Now just to clear the air. I personally don't run Windows in a virtual machine or dual-boot. However, there are some games I play using WINE. If you're stuck trying to pull yourself away from legacy Windows applications take heart, there is hope. One of the options above may provide you with a means of using Linux for most daily tasks while still having access to any Windows applications you can't live without.
What say you? Do you find yourself dual-booting or using WINE? Perhaps you didn't know that it's possible to run an unregistered copy of Windows 10 without any show-stopping restrictions? Hit the Comments and share your experience with Windows applications as a Linux user.
The history of the Gnome and KDE desktops go a long way back and their competition, for the lack of a better term, is almost as famous in some circles as the religious divide between Emacs and Vi. But is that competition stil relevant in 2016? Are there notable differences between Gnome and KDE that would position each other on a specific segment of users? Having both desktops running on my systems (workstation + laptop) but using really only one of them at all times, I wanted to find out by myself.
My workstation and laptop both run ArchLinux, which means I tend to run the latest stable versions of pretty much any desktop software. I will thus be considering the latest stable versions from Gnome and KDE in this post. Historically, the two environments stem from different technical platforms: Gnome relies on the GTK framework while KDE, or more exactly the Plasma desktop environment, relies on Qt. For a long time, that is until well into the development of the Gnome 3.x platform, the major difference was not just technical, it was one of style and experience. KDE used to offer a desktop experience that was built along the lines of Windows, with a start center on the bottom left, a customizable side bar, and desktop widgets. Gnome had its two bars on the top and bottom of the screen, and was seemingly used as the basis for the first design of Mac OS X, with the top bar offering features that were later found in the Apple operating system.
MAYBE it’s how intrusive Windows 10 can be. Or maybe you’re just fed up with working under the constant threat of viruses and other malicious software. Or perhaps, you’re tired of paying thousands of pesos for applications and equally weary of breaking the law by installing pirated versions of the software. Indeed, there are many reasons to dump Windows in favor of the free and open-source Linux operating system. Here’s what Windows users who are contemplating the move should keep in mind.
It's no secret that Chrome OS has not been the same striking success for Google that the Android OS has been. And yet, Chromebooks--portable computers running the platform--have not only found their niche, but they are also introducing a new generation to cloud computing. Chromebooks are firmly entrenched in the education market, where many young users have become used to the convention of storing apps and data in the cloud.
Now, according to new research from Gartner, Chromebooks are ready to hit new milestones. Analysts there report that Chromebook shipment growth will be in the double digits this year. At the same time, though, Chromebooks have not become fixtures in the enterprise, replacing Windows PCs.
System administrators play a crucial role in businesses today. They are the individuals responsible for the configuration, support and maintenance of company computer systems and servers. For this reason, they are a popular hiring request, with defense and media companies alike looking for these professionals on Dice.
Yet, despite the ongoing demand, finding and recruiting system administrators may be more of a challenge. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that the quarterly unemployment rate for system administrators was 0.6%, well below the national quarterly average (4.9%) and the quarterly average for all tech professionals (2.1%). Employers thus need to focus more of their recruitment strategies on poaching this talent from competitors.
A few years later, sysarmy, the local IT community, was born as the "Support for those who give support." And in that spirit, for this 8th AdminFest edition, we want to do exactly that: support those who help others in our Q&A platform, sysarmy.com/help. Each 500 points a participant earns, he/she gets a free drink in return!
John Willis takes a brief look at the history of how Devops principles and operating systems have converged. He spends most of the time forward looking at what and how unikernels will converge with Devops tools, processes and culture. He ends with a demo of how containers, unikernels and Devops ideas can work together in the future.
Whether you're still using Subversion (SVN), or have moved to a distributed system like Git, revision control has found its place in modern operations infrastructures. If you listen to talks at conferences and see what new companies are doing, it can be easy to assume that everyone is now using revision control, and using it effectively. Unfortunately that's not the case. I routinely interact with organizations who either don't track changes in their infrastructure at all, or are not doing so in an effective manner.
If you're looking for a way to convince your boss to spend the time to set it up, or are simply looking for some tips to improve how use it, the following are five tips for using revision control in operations.
So, after a slight delay due to my travels, I'm back, and 4.7 is out.
Despite it being two weeks since rc7, the final patch wasn't all that big, and much of it is trivial one- and few-liners. There's a couple of network drivers that got a bit more loving. Appended is the shortlog since rc7 for people who care: it's fairly spread out, with networking and some intel Kabylake GPU fixes being the most noticeable ones. But there's random small noise spread all over.
Today, July 24, 2016, after a week of holiday fun, Linus Torvalds has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.7 for all GNU/Linux operating systems.
The Linux 4.7 kernel has been in development for the past two months, but that shouldn't surprise anyone who is either reading our website on a regular basis or keeping pace with the Linux kernel development cycle, which was very normal for this branch. A total of seven Release Candidate (RC) testing builds were released since May 29, 2016, which introduced numerous new features and improvements.
If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.7 kernel will be released before the day is through.
Last October I looked at The Size Of The Different Open-Source Linux DRM/Mesa Graphics Drivers, but with it being nearly one year since then and Linux 4.7 due out today, I decided to run some fresh L.O.C. measurements on the popular DRM/KMS drivers to see their current sizes.
This lines-of-code counting was mostly done out of a curiosity factor. In this article I'm just looking at the in-kernel DRM code and not the Mesa drivers, DDX drivers, LLVM back-ends, or anything else in user-space related to the open-source graphics drivers.
Yet another Linux kernel security feature coming to the mainline kernel that appears readied for the Linux 4.8 merge window is hardened usercopy.
Hardened usercopy was originally based upon GrSecurity's PAX_USERCOPY feature but reworked into a whole new form, according to developer Kees Cook at Google. This hardened usercopy is to be exposed as the CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY option within the kernel.
Alexandre Oliva from the GNU Linux-libre project happily announced the release and general availability for download of the GNU Linux-libre 4.7 kernel for those who want 100% freedom when using a GNU/Linux operating system.
The release of GNU Linux-libre kernel 4.7 comes a few hours after Linus Torvalds' announcement for the new Linux 4.7 kernel branch, on which GNU Linux-libre 4.7-gnu is based, and, as usual, it contains deblobbing changes for various of the included drivers, including Radeon, Intel i915 CSR, Intel Skylake audio, HFI1 InfiniBand, Realtek rtl8xxxu Wi-Fi, iwlwifi, mwifiex, Broadcom brcmfmac, and Atheros ath10k.
The latest work landing in Mesa Git has been for H.264 VA-API video encoding.
Earlier this month I wrote about the work being done by AMD engineers on H.264 VA-API video encoding inside Gallium3D. Of course, with the code being worked on by AMD, the primary focus has been for their RadeonSI Galloum3D driver with GPUs that have their VCE video encode engine. However, this could end up benefiting other Gallium3D drivers too.
Oracle announced the release of the first maintenance update to the VirtualBox 5.1 series of the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software for all supported computer operating systems.
Each Linux distribution has a default terminal emulator for interacting with system through commands. But the default terminal app might not be perfect for you. There are so many terminal apps that will provide you more functionalities to perform more tasks simultaneously to sky-rocket speed of your work. Such useful terminal emulators include Terminator, a multi-windows supported free terminal emulator for your Linux system.
If you could magically, instantly, create any sort of app for the Linux desktop right now, what would it be?
The Battle for Wesnoth is probably one of the all time great open source games. It's been around for a long time, it's well polished and now it's looking to get on Steam.
Kalypso Media really are getting Linux friendly aren't they! Vikings – Wolves of Midgard has been announced as a new action RPG that will launch in early 2017.
One of the latest fun projects making use of Khronos' Vulkan API is a port for Quake 1.
If you have some time to kill this week, vkQuake is a port of Quake 1 to the Vulkan API for graphics rendering. The Quake 1 code is derived from QuakeSpasm, a popular open-source Quake project.
Auto-Staccato is a new action rhythm game coming to Linux and it's trying to get on Steam.
Three new Linux Distributions join the ranks: - PCLinuxOS - Netrunner - ZorinOS
Feral Interactive announced recently that they managed to successfully port the popular, award-winning Life Is Strange game to GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.
Life Is Strange is an episodic graphic adventure game published by Square Enix and developed by Dontnod Entertainment. The story follows the life of Max Caulfield as a photography senior that discovers a time traveling method to save her friend Chloe Price. The player will be able to rewind time, which will affect the past, present and future.
The GNOME 3.21.4 desktop environment was released last week, which means that many of the default applications and components were updated with bug fixes and various enhancements.
Solus Project founder and architect Ikey Doherty announced on July 24, 2016, that the static release schedule for their Solus operating system is officially and completely dropped.
Why 5? Why not 10?
The more distributions that I list, the more confusion that I will introduce to potentially new users. If I had to recommend 1 it would be Linux Mint but we are all different so I have tried to add a bit of variety.
The list includes 2 main stream behemoths, a rolling release distribution, a lightweight distribution and a cool modern distribution. I think that covers most bases.
Thankyou for reading.
Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia about the availability of the public Beta release f his upcoming 4MLinux 19.0 GNU/Linux distribution, which comes one week after the release of the 4MLinux 19.0 Core edition.
As reported by us in the second week of July, the Beta release of 4MLinux 19.0 Core, which the developer uses as the base for all the distributions and distrolettes that are being distributed as part of the 4MLinux family, including 4MParted, 4MRescueKit, BakAndImgCD, 4MRecover, and Antivirus Live CD, the operating system uses the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 6.1.0.
The development cycle of the openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system continues, and today we would like to inform our readers about the availability of the third and last Alpha build in the series.
Starting from version 1.21.0 you'll experience an improved graphical user interface, where show and compare views are connected. With this you can navigate between viewing different descriptions as well as comparing them, so working with multiple system descriptions is much faster and offers greater usability.
When you start the graphical user interface you will get a list of all available system descriptions, where you can choose one to view more details. The following screen shot shows this list. You can use the search mask to filter them for certain terms. Simply click on the description you would like to see and it will get you to the details view. Run the command `machinery list --html` to get to the list view.
We are happy to announce that Azure image type has been enabled for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP1 appliances. From now on you can build and upload SLE12 SP1 based appliances in the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
Modularity is an exciting, new initiative aimed at resolving the issue of diverging (and occasionally conflicting) lifecycles of different “components” within Fedora. A great example of a diverging and conflicting lifecycle is the Ruby on Rails (RoR) lifecycle, whereby Fedora stipulates that itself can only have one version of RoR at any point in time – but that doesn’t mean Fedora’s version of RoR won’t conflict with another version of RoR used in an application. Therefore, we want to avoid having “components”, like RoR, conflict with other existing components within Fedora.
Fedora Program Manager Jan Kurik announced that the Fedora 22 Linux operating system has officially reached end of its life on July 19, 2016, urging users to upgrade to either the Fedora 23 or Fedora 24 releases.
Canonical just released Ubuntu 16.04.1, the first point release in the Ubuntu 16.04 “Xenial Xerus” series. All the changes made to Ubuntu 16.04 have been combined into a new installer image, which you can now download.
It doesn’t what sort of portable device you use, from laptop, to tablet, to phone: you know how crucial it is to monitor battery life.
The guys over elementary OS have released a second Beta version of the highly anticipated elementary OS 0.4 "Loki" operating system, fixing numerous of the issues reported by users since the first Beta.
This time, the announcement was made by Daniel 'DanRabbit' Foré, who reports that more than 70 bugs reported by public beta testers since last month's Beta release have been squashed, and that many of the fixes are in fact configuration changes, which means that they won't be available to those running the first Beta build, so they'll have to make a fresh install.
As part of the Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) announcement, Martin Wimpress informs us about the release of the Ubuntu MATE 16.04.1 LTS operating systems for users of Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS.
Ubuntu MATE 16.04.1 LTS is not a major release, and if your Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) installation is up to date, you already have the latest software updates and security patches that have been injected in the new installation mediums generated mainly for those who want to reinstall or deploy the OS on new systems.
The first point release of the Xubuntu 16.04 LTS computer operating system has been officially published as part of the Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) announcement earlier in the week.
Now that I’ve had about a week to play around in Mint 18, I find a lot to like and have no major complaints. While Cinnamon probably isn’t destined to become my desktop of choice, I don’t dislike it and find it, hands down, the best of the GNOME based desktops I’ve tried so far. Anybody looking for a powerful, all purpose distro that’s designed to work smoothly and which can be mastered with ease would be hard pressed to find anything better.
Artila’s “Matrix-700” control computer runs Linux on a Cortex-A5 SoC, and offers 8GB eMMC, plus three USB, four RS-232/485, GbE, and Fast Ethernet ports.
The Matrix-700 is the first Cortex-A5 based model in Artila’s family of traditionally ARM9-driven Matrix industrial computers. The device is designed for non-stop operation in remote locations, such as device networking and remote monitoring.
Rabid Prototypes is crowdfunding a $20 “Neutrino 2.0” version of its earlier, tiny Arduino Zero clone. Rev 2.0 adds RX/TX pins and several other tweaks.
Like last year’s Neutrino clone of the Arduino Zero, Rabid Prototypes chose Kickstarter to launch Neutrino 2.0. The latest campaign has four days to cover the last $700 or so of its $5K goal.
The StackSavings Web Editor has recently been launched as an open source project. The aim of the project is to be a Web Editor for the Internet of Things.
It would have been easier if we already had an open source platform we could build on. Although we did manage to build it quickly without disrupting our main projects, other companies might find it easier to adopt an existing platform rather than allocate extra time towards building an in-house productivity management application. For that reason, we've made Fluxday an open source project.
Black Duck's latest open source survey shows that a majority of companies are now using open source. So what's stopping the rest? Here's a look at the reasons why businesses might choose not to use open source, or avoid partnering with companies that do.
Virtuozzo announced on Monday general availability of Virtuozzo 7. With this new version, the platform ushers in a new level of portability, reliability, and performance, especially for customers in large data center environments where vendor flexibility, as well as low latency, is critical.
Wire is one in a growing number of messaging services that promise to keep their users' correspondence private. In this case, the service offers encrypted text, voice, and video calls. And now it's open source.
Encrypted text, voice and audio calling service Wire has gone open-source, releasing the code for everything devs need to build their own apps that interface with the service.
For the past year, we've taken note of the many projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves Big Data projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support and more.
Continuing the trend, the foundation has announced that Apache Kudu has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). Kudu is an open source columnar storage engine built for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem designed to enable flexible, high-performance analytic pipelines.
“Under the Apache Incubator, the Kudu community has grown to more than 45 developers and hundreds of users,” said Todd Lipcon, Vice President of Apache Kudu and Software Engineer at Cloudera. “We are excited to be recognized for our strong Open Source community and are looking forward to our upcoming 1.0 release.”
Thank you very much to OpenSym for having the GNU Health project, and looking forward to meet with the GNU Health and other Free communities in Berlin !
Following is the abstract of the presentation Luis Falcon will be giving. For more details please visit the OpenSym homepage.
Susan joined Mozilla in 2011 as Head of Strategic Development. During her five years at Mozilla, Susan has worked with the Mozilla team to conceive and execute multiple complex negotiations and concluded hundreds of millions dollar revenue and partnership deals for Mozilla products and services.
Bundling some of the functionality into the container itself is one approach. However, orchestration may also become subsumed into a PaaS offering or be included as capability offered by a cloud provider. Wikibon’s Brian Gracely described this option as a container management platform in a recent article. This term is useful because it captures a broader stack of services being deployed together as a stack. Along with workload and company size, the choice of container management platforms is also still affected by the cloud(s) being deployed to.
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces today that the third beta release of PostgreSQL 9.6 is available for download. This release contains previews of all of the features which will be available in the final release of version 9.6, including fixes to many of the issues found in the first and second betas. Users are encouraged to continue testing their applications against 9.6 beta 3.
PostgreSQL 9.6 Beta 3 was released on Thursday as this major database update gets closer to its general availability release later this year.
PostgreSQL 9.6 Beta 3 brings a number of fixes to the parallel query support and fixes many other items throughout the PostgreSQL server code. The official 9.6 release isn't expected until "late 2016."
OpenBSD, one of the more prominent variants of the BSD family of Unix-like operating systems, will be released at the beginning of September, according to a note on the official OpenBSD website.
Often touted as an alternative to Linux. OpenBSD is known for the lack of proprietary influence on its software and has garnered a reputation for shipping with better default security than other OSes and for being highly vigilant (some might say strident) about the safety of its users. Many software router/firewall projects are based on OpenBSD because of its security-conscious development process.
DragonFlyBSD 4.6 is up to the release candidate stage and the official release of this next feature version is coming in just a few days.
The release candidate to DragonFlyBSD 4.6 is now available for testing.
OpenKnit is an open-source, low cost, digital fabrication tool that affords the user the opportunity to create her/his own bespoke clothing from digital files. Starting from the raw material, the yarn, and straight to its end use, a sweater for example, in about an hour. Designing and producing clothes digitally and wearing them can now happen in the very same place, rewarding the user with the ability to make decisions regarding creativity and responsibility. (homepage) (full instructions for a Wally120 open-source knitting)
Steven Keating had always been interested in data and learning about things, which is why he volunteered to do a research scan when he was a student. The scan revealed an abnormality. In 2014, the abnormality had grown into a massive tumor. Soon he learned that there were many barriers keeping him from accessing his own data. "And that's what I've been sharing, which is this question: How come as a patient we're last in line for our own data? How come my doctors and my university researchers can see my tumor genome and I can't?"
On Sunday, the International Olympic Committee decided not to call for a blanket ban on Russia for the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games after reports of doping scandals endangered the country’s chances of competing.
Instead, individual international sports federations will make the call on whether or not Russian athletes can compete in the games — which means they will review them all, one by one. Athletes who have been served suspensions for doping will not be allowed in the games. That includes athletes who already completed their suspensions, according to The Wall Street Journal. The findings must be upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to be final.
The ArchStrike developers have announced today, July 25, 2016, that their Arch Linux-based operating system designed for ethical hackers now has official installation mediums as ISO images.
An Indian security researcher was able to find Vine’s source code in plain sight.
Pornhub hosted a bug bounty program a couple of months ago.
Apache HTTP Server and password manager Keepass are to receive a code audit from the European Commission (EC) after a public vote.
The open source tools were by far the most popular – chosen from a lengthy list of similar open source software platforms including FireFox, Drupal and OpenSSL which are in use at the EC and the European Parliament (EP).
In the coming weeks the audits will look to uncover any security issues in the code and share the findings with software developers.
They represent the next phase in a pilot project between the IT departments of the Commission and the Parliament.
The European Police Agency Europol on Monday announced a collaboration with tech giant Intel, security expert Kaspersky Lab and the Netherlands police to tackle the exponential growth of ransomware use by criminals.
Together, the companies and agencies launched an online portal called No More Ransom to help inform the public about the dangers of ransomware and help victims recover their data without having to fork over money to criminals.
Ransomware steals and holds user data hostage, forcing individuals and companies to pay criminals in order to regain control of that data. Kaspersky research shows that the number of ransomware attacks increased more than fivefold between 2014-2015 and 2015-2016, from 131,111 to 718,536.
President Obama is keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting an unwinnable war for fear of the political consequences if he faces reality and admits defeat, an echo of Vietnam, writes Jonathan Marshall.
The shooter at a Munich mall last week who killed 9 and left 27 wounded was an admirer of far right wing Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, and appears to have hated Muslims.
Although David Sonboly was of Iranian heritage, he does not seem to have been a Muslim and appears to have felt no connection to that community.
Iranians are mostly Shiite Muslims who are often victimized by ISIL, so it wasn’t ever very likely that his rampage was inspired by that organization.
The current insistence by politicians and journalists on treating anyone with a drop of Middle Eastern blood as a “Muslim” is frankly racist. After all, millions of people of Christian heritage would now insist that they are not Christians. Why can’t people from Muslim families convert to other things, too? Sonboly appears to have considered himself a Christian or at least a Westerner.
As with many mass killers, the 18-year-old likely had mental problems. But to the extent that he was driven by ideology, it was the that of the Islamophobia Network. Sonboly was part of a far-right anti-Muslim tendency that now haunts Europe .
As many attacks in Europe are carried out by the white far right as by Muslims.
The ambiguities of identity were on display in this case, since Sonboly shouted “I am German!” at the Turkish-Germans he targeted, whom he called ‘Fucking Turks.’ He seems to have blamed practicing Muslims for creating the conditions of prejudice toward people who looked like him in Germany.
I wonder, too – how could I not with my future life as a “refugee” in mind? – about the 65 million human beings uprooted from their homes in 2015 alone, largely in places where we Americans have been fighting our wars for this last decade and a half. And it’s hard not to notice how many more have followed in their path this year, including at least 80,000 of the Sunni inhabitants of Iraq’s recently “liberated” and partially destroyed city of Fallujah. In the process, tens of millions of them have remained internal exiles in their own country (or what is left of it), while tens of millions have officially become refugees by crossing borders into Turkey, Lebanon, or Jordan, by taking to the seas in flimsy, overcrowded craft heading for Greece (from Turkey) or Italy (from Libya) moving onward in waves of desperation, hope, and despair, and drowning in alarming numbers. At the end of their journeys, they have sometimes found help and succor, but often enough only hostility and loathing, as if they were the ones who had committed a crime, done something wrong.
Racial, gender, and ethnic diversity matters, of course, but political correctness (PC) tied to bourgeois identity politics can be deadly to Left thinkers and activists and to the causes of peace and social justice. Part of what made the deeply conservative Barack Obama attractive to the U.S. corporate and imperial establishment during the long run up to the 2008 presidential election was the American power elite’s reasonable, born-out expectation that Obama’s skin color and status as a First Black President (FBP) would help make progressives, leftists, and serious liberals reluctant to forthrightly protest his coming service to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, class, empire, and (curiously and stealthily enough) white privilege. Smart power brokers calculated correctly that political correctness around race – and the related fear of being considered racist because one dared to criticize a FBP – would help keep the left in check on Obama’s corporatist, Wall Street-pleasing, and imperial policies.
A failed Syrian asylum seeker has blown himself up and injured 12 other people with a backpack bomb near a festival in the south German town of Ansbach.
The state of Bavaria's interior minister said the 27-year-old man had detonated the device after being refused entry to the music festival.
About 2,500 people were evacuated from the venue after the explosion.
Bavaria has been on edge since a knife rampage on a train claimed by so-called Islamic State last Monday.
The Ansbach blast is reported to have happened at about 22:10 (20:10 GMT) outside the Eugens Weinstube bar in the centre of the town, which has a population of 40,000 and is home to a US military base.
The shooting comes the month after a massacre at a nightclub in the Florida city of Orlando, in which a lone gunman killed 49 people in the deadliest mass shooting in U.s. history.
Nothing erodes public confidence in the ruling class like political upheaval, violence and economic uncertainty. Yet in Germany these days, that combustible mix is fueling a quiet revival of Angela Merkel’s political fortunes.
The weekend violence in Germany, which began with the deadly rampage by a bloodthirsty teen in Munich and ended with a suicide bombing in a small Bavarian city, marked the latest in a series of events, from the U.K. referendum to an ISIL-inspired hatchet attack on a German commuter train, that have unnerved the Merkel Republic.
This weekend, we’re bringing the call for clean energy to Philadelphia in a big way, and if you want a ban on fracking, you won’t want to miss this.
However, the EU continues to turn a deaf ear to the calls for a total ivory trade ban. On 1 July 2016, the European Commission decided that a global ivory trade ban did “not seem justified” and encouraged the Council to take a position against “a general closure of domestic ivory markets.”
This recommendation comes ahead of the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP17) to the 1976 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which will take place in South Africa from 24 September- 5 October and in which 182 member states of CITES will participate.
One by one, the seven council members present voted to uphold the ban on transporting coal. The decision was finalized by a second vote on July 19, leaving the proposed $250 million project in limbo. Without coal as one of the terminal’s possible bulk commodities, proponents warned, it would be at risk of losing critical funding — depriving an economically struggling neighborhood of job opportunities. Critics of the plan, however, worried that transporting millions of tons of coal by rail — even in covered cars — through West Oakland poses a public health and safety risk to local residents, who already experience high levels of air pollution.
There’s no such thing as a good place for an oil-train derailment, but this year’s June 3 spill outside Mosier, Oregon, could have been worse if the 16 oil cars had derailed and caught fire even a few hundred feet in either direction. The derailment was just far enough away from populated areas, including a nearby school and mobile home park, that no injuries resulted, and the amount of oil that spilled into the river was limited. If it had happened another mile-and-a-half down the tracks, the damaged tank cars would have tumbled directly into the Columbia river during the peak of the spring Chinook salmon run.
With plenty of overlap between them, both climate justice campaigners and supporters of Bernie Sanders held marches and rallies in downtown Philadelphia on Sunday, making their presence and political demands heard a day before the Democratic National Convention officially kicks off.
Under a banner calling for a "Clean Energy Revolution," the climate march put a focus on key shortcomings when it comes to the Democratic Party's commitment to addressing an increasingly hot planet.
Mark Schlosberg, national campaign director for Food & Water Watch, which spearheaded the protest with the backing of nearly 900 other local and national organizations, said neither party has shown the necessary urgency when it comes to dealing with the crisis. "Together," Schlosberg explained in a blog post ahead of the march, "we are sending a clear message to our elected officials: we demand a future powered by clean, renewable energy, not one that depends on dirty, polluting fossil fuels."
Perhaps Britain will find, in the uncertain new world it has chosen to live in, that it cannot implement Boris Johnson’s policy on cake – 'pro having it and pro eating it'. Easy as a backbencher, or even mayor of London; not so easy as Foreign Secretary
Economies have no essential nature. Once this is recognized, many more opportunities for change present themselves.
‘What kind of man is it who can count his fortune in billions but does not know what decent behavior is?’ - Frank Field MP, chair of the Work and Pensions Committee
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to bump up the price of its infrastructure gear in Blighty from today, 25 July, blaming the crash in the value of UK sterling currency for the hike.
According to sources close to the matter, the cost of servers will go up between six to seven per cent, and storage and legacy networking by circa 10 per cent.
Theresa May will today insist that peace and stability in Northern Ireland is her "highest priority" as she pledges to ensure that border controls will not be erected after Brexit.
The Prime Minister will travel to Belfast today to hold talks with First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, to discuss delivering stability in Northern Ireland in the wake of the EU referendum.
"What can I do to fix a broken global economy?" It's a question I've been asked a lot these past few months as I've crisscrossed the US speaking at TED venues, music concerts, the World Affairs Council, bookstores, on radio and TV shows, and at a variety of other forums.
During this election year it is important to recognize that corporations pretty much run the world. Despite the outcome of the elections, they will continue to do so -- at least until we organize and change the rules that have created the dominant neoliberal system.
The Think Tank is an organization started in 2014 that is modelling a new approach for addressing poverty. Based in Newark, Ohio, the town where Wills lives, the group is made up of people currently struggling with poverty, or who have struggled in the past. The group's goal is to have their voices heard by people who make decisions.
Despite being without national trade policy for four decades, we can predict a lot about the UK’s future trade deals outside of the EU from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and what we know gives great cause for concern.
If and when Brexit is completed, TTIP will not directly apply to a UK outside the single market. But with the US knocking on the door to create a trade deal with the UK we know its interests are the same as expressed in TTIP. All the warning signs from TTIP suggest that under the current government vested interests will be satisfied ahead of the wider public interest.
Does Hillary Clinton understand that the biggest divide in American politics is no longer between the right and the left, but between the anti-establishment and the establishment?
I worry she doesn’t – at least not yet.
A Democratic operative I’ve known since the Bill Clinton administration told me “now that she’s won the nomination, Hillary is moving to the middle. She’s going after moderate swing voters.”
Presumably that’s why she tapped Tim Kaine to be her vice president. Kaine is as vanilla middle as you can get.
In fairness, Hillary is only doing what she knows best. Moving to the putative center is what Bill Clinton did after the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994 – signing legislation on welfare reform, crime, trade, and financial deregulation that enabled him to win reelection in 1996 and declare “the era of big government” over.
Clinton responds to party chair's resignation on Sunday by thanking "longtime friend" for her service at DNC and immediately naming her as honorary chair of her own campaign
Hillary Clinton is thanking her “longtime friend” Debbie Wasserman Schultz after the Florida congresswoman’s decision to step down as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Clinton says that Wasserman Schultz will serve as honorary chair of her campaign’s 50-state program to help elect Democrats around the country.
In the rush for big donations to pay for this week’s Democratic convention, a party staffer reached out to Tennessee donor Roy Cockrum in May with a special offer: the chance to attend a roundtable discussion with President Obama.
Cockrum, already a major Democratic contributor, was in. He gave an additional $33,400. And eight days later, he was assigned a place across the table from Obama at the Jefferson Hotel in downtown Washington, according to a seating chart sent to the White House.
Here are 50 excerpts from the 2016 GOP platform.
1. Tax cuts for the rich: "Wherever tax rates penalize thrift or discourage investment, they must be lowered. Wherever current provisions of the code are disincentives for economic growth, they must be changed… We propose to level the international playing field by lowering the corporate tax rate to be on a par with, or below, the rates of other industrial nations."
2. Deregulate the banks: "The Republican vision for American banking calls for establishing transparent, efficient markets where consumers can obtain loans they need at reasonable rates based on market conditions. Unfortunately, in response to the financial institutions crisis of 2008-2009, the Democratic-controlled Congress enacted the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, otherwise known as Dodd-Frank."
“News media could either be our ally or our enemy—we wanted them as an ally,” Laurie Pritchett said in a 1985 interview about his strategy as police chief in Albany, Georgia, during Martin Luther King, Jr.’s desegregation efforts in 1962.
Pritchett famously ordered his officers to enforce the city’s segregation laws nonviolently and arrest as few protesters as possible. He knew that if he had acted as other police departments had—like Bull Connor’s dogs and firehoses in Birmingham (1963) and Jim Clark’s Bloody Sunday in Selma (1965)—news media would show the country how brutally oppressive police were, inspiring greater public support for King’s cause. In short, he beat nonviolent protesters at their own game by exploiting the media.
While it’s impossible to know whether systemic pro-Hillary Clinton bias at the DNC was decisive in the 2016 Democratic primary race, we now know beyond any doubt that such a bias not only existed, but was endemic and widespread. DNC officials worked to plant pro-Clinton stories, floated the idea of using Sanders’ secular Judaism against him in the South, and routinely ran PR spin for Clinton, even as the DNC claimed over and over it was neutral in the primary. The evidence in the leaks was so clear that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned her role as DNC chair—after her speaking role at the Democratic National Convention this week was scrapped—while DNC co-chair Donna Brazile, who is replacing Wasserman Schultz in the top role, has apologized to the Sanders camp.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump didn’t completely rule out the possibility that he would support a Democrat running against David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, who announced he is running as a Republican for U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana.
When asked by Meet The Press’ Chuck Todd whether he would support a Democrat if it meant defeating Duke, Trump waffled, saying, “I guess, depending on who the Democrat, but the answer would be yes.”
Every network attack against a company like Sony Entertainment, an organization like the DNC, or a government agency like OPM, comes with a series of questions to be answered, including the obvious ones like when did it begin? What was taken? Who was responsible? Are the attackers out of my network?
Attribution, simply put, purports to answer the question of who is responsible. For example, CrowdStrike investigated the DNC network breach and determined that the Russian government was responsible. FireEye investigated the Sony Entertainment network attack and determined that the North Korean government was responsible.
It’s important to know that the process of attributing an attack by a cybersecurity company has nothing to do with the scientific method. Claims of attribution aren’t testable or repeatable because the hypothesis is never proven right or wrong.
Neither are claims of attribution admissible in any criminal case, so those who make the claim don’t have to abide by any rules of evidence (i.e., hearsay, relevance, admissibility).
The closest analogy for a cybersecurity company’s assignment of attribution is an intelligence estimate, however intelligence analysts who write those estimates are held accountable for their hits and misses. If the miss is big enough (No WMDs in Iraq, missed India’s five nuclear bomb tests in ’98, missed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, etc.), there are consequences, and perhaps a Congressional investigation.
On the heels of a law-and-order-obsessed Republican National Convention, Democrats are meeting this week in Philadelphia to do their thing. The protests are already more impressive than anything on the streets of Cleveland.
On October 16, 2012, my vice presidential running mate and I were arrested. Our crime? Daring to try to attend a presidential debate.
This year, I hope the American people will demand that Libertarian Gary Johnson and I take our rightful places in the presidential debates. Because Americans not only have a right to vote. We have a right to know who we can vote for.
For decades, Republicans were the fiercest of Cold Warriors, fighting the spread of communism and, not incidentally, winning elections by painting Democrats as the party of the frail and feckless.
First of all, I think that a lot of coverage decisions are often made subconsciously. Most journalists think that they don’t actually make decisions about what’s newsworthy and what isn’t and their media outlets cover anything that’s newsworthy. And this is plainly not the case; there’s huge numbers of obviously newsworthy stories that are routinely, systemically ignored by large media outlets. And sometimes it’s just a by-product of the news-cycle rhythms, but a lot of times there are clear patterns to it. One major pattern is that the political media in particular views everything through a partisan lens. So if there’s some sort of dispute between the two parties, where the Democrats think one thing and the Republicans think another, that tends to get covered, because that’s viewed as an important political debate. But on the issues where there’s bipartisan consensus, where the two parties essentially agree, which is far more common than disagreeing, those tend to get completely ignored. So you look at U.S. support for Israel, or for Saudi Arabia in a foreign-policy context, or the idea that the U.S. should have the largest military in the world, or that we should continue with our state of mass incarceration, or just the general neoliberal economic policies that both parties believe in and support — those tend to be completely excluded from any kind of media discussion or coverage, because it just doesn’t get onto the radar of what matters. So these kinds of choices get made all the time.
Jill Stein believes the American people deserve another choice between “a racist billionaire and a proponent of the billionaire club.”
As the presumptive presidential nominee for the far-Left Green Party, Stein wants Donald Trump to be stopped. But she doesn’t think Hillary Clinton is the best alternative.
“Donald Trump, he is a racist, a xenophobic, anti-woman, just anti-working people and it’s very important that that movement, that right wing extremism needs to be stopped,” Stein said in an interview with ABC News at the Democratic National Convention today.
Protesters in Philadelphia have found a new glimpse of hope: Dr. Jill Stein.
Though Stein has been running as the Green Party’s presumptive presidential candidate for 13 months now, here in the City of Brotherly Love she’s had something of a bump in public opinion.
At a protest with a few hundred people today near City Hall, there were several rounds of chants for “Jill Not Hill” and signs lining Stein up with Sanders as the progressive alternative to Clinton.
As you almost certainly know by now, on Friday Wikileaks released a bunch of hacked DNC emails just before the Democratic Presidential convention kicked off. While Wikileaks hasn't quite said where it got the emails, speculation among many quickly pointed to Russian state sponsored hackers. That's because of the revelation last month of two sets of hackers breaching the DNC's computer system and swiping (at the very least) opposition research on Donald Trump. Various cybersecurity research firms, starting with CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC to investigate, pointed the finger at the Russians.
Of course, whether or not you believe that may depend on how credible you find the big cybersecurity firms like CrowdStrike, FireEye and Mandiant (the big names that always pop up in situations like this). For what it's worth, these guys have something of a vested interest in playing up the threat of big hacks from nation-state level hackers. For a good analysis of why this finger-pointing may be less than credible, I recommend two articles by Jeffrey Carr, one noting that these firms come from a history of "faith-based attribution" whereby they are never held accountable for being wrong -- and another highlighting serious questions about the designation of Russia as being responsible for this particular hack (he notes that some of the research appeared to come pre-arrived at that conclusion, and then ignored any evidence to the contrary).
Still, the claim that the data came from the Russians has become something of a story itself. And, of course, who did the hack and got the info is absolutely a news story. But it's an entirely separate one from whether or not the leaked emails contain anything useful or newsworthy. And yet, because this is the peak of political silly season, some are freaking out and claiming that anyone reporting on these emails "has been played" by Putin and Russia. Leaving aside the fact that people like to claim that Russia's behind all sorts of politicians that some don't like, that should be entirely unrelated to whether or not the story is worth covering.
Protip: maybe don't laugh off accusations that you're bad at cybersecurity in emails on a network that has already been infiltrated by hackers. That message did not make it through to one Eric Walker, deputy communications director for the Democratic National Committee. As you've heard by now, the DNC got hacked and all the emails were posted on Wikileaks. An anonymous user in our comments pointed us to a now revealed email from Walker brushing off a story in BuzzFeed, quoting cybersecurity professionals arguing that both the RNC and the DNC are bad at cybersecurity, mainly because they're handing out USB keys at their conventions.
Third parties are not new to American politics. The Anti-Masonic Party emerged in the 1820s to campaign against the Freemasons, which its members viewed as a corrupt. The Free Soil Party opposed the expansion of slavery in the years before the Civil War. Others throughout history have emerged to champion various causes, like the Know-Nothings, the Progressives, the Prohibition Party, the Reform Party and many others.
Martin was covering the DNC protests in Philadelphia for teleSUR.
Abby Martin, host of "Empire Files," was covering the DNC protests in Philadelphia for teleSUR when she was arrested by police.
Martin was on her way to a "Democracy Spring" event where there were reports of civil disobedience and arrests being made. The police had closed off all streets surrounding the action.
WikiLeaks has accused Facebook of censorship after multiple users reported that they could not post links on the social network following the explosive DNC Leaks.
Facebook has reportedly told WikiLeaks that it has unblocked links to the site on Facebook, calling the block “an accident” after it faced widespread accusations of political censorship.
‘Hate speech is excluded from protection’, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo tweeted last year, echoing a dangerously common misconception. ‘Hate speech isn’t free speech’, people say, assuming they have a right not to hear whatever they consider hateful language and ideas. US government officials sometimes share this view: the mayor of West Hollywood confirmed to Eugene Volokh that she would not issue a special events permit for a Donald Trump rally so long as he trafficked in hate, contrary to the ‘values and ideals’ of the West Hollywood community.
This is the tweet that Index on Censorship shared on 14 March 2015 when Nabeel Rajab, the Bahraini human rights campaigner, was challenging a six-month suspended sentence for “denigrating government institutions” for comments about the role of prisons as incubators of extremism. It is also one of the tweets now being used in evidence against Nabeel in a new case the government has brought against him. The latest case charges Nabeel, president of the award-winning Bahrain Center for Human Rights, with “publishing and broadcasting false news that undermines the prestige of the state”.
Filmmaker Shashant Shah, who has helmed films like 'Dasvidaniya' and 'Chalo Dilli' and has now directed a web series 'Shaadi Boys' for Viacom18's digital platform Voot, says he believes in self-censorship. 'Shaadi Boys' is about three boys who accidentally get into the shaadi business and make big bucks. Asked whether a filmmaker enjoys complete freedom in terms of censorship with web series, Shah told IANS: "I believe in self-censorship.
Russell Knaggs, the accused drug dealer, apparently utilized a Yahoo email account to hook up suppliers in Colombia with buyers in Europe. To add to the difficulty level, Knaggs did this while serving time for another drug bust. The method used was not all that uncommon. Everyone shared a single email account and composed draft messages. Each party would log into the account, read the draft message left for them, and compose a draft of their own in response. No emails were sent. All drafts were then deleted from both the "Draft" folder and the "Trash."
Revised ePrivacy laws should guarantee confidentiality of communications and encourage encryption, the European Union’s data watchdog has said.
European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) Giovanni Buttarelli published his official opinion on the review of the ePrivacy Directive on Monday.
An overhaul to the so-called Cookie Law is currently be worked on by officials at the European Commission, with the completion date expected before the end of the year to bring it into line with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
“The EU rules designed to protect privacy in electronic communications need to reflect the world that exists today," said Buttarelli.
The new Prime Minister spent six years as Home Secretary but Theresa May’s legacy at the Home Office is not one to be proud of. She cut front line police services relentlessly and her record on civil liberties was appalling.
Two years ago, at the height of summer, she rushed through legislation that gave GCHQ the power to force companies to hand over their customers’ personal data, including phone records and information about emails and browsing history.
She used the spectre of terrorism to justify the legislation, called the Data Retention and Investigator Powers Act (DRIPA), but it was poorly drafted and deeply flawed. Among other things, it effectively gave the Government the right to monitor mobile phone data and internet browsing history without the approval of a judge. That’s why I took the unusual step of joining forces with my Conservative party adversary David Davis to sue the Government in the High Court.
The Floor might have been a prop for TV, but it was beautiful. Spotlights danced off the red, white and blue bunting, off the tall, triangular signs spelling out the names of the states and the territories, off the delegates themselves, equal and unruly, a republic made flesh. To stand on it gave one a feeling of chaos and joy.
The states were defined by red carpets running between them, and by their costumes. The Guam wore tropical-print shirts. Texas had Lone Star flag shirts and cowboy hats and supersized enamel pins. North Carolina seemed patrician and a slightly aloof in their seersucker suits. West Virginia wore hardhats and pinstripes waving “Trump Digs Coal” signs. Chunks of Colorado displayed a mutinous, die-hard love for Ted Cruz by walking out of the convention on Monday afternoon. The many-footed whip was walking up and down the aisles, handing out Trump/Pence signs, whipping up cheers of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” often settling for “USA! USA! USA!”
The charter flight on Titan Airways departed Stansted for Nigeria and Ghana on May 24. It was staffed for the UK Home Office by the private security company Tascor, a subsidiary of Capita, who claim to achieve the “safe and secure escorting and removal of more than 18,000 individuals from the UK each year”.
Defense lawyers for the alleged 9/11 plotters said for the first time Sunday that the government destroyed a secret CIA prison with secret permission of the trial judge, and they learned of it only after the fact.
Defense attorneys have been complaining about a mysterious destruction of evidence episode in a cloaked manner since May. Prosecutors have said they did nothing wrong but declined to explain with any specificity. After a closed session Friday, during which the judge apparently agreed some details were no longer classified, the defense lawyers laid out what they knew in a Sunday roundtable.
It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re intended just to challenge and be part of a wider dialogue.
My background is archaeology, so also history and anthropology. It leads me to look at big historical patterns. My theory is that most peoples’ perspective of history is limited to the experience communicated by their parents and grandparents, so 50–100 years. To go beyond that you have to read, study, and learn to untangle the propaganda that is inevitable in all telling of history. In a nutshell, at university I would fail a paper if I didn’t compare at least two, if not three opposing views on a topic. Taking one telling of events as gospel doesn’t wash in the comparative analytical method of research that forms the core of British academia. (I can’t speak for other systems, but they’re definitely not all alike in this way).
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has launched a joint initiative with Impact Hub, an international community of social entrepreneurs. The initiative is a platform named “#Accelerate2030,” aiming at supporting and promoting the most promising impact-driven ventures focusing on the UN Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs).
This is flat out wrong in most situations. As we've pointed out again and again and again and again, in nearly all cases, politicians using music at an event have the proper licenses. They don't need to get permission from the musicians so long as either the campaign or the venue have ASCAP or BMI blanket licenses, which they almost always do. The whole point of ASCAP/BMI licenses is that you don't need to get individual permission from the artists or their publishers.
There are instances, occasionally, where politicians ridiculously don't have such a license, but it's pretty rare. And there may be a few other narrow exceptions, such as if there's an implied endorsement by the musicians, but that's rarely the case.
Unfortunately, the song from John Oliver and friends ignores all of that, even stating directly at one point that for a politician to use music, you first have to call the publisher. That's wrong. ASCAP and BMI already have taken care of that.
Perhaps this isn't a huge deal, but one would hope that Oliver would actually get the basic facts right on this too, because every election season this issue comes up and spreading more misinformation about it doesn't help.
So you may have seen reports last week charging CloudFlare and some other tech companies with "aiding" internet malware pushers. The "report," called "Enabling Malware" was announced in a press release last week from the Digital Citizens Alliance -- a group that describes itself as representing consumer interests online:Digital Citizens is a consumer-oriented coalition focused on educating the public and policy makers on the threats that consumers face on the internet and the importance for internet stakeholders – individuals, government and industry - to make the Web a safer place.And while the story wasn't picked up that widely, a few news sources did pick it up and repeated the false claim that DCA is a consumer advocacy group. TorrentFreak, FedScoop and Can-India also picked up the story, and all simply repeated DCA's claim to represent the interests of "digital citizens."
But that leaves out the reality: DCA is a group mostly funded by Hollywood, but also with support from the pharmaceutical industry, to systematically attack the internet and internet companies, for failing to censor the internet and block the sites and services that Hollywood and Big Pharma dislike. DCA has been instrumental in pushing false narratives about all the "evil" things online -- "counterfeit fire detectors! fake drugs!" -- in order to push policy makers to institute new laws to censor the internet. DCA buries this basic fact in its own description, merely noting that it "counts among its supporters... the health, pharmaceutical and creative industries."
The organization was formed in late 2012, partly as a response to the MPAA's big loss around SOPA. Recognizing that it needed to change tactics, the MPAA basically helped get DCA off the ground to push scare stories about horrible internet companies enabling "bad things" online, and how new laws and policies had to be created to stop those evil internet companies. Much of this was merely speculation for a while, based on the fact that every DCA report seemed to wrongly blame internet companies for other people using those tools to do bad things online. However, it became explicit thanks to the Sony Hack, which revealed that a key part of the MPAA's anti-Google plan, dubbed Project Goliath, involved having the DCA pay Mississippi's former Attorney General Mike Moore (who mentored its current AG, Jim Hood), to lobby Jim Hood to attack Google.