audit project on open source by the European Commission and the European Parliament.
Romania’s electronic procurement portal ‘e-licitatie’ now provides more information on the public procurement process, the portal announced on 8 June. Users can now find preliminary information on planned calls for tender, and can learn how to bid for national and European contracts.
The European Commission published this week an update to its eGovernment factsheet. The previous version was from 2015. This factsheet update is the last in the suite of 34 covering eGovernment in Europe. The text presents an overview of the state and progress of eGovernment in Europe and at the European Commission.
On the political level, this 2016 update casts a light on numerous strategic directions, programmes and initiatives promoted at European level in order to deliver sustainable, economic and social benefits from a Digital Single Market. One of these programmes is the freshly launched EU eGovernment Action plan 2016-2020 substantiated into 20 concrete actions. This plan strives for efficient, inclusive, user friendly and end-to-end digital public services in EU by 2020.
Next week, France’s platform for civil servants working on free software, Adullact, will unveil its revamped software development platform and repository. At its 6th annual congress, the association will also launch a label to highlight and reward French public administrations contributing to free software.
Open source software licenses may not excite people as much as open source code, but they have been just as important in keeping software free. Open source licensing as we know it today didn't always exist, however. It evolved as programmers developed more sophisticated strategies regarding their intellectual property.
Below is a look at the major milestones in open source licensing history. It doesn't cover every twist and turn. That would take a book.
But it outlines the major arc in open source licensing strategies, from the days when free software promoters disdained licenses altogether through present-day battles about software licensing and the cloud.
One of our main goals here in the Free Software Foundation's Licensing & Compliance Lab is education. Over the years we have created a wide breadth of tools and resources to help users and developers understand free software licenses and related legal issues. We've been doing this for so long that some resources, published some years ago but still very relevant, aren't consulted as often as they could be. With all these great tools available, we thought it would be good to take some time to highlight individual resources that you may not know about. With that, we are starting a regular series of articles, each promoting a particular tool or resource to help you understand the legal side of free software.
The robots are coming and 3D printing is partially to blame for the impending invasion. Similar in concept but different in execution to the 3D printed WireBeings robot we covered a few months back, Marty the Robot is a being promoted through a new indiegogo campaign that's hoping to introduce robotics to younger generations.
Open sourcing your code is one thing – openly sharing your roadmap, marketing playbook, and strategy is another matter entirely. In New Orleans, GitLab CMO Ashley Smith gave me the skinny on GitLab’s business model, and how a radical open source style drives their growth.
Microsoft has just rolled out a new update for its Office productivity suite on iOS devices, so iPhone and iPad users can now benefit from important additions, such as support for the OpenDocument format.
All productivity apps included in the Office suite have been updated to version 1.22, which, according to the listings added in the App Store, comes with support for exporting a document to the OpenDocument Text (.ODT) format.
No other change is included in the release notes, although some other bug fixes and performance improvements are very likely to be part of the update, but the addition of ODT format support for exporting is anyway a pretty important thing.
Microsoft's most recent security update is causing problems with Windows Group Policy settings.
Users on Reddit and Microsoft support forums are reporting that after the MS16-072 update was installed, changes were made in Group Policy object (GPO) settings that left previously hidden drives and devices accessible.
"I installed windows patches last night and this morning found out that there were a number of issues with my GPOs," writes one admin.
"Example: desktop image would not show up, A, B, C and D drives that were meant to be hidden from users are now showing up."
When teachers were asked why teaching climate change correctly is such a difficult task, their answers made sense.
Not only did they report being challenged by peers and parents when attempting to teach the science behind climate change, they also said a lack of aligned materials is to blame, too.
In 2014, a class of drugs known as opioids were involved in more than 28,000 deaths, or 61 percent of all drug overdose deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The rate of opioid overdoses has tripled since the year 2000. Recent data show two different but related trends: an increase in so-called illicit opioid overdoses, largely due to heroin, and then this 15-year increase in overdose deaths involving prescription opioid pain relievers. Those drugs, like oxycodone and hydrocodone, or brand names like OxyContin and Vicodin, account for more than 16,000 fatal overdoses each year. The CDC says they’re comfortable using the term “epidemic” to describe the crisis.
The research of Yang Yu, founder of Tencent's Xuanwu Lab, has helped Microsoft patch a severe security issue in its implementation of the NetBIOS protocol that affected all Windows versions ever released.
Microsoft is today closing off a vulnerability that one Chinese researcher claims has "probably the widest impact in the history of Windows." Every version of the Microsoft operating system going back to Windows 95 is affected, leaving anyone still running unsupported operating systems, such as XP, in danger of being surreptitiously surveilled.
According to Yang Yu, founder of Tencent's Xuanwu Lab, the bug can be exploited silently with a "near-perfect success rate", as the problems lie in the design of Windows. The ultimate impact? An attacker can hijack all a target's web use, granting the hacker "Big Brother power", as soon as the victim opens a link or plugs in a USB stick, claimed Yu. He received $50,000 from Microsoft's bug bounty program for uncovering the weakness, which the researcher has dubbed BadTunnel. Microsoft issued a fix today in its Patch Tuesday list of updates.
"Even security software equipped with active defense mechanisms are not able to detect the attack," Yu told FORBES. "Of course it is capable of execute malicious code on the target system if required."
GNU/Linux and never had any problems with software the rest of the school year. I’ve been using GNU/Linux ever since and have had no regrets. It’s been the right way to do IT. My wife saw the light a few years ago. She was tired of years of TOOS failing every now and then and needing re-installation. Once her business started using a web application, she had no more need of TOOS, none.
Recent Intel x86 processors implement a secret, powerful control mechanism that runs on a separate chip that no one is allowed to audit or examine. When these are eventually compromised, they'll expose all affected systems to nearly unkillable, undetectable rootkit attacks. I've made it my mission to open up this system and make free, open replacements, before it's too late.
By exploiting the SS7 flaw, a hacker can hack someone’s Facebook account just by knowing the associated phone number. This flaw allows a hacker to divert the OTP code to his/her own phone and use it to access the victim’s Facebook account. The security researchers, who have explained the hack in a video, advise the users to avoid adding their phone numbers to the public services.
An Anonymous-affiliated hacker has painted numerous ISIS Twitter accounts with gay pride messages and pictures in support of the Orlando shooting victims. On the other hand, a 21-year-old hacker has pleaded guilty to helping ISIS and he is scheduled to get a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.
Public schoolchildren in Michigan are now required to learn about the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide as part of their social studies curriculum, according to a law Governor Rick Snyder signed on Tuesday.
While most students in Michigan no doubt learn about the Holocaust already, the new law would require teachers in public schools to spend a certain amount of time on these topics. Between eighth and 12th grades, schools must spend a combined six hours on genocide education, specifically the Holocaust—in which, during World War II, Nazi Germany killed 11 million Jews, Roma, and other ethnic minorities—and the Armenian genocide—in which Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1920. While Turkey denies a genocide took place, 29 countries and 45 U.S. states use the term “genocide” to refer to the killings.
Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has a moral responsibility to try to ease tensions between majority Buddhists and minority Rohingya Muslims, her fellow Nobel laureate, the Dalai Lama, said on Monday.
The Tibetan spiritual leader said he had stressed the issue in meetings with Suu Kyi, who came to power in April in the newly created role of state counsellor in Myanmar’s first democratically elected government in five decades.
“She already has the Nobel Peace Prize, a Nobel Laureate, so morally she should… make efforts to reduce this tension between the Buddhist community and Muslim community,” he told Reuters in an interview in Washington.
“I actually told her she should speak more openly.”
Violence between majority Buddhists and minority Muslims in recent years has cast a cloud over progress with democratic reforms in Myanmar. Rights groups have sharply criticised Suu Kyi‘s reluctance to speak out on the Rohingya‘s plight.
The Dalai Lama said Suu Kyi, who won worldwide acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize as a champion of democratic change in the face of military persecution, had responded to his calls by saying that the situation was “really complicated.”
Not long after last Sunday’s deadly shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a news story published by Fox News suggested that the shooter, Omar Mateen, had been radicalized by his connection to a local imam.
Citing anonymous officials, the report claimed that a man named Marcus Dwayne Robertson, also known as Abu Taubah, had been “rounded up,” along with several of his associates, in connection to the attack. The official quoted in the article, described as “a law enforcement source familiar with Robertson’s history of recruiting terrorists and inciting violence,” claimed that Mateen had been a student of Robertson’s online Islamic seminary.
Democratic leaders came out in force on Wednesday in favor of a proposal to prohibit Americans who are on federal government terrorist watchlists from purchasing firearms. A group of Democratic senators waged a fillibuster on the Senate floor. And after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump announced that he intends to meet with the powerful National Rifle Association to discuss a similar restriction, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton welcomed him to the cause.
Normally, when the FBI identifies a Muslim mouthing off about joining ISIS, they throw one or more informants at him, develop his trust, then have him press a button or buy a plane ticket to Syria, which they use to arrest the guy.
That didn’t happen here. While they did record the conversations between these informants and Mateen, they never got him to do something they could arrest him for.
We can rail against ISIS, hate crimes, terror threats, Islamic radicalization, gun control and national security. We can blame Muslims, lax gun laws, a homophobic culture and a toxic politic environmental. We can even use the Orlando shooting as fodder for this year’s presidential campaigns.
But until we start addressing the U.S. government’s part in creating, cultivating and abetting domestic and global terrorism – and hold agencies such as the FBI and Defense Department accountable for importing and exporting violence, breeding extremism and generating blowback, which then gets turned loose on an unsuspecting American populace – we’ll be no closer to putting an end to the violence that claimed 50 lives at an Orlando nightclub on June 12, 2016, than we were 15 years ago when nearly 3,000 individuals were killed on Sept. 11, 2001.
As NATO steps up military maneuvers near Russia’s borders and congressmen fume about “Russian aggression,” a delegation of Americans including former U.S. officials is looking for face-to-face ways to encourage peace, writes Ann Wright.
Eyewitneses have described the moment Labour MP Jo Cox was shot outside her consitituency office in Birstall.
Ms Cox is believed to be a in a “critical condition” and has been airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary. The Labour MP was shot while holding an advice surgery for her constituents.
Julian Assange, editor-in chief of WikiLeaks, says the whistle-blowing journalism organization will soon be publishing unreleased emails from Hillary Clinton.
Clinton, the Democratic Party presidential front-runner, has been under criminal investigation by the FBI for using a personal email account on a private server in her home that contained top-secret information.
Assange doesn’t believe that Clinton will be indicted, but argues that the government has more than enough evidence, in both her emails and in the dealings of the Clinton Foundation, if it were truly committed to doing so.
“We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton,” Assange said. “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”
Assange made these remarks in an interview with the British ITV network on Sunday. The host noted WikiLeaks has been “taking interest” in Clinton’s use of the private email server.
When Edward Snowden went public as the NSA whistleblower in 2013, few were surprised that a system administrator was behind the spy agency’s leak. Inside administrators who hold the keys to an organization’s data kingdom are a much greater threat to security than outside hackers.
Now it appears another technical insider may be connected to a leak at Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the heart of the massive Panama Papers scandal. A computer technician employed by Mossack Fonseca’s Geneva office was arrested this week on suspicion of removing “large amounts of data” from the law firm’s network, according to Swiss newspaper Le Temps. Le Temps reported that the worker was arrested after the law firm filed a complaint accusing him of unauthorized access and breach of trust, and of stealing a large amount of confidential data. Investigators also seized computers in the law firm’s Swiss office.
The Air Force says there's no evidence of malicious intent, as far as it can tell. But there's also no evidence of competence. Why is it that files related to oversight of a government agency have no apparent redundancy? It's small details like these that show the government generally isn't much interested in policing itself.
If anything's going to be recovered, it's going to be Lockheed's job, and it's already spent a few weeks trying with little success. There may be some files stored locally at bases where investigations originated, but they're likely to be incomplete.
While I understand the inherent nature of bureaucracy makes it difficult to build fully-functioning systems that can handle digital migration with any sort of grace, it's completely incomprehensible that a system containing files collected over the last decade would funnel into a single storage space with no backup. It's one thing if this was just the Air Force's fault.
But this is more Lockheed's fault -- and despite its position as a favored government contractor -- it's also known for its innovation and technical prowess. Neither of those qualities are on display in this public embarrassment. And if it can't recover the data, it's pretty much erasing more than a decade's-worth of government mistakes, abuse, and misconduct. And while no one's going to say anything remotely close to this out loud, there has to be more than a few people relieved to see black marks on their permanent records suddenly converted to a useless tangle of 1s and 0s.
Singapore cannot step further to enter Indonesia’s legal domain on the issue of forest fires because the two countries do not have an agreement in the matter, said Indonesia’s Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar.
“The protocol on forest fires in the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act (THPA) is a multilateral agreement, so there was never a bilateral agreement between Indonesia and Singapore, that must be remembered,” Dr Nurbaya said during a breaking of fast session with reporters on Monday (Jun 13).
She was responding to a question about Singapore’s Transboundary Haze Pollution Act (THPA) which it passed in 2014 to go after companies that start fires or let their concessions burn.
Indonesia has taken issue with Singapore's attempts to act against companies responsible for the haze-causing forest fires that choked parts of Indonesia and the region. Jakarta previously objected by lodging a strong protest through its ambassador in Singapore.
Dr Nurbaya said that she has explained to Singapore’s Foreign Minister that the THPA is controversial, and that it is being continuously discussed on the Asean’s sub-regional ministers level between Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand.
The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, later named Papahānaumokuākea, was established by Presidential Proclamation 8031 on June 15, 2006 using the Antiquities Act. It was created to protect an exceptional array of natural and cultural resources. It encompasses 139,797 square miles of the Pacific Ocean and is home to more than 7,000 marine species, one quarter of which are found only in the Hawaiian Archipelago.
When the negotiations for the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada were concluded in September 2014, the text was finally released after years of secrecy. At the time, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put together what remains the best overall analysis of the main text's 1598 pages, in a series of studies collectively called "Making Sense of CETA." The same organization has now published a set of analyses looking at key aspects of TPP, entitled "What’s the big deal? Understanding the Trans-Pacific Partnership".
They are all worth looking at, but Techdirt readers will probably be particularly interested in one called "Foreign investor protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership." It's by Gus Van Harten, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto, Canada, and a well-known commentator on trade law and policy. The first part of his analysis provides a good summary of the world of corporate sovereignty, or investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) as it is more formally known. The later section looks at some new research that provides additional insight into just how bad corporate sovereignty is for those of us who are not insanely rich.
For example, Van Harten quotes some recent work showing that 90% of ISDS fines against countries went to corporations with over $1 billion in annual revenue or to individuals with over $100 million in net wealth. Similarly, the success rate among the largest multinationals -- those with turnovers of at least $10 billion -- was 71% in the 48 cases they initiated, compared with a success rate for everyone else of 42%. So any claim that ISDS is equally useful to all companies, including small and medium-sized businesses, is not borne out by the facts.
Around half of the people in 26 countries surveyed by Reuters, including Australia, say they use social media as a source of news each week, with one in 10 saying it was their main source.
Of the 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed, 28% cited social media as their main news source, compared with 24% for TV.
As Husseini noted in a response on his own blog (6/15/16), the correction does little to explain the significance of Temple-Raston’s mistake: She had speculated that ISIS might intentionally attack the United States in the run-up to the November elections, possibly in order to help elect Donald Trump, since “they would be able to perhaps get more recruits because of the way he talks about Muslims.” Though noting there was no evidence that this was happening, Temple-Raston claimed that “it’s happened in the past”—which is how she led in to her false statement that “the more conservative candidate ended up winning” in the Spanish election immediately following the Madrid train station bombing.
Why would Hillary threaten workaday Americans with another poke in the eye from her con man spouse?
Amos was jailed last year for making offensive remarks against Christianity and posting obscene images online. He was charged in Court again on May 26 this year and faces 8 charges.
The liberal Indian who cares for the rule of law and freedom of expression now faces a unique predicament. He must acquiesce to the arbitrary and whimsical decisions of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and allow Pahlaj Nihalani and his bunch of hypersensitive nannies to expand their reach and become the nation’s moral arbiters. Or he must turn to overburdened courts to restrain the board’s wanton vandalism and restore some sanity, such as treating audiences as responsible adults and not as mollycoddled, over-protected and impressionable adolescents.
Multiple Twitter users have reported that the popular #GaysForTrump hashtag is being censored on the platform.
A GIF posted by Twitter user @PunishedSage has revealed that the Twitter hashtag does not appear in the site’s suggested searches. When you type “#GaysFor” or even “#GaysForTr” into the site’s search function, the hashtags does not appear as a recommendation, despite its popularity in the wake of the Orlando shootings.
Indian film producer Anurag Kashyap and Central Board of Film Certification chief Pahlaj Nihalani are pressing for the censorship guidance to be revamped.
A developer named Ben Erez has blamed Cupertino for stealing his Yoga-inspired app called “Breathe”. At WWDC 2016, along with the unveiling of watchOS 3, Apple revealed its own breathing app named Breathe. Taking a look at both the apps, they seem quite familiar in appearance and behavior.
After a series of objections from the India's Censor Board, Bollywood film Udta Punjab was recently cleared for release with just a single cut. However on June 15, the prints of the entire film were leaked online, just two days before its release on June 17.
Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor and Diljit Dosanjh's Udta Punjab engaged in a legal battle with the CBFC after it ordered the film to make a total of 94 alterations in film. The makers were furious with CBFC, but with a favourable court ruling, will it pave the way for better censorship in India...
In addition to the $21 billion made annually by cable set top box rental fees, cable companies make untold billions from monetizing the user viewing data these boxes help collect. That captive revenue alone is the driving force behind the pay TV sectors histrionic opposition to the FCC's plan to open the sector up to third-party hardware competition. Consumer viewing and behavioral data is an immense cash cow, one the cable industry has occasionally threatened to take even further -- with patents on tech that lets the cable box literally watch or listen in on American living rooms.
While things haven't quite reached that level of total information awareness yet, consumer groups this week filed a formal complaint with both the FTC and FCC arguing that things have gone far enough. Public Knowledge, the Center for Digital Democracy and Consumer Watchdog have filed formal privacy complaints with both the FCC and FTC saying that major cable companies routinely fail to inform consumers about the degree in which their viewing data is collected, stored and monetized via ye olde cable box.
"Go to Teufelsberg," he replied confidently, before going on to explain that Teufelsberg is an abandoned listening post in West Berlin that the US National Security Agency (NSA) once used to intercept East Berlin and Soviet communications...
When I first started seeking out other victims, about six months ago, I did not want to formally report any of the stories I had heard from Jake’s victims to the Tor Project or others, for two primary reasons. First, that my main motivation in this was to ensure that these behaviours stopped, and it was not clear to me that any traditional punitive “justice” measures would achieve such. Second, I feared retaliation from Jake, as well as retaliation towards any of the victims whose stories I would divulge. Multiple victims at the time expressed that they didn’t want me to tell The Tor Project, later admitting they feared retaliation to be extremely likely, as well as difficult to combat.
Last week, a county in California encompassing much of Silicon Valley set a new standard in local surveillance transparency after months of activism by residents and allies from across the bay area. Their efforts, and the policy it enabled, suggest an overlooked strategy in the national battle to curtail unaccountable secret mass surveillance.
While federal agencies play a controversial role in monitoring Americans, their local counterparts also conduct similar activities—not only in the context of counterterrorism, but even for the sake of routine public safety. While concerns about the militarization of local police have long united Americans across the political spectrum, the metastasis of surveillance platforms across local police departments, county sheriffs, and state highway patrols too often went largely unnoticed until recently.
Top government officials in Scotland are under pressure to explain their knowledge of a secretive police surveillance unit that was exposed in documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
On Tuesday, cabinet secretary for justice Michael Matheson was grilled in the country’s parliament about the so-called Scottish Recording Centre and its previously undisclosed involvement in covert surveillance operations.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is interested in collecting information from biomedical devices for national security purposes, according to recent statements made by the agency’s deputy director, Richard Ledgett. Under- and unprotected devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), including medical devices, could be both a help and a hindrance to intelligence agencies like NSA, he said, providing them with a wealth of information and potentially exposing them to terrorist surveillance.
LinkedIn, for its part, has been struggling; in February, its stock dropped more than forty per cent in a single day, after it announced a forecast that fell far short of what analysts had expected. The company’s C.E.O., Jeff Weiner, has blamed its recent troubles largely on a broader economic slowdown; LinkedIn’s business model relies on charging employers and employees for premium services, like sending messages to strangers, and when the economy isn’t thriving headhunters and workers tend not to be as willing to pay for connections. But the dominance of Facebook, among other big rivals, has also made it harder for LinkedIn, whose ad business competes with Facebook’s, to survive as an independent company. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in a Profile, last year, of the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, “Silicon Valley is obsessed with ‘scale,’ and LinkedIn is, as yet, insufficiently enormous.” On Monday, Weiner acknowledged as much. “Imagine a world where we’re no longer looking up at Tech Titans such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, and wondering what it would be like to operate at their extraordinary scale—because we’re one of them,” he wrote.
Another injunction request has been filed in response to a Phil Mocek public records request pertaining to Seattle's power utility. This time, Mocek and MuckRock (through which Mocek's requests have been routed) are not named as defendants. It's only the city of Seattle and its public utility (Seattle City Light) being named as defendants, but Mocek's public records request is specified in the federal court filing [PDF]. (h/t Mike Scarcella)
This time, the plaintiff isn't a multinational corporation. It's the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The nexus for the FBI's attempt to block further disclosures to Mocek (and other requesters like local new station KIRO) is its remora-esque relationship with Seattle's public utility. After a long paragraph utilizing terms like "tradecraft," "concealments," and "advanced electronic surveillance," we finally get to the real reason the FBI wants the court to keep the city of Seattle from handing out any more public utility documents to requesters.
The head of the House Intelligence Committee is hand-delivering a letter to colleagues on Capitol Hill, demanding they not restrict the FBI’s surveillance power — and citing the recent mass shooting in Orlando as justification. The letter opposes a proposed amendment that would put an end to FBI “backdoor” searches of an NSA database of foreign intelligence without judicial oversight.
“The national security threats to the United States and its allies are greater today than at any point since 9/11. To keep Americans safe, our intelligence community needs to fully employ every tool available to it,” Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., wrote in the letter obtained by The Intercept, cosigned with Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga.
There’s much that’s depressingly familiar about the news coming out of Orlando, where Omar Mateen committed the worst mass shooting of its kind in U.S. history: the heartbreaking images and stories of survivors and the relatives of those gunned down; the almost immediate offering of empty platitudes by politicians conspiring to do nothing about yet another bloodbath carried out with a high-powered weapon; the just-as-immediate resort to naked bigotry by the ignorant and the unscrupulous; the eagerness to declare the shooter in some way associated with foreign terror threats before the bodies of the dead are cold.
A new justice department-funded study concludes that a version of the so-called “Ferguson Effect” is a “plausible” explanation for the spike in violent crime seen in most of the country’s largest cities in 2015, but cautions that more research is still needed.
The study, released by the National Institute of Justice on Wednesday, suggests three possible drivers for the more than 16% spike in homicide from 2014 to 2015 in 56 of the nation’s largest cities. But based on the timing of the increase, University of Missouri St Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld concluded, there is “stronger support” for some version of the Ferguson Effect hypothesis than its alternatives.
Freedom of the Press Foundation recently filed a huge brief in the organization's case demanding that the Justice Department release its secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters. And in related news, a coalition of 37 news organizations - including the New York Times, The Associated Press, USA Today, Buzzfeed, and tons more - filed an amicus brief in support of the Freedom of the Press Foundation case, demanding that the Department of Justice do the same.
A coalition of thirty-seven of news organizations—including the New York Times, the Associated Press, NPR, USA Today, and Buzzfeed—filed a legal brief over the weekend in support of Freedom of the Press Foundation’s case demanding that the Justice Department release its secret rules for targeting journalists with National Security Letters (NSLs).
A cache of declassified documents has revealed new details about the CIA’s torture program. Among other findings, the records show a prisoner who was waterboarded 83 times was likely willing to cooperate with interrogators before the torture. The account from medical personnel who helped with the first waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah deals a major blow to the CIA’s insistence it gained crucial information through torture.
The CIA released 50 new documents yesterday relating to its post-9/11 torture and rendition program. Despite the many disclosures that have come in the course of our decade-long fight to reveal the details of the program, the new revelations still have the capacity to shock.
The CIA on Tuesday released dozens of documents detailing its torture and rendition program under the Bush administration, from the horrific treatment of detainees to the agency's 2002 plan to ask the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) not to prosecute interrogators.
The heavily redacted trove of more than 50 documents was published in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the ACLU last year, which sought records referenced in the U.S. Senate's damning report on the CIA's program—commonly referred to as the torture report—released in December 2014.
Spurred by concerns about problem nurses, New York lawmakers are racing to pass legislation to toughen oversight of more than 50 types of licensed professionals in the state.
Earlier this month, Senate and Assembly committees unanimously passed bills that would allow the state Education Department to suspend licenses more swiftly and compel more reporting of criminal convictions and misconduct. A ProPublica investigation published in April found New York lagged behind other states in these regards, citing examples of nurses who retained their licenses even after being charged with or convicted of violent crimes.
Later this week, many of the nation’s best investigative journalists will be gathering in New Orleans for the annual Investigative Reporters & Editors conference. They’ll swap ideas, learn new skills and hopefully return to their hometowns to dig with renewed fervor. Full disclosure: I serve on the board of IRE, so can be totally unbiased in saying that I think the organization is the best resource in the universe for investigative reporters.
With just over a week to go before Britons vote on whether or not to leave the European Union, the campaign for “independence” from the EU has turned farcical and deeply nasty, with nationalists relying heavily on anti-immigrant hysteria and racism to make their case.
And it turns out that Donald Trump has chosen next Friday, June 24 — the day the referendum votes will be counted — to visit his mother’s ancestral homeland, Scotland. Trump’s avowed purpose is to celebrate the reopening of a golf resort he owns there, but the timing suggests he may be hoping to be on hand to cheer the success of a reactionary political movement based on the same sort of appeals to nativism and xenophobia that have served him so well in America.
Apple has taken its turn at the hammer, and added its own i-Nail to the coffin of Flash.
Over at the Webkit blog, Ricky Mondello of the Safari team writes that Safari 10, due in the northern fall, will “behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed”.
Instead, it will try to default to HTML5 for content like video, and Safari will not ship with an exception list. If a site only offers Flash, the user will have to explicitly switch it on for that site and add it to their own exceptio
Whenver we discuss a particularly egregious case of trademark abuse, usually centered around the trademarking of some insanely common word or phrase, there's always at least one instance of "that joke" in the comments. You know the joke I'm talking about: well, I'll just trademark X and sue everyone, where X=super-common word or phrase. For example: "I'll just trademark "trademark" and sue anyone who uses a trademark!", or, "I'll just trademark "the" and sue everyone who uses it!" These jokes play on the common problem of generic terms being granted trademarks, but of course they are examples so ridiculous that it couldn't happen for those specific words and terms. Still, to our lovely commenters, we say, "Thank you."
Who knew? Banking giant Citigroup has trademarked "THANKYOU" and is now suing technology giant AT&T for how it says thanks to its own loyal customers. This is "unlawful conduct" amounting to wanton trademark infringement, Citigroup claims in its federal lawsuit.
Here is a copy (PDF) of the trademark certificates and trademark applications connected to what Citigroup is calling its "THANKYOU Marks."
The UK's trade association for providers of Internet services have nominated a notorious copyright troll for the much coveted title of "Internet Villain of the Year". ISPA UK, which counts the major ISPs and Google as members, shortlisted TCYK LLC for its "speculative invoicing" campaign against Internet account holders.
Copyright is supposed to be a limited-use protection for creative works. The "limited" part went away with endless term extensions and auto-copyright for any creation attached to a "fixed medium." These days, copyright is the magical cure-all that doesn't actually cure anything. It's a weapon to be wielded dishonestly and inelegantly against the ignorant, in hopes of limiting speech to only what IP abusers like.