Day 1 of my "I'm a ridiculous person who is going to use nothing but a Linux terminal for 30 days" experiment is complete. And it was not an easy day. Not bad. Just... challenging.
The day started as I expected it to. I fired up a terminal window and made it full screen and launched tmux—a terminal multiplexer. (I'm keeping a traditional desktop environment running in the background for a few days as a safety net while I get things working just right.)
For those new to the concept of a terminal multiplexer, think of it like a tiled window manager (multiple windows arranged in a non-overlapping fashion)—only just for terminals. That way you can have multiple shell sessions (and multiple applications) running at the same time within the same terminal.
Hardware that ships with Linux installed isn't as rare as it used to be. System 76, Purism, ZaReason, and others have been cranking out hardware with Linux pre-installed for quite a while now. But while those of us who use Linux may know these companies, there's only one household name that currently ships laptops with Linux installed—Dell.
Dell's Project Sputnik has been dedicating resources to creating a "just works" experience for Dell Ultrabooks running Ubuntu for nearly four years now. Lead developer Barton George, who leads the effort, and other developers have been writing code where necessary (and contributing that code back upstream) and refining the user experience to a point where everything does indeed just work.
Today, June 16, 2016, Entroware, a British hardware manufacturer known for building laptops with Ubuntu or Ubuntu MATE GNU/Linux operating system pre-installed, had the great pleasure to inform Softpedia about an exciting new product.
When you are considering a switch to a computer with Linux pre-installed, you may be surprised to discover that the hardware is about the same price as a comparable Windows machine. You may have heard of something called the "Microsoft Tax" which refers to the extra price you pay for the cost of Windows on a computer that you buy with the intention of installing Linux on it. As a result, you may think that you should pay less for an equivalent computer with Linux pre-installed. After all, Linux is free and Windows sells for hundreds of dollars. But you don't. That's because the so-called Microsoft Tax doesn't really exist. It's a myth.
Acer's CXI2 Chromebox line-up is now supported by mainline Coreboot.
The CXI2 has been using Coreboot similar to other Chromebook/Chromebox devices, but wasn't supported by mainline Coreboot. That changed yesterday with the code now working its way into mainline Git.
Apache enterprise software plays a key role, including Mesos, Kafka, Spark, and the Apache HTTP server. And a host of other OSS software, including Docker, Ansible, CoreOS, DHCPD, Ubuntu Linux, and Fleet.
No, the operating system enablement only supports applications of the same type. As such, a little endian operating system (ppc64le or ppc64el) can only run little endian applications built for this software platform. Likewise, big endian operating systems (ppc64) only support software built for big endian.
CoreOS Linux, an open source Linux operating system, is now available in China. Microsoft Azure operator 21Vianet has become the first officially supported cloud provider to offer CoreOS Linux in China. Until now, many Chinese organizations have deployed CoreOS Linux internally, on their own.
Students at the Holberton School, San Francisco’s innovative new school for training students of any age to be full stack software engineers, are being woken early, really early, to learn just what’s it’s like to be a part of a DevOps team.
Container technology is rapidly transforming the way enterprises develop and deliver applications, and adoption is set to ramp up spectacularly in the next year, even as obstacles towards adoption persist.
Today, June 16, 2016, Ben Hutchings had the pleasure of announcing two new maintenance updates for the Linux 3.2 and Linux 3.16 long-term supported kernel series, Linux kernel 3.2.81 and Linux kernel 3.16.36.
We reported earlier on the release of the Linux 3.2.81 LTS kernel, and we promised to tell you what's new in the thirty-sixth maintenance update of the long-term supported Linux 3.16 kernel series as well.
Linux kernel 3.16.36 LTS was also announced by Linux kernel developer Ben Hutchings today, June 16, 2016, immediately after he released Linux 3.2.81. Looking at the diff from the previous maintenance release, version 3.16.35, we can notice that the Linux 3.16.36 kernel is a big update that changes a total of 140 files, with 1416 insertions and 1004 deletions.
Today the Linux Foundation announced a set of technical, leadership and member investment milestones for OpenHPC, a Linux Foundation project to develop an open source framework for High Performance Computing environments.
In the world of networking and network switches and routing, there are some interesting open source moves afoot. The Linux Foundation, has announced that the OpenSwitch Project is becoming a Linux Foundation project. OpenSwitch is an open source, Linux-based network operating system (NOS) designed to power enterprise grade switches from multiple hardware vendors that will enable organizations to rapidly build data center networks that are customized for unique business needs.
This week I was invited by Memblaze to give a talk on Data Center Technology Conference 2016 about Linux MD RAID performance on NVMe SSD. In the past 3 years, Linux community make a lot of effort to improve MD RAID performance on high speed media, especially on RAID456. I happen to maintain block layer for SUSE Linux, back port quite a lot patches back to Linux 3.12.
As covered here recently, a continuously growing group of top technology and finance companies including IBM, Wells Fargo and the London Stock Exchange Group is partnering and working with The Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technology, which is central to how many businesses process transactions. if you ask some people, they'll tell you that the concept of the Blockchain is as dramatic as the creation of the Internet.
For your viewing pleasure this Friday is our largest Windows vs. Linux graphics/gaming performance comparison ever conducted at Phoronix in the past 12 years! With the brand new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards, their performance was compared under Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 when using the very latest NVIDIA Corp drivers for each OS. A range of Steam gaming benchmarks and more were done, including some cross-platform Vulkan graphics benchmarks. Continue on for this interesting comparison.
NetData is a free, simple, yet useful utility that provides the real-time performance monitoring for your Linux systems, applications, SNMP devices, and visualize the result in a web browser with comprehensive detail. So, you can clearly get an idea of what is happening now, and what happened before in your Linux systems and applications. You don’t need to be an expert to deploy this tool in your Linux systems. NetData just works fine out of the box with zero configuration, and zero dependencies. Just install this utility and sit back, NetData will take care of the rest.
Koschei is a continuous integration service for RPM packages. It helps developers fix bugs as fast as possible. It tracks package dependency changes in Rawhide, the bleeding-edge, development version of Fedora. Packages whose dependencies change too much are rebuilt. Koschei logs these rebuilds, displaying dependency changes and current state.
It tries to detect packages that fail to scratch-build from source (FTBFS) in Rawhide. (A scratch build is a short-term, temporary build Fedora doesn’t ship to users.) To do this, it builds packages from the latest available source in Koji, the Fedora build system. However, you don’t need a special Koji client for this purpose.
Oracle has announced the release and general availability of VirtualBox 5.0.22, a new maintenance update of his open-source and cross-platform virtualization software for all supported platforms.
Both Alex and I have been experimenting with 3rd-party app distribution for quite some time, with me working on Listaller and him working on Glick and Glick2. All these projects never went anywhere. Around the time when I started Limba, fixing design mistakes done with Listaller, Alex started a new attempt at software distribution, this time with sandboxing added to the mix and a new OSTree-based design of the software-distribution mechanism. It wasn’t at all clear that XdgApp, later to be renamed to Flatpak, would get huge backing by GNOME and later Red Hat, becoming a very promising candidate for a truly cross-distro software distribution system.
The open source Git distributed version control system, the cornerstone of the GitHub code-sharing site, has been upgraded with faster submodules and improvements for diffs and testing.
Version 2.9, released this week, expands options for submodules, which enable users to keep another Git repository in a subdirectory of a repository. The submodule improvements focus on speed and flexibility.
A new version of Git was released this week, bringing a number of improvements that will be a welcome sight to software developers. Alongside the normal bug fixes and general maintenance work, some interesting new experimental features have been added.
Today, June 17, 2016, Calibre developer Kovid Goyal has proudly announced the release and general availability of the Calibre 2.59 update of the open-source and cross-platform ebook library management software.
Calibre 2.59 arrives after only one week after the debut of Calibre 2.58, the previous point release that added compatibility with the latest Qt 5.x technologies (Qt 5.5 or later) on the Ubuntu Linux operating systems. And it looks like it introduces several improvements to the Amazon Metadata Download functionality.
Linux has a big impact on our Lives. At least, your android phone has Linux kernel on it. However, getting started with Linux just make you discomfort for the first time. Because on Linux, you usually should use terminal commands instead of just clicking the launcher icon (as you did on Windows). But don't worry, We will give you 10 basic Linux commands & important commands that will help you get started.
The Wine team released today third stable release of their software. Version 1.8.3 has 54 bugfixes.
This stable release contains bugfixes, translations updates and updated GPU description table(NVIDIA cards were added), new features are included in development releases from 1.9 branch.
In this week's edition, we take a look at a new headset from OSVR, Google's DeepMind playing Montezuma's Revenge for rewards, and two new games out for Linux.
If you picked up the Steam Controller during the recent deal that put it at just $35 USD or have had one of these controllers from Valve for some time, you'll definitely want to check out the latest Steam client beta available tonight.
Following this past week's big Steam stable update, there's a big Steam beta update today but it's mostly focused around Steam Controller improvements.
We aren't exactly short on FPS games on Linux now, but we don't have many shooters that have great and active online gameplay.
Shortly after the Linux version was put up, so that's awesome news.
A recently released MMORPG looks like it will come to Linux the developers noted on Steam. Sounds like it's a little on the rough side.
Valve has just released a new Beta of its Steam Client, for all supported platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows), bringing a lot of improvements to the Steam Controller, along with support for newer GNU/Linux distributions.
SuperTuxKart is the classic open source racer and it has a brand new version with new tracks. This is the first RC release that will become a major new release.
Tempest is the awesome looking Early Access naval combat game that we previously mentioned would come to Linux, the developer has now said it will be soon.
This release brings an all-new login screen design completing the Breeze startup experience we trialed in Plasma 5.6. The layout has been tidied up and is more suitable for workstations that are part of a domain or company network. The Air and Oxygen Plasma themes which we still fully support for users that prefer a more three-dimensional design have also been improved.
Today, June 17, 2016, KDE has had the great pleasure of announcing that the Beta of the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment is now available for public beta testing.
Initially planned for June 16, KDE Plasma 5.7 Beta is here, and we can finally see what the KDE developers have prepared for fans of the modern, Qt5-based desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems. And just by taking a quick look at the release notes, we can notice that a lot of goodies are coming.
The Document Foundation announces that KDE e.V. is joining the organization’s Advisory Board, and at the same time The Document Foundation joins KDE’s group of advising community partners as an affiliate.
The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. have joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation.
The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. have joined TDF's Advisory Board while in exchange The Document Foundation now has a seat on the boards of both GNOME and KDE. The press message The Document Foundation sent out this morning explained, "The objective is to strengthen relationships between the largest not for profit organizations focused on open source software, to foster the growth of the entire ecosystem."
Today, June 16, 2016, the Qt Company was proud to announce the final release and general availability of the long-anticipated Qt 5.7 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit for all supported platforms.
As many of you expected, Qt 5.7 is a major release that brings exciting new features and technologies for any and all Qt application developers out there, no matter if they're using a GNU/Linux distribution or the latest Windows 10 and macOS operating systems.
Hello all,
Tarballs are due on 2016-06-20 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.21.3 unstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday.
The Document Foundation and GNOME Foundation have decided to tighten their relationship, in a move intended to create stronger ties between the two communities, and to foster the integration between LibreOffice and one of the most popular desktop environments for Linux.
The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that furthers the goals of the GNOME Project, which is composed of both volunteers and paid contributors, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use.
I’m doing a GSoC project this summer which in a single line is to “handle proxies in our system”. Some of us may not have encountered this headache ever . The problem starts arising from the time we start thinking of multiple connections with proxies enabled . Firefox or any browser can’t be helpful in this case ( it doesn’t know which proxy to choose for an inserted URL). Env vars like http_proxy, https_proxy ? No!. We can’t use a LAN thing with a VPN, so there’s no scope for a generic proxy ( Proxies are meant to be separate for each connection like all other network resources ) . So what we needed ?
Oh, and as a little word of warning, in case someone is planning on trying this out at home, there is currently a bug in the latest git master of OpenTripPlanner that makes useage without OSM data loaded in the server (as is what I have intended for GNOME usage, since we already have GraphHopper, and as OTP would probably not scale well loading many large regions worth of raw OSM data) querying for routes using pure coordinates doesn't work in that case, so I'm on a couple of weeks old commit right now. I might wait until this is resolve. Or I might actually look into trying to query for transit stops near the start and finish point and use that when performing the actual query, which might actually yield better result when selecting a subset of allowed transit modes.
It is also probably time to start trying to find funding for a machine hosting an OTP instance for GNOME :-)
As you may know, I've been remixing Fedora for several years for my own personal use... called MontanaLinux. I've also been remixing CentOS and Scientific Linux and thought I'd write a little bit about it.
The main reason I created the EL7 remixes is because I have a few older HP Proliant servers at work that have the CCISS Raid Controller and Red Hat dropped support for those in RHEL 7. Also, I originally included both GNOME and KDE as part of it but have since decided to make it leaner by switching to XFCE 4.12 that is available in EPEL... and of course it includes all of the available updates as of build time.
Robolinux developers are announcing today, June 17, 2016, that the Robolinux 8.5 LTS "Raptor" operating system is now available for download based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux repositories.
Robolinux is a unique Linux distribution that comes with a stealth VM for deep Windows integration. The latest release of this operating system i.e. Robolinux 8.5 LTS “Raptor” is now available for download. This release–featuring Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce, and LXDE versions–comes with Steam for Linux client for seamless gaming.
It has been a very busy week, but it has shown how much enthusiasm every contributor puts into Tumbleweed. There have been again 4 snapshots released (0609, 0611, 0612 and 0613) and this marks the end of ‘Tumbleweed being built using GCC 5’. As usual, one end is just the beginning of something new: starting with Snapshot 0614 (or any higher number, in case openQA won’t agree) the entire distribution is built using GCC 6 as compiler.
OpenShift Online, Red Hat's hosted open source PaaS solution, is getting a container-powered revamp.
Specifically, it'll be upgraded to run Red Hat's OpenShift 3, which reworks the platform around container technology. This constitutes another step, if a small one, toward Red Hat's vision for an open source-powered enterprise hybrid cloud.
A 6-year-old Silicon Valley startup with Red Hat roots has tapped Raleigh for a new East Coast hub – and it’s plotting major growth.
While Spike Washburn, the vice president of engineering and Raleigh site lead for CloudBees, won’t say how many employees the company has overall, he does say the company has 25 employees in the Triangle.
Rikki started writing for SysAdmin Magazine back when it was all about Unix, because Linux hadn’t yet become a big deal. Her LinkedIn profile tells you what she’s been up to since then, up to her present-day position as a community manager and editor for the Red Hat-sponsored OpenSource.com website, a popular site that, Rikki claims, is operated without any help whatsoever from Red Hat marketing or PR people. It’s a good site, too, at least in part because of Rikki’s exceptional leadership.
Yes, it's finally coming, the highly anticipated Fedora 24 Linux operating system has been approved for landing next week, June 21, 2016, when users can start upgrading their current Fedora 23 installations.
After four delays, Fedora 24 has a final release date, as the Fedora developers today, June 16, 2016, announced, immediately after the second Fedora 24 Final Go/No-Go meeting took place.
With the install done and the system rebooted, I was greeted with the default desktop. First impression? It's clean, and it looks nice. It's the exact same desktop, minus the changed wallpaper, that has been featured a few releases. But, for some reason, this new release just feels... cleaner. Maybe it's the crisper fonts the activity bar; maybe it's the darker wallpaper that pairs better with the black along the top; maybe I just like the new wallpaper more than past releases. Additionally, the animations feel smoother. I'm not sure if that's a side effect of Wayland, or if the developers sped up the animation speed slightly, but, whatever it is, I appreciate the slickness.
Arthur is from Kenya and first used Linux in 2002 when he was a freshman in college. During that time, open source software was just starting to be used in Kenya. He used Red Hat Linux 8 at the time, which he eventually upgraded to Red Hat Linux 9.
When asked about his childhood heroes, Arthur replied, “I grew up watching Indiana Jones on a VCR. Boy, did I wish I had a whip just like Indie’s!” He is an avid mountain biker and dog trainer. During the day, Arthur works as a software engineer at the United Nations office in Nairobi. At night, he interacts with open source software communities and chases after dogs he trains.
Last week I made a side-by-side comparison of Calamares and Ubiquity, the former a non-denominational Linux installer and the latter the Ubuntu installer.
This week, since it was just announced that Fedora 24 will be released next Tuesday, I would like to make a similar walk-through of the Fedora installer (anaconda) and the Linux Mint Debian Edition installer.
Jan Kurik tonight announced that Fedora 24 is GO for release. Despite a couple of Windows 10 boot bugs the Fedora 24 RC 1.2 (20160614.0) compose is considered GOLD. In other news, Fedora developers aren't exactly overjoyed at the prospect of Snap packages for Fedora and they sure didn't cooperate with Canonical as implied. Besides the security risks, Fedora is backing xdg-app successor Flatpack. Elsewhere, KDE, GNOME, and The Document Foundation just got a lot chummier and Darknet.org joined in with the FSF to advise against the Intel Management Engine.
The reason is not the Fedora LiveCD I composed from a tweaked and tuned, running workstation. The reason is not that we run these off of an up-to-date “Install to hard-drive”. The reason is I stole it, and are going to let my wife create that all-important feedback cycle over the weekend.
Bodhi is a web application that facilates the process of publishing package updates of Fedora. Once a package is submitted to Bodhi it goes through various stages: Pending, Testing, Stable, Obsolete. The details can be found here Package States.
The Software app has always provided the ability to process updates. But to upgrade to the latest Fedora — for example, Fedora 22 to 23 — you had to use the command line. But that’s about to change for users running a fully-updated Fedora 23 system. The Software app on Fedora 23 will soon let you upgrade your whole system to Fedora 24 without the command line.
You may have read some stuff this week about an application delivery mechanism called Snappy and how it’s going to unite all distributions and kill apt and rpm!
This is, to put it diplomatically, a heaping pile of steaming bullshit. You may not be surprised to learn that said pile has been served by the Canonical press department.
Honestly, modern Linux is easier, faster and less hassle to install than any recent release of Windows. That's the truth. No messing with keys, no worrying about activation and no digging out that lost install disc or USB drive.
The beauty of Linux is that because it's free software anyone can download (or pop in a disc) and start using it. You don't even have to install anything! Linux technology and its free and easy licence means that it can be run straight off a CD or DVD.
When karma comes to visit, the one thing to remember is that in some way — which might even seem totally unrelated — you have some responsibility for that karmic bite. The best thing to do is to accept it with grace and to move on. I tell you this because that should give you a pretty fair assessment of what my life has been like since the last Week in Review.
But it hasn’t all been bad karma. There’s been good news on the FOSS front as well…
I don’t know how else to put it. I’m sorry. It’s bad. It’s bad in my opinion, not fact. My opinion, is my expectation, will only turn fact by the time it is too late to do anything about it.
It’s like, “why back-up anything?” — well, you’ll know when you’ve lost everything. In other words, when it is just slightly beyond way too fucking late.
Canonical's Snappy package manager is taking its first steps outside the Ubuntu world. As of now, you can install it on Arch, Debian, Fedora and several other popular distros. And with developers like Mozilla getting behind it, it could soon become a new "universal standard".
DockerCon hasn't even started yet, but the channel has already seen two major open source DevOps announcements. Here's an overview of the latest news from Canonical about snap packages and Chef about its new app automation platform, Habitat.
Ubuntu's "snap" package format now works on a bunch of other popular Linux distros, including Arch, Debian, Fedora, and most of the Ubuntu flavors. It's also coming to CentOS, Mint, OpenSUSE, and even OpenWrt, among others.
Ubuntu’s Touch OS powered smartphone have slowly started becoming a reality since the last few years. Meizu MX4 was one of the powerful Ubuntu powered phones launched till date. That aside there are a few other devices that support Ubuntu Touch OS thanks to ports like these. Canonical’s Ubuntu OS however has succeeded to get a head start in the smartphone mainly due to the lack of features over an Android or iOS device.
From June 15th-21st you can get a 15% discount on a Bodhi Linux branded T-Shirt with the code TSHIRT16 on our Merchandise store.
elementary OS is a very popular and one of the most beautiful Linux distros out there. The upcoming version of the OS i.e. elementary OS 0.4 ‘Loki’, is coming in next few months. The first beta of this open source operating system is already here and you can download it right now to get started with testing.
Some of it was streamed from my other Linux computers...
The Gear S2 has served as a fantastic Tizen flagship smartwatch, but now its time for the next iteration in its evolution, and according to a recent report it’s codenamed Solis. We expect this next device to run Tizen, hence the reason we are reporting it, and it will also support a circular display.
Data that shows the active usage of Android devices indicates that fragmentation may not be as big of a problem on Android as previously thought.
This data analysis comes from Apteligent and has been shared with BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service.
Some of the recent high-end Androids — like the Galaxy S7 or the LG G5 — pack some amazing technology under their glass face. Eight core processors and gigabytes of RAM, combined with dual-band ac WiFi radios and 16 core graphics are specifications that most computers didn't have just a few years ago. Some of us get really caught up in the race for newer and better hardware, while others aren't concerned at all and just want to get on Facebook, but most of us fall somewhere in the middle. We want a phone that does it all, doesn't struggle to do any of it and doesn't break the bank.
Announced at Google I/O 2016, Androids apps and the Play Store are now officially on Chromebooks. Chrome OS 53 is rolling out now to all devices in the developer channel, but the Play Store is only showing up on the ASUS Chromebook Flip. Early users are reporting bugs, but reactions are generally positive with performance improvements over Android apps installed via ARC Welder.
While the Acer Chromebook R11 and the 2015 Chromebook Pixel are on Chrome OS 53, the Play Store is not yet visible in the app launcher, nor is there an option in settings to enable Android apps. Along with the Flip, the laptops will be the first to feature the Play Store. For a full list of Chromebooks that will support Android apps later this year, check Google’s support site.
I have always been an open source enthusiast. And when I heard about the awesome community from my brother I just couldn't wait to join in. He has always motivated me to do great things. I'm always enthusiastic to learn new things. Contributing to open source organizations, meeting amazing people and communities, and, of course, a deep interest of writing code have motivated me to join the summer training. I believe that I am able to achieve all these things after I joined the summer training and the great community DGP LUG.
An open source component can be inappropriate for a developer in many ways. Starting from the risks the component is exposed to, to its license policy, developers have to keep a lot of things in mind while selecting the right piece for their tech puzzle. In an exclusive conversation with TechGig.com, Rami Sass, CEO and Co-Founder of WhiteSource, shared tips for selecting right open source components with developers. Read on.
There's a shift to open-source mobile test automation tools happening today among developers and QA. And it's not just happening in mobile testing. Many mature technology sectors are adopting lightweight, vendor-transparent tools to fulfill the need for speed and integration.
As with many free and open-source software markets however, a plethora of tools complicates the selection process. How do you know what to spend time learning, integrating and deploying in your own environment?
Open source software and hardware continue to infiltrate the data center, but the lack of professional support remains a top business and IT concern.
In late March 2016, I attended some Wikimedia gatherings in the Middle East: The WikiArabia conference in Amman (Jordan), a Technical Meetup in Ramallah (Palestinian territories), and the Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem (Israel).
Open source knowledge is very valuable in today’s job market. The 2016 Open Source Jobs Report from The Linux Foundation clearly showed that hiring managers are placing much value on open source cloud, networking, and security skills. It also showed that DevOps is emerging as a red hot job category.
Big Data implementations are invariably built around Hadoop, Apache Spark and other open source solutions. And since these constructs must integrate into the broader enterprise data ecosystem at some point, is it possible that open source will come to rule the data center as a matter of course?
Sacred Oak Medical Center in Houston, opening in August, will use the OpenVista electronic health record system of Medsphere Systems. The inpatient behavioral health facility will open with 20 beds and plans to expand over time to 80 beds.
There have been other open-source networking software releases in the past, including OpenDaylight, Midokura, and Big Switch’s Project FloodLight, that could let networking engineers program and manage networks without being locked in to the software from vendors like Cisco, whose products cost lots of money. Nicira was doing something like this, but it ended up getting acquired by VMware. And it wasn’t open-sourced. But SnapRoute is different.
Chris Buechler from pfSense announced earlier today, June 16, 2016, that there's a new maintenance update available for the pfSense 2.3.1 FreeBSD-based firewall distribution.
pfSense 2.3.1 Update 5 (2.3.1_5) is a small bugfix release for the pfSense 2.3.1 major update announced last month, and since pfSense now lets its maintainers update only individual parts of the system, we see more and more small builds like this one, which patch the most annoying issues.
ART has been the default routing table backend in OpenBSD for some months now. That means that OpenBSD 6.0 will no longer consult the 4.3 BSD reduced radix tree to perform route lookups.
The principal motivation for adopting a new tree implementation can be explained in three letters: SMP.
I'll describe in a different context why and how ART is a good fit in our revamp of OpenBSD network stack. For the moment, let's have a look at the single-thread performances of this algorithm in OpenBSD -current.
This new parallelism library is described as "[hosting] the development of libraries which are aimed at enabling parallelism in code and which are also closely tied to compiler technology. Examples of libraries suitable for hosting within the parallel-libs subproject are runtime libraries and parallel math libraries. The initial candidates for inclusion in this subproject are StreamExecutor and libomptarget which would live in the streamexecutor and libomptarget subdirectories of parallel-libs, respectively."
The use of open source software is pretty much a forgone conclusion in the federal market but we are just now starting to scratch the surface of its power to disrupt the market.
An open source tool, the Food Computer, is being developed at MIT that can be used to create, save, and share climates for growing crops, maximized for nutrition, yield and taste, regardless of location or season.
A community college reform group has selected a handful of schools in Virginia and Maryland to develop degree programs using open-source materials in place of textbooks, an initiative that could save students as much as $1,300 a year.
A new, open source computer programming framework that could make the web significantly more energy efficient, allowing people to save more battery power while browsing on mobile devices, has been developed by researchers including one of Indian-origin.
Scientists developed what they are calling "GreenWeb," a set of web programming language extensions that enable web developers to have more flexibility and control than ever before over the energy consumption of a website.
"Because user awareness is constantly increasing, web developers today must be conscious of energy efficiency," said Vijay Janapa Reddi from University of Texas in the US.
A recent article on Slashdot points out with some chagrin that the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Veterans Affairs in the United States still use COBOL, originally invented in 1959, based on work by the late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. The implication is—and has been for some years in the IT community—that COBOL is a completely dead language. Not so! In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL, and surveys in 2006 and 2012 by Computerworld found that more than 60% of large financial organizations use COBOL (more, in fact, than use C++, a much newer language), and that for half of those, COBOL was used for the majority of their internal code. The COBOL standard has continued to be updated, with the most recent change being in 2014.
The United Kingdom is introducing an open standard for IT systems used by emergency services, the country’s Digital Service announced on 23 May. The ‘Multi-Agency Incident Transfer’ (MAIT) standard is to harmonise the exchange of information within the emergency responder community to streamline the flow incident information between agencies.
Last week, I tried to get a subscription to Microsoft Office. I expected to simply find an Office license that included what I needed for a simple price. Instead, I discovered that Microsoft’s Office licenses are infuriatingly complex, making it nearly impossible for anyone to get what they need without overspending.
IF Microsoft has its way, the vast membership of LinkedIn, the business networking site with more than 433 million members, will be instantly available to you while you use Microsoft products like Outlook or Skype. How many of LinkedIn’s members do you want to consult while also using Excel or typing away in Word? Microsoft is betting it’s a lot; this is part of its rationale for its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, announced on Monday.
The companies’ chief executives, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn, explained their reasons for the deal in a PowerPoint presentation distributed to investors. In the center of a graphic titled, “A professional’s profile everywhere,” was a picture of an anonymous LinkedIn “professional” with arrows pointed outward to seven Microsoft products.
Satya Nadella wasn't kidding when he said earlier this year that he believed in using chat as a platform for computing. Microsoft just bought Wand, a chat app for iOS, to further that vision.
If you listen to some entrepreneurs and investors, the flying car – a longstanding staple of science fiction – is right around the corner. Working prototypes exist. At least two companies already take orders for the vehicles, with deliveries promised next year.
The last decade has seen the introduction of practical consumer videoconferencing, voice recognition, drones, self-driving cars and many other items that once were found only in science fiction stories. It therefore might seem plausible that practical flying cars are around the corner. They aren't. Indeed, massive safety, infrastructure and technology problems make them a near impossibility.
Of all the furry ambush predators on the planet, domestic house cats — some 600 million of them — are among the most numerous. Their ancient evolutionary history does not always feel so ancient, as anyone who has lobbed a catnip mouse at a tabby or wiggled a defenseless ankle near a kitten can attest.
The fired head of the drinking water division of the Department of Environmental Quality invoked her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination through her attorney this morning after receiving an investigative subpoena in the Flint water crisis investigation.
Brian Morley, a Lansing attorney representing Liane Shekter-Smith, said a hearing was held Thursday morning in Wayne County Circuit Court after he objected on Shekter-Smith's behalf to an investigative subpoena seeking her testimony in Attorney General Bill Schuette's Flint drinking water investigation, which is headed by Royal Oak attorney Todd Flood.
The 28 European Union governments today were expected to give final approval to a first-ever plan to analyse medicines competition in Europe, with reference to drug prices, generics and biosimilars, and intellectual property rights. The final version was watered after what sources said was heavy industry lobbying, compared to a leaked version published in Intellectual Property Watch two weeks ago, but still retains some strong provisions regarding pricing and competition.
A new response plan for a strategic response to the Zika virus has been announced by the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.
The revised Zika Strategic Response Plan includes elements such as integrated vector management, sexual and reproductive health counselling, and health education.
The 28 European Union member governments have concluded next steps for addressing antimicrobial resistance, with a strong emphasis on reducing use of antibiotics in animals, but also including a call for new business models.
There does not appear to be a mention of price, intellectual property rights, or del-inkage of price from the cost of R&D, but there is a call for new business models as follows:
“actively engage in initiatives and proposals to implement a new business model to bring new antibiotics to the market, including models in which investment costs or revenues are de-linked from sales volumes;”
I recently thought of the apocryphal story about the solid reliability of the IBM AS/400 systems. I’ve heard several variations on the story, but as the most common version of the story goes, an IBM service engineer shows up at a customer site one day to service an AS/400. The hapless employees have no idea what the service engineer is talking about. Eventually the system is found in a closet or even sealed in a walled off space where it had been reliably running the business for years completely forgotten and untouched. From a reliability perspective, this is a great story. From a security perspective, it is a nightmare. It represents Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous “unknown unknowns” statement regarding the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.
The average data breach cost has grown to $4 million, representing a 29 percent increase since 2013, according to the Ponemon Institute.
Instead of simply ordering his company to defend itself in conventional fashion he was going to write to all 5,000 of Computop’s customers and partners telling them that on 15 June his firm’s website was likely to be hit with a DDoS attack big enough to cause everyone serious problems.
As part of the Mozilla Open Source Support program (MOSS), the Mozilla Foundation has set up a fund dedicated to helping open source software projects eradicate code vulnerabilities.
So it seems the latest generation of Intel x86 CPUs have implemented a Intel hidden management engine that cannot be audited or examined. We can also assume at some point it will be compromised and security researchers are labelling this as a Ring -3 level vulnerability.
If you haven't yet read about my previous research regarding finding bad exit nodes in the Tor network you can read it here. But the tl;dr is that I sent unique passwords through every exit node in the Tor network over HTTP. This meant that is was possible for the exit node to sniff the credentials and use them to login on my fake website which I had control over.
RED-FACED SECURITY OUTFIT CrowdStrike has admitted that the Russian government wasn't responsible for a hack on the Democratic Party after lone hacker Guccifer 2 claimed that he was responsible for the breach.
Islamic State is committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the religious community of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes, United Nations investigators said on Thursday.
Such a designation, rare under international law, would mark the first recognized genocide carried out by non-state actors, rather than a state or paramilitaries acting on its behalf.
The husband of Jo Cox urged people to “fight against the hatred” that killed his wife on Thursday night, after the Labour MP was murdered by a gunman on the steps of her constituency surgery, Robert Mendick, Gordon Rayner and Nicola Harley write.
On a dark day for democracy, Mrs Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two, was shot three times and repeatedly stabbed by a killer screaming “Britain first”.
The series of smashed global records, particularly the extraordinary heat in February and March, has provoked a stunned reaction from climate scientists, who are warning that climate change has reached unprecedented levels and is no longer only a threat for the future.
The two protectionist agreements masquerading as free trade agreements, TPP and TTIP, appear to be meeting serious resistance – TTIP in particular. This makes the entire coup attempt unlikely to succeed.
As detailed in the book Information Feudalism: Who owns the Knowledge Economy?, the United States reacted to its industrial obsolescence – as accented primarily by the ascent of Toyota and the fall in Detroit of the late 1970s – by hijacking a number of global fora and attempting to push through so-called Free Trade Agreements that were little more than attempts to redefine value, production, and economy in a way that forced the rest of the world to pay rent to the United States, in order to safeguard its dominant position going forward.
The first problem comes from there never having been a need – in an objective sense – for this EU referendum.
By “objective” I mean that there was no external reason – such as a new EU treaty or similar proposal – for a referendum to take place in June 2016.
As such, it can be described an objectively pointless referendum.
Gwen Moore to propose bill requiring tests for returns with itemized deductions of more than $150,000, in response to right’s ‘criminalization of poverty’
But Bolivia's government, led by anti-imperialist president Evo Morales, says the South American nation already produces 197 million chickens annually, and has the capacity to export 36 million. Bolivia's pride is justified: the country's economy has nearly tripled in size over the last decade, with its GDP per capita jumping from $1,200 in 2006 to $3,119 in 2015. The IMF predicts that Bolivia's economy will grow by 3.8 percent in 2016, making it the best performer in South America.
Right now, in the Ukip bunker, there is a search going on. It is urgent. It is probably desperate. It is the search for a tone. The emotional Rolodex of Nigel Farage is being riffled through in the hope it might throw up something usable. Top presentational aides have been dispatched on a vital quest to find the outer limits of his range. The journey is unlikely to detain them very long. Yet at the most recent reckoning Farage stands a few disputed percentage points away from being acclaimed – like it or not – the most extraordinarily successful British politician of a generation. Globally, he may soon be seen as reflecting us.
Almost four-tenths, or 38 per cent, of Finns have lost their confidence in the traditional media, finds a recent survey.
“The numbers are astonishingly high: four in ten have reservations about journalistic content,” Ville Pitkänen, a researcher at Think Tank e2, reveals while shedding light on the preliminary results of the survey in his blog on Puheenvuoro.
In June 2006, a 16-year-old girl began a video blog on YouTube. Her name was Bree, she’d been lurking in the burgeoning community for a while. She was a self-described dork, she thought her hometown was really boring – “Maybe that’s why I spend so much time on my computer …”
Did you ever have a brush with censorship in the past and do you think it is time the Cinematograph Act, 1952, is overhauled?
No, I have never experienced such a major censor problem with my movies before. In fact, a battle against censorship has never been fought like this before, that it became a movement. As we move ahead with time, the laws related to art and culture need to be reassessed, including the Act we have for film certification.
Trivedi can simply stand near a bottle of water, transfer some of his powerful energy, and sell this bottled water to you at a presumably healthy markup. Among other things, the energized water can supposedly go full Lazarus on your flora.
[...]
And, even under the complete lack of scrutiny provided by pay-for-play "scientific journals," the studies Trivedi claims back up his miracles have nothing approaching scientific methodology contained in them. One claiming Trivedi was able to introduce bacterial mutations simply by waving his hand over some Petri dishes is deftly summed up this way by a slightly more sympathetic blogger at "Integral World."
Last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg hosted a summit with “leading conservatives” at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif. offices, in which he sought to ease concerns about a liberal bias in the social media company’s “trending” features.
Whether that problem has been fixed or not, it appears that Facebook is currently engaging in “viewpoint discrimination” in another way, namely in its service which allows users to “boost” a story, for which Facebook receives a fee.
While it's true that prisoners enjoy fewer rights than Americans who've never been convicted of a crime, their rights are by no means nonexistent. Except in some cases... where bits and pieces of protected speech vanish into the gaps between established prison guidelines and case law directly addressing the matter.
That's an admittedly unclear summation of the appeals court decision finding a federal prisoner's rights weren't violated when he was removed from a halfway house and placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for publishing an article about his prison experience.
A blogger who wrote for The Huffington Post while serving a federal prison sentence didn't have a First Amendment right to publish an article critical of prison conditions, an appeals court has ruled.
Daniel McGowan, an environmental activist whose prosecution for "eco terrorism" was the subject of an award-winning film, was finishing his seven-year term at a Brooklyn halfway house when he wrote a HuffPost blog post that contained details about a secretive prison where he had spent years in isolation.
The folks running Twitter may be too young to have heard of George Orwell, or perhaps they simply do not care that their new advisory council sounds frighteningly Orwellian. Either way, the brand new “Twitter Trust and Safety Council” seems like a board ready to censor comments in deference to political correctness.
It doesn’t help that among the more than 40 organizations that make up the council, one finds such groups as the “Dangerous Speech Project,” a group with ties to the liberal John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and to financier George Soros’ Open Society Institute.
The European Commission is requesting/requiring Facebook, Twitter, and others to police their networks against undesirable political opinions and bad speech. This is cause for concern on a number of levels.
Facebook’s community standards have long banned certain topics from being discussed – quite notably, anything resembling nudity.
This is an effect of Facebook being a child of the culture it was founded in, the United States of America. If Facebook had been built in Germany, nudity would not have been a problem at all with Facebook, but there would instead be a complete ban on anything even resembling hate speech rallies, which there i In this, we can observe that all cultures have their taboos and their intolerance of certain subjects. Paul Graham has an excellent essay on the matter called “What you can’t say”.
Free speech comes with a price: tolerance for unpopular opinions.
In recent weeks, the First Amendment has struggled against pressures. On college campuses, “safe zones” chill debate. Online, a proposal to combat terrorism includes hitting the internet kill – silencing all speech to fight extremism.
These events should concern everyone. Unrestricted speech is a fundamental liberty in America, but this was not always the rule. Not long ago, Kentucky’s censors monitored the movies, editing out unpopular ideas.
Another day, another example of Facebook's attempt at applying automated morality going poorly. For a site designed for little else beyond expressive speech, I suppose some erroneous applications of any kind of puritanism would go awry. Perhaps then you might have forgiven Facebook's mistaking a children's illustration for man-horse-fucking, or the algorithm's inability to recognize satire.
But you would think that, in the wake of the tragic shooting that occurred at a nightclub in Orlando, one member of the LGBT community's perfectly cogent and innocuous rant wouldn't be gobbled up the by censor algorithm as being offensive. Here is the author's tweet complaining about its removal (twice), including a screenshot of the text, so that you can get an idea of what was taken down.
The ongoing Udta Punjab controversy has fanned the debate on censorship yet again. Now everyone wants the system to be abolished, for such practices cannot exist in a liberal democracy. It’s important we realise that censorship is a tight slap on the face of creative expression, and our films only deserve to be rated, not edited by CBFC.
In May, Media Monitoring Africa, supported by the SOS Support Public Broadcasting Coalition and the Freedom of Expression Institute, lodged papers with the complaints compliance committee of the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) over the public broadcaster’s decision to ban coverage of violent protests.
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) has given the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) until Monday to oppose a complaint by Media Monitoring Africa against its new broadcasting policy.
Last month, the SABC decided it would no longer air footage of protesters destroying public property, arguing that it might encourage others to follow suit.
Media Monitoring Africa believes this is a clear form of censorship.
Icasa has agreed with Media Monitoring Africa, which laid the complaint two weeks ago, that the matter is urgent.
We talk a lot around here about stories with people trying to determine what "real journalism" is. Those stories tend to veer towards the incredibly dumb, with most centering on a misunderstanding of what journalism actually means in the digital age. For a long time, journalism was an alchemy performed by a select few wizards, horded by a few outlets, which vetted and locked up their product. Today, of course, the barriers of entry to doing any kind of journalism are lower and the ability to distribute that kind of work is virtually unlimited. And, despite what you might hear from some grumpy folks who prefer the good ol' days, it turns out that smaller websites and independent citizens can journalism really well!
But not everybody has gotten that memo, apparently. Take Eric Papenfuse, Mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He has recently, and apparently surprisingly, decided to ban anyone working for website PennLive to the weekly meetings and briefings the rest of the press is allowed to attend.
Marketing and sales company Smart Circle is using the DMCA to uncover the identity of a critical blogger. The company obtained a subpoena directed at WordPress, stating that the blogger in question violates their copyrights by publishing modified images of its key employees.
MI5/MI6 agent-turned-author John le Carré frequently called himself a liar, “born a liar, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living.” British Secret Service agent Malcolm Muggeridge said intelligence work “necessarily involves such cheating, lying, and betraying that it has a deleterious effect on the character.”
Former deputy prime minister tells a public meeting he was unaware parliamentary emails were scanned by system linked to GCHQ
The fun thing about leaked documents is that they almost always reveal something more than just the focal point. The leaked reports that showed British intelligence agencies to be drowning in data also exposed a previously hidden part of the UK intelligence apparatus.
Earlier this week, we wrote about a ridiculous misinformation campaign that was being sent around by House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes against an amendment (sponsored by Reps. Thomas Massie and Zoe Lofgren) to a Defense appropriations bill that would block spending on two different kinds of surveillance "backdoors." First, ending backdoor searches, whereby tons of information on Americans that was collected "incidentally" as part of other searches, and then kept, could be scanned without requiring the showing of probable cause. Second, blocking the NSA from requiring backdoors into encryption technologies. A basically identical amendment easily passed in each of the last two years, but was stripped out before a final bill was approved.
With so much focus on things like iPhone encryption this year, some were wondering how the House would handle the amendment this year, and Nunes apparently decided to ramp up the pure FUD and lies against it, sending around a letter that exploited the Orlando shootings from this weekend, falsely claiming that the bill would block law enforcement/intelligence from scanning the 702 database for connections between the shooter and overseas individuals. This is wrong (never mind the fact that the CIA admitted yesterday that it can't find any connections at all). There are plenty of other tools available, including the ability to get a warrant, for officials to search for the relevant data. Nothing in the amendment would have stopped that at all. It only stops the random sniffing through the database, without cause.
Facebook wants to show advertisers that their ads make you visit their bricks-and-mortar stores and buy their stuff. To do this, they’ll use phones’ location services to track whether people actually walk into the stores after seeing an ad.
Facebook is planning to track how many times a week you go to the grocery store, and every other store, and it will share that information with advertisers.
Using the location services on your phone, Facebook will keep a tally of who goes to what stores, and show the anonymized numbers to advertisers, as evidence that buying ads on Facebook is getting people to visit brick-and-mortar businesses.
It's a great thing for Facebook, which will now have excellent data to prove (or disprove) on a user-to-user basis what a store is getting for its advertising dollar. But it's a pretty frightening idea that a company will have information not unlike your credit card statement all from location services data.
When it seemed we did not have the intelligence and enforcement tools needed, we created a new cabinet level agency, the Department of Homeland Security. That quickly grew into one of the largest bureaucracies in America. We created terror fusion centers, staffed up at the FBI and CIA, every day expecting different results.
Wary House lawmakers have rejected a measure that would have prohibited the U.S. government from searching the online communications of Americans without a warrant. The vote came days after the mass shooting in Florida.
When it comes to surveilling its citizens, the United States is worse than China. So says Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson.
“China has a much lower incarceration rate than the United States, they don’t spy on their citizens like we do with the NSA,” Johnson told The Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon and senior editor Andrew Kirell during a Facebook Live interview on Thursday.
Pressed further on that controversial point, Johnson pointed to the National Security Agency’s widespread collection of metadata from private citizens. When told that the Chinese government monitors political dissidents, he replied: “What do you call the NSA and the satellites that are trained on us and the fact that 110 million Verizon users are having everything we do on our cell phones being data-collected?”
The New York Times is taking a look at the FBI's battle against terrorism (not the first time it's done this) -- namely, its near-total reliance on sting operations to round up would-be terrorists. As the Times' Eric Lichtblau points out, stings used to be a last-resort tactic. Now, it's standard operating procedure. Two out of every three terrorism prosecutions begin with undercover agents nudging citizens and immigrants toward acts of violence and "material support." In some cases, the FBI agents are doing all the work themselves.
The FBI, of course, maintains that these terrorists would have acted on their own without the agency's intercession -- even though it seems to be placing a rather heavy finger on the scale.
[...]
I guess this all depends on your definition of "actively plotting." In cases we've covered here (and mentioned in the NYT article), federal agents have done everything from script and film "declaration of intent" videos to purchase all of the supplies needed for a "terrorist attack" they planned from start to finish.
The rogues gallery compiled by the FBI over the past half-decade is hardly threatening. It includes senior citizens, mentally-disabled teens, would-be terrorists who weren't even threatening enough to get their mothers to give them back their passports, and an assortment of extremely-impressionable young men who were all talk and no action.
While the FBI maintains it's doing nothing wrong, former FBI agents and intelligence community members aren't so sure.
The head of one of Malaysia’s oldest universities has announced there will be a “thorough investigation” after it came under fire when a set of controversial religious education slides leaked online.
The slides, part of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia’s (UTM) Islamic and Asian Civilisation Studies course, reportedly claimed Islam introduced “manners and body cleanliness” to early followers of Hinduism.
According to Indian broadcaster NDTV, the slides also claimed Hindus consider dirt on their bodies “as part of their religious practice to achieve nirvana,” and that the early foundations of the Sikh faith came about after founder Guru Nanak combined Islam and Hinduism, something he had a “shallow understanding” of.
A group of Muslim criminals knocked on the door of Ripan’s house near the college campus around 4:30pm and started indiscriminate stabbing on him when he opened the door, said Prof Hiten Chandra Mandal, principal of the college. The style of attacks resembles with the Jamiat-ul-Mujaheedin-Bangladesh (a local operative of Islamic state in Bangladesh) method of hacking the Kaffirs as believed.
The fact that Techdirt has been writing about e-voting problems for sixteen years, and that the very first post on the topic had the headline "E-voting is Not Safe," gives an indication of what a troubled area this is. Despite the evidence that stringent controls are still needed to avoid the risk of electoral fraud, some people seem naively to assume that e-voting is now a mature and safe technology that can be deployed without further thought.
POLICE investigating the murder of MP Jo Cox say they are probing possible links to right-wing extremism.
People reported that the man who targeted the mum-of-two shouted "Britain First" before launching their attack on the MP.
Police have since detained Kilmarnock-born Thomas Mair in connection with the incident.
Temporary Chief Constable Dee Collins of West Yorkshire Police said: "We have now confirmed that just before 1pm yesterday Jo was attacked and sustained serious injuries from both a firearm and a knife.
So, when it comes to women being accepted in The Tech World, sure it's gotten better. A lot better. But that strong dislike for women in our field exists just under the skin of some men. They know they can no longer gain the support and the 'at-a-boy' slaps on the back for approaching and demeaning a woman in public. In fact, they know they well be rejected and punished for doing so. The only difference between then and now? They do it in the wee hours of the morning with bricks, knowing that they would be rebuked by their peers for assaulting a woman in public...like in The Old Days.
Leaflets denouncing music and dancing as ‘acts of the devil’ have been found at a Muslim faith school in Birmingham, school inspectors have warned.
While hardline free marketeers and incumbent ISPs often try to paint city-owned broadband networks as the pinnacle of government-sponsored disaster, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke this week credited the city utility's gigabit broadband service as a major contributing factor for the city's re-invention.
What would a self archiving internet look like? At the recent Decentralized Web Summit hosted by the Internet Archive, Vint Cerf, one of the computer scientists hailed as a founding father of the Internet, gave a thought provoking talk on the future of the Internet. At an event where high level discussion was the norm, Vint Cerf shared his thoughts on a relatively basic concept with a very understandable goal – preserving the world’s knowledge. The Internet is the focal point of all of humanity’s knowledge, and soon it will be the focal point of all of humanity’s activity.
IPv4 addresses are now so valuable that criminals are setting up shell companies so they can apply for addresses, then resell them to users desperate to grow their networks.
Criminals are doing so because there are no more IPv4 addresses left: the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) ran out in September 2015.
Back in October, my keynote at New Media Days in Copenhagen was titled "The Internet: Not Just Another Medium". Although most of the talk was new, the core concept is was one I first presented at the Berkman Center three weeks earlier: that it helps to think of the Net as a "giant zero". Now that I've given the talk twice and thought about it for a month more, I'm almost ready to make the same case in text.
Last fall, we noted how New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office had launched an investigation into awful broadband service quality. In and of itself that was nothing particularly interesting (especially given Schneiderman's history of grandstanding), though what made the inquiry of note is the office's hiring of Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who first coined the term "net neutrality" back in 2002. With Wu as the AG's "senior lawyer and special adviser," Schneiderman sent letters to NYC area broadband incumbents Verizon, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable -- questioning whether they actually deliver the speeds they advertise.
In one of the first written decisions based upon the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), Judge Tigar has granted Schein’s motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking former employee Jennifer Cook “from accessing, using, or sharing” allegedly stolen confidential data. Cook was a sales representative for Schein’s dental-supplies business and left to join competitor Patterson Dental. The TRO also prohibits Cook “from soliciting, contacting, or accepting business from any HSI customers assigned to her while she was employed by Plaintiff.” In addition to the standard fiduciary duty employees owe to their employer, Cook had also signed a confidentiality and non-solicitation agreement.
This one was so easy to predict. For the past couple of decades, completely clueless US politicians and bureaucrats (and tech company execs) have been screaming about how China "doesn't respect" our intellectual property. They demanded that China "get more serious" about patents and respecting IP. And for nearly a decade we've been warning those people to be careful what you wish for. Because, now China has massively ramped up its patent system, often by using odd incentives, but rather than helping American companies that demanded it, pretty much every patent lawsuit in China has been about a Chinese company punishing or blocking foreign competition. This is because the Chinese aren't stupid. It's a country that has thrived on protectionism, despite global efforts to "open up trade," and here it realized that the West was handing them the perfect trade barrier: one that let them say they were doing what the West wanted, while giving it the perfect excuse to block out foreign competition.
So, while clueless US and European IP bureaucrats celebrated China issuing so many patents, they totally missed that they'd actually given away everything.
For that, Apple can largely thank the general decline in the availability of injunctive relief following the Supreme Court’s decision in eBay v MercExchange. Apple’s rivals in China, however, don’t seem to have the same problems.
More than one trademark practitioner has probably asked herself how soft drink giant Coca-Cola goes about protecting its various ZERO-based trade marks. A window to this question can be found in the recent ruling of the United States Patent and Trademark Office decision in connection with oppositions filed by Royal Crown Company and Dr Pepper/Seven Up Inc.
A while back, we wrote about the hilariously bullying cease and desist notice Vice Media, a billion dollar media company, sent to ViceVersa, an un-signed punk band. At issue, according to Vice Media, was the band's name and trademark application, both of which the media company declared would damage its own brand and confuse customers. Neither of those claims was remotely true, but they bullied in the way that only bullies can.
In April, Vice Media ordered an unsigned band to change its name. The company, which is reportedly worth billions of dollars, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Los Angeles trio ViceVersa arguing the band's name and logo were too much like Vice's. (In November, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had reportedly signed off on ViceVersa guitarist Christopher Morales' application to trademark the band's name.) Today, both parties reached a settlement over the trademark dispute. In a statement, ViceVersa's lawyer wrote: "After a few weeks of negotiations, the two parties have come to an amicable agreement. Changes have been made to the band’s trademark details as registered with the USPTO, thus narrowing the scope of their services. ViceVersa will continue using their name and logo as they please and Vice Media will go about their $2.5 billion business." Reached for comment, a Vice spokesperson said: "We're glad this worked out for both parties, and we wish the band the best of luck."
You may recall the Kirtsaeng case that we covered a few years back, in which a student, Sudap Kirtsaeng, had been sued for copyright infringement by publishing giant John Wiley for buying English-language textbooks in Thailand (that were cheap) and then reselling them to students in the US. It was a classic arbitrage situation. Wiley insisted that this was infringing, while Kirtsaeng pointed to the First Sale doctrine, allowing people to resell physical products they've legally purchased, even if they include copyright-covered content. Wiley's argument against first sale is that it only applied to content that was "legally made under this title." Thus, since the textbooks were made in Thailand and not under US copyright law, First Sale didn't apply. The Supreme Court, thankfully, rejected that argument 6 to 3, and said that first sale does apply. That was good.
The case then went back to the lower courts where Kirtsaeng sought to have Wiley pay his legal fees. The lower court and the appeals court both rejected this request, arguing that the standard for assigning attorneys' fees in copyright cases was whether or not the plaintiff bringing the case had an "objectively reasonable" argument -- and noting that with 3 of the 9 Justices eventually siding with Wiley, the case was likely "objectively reasonable," even if it failed in the end. This argument also reached the Supreme Court and on Thursday, the Justices decided to tweak the standard.
Very similar to the case it decided earlier in the week concerning patent damages (and, in fact, it cites that case in this ruling), the Supreme Court rejects the purely "objectively reasonable" standard test as being too "rigid." It's pretty clear that the court thinks that lower courts should have some leeway in determining the appropriate remedies, rather than sticking to a set of strict guidelines.
Copyright trolls operating in the UK will be doing so a little less confidently this morning after being slammed in the House of Lords yesterday. Lord Lucas named and shamed several companies involved in the practice, describing them as scammers and extortionists while urging the government to take action.
Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde may have thought he'd left the notorious site behind, but the legal system has other plans. The Helsinki District Court has just ordered him to pay $395,000 to record labels including Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI, after their content was shared illegally via the platform.
A Finnish court has ordered the Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde to pay record labels a sum $395,000. This decision came after various record labels accused the torrent website of sharing their artists’ contents illegally. Even though Sunde has left the website many years ago, he continues to face numerous problems.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU's highest court, has a slightly unusual procedure for delivering its judgments. After a case has been referred to it by a national court, one of the CJEU's top advisors, known as an Advocate General, offers a preliminary opinion. This is meant to provide guidance to the judges considering the case, and generally indicates how the CJEU will rule. But it is by no means binding, and judges have been known to go completely against the advice offered to them. Let's hope that doesn't happen in a copyright case currently before the EU court.
The EU is one step closer to adopting a universal legal policy enabling libraries to lend ebooks. Earlier today Advocate General Maciej Szpunar published a nonbinding advisory opinion which said that libraries should be able to lend ebooks just like they do paper books.
Electronic books should be treated just like physical books for the purposes of lending, an advisor to Europe's top court has said.
Maciej Szpunar, advocate general to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), said in an opinion published (PDF) Thursday morning that public libraries should be allowed to lend e-books so long as the author is fairly compensated.
Those above are - in a nutshell - the questions currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Vereniging Openbare Bibliotheken v Stichting Leenrecht, C-174/15, a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Rechtbank Den Haag (District Court of The Hague, Netherlands).
This reference has arisen in the context of proceedings brought by the association of Dutch public libraries which, contrary to the position of Dutch government, believes that libraries should be entitled to lend electronic books included in their collections according to the principle "one copy one user". This envisages the possibility for a library user to download an electronic copy of a work included in the collection of a library with the result that - as long as that user "has" the book - it is not possible for other library users to download a copy. Upon expiry of the e-lending period, the electronic copy downloaded by the first user becomes unusable, so that the book in question can be e-borrowed by another user.
The record labels basically will find no innovation that's not worth suing, and so back in 2013 they sued the online video hosting/streaming site Vimeo, in part because the site had created a popular genre of videos known as "lipdubs" where people would lip sync to a song in a video. In the fall of 2013, the district court rejected most, but not all, of the record labels' arguments about the DMCA. The labels had argued that Vimeo lost its DMCA safe harbors for a variety of reasons, including not having a reasonable repeat infringer policy (and by "reasonable" the labels claimed it had to be the same as YouTube's), red flag knowledge, and the fact that because Vimeo lets people download videos there's no safe harbor. The court rejected basically all of those arguments -- but did leave open the possibility that red flag knowledge might apply if Vimeo employees had watched some of the videos at play in the case. There was also one very problematic part of the ruling, which is that the court said that pre-1972 sound recordings do not qualify for the DMCA's safe harbors because of the weird quirk of copyright law history by which pre-1972 sound recordings are not actually covered by federal copyright law (but, instead, various state laws and common law).
In Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons (2016), the Supreme Court has vacated the Second Circuit’s ruling denying attorney-fee awards in the copyright case – but offered a balanced opinion that places a number of limits on when fees may be awarded.
The opinion holds the reasonableness of the losing party’s position should be a substantial factor. I.e., the more reasonable that position, the less likely that fees should be awarded. However, objective reasonableness is not the ‘controlling factor.’
The organization behind Wikipedia has warned that tinkering with the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA could interfere with its already effective handling of copyright issues. Charles M. Roslof, Legal Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, says that a "takedown, staydown" system would be both expensive and likely to chill free speech.