The title is a bit of a mouthful, but the basic idea is pretty simple; Instead of schlepping around a Linux machine, you can transform an Android device into a lightweight Linux-based platform for organizing, processing, and backing up photos and RAW files when you are on the move. The key ingredient of this solution is the Termux, a small open source app that combines a terminal emulator and a lightweight Linux environment. The app comes with its own software repository that has all the tools you need to set up a simplified photographic workflow. The Linux Photography book explains exactly how to can go about it, but here are a few pointers to get started.
You can’t go to a developer conference today and not hear about software containers: Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos and a bunch of other names with a nautical ring to them. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and everybody else seems to have jumped on this bandwagon in the last year or so, but why is everybody so excited about this stuff?
To understand why containers are such a big deal, let’s think about physical containers for a moment. The modern shipping industry only works as well as it does because we have standardized on a small set of shipping container sizes. Before the advent of this standard, shipping anything in bulk was a complicated, laborious process. Imagine what a hassle it would be to move some open pallet with smartphones off a ship and onto a truck, for example. Instead of ships that specialize in bringing smartphones from Asia, we can just put them all into containers and know that those will fit on every container ship.
Chicago-based ShuttleCloud helps developers import user contacts and email data into their applications through standard API requests. As the venture-backed startup began to acquire more customers, they needed a way to scale system monitoring to meet the terms of their service-level agreements (SLAs). They turned to Prometheus, the open source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud, which is now a project at the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation.
In advance of Prometheus Day, to be held Nov. 8-9 in Seattle, we talked to Ignacio Carretero, a ShuttleCloud software engineer, about why they chose Prometheus as their monitoring tool and what advice they would give to other small businesses seeking a similar solution.
VMware is the latest IT vendor to support Kubernetes, the open-source container management system that Google developed. VMware announced on Oct. 18 at its VMworld 2016 Europe event that it is now supporting the Kubernetes container management system on the VMware Photon platform.
Kubernetes is an open-source project that was developed by Google and today benefits from the contributions of a diverse community, including Red Hat and CoreOS. The Kubernetes project became part of the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in July 2015. The Kubernetes 1.4 release debuted on Sept. 26 with added security features.
"We have now built a Kubernetes-as-a-service capability into Photon Platform," Jared Rosoff, chief technologist for cloud native apps at VMware, told eWEEK.
The purchase of container management vendor Redspread is the container startup's second acquisition. CoreOS on Oct. 17 announced the acquisition of privately held container management vendor Redspread. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.
Redspread got its start in the Y Combinator cyber accelerator for technology startups and was officially launched in March. Coincidentally, CoreOS was also originally part of Y Combinator, graduating in 2013. To date, CoreOS has raised $48 million in funding to help fuel its container efforts. The acquisition of Redspread is the second acquisition by CoreOS and comes more than two years after CoreOS' acquisition of quay.io in 2014.
I suppose I should introduce myself. I’m Private 78523 Benjamin Carly Rae Jepsen-Calico-Smith. I’m not very important to the platoon. I’m new, you see, but all the other cats have gone to the Furball and Bucket and said I have to stay here. And Commander Torvalds has been on the line with special instructions.
Basically, he’s closed the kernel window for RC1 of Linux 4.9 early. And the Colonel is asleep. I bet he’s going to make it my fault.
The Commander said: "I usually do the releases on a Sunday afternoon, but occasionally cut the merge window short by a day just to keep people on their toes, and make sure people learn not to send in last-minute pull requests. No gaming the merge window to the last day. This is one such release.”
The 4.8 kernel was released on October 2nd. This also marked the start of the merge window for the 4.9 kernel. The merge window is the time period when kernel subsystem maintainers send their pull requests for new features to be included in the 4.9 kernel. Here are a few features pulled into the 4.9 kernel that might be of interest for Fedora users.
With all the new features in Linux 4.9, obviously Tux put on a bit of weight this kernel cycle... Here's some numbers.
In yesterday's Linux 4.9 feature overview I failed to mention the latest code stats for this exciting kernel update that's introducing Greybus, boasts experimental GCN 1.0 AMDGPU support, supports 29 new ARM machines, and much more.
NVIDIA this morning is expanding the Pascal family with the announcement of the GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti lower-cost graphics cards.
As usual when there's a new Ubuntu Linux, the requests come in for running OpenGL graphics/game benchmarks under the different desktop options. For some Ubuntu 16.10 on Intel Mesa graphics tests are results for GNOME Shell, Xfce, LXDE, KDE Plasma, Openbox, MATE, and Unity running atop X.Org.
Tor Project informed the Tor (The Onion Router) community about the immediate availability of the Tor 0.2.8.9 stable update, which adds a few important security fixes to keep your Tor installation reliable at all times.
Indicator Diskman Indicator Diskman is a small panel-based indicator applet that lets you view and manage mounted drives, volumes, partitions, and disc images.
Sometimes there are apps that I want to write about but I’m uncertain of why I want to write about them. Case in point today is Synapse, a smart application launcher (and then some), a one-time mainstay on many a Linux desktop.
A few minutes ago, Oracle announced the availability of two new maintenance updates for its popular, open-source and cross-platform VirtualBox virtualization software, versions 5.1.8 and 5.0.28.
The VirtualBox 5.1.8 point release is the most advanced Oracle VM VirtualBox version you can get right now, and it promises a month's worth of bug fixes and improvements to further stabilize the application for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
The Wine Staging release 1.9.21 is now available.
Re-basing to last week's Wine 1.9.21 release is a new version of Wine-Staging that incorporates various experimental/testing patches atop this code-base for running Windows binaries on Linux and other operating systems.
Notable to Wine-Staging 1.9.21 are improvements around its experimental Vulkan wrapper, which allows for running Windows Vulkan programs that in turn rely upon host's native Vulkan driver. There is also a GIF encoder added to its Windows codecs implementation.
Today, October 18, 2016, the Wine Staging development team announced the availability for download of a new version of their Wine Staging open-source alternative to the popular Wine software.
Based on the recently released Wine 1.9.21 development build, Wine Staging 1.9.21 promises a bunch of goodies for those interested in running the latest Windows games and applications on their GNU/Linux operating system, among which we can mention improvements to the Vulkan wrapper.
The 'SMACH Z' [Kickstarter] is a promising device and I'm quite excited to see how this all turns out, the promise of taking my Steam library easily on the go sounds fun.
They are no longer using SteamOS, but their own Linux-based "SMACH Z OS", although it will still be a mostly normal Linux distribution since it will run Linux games and Steam.
What bugs me, is that they "recommend" their Linux OS, but all their benchmarks in the video and noted on the Kickstarter were done on Windows. That tells me a lot about their confidence in showing how it will run games if people don't use Windows. As sad as that is, we know most games run a bit slower on Linux right now, so it's not really surprising. The real issue here, is that Windows support is a stretch-goal, meaning all of the benchmark/performance information is useless unless they hit that goal.
The release of Mad Max [Steam, Feral Interactive] for Linux is fast approaching this week (20th!) and Feral have now updated their website with the minimum and recommended system specifications.
After announcing earlier today, October 18, 2016, the release of the second maintenance update to the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, KDE published the release schedule for the upcoming major versions of the project.
The open-source, cross-platform and free integrated development environment (IDE) software KDevelop has been updated the other day, October 17, 2016, to version 5.0.2.
On Monday, KDE’s Plasma team held its traditional kickoff meeting for the new development cycle. We took this opportunity to also look and plan ahead a bit further into the future. In what areas are we lacking, where do we want or need to improve? Where do we want to take Plasma in the next two years?
Our general direction points towards professional use-cases. We want Plasma to be a solid tool, a reliable work-horse that gets out of the way, allowing to get the job done quickly and elegantly. We want it to be faster and of better quality than the competition.
KDE Plasma developers talked this week about their plans for the new development cycle and what they want the desktop to look like moving into 2017 and further ahead into 2018.
On October 18, 2016, long time KDE software developer Sebastian Kügler published an in-depth story about what's coming to the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment in the next couple of years.
It appears that KDE’s Plasma team had their traditional kickoff meeting on Monday, October 17, to discuss the upcoming features of the next KDE Plasma 5 release, which will be versioned 5.9 and whose release schedule has been already published, as reported earlier right here on this space.
However, the Plasma team also discussed new ways to improve the quality of the popular desktop environment, as well as make it faster, more stable and reliable than existing versions. Their aim is to bring KDE Plasma to an unprecedented level of quality that will blow the competition away.
"Our general direction points towards professional use-cases. We want Plasma to be a solid tool, a reliable work-horse that gets out of the way, allowing to get the job done quickly and elegantly. We want it to be faster and of better quality than the competition," said Sebastian Kügler in the blog announcement.
Twenty years ago, a German software developer named Matthias Ettrich kicked off a project to provide Linux users with all the desktop functionality that Windows users had at the time.
The detailed email inviting participation was sent by Ettrich on 14 October 1996. He outlined his ideas and goals and attracted plenty of interest. The K Desktop Environment project was on its way.
The annual GStreamer Conference took place last week in Berlin alongside the Linux Foundation's Embedded Linux Conference Europe. The videos from this multimedia open-source conference are now available.
The folks from Ubicast have once again done a nice job recording all of the presentations from this GStreamer event. Conference talks ranged from the "stage of the union" to the state of VA-API with GStreamer, GStreamer Video Editing, dynamic pipelines, Vulkan, and more.
When it comes to Vulkan support in GStreamer, there is work underway on vulkansink and vulkanupload elements, basic Vulkan support modeled on GStreamer's libgstgl API, and more, but much more work is needed before it will be at the level of OpenGL support.
It's been a great week for users of the unique and independent Solus operating system, and while you're waiting impatiently for the Solus 1.2.1 release, we'd like to tell you a little bit about what landed in Solus during the past week.
Today, October 19, 2016, Softpedia was informed by the Solus Project about the official release and general availability of the long-anticipated Solus 1.2.1 release, along with the first Solus MATE Edition.
Version 1.2.1 of the promising Solus Linux distribution is now available and also premieres a MATE edition ISO to complement its original Budgie desktop.
Maui, the Netrunner Kubuntu replacement, is an inviting alternative. It is both new and already accomplished. The developers took a Kubuntu distro that was well-oiled but at the end of its development line to the next level.
That should make adopting the Maui Linux distro a less risky option. Most other Linux distros are moving in the new direction of Wayland, Systemd and such. Maui's developers are already there.
Maui 1 is very stable and easy to use. It is a well-stocked distribution with an established library of KDE software.
Today, October 18, 2016, Parted Magic LLC announced the release and general availability of a new, updated version of their once free Parted Magic disk partitioning Live CD.
Arch Linux is a very popular name amongst Linux enthusiasts. It is very popular because it allows the user to tailor-make their linux distro to their taste. Arch Linux provides a solid base for you to work with, while still allowing for expansion and complete customization. ââ¬â¹
The openSUSE project today announced the release of Leap 42.2 Release Candidate 1 with less than one month remaining before final. On the other side of town, Dustin Kirkland announced Ubuntu kernel hotfixes and the Hectic Geek reviewed recently released 16.10. Jack Germain said Maui 1 "is stable and easy to use" and Sebastian Kügler blogged on "Plasma's road ahead."
High Point University senior Ryan Long got a taste of his dream career during a web development and design internship at Red Hat in Raleigh.
Long, an interactive media and game design major and computer science minor from Fort Mill, South Carolina, gained valuable experience with the IT marketing team. He worked with the company’s website, fixing broken links, inserting translations and doing quality assurance. He also provided graphic design assistance and collaborated with the video team for projects that would be incorporated into the website.
Dan Walsh (of SELinux fame) gave a talk on container security at the recent Red Hat Summit 2016.
Comment Red Hat is the biggest – and one of the oldest – companies in the Linux world, but despite the difficulty of accurately measuring Linux usage figures, Ubuntu and its relatives seem to be the most popular Linux distributions. Red Hat isn’t sitting idle, though. Despite its focus on enterprise software, including virtualisation, storage and Java tools, it’s still aggressively developing its family of distros: RHEL, CentOS and Fedora.
Fedora is the freebie community-supported version, with a short six-month release cycle, but it’s still important. Although RHEL is the flagship, it’s built from components developed and tested in Fedora. According to Fedora Project Lead Matthew Miller told this year’s Flock to Fedora conference this summer its future looks bright.
So support for the Raspberry Pi in Fedora has been a long time coming and yes, it’s FINALLY here with support landing just in time for Beta!
The most asked question I’ve had for a number of years is around support of the Raspberry Pi. It’s also something I’ve been working towards for a very long time on my own time. The eagle-eye watchers would have noticed we almost got there with Fedora 24, but I got pipped at the post because I felt it wasn’t quite good enough yet. There were too many minor issues around ease of use.
While Fedora has always supported ARM/AArch64 hardware well, they've missed out on the whole Raspberry Pi craze even as the ARMv7 hardware has been shipping for a while and there are plenty of Pi-focused Linux distributions out there. With Fedora 25, there's finally going to be good support for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 devices.
Just a few moments ago, Fedora Project proudly announced that support for Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computers is finally coming to the Fedora Linux operating system.
As you might know, the Beta of the upcoming Fedora 25 operating system has been released, and it brought numerous new GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software projects, including but not limited to Linux kernel 4.8, GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS, and LibreOffice 5.2.2. One thing was missing, though, and that's support for ARM devices like the popular Raspberry Pi.
There are probably some people living in the world today who still haven't heard of systemd, though I doubt that any of them read DistroWatch. More digital ink has been spilled debating the topic of init systems than any other in techie history. There is probably nothing I can say about systemd that hasn't already been said, and no argument either for or against it that hasn't been repeated ad nauseum. So I won't waste this review seeking converts for The Causeââ¢. I don't expect the issue to be finally settled until the Sun swells up to become a red giant and evaporates the Earth.
Geeks determined to resist the systemd juggernaut have several options. For me, the most interesting project is Devuan, a fork of Debian. I will say by way of disclosure that I have downloaded Devuan, installed it, used it for months, and like it. However, it does have a few flaws - the installer in particular needs some more work. The first beta forces you to do a network install that - depending on your Internet connection speed - can take an hour or more. This has defeated curious newbies who decide to give up long before the first boot-up prompt appeared.
It was my search for a quick and easy way to get Devuan up and running that led me to Refracta, a unique distro that fills a niche that has long been neglected. Refracta's existence predates the systemd wars - it was originally based on Debian 5.0, otherwise known as "Lenny." But when Debian 8.0 "Jessie" went full systemd, Refracta moved to the Devuan camp.
Refracta's chief selling point is this: it's a live image that can be quickly installed, customized, and re-installed back to live media again. So basically you can roll your own live CD, configured for your hardware and tweaked to suit your personal tastes. It is currently my favorite distro, and I'd recommend it to any Linux geek who has had a little bit of experience. A total Linux newbie might feel more comfortable with a distro that mimics Windows' point-and-click friendliness, but once you've got the basics down, Refracta is easy to get used to.
It's also worth mentioning that even without being installed, a Refracta live CD or USB stick makes an excellent diagnostic and rescue tool. It contains quite a few command line utilities that aren't in a default Devuan or Debian installation, including gddrescue, testdisk, smartmontools, hdparm, lm-sensors, iftop, and iptraf. I have personally used testdisk to recover data from a crashed hard drive.
After the previous 16.04 Long Term Release, Ubuntu has rolled out its latest ‘short term’ (my own naming convention for the non-LTS releases) version 16.10. Mainly, the ‘short term’ releases are only supported for 9 months and usually include software applications with their recent updates.
When you release a new version of your operating system within every 6 months, usually there isn’t a lot of room for adding major changes. And that is the case with many GNU/Linux distributions these days, and Ubuntu 16.10 release is no exception. Since Unity is based on the user application set provided by GNOME desktop environment, according to the release notes, the underlying GNOME user applications have been upgraded to the version 3.20 at least (which is the case with the file manager -- ‘files’, for instance) and some others have been upgraded to the version 3.22 which is the latest release of GNOME currently.
Today, October 18, 2016, Canonical informs us, through Dustin Kirkland, about a new interesting feature for Ubuntu Linux, which users can enable on their current installations.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS’s 4.4 Linux kernel includes an important new security capability in Ubuntu -- the ability to modify the running Linux kernel code, without rebooting, through a mechanism called kernel livepatch.
Canonical's Ubuntu 16.10, codenamed "Yakkety Yak", is nowhere near as chunky an update as 16.04 LTS was earlier this year. But that doesn't mean there's nothing new. In fact, the firm's second release of the year has quite a few fresh features to hold users over until the bright and shiny future of Unity 8 and Mir arrive some time next year.
Nevertheless, it's very odd to have what feels like a smaller update arrive with Ubuntu's October release, which typically is the more experimental release with tons of new features being tested. This time around that's not really the case. In what's become a familiar refrain for Ubuntu, most of the work is happening with the still-not-quite-there Unity 8.
Ubuntu 16.10 marks the seventh time Unity 8 has not been ready for prime time. While Unity 8 appears to be progressing - judging by developer updates and playing with pre-release versions - it is, at this point, in danger of joining Duke Nukem Forever on the great vaporware list in the sky. Still, take heart Ubuntu fans, just as Duke Nukem Forever did eventually see the light of day, it seems very likely that Unity 8 and Mir will in fact be released eventually. Perhaps even as early as 17.04. Also, I have a bridge for sale, if anyone is interested.
Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak has just been released with quite a few number of new stuff and a first preview of Unity 8 desktop environment. Unity could be installed in Ubuntu 16.04 but it comes with 16.10 pre-installed. Unity 8 has been in development since 2013 and anyone who has seen or used Ubuntu phone will quickly notice the similarities and some major differences.
Canonical, developer of Ubuntu, a distribution of Linux, released a new version of its software that targets hybrid cloud deployments. Ubuntu is often mentioned as one of the top 3 distributions of Linux when shipments are considered, depending upon which research firm one cites.
With the release of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system, Canonical also had the pleasure of informing the community about the latest status of their Snaps universal binary packages.
Canonical informs Softpedia about their latest collaboration with ARM, the industry's leading supplier of microprocessor technology, to bring the company's OpenStack and Ceph offerings to 64-bit ARM-based servers.
Advantech launched one of the first ARM Mini-ITX SBCs. The RSB-6410 runs Linux or Android on an i.MX6, and has mini-PCIe, SATA, M.2, and triple displays.
Advantech calls the RSB-6410 the world’s first RISC-based Mini-ITX motherboard. Considering that all ARM Cortex-A SoCs are RISC SoCs, there have actually been a few others, but it’s still a rarity for this x86-oriented, 170 x 170mm form factor.
During the past few years, my BirdCam setup has evolved significantly. As I mention in the UpFront section of this issue, I hope to get the stream transferred to a YouTube Live stream at some point, so I can watch the feathery show on my television. And although watching the birds is the end goal, I'm constantly on a mission to improve the quality and flexibility of my setup.
Kontron’s Linux-ready Intel 6th Gen Type 6 and 5th Gen Type 7 COM Express modules integrate its new Security Solution Approtect technology.
Today, Huawei unveiled their next smartwatch branded as the Honor S1. We previously reported on the possibility that this new wearable device would run Tizen. According to a report in the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper Huawei are currently working with Samsung to deploy the Tizen operating system in its next smartwatches. Well today the unveil happened and strangely enough there is no mention of Android Wear in any of the supporting documentation, but also there is no mention of Tizen either ! Looking at the User Interface (UI) it definitely isn’t an Android Wear device, as Google will not let OEMs alter its appearance, but more of a bespoke Operating System (OS).
More action games come rolling in as War Thunder is released on the Tizen Store for Tizen smartphones. This is a Unity game that has been released for the Tizen platform. The game is brought to you by Pham Dinh, the same person that brought you Action Strike, Zombie Reborn, Call of Duty , and Danger Run.
BlackBerry appears to be working quite fantastically when it comes to launching new Android smartphones, though the same cannot be said about selling them. The Canadian firm is known to be working on a new handset dubbed the DTEK60 following the launch of the DTEK50 and the Priv. However, we’re now hearing that it is working on even more Android hardware.
Switching from iPhone to Android can be a bit daunting. If you're unpacking a brand new Pixel or Galaxy S7, or something else equally exciting, let us help you get set up quickly and easily!
If you've never used an Android phone before, there are a few things you should know before taking the leap (even though it's the leap home).
Review Data storage is difficult, and ZFS-based storage doubly so. There's a lot of money to be made if you can do storage right, so it's uncommon to see a storage company with an open-source model deliver storage that doesn't suck.
I looked at TrueNAS from iXsystems, which, importantly, targets the SMB and midmarket with something that is theoretically more resilient than a Synology. That's really odd. Not a lot of companies do that, so it intrigued me.
I'd also had a few interesting conversations with some Reg readers about the dearth of storage offerings for the "small, but not Synology small" business space.
Open-source developers can work with Disney itself with its new Open Source Program. The program acts as a place where developers can collaborate with other Disney enthusiasts, implementing the open-source libraries and platforms that Disney uses in the development of some of its animations.
Like other large non-technology-related companies, Disney is joining the realm of open-source software as a way to become more open toward developers in general. On its GitHub.io page, the company is hosting open-source projects used by Disney animators and developers. They were also used in film series like Sony’s Hotel Transylvania, Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter movies, Disney’s Toy Story, and Pixar shorts.
There are several things to think about while building a company, but the ones that are particularly critical for building a successful company based on an open source technology are evangelism, community influence, the business model, and having the pragmatism to balance investment across these areas. Open source technology greatly simplifies the adoption problem for a new technology and empowers developers to use the technology that is right for building products. Essentially, the developer is the new buyer.
Google today released Nomulus, the Java-based registry platform that powers Google’s own .google and .foo top level domains (TLDs).
Google says it started working on the technology behind Nomulus after the company applied to operate a number of generic TLDs itself back in 2012. Until then, domain names were mostly restricted to the .com’s, .net’s and various country-level TLDs like .de and .uk. Once the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided to open TLDs up to so-called generic TLD’s like .app, .blog and .guru, Google jumped into the fray and applied for .google and a number of other TLDs.
Blockchain enthusiasts were all too aware of how Disney is working on distributed ledger technology as well. The company has open sourced their dragon chain concept, which, in theory, makes it easier to integrate advanced blockchain features for third parties. Quite an exciting development, as integration existing systems with blockchain, has proven to be quite a challenge so far.
Dragonchain is officially labeled as a blockchain platform that encompasses everything one would need to integrate distributed ledger features. This internal blockchain platform provides a foundation to develop these features as the enterprise or user sees fit.Additionally, the project also offers a network-wide interface, an efficient data distribution model, and cryptographic capabilities.
Node.js v6 transitioned to LTS line today, so let’s talk about what this means, where other versions stand, and what to expect with Node.js v7.
The Node.js Foundation will release version 7 of the JavaScript platform next week. With the new release, version 6 will move to long-term support, and version 0.10 will reach "end of life" status.
Node 7, offered in beta in late September, is a "checkpoint release for the Node.js project and will focus on stability, incremental improvement over Node.js v6, and updating to the latest versions of V8, libuv, and ICU (International Components for Unicode)," said Mikeal Rogers, Foundation community manager.
State agencies can now leverage an open source tool to help ensure that individuals eligible for income-based human service benefits actually receive them.
The software is Benefit Assist, and it was first launched in 2015 by Intuit for that company’s TurboTax users. Benefit Assist sifts through tax information to help determine a person’s eligibility for benefits from programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid and Medicare.
The Open Source Initiative€® (OSI), a global non-profit formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source software and communities, announced today the affiliate membership of the Odoo Community Association (OCA), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the widespread use of Odoo and to support the collaborative development of Odoo features.
Google Chrome has multiple release channels to test new features and insure that bugs are ironed out before they reach end users. Joining Android’s current stable, beta, and dev channel is Chrome Canary. Long available on desktop, Canary “is primarily intended to be used by developers and early adopters to test recent Chromium changes.”
Chrome Canary for Android is currently at version 56 and the only notable difference is its yellow Chrome icon. Otherwise, the UI and features are similar to current versions. While it might include new features, enhancements, and bug fixes in the future, there is a high likelihood that the app will be unstable.
Beyond a certain scale, commercial private clouds and OpenStack distributions are cheaper than public clouds, according to the latest Cloud Price Index from 451 Research.
Commercial private cloud offerings from vendors such as VMware and Microsoft offer a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) when labor efficiency is lower than 400 virtual machines managed per engineer, according to the report, which was published today.
The great promise of a global open source software project like OpenStack is that it can bring together the best and the brightest from all around the world to together create something far greater than any one person, company, or nation could do on its own.
But with diversity can come challenges, as cultural norms and social expectations can vary greatly from place to place and group to group. If bringing in the best ideas requires diverse contributors, then bringing in diverse contributors requires building a safe space where each person can feel comfortable and welcome.
Back in April, the OpenStack Foundation released the results of its seventh official OpenStack survey, which found that sixty-five percent of OpenStack deployments were in production, 33 percent more than a year ago. Now, the foundation has released the results of the eighth official survey, which shows growing user interest in containers, and a growing focus on cost savings driven by OpenStack.
The JDK 9 release schedule is indeed being pushed back by four months and now will be released in late July.
You'll recall that we recently commented on the NFL's new dumb social media policy for its member teams, which outlines how much video content a team can push out as kickoff approaches (less than before), what type of video content from games teams can produce and distribute on their own (basically none), and the size of the fines if teams violate this policy (huuuuuge). The NFL has insisted elsewhere that this one-size-fits-all marketing approach has zilch to do with its precipitous ratings decline, although few believe it on this point. And, even as news of the policy has been released, the NFL itself has been inclined to push out as much of this very same content itself, centralizing its social media media control.
So, if you're an NFL team that doesn't like the new policy and wants to make its fans aware of how silly it is in the most hilarious way possible, what do you do? Well, if you're the Cleveland Browns and the Philadelphia Eagles, you push out Twitter updates to your followers that depict game highlights using plastic figurines. Here is how the Browns alerted their fans that their team had scored a touchdown.
After the image of the New England Patriots coach slamming a Microsoft Surface tablet on the sideline in a Week 4 game against the Buffalo Bills went viral, Belichick explained Tuesday why he is fed up with the product.
Whether it's Google's headline-grabbing DeepMind AlphaGo victory, or Apple's weaving of "using deep neural network technology" into iOS 10, deep learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage these days, promising to take applications to new heights in how they interact with us mere mortals.
The World Health Organization pandemic influenza framework advisory group is meeting this week, behind closed doors. A consultation is expected to take place on 20 October with stakeholders, and an information session has been organised on 21 October on the work of the advisory group, but no press is allowed in either meeting nor able to obtain any information about any aspect of the week’s events.
The EFF's series on "shadow regulation" continues, this time exploring how American pharmaceutical companies are keeping affordable medication out of the hands of Americans. The examination goes beyond what's already common knowledge: that patents and regulatory capture have created a skewed marketplace that ensures healthy profit margins, rather than healthy Americans.
But what's not generally known is that the pharmaceutical companies have "partnered" with internet intermediaries to lock Americans out of purchasing options specifically approved by the FDA. To hear big pharmaceutical companies tell it, purchasing drugs from other countries (where the price is generally lower) is extremely dangerous, if not completely illegal. But that's simply not true.
Pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly today announced a stepped-up commitment to provide improved access to quality healthcare for 30 million people in resource-limited settings by 2030.
The initiative, called Lilly 30Ãâ30, is based on a five-year, US$90 million investment in the Lilly Global Health Partnership, and aims at improving access to treatments for diabetes, cancer, and tuberculosis.
A new security audit has found critical vulnerabilities in VeraCrypt, an open-source, full-disk encryption program that's the direct successor of the widely popular, but now defunct, TrueCrypt.
Users are encouraged to upgrade to VeraCrypt 1.19, which was released Monday and includes patches for most of the flaws. Some issues remain unpatched because fixing them requires complex changes to the code and in some cases would break backward compatibility with TrueCrypt.
However, the impact of most of those issues can be avoided by following the safe practices mentioned in the VeraCrypt user documentation when setting up encrypted containers and using the software.
SECURITY FIRM VERACODE has released a damning report into open source and third-party software components and warned that, for example, almost all Java applications are blighted with at least one problem.
Open-source and Java components used in applications remain a weak spot for the enterprise, according to a new analysis.
Java applications in particular are posing a challenge, with 97 percent of these applications containing a component with at least one known vulnerability, according to a new report from code-analysis security vendor Veracode.
Earlier this year, I prepared a list of the top operating systems used for ethical hacking purposes. In that list, Parrot Security OS ranked at #2. It’s developed by Frozenbox Network and released under the GNU/GPL v3 license. A couple of days ago, Parrot Security 3.2 ethical hacking Linux distro arrived. The new version of this popular operating system is codenamed CyberSloop and it’s based on the Debian GNU/Linux 9 Stretch.
Parrot Security 3.1 version arrived long back in July. Compared to that, the new version has taken a while due to some buggy packages in the Debian Testing repository that Parrot Security team had to fix themselves. In particular, the bug being discussed here is the latest GTK updates that broke the MATE interface.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices running on the open-source Linux OS are under attack from NyaDrop.
The attack loads malware on IoT devices lacking appropriate security after brute forcing default login credentials, according to a report by David Bisson for Graham Cluley Security News. The code achieves this by parsing its list of archived usernames and passwords. Once authenticated, NyaDrop is installed. The lightweight binary then loads other malware onto the infected device.
We've increasingly covered how the "internet of poorly secured things" has contributed to a rise in larger DDoS attacks than ever before. The barely-there security standards implemented by companies more interested in hype than quality meant it didn't take long before hackers were able to incorporate "smart" refrigerators, power outlets, TVs and other IoT devices in the kind of DDoS attacks that recently took down security researchers like Brian Krebs. The end result is DDoS attacks that continue to break records, first 620Gbps in the Krebs attack, then more recently a 1.1 terabits per second attack on a French web host.
But just how bad have things become? A new report by Akamai warns that hackers are using a 12-year-old vulnerability in OpenSSH to funnel malicious network traffic through IoT devices. SSH certainly can be implemented securely, but as with every other security aspect of the IoT, many hardware vendors aren't bothering to do so. Akamai's data indicates roughly 2 million devices have been compromised by this type of hack, which the firm dubs SSHowDowN.
Malware creators often borrow ideas from each other. We have historically seen clusters of malware each trying to do something in a functionally similar way. For example, the coding may change, but it's still an SQL injection attack at the heart of it.
Two Muslim men arrested in the Hindu RTI activist Bhupendra Vira murder case were remanded in police custody till October 24 by a magistrate in Mumbai today.
The Mumbai police had arrested former Mumbai corporator Razzak Khan (78) and his son Amjad Khan (53) for their alleged involvement in the murder of the RTI activist. A 61-year-old Right to Information activist was killed in Mumbai on Saturday evening by a man who barged into his home, held a gun to his head and fired.
Demanding their police custody, public prosecutor Ashok Medhe told the court, “The complainant (Vira’s son-in-law) in this case has alleged that they were getting repeated threats from the family of the accused. They also have a property dispute. In the past, family members of the accused had attacked Vira’s son. Police custody is required for a detailed investigation.”
Earlier today the website DailyKos reported on a smear campaign plot to falsely accuse Julian Assange of pedophilia.
Here is the description of the plot from Mr Assange’s legal team, the investigative report into the front company and associated correspondence. An unknown entity posing as an internet dating agency prepared an elaborate plot to falsely claim that Julian Assange received US$1M from the Russian government and a second plot to frame him sexually molesting an eight year old girl.
The second plot includes the filing of a fabricated criminal complaint in the Bahamas, a court complaint in the UK and laundering part of the attack through the United Nations. The plot happened durring WikiLeaks’ Hillary Clinton related publications, but the plot may have its first genesis in Mr. Assange’s 16 months litigation against the UK in the UN system, which concluded February 5 (Assange won. UK and Sweden lost & US State Dept tried to pressure the WGAD according to its former Chair, Prof. Mads Andenas).
Ecuador has acknowledged it partly restricted internet access for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is taking refuge at its London embassy.
It said Mr Assange had in recent weeks released material that could have an impact on the US presidential election.
Ecuador also said its move was not the result of pressure from Washington.
The US denied WikiLeaks accusations that it had asked Ecuador to stop the site publishing documents about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
WikiLeaks has said US Secretary of State John Kerry asked Ecuador to cut its leader Julian Assange's Internet connectivity after the organisation had released the content of paid speeches that Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had given to Goldman Sachs.
The US State Department has denied that Kerry was involved.
The whistleblower organisation had accused Ecuador of cutting Assange's Internet access a day earlier, saying "We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs."
On Tuesday, it released another lot of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. None of the material released has contained any sensational disclosures.
Ecuador, the nation that has granted political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the country's London embassy, said late Tuesday it had cut off his Internet access. Ecuador says it did this because of WikiLeaks' recent dumps of hacked e-mails surrounding Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
"The Government of Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate," the government said in a statement. "Accordingly, Ecuador has exercised its sovereign right to temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications network within its Embassy in the United Kingdom. This temporary restriction does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out its journalistic activities."
The government of Ecuador disconnected the internet access of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at its Embassy in London because of his site’s publishing of documents that could affect the US presidential election, the government said in a statement today.
WikiLeaks announced early on Monday that Assange’s internet link had been severed, saying that it had “activated the appropriate contingency plans.”
In that statement, shared by Politico reporter Eric Geller, the Ecuadorian government says it “respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states” and that it “exercised its sovereign right to temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications network within its Embassy in the United Kingdom.”
Wikileaks said Tuesday that Secretary of State John Kerry asked Ecuador to stop WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, from publishing leaked emails that could disrupt peace negotiations with a guerrilla group in Colombia.
[WikiLeaks emails show influence of Univision chairman in Clinton campaign // Internet cutoff is just the latest trouble for WikiLeaks’ Assange]
Assange, who has been in refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London for more than four years, saw his access to the internet cut over the weekend.
One of the last pieces of horse-trading that went on in order to conclude the TPP deal involved corporate sovereignty, aka investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), and tobacco. As we reported a year ago, a "carve-out" for tobacco was agreed, which was designed to assuage fears that tobacco companies would use TPP's ISDS mechanism to challenge health measures like plain packs -- something that Philip Morris attempted against both Australia and Uruguay.
The free trade pact between the European Union and Canada is likely to be sealed next week despite opposition from the Belgian region of Wallonia, according to European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom as quoted by AFP.
CETA, the Canada-Europe trade agreement, is still not at the finish line yet. The European Commission has all but one member state on board for the signature of the Comprehensive Economy and Trade Agreement (CETA), Slovak Economy Minister Peter Ziga said today after a meeting of the trade ministers of the EU member states.
There are over 3,000 international investment treaties worldwide, with more under negotiation. The number of investor-state arbitrations based on these treaties continues to grow. Human rights issues have emerged in several arbitrations, for example in disputes that affected water access, public health, land rights, the environment and actions favouring disadvantaged groups. Yet few investment treaties contain meaningful references to human rights, and some arbitral tribunals have proved reluctant to consider human rights arguments made by states and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Investment treaty policy needs reconfiguring in the light of human rights obligations. The UK has long been a key player in the development of the international investment regime. As the country gears up for international trade and investment negotiations in the aftermath of the ‘Brexit’ vote, there is an opportunity to show leadership by ensuring that investment policy supports human rights.
When a country's top business association offers criticism in more or less the same terms as anti-TPP activists, maybe it's time to think twice about ratifying a deal that still lacks any credible justification.
When Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein tapped Ajamu Baraka to be her running mate back in August, there were a flurry of news stories. Most tried to paint him as the anti-Obama—too radical, too intense, too left to occupy the space just a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
All of these characterizations of Baraka amounted to attempting to insult him with compliments.
Long a voice for oppressed people around the globe, Baraka’s presence on the Green ticket is both self-aware and forward-moving; Southern organizer, human rights activist, veteran and socialist, Baraka is strategically positioned to prove that the core of what centrist Democrats would like you to believe about the Green Party is a lie.
Director Ken Loach has taken aim at the BBC, describing its news coverage as “manipulative and deeply political” and saying it is a “rotten place for a director”.
Prominent leftwinger Loach, who is promoting his Palme d’Or-winning film about a man’s struggle with the UK benefits system, I, Daniel Blake, said there was a need to “democratise” the corporation.
“Diversify it so that different regions can make their own dramas. And its notion of news has got to be challenged,” he told the Radio Times.
“The BBC is very aware of its role in shaping people’s consciousness; this is the story you should hear about, these are the people worth listening to. It’s manipulative and deeply political.”
In response to the comments, a BBC spokeswoman said: “BBC News is independent and adheres to clear published editorial guidelines including on impartiality. The BBC is consistently rated the most trusted and accurate news provider by the majority of people in the UK.”
The fact that political candidates are closely coordinating with friendly Super PACs — making a mockery of a central tenet of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision — is one of the biggest open secrets in Washington.
Super PACs are only allowed to accept unlimited contributions on the condition that the money is spent independently of specific campaigns. The Federal Election Commission hasn’t reacted for a variety of reasons, including a lack of hard evidence, vague rules, and a partisan divide among the commissioners so bitter they can’t even agree to investigate obvious crimes.
But newly disclosed hacked campaign documents published by WikiLeaks and a hacker who calls himself Guccifer 2.0 reveal in stark terms how Hillary Clinton’s staffers made Super PACs an integral part of her presidential campaign.
In what might be one of the more delicious cases of irony to ever grace a presidential election, a researcher has found that a number of email servers linked to Donald Trump’s hotel and others businesses are running horribly out of date software which receive no security patches, and are lacking other precautions for keeping hackers out.
The findings come at a time when cybersecurity is a crucial topic in the presidential election, with hackers dumping documents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign online, and Trump and his supporters continuing to criticise Clinton’s use of a private email server.
An email from Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta released in the recent WikiLeaks dump reveals a group of potential running mates considered by Clinton's campaign. Clinton's vice presidential candidates, while not altogether surprising, include some vaguely interesting choices like Bill and Melinda Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and General Motors CEO Mary Barra.
President Obama on Tuesday offered a blunt rebuke to Donald Trump’s claim the presidential election will be rigged against him: Stop whining.
“I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes,” Obama said during a Rose Garden press conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
Trump has riled his supporters in recent days by ramping up his effort to undermine the November elections as “rigged” by the political establishment and mainstream media.
Many of the Twitter users supporting Donald Trump after the presidential debates were bots, according to a new analysis.
More than four times as many tweets came from automated accounts that supported Mr Trump than they did backing Hillary Clinton, according to Philip Howard from the University of Oxford.
The robot tweets helped give the appearance that Mr Trump had more support than he did, according to Professor Howard. That apparent surge in support was referenced repeatedly by Mr Trump, who claimed that despite what the official polling showed he had actually won both of the debates.
Republican senators don’t want to talk about Donald Trump’s allegations of a rigged election.
The Hill contacted the offices of all 54 Republican senators and asked them if they think the election is rigged. Thirty-four of the senators’ offices did not respond, while another three declined to comment.
Those that did respond offered little support for the GOP nominee’s claim.
Fifteen senators said they do not think the election is being or will be rigged.
One, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), wants to “wait and see.”
Earlier today we wrote about a new Project Veritas undercover video that uncovered several democratic operatives openly discussing, in explicit detail, how to commit massive voter fraud. One of the operatives was a person by the name of Robert Creamer who is a co-founder of a democratic consulting firm called Democracy Partners. Within the video, an undercover journalist details a plan to register Hispanic voters illegally by having them work as contractors, to which Creamer can be heard offering support saying that “there are a couple of organizations that that’s their big trick" (see: "Rigging Elections For 50 Years" - Massive Voter Fraud Exposed By Project Veritas Part 2").
Unfortunately, the embarrassing video caused Creamer to subsequently resign from consulting the Hillary campaign as he issued a statement saying that he was "stepping back from my responsibilities working the [Hillary] campaign" over fears that his continued assistance would be a distraction for the campaign.
David Ulevitch, the founder of OpenDNS (now owned by Cisco), apparently discovered that the dirty minds at the California DMV see "lust" in information security.
An angry mom has attracted attention recently because she wants rapper Vince Staples to think about the children.
A Christian mother of four made national news when she posted an 11-minute video ranting and crying about the lyrical content of Staples’ song “Norf Norf” off his album “Summertime ‘06.”
The unnamed mother said: “This is on our local radio station. This crap is being played. I couldn’t even believe the words that I was listening to. As a mom, it infuriated me.”
Last week, I wrote a column discussing the lack of “pro-wall” voices in the coverage of the College Republican’s defaced “Build the Wall” mural on the Washington Avenue Bridge. The articles I read presented two sides: People who oppose Trump’s proposed wall and support with the ensuing defacement of the mural with the words “Stop White Supremacy;” and conversely, people who oppose the wall but defend the College Republican’s freedom of speech. I didn’t know whether the lack of perspectives was an oversight by reporters, or due to the difficulty in gathering sources.
[...]
I suggest we start by examining the College Republicans and their President, Madison Faupel, who continuously mock “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” on their social media accounts. Faupel even tweeted a picture of the other bridge panels, calling it, “24 feet of pure liberal triggering.” None of this justifies vandalism, a point I should have clarified in last week’s column, but it suggests far more awareness on the part of the College Republicans than their official statement — “We find it highly disturbing that someone would vandalize a simple statement such as ‘build the wall’” — would suggest. It also calls into question why College Republicans feel their opinions deserve respect when they don’t respect the opinions of who think differently from them.
The silencing of Stephen Daisley has nagged away at journalism in Scotland for months. His employer, STV, holds the ITV licences for central and northern Scotland, and is staying very quiet. The Scottish National Party rolls around like a drunk who has won a bar fight. Its politicians and its claque of Twitter trolls celebrate their power to bully and tell direct lies about the journalist they have humiliated. The BBC endorses them. The National Union of Journalists supports them. Everyone behaves as if they are living in a one-party state.
Not a dictatorship with men in uniforms marching down the street. But a democratic one-party state like Scotland has become and England and Wales will soon be: a state where it is simply impossible to imagine the ruling party losing power. Everything changes once that prospect is glimpsed. Opposition seems futile. Media organisations adapt themselves to the new order. The best editors tell their journalists to hold power to account. The cowards and the jobsworths suck up to the elite in the hope of gaining commercial privileges or enjoying the quiet life. Because it is regulated by the state, and because politicians know the public gets most of its news from television, you see the worst bullying and the most abject cravenness in broadcasting.
It takes so little to set it off. Censorship always contains an element of absurdity. What is absurd about the Daisley affair is that the SNP has pursued him with malicious vindictiveness for minor failures to go along with nationalist power. What is sinister is that, instead of protesting, STV, the National Union of Journalists and the supposedly neutral BBC have tugged their forelocks so hard, I fear they may soon not have a hair left on their empty heads
Fake lawsuits featuring fake plaintiffs filed against fake defendants and hustled past judges to secure court orders demanding delisting by search engines: that's the new face of reputation management, apparently.
Paul Alan Levy, along with newly-acquired partner Eugene Volokh, have managed to track down the possible perpetrator behind a couple dozen bogus lawsuits filed in recent months. Richart Ruddie and his company, Profile Defenders, appear to be engaging in some illegal activity in order to provide clients with the services they've promised them.
Ruddie has refused to comment on the lawsuits or answer questions posed by Levy and Volokh. Instead, he has opted to fight speech with more speech [lol] by issuing a very self-serving press release.
GCHQ has refused to be drawn into a war of words with Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, who described the agency as "barbaric".
Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Sunday, Stone – the director of JFK, Platoon, Wall Street and Snowden said: "GCHQ is one of the most barbaric agencies around, very cold, very smart.
"And likely to arrest anybody at any time, on any thing on any cause. So hello!"
In other news, Google saw an increase in FISA-ordered requests for user info, bumping it up by about 5,000 total accounts as compared to the previous reporting period.
Hopefully, Google's ungagged-but-still-secret NSL won't stay secret for much longer. It would be troubling if this were to become Google's standard policy -- the announcement of gag order removals but with no further details forthcoming. Not much "transparency" in the Transparency Report, unfortunately… not if that's how it's going to be handled.
True, much of the opacity is still the government's fault: the not-at-all-useful "banding" that makes NSL numbers impossible to parse (1-499 could mean one NSL… or almost 500 in one reporting period), the gag orders that remain in place forever, etc. But private companies shouldn't take their cues from naturally-secretive government agencies. They're pretty much all we have to provide us with an outside, somewhat unrestricted measure of the government's surveillance efforts.
The DOJ wants the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit the decision it handed down in July -- the one that's preventing it from forcing Microsoft to hand over data stored on its servers in Ireland. The DOJ hoped the court would read the Stored Communications Act as applying to the location of the company served with the data request, rather than the actual location of the data. The Appeals Court disagreed with the lower court's finding -- one that dragged in the Patriot Act for some reason -- pointing out that the purpose of the SCA was to protect the privacy of communications, not to facilitate the government in obtaining them.
British spy agencies collected data illegally for more than a decade, a court has ruled.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which investigates complaints against intelligence services, ruled on Monday that the agencies’ secretive collection and use of bulk communications data (BCD) failed to comply with human rights laws until 2015.
The ruling is the result of a case brought by privacy campaigners Privacy International that challenged the collection and use of bulk data by security agencies GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.
A coalition that includes the ACLU, EFF, and 50 other organizations has asked the Department of Justice to investigate how the FBI and police are using large-scale facial recognition databases in criminal investigations. The letter comes alongside a new report that claims around half of American adults are effectively part of these databases.
The report, released by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology, draws on both existing data and material obtained through public records requests. It notes that at least 26 states — which have been previously identified — let law enforcement scan photos from the Department of Motor Vehicles as part of investigations. Based on the number of drivers who have received licenses in each state, the study’s authors calculate that this covers 117 million adults — or 48 percent of the total adult population. The licenses aren’t part of one central index, but several databases across states.
Half of American adults are in a face-recognition database, according to a Georgetown University study released Tuesday. That means there's about 117 million adults in a law enforcement facial-recognition database, the study by Georgetown's Center on Privacy & Technology says.
"We are not aware of any agency that requires warrants for searches or limits them to serious crimes," the study says.
The report (PDF), titled "The Perpetual Line-up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America," shows that one-fourth of the nation's law enforcement agencies have access to face-recognition databases, and their use by those agencies is virtually unregulated.
President Kennedy’s order to the CIA to begin collecting intelligence on American reporters—shattering its own charter—was formalized as Project Mockingbird. In the spring of 1963, this resulted in the wiretapping of two columnists, Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott, after they allegedly revealed classified secrets. Other reporters were also monitored in this program until its end in 1965.
To this end the Digital Economy Bill creates a regulator that will seek to ensure that adult content websites will verify the age of users, or face monetary penalties, or in the case of overseas sites, ask payment providers such as VISA to refuse to process UK payments for non-compliant providers.
There are obvious problems with this, which we detail elsewhere.
However, the worst risks are worth going into in some detail, not least from the perspective of the Bill Committee who want the Age Verification system to succeed.
As we've been noting there have been growing calls for the Obama Administration to publicly scold Russia for hacking the DNC, and to dole out some kind of righteous punishment for this unseemly behavior. Calls on this front have ranged from launching larger cyber offensives or even a brick and mortar military response. We've noted repetaedly how this is stupid for a multitude of reasons, since hacking "proof" is (if the hacker's any good) impossible to come by, with false-flag operations consistently common.
So while there are some very obvious problems with escalation here, the U.S. press seems pretty intent on helping the intelligence community justify doing exactly that. Enter countless outlets breathlessly passing along the idea that we simply must "retaliate" for Russia's behavior, willfully ignoring that the United States wrote the book on nation state hacking and lacks the moral high ground. As Snowden and other whistleblowers should have made abundantly clear by now, we've been hacking allies, fiddling in Democratic elections, creating indiscriminately dangerous malware and worse for decades.
Led by our bad example, we've cultivated a global environment in which nation state operators hack one another every second of every day to keep pace with the United States. As such, the idea that the United States is an innocent daisy that needs to "retaliate" is absurdly, indisputably false, yet this concept sits at 90% of the reporting on this subject. Case in point: eager to get the escalation ball rolling, the CIA last week used NBC to make the case for a renewed cyber-warfare campaign against Russia in the coming months...
Europe-based StartPage, a search engine that focuses on user privacy has canceled its partnership with Yahoo. In an announcement made on Monday, StartPage said it will be dropping Yahoo’s aggregate search results from its metasearch platform Ixquick.eu by the end of the month.
t might not be as momentous as knocking down the Berlin Wall, but tearing down the barriers between Signals Intelligence and Information Assurance inside the National Security Agency is revolutionary, an NSA official in the thick of those efforts contends.
The NSA is six weeks into "NSA21," which the agency calls the most substantial organizational reform in its 60-year history. Announced earlier this year, NSA21's primary change is flattening the organization and moving it from a mission-based construct to a functional model.
The Obama administration's anti-leak drive has netted its most serious conviction of a high-ranking government official: a guilty plea by a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a felony charge of lying to investigators probing leaks about top secret U.S. efforts to disrupt Iran's nuclear program.
Retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright appeared in federal court in Washington on Monday afternoon, speaking in a low voice as U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon accepted the former four-star general's admission that he lied to FBI agents about his contacts with New York Times reporter David Sanger and former Newsweek reporter Daniel Klaidman.
Last week it was announced that journalist Amy Goodman would go to North Dakota to face charges over her coverage of North Dakota oil pipeline protests that went viral. The idea that Goodman was charged with doing journalism was really ridiculous. The original charges focused on "trespassing" but once the local state's attorney, Ladd Erickson, realized that those clearly would not stick, he changed them to rioting. When asked to defend the arrest warrant and charges by a local newspaper, Erickson displayed a complete lack of understanding of the First Amendment in saying that because Goodman's coverage was sympathetic to the protesters, it was fine to consider her a protester too.
Thankfully, a judge disagreed and rejected the rioting charge.
The radio journalist Amy Goodman spent the weekend with the threat of a riot charge hanging over her, arising from protests over a planned oil pipeline in North Dakota. But on Monday a judge rejected the case for lack of evidence.
Ms. Goodman, the host and executive producer of the syndicated radio, television and web show “Democracy Now!” on Pacifica Radio, had planned to enter a not guilty plea on Monday, but District Judge John Grinsteiner declined to sign the charging document, bringing the case to a stop — at least for now.
She and her lawyers declared victory on Monday, but Ladd Erickson, a state prosecutor who is assisting the Morton County state’s attorney’s office in the case, said other charges were possible.
Sexting continues to be a thing. And, as we have covered various stories revolving around people sending pictures of their naughty bits to one another, much of the consternation in the public tends to be around children partaking in sexting. And I can see their point. While I tend to laugh at prudishness in general, it would probably be best for all involved if underage youngsters weren't texting each other provocative pictures of themselves with reckless abandon.
So what is a parent to do if their children are found to be doing just that? One might think that going to both the child's school and authorities to ask for help in stopping this behavior would be in order, right? Well, for one parent in Australia, doing just that landed him a conviction for child pornography and sex offender registration, even as essentially the entire legal system acknowledged that he was just trying to be a good father.
A man who found out that his 15-year-old stepdaughter was sexting her boyfriend proceeded to download the evidence to bring it to the school and the police to ask them to intervene.
Oh dear, readers. You know where this is heading. Intervene they did. Now the dad has been convicted on child pornography charges and placed on the sex offender registry. This, despite the judge understanding exactly why the man, Ashan Ortell, 57, held onto the images.
"There is no suggestion of any exploitation of them by anybody," ruled Judge Jane Patrick, over in Australia, which is becoming as daffy as the United States. "You made no attempt to conceal the images. In fact, you were so concerned that you contacted the authorities about the images."
A child bride in Turkey has died of a brain hemorrhage after giving birth at the age of 15, local media have reported.
The bleed thought to have killed her is believed to have been associated with going into labour at such a young age.
Known only as Derya B, the girl was married in a religious ceremony at the age of 14.
Child brides in Turkey are often raped, beaten and forced to undergo virginity tests, according to the director of a new documentary which aims to break the silence on the taboo issue.
"Growing Up Married", which will premiere in London on Oct. 30, examines the impact of child marriage on four women who were wed as teenagers in western Turkey.
"When hearing some of their stories I thought to myself 'how are you still alive?'," filmmaker Eylem Atakav said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Globally, one third of girls in developing countries, excluding China, are married before the age of 18 and one in nine before the age of 15, according to U.N. data.
The Islamic Republic however didn’t incline towards the Sharia Law until the late 70’s. The Iranian Revolution that took place in the year 1978 witnessed massive changes in the otherwise modern country.
Right from their eating habits to their attire, to literature and art & culture, Iran witnessed a sudden shift in their functioning. Overtaking the Pahlavi dynasty changed the fate of the innocent Iranians forever under the rule of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Nearly two-thirds of "child" refugees who officials questioned about their real age were found to be adults, Home Office documents show.
Figures show that in the year to September 2015, 65 per cent of the child refugees who had their age disputed were found to be over 18.
It comes after Conservative MPs raised questions about the ages of 14 refugees who were brought to the UK this week from the “Jungle” migrant camp in Calais.
The Home Office has no way of independently verifying the age of child refugees being brought to the UK.
Home Office documents show that if a refugee does not have a birth certificate, a Home Office screening officer can certify them as a child based on their “physical appearance” or “demeanour”.
A woman who was captured on CCTV being stripped, stomped on and kicked in the Ballarat police cells has spoken out for the first time.
After unlawfully imprisoning our client Mohamedou Ould Slahi at Guantánamo for 14 years without charge or trial, the U.S. government has finally released him. He is now home in his native Mauritania.
We are overjoyed for Mohamedou and his loving family, who have been anxiously awaiting his return for so many years. His release brings the U.S. one man closer to ending the travesty that is Guantánamo.
Never let it be said law enforcement won't get their man. Even if it's the wrong man. And even if they do it twice.
This was Denver native Steven Talley's first experience with the local PD.
Australia lacks adequate protections for human rights defenders and has created "an atmosphere of fear, censorship and retaliation" among activists, according to a United Nations special rapporteur.
Michel Forst, who released an end-of-mission statement on Tuesday after a fortnight in Australia, said he was "astonished" by numerous measures heaping "enormous pressure" on public servants, whistleblowers and ordinary citizens.
Strict secrecy laws and harassment by government officials are creating an "atmosphere of fear" in Australia, a UN investigator warns. In a damning report Tuesday, United Nations special rapporteur Michel Forst said several human rights defenders had refused to meet him because of the fear of persecution.
SDNs can help organizations keep up with evolving network demands in an app-centric IT environment and give network managers much more flexibility.
How can we surf the web without using Google, Amazon or Facebook? French group Framasoft, which promotes the use of open-source software, offers a way.
Under the "De-google-ify internet" initiative, the group uses decentralized software solutions to design tools that allow consumers to retake control of their data.
Members of Framasoft are strong advocates for the digital privacy of consumers. They consider it their mission to educate people about internet freedom.
TRADITIONAL USB ports could be about to go the way of the 3.5mm headphone jack after the news that Apple's new MacBook Pro will come with USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 only.
A report from Macotakara claimed that Apple's upcoming MacBook Pro models will ditch traditional USB ports, Thunderbolt 2 and the company's MagSafe charging connector.
Instead, according to a "reliable Chinese supplier", the 13in and 15in laptops will have USB Type-C and Thunderbolt 3 ports, so buyers will be forced to cough up €£65 to hook up standard USB devices.
The most interesting new information is about the MacBook Air. The 13-inch model is said to get USB Type-C and Thunderbolt 3, and those ports will replace all of the ports on the current Air—USB Type-A, Thunderbolt 2, and Magsafe 2. We don't know how many of these ports the Air will get, but if the design stays more or less the same, it should at least get more than the one-ported MacBook. The 11-inch Air, which currently serves as Apple's entry-level laptop, would be removed from the lineup.
The operator of streaming sites detailed in a UK High Court order obtained by the MPA has been arrested. Rainier Tamayo was reportedly arrested while uploading movies to his site but tracking him down probably wasn't that hard. The computer graduate included his own name in his site's URLs.