Mike Mason, technology activist and adviser to the CTO at ThoughtWorks, discusses the next big thing in technology, and how business and tech leaders should prepare
The Linux Foundation today released its third annual “Guide to the Open Cloud” report on current trends and open source projects in cloud computing.
The report aggregates and analyzes industry research to provide insights on how trends in containers, microservices, and more shape cloud computing today. It also defines the open source cloud and cloud native computing and discusses why the open cloud is important to just about every industry.
Linux 4.9 is coming along nicely, with Linus Torvalds emitting the fourth release candidate on Saturday evening.
But before he got there, he offered a minor kernel mailing list explosion when developer Miklos Szeredi proposed “the concept of feature flags to allow backward incompatible changes to the overlay format” in overlayfs. Szeredi opined that the feature was long overdue.
Torvalds disagreed that the feature was needed, never mind overdue. Another poster to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Amir Goldstein, asked for clarification of Linus' thinking.
For those more interested in Linux GPU performance for CUDA/OpenCL GPGPU computing than Linux gaming, this article is for you with a fresh round of results across my available GeForce Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal cards using the latest NVIDIA 375.10 binary driver paired with CUDA 8.0 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Linux.
The free, GTK+ based, open-source, fast, user-friendly and lightweight Claws Mail email client has been updated today, November 6, 2017, to version 3.14.1 for GNU/Linux distributions.
For probably the better part of 15 years, PDF has been the de facto standard for sharing, e-mailing, and printing documents. It is a well-supported format, and Linux distributions have been able to read them since, well, since forever! The only problem is, while Windows and MacOS machines can easily buy and install Adobe Acrobat Pro, there is no native Linux version. Still, there are a few good Linux PDF editors available, and I had a go at testing them for you.
The development team behind the open source Calamares universal installer framework used in various GNU/Linux distributions, including Chakra, KaOS, and Netrunner, announced the release of version 2.4.4.
Calamares 2.4.4 is the fourth maintenance update to the stable 2.4 series, adding a bunch of improvements and new features. Among these, we can mention improvements to the flag management of EFI system partitions, which deprecates the use of the sgdisk program, and better parsing of SDDM display manager configuration.
Furthermore, there's now support for selecting visible groups in the netinstall module by default, a new option that allows updating of the database of packages before running any other package management operation, and support for the "try_remove" and "try_install" parameters in the packages module configuration.
NetworkManager developer Lubomir Rintel announced today, November 6, 2016, the availability for download of the first development snapshot towards the major NetworkManager 1.6 release of the widely-used network connection manager.
NetworkManager 1.6 will probably launch next year and promises exciting new features, including Vala bindings for the libnm library, the ability to keep most network connection up during system shutdown, except Wi-Fi and VPN, and support for removing new connections or disconnect devices to the checkpoint/restore connection functionality.
PeaZip, a free and cross-platform graphical file archiver that supports extracting and compressing of over 180 archive types, including 7-Zip, FreeArc, RAR, LHA, PAQ, ISO, UPX, 7Z, ACE, CAB, ZIP, XZ, ARJ, BZ2, and TAR was recently updated to version 6.2.0.
PeaZip 6.2.0 appears to be a major release that updates the 7z backend to version 16.04 for Windows platforms, and introduces real-time display of cumulative progress when running simultaneous jobs to the GUI (Graphical User Interface) for the archiving and extraction operations.
Once upon a time, I started geotagging my photos. For that I bought a GPS logger, an Holux M-1200E. The device works great with gpsbabel, and since my photography workflow was stuck on MacOS, I used Houdah GPS (which uses gpsbabel behind the scene, BTW). Also I have been working for too long on moving that workflow to Linux and GNOME. At one point I even started to write an app I called "Magellan" to do what that MacOS tool did, as a part of my other project, Niepce. I didn't really get motivated so it went nowhere. It was written in C++ like the rest of Niepce. The technology isn't the problem here.
As part of updates to its Windows and web desktop apps, the official Spotify for Linux client has picked up a minor redesign. Well, sort of. The company is testing a small redesign of the main player control UI in its desktop app with a sub-section of Spotify desktop users.
Scary Humans [Steam, Official Site] is a small and difficult survival game where you are constantly being chased by those pesky Humans. Is it worth your bucks?
The developers of 'STASIS' have been unable to bring the game officially to Linux, but their next game 'CAYNE' [Steam, Official Site] will have Linux support from Day-1. It will also be free, so that's really awesome considering how high-quality it looks.
Wine [Official Site] is a rather heated topic at the best of times, but I think we can all agree what the Wine developers have been able to achieve is nothing short of extraordinary. Wine enabled me to re-live an experience I had with a game as a child, and I felt the need to share it.
I'm never one to advocate the use of Wine really, in fact, in the past I have been rather against it. My tune changed and cooled down a lot during the years I've been running GOL, as it really is such an awesome bit of software I don't think anyone should turn their nose up at it.
I should state for the record that I don't particularly think it's a great idea to use it for new games, since there's always a chance they could come to Linux natively, but when it comes down to either using Windows, or using Wine on Linux. The answer should be obvious really, Wine it is. Not everyone is willing to give up certain Windows games they love, and I don't think we should speak out against anyone who does. It brings them a step closer to being a fully-native Linux gamer, so that's awesome really isn't it? A Windows user coming to Linux, using Wine and possibly buying future native Linux games further growing us as a platform can only be a great thing.
GOG Connect is the ability to own games on GOG, that you already have on Steam. Alongside the currently sale going on at GOG, the team have added in new titles for you to bring over to GOG for free.
While Ubuntu Phone continues to stew, bereft of new devices and little developer interest, other efforts to create a fully-fledged Linux* smartphone are picking up pace. Chief among them is KDE Plasma Mobile. KDE itself needs little introduction. It’s one of the most popular Linux desktop environments around, and recently celebrated its 20th birthday.
The Qt Company, through Tuukka Turunen, was pleased to announce that the upcoming Qt 5.8 major update of the popular, open-source and cross-platform GUI toolkit for building Qt apps for mobile and desktop platforms entered Beta stages of development.
And a first Beta build is now available for download, and testing, for early adopters, bringing a bunch of exciting new features, among which we can mention a brand-new configuration system, an all-new graphics architecture containing Qt Quick 2D Renderer for devices without OpenGL support. For improved startup, Qt 5.8 Beta ships with built-in QML (Qt Meta Language or Qt Modeling Language) cache.
If your GObject class implements GomProperty interface, and is a property in your object, it will be translated to an Element attributes with a name and a text value.
For simple types, this means you can control if an attribute is written or not, depending if it is not null. Standard properties, not GObject classes implementing GomProperty, they will be always written with its default value. This is, for example, a boolean will always use false by default.
It's been more than three months since the free, lightweight, open-source and simple Parabola GNU/Linux-libre operating system received an updated install medium, so the development team recently announced Parabola GNU/Linux-libre 2016.11.03.
Two weeks after the release of Netrunner Core 16.09 "Avalon," the development team behind the Debian-based operating system proudly announced the availability of the Desktop Edition of the Netrunner 16.09 "Avalon" series.
I was going to make this post a review of the SpaceFM file manager (RAS syndrome, I know) upon recommendation by a commenter in a previous post. Then I checked it out for a bit, and realized that while it has a lot of potential for graphical customization, I still wouldn't feel particularly compelled to write a full review about that one application. Instead, I'm reviewing the Cinnamon edition of the latest version of Manjaro Linux. Last year, when I reviewed it, it was still relatively tied to Arch Linux. Since then, it has become much more independent, using its own repositories and maintaining a semi-rolling release model (though maintaining ties via the Arch User Repository (AUR)). Given that, I figured it might be time for a new review to see what has changed. I tried it using a live USB made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it's like.
openSUSE Project's Douglas DeMaio reports the availability of a new framework in the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release operating system that promises to let users enjoy the latest Flatpak software releases.
As the company that holds number two rank among open source outfits, SUSE Linux isn't normally the kind of entity that tends to indulge in name calling.
Stability addicts can keep quiet, PHP 5.3.3 is still the standard version provided with RHEL-6, and PHP 5.4.16 the one in RHEL-7
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that EdLogics, a health education-based consumer engagement company and innovator in game-based learning, has built its digital health literacy platform on container and cloud solutions from Red Hat, including Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, and Ansible by Red Hat. EdLogics’ Education-as-a-Service offering, based on Red Hat technology, is aiming to transform the way consumers learn about health and improve health literacy while simultaneously cutting consumer costs.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 was officially released on November 3, and now represent the leading edge of Red Hat's Linux enterprise efforts.
Among the improvements that have landed in RHEL 7.3 are ease-of-use enhancements to SELinux as well as security compliance checking for container via the OpenSCAP protocol.
Users of the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 "Nev" and Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 "Erik" distributions are in for a treat this weekend, as a new kernel update and latest Debian Stable security updates landed in the software repositories.
On November 5, 2016, Debian developers Emilio Pozuelo Monfort and Niels Thykier were proud to announce that the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system entered the Transition Freeze development stage.
Came to the check-in counter at around 02:00 hrs, did the security thing and just had to wait as the flight was of 0400 hrs (from my limited search experience, the cheapest flights are at such times when nobody else (i.e.civilized people) wants to fly). Entered Doha around 5:15 Doha time and saw a much much bigger airport than either the Mumbai International Airport or/and the Delhi International Airport . While I have written some negative stuff about Doha, there were two positives that I am sure, I had forgotten to share –
If you are in the market for a new mini PC you might be interested to know that a new version of the popular Vorke V1 small form-factor desktop computer is now available to preorder with prices starting from $350.
For that price the system comes equipped with a Intel Core i5 processor 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and Ubuntu Linux software, with other offerings equipped with a Core i7 Skylake processor if your budget will stretch.
I'll be the first person to admit that there are applications missing from Ubuntu. This is also true of other Linux distributions, as well. But I think this is a larger issue with distributions like Ubuntu simply due to its popularity.
This article will share some of the most commonly missed applications that Linux users have expressed interest in seeing ported over.
LAST WEEK was an exciting one for us at INQ as we went hands-on with the eagerly awaited ZX Spectrum Vega+, a handheld version of the popular 1980s computer.
We got our mitts on a production model of the long-awaited device, which raised nearly half a million quid on Indiegogo earlier this year. The company has taken a lot of flack in the past few months, but the joy of the finished device has made it all worthwhile.
In 2006, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was founded at Cambridge University with the humble goal of getting more people to study computer science. The proposed solution, a small and cheap Linux computer, was immediately popular with a large number of people. Since 2012 educators, hobbyists, and industrial users have been making the most of our range of devices, and funding our education programs. All profits made by our trading subsidiary go to the Foundation.
Diamond’s “Eagle” and “Eaglet” carrier boards turn Toradex’s Apalis i.MX6, Tegra 3, and Tegra TK1 COMs into rugged, Linux-ready SBCs.
Longtime embedded boards vendor Diamond Systems has released its first ARM-based single board computers, in a solution that serves up multiple versions of Toradex Apalis modules in sandwich-style SBC designs. The new ARM SBCs are based on Diamond’s new Eagle and smaller Eaglet carrier boards, which are either available barebones, or combined with a choice of three Apalis COMs plus a customized Linux OS on a microSD card, a full cable kit, and long lifecycle support.
Eurotech’s Linux-based EDCK 4001 dev kit is built around its ReliaGate 10-11 IoT gateway and middleware, adding a PLC and demo board to mimic sensor I/O.
The EDCK 4001 Everyware Device Cloud Development Kit simulates typical IoT sensor data sources and receivers on a demo board panel controlled by a PLC. This setup is in turn controlled by Eurotech’s ReliaGate 10-11 industrial computer running Yocto Linux and Eurotech’s Everyware Software Framework (ESF) IoT device middleware.
On Nov. 11 Nintendo is set to launch the NES Classic Edition. This tiny console ships with 30 NES games preloaded, an NES controller just like the original, and the ability to output at 1080p complete with a number of screen filters.
On the outside there's nothing too surprising—it's just a tiny NES. However, on the inside is a surprisingly powerful single-board computer that's running Linux.
Chances are you’ve seen (and cooed over) the Nintendo NES Classic, a $60 re-version of the 1980s gaming console legend. It’s cute, cheap and comes with 30 NES games pre-loaded. You also get everything you need right in the box, including a control pad and a HDMI cable.
If I told you that you could buy a 64-bit quad-core PC that runs Ubuntu for just $20 you’d presumably ask me what the reward tiers are, cos it sounds like a crowd-funding pitch. But it’s not. Meet the Orange Pi PC 2, a 64-bit quad-core single-board computer from Shenzhen Xunlong. And it only costs $20.
The open spec Orange Pi PC 2 runs Linux or Android on a quad-core -A53 Allwinner H5 SoC, and offers GbE, a 40-pin RPi interface, and three USB host ports.
Shenzhen Xunlong is keeping up its prolific pace in spinning off new Allwinner SoCs into open source SBCs, and now it has released its first 64-bit ARM model, and one of the cheapest quad-core -A53 boards around. The Orange Pi PC 2 runs Linux or Android on a new Allwinner H5 SoC featuring four Cortex-A53 cores and a more powerful Mali-450 GPU.
The creators of VoCore coin-sized computer are back with VoCore2 which is an advanced version of the tiny Linux computer. It also comes in a VoCore2 Lite variant which is low on hardware and priced at $4. The VoCore is accompanied by a bunch of docks to enhance its capabilities.
The latest wearable tech from Samsung, the Gear S3, has been rolling out to various markets over the last week, one of those markets being Germany. Now lots of the other countries have had stock come in and then a couple of days later run out of it again, like what we have seen happening in the UK and US. We hate people not being able to get Samsung’s latest Tizen wearable device, but we can’t help being happy their is some good demand there ðŸËâ°
Hi-Clay Studio brings you a Japanese horror game called Daruma-San is Coming, minions of “Daruma doll”, the master of all minions, are used to bring destruction. You start on a street where Daruma Doll’s minion is waiting for you and 5 other AI characters. After ‘go’ you need to tap the left and right feet consecutively until the minion finishes his sentence ‘Daruma-San is coming!’ By the time he has finished speaking he will immediately turn around, you will need to watch his speech bubble very carefully to know your timing. If you move whilst the minion is watching, you will EXPLODE!!!
The Line messenger app for Tizen smartphones was first launched on the Samsung Z2 in Indonesia as it came pre-installed as part of the Operating System (OS) in version Z200FDDU0API2. The good news now is that it has been released in the Tizen Store for Z2 users based in India.
When you think about development boards they’re all about enabling creators to invent new, amazing stuff. But who are these creators? According to the Hackster Maker Survey 2016, 45.05% of hardware creators are startups. And when you look at startups, those who are more prone to actually build such new, amazing stuff, few platforms can tell to support them as SAMSUNG ARTIK does.
Nokia is tipped to return to the smartphone market in 2017, and the company is expected to unveil two to three devices in the upcoming year. One of them is the rumoured Nokia D1C, whose specification details have been cropping up recently. Now, fresh images have been leaked giving us a glimpse of what the smartphone looks like, and cementing the fact that indeed a Nokia mobile device is up for resurrection.
Google’s Android One program has been pretty quiet over the past couple months. The last device released, the Sharp 507SH, landed in Japan but with Android Marshmallow out of the box. Since then Nougat has been released and now General Mobile has announced the GM 5, the first Android One device to launch with the latest version of Google’s mobile OS…
When Android TV was introduced to the world back in 2014, the new TV-focused operating system wasn’t packaged as a new entertainment platform as such, but more of an upgrade to its old (failed) Google TV initiative. It sought to bring cohesion to Android content across devices.
“We’re simply giving TVs the same level of attention phones and tablets have had,” explained Android director of engineering David Singleton at the launch.
Over the past couple of years, Android TV has arrived on a number of smart TVs and set-top boxes — including the now-discontinued Google Nexus Player — as Google strives to ensure its presence extends beyond your mobile devices into the centerpiece of your living room.
GitHub has a powerful search engine where you can customize your search in a variety of ways. The easiest way to search is by issue label.
A lot of open source projects label their issues to conveniently track them, using labels like beginner, easy, starter, good first bug, low hanging fruit, bitesize, trivial, easy fix, and new contributor.
You can further narrow down your search based on the programming language you're comfortable with, by adding language: name to your search query. For example, here are all issues labeled as "beginner" in JavaScript.
In the open source universe, using terms such as FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) is common and represents a casual conflation of the terms open source and free software, which are often used interchangeably. I would be remiss if I didn't also admit that I have been guilty of same. I won't be doing that anymore—or at least I'll try not to—for a simple reason: Using the terms interchangeably is dangerous to the goals of free software and open media advocates (read "anti-DRM"). To continue this practice is to undermine beliefs that are fundamental to free software and associated movement.
The RPG development community is shrinking. I don't mean because old programmers are riding into the sunset. I'm talking about collaboration and its ability to guide development that benefits the community by addressing the challenges of next generation applications for IBM midrange shops. Not that a collaborative open source culture is thriving here. But it could and it should. There are efforts to get this under way. And that will figuratively shrink the community.
This talk by Vinu Charanya and Michael Benedict at LinuxCon North America goes into fascinating detail on the metering and chargeback system Twitter engineers built to solve this problem, using both a technical and social approach.
Twitter runs on a massively complex infrastructure running thousands of services, so small efficiencies result in large gains. But figuring out how to measure performance is a giant problem in a system this complex, as is giving Twitter's teams the incentive and tools to improve resource allocation. Vinu Charanya and Michael Benedict's talk at LinuxCon North America goes into fascinating detail on the metering and chargeback system Twitter engineers built to solve this problem, using both a technical and social approach.
Software Freedom Law Center president and executive director Eben Moglen speaks about the most effective ways to approach open source license compliance at the SFLC fall conference on Oct. 28, 2016.
Recently, I’ve attended the first ever OpenPGP conference in Cologne, Germany. It’s amazing how 25 years of OpenPGP have passed without any conference for bringing various OpenPGP people together. I attended rather spontaneously, but I’m happy to have gone. It’s been very insightful and I’m really glad to have met many interesting people.
Despite all the effort Microsoft is expending in getting Internet users to try out and stick with its Edge browser, Chrome continues to the popular choice. Even worse for Microsoft, Chrome's popularity is growing—it now accounts for more than half of all desktop browser usage and has nearly double the market share of Edge and Internet Explorer combined.
Market research firm Net Applications has Chrome sitting pretty with a 54.99 percent share of the desktop browser market, up from 31.12 percent at this moment a year ago, while Internet Explorer and Edge combine for 28.39 percent and Firefox stuck at around 11 percent. Even more interesting is that when Windows 10 launched to the public at the end of July 2015, Chrome had a 27.82 percent share of the market while Internet Explorer still dominated the landscape with a 54 percent share. Now the script has flipped.
In a show of hacker team spirit in August of last year, Parisa Tabriz ordered hoodies for the staff she leads at Google, a group devoted to the security of the company’s Chrome browser. The sweatshirts were emblazoned with the words “Department of Chromeland Security,” along with Chrome’s warning to users when they visit insecure websites that leave them open to surveillance or sabotage: a red padlock crossed out with an X.
Last week I treated myself to some hardware upgrades for my desktop, which will be my main workstation from now on. After installing Ubuntu Gnome, I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of my favorite applications from OSX have a Linux version.
One application that does not have a native Linux client is 1Password, my (now ex-) password manager. Luckily, there’s Pass.
Are you interested in keeping track of what is happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
Bill Sullivan, vice president for public sector at Cloudera, has said government agencies should implement an open-source technology platform to process and analyze large data sets in order to facilitate operations and delivery of services to citizens.
Sullivan wrote that agencies can implement security measures when it comes to the adoption of commercial-based or hybrid open-source software.
The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) has been running PostgreSQL for one year now to power the GOV.UK portal. This open-source database system hosts the central content store underlying the portal, its Content Management System (CMS), and its internal publishing API.
Municipalities in Hungary should be able to use modern, web based eLearning tools to train their staff. To make this possible, Hungary’s State Treasury is looking for a service provider to help them run the open source Moodle eLearning solution.
There were definitely some attractive features in FreeBSD 11.0. I especially enjoyed the changes to the system installer. The ability to set up UFS and ZFS through a series of guided steps was a welcome feature. I also really appreciate that the installer will allow us to enable certain security features like PID randomization and hiding the processes of other users. Linux distributions allow the administrator to set these options, but they often require digging through documentation and setting cryptic variables from the command line. FreeBSD makes enabling these features as straight forward as checking a box during the initial installation.
I also like how pkg has progressed. I think it has become faster in the past year or two and handled dependencies better than it did when the new package manager was introduced. In addition, FreeBSD's documentation is as good as ever, though I feel it has become more scattered. There were times I would find what I wanted in the Handbook, but other times I had to switch to the wiki or dig through a man page. The information is out there, but it can take some searching to find.
Other aspects of running FreeBSD were more disappointing. For example, I had hoped to find boot environments working and accessible from the boot menu. However, progress seems to have reversed in this area as switching boot environments prevented the system from loading. There were some other issues, for example I was unable to login from the graphical login screen, but I could access the Lumina desktop by signing into my account from the command line and launching an X session.
Hardware was a weak point in my experiment. FreeBSD did not work on my desktop machine at all in BIOS mode and failed to boot from installation media in UEFI mode. When running in a VirtualBox environment, the operating system did much better. FreeBSD was able to boot, play sound and run smoothly, but screen resolution was limited, even after VirtualBox modules had been installed and enabled.
Perhaps my biggest concern though while using FreeBSD 11.0 was that I could not update the base operating system, meaning it would be difficult to keep the system patched against security updates. Even once I had manually created a /boot directory to fix the boot environment creation issue, freebsd-update and freebsd-version continued to fail to detect the running kernel. This leaves the system vulnerable and means our best chance for keeping up with security updates is to manually install them from source code, not an ideal situation.
All in all, FreeBSD 11.0 does have some interesting new features, but it also has several bugs which make me want to hold off on using the operating system until a point release has been made available to fix the existing issues.
The latest feature landing in mainline GCC for next year's GCC 7 stable release is -fsanitize-address-use-after-scope.
Over the past few years, we’ve taken unprecedented action to help Americans engage with their Government in new and meaningful ways.
Using Vote.gov, citizens can now quickly navigate their state’s voter registration process through an easy-to-use site. Veterans can go to Vets.gov to discover, apply for, track and manage their benefits in one, user-friendly place. And for the first time ever, citizens can send a note to President Obama simply by messaging the White House on Facebook.
By harnessing 21st Century technology and innovation, we’re improving the Federal Government’s ability to provide better citizen-centered services and are making the Federal Government smarter, savvier, and more effective for the American people. At the same time, we’re building many of these new digital tools, such as We the People, the White House Facebook bot, and Data.gov, in the open so that as the Government uses technology to re-imagine and improve the way people interact with it, others can too.
When it comes to the U.S. government, most people's eyes are trained on the Presidential race, and if yours are, you may have missed the substantial work promoting open source software that the government is doing. For example, The Office of Management and Budget recently mandated in a lengthy memo that under the final Federal Source Code policy, federal agencies will have to share internally developed code with each other and release at least 20 percent of their code to the public.
Now, the government has launched an update of its website, Code.gov, aimed at housing key open source projects.
EFF works to inform the world about breaking issues in the world of technology policy and civil liberties. And one of our best ways of communicating with our friends and members is through our nearly-weekly newsletter, EFFector. Last week, we sent out a very special EFFector: a deep dive, single-issue edition that got into the nitty-gritty of open access and research. To keep the conversation going, we are publishing it here on the Deeplinks blog as well.
The three-day conference brings together key stakeholders from EAC Partner States including Ministries of Health, Finance and Industry, National Medicines Regulatory Agencies (NMRAs), National Procurement Agencies (NMPAs), AU-NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency, World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the private sector (local and international pharmaceutical manufacturers) as well as international development partners and investors among others.
The Indian Drug Technical Advisory Board meeting on 7 November is expected to discuss a measure that could lead to opening the way to a 10-year data exclusivity period for originator pharmaceutical companies in India, according to the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance. The alliance submitted a letter to the advisory board to warn against consequences on public health of data exclusivity if the Indian government “succumbs to” pressure by the United States.
In a letter to the Indian Drug Technical Advisory Board dated 27 October, D G Shah, secretary general of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), explained why data exclusivity, which extends market exclusivity, would delay access to cheaper versions of the medicines.
A leading cause of liver cancer and cirrhosis, chronic infection by hepatitis C virus (HCV) affects more than 80 million people worldwide, 85% of whom live in low (13%) and middle (72%) income countries. Around 15% of Egypt’s population, for example, is infected – one of the world’s highest prevalence rate – while it is estimated that 12 million people in India have hepatitis C.
Nearly 700 000 people are killed by hepatitis C yearly, where preventive vaccines are lacking.
And this occurs at a time when at least 1.2 million people in Japan and three million Americans suffer from hepatitis C, while the infection is a major European public-health challenge (between 0.4% and 3.5% of the population in different EU Member States), as the most common single cause of liver transplantation.
There are certain things people want and will pay for. There are things they want and won’t. If we look at security it’s pretty clear now that security is one of those things people want, but most won’t pay for. The insane success of Let’s Encrypt is where this thought came from. Certificates aren’t new, they used to even be really cheap (there were free providers, but there was a time cost of jumping through hoops). Let’s Encrypt make the time and actual cost basically zero, now it’s deployed all over. Depending who you ask, they’re one of the biggest CAs around now, and that took them a year? That’s crazy.
Research director Scott Tenaglia and lead research engineer Joe Tanen detailed the vulnerabilities during their ‘Breaking BHAD: Abusing Belkin Home Automation devices’ talk at the Black Hat Europe conference in London last Friday.
The zero-day flaws specifically relate to Belkin’s smart home products and accompanying Android mobile application, which is used to wirelessly control the home automation devices.
The first flaw, a SQL injection vulnerability, enables would-be hackers to inject malicious code into the paired Android WeMo smartphone app, and thus take root control of the connected home automation device.
The BBC World Service was founded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and funded by them directly for six decades, until a cosmetic change last year. Its specific purpose is to spread British values and the British view of the world abroad. It specifically, on its dozens of different national services, gives an opportunity to dissident voices who cannot get on their mainstream media. The Americans spend hundreds of millions annually on outfits like RFE/RL to do the same. Yet when the Russians do precisely the same thing on a much smaller scale, for example by enabling you to listen to me, this is portrayed as evil propaganda.
Fortunately we have the Henry Jackson Society to defend you from it. The Henry Jackson Society, supported by Liam Fox, Jim Murphy and pretty well every other right wing enthusiast you can name, is of course a great believer in free markets. And its sense of the market has detected that its old product of a constant stream of Islamophobia is becoming dated, and currently buyers want Russophobia. Whatever your phobia, the Henry Jackson Society will have some to sell you, so here we have their new Manual of Russophobia.
A new poll from an unlikely source suggests that the US public and the US media have very little in common when it comes to matters of war and peace.
This poll was commissioned by that notorious left-wing hotbed of peaceniks, the Charles Koch Institute, along with the Center for the National Interest (previously the Nixon Center, and before that the humorously named Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom). The poll was conducted by Survey Sampling International.
The war in Yemen had been going on for just two months when Abdullah al-Ibbi sat down for a late-night meal with his two wives, their children and grandchildren. It was then, in an instant, that his world shattered.
The air strike that hit Abdullah's home killed 27 members of his family. He survived, but only learnt about their deaths six weeks later when he woke up in a hospital bed.
"If I didn't fear God, I would have committed suicide at that moment," he recalls. "I would have jumped off a building... but God gave me patience."
The family had lived in the Houthi rebel stronghold of Saada, which has come under intense aerial bombardment by the Saudi-led coalition supporting the exiled President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.
The air strike hit their home at around midnight, says Abdullah. Rescuers with bulldozers worked until morning to retrieve the bodies buried under the rubble. Seventeen were children - the youngest, Abdullah's granddaughter, Inas, was one month old.
Three of his adult sons also made it out alive.
NOAA 2017 tide tables are now available. NOAA tide tables have been in production for 150 years and are used by both commercial and recreational mariners for safe navigation. Printed tide tables provide users with tide and tidal current predictions in an easy-to-read format for particular locations. NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services produce these tide tables on an annual basis.
This week on CounterSpin: In their feature “What to Know About the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests,” Time magazine told readers that “environmental activists say” the pipeline would contribute to man-made climate change; “they insist that fossil fuels—including the vast reserves in the Bakken Shale—need to be kept in the ground to protect the world from the worst effects of climate change.”
For more than a year, Adidas has been teasing the release of a shoe made almost entirely from discarded plastic fished out of the oceans. It revealed its first prototype of the sustainable sneaker, created in collaboration with environmental organization Parley for the Oceans, in June 2015. Finally, in mid-November, the first mass-produced quantity—7,000 pairs, to be exact—will go on sale, and according to Adidas, that’s just the start.
“We will make one million pairs of shoes using Parley Ocean Plastic in 2017—and our ultimate ambition is to eliminate virgin plastic from our supply chain,” Eric Liedtke, an Adidas executive board member responsible for global brands, said in a Nov. 4 statement.
Colin Bennett is no stranger to running as a Green Party candidate in the 33rd Senate District. He ran and lost in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2014. The only race he missed in the past decade was in 2012, when he ran for Congress.
Bennett believes that the issue of climate change is too important not to keep trying to find a way to awaken people to the dangers involved, and if that involves running for office, then so be it, he says.
"Literally, I feel the world is on the precipice of disaster," said Bennett. "I'm doing everything in my power to turn that around."
Bennett, 37, lives in Westbrook, runs a small used bookstore in Deep River called Bennett's Books, and has other jobs to make ends meet. In the summer, Bennett works for Sail Connecticut Access, a nonprofit operation that gives people with special needs the opportunity to go sailing.
The campaign across the 33rd Senate District, which stretches down the Connecticut River Valley from Portland to Old Saybrook, has been dominated by disputes between Republicans and Democrats over Donald Trump and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.
French MEP Yannick Jadot will be the Green candidate for French president next year after winning a second-round party primary Monday.
Jadot won 54 percent of the vote against Michèle Rivasi, who also sits in the Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament.
Jadot, a 49-year-old former Greenpeace activist, won the most votes in the primary’s first round in late October with support of 36 percent. Around 13,000 party members and supporters cast their ballot either by mail or online (for French nationals abroad) last week in the second-round of voting.
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for giving “voice to the voiceless” on international social justice issues, wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s Times (10/30/16) arguing for increased government action on poverty. His calls for heightened attention to economic deprivation, though, were buried in a larger message that was familiar to longtime Kristof-watchers: that the poor aren’t actually poor because they lack enough money, but because of their own moral failings.
IT workers in the infrastructure team at Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) were notified recently of their layoff. They expect to be training replacements from India-based contractor HCL. The layoff affects more than 500 IT workers, according to the insurance firm.
This familiar IT story began a little differently. A few days before employees were notified in mid-October of their layoff, HCSC CEO Paula Steiner talked about future goals in an internal, company-wide video.
Steiner's comments weren't IT-department-specific, but the takeaway quote by one IT employee was this: "As full-time retiring baby boomers move on to their next chapter, the makeup of our organization will consist more of young and non-traditional workers, such as part-time workers or contractors," said Steiner in the video.
What Steiner didn't say in the employee broadcast is that some of the baby boomers moving "on to the next chapter" are being pushed out the door.
Last year, Ripple Labs, creator of the virtual currency XRP, was fined $0.7 million (~€£540,000) by the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for violating regulations concerning money laundering.
Some observers cite this as the moment cryptocurrencies shaved off their startup hipster beards, put on a tie, and went mainstream. Being fined by a regulator means that you’re part of the financial services industry at last.
Given that the first and most famous cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was launched back in 2009, it has taken the wider industry a relatively long time to warm to it. But now suddenly everyone is talking about Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology as a disruptor of potentially massive proportions: Sweden is trialling a new land registry that uses a blockchain, dozens of startups spanning numerous sectors are poking around at possible uses, and importantly policy makers such as the European Parliament have voted in favour of a more hands-off approach towards blockchain tech regulation.
Activists in the Netherlands have gathered almost two-thirds of the signatures needed to lay the groundwork for a referendum on Europe’s free trade deal with Canada, which they say overly favours the interests of multinational companies.
The Dutch have twice voted down European Union initiatives in referendums, scuppering a proposed EU constitution in 2005 and in April throwing into disarray plans for closer EU relations with Ukraine.
How Hillary Clinton backers deployed faux feminism and privilege politics to divert attention from her destructive policies.
Most, but not all campaign stories featured these sorts of empty calories; some dealt with important questions of candidates’ leadership, demeanor and conflicts of interest. One piece (Washington Post, 8/30/16) highlighted Trump’s “us vs. them” strategy, often blaming US problems on minority groups. Another (New York Times, 9/3/16) detailed Clinton’s cozy relationship with and frequent courting of the ultrarich.
Another 12 percent of front-page election stories were focused on voters. Over half of these stories featured straightforward polling reports, while the others were more detailed looks at voter mood and logic. The New York Times covered voters particularly well; giving voice to their doubts and hopes for the candidates (9/14/16, 9/9/16). The Washington Post (8/22/16) and USA Today (9/13/16) both published some illuminating voter pieces, but many merely regurgitated poll data.
Nevada was of course one of the most blatant examples of all of the Democratic National Committee rigging the election against Sanders. Firstly the caucuses featured casino owners bussing in coachloads of employees with firm instructions to vote for Hillary. Even with this, Hillary was struggling. Next the Democratic party machine announced to the media on 21 February that Hillary had won, despite it being by no means clear if that were true.
Finally at the delegate conference, Hillary acolyte and DNC member Roberta Lange in the chair called the state for Clinton on the basis of the most dubious delegate vote imaginable – and denying any recount. What is more, the Clinton camp scored a double whammy by portraying, throughout the controlled corporate media, the precise scenes you see in this video as a violent riot by Sanders supporters. I do ask you to watch this video through and see what you think. It may just change your entire mind on what is really happening in US “democracy”.
Current and former FBI officials have launched a media counter-offensive to engage head to head with the Clinton media machine and to throw off the shackles the Loretta Lynch Justice Department has used to stymie their multiple investigations into the Clinton pay-to-play network.
Sen. Al Franken called Sunday for the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on FBI Director James Comey's handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server. And the Minnesota senator said he thinks Hillary Clinton can rely on his state's voters despite a last-minute visit from Donald Trump, though he said he's always "nervous."
"I think that there should be hearings, and I'm certain there will be hearings in the Judiciary Committee on this matter," the Franken told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union."
His comments reflected the Democratic frustration with Comey telling lawmakers 11 days before the November 8 election that the FBI was reviewing new emails potentially connected to its investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information.
[...]
Franken also defended the Clinton Foundation as Tapper pressed him on whether it should be shuttered if Clinton wins the election.
At this point, I would think that the Oligarchy would prefer to steal the election for Trump, instead of from him, rather than allow insouciant Americans to destroy America’s reputation by choosing a person under felony investigations for president of the United States.
The journalists of course attempt to say that to vote for Stein is to let Trump in. Stein sticks strongly to the argument that the “Queen of Corruption” and “Warmonger” Clinton is not in fact a real choice from Trump. This is of course absolutely true, Clinton is a dangerous extremist – she just happens to support the extremism of the right wing establishment and its poodle media.
I have been fascinated by the apoplexy generated in the pretend left by the notion that people ought not to vote for Clinton. The go-to argument is that not to vote for her is in itself an act of misogyny. I wonder if they will argue the same for Marine Le Pen. The second argument is that a corrupt warmonger is better than the racist bigot Trump. The interesting thing is, close examination reveals an almost 100% correlation between those apoplectic at any lack of support for Clinton, and those who supported Tony Blair. The idea that being an ultra-corrupt warmonger is not a big problem is obviously a fixed principle with these people.
Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate. The most important issue in this election does not revolve around the personal traits of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It revolves around the destructive dynamic of unfettered and unregulated global capitalism, the crimes of imperialism and the security and surveillance apparatus. These forces are where real power lies. Trump and Clinton will do nothing to restrict them.
It is up to us to resist. We must refuse to be complicit, even in the act of voting, with the fossil fuel industry’s savaging of our ecosystem, endless wars, oppression of the poor, including the one in five children in this country who is hungry, the evisceration of constitutional rights and civil liberties, the cruel and inhumane system of mass incarceration and the state-sponsored execution of unarmed poor people of color in our marginal communities.
[...]
The rise of Donald Trump is the product of the disenchantment, despair and anger caused by neoliberalism and the collapse of institutions that once offered a counterweight to the powerful. Trump gives vent to the legitimate rage and betrayal of the white underclass and working poor. His right-wing populism, which will grow in virulence and sophistication under a Clinton presidency, mirrors the right-wing populism rippling across much of Europe including Poland, Hungary, France and Great Britain. If Clinton wins, Trump becomes the dress rehearsal for fascism.
Americans will vote on 8 November to choose their next president.
The numbers have begun to tighten as we approach election day amid crises affecting both Democratic contender Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump.
Use our tracker to follow the contest and scroll down to find some explanation on what the polls show.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank appears to have asked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to do the majority of the research for a negative column he wrote about Donald Trump in April 2016.
Milbank’s column was titled, “The Ten Plagues of Trump,” and featured a list of “outrageous things” said by Trump. One of the “plagues” listed by Milbank, for example, was “Blood” and centered around a quote from Trump about Megyn Kelly: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel used personal email accounts and a personal email domain to communicate with government officials and political figures, according to a published report based on hacked emails posted by WikiLeaks.
Emanuel's personal account information turned up among the thousands of emails from John Podesta, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, the Chicago Tribune reported. Clinton has come under fire for her use of a private email server because doing so potentially jeopardized classified information.
Emanuel registered his personal email domain, "rahmemail.com," on May 16, 2011, the day he was sworn into office. The hacked emails also turned up evidence of Emanuel's personal Gmail account.
Chelsea Clinton’s husband used his connections to the Clinton family and their charitable foundation to raise money for his hedge fund, according to an allegation by a longtime Clinton aide made public Sunday in hacked documents released by WikiLeaks.
Marc Mezvinsky extended invitations to a Clinton Foundation poker event to rich Clinton supporters he was courting as investors in his hedge fund, and he also relied on a billionaire foundation donor to raise money for the fund, according to the WikiLeaks documents. They also assert that he had his wife Chelsea Clinton make calls to set up meetings with potential investors who support her family’s political and charitable endeavors.
The documents — a memo and an email — were written in late 2011 and early 2012, respectively, by ex-Clinton aide Doug Band. They were sent to family confidants including John Podesta, who is now serving as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, and Cheryl Mills, who was Clinton’s State Department chief of staff.
Wikileaks is playing a prominent, if under reported, role, in the 2016 American presidential election. Few understand the importance of Wikileaks in the eventual writing of the history of presidential politics.
The media write and talk about events as they happen, usually without historical background or context. A good historian writes with retrospection about past events that explain historical outcomes. U.S. Presidential elections leave behind a clutter of accounts of those who were (or claim to have been) eyewitnesses to history – campaign insiders, journalists, pundits, and hangers-on. The best insider accounts pierce some of the veil of campaign rhetoric, PR, talking points, and smoke and mirrors to explain what was really happening behind the scenes.
Like most of Hollywood, Viggo Mortensen is solidly anti-Trump in this election, but he’s also no fan of Hillary Clinton.
Instead the “Lord of the Rings” star — a Bernie Sanders supporter until he dropped out of the race — will be casting his vote for Jill Stein.
“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and go, ‘You know, I never voted my conscience,’ ” he said at a luncheon for his movie “Captain Fantastic” at the Explorer’s Club.
“Not really, when it mattered. I don’t want to do that. And I don’t look at it as a protest vote. I’m not voting against something, I’m voting for something. I’m voting my conscience. It’s not a protest, it’s an affirmation.”
Newly released emails from WikiLeaks suggest that the Democratic National Committee colluded with CNN in devising questions in April to be asked of then-Republican primary candidate Donald Trump in an upcoming interview.
In an email to DNC colleagues on April 25 with the headline "Trump Questions for CNN," a DNC official with the email username DillonL@dnc.org asked for ideas for an interview to be conducted by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.
"Wolf Blitzer is interviewing Trump on Tues ahead of his foreign policy address on Wed. ... Please send me thoughts by 10:30 AM tomorrow."
The sender of the email would seem to be DNC Research Director Lauren Dillon, who was identified in previous reports of DNC emails released by WikiLeaks in July.
Hillary Clinton's daughter Chelsea allegedly used resources from the Clinton Foundation for her wedding, a new dump of Wikileaks emails appear to reveal.
In several emails, Doug Band, a former top aide to president Bill Clinton and a former Clinton Global Initiative board member, complains about Chelsea Clinton (writing 'cvc' for Chelsea Victoria Clinton).
In one email, dated January 1, 2012, Band emails John Podesta, Chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and says Chelsea Clinton was conducting an internal investigation into CGI and the Clinton Foundation, which posed a conflict of interest.
It is unclear why Chelsea Clinton was investigating her family's foundation and its dealings with money.
The Democratic National Committee helped CNN anchors Wolf Blizter and Jake Tapper prepare for interviews with Donald Trump, the latest WikiLeaks email dump has revealed.
Among the batch of 8,263 emails released on Sunday night, one shows that staff working for the network hosts asked DNC staffers what questions they should put to the Republican candidate.
They also asked for advice when it came to an appearance from former candidate, Ted Cruz.
An email dated April 28 entitled 'Cruz on CNN' reads 'CNN is looking for questions. Please send some topical/interesting ones.'
With Hillary Clinton circumventing yet another FBI investigation, progressives have an alternative to establishment Democrats. If your conscience won’t allow you to side with a person who is advised by Henry Kissinger and neoconservatives like Robert Kagan, then you have a choice on November 8, 2016. You can vote for a future without a media beholden to John Podesta’s dinner parties. You can choose a future without Wolf Blitzer or Donna Brazile colluding with the DNC, and without a Democratic nominee accepting Foundation contributions from countries that fund ISIS. If you envision a world without wars for oil, fracking, the prison industrial complex, and severe breaches in campaign finance laws, then you certainly don’t have to pick Clinton or Donald Trump.
You can vote for WikiLeaks.
You can vote for WikiLeaks, and appease your conscience by championing Dr. Jill Stein and the Green Party.
Every movement has a beginning, and although Jill Stein has been active in politics for years, this year marks a turning point in American history. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have allowed voters to see the inner workings of the Clinton campaign; countering an American media serving essentially as Hillary Clinton’s public relations machine. Instead of a 2005 hot mic audio of Donald Trump (considered to be Pulitzer Prize winning journalism by the The Washington Post) Assange and WikiLeaks have published enough Podesta emails to highlight the long-term implications of a Clinton presidency.
If you use Facebook, or Twitter, have a Wi-Fi connection, watch television or have been to an office Halloween party, you’ve probably encountered them: internet memes.
These shareable, sometimes pithy and often puerile units of culture have emerged as the lingua franca of the 2016 election, and have given the American people an entirely new way of articulating their beliefs. Clinton’s top tweet is a meme. Trump’s taco bowl became one. Through memes, Ted Cruz was “unmasked” as the Zodiac killer. Jeb Bush’s limp plea for applause got him Vined into oblivion. Bernie Sanders shared a moment with a bird that blossomed into something out of Walt Disney’s long-lost Marxist phase.
Memes can be fun, or they can be dumb – but as an emerging medium, they haven’t provoked a lot of debate or analysis. In fact, they seem to defy scrutiny.
And slowly, before anyone can even take note, memes are ruining democracy.
WikiLeaks has published its 33rd tranche of emails from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Trends
The whistleblowing organization has now published more than 55,600 emails in a series of daily online releases which it said were building towards the November 8 presidential election.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) apparently helped CNN anchors prepare for interviews with Donald Trump, according to the latest WikiLeaks email dump.
Included in some 8,263 emails released by WikiLeaks is an exchange that shows DNC staff discussing how to advise CNN on what questions to ask Mr Trump in a scheduled interview ahead of his foreign policy address.
However CNN defended the practice, saying it had sought the Republicans' opinions about questions to ask Hillary Clinton in order to "ensure a tough and fair interview".
Although the interview with Mr Trump was ultimately cancelled, the emails showed numerous questions were submitted by the DNC.
The following question was asked on Sept. 21, 2015, via email, to the chairman of a major presidential campaign, John Podesta: “What should I ask Jeb?”
At the time, Jeb Bush was still a leading candidate to challenge Hillary Clinton for the White House — and had more money behind him.
The question didn’t come from a campaign surrogate or an opinion host — it came from the chief Washington correspondent at CNBC, John Harwood. And just to make sure he hit Bush where the Clinton campaign — which still viewed the former Florida governor as its most likely opponent for 2016 — wanted him to most, Harwood went to Clinton’s campaign chief to do all the thinking for him.
It should be noted that the title “chief Washington correspondent” means Harwood is not an opinion host or a partisan pundit — he’s one who represents the network as objective and nonpartisan. It also means he cannot consult with opposition campaigns for advice — nor can he provide advice back to a campaign, which Harwood has on several occasions via recent WikiLeaks dumps.
An email released by WikiLeaks on Sunday shows that the husband of CNN vice president and Washington bureau chief Virginia Moseley tipped the Clinton campaign off to a favorable poll just before its release last September.
“Good CNN poll coming,” Thomas Nides, Moseley’s husband, wrote to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in a Sept. 20, 2015 email.
Nides served as deputy secretary of state under Clinton and is currently vice president at Morgan Stanley. His name has been floated for a possible high-level spot in a Clinton White House.
It hasn’t been an easy election year for progressives. Many were crushed when Bernie Sanders failed to pull off a historic upset of establishment pick Hillary Clinton, then outraged when leaked emails proved what they already knew — that the Democratic Party elite had conspired against Sanders’ political revolution the whole time.
But with the racist, sexist billionaire buffoon Donald Trump leading the GOP, many progressives have resigned themselves to pulling the lever for Clinton in an attempt to keep Trumpismo at bay. But before you accept yet another election year of “lesser evilism,” allow yourself to consider investing your vote in the Green Party
In a 2006 interview with the editorial board of the Jewish Press in Brooklyn, then-Senator Hillary Clinton shared her opinion on the recent election in Palestine: “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”
Regardless of who wins this election, around half of the country is going to have to learn to live under the rule of someone they've vilified for the entire election cycle. (That's two and a half years, but with a RealFeel of untold centuries trapped in the Phantom Zone.) In order to help people from both sides, we've put together a few tips in case the other side wins.
CNBC host John Harwood in September 2015 asked Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, what he should ask then-Republican presidential candidate former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in an upcoming interview, according to new emails published by WikiLeaks.
Harwood, who faced harsh criticism for his performance as a debate moderator in the third Republican presidential primary debate in October 2015, sent Podesta an email on Sept. 21, 2015, with the subject line, “What should I ask Jeb…” The body of the email read, “…in Speakeasy interview tomorrow.”
It’s impossible to tell you, because it really will depend on the mood, on the emotions of the voters on election day. That’s all these campaigns are about, because they both essentially are neo-liberal candidates who will do nothing to impede imperial expansion and corporate power. The whole campaign has descended to, you know, not surprisingly, to the level of a reality TV show, with presidential debates featuring women who have accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault being brought in by Donald Trump; videos - I’ll go back to the primaries - of the size of people’s genitals. I mean, it’s just appalling, but all of that is emblematic of a political system in deep decay and one that no longer revolves around fundamental issues. We know from the Wikileaks emails, the John Podesta emails that were leaked from Hillary Clinton, that there was a calculated effort on a part of a Clinton campaign to promote these fringe candidates - like Trump, and they particularly wanted Trump, because the difference between Hillary Clinton and a more mainstream Republican candidate, like Jeb Bush, is so marginal. So if you had to ask me, I don’t think Trump will win, but I don’t rule out the possibility that he will win - we have to look at the Brexit polls in Britain…
Jill Stein is already looking past tomorrow’s election.
The Green Party candidate, who is has a polling average of about 2% heading into Election Day, chuckled at the prospect of an outright win Tuesday. She said she’s hoping for 5% in election returns, and beyond that, she’s planning to push for reforms in the presidential debate commission and to help pave the way for future third party candidates with a rank choice voting initiative.
Stein spoke to TIME on the eve of the election about what she’s seem from voters this year, how women were talked about in the race and why she never takes vacations.
Is the Serbian government using underhanded censorship methods to control the media narrative or are critics too harsh?
Several years ago Platform Computing (now owned by IBM) released an open source version of LSF (Platform Load Sharing Facility) -- their premier software product. LSF is a workload management platform and job scheduler for distributed HPC environments. In recent years that open source product has begun to flourish, and now IBM is using the DMCA in an attempt to erase all progress made on the project since it was first released. I guess if you can't compete, you call your legal team...
Two early internet pioneers are expressing sadness and disbelief at the fact that Shiva Ayyadurai, a self-described “world-renowned scientist, inventor, lecturer, philanthropist and entrepreneur” who says he invented “email: the electronic mail system as we know it today,” will receive a $750,000 settlement from Gawker Media, the bankrupt publisher that he sued for defamation earlier this year over a series of stories that, his lawsuit claims, “falsely trace the origin of email and call Dr. Ayyadurai a liar.”
Computer programmer Ray Tomlinson is credited by many experts and historians with developing the technology that we understand today as email. Dave Crocker, who helped write several foundational standards documents about messaging over the internet, told Gizmodo that Ayyadurai’s settlement with Gawker Media represents a victory for a version of the history of email’s development that isn’t supported by evidence. “I grew up being taught that the truth is always a sufficient defense against claims of defamation,” Crocker said upon hearing about the settlement. “Given the extensive documentation about the history of email, I’m sorry to find that that the adage no longer holds true.”
John Vittal, one of Crocker’s co-authors, seconded his frustration. Vittal is best known in the traditional history of email for being the first person to implement “reply” and “forward” functions. “What’s true is true, and you can’t hide from it, and shouldn’t be able to capitalize on thwarting it,” said Vittal. “To me, it’s a sad day.”
If there's one thing that the two major Presidential candidates seem to agree on it's that we have too much free speech and all you First Amendment whiners should quiet down. Just this morning, we wrote about Trump threatening a documentary filmmaker with a cease & desist letter (the latest in a fairly long list of defamation threat letters). And it appears that the Clinton campaign is also ramping up its similar legal threat letter business.
Last week, it sent cease & desist letters to broadcasters in Florida who were airing Trump ads that used some footage of Michelle Obama back in the 2008 campaign taking something of a swipe at Clinton. And, just today, the campaign supposedly sent out cease & desist letters to broadcasters airing new Trump ads claiming that Clinton is "under investigation by the FBI."
Several far-right Polish groups have protested outside Facebook’s office in Warsaw after the social networking site temporarily blocked their profiles.
About 120 people demonstrated in the Polish capital Saturday afternoon, denouncing what they said was “censorship.”
In the last 10 days or so, James Comey sent two letters to Congress -- the first one notifying Congress of some new information in an "unrelated" investigation that may pertain to Hillary Clinton's emails. And then the one from yesterday admitting that there was nothing important in those emails. That was effectively all that Comey said officially. Yet, in between all of that a ton of information leaked from the FBI about the investigation. We learned what it pertained to (the Anthony Weiner investigation), heard estimates of the number of emails involved, heard that the FBI found them weeks ago but only told Comey right before he sent the letter, that the FBI didn't have a warrant to read the emails -- and then that it did, and that a whole bunch of people inside both the FBI and DOJ have opinions on both sides of this whole mess.
Basically, the FBI (and the DOJ) were leaking information like it was the last chance they'd ever have to leak information and their lives depended on who could leak the most.
The Privacy Shield transatlantic data transfer deal is now caught in a pincer action: A week after it emerged that Irish digital rights activists had filed suit to annul the deal come reports that a French campaign group has begun its own legal action.
French civil liberties campaign group La Quadrature du Net filed suit against the European Commission, the European Union's executive body, on Oct. 25.
Although the Court of Justice of the EU has not yet published details of the complaint, Brussels-based news agency Euractiv reported Thursday that La Quadrature's goal is to annul the Commission's decision that Privacy Shield provides adequate protection under EU law when the personal information of EU citizens is transferred to the U.S. for processing.
The Cyber Security Law was passed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, and will take effect in June, government officials said Monday. Among other things, it requires internet operators to cooperate with investigations involving crime and national security, and imposes mandatory testing and certification of computer equipment. Companies must also give government investigators full access to their data if wrong-doing is suspected.
China’s grown increasingly aggressive about safeguarding its IT systems in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. spying, and is intent on policing cyberspace as public discourse shifts to online forums such as Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat. The fear among foreign companies is that requirements to store data locally and employ only technology deemed “secure” means local firms gain yet another edge over foreign rivals from Microsoft Corp. to Cisco System Inc.
So Big Mouth Billy Bass — you know, that animatronic singing fish that was annoyingly popular at the end of the 1990s — was, frankly, already pretty creepy. But one little modification brought it to new, disturbing heights.
Brian “Wizard of Terror” Kane posted this lil’ video to Facebook on Oct. 27, which features a Big Mouth Billy Bass configured so that the voice of Alexa — Amazon’s voice assistant similar to Apple’s Siri — emanates from the fish’s mouth.
The video is simply captioned, “the future” ââ¬â¢ and it’s a dystopian vision indeed.
A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end encryption with friends and family. I explicitly asked people not to list options only used in a work setting. The background is the uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as a blog post from Sander Venima about why he do not recommend Signal anymore (with feedback from the Signal author available from ycombinator). I wanted an overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options in a less biased survey later on. So far I have not taken the time to look into the individual proposed systems. They range from text sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging, VOIP and video conferencing. For those considering which system to use, it is also useful to have a look at the EFF Secure messaging scorecard which is slightly out of date but still provide valuable information.
For the last year, EFF has been battling to free records from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regarding an ethically dubious research program to promote the development of automated tattoo recognition technology. The agency is months delinquent in providing a variety of information, most notably the list of 19 research entities who received a giant set of tattoo images obtained from prisoners in custody. This delay is particularly alarming as NIST is currently recruiting institutional participants for the next stage of its expanded research, scheduled to begin on Dec. 1.
What we’ve discovered so far about NIST’s approach to tattoo identification raises major concerns for privacy, free speech, the freedom to associate, and the rights of research subjects. We’ve also learned that similar tattoo recognition experiments are being conducted in Germany, a country that is usually sensitive to personal privacy.
The civil rights director of the Oregon state Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against his employer. It seems the department got a new computer program that lets them search social media, and to test it out, they looked for hash tags related to Black Lives Matter and activism against police violence, turning up a tweet by Erious Johnson, which led his colleagues to start compiling a report on him without his knowledge. Johnson’s lawsuit claims racial discrimination and a hostile work environment for engaging in protected activity.
Twenty-five years after she was first accused of the arson-murder of her uncle, 68-year-old Sonia Cacy on November 2 was finally exonerated by Texas’ highest criminal court, a move that clears the way for her to seek compensation from the state for her decades-long ordeal.
Cacy’s conviction for a crime that never happened is a prime example of the devastating consequences of allowing junk science into the courtroom, of the need for continuing education of forensic practitioners, and for the robust review of convictions that may have been tainted by outdated, or imagined, science.
In fact, arguably, it was Cacy’s case that set in motion a series of events that would eventually culminate in a unique partnership between the Innocence Project of Texas and the Texas state fire marshal, designed to review old arson-related criminal cases in order to ferret out convictions based on unsupportable fire science. “Sonia’s case is a lesson to the entire criminal justice system of how important it is to keep bad science out of court,” said Gary Udashen, president of the IPTX and Cacy’s longtime attorney.
A San Antonio police officer has been fired after an internal investigation determined he tried to give a homeless man a sandwich with feces inside it.
A man was shot and killed by an off-duty Chicago police officer Saturday afternoon in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood. The man was riding as part of a funeral procession, his family says, when what officials are calling a "road rage incident" escalated and he was shot and killed.
During a short press conference, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson described the chaotic scene near 111th and Troy that led to the fatal shooting around 3 p.m. Saturday.
Johnson said it began as a "road rage incident" between multiple people and a "fire department member." Then, Johnson said, an off-duty police officer who was in a barbershop across the street saw the fight and headed over, "announcing his office" as he got involved. That's when "the subject," identified by his family as 25-year-old Joshua Beal, "displayed a weapon," according to Johnson.
A court in northern Nigeria has freed five Muslim men accused of killing an elderly Christian woman for allegedly blaspheming the Prophet Mohammed.
The court in the city of Kano discharged the five men on Thursday on the legal advise of the prosecution.
"The legal advice presented to the court, dated June 24, states that there is no case to answer as the suspects are all innocent and orders the court to discharge all the suspects," the judge said in his ruling.
In fresh attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, unidentified miscreants set ablaze some of their houses and damaged two temples in central Brahmanbarhia district where several places of worship of the minority community were vandalised earlier this week, police said.
Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, in an interview with Deutschlandfunk Monday, compared the Turkish government’s dismissal of civil servants to methods used by the German Nazi regime, and recommended that the European Union impose economic sanctions.
Since the failed July 15 coup that killed more than 240 people, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoßan has detained, suspended or dismissed more than 110,000 public servants as part of a wider crackdown on his political opponents.
Last week, we noted how Disney and ESPN threw a bit of a hissy fit when Nielsen data indicated that ESPN had one of the biggest subscriber losses in company history last month. According to Nielsen's data, ESPN lost 621,000 homes in a single month, as well as losing 607,000 ESPN2 households and 674,000 ESPNU homes. That's of course on the heels of losing more than 7 million subscribers over the last three years or so, thanks largely due to the rise of cord cutting, cord trimming (scaling down your TV package) and the rise of some "skinny bundles" that exclude ESPN from the base channel lineup.
ESPN demanded that Nielsen withdraw its numbers, insisting they represented a "dramatic, unexplainable variation" that didn't match ESPN's own numbers. Nielsen obliged, but after conducting an "extensive" review of the numbers found them to be "accurate as originally released." Of course, this shouldn't be a surprise; we've noted how everybody but ESPN appears to have seen the writing on the wall. But instead of adapting to the changing times, ESPN responded by denying that cord cutting was real, and suing companies like Verizon for trying to bring some flexibility to the traditional cable bundle.
The hot-button issues this election can be counted on one's fingers—and for most voters, things like copyright and patent policy don't make the list. Assigned to a wonkish zone far from the Sunday morning talk shows, intellectual property issues aren't near the heart of our deeply polarized political discourse.
Of the two major party candidates in 2016, only the Democratic candidate has a platform that even addresses copyright and patent policies. So today, let's look at what we know about Hillary Clinton's plan, and make some informed speculation about what could happen to these areas under a Donald Trump presidency.
Given that the campaign is focused (as always) on a relatively small group of issues, tech policy watchers who spoke to Ars were surprised to see a presidential platform that mentions IP issues at all. Clinton's briefing paper on technology and innovation addresses both copyright and patent issues directly, and that in itself is something of a surprise. Trump's website has no such information, so the best clues to his approach lie in his public statements and the people he has surrounded himself with.
That said, the copyright industries are not alone in their financial support for Hillary, who has raised more than twice as much money than Trump. Clinton is the favorite in most sectors.
Producers of movies and TV shows in Russia say they want companies including Google, Yandex and Microsoft to wipe piracy from their search engines. The rightsholders want the companies to remove links to pirate sites from their search listings on demand, or face being held liable for third party infringement.