LinuxQuestions.org (LQ) recently turned 16, which means we can sing the Chuck Berry song “Sweet Little Sixteen” to it. Even better, this means the site is old enough to drive in most states. Hot stuff! And today’s interviewee, Jeremy Garcia, is the founder and still head LQ-er. In this video, he’ll tell you how he once expected to get *maybe* 100 members, and talks about how he would (or wouldn’t) do things differently if he was starting LQ today.
When you think of Linux, you probably don’t think of Apple or its products. But some Linux users actually prefer to run it on Apple’s MacBook laptops. A MacBook owner recently asked if Linux would run well on his laptop, and he got some interesting responses in the Linux subreddit.
Bulgarian software-defined storage maker Storpool adds Cloudstack support and boosted performance, but holds fire on adding enterprise-friendly VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments
Software-defined storage – and hyper-converged infrastructure – provider Storpool has added some incremental improvements to its product, such as Cloudstack integration and boosting scalability to 20,000 volumes and snapshots per cluster.
Scalix, the award-winning Linux email, group calendaring, and messaging company, today announced certification of support for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 and 12. Close collaboration between the Scalix and SUSE teams resulted in a combined solution that brings advanced, cost-effective collaboration to the highly-reliable, scalable and secure SUSE platform for enterprise-class IT services, whether on premises or in the cloud.
Canonical has announced a new partnership between them and Pivotal to collaborate on delivering a cloud native platform based on the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system to their customers.
The Kubernetes community on Wednesday introduced Version 1.3 of its container orchestration software, with support for deploying services across multiple cloud platforms, including hybrid clouds.
Kubernetes 1.3 improves scaling and automation, giving cloud operators the ability to scale services up and down automatically in response to application demand, while doubling the maximum number of nodes per cluster, to 2,000, says Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Product Manager Aparna Sinha in a post on the Kubernetes blog. "Customers no longer need to think about cluster size, and can allow the underlying cluster to respond to demand," Sinha says.
Once again the level of manual deployment, be it either with a CI system or as a completely manual approach was very surprising, looking further into this data, we did a breakdown across the main orchestration tools, and looked at which CI tools participants are using in conjunction with the various orchestration tools.
What has 21 million lines of code, 4000 contributors, and more changes per day than most software projects have in months, or even years? The Linux kernel, of course. In this video, Greg Kroah-Hartman provides an inside view of how the largest, fastest software project of all absorbs so many changes while maintaining a high level of quality and stability.
The Linux Foundation is again hosting its annual LinuxCon conference which will be held on August 22 – 24 in Toronto, Canada offering the opportunity for developers, sys admins, architects and all types and levels of technical talent to gather together at one event for education, collaboration and problem-solving for the Linux platform.
The event offers more than 100 sessions ranging from tutorials to deep technical dives and everything in between and 1,000 Linux community members with which to collaborate.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration today is announcing six new members are joining the organization: Bitnami, CoSoSys, GigaSpaces, Thundersoft, NXT Foundation and INUIT Foundation - University of Rome Tor Vergata.
Mesa 12.0 has many new features especially when it comes to the advancing of OpenGL 4.x support by the major Intel/Radeon/Nouveau graphics drivers. While enthusiasts/gamers should really be riding Mesa Git for best support, it's a pity to see the 12.0 release has yet to happen.
Timothy Arceri sent out the latest version of his Intel Mesa patches for the ARB_enhanced_layouts OpenGL extension. These patches finish up this last GL extension that's needed by this open-source Intel Linux driver before it can claim OpenGL 4.4 and then 4.5 compliance.
All modern laptops have a gpu integrated into their processor (the igpu), some models also have a more powerful dedicated gpu (dgpu), this is called switchable graphics.
By default all apps will run on the more energy efficient igpu and the OS can choose to switch to the dgpu when more gpu-power is necessary, trading battery time for graphics performance. On most laptops the default gpu can be changed to the dgpu so that everything will always run on the dgpu.
Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been tasked with making improvements to Linux's switchable graphics support, namely for laptops with integrated and discrete GPUs.
For years there's been various developers working on Linux switchable graphics and features like DRI PRIME, but to this day the support remains a great deal behind what's offered by Windows and OS X. Hans de Goede is hoping to improve the situation for Fedora, but thanks to Red Hat's workflow, will benefit upstream Linux projects to help other distributions too.
It's not often we get to talk about NVIDIA developers making open-source contributions to Mesa... After all, their contributions to the Nouveau driver tend to be limited just to the Nouveau DRM/KMS kernel driver and even there seeing patches from the green giant tend to be very infrequent. The latest Mesa patches from NVIDIA aren't even tied to Nouveau but just for wiring up an EGL extension.
The FFmpeg development team have announced recently the release of the first maintenance update for the FFmpeg 3.1 "Laplace" series of the popular open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework.
Let’s admit it, professional grade video editing is still a weakness of the Linux desktop. The closest thing you can get to professional video editing on Linux is Lightworks, but that’s still closed source.
If you are looking for fully open source video editing software for Linux, there are actually many options, but in my experience, they all lack something or other. There are two video editing tools in particular that I often use on my Linux machine depending on the project: PiTiVi and Blender.
On a network such as the Internet, mail clients send mails to a mail server which then routes the messages to the correct destinations (other clients). The mail server uses a network application called Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).
We are proud to announce the new release of Poppins 0.2 beta. This release is a big improvement including new features and bug fixing.
Oracle has released the first RC development release of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.1.
VirtualBox 5.1 has been migrating the GUI to Qt5, new APIC implementations, more MMIO emulation, improved GUI performance, better Python 3 support, and more.
Oracle is proud to announce the availability of VirtualBox 5.1 Release Candidate 1.
This release is a major improvement which include a large number of enhancement and bug fixes.
Today, July 7, 2016, Oracle has had the pleasure of announcing that the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.1 virtualization software is available for public testing.
Several years ago I've complained about uTidylib not being maintained upstream. Since that time I've occasionally pushed some fixes to my GitHub repository with uTidylib code, but without any clear intentions to take it over.
Time has gone and there was still no progress and I started to consider becoming upstream maintainer as well. I quickly got approval from Cory Dodt, who was the original author of this code, unfortunately he is not owner of the PyPI entry and the claim request seems to have no response (if you know how to get in touch with "cntrlr" or how to take over PyPI module please let me know).
After a typically long period of deliberation, I finally decided to buy myself a proper GPS tracker for recording my MTB rides. I have had a GPS tracker/mapper on my phone for some time now, but with the possibility for ranging further a field on a potential bike-packing trip in future, I did not want to rely on my mobile phone. I also wanted to get a wireless HRM that would work with the GPS tracker so that I could understand how hard I was working on my various routes.
Hi folks! So in the last couple of days a significant issue in all Fedora releases has come to our attention, affecting (so far) several systems that use the Intel ‘Skylake’ hardware platform. Systems that appear to be affected so far – at least with some system firmware versions – include: Lenovo Thinkpad T460, Lenovo Thinkpad x260, Lenovo Yoga 260, ASUS Zenbook UX305CA, Asus Zenbook UX303UB, Samsung Notebook 9. [...] microcode load fails and hangs the system.
Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved to be a slight challenge. Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it again. It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up an hardened Android installation from the Tor project blog on a device I had access to. It is a old mobile phone with a broken microphone The initial idea had been to just install CyanogenMod on it, but did not quite find time to start on it until a few days ago.
I feel bad for the Battlestation: Harbinger developer, as I think it's a pretty nice name but another developer has coined the "Battlestation" term so they have to change their name. They will also be doing a free update soon.
The other developer is at least being nice about it and isn't trying to sue them, so that's something at least.
A little bit of gaming history just got the MIT license treatment. Habitat from Lucasfilm Games is now available under the MIT license on github.
So far the Linux port quality seems to be great and I've been having a really good time with what I've played so far.
Proper fighting games is something we lack, so it's really great to see that Vanguard Princess is coming to Linux!
It's a two on two battle system, so that alone has me interested to see how it plays out.
Parkitect is a very cool Early Access theme park building sim and the latest alpha is now available with Linux support.
KDE's server inventory is a mixed bag. We have a few physical machines that were donated to us. There's some sponsored colocation. We also rent a couple of big machines from Hetzner, divvy them up into smaller containers with lxc and host services there. Today, I can announce that we're adding droplets from DigitalOcean to that bag.
But we don't have to end this way! As in a marathon, after a period of slower running, we can get a second wind, take a drink of some energy-fueling stuff, and put on a burst of speed to finish in style! Please share on twitter, G+, Facebook and on your own blogs, and let's finish our KDE summer fundraiser in a generous way. The Randa Meetings were a huge success, and Qt.con is coming up.
Another way features become priorities is what Rempt calls the "organic" method. Over time, the general dissatisfaction or demand for a feature increases, until a consensus is reached that it needs to be improved or rewritten. "Right now," Rempt says, "we're getting people who ask whether it isn't time to start improving the brush engines again, [so] next year, it might be time to spend some really focused time on them again."
No! DO NOT WANT! It’s bad enough having Gtk 2 and Gtk 3 (thankfully Gtk 1 is long gone), and you want me to have to litter my system with even more Gtk-sized turds… Please, no.
Softpedia has been informed today, June 7, 2016, by NethServer developer Alessio Fattorini about some of the features coming to the NethServer 7 server-oriented open-source operating system.
It's been more than one month since the third and last Alpha build of the NethServer 7 distribution has hit the streets, and users were asking for a new development build. As such, Alessio Fattorini and his team of skillful developers have been working hard all this time to bring you a Beta version of NethServer 7, which will be based on the CentOS 7 series of server-oriented distros.
JBoss EAP 7 has recently been fully Java EE 7 certified. For most developers this essentially represents serious commitment from Red Hat towards commercial support for Java EE 7. As many of us know, WildFly (the upstream community project for JBoss EAP) was one of the earliest Java EE application servers to get certified against Java EE 7. There are already numerous publicly known adoption stories for Java EE 7 on WildFly. However, a lack of Red Hat commercial support for WildFly had been a show-stopper for many - particularly very large enterprises. JBoss EAP removes this hurdle and is bound to be a further boost to Java EE 7 adoption. In my view JBoss has ranked for many years as one of the best Java EE implementations and with significant adoption. That said, one of the most valuable characteristics of Java EE is the rich implementation choices it offers (and hence the freedom from vendor lock-in).
Red Hat Summit 2016 has come and gone, leaving behind several interesting announcements that should be of interest to readers of Virtualization Review. I'm not going to try to analyze all of them here; instead, I'm going to look at just one area: Red Hat and containers.
Red Hat talks about the use of containers in several ways, including: a discussion of how they help in a DevOps environment; how they make it more easily possible to decompose applications into microservices then deploy them quickly; and how a containerized approach makes it possible for enterprises to modernize their environments by moving workloads from legacy platforms, one microservice at a time.
The OP@L initiative will deliver offerings built on Lenovo's infrastructure that will run Red Hat's NFV and OpenStack software. Lenovo is teaming up with Red Hat as it looks to build tightly integrated and open systems for the telecommunications industry, and is looking at network virtualization as a key part of the effort.
At the recent Red Hat Summit, Lenovo officials unveiled its Open Platform@Lenovo (OP@L) to create open infrastructure that will run Red Hat's software stack for network-functions virtualization (NFV), an emerging technology that is playing a key role in telco initiatives to create more agile, programmable and scalable networks to address changing customer demands.
Virtualization environments are getting more complex and susceptible to security risks. Here are some risk mitigation strategies, outlined in a session at the annual Red Hat Summit.
BPM and DevOps have embraced the same goals from different sides of the organization. Now, Red Hat is trying to close the gap between developers and business process creation.
Love Fedora? Want to work with Fedora full-time to help support and grow the Fedora community? Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards (OSAS) team is hiring a Fedora Community Outreach and Impact Lead to do just that.
The Fedora Linux community is preparing something that most of us have been waiting for so long, something that should have been implemented in most GNU/Linux distros a long time ago.
The nearly finished Fedora Media Writer is looking to take on a greater role with Fedora 25 in making it easier to write Fedora images out to USB sticks.
A new feature proposal is looking to make Fedora Media Writer a primary downloadable with Fedora 25. Fedora Media Writer is the almost-finished rewrite of Fedora's Live USB Creator. The new media writer program has a better interface, is now written in C++, and should work out much better than liveusb-creator.
Debian (and consequently Ubuntu) contains a range of extraordinarily useful monitoring packages.
I've been maintaining several of them at a basic level but as more of my time is taken up by free Real-Time Communications software, I haven't been able to follow the latest upstream releases for all of the other packages I maintain. The versions we are distributing now still serve their purpose well, but as some people would like newer versions, I don't want to stand in the way.
Six members of the Debian Perl team met in Zurich over the weekend from May 19 to May 22 to continue the development around perl for Stretch and to work on QA across 3000+ packages.
Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock, who died late last year in strange circumstances, killed himself, according to an autopsy report obtained this week.
On the evening of December 28, the 42-year-old fired off a string of increasingly incoherent tweets, claiming he had been beaten up by police officers near his home on Green Street, San Francisco, and was threatening to kill himself. Fearing he was going to take his own life, his friends on the internet called the city's police department, who sent round a cop to check on him.
Peering through a window, the officer could see the open-source guru lying face down on his stairs. The cop kicked down the locked front door, and found Murdock naked and lifeless with electrical cord around his neck. He was confirmed dead at 7.40pm.
The autopsy reports have confirmed that Debian founder Ian Murdock, who died last year, committed suicide. Dr. Amy Hart, assistant medical examiner who signed the report, said the death was suicide by hanging. He also noted that Docker employee suffered from “alcohol abuse with withdrawal seizures and Asperger’s syndrome.”
Today, July 7, 2016, Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system will reach end of life (EOL) in three weeks from the moment of writing this article, on July 28, 2016.
Ubuntu e-mail client Dekko is shaping up pretty damn nicely for its future desktop début.
Dekko developer Dan Chapman shared some images of a new, converged Dekko for the desktop on Google+, under the title “An all new Dekko is coming!”.
The buzzword convergence has been bandied about a lot in relation to Ubuntu. That’s because the plan is to have one single Ubuntu that works the same way across phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, TVs, kiosks, and refrigerators. It’s an exciting idea that some other software environments have also aimed at, but so far have not been able to deliver on.
Ubuntu 16.04 was released a couple months ago and with it came a lot of interesting changes.
On August 4, 2016, Canonical will announce the fifth and last point release of its long-term supported Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system, Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS.
Today, July 7, 2016, the company behind one of the widely used GNU/Linux distributions has announced that Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS (Trusty Tahr) will offer users the latest Linux kernel and graphics stacks from the current LTS (Long Term Support) version of the operating system, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Mycroft, the company behind the Mycroft AI open source intelligent personal assistant for GNU/Linux operating systems, has published a story recently on how they are using Ubuntu Linux and Snaps to deliver their software Mycroft devices.
The big news in the Linux world this week is that Ubuntu will drop support for 32-bit processors. Here's what the change means for the channel. (Hint: Hardware now matters less than ever.)
In late June, Ubuntu developer Dimitri John Ledkov suggested on the Ubuntu mailing list that Ubuntu should no longer support PCs with 32-bit processors. His proposal was to end such support by the time of the Ubuntu 18.04 release, which is planned for April 2018. Other major Linux distributions have already ceased 32-bit support.
The variety of ways people have found to cram the palm-sized Raspberry Pi computer inside a handheld device are some of my favorite Pi projects. But those projects are usually expensive, and some even require a 3D printer. The PocketC.H.I.P. isn’t nearly as powerful as a Pi, but it’s still the handheld machine I’ve wanted for a long time. Plus, it’s just $50.
X-ES announced an “XPedite5850” COM Express Basic Type 5 module that runs Linux on an NXP QorIQ T4240 SoC with 12 e6500 PowerPC cores.
Extreme Engineering Solutions (X-ES) regularly taps NXP (formerly Freescale) QorIQ system-on-chips for its Xpedite SBCs and modules, both the newer ARM-based variety, as in the XPedite6401 and XPedite6370 (QorIQ LS1043A or LS2088A) and the PowerPC-based Xpedite 6101 (QorIQ T2081, T1042, or T1022). The new XPedite5850 COM Express module uses NXP’s highest-end Power Architecture chip, the QorIQ T4240, and appears to be the first COM Express module based on the SoC.
Gumstix released a customizable carrier board for its tiny OMAP4430-based DuoVero COMs, featuring touchscreen and Raspberry Pi style CSI-2 camera support.
Gumstix has launched an open-source “Garret 50C” carrier board for its dual-core DuoVero computer-on-module family, the company’s higher-end alternative to its single-core Overo COMs. The board was designed with the company’s online Geppetto DIY design and quick-turn prototype manufacturing service, which customers can use to customize the board.
The best known smart bulb setups (such as the Philips Hue and the Belkin Wemo) are based on Zigbee, a low-energy, low-bandwidth protocol that operates on various unlicensed radio bands. The problem with Zigbee is that basically no home routers or mobile devices have a Zigbee radio, so to communicate with them you need an additional device (usually called a hub or bridge) that can speak Zigbee and also hook up to your existing home network. Requests are sent to the hub (either directly if you're on the same network, or via some external control server if you're on a different network) and it sends appropriate Zigbee commands to the bulbs.
Backup anxiety syndrome is not a real medical condition, but as a photographer, you might be familiar with the main symptom all too well: the constant worry about keeping your photos safe, especially when you are traveling. So what can you do to alleviate this debilitating condition? Besides the obvious, but far from practical, solution of lugging your laptop around as a glorified backup device, you have two options: splurge on something like WD My Passport Wireless Pro or build a backup device yourself. Going with the former option seems like a no-brainer: a simple financial transaction gives you a decent, albeit expensive, backup solution. So why bother wasting time and effort on reinventing the wheel and building a DIY backup device from scratch? Because it’s neither difficult nor time-consuming.
Earlier this year I was in an elevator with Rich Miner, the Android co-founder who has been a general partner with Google Ventures since the corporate venture capital group was formed in 2009. We talked about our kids, and the difficulty in finding quality educational apps and other kid-focused Internet services that weren’t primarily either: (a) Babysitters; and/or (b) Ad delivery devices.
Nokia is finally making smartphones, except not really. The company announced a few months ago that it will indeed get back into the mobile game, setting its sights on Android. But the Nokia we used to know and love will not actually make the phones that its diehard fans have been asking for. Nokia will license its brand to its Asian partners, which will then create Nokia handsets.
Up until now, Android One phones were mainly targeted at emerging markets, such as India and Turkey. Japanese manufacturer Sharp, however, decided to change that by announcing the awkwardly named 507SH, the first Android One phone to make its way to the Land of the Rising Sun.
Today we release all of our own source code as Free/Open Source Software.
A new open source PaaS, Tsuru, is out to ease the application deployment process by reducing it to little more than a Git push command.
The workflow for Tsuru, according to its documentation, consists of writing an app, backing it with resources like databases or caching, and deploying it to production with Git. Tsuru handles the rest, including crating up the apps in Docker containers and managing their workloads. Its creators claim it can be deployed both locally and on services like AWS, DigitalOcean, or Apache CloudStack.
Mouser Electronics, Inc. is now offering Hexiwear wearable platform products from MikroElektronika. Completely open source and developed in partnership with NXP, the Hexiwear device incorporates a low-power NXP Kinetis K64 microcontroller, Bluetooth€® low energy (BLE) and wireless connectivity, and six onboard sensors into a compact wearable form factor for developers who need a complete Internet of Things (IoT) toolkit. With Hexiwear’s low-power yet versatile hardware, compatible smartphone and iOS apps, and cloud connectivity, developers can prototype and build devices such as cloud-connected edge nodes, wearable devices, or complex controllers for industrial IoT applications.
Are you wondering how to get involved in an open source project? Maybe this episode from the Mondern Web podcast will give you some ideas.
I'll be at Texas LinuxFest in Austin, Texas this weekend. Friday, July 8 is the big day for open source imaging: first a morning Photo Walk led by Pat David, from 9-11, after which Pat, an active GIMP contributor and the driving force behind the PIXLS.US website and discussion forums, gives a talk on "Open Source Photography Tools". Then after lunch I'll give a GIMP tutorial. We may also have a Graphics Hackathon/Q&A session to discuss all the open-source graphics tools in the last slot of the day, but that part is still tentative. I'm hoping we can get some good discussion especially among the people who go on the photo walk.
Mozilla works on uplifting privacy settings of the Tor browser project to the Firefox web browser to provide privacy conscious users with additional privacy-related options.
While the Tor browser is based on Firefox ESR, it is modified with additional privacy and security settings to protect users of the browser while using the program.
The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.10. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.
Version 1.10 of the Rust programming language is now available.
Rust 1.10 brings the -C panic=abort flag as their most-requested feature for yielding 10% smaller binaries and about 10% faster compilation time. Rust 1.10 also brings the new cdylib crate type for compiling Rust as a dynamic library to be embedded in another language. Rust 1.10 also has build system changes to allow it to be built with Rust 1.9 and that trend will continue to be supported for future releases.
According to a contract seen by Recode, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer struck a deal with Mozilla in 2014 specifying annual payments of $375 million to the browser creator in exchange for Yahoo's search engine appearing in the default position on Firefox. That $375 million price tag will be paid out every year until 2019 one way or another—even if Mozilla doesn’t like the company that buys Yahoo and decides to walk away.
Of course, if Mozilla decides it likes whichever company buys the embattled search giant, then payments continue as before and the new owner of Yahoo’s search engine retains the default position on the browser.
Under terms of a contract that has been seen by Recode, whoever acquires Yahoo might have to pay Mozilla annual payments of $375 million through 2019 if it does not think the buyer is one it wants to work with and walks away.
Mozilla has a way of popping up with unexpected projects that it opens up for community development, and it has now unveiled a project called the Context Graph. The effort is focused on the answer to this question: "What if web browsers were immediately useful instead of demanding input when you launched them?"
Belgian, British and German advocates of open source in healthcare want to join efforts, hoping to raise interest, and to strengthen the network of software healthcare specialists. A conference is tentatively being planned in London (UK) early next year.
ONLYOFFICE celebrates its 6th birthday today and we have big exciting news for our open source community! We have updated the ONLYOFFICE server source code making our web-office more feature-rich and easier to install. But first things first.
Join the FSF and friends Friday, July 8th, from 12pm to 3pm EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.
Participate in supporting the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.
Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.
France's national computer science institute, Inria, has unveiled its Software Heritage archive. The project aims to “collect, organise, preserve, and make accessible all the source code for all available software”.
Bulgaria has signed into law a new rule that will require all software developed for, and used by, the government to be open source.
Bozhidar Bozhanov, a software engineer who has been advising the deputy prime minister, blogged that the Electronic Governance Act has been amended to state that "all software written for the government [is] to be open source and developed as such in a public repository".
Bozhanov continued: "That does not mean that the whole country is moving to Linux and LibreOffice, neither does it mean the government demands that Microsoft and Oracle give the source to their products.
Bulgaria's Parliament recently passed legislation mandating open source software to bolster security, as well as to increase competition with commercially coded software.
Amendments to the Electronic Governance Act require that all software written for the government be Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)-compliant. The new provisions reportedly took effect this week.
Software developer Bozhidar Bozhanov, advisor to one of Bulgaria's four deputy prime ministers, orchestrated the new law.
This move is supposed to improve government transparency, give citizens a tangible return on their tax dollars, and improve the quality and security of sometimes-shoddy bespoke government software. The law was seen as a win by advocates of open source software, but it also means Bulgaria must face the double edge of open sourcing.
The European Commission will reward software and services that have been proven to be shared and reused in the public sector and which have a potential for wider reuse in Europe.
The government of Italy will stop highlighting the importance of an open, interoperable ICT architecture. The government will no longer require the Agency for the Digitalisation of the Public Sector (Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale, AGID) to assess public administration’s ICT plans, and is also scrapping publication and maintenance of a list of open ICT standards that are to be used by public administrations.
Static analysis was introduced to the software engineering process for many important reasons. Developers use static analysis tools as part of the development and component testing process. The key aspect of static analysis is that the code (or another artifact) is not executed or run, but the tool itself is executed, and the input data to the tool provides us with the source code we are interested in. Static analysis started with compilers and derived technologies that are well established in the software development world. Each technology applicable for static analysis can choose between several alternatives, set up its own rules, and benefit from using them. What is most surprising to me is that even with a huge set of tools and possibilities, static analysis is not properly used and disregarded in most projects.
The new features in LiveCode 8 are intended to empower a new audience of app makers. Some of these include nine pre-made widgets, 46 new extensions, the all new LiveCode Builder language, a 3.5x performance boost, Script Only stacks for better version control and working in teams, LiveCode for HTML5 and a new Feature Exchange for community funding of new features, among others.
While we've had some reservations in the past about the FTC's guidelines on endorsements and testimonials in the online arena, our concerns have tended to be about the grey areas of the law. The way that reviews for books, music and games often work falls into this grey area, with products and media handed out for review, and the disclosure guidelines the FTC laid out seem overly intrusive. Whatever our reservations about those guidelines, however, the goal of preventing the surreptitious pimping of a product or service by a trusted source that has direct connections with it was laudable.
Which brings us to two YouTube personalities, TmarTn and Syndicate Project, whose real names are Trevor Martin and Tom Cassell. These two have spent a great deal of time urging their followers to use the CSGO Lotto website while, at best, barely disclosing the site's sponsorship, and never even coming close to acknowledging that they are executives of the company behind the site.
The best, by which I mean worst, part of the e-mail is that it gets the lingo wrong. "Drank" does not mean "drink." "Drank" means "cough syrup;" specifically, cough syrup containing codeine and promethazine that is consumed recreationally. Opioids like codeine are routinely abused to get high, and, when combined with the antihistamine promethazine, can produce feelings of euphoria.
Kevin Turner, Microsoft chief operating officer for the past 11 years, is moving to Citadel Securities, where he will be chief executive officer. He will also be vice chairman of Citadel, the parent company.
Despite opposition from consumer advocacy groups, a controversial bill on the labeling of genetically modified (GM or GMO) food passed a cloture vote in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, even as critics warned the legislation is needlessly complicated and bends to the agriculture lobby interests.
Where a hospital is located and who owns it make a big difference in how many of its doctors take meals, consulting and promotional payments from pharmaceutical and medical device companies, a new ProPublica analysis shows.
A higher percentage of doctors affiliated with hospitals in the South have received such payments than doctors in other regions of the country, our analysis found. And a greater share of doctors at for-profit hospitals have taken them than at nonprofit and government facilities.
Today, The Dig dives into water. Pun totally intended. I’ve received a lot of questions about applying investigative reporting techniques to figuring out whether your water is safe — the stuff in your taps, the stuff in your rivers, the stuff at the beach. Flint, Michigan, has made us all want to be water sleuths.
E-cigarettes or vaporizers have surged in popularity in recent years, especially among teenagers. But the tobacco-alternative comes with an unexpected health risk: the devices can explode and cause severe burns, according to a slew of lawsuits filed against manufacturers.
Scientists can distinguish between a viral and a bacterial infection by assaying just seven human genes, according to a study published this week (July 6) in Science Translational Medicine. A clinical test based on these findings would enable doctors to more appropriately prescribe antibiotics, which are ineffective against viruses.
This May, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that doctors prescribe antibiotics when they’re not needed in around 30 percent of cases examined. Overuse of these drugs may promote more widespread antibiotic resistance.
To address the problem, scientists at Stanford University looked at more than 1,000 patient blood samples to identify gene activation signatures associated with either bacterial or viral infections.
The year 2003 was a game changer when two Pennsylvania State Correction facilities were shut down and relocated to a new facility, the State Correctional Institute at Fayette (SCI Fayette), outside the town LaBelle, which was built directly on top of an old coal mine and adjacent to a fly ash dump – fly ash is “the powdery residue left over from coal combustion” – Kevin Williams reports for Al Jazeera. After thirteen years of operation and many health problems, nothing is being done to combat the effects of the toxic waste site known as the old coal mine. As Williams notes in his article, “‘Poisonous Lands’: Pennsylvania Prison Built Next to Toxic Dump,” prisoners and townsfolk alike are being harmed by the debris.
Prisons being built on toxic lands are nothing new, but the adverse health effects are not just harming the prisoners. The local townsfolk and the correction officers are also being affected by the state’s choice to cut costs and save money. Although the scale of impact seems to be contained to only this relatively small area, the actuality is that as consumers we are creating this problem. The coal mine site has higher contaminant recordings than the federal and state standards of lead, mercury, arsenic, etc. (Williams, 2016). These contaminants are causing the individuals to develop cancer at a statistically significant rate higher than the general populous. The individuals in this area are experiencing medical issues involving skin, eye, throat, and nose irritation.
On June 9, the GNU wget project released version 1.18 of its famous file downloading package, following a report from security researcher Dawid Golunski and SecuriTeam.
Remember how we managed to raise €1 million to demonstrate security and freedom aren’t opposites? For the next two weeks now (until July 8, 2016), you can decide which project you think should be the first to receive a code review as part of the FOSSA pilot project.
Today, July 7, 2016, the Samba development team has announced the immediate availability for download of the Samba 4.4.5, 4.3.11, and 4.2.14 maintenance updates.
A major acquisition deal has been announced by Avast in which they will purchase AVG after an all-cash deal of $1.3 billion. The two firms are a known name in the digital security world and have been in existence for more than 20 years.
Firms supplying essential services, e.g. for energy, transport, banking and health, or digital ones, such as search engines and cloud services, will have to improve their ability to withstand cyber-attacks under the first EU-wide rules on cybersecurity, approved by MEPs on Wednesday.
Setting common cybersecurity standards and stepping up cooperation among EU countries will help firms to protect themselves, and also help prevent attacks on EU countries’ interconnected infrastructure, say MEPs.
The European Union approved its first rules on cybersecurity, forcing businesses to strengthen defenses and companies such as Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. to report attacks.
The European Parliament endorsed legislation that will impose security and reporting obligations on service operators in industries such as banking, energy, transport and health and on digital operators like search engines and online marketplaces. The law, voted through on Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, also requires EU national governments to cooperate among themselves in the field of network security.
SECURITY OUTFIT Symantec has warned customers that security flaws in the firm's systems outed by Google's Project Zero last month won't be fixed until mid-July.
Eleven years ago today, three suicide bombers attacked the London subway and a bus and killed 51 people. Almost immediately, it was obvious that retaliation for Britain’s invasion and destruction of Iraq was a major motive for the attackers.
Two of them said exactly that in videotapes they left behind: the attacks “will continue and pick up strengths till you pull your soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq . . . . until we feel security, you will be targets.” Then, less than a year later, a secret report from British military and intelligence chiefs concluded that “the war in Iraq contributed to the radicalisation of the July 7 London bombers and is likely to continue to provoke extremism among British Muslims.” The secret report, leaked to the Observer, added: “Iraq is likely to be an important motivating factor for some time to come in the radicalisation of British Muslims and for those extremists who view attacks against the UK as legitimate.”
Before addressing the issues raised in the Iraq Inquiry report, I would like to remember and honour the 179 British servicemen and women killed and the thousands maimed and injured during the Iraq war, and their families as well as the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq launched by the US and British governments 13 years ago.
Yesterday I had a private meeting with some of the families of the British dead as I have continued to do over the past dozen years.
It is always a humbling experience to witness the resolve and resilience of these families and their unwavering commitment to seek truth and justice for those that they lost in Iraq.
The Ukrainian intelligence service at the center of the inquiry into who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is accused by a top U.N. official of blocking a probe into Ukrainian government torture, reports Robert Parry.
Almost as if it were planned, former U.S. President George W. Bush rang in his 70th birthday on Wednesday with a remarkable gift: a reminder of his seemingly eternal impunity for war crimes committed in Iraq and beyond.
The long-awaited publication of the Chilcot Inquiry—the UK government's investigation into the lead-up to and execution of the Iraq War—amounted to a searing indictment of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, accusing him of deceiving the public and British Parliament about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction and following the United States blindly into an "illegal" war.
Donald Trump praises Saddam Hussein these days. “He was a bad guy, really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good,” Trump said on Tuesday. Last fall, Trump said that the world would be “100 percent” better if Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi were still in power.
But you know when Trump was really angry at Saddam? Back in the early 1990s, when Trump—deep in debt and piling on loans in the midst of a recession—blamed the Iraqi leader for his business woes.
In August 1990, Trump couldn’t break even on his Taj Mahal casino hotel and the Trump Shuttle airline—but it wasn’t his fault. “Nobody projected that oil prices would go through the roof because of some madman in the Middle East,” Trump said, according to Newsday. “This just adds to and makes the recession worse.”
Trump owed his creditors $245 million for the Trump Shuttle, and he had had missed a $1.1 million interest payment. The airline merged with another company in 1992.
After almost a decade of waiting, the Chilcot report is finally being released today promising to uncover the real reasons for the UK’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq. While British political elites are dealing with the aftermath of this political bombshell, the media and population are once again demanding answers for this costly and unnecessary war.
Perhaps the most salacious expectation is the possibility that top leaders such as Tony Blair could be brought up on charges as a “war criminal”. For many families of the fallen and citizens in general, it is an opportunity to hold politicians to account for the real casualties of their policies. When it comes to tens to hundreds of thousands of death at home and abroad, electoral defeat is simply not punishment enough.
Barack Obama has delayed his planned troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, meaning there will now be 8,400 US forces in the country when he leaves office in January.
The US president’s most recent estimate for that figure was 5,500. In 2012, he promised that the war would be over by 2014.
In a surprise White House statement on Wednesday, Obama warned that a “precarious” security situation in Afghanistan could yet provide support to terrorists some 15 years after the September 11 attacks that first led to western military intervention.
On June 21, 2015 the London-based Guardian newspaper published an article describing the testimony of a soldier who says he deserted the army after his unit was given an order to kill activists whose names appeared on two lists. He reported seeing one list given to his Military Police unit that formed part of the Xatruch task force, and a second for a Military Police unit that formed part of the National Force of Interinstitutional Security (FUSINA) task force. The second contained the name of Lenca indigenous leader Berta Caceres, murdered on March 3, 2016.
Here is an interview I did yesterday about the long-awaited Chilcot
It’s been more than a year since I first tried to connect with the retired four-star general and ex–CIA director—and no luck yet. On a recent evening, as the sky was turning from a crisp ice blue into a host of Easter-egg hues, I missed him again. Led from a curtained “backstage” area where he had retreated after a midtown Manhattan event, Petraeus moved briskly to a staff-only room, then into a tightly packed elevator, and momentarily out onto the street before being quickly ushered into a waiting late-model, black Mercedes S550.
Thursday’s suspected militant attack on Bangladesh’s biggest congregation to celebrate Eid was possibly aimed at a liberal cleric who has led a public campaign against Islamist radicals in the country, police said.
Maulana Farid-uddin Masud, the chief cleric of the main mosque in Kishoregunj town that was attacked, collected more than 100,000 signatures, including from leading Islamic scholars and intellectuals, against a recent wave of extremist attacks in the country targeting atheists, religious minorities.
Masud had described radical Islamists as pursuing “empty Islam” and said those perpetrating violence in the name of the faith would “go to hell”.
“We believe he was the target,” Tofazzal Hossain, assistant superintendent of police in Kishoregunj, told Hindustan Times.
The death toll from the horrific recent Iraq bombings has risen over 250. If Blair had not been absolutely determined to attack Iraq on the basis of a knowing lie about WMD, they would be alive now, along with millions of other dead. ISIS would never have taken control of territory in Iraq and Syria. Al Qaeda would never have grown from an organisation of a few hundred to one of tens of thousands. We would not have a completely destabilised Middle East and a massive refugee crisis.
Do not expect a full truth and a full accounting from the Chilcot panel of establishment trusties today. Remember who they are.
Blair is still a creature of absolute self-serving slime. His attempt yesterday to justify the invasion of Iraq as an effort to prevent a 9/11 on British soil is dishonest in every way. Blair knew full well that Iraq had nothing at all to do with 9/11 – that was his still friends and financiers the Saudi elite. The intelligence advice in advance of the invasion he received was unequivocal that it would increase the threat to the UK, and it directly caused the attacks of 7/7.
Remember, there was a leaked memo from the head of British intelligence that the intelligence justifying the Iraqi Invasion was “fixed” or orchestrated to produce the justification for the invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard established by the United States. Chilcot’s job was to make this fact go away or assume less importance and to protect the Butler Inquiry’s orchestrated verdict that, despite the word of the head of British intelligence, the intelligence was not fixed.
The Russian president was meeting with foreign journalists at the conclusion of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 17th, when he left no one in any doubt that the world is headed down a course which could lead to nuclear war.
Putin railed against the journalists for their "tall tales" in blindly repeating lies and misinformation provided to them by the United States on its anti-ballistic missile systems being constructed in Eastern Europe. He pointed out that since the Iran nuclear deal, the claim the system is to protect against Iranian missiles has been exposed as a lie.
You probably heard that Jim Comey testified to the House Oversight Committee for over four hours today. You’ll see far less coverage of the second panel in that hearing, the testimony of Inspector Generals Steve Linick (from State) and Charles McCullough (from the IC).
In addition to OGR Chair Jason Chaffetz suggesting the committee convene a secrecy committee akin to the one Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan convened back in the 1990s (which would be very exciting), McCullough revealed something rather startling regarding a letter he sent to Congress back in January (this was first reported by Fox). The letter was his official notice to Congress that some of the information in Hillary’s emails was claimed by an agency he didn’t name to be Special Access.
I write this post reluctantly, because I really wish the Hillary investigations would be good and over. But I don’t think they are.
After having watched five and a half hours of the Clinton investigation hearing today, I’ve got new clarity about what the FBI has been doing for the last year. That leads me to believe that this week’s announcement that DOJ will not charge Clinton is simply a pause in the Clinton investigation(s). I believe an investigation will resume shortly (if one is not already ongoing), though that resumed investigation will also end with no charges — for different reasons than this week’s declination.
First, understand how this all came about. After the existence of Hillary’s server became known, State’s IG Steve Linick started an investigation into it, largely focused on whether Hillary (and other Secretaries of State) complied with Federal Records Act obligations. In parallel, as intelligence agencies came to complain about State’s redactions of emails released in FOIA response, the Intelligence Committee Inspector General Charles McCullough intervened in the redaction process and referred Clinton to the FBI regarding whether any classified information had been improperly handed. As reported, State will now resume investigating the classification habits of Hillary and her aides, which will likely lead to several of them losing clearance.
Comey, a Republican appointed as FBI director by President Obama, crossed all three of those lines. Very few commentators noted that Comey shouldn’t have said anything at all, and how unusual it was that he did. One exception was Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of the Lawfare blog and a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) once claimed that he “never voted for a [government] shutdown and never will.” But Issa is so angry the FBI recommended Hillary Clinton not be indicted for using a private server for her email that he suggested on Wednesday that he is rethinking his promise. He proposed that now might be a good time for the Republican leadership to shut down the federal government, in protest of what he called “an imperial president” who will not “enforce criminal charges against a criminal.”
Presto! Instant blanket exemption from disclosure at both federal and state level. The FBI takes care to point out which Florida Sunshine Law exemption local agencies can use to withhold documents from requesters.
There's significant public interest in these documents, especially those related to EMS/police response to emergency calls. This obviously conflicts with the FBI's determination that its ongoing investigation -- which now apparently contains every document created by every responding law enforcement agency in Florida -- should preempt any and all requests for documents via Florida open records laws.
Not for nothing have there been several efforts mounted to alter blanket exemptions like the one the FBI is using to insert itself into local level records requests. Unfortunately, it's very likely the FBI's wielding of this "open investigation" exemption will be granted deference by the federal court currently presiding over an open records lawsuit between the Orlando Sentinel and the City of Orlando, even though this fight never should have included a federal agency conducting its own concurrent investigation of the mass shooting.
Ever since the hydraulic fracturing boom began in the mid-2000s, Wisconsin has been a leader in mining the silica sand the fracking industry uses in a watery mix with other chemicals to extract oil and gas trapped in shale rock. And similar to fracking, some have long worried that sand mining harms the environment and public health, polluting air and water.
Reconstruction of climate events long before the Ice Ages shows that failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could eventually lead to temperatures rising by up to 10 degrees.
At the start of June, Chris Faulkner, Chief Executive Officer of Breitling Energy, was a high-flying shale company executive and media darling, often interviewed on CNN, Fox Business News and even the BBC. During his most recent appearance on CNN on June 2nd, he weighed in on the financial prospects for drillers who survive low oil prices despite the spate of bankruptcies sweeping the shale industry.
The history of the fossil fuel industry can feel like it is told in complicated deals the public isn’t meant to understand. This is what is happening in Sweden. The government-owned energy company, Vattenfall, is demanding the sale of its coal mines and power plants based in Germany to a Czech company, EPH. The deal includes some of Germany’s largest coal mines – and three of the top 10 most polluting coal plants in Europe. They are going to a deeply unattractive buyer – EPH, a company hell-bent on burning as much coal as possible.
In the next couple of weeks, Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, is facing a stark choice. On one hand, he could approve the sale of the most climate-destroying assets in Europe, breaking his own election promises in the process. Or, he could promote a transition to keep coal in the ground – and support a liveable climate – in an unprecedented decision by a government to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels, and lignite or ‘brown coal’ is the most polluting type of coal and the greatest threat to EU climate goals.
Democrats need to get serious about climate change—and time is running out for them to do so.
Environmentalists see the upcoming full Democratic Platform Committee meeting in Orlando as a final opportunity to ensure the party takes meaningful action on climate change over the next four years.
The Commission’s proposal on provisional application of the Canada-EU trade agreement (CETA) violates EU law.
The EU can only provisionally apply those parts of the international agreement over which it has exclusive powers. However, in today’s proposal, the Commission is seeking to provisionally apply CETA in its entirety. This violates the founding treaties of the EU.
The Commission has already shown it is not sure it has the power to do this, by asking EU judges to rule on the division of power in the EU-Singapore Free Trade deal. This judgement is expected later this year or early next year.
Instead of waiting for this important Court ruling, the Commission is hastily pushing for a decision that may be contrary to what the ECJ decides.
But it is just another day at the office for the 1%. They own the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government. As Chris Hedges frequently stresses: “We’ve undergone a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. And it’s over. We’ve lost, and they’ve won.”
But, as usual, things are more complicated. We should hope that, in one respect, Britain’s exit from the EU will create a kind of dependence that did not exist while it was still a member of the union.
Sovereign debt – the debt of national governments – has ballooned from $80 trillion to $100 trillion just since 2008. Squeezed governments have been driven to radical austerity measures, privatizing public assets, slashing public services, and downsizing work forces in a futile attempt to balance national budgets. But the debt overhang just continues to grow.
The most disappointing consequence of Brexit for foreigners living in the UK has become the unexpected rise of xenophobia. According to the behavior of locals, the EU open door policy has completely failed. Brits have made it clear that foreigners are not welcome. Not only immigrants from conflict areas, but people from Poland and Baltic States face insults or even physical violence, hear offensive words and the call to pack their bags and leave.
Britain supports EU free trade deal with Canada despite Brexit: Freeland
Britain has assured Canada it will push for speedy ratification of the mammoth free trade deal with the European Union, despite its intention to leave the 28-country bloc, says International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland.
There has been much controversy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a plurilateral trade agreement involving a dozen nations from throughout the Pacific Rim – and its impact upon the environment, biodiversity, and climate change.
The secretive treaty negotiations involve Australia and New Zealand; countries from South East Asia such as Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Japan; the South American nations of Peru and Chile; and the members of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Canada, Mexico and the United States. There was an agreement reached between the parties in October 2015. The participants asserted: ‘We expect this historic agreement to promote economic growth, support higher-paying jobs; enhance innovation, productivity and competitiveness; raise living standards; reduce poverty in our countries; and to promote transparency, good governance, and strong labor and environmental protections.’ The final texts of the agreement were published in November 2015.
Iris Milano could hardly sleep after she got the news that her family would be kicked out of their two-bedroom apartment in San Jose.
“You’re always thinking and worrying. It’s something that is always with me,” said Milano, 47, a skin-care technician who lives with her husband and 14-year-old son in an apartment protected by rent control in the northern California city. “We are being forced to move. This is our home.”
Milano, who is originally from Venezuela and has lived in the area for 13 years, is one of roughly 670 tenants who are being displaced from their homes in what local housing advocates believe to be Silicon Valley’s largest-ever mass eviction of rent-controlled tenants.
The 216-unit complex called the Reserve Apartments that is being demolished to make way for a development of market-rate housing – located five miles away from Apple’s headquarters, 14 miles away from Google and 20 miles away from Facebook – is the latest example of rising income inequality in a region home to many of the world’s wealthiest technology companies.
Consumer confidence has seen its sharpest drop in 21 years after the UK vote to leave the EU, a survey suggests.
The market research firm GfK conducted a one-off online survey of 2,000 people after the result was known.
Its confidence index fell by eight points to minus nine, a drop not since seen December 1994.
Less confident consumers tend to curb their spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of the UK economy.
It is also one measure watched by the Bank of England when deciding its next move on interest rates. Governor Mark Carney has already warned the UK's economic outlook is "challenging" following the decision to leave the EU.
The Gfk survey also suggested that 60% of consumers expect the general economic situation to worsen over the next year, compared with 46% in June. Just 20% expect it to improve, down from 27% last month.
Texas populist Jim Hightower will present the Democratic Party platform committee with a Bernie Sanders-sponsored amendment to the draft platform when it meets in Orlando this Friday and Saturday. It will read:
It is the policy of the Democratic Party that the Trans-Pacific Partnership should not get a vote in the lame duck session of Congress and beyond.
This should be a no-brainer. All of the Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination were opposed to the TPP trade deal, as of course is Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
This is a crucial time for Dr. Jill Stein. It’s a test of whether she can move her presidential campaign from the fringes into the mainstream of an election that she says “has tossed out the rule book.”
“We are here to keep the revolution going,” Stein, the prospective Green Party presidential candidate, told me in a telephone interview Tuesday. “Bernie [Sanders] supporters are grieving over the loss of the campaign, of their hard work, their vision, but they are remobilizing. Our events are absolutely mobbed with Bernie supporters.”
We spoke in the morning, before FBI Director James Comey threw yet another twist into the presidential race by announcing that while the bureau would not recommend criminal charges in the Hillary Clinton email affair, she had been “extremely careless” with her use of a personal email address and a private server for sensitive communications.
Bernie Sanders' next signature rally may take place in Philadelphia—the night before the Democratic National Convention.
The Vermont senator's campaign has applied for a permit to hold an event that will reportedly host between 15,000 to 40,000 people on July 24 at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park. It is one of 10 such pro-Sanders events requesting permission from the Philadelphia mayor's office, the Burlington Free Press reports.
Sanders spokesperson Michael Briggs said last month that the senator was planning to deliver a "victory statement" in Philadelphia, but said on Wednesday that plans for the rally are still being finalized.
The campaign is gearing up for the convention, where Sanders has promised to bring a floor fight over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) platform after a slew of his proposals—including banning fracking and blocking U.S. Congress from voting on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)—were overruled or watered down during previous negotiations.
On May 17, Donald Trump announced an arrangement with the Republican National Committee (RNC) that will allow individuals to donate almost $500,000 each to a joint fundraising committee between Trump, the RNC and 11 state Republican parties. In 2012, Mitt Romney’s joint fundraising committee could only raise $135,000 from each individual. What happened in the last four years to make these numbers so much higher?
It seems like a nightmare, but it is reality: The Democratic Party has chosen a criminal as its presidential candidate. And the liberals said that Reagan wore teflon!
The United States touts its commitment to free speech but American discourse has degenerated into self-absorbed info-tainment and trivia, ignoring many of the most pressing issues of the day, writes Michael Brenner.
It's no secret that Apple does not want you to monkey around with your device's innards or to take it anywhere but to its own stores for repairs. The company has continually screwed around with the screws that keep its hardware together in an effort to prevent DIYers and non-Apple-approved repair shops from opening its devices.
Now, Apple can't legally prevent anyone from utilizing third parties for repairs, as explained in this Motherboard article by Jason Koebler. A 40-year-old piece of legislation states companies can't void warranties simply because the devices have been opened.
Over the past two months, the public broadcaster has been embroiled in unconstitutional pronouncements aimed at compromising and more importantly censoring information intended for public consumption.
'I would recommend that Knesset TV not broadcast her words as a matter of principle,' Zionist Union's Herzog. MK Freige: Herzog a 'useful idiot' for Netanyahu and the right.
Hearing: Blasphemy Laws and Censorship by States and Non-State Actors: Examining Global Threats to Freedom of Expression
Reddit’s World News moderators have censored a story about a German woman who didn’t report her rape due of fear of inciting “racism against refugees” while allowing the posting of a story about a young girl lying about about a refugee sex attack.
The story of the German activist and leader of left wing German youth movement Solid lying about the identities of the men who raped her was reported on by The Washington Times. The article was removed from /r/WorldNews under the belief that it did not constitute worldwide news and was marked as “local news”.
The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) of the People's Republic of China announced a rule that meant all games had to be pre-approved by SAPPRFT before going live.
SAPPRFT has also allowed a three month grace period in which existing games must be submitted and post-approved.
However, one games developers grievances have been shared around the internet as his game was denied for having English words in it.
The UK government is on a mission to protect the young of the country from the dark recesses of the web. And by the darker recesses, what is really meant is porn. The main ISPs have long been required to block access to known piracy sites, but porn is also a concern -- for politicians, at least.
As part of its bid to sanitize and censor the web, Sky -- from the Murdoch stables -- is, as of today, enabling adult content filtering by default for all new customers: Sky Broadband Shield. The company wants to "help families protect their children from inappropriate content", and in a previous experiment discovered -- unsurprisingly -- that content filtering was used by more people if it was automatically enabled.
The government has proposed that all money-making porn sites that operate in the UK need to have an age verification system in place, and in many ways Sky's scheme is just an extension of the idea. Sky's approach, however, the reverse of similar systems used by other ISPs, Rather than asking customers if they want to enable the content filter, the question is flipped on its head so they are asked if they want to disable the option.
The aftermath of the police shooting of Philando Castile, 32, was broadcast to the world when his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds used Facebook Live to document the traffic stop turned fatal in St. Paul, Minnesota. Castile’s death is the latest of a string of police-involved shootings of African Americans, but it’s also part of a growing trend: live-streaming violent events. And social media companies are now being scrutinized for how they handle them.
Reynolds filmed for 10 minutes, starting just seconds after Castile was shot and slumped over in the driver’s seat, until her phone died. “The only thing y’all didn’t see is when he was shot,” she said during a subsequent Facebook Live broadcast Thursday.
Privacy Shield—the much maligned replacement to the Safe Harbour deal between the European Union and the US—looks set to be approved by national representatives on Friday, Ars understands.
The scheme, which will allow the transfer of personal data from the EU to the US despite privacy and data protection concerns, has faced an uphill battle. Brussels officials who negotiated the deal on behalf of the EU have been desperate to push it through in the face of criticism from the European Data Protection Supervisor, national data protection authorities, and the European Parliament, in order to give some legal certainty to companies that rely on transatlantic data flows.
I saw the evocative Time Magazine cover from March 2011 (it has been widely used with credits) and it got me thinking. We have long known that Google collects information on its search and Android users. It is a longstanding joke that Android is a thinly disguised advertising delivery mechanism – why else would Google give it away? Hope you enjoy this weekend, tin-foil hat read.
Truth is, it is much bigger than Google. It is Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, search engines, and hundreds of more so-called free apps — loyalty programmes especially — that have the sole purpose of gathering information about you. It is also your government/s, telco, newspaper subscription, gym membership, medical records, Uber, cab bookings, banks, and so many more. Some use it to generate advertising revenue, some to present tailored offers to you, some sell it, some put it into massive collaborative data lakes like Adobe or Oracle Marketing clouds, etc.
Double-Click admitted in 2012 that at that time it shared its tracking with 105 companies. Ghostery, a tracking blocker, says now over 2000 trackers know your every Web move. It is not unusual for it to find 30 to 50 trackers per page – especially on high volume sites.
Alex Gibney has made a living making movies about topics that people don't want to talk about publicly.
He was nominated for an Oscar for his look at the downfall of Enron ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), won an Oscar for a movie about the US’s torture and interrogation practices during the war in Afghanistan ("Taxi to the Dark Side"), and recently gave us a peek into the Church of Scientology ("Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief").
We've been talking for several years now about how modern "smart cars" don't adhere to particularly smart security practices. Nissan recently opened Leaf owners to remote attack via a nasty vulnerability in the car's app. The Mitsubishi Outlander was similarly unveiled to be relatively trivial to hack. And last year, hackers showed just how easy it was to manipulate and disable a new Jeep Cherokee running Fiat Chrysler's UConnect platform.
Most of these attacks involve the intruder worming so deeply into a vehicle's systems that they're in some cases able to actually control most if not all of the car systems from anywhere on the planet. So as you might imagine, simply unlocking the doors and starting the engine while in or near the car isn't proving too difficult for many hackers.
Fifteen secretive orders are in force allowing British spy agencies to collect large volumes of communications data, it has been revealed.
The measures were issued by Home and Foreign Secretaries on behalf of MI5 and GCHQ using a little-known legal provision between 2001 and 2016.
Administration officials also wrongly blamed encryption for terrorist attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, and Brussels, before evidence even emerged about terrorists’ online behaviors.
At the end of June, Russia’s upper and lower houses of parliament approved the “Yarovaya laws,” a controversial package of legislative amendments that Edward Snowden has called “an unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights.” Named for its co-author, State Duma MP Irina Yarovaya, the package will undermine the core principles of Russian criminal law.
The section of the bill that amends the Criminal Code is nonsensical and brazenly repressive, even compared to other recent retrograde legislation. It makes “failure to report a crime” a criminal offense; any individual who becomes aware of “reliable information” about plans to carry out an act of terrorism, armed mutiny, or any of a dozen other crimes and does not notify the authorities will face up to a year in prison.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the German ruling coalition’s parliamentary groups to immediately amend a proposed law on the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, in order to prevent the BND from spying on journalists.
You would think that "the law" is obviously part of the public domain. It seems particularly crazy to think that any part of the law itself might be covered by copyright, or (worse) locked up behind some sort of paywall where you cannot read it. Carl Malamud has spent many years working to make sure the law is freely accessible... and he's been sued a bunch of times and is still in the middle of many lawsuits, including one from the State of Georgia for publishing its official annotated code (the state claims the annotations are covered by copyright).
But there's another area that he's fought over for many years: the idea that standards that are "incorporated by reference" into the law should also be public. The issue is that many lawmakers, when creating regulations will often cite private industry "standards" as part of the regulations. So, things like building codes may cite standards for, say, sheet metal and air conditioning that were put together by the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors National Association (SMACNA), and say that buildings need to follow SMACNA's standards. And those standards may be great -- but if you can't actually read the standards, how can you obey the law. At one point SMACNA went after Malamud for publishing its standards. And while they eventually backed down, others are still in court against Malamud -- including the American Society for Testing & Materials (ASTM), whose case against Malamud is set to go to trial in the fall.
On the morning of August 28, 2014, two days after the end of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Sohaib Zahda hopped into a shared taxi in Hebron that was going to Ramallah, where he had a job interview.
Thirty-three-year-old Zahda, who owns a paintball company, is an unlikely terrorist. An avid cyclist who speaks Arabic, Italian, French, and English, he is a member of Youth Against Settlements, a nonviolent organization that protests against Israeli settlers who live in and around Hebron. He is opposed to Hamas firing rockets into Israel. He likes to tell visitors his grandfather had Jewish friends in Hebron in the 1920s.
Hebron and Ramallah are about 25 miles apart. To get between them, Palestinians must pass through the “container checkpoint,” manned by Israeli soldiers on a road that connects the southern West Bank to its central and northern cities. At the checkpoint — named for a shipping container once located at the barrier — Palestinian pedestrians queue up to get their IDs checked, while cars wait for inspection and for soldiers to wave them through. When Zahda’s taxi drove up, masked Israeli soldiers stopped the vehicle, asked him to get out, and then handcuffed him.
“I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. ... [They] must advance ... and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence 240 years ago on July 4. Today, we often congratulate ourselves for serving as the model of democracy for the rest of the world, yet our country has perhaps never been so polarized, so divided and so dysfunctional. More and more Americans have a vague and increasing sense that our government is simply incapable of addressing basic challenges like immigration, guns, entitlements, trade, climate and environment, privacy and security, the federal budget, spiraling inequality, money in politics … or even a health emergency like the Zika virus. It is no longer hyperbole to say that American democracy is broken.
It's no accident that Trump's social media feeds keep using neo-Nazi imagery; he's actively courting hate.
Pattakos' mild urging that a Scene writer "get their reporting pants on" is akin to shouting "Fire!" in a crowded forest… and then walking away while it burns? Because the defendants claimed this single article adversely affected its settlement attempts, the court has decided this lawyer should be punished for doing something lawyers do every day -- and something that is apparently permitted by the rules governing attorney conduct.
But the opening of the same decision condemning Pattakos' behavior opens with a recitation of the events leading up to this decision, which includes a period of three years (February 2012-January 2015) where the defendants made zero effort to make counteroffers to the plaintiff's settlement demands. It appears the defendants truly believed the jury would side with it and allow it to escape litigation without having to pay a settlement and are now looking for someone to blame because it ended up paying out $400,000 to the plaintiff and opposing counsel.
So, four hours of narcotics agents milling around, trying to find an excuse to search a residence without a warrant. And nothing to show for it but claims that the appellant sometimes sold pseudoephedrine to one of the people who answered the knock and talk, a bag of opened OTC drug packages, and a white, non-illicit powder.
Remember David Nosal? He was the former Korn/Ferry executive looking to set up his own competing firm, but one that mainly relied on Korn/Ferry's big database of people. As part of that process, after he left the company to head out on his own, he had some former colleagues who were planning to join him log into their Korn/Ferry accounts to access information. Then after those employees left, they got another former colleague to share her password so they could continue to log in. He was charged with violating the criminal portion of the CFAA, under the theory that convincing his former colleagues to gather info for him was a terms of service violation -- and that meant he had "exceeded authorized access" under the statute. This became a key case in determining whether merely violating a terms of service could be considered criminal hacking under the CFAA. Thankfully, back in 2012, the 9th Circuit rejected such a broad ruling of the CFAA, pointing out that such an interpretation would "unintentionally turn ordinary citizens into criminals" and that couldn't be the intent from Congress. This was a huge win that helped limit some of the worst abuses of the CFAA.
However, the US government was not yet done with Nosal. It then filed new CFAA charges against him, not over the original information sharing, but rather for getting that last colleague to share her password with Nosal. The feds argued that this fell under the other prong of the CFAA, that it was a version of accessing a computer system "without authorization" (as opposed to exceeding authorization). Unfortunately, the 9th circuit appeals court has ruled that merely sharing a password can be a CFAA violation.
One of the nation’s most powerful appeals courts ruled Wednesday that sharing passwords can be a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a catch-all “hacking” law that has been widely used to prosecute behavior that bears no resemblance to hacking.
In this particular instance, the conviction of David Nosal, a former employee of Korn/Ferry International research firm, was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who said that Nosal’s use of a former coworker’s password to access one of the firm’s databases was an “unauthorized” use of a computer system under the CFAA.
The decision is a nightmare scenario for civil liberties groups, who say that such a broad interpretation of the CFAA means that millions of Americans are unwittingly violating federal law by sharing accounts on things like Netflix, HBO, Spotify, and Facebook. Stephen Reinhardt, the dissenting judge in the case, noted that the decision “threatens to criminalize all sorts of innocuous conduct engaged in daily by ordinary citizens.”
Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota on Thursday asked the Department of Justice to investigate the killing of a black motorist shot by a white police officer. Philando Castile's dying moments were live-streamed on Facebook, and the incident prompted a comment from President Barack Obama.
Dayton said he wanted an "immediate independent federal investigation into this matter." The governor suggested that racism was to blame for the killing of Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria manager, who was shot at least four times by a police officer after being pulled over for a broken taillight in Falcon Heights.
"Would this have happened if those passengers, the driver and the passengers, were white?," Dayton told a news conference Thursday. "I don’t think it would have. So I’m forced to confront, and I think all of us in Minnesota are forced to confront, that this kind of racism exists."
Five Dallas police officers have been killed and six wounded by gunmen during protests against the shooting of black men by police, authorities say.
Three people are in custody and one man who was in a stand-off with police shot himself dead, US media have reported.
Gunfire broke out at around 20:45 local time on Thursday (01:45 GMT Friday) as demonstrators marched through the city.
The protests were sparked by the deaths of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana.
If unaccountalbe police brutality continues, will American citizens come to the conclusion that cops are criminal thugs of great danger to the public and must be shot down on sight before they murder again?
The goon thugs have done a good job of proving that Amerians would be far safer in the absence of police who during 8 years of the iraqi War killed more Americans than we lost troops in combat.
On February 17th, 2016, French Parliament voted to extend the nation’s state of emergency for three months.
Donald Trump may be backing off elements of his proposed temporary ban on all Muslim immigration to the United States, but in the meantime his original proposal has become way more popular than he is, according to many national polls.
Trump most recently said he was calling for a temporary ban on immigration from “areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States”– rather than all Muslims from anywhere.
But Trump’s poll numbers have been dropping lately; the Huffington Post’s aggregate of polling data shows that Trump has a 35 percent favorability rating, down from 37 percent in late May. Meanwhile, Reuters/Ipsos’s rolling five-day poll as of July 1 showed that 46 percent of Americans favor temporarily banning all Muslims from entering the country, up from 40 percent in late May.
An NBC News-SurveyMonkey poll conducted shortly after the deadly shooting in Orlando showed that 50 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat supported the ban, while 46 percent opposed it.
As my colleague Liliana Segura noted on Twitter this morning, the documented killing of black Americans by police officers has become so routine that it is hard for even the racists who seek to justify the slaughter in online comment threads to keep up.
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That’s why the first reports on the killing of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old cafeteria supervisor at a Montessori School in St. Paul, Minnesota, who was shot while reaching for his license during a traffic stop on Wednesday night, included a comment from a Facebook spokesman. The aftermath of the shooting, as Castile bled to death in the front seat of a car, was streamed live on the social network from the phone of Castile’s distraught girlfriend.
On Wednesday, the world woke to a scene that is all too familiar in America: A black man, Alton Sterling, was shot and killed by the police (an alarm tragically repeated again on Thursday). A cellphone video shows Sterling pinned to the ground beneath two police officers when he is shot several times at point-blank range.
Protesters immediately gathered outside the convenience store where Sterling was killed. Outrage has mounted online; his death has been called a murder, an assassination, and a lynching. The Department of Justice announced that they would open a civil rights investigation into the case.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards called for a federal civil rights investigation on Tuesday into what was at that point the latest fatal police shooting of a black man in the United States.
But in May, Edwards signed a bill into law that makes targeting a police officer a hate crime. Passage of such bills at the state level is a top priority of a national organization called Blue Lives Matter, which was formed in response to the Black Lives Matter movement .
Alton Sterling, 37, was shot in the chest at point-blank range by Baton Rouge police early Tuesday morning; it was captured on video by witnesses. Philando Castile, 32, was shot after police stopped his car outside St. Paul, Minn.; his girlfriend livestreamed his death on Facebook.
But it is the civil rights of police officers that Edwards was concerned about in May, as if theirs were being routinely violated.
We're out of words. Two more black men - Alton Sterling, Philando Castile - murdered by police. Two more sorrowful hashtags, two more bloody videos, two more sets of weeping families, two more outraged cities and many more in spirit, two more barrages of tragic parallel stories: They were good guys, they were doing nothing wrong but being black, their awful deaths prove, one more awful time, that whiteness is blindness, and cops are America's terrorists, and black people are tired and hurting - but, alone amidst a well-armed population, not allowed to have guns. We have been here so long that Malcom X spoke of it 55 years ago, and he's still right. We're out of words. Here are his.
For years T-Mobile has been making some welcome changes to U.S. wireless service, implementing everything from free data while roaming internationally, to rollover data plans that let you keep unused data. T-Mobile's strange, new tactic of treating consumers well has paid incredible dividends for the company, which has been adding significantly more postpaid wireless subscribers per quarter than any other major carrier. Between the elimination of consumer pain points and its foul-mouthed CEO, T-Mobile's been a welcome change for the sector (just ignore its attack on the EFF and failure to support net neutrality).
Despite dedicated resistance by tens of thousands of Web users and civil society groups, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has allowed Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to move to the next phase of development within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Today the Medicines Patent Pool announced the signing of nine new sub-licensing agreements for the generic manufacturing of key HIV and hepatitis C treatments.
According to the MPP press release, it signed licences with Aurobindo (India), Desano (China), Emcure (India), Hetero Labs (India), Laurus Labs (India), Lupin (India) and a new partner, Zydus Cadila (India).
Aurobindo signed two new sub-licences for lopinavir and ritonavir (both HIV treatments) for Africa. Desano, a Chinese manufacturer and Emcure also signed licences for those treatments.
Next week, the French Senate is due to consider a bill on biodiversity for the third time. That bill, which could be modifying several legislations, might allow for the sharing and selling by non-governmental organisations of seeds in the public domain to non-commercial buyers, which is so far not permitted under the current French legislation, according to sources.
Can operators of physical marketplaces be considered "intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe an intellectual property right", so that "rightholders are in a position to apply for an injunction" against them, pursuant to the third sentence in Article 11 of the Enforcement Directive? Put it otherwise: how does the landmark decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in L'Oréal v eBay [noted here, here, and here] apply in an offline context?
The UK’s current copyright legislation is set for an overhaul, thanks to the introduction of the Digital Economy bill. This bill has been focused on implementing harsher sentences for online piracy.
This recommendation followed a debate that resulted in a plan devised by the UK Government to increase the maximum prison sentence in such cases five-fold. If this bill is passed in the current form, the online pirates will face a maximum prison of ten years.