Long story short, this is a fine laptop—and its hardware makes it a far better choice than the Dell XPS 13 for video encoding, compiling code, or other heavy computing tasks. But the OS it comes with is not optimized for the hardware. Hell, it’s not a stretch to say that the OS keeps this PC from being the workstation it's supposed to be. If anything, this PC is a case study in why PC makers who want to ship desktop Linux should pay attention to what they are doing before they push a product to market. The whole idea of buying a Linux laptop is to avoid these types of troubles, after all. In that respect, the Precision 5520 feels like a step back from the great platform we saw in the 2016 XPS 13.
The Pinebook is a cheap, low-power laptop with an ARM-based processor. First unveiled in November, the Pinebook comes from the makers of the Pine A64 single-board computer and it uses the same processor as that tiny desktop.
Now the company is getting ready to begin shipping laptops to customers.
Nginx, the fastest growing web server, has reached 33.3% market share. Seven years ago, it only had 3.9%. On average, every minute one of the top 10 million websites starts to use Nginx. [...] In the same time frame since 2010, Apache's market share fell from 71.5% to just below 50%, and Microsoft-IIS fell from 20.6% to 11.3%.
Among the 704 million sites that are powered by Microsoft web server software, Windows Server 2008 is still the most commonly used platform. The original version of this operating system shipped with Microsoft IIS 7.0 as its web server [...]
It's difficult to achieve critical mass for an open source project—even the largest enterprise IT vendors have challenges. It requires product management skills when there's no actual product. In addition to traditional product management expertise, open source projects must have an active community.
I'm a firm believer that enterprise IT shops will soon find themselves in a position where open source becomes a necessity for delivering IT infrastructure. Highly publicized companies like Capital One, Comcast, and Walmart are all increasingly embracing open source.
Mediatek developers have been working to mainline their MT2701 SoC support in the Linux kernel the past number of months and with Linux 4.12 will come support to their DRM/KMS driver.
Last week when posting an eight-way BSD/Linux OS comparison there were a few premium members who requested seeing Solus results side-by-side. For those interested, here are some fresh benchmarks of this promising Linux distribution.
Astronomy is the branch of science that deals with the study of celestial objects such as stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, meteor showers, nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies. Astronomers observe the objects in the night sky to establish their composition and learn more about the origin and structure of the universe.
Astronomy is a very popular natural science. It’s not only for professional astronomers. The Hubble telescope has been providing superb images since 1990, inspiring more people around the world to take up astronomy as a hobby. There are so many fascinating pursuits to explore. For example, the search for the 9th planet in our solar system, and monitoring Asteroid 2014 JO25, due to fly by Earth on April 19 at a distance of about 1.1 million miles, are just a few current interests of mine.
Spotify Web Player for Linux has been discontinued, with the developer of the unofficial Spotify app citing changes to the music streaming service's backend.
Dark Horizons: Mechanized Corps [Steam], a mech combat game on Steam now has a Beta available with Linux support baked-in.
Work on Godot 3.0 as the next major update to this open-source, cross-platform 2D/3D game engine is advancing with an alpha now in sight.
Another month of work, another progress report. This month work was divided into completing the exporters, DLScript and the new particle system.
I wrote about The Signal From Tölva [Official Site] back in August of last year as it looks amazing. It has now been released on Windows and the developers are still fully open to getting it on Linux.
Inner Chains [Steam] is a rather dark FPS powered by Unreal Engine 4 and it does look incredible. The problem is, the release date has been set with no Linux release in sight.
Man O' War: Corsair - Warhammer Naval Battles [Steam, GOG, Humble Store] only added Linux support back on March after I poked the developer and now they have a final release date set.
One thing I totally forgot to write about is that in the next release of OpenMW, the open source game engine for Morrowind, will finally have the 'Distant terrain' feature.
Quern - Undying Thoughts, a first-person puzzler inspired by the likes of Myst and Riven has been released on GOG and they have a Linux build too. In the interest of full disclosure: My GOG contact sent over a key to take a look.
Serious Sam's Bogus Detour [Steam, Official Site] is another Serious Sam title, but this one is a top-down manic shooter for up to 12 players. It's not actually being created by Croteam, but rather Crackshell, who developed Hammerwatch.
Classic first-person shooters are without question my favourite video game genre. Having grown up on games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D and then later falling in love with Blood, I often still find myself drawn to my collection of classic FPS titles, either to replay old favourites or to try for the first time one of the few stragglers that have somehow managed to escape my notice. It is a deep well of FPS games I have, but it is by no means limitless, and it is here that I encounter a problem.
Today the Kubuntu team is happy to announce that Kubuntu Zesty Zapus (17.04) RC is released . With this release candidate, you can see and test what we are preparing for 17.04, which we will be releasing April 13, 2017.
KDE Frameworks are 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.
KDE Frameworks 5.33 was released this weekend as the latest monthly installment to this large set of KDE libraries to complement Qt.
KDE Frameworks 5.33 brings Baloo support for searching in symlinked directories, a KAuth back-end for macOS, updates to KIO, Plasma Framework changes, and a variety of other updates to these add-on libraries.
The Qt Company, through Tuukka Turunen, was pleased to announce the availability of the Beta release of the upcoming Qt 5.9 open-source and cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit.
Qt 5.9 entered developed in February this year, when it received an Alpha build, which represented an early stage of evolutionary development, but the Beta is here to give Qt application developers an early taste of what's coming to the final Qt 5.9 release, which should hit the streets at the end of May.
With last week's surprise decision by Mark Shuttleworth to abandon Unity 8 efforts and switch back to the GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, while some applauded the decision, others begged the question why not switch to KDE or "Ubuntu should default to [your favorite DE]."
KDE contributor Alessandro Longo has pleaded the case that Ubuntu should have decided on the KDE desktop rather GNOME. In making his argument, he wrote a blog post with "10 reasons why Ubuntu should use KDE Plasma instead of GNOME."
Following news that Ubuntu is to switch to GNOME as its default desktop in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, some users have been keep to get a head start and switch over a little sooner. Bad Voltage podcaster Stuart Langridge is among them, and has written a blog post titled ‘Making GNOME Shell feel like Unity’.
NetworkManager 1.6 was delivered in early 2017, and is doing pretty well. It has found its way to many Linux distributions, including the upcoming Debian 9 “Stretch” release. There are good chances you’re already running it. Nevertheless, we still owe you an overview of what’s new.
We picked up some more of the comments made by Mark Shuttleworth recently on Google+, where the Canonical and Ubuntu founder answered various questions posted by members of the Ubuntu community.
This comes as a follow-up article on yesterday's report that Ubuntu GNOME is becoming the default flavor of the popular Linux-based operating system, and that the Unity 7 user interface will be available for installation from the official repositories after the launch of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS next year in April.
GNOME developer Carlos Soriano, known for his contributions to the Nautilus file manager and GNOME Shell user interface, reports on the latest progress made to simplify the contribution process to the GNOME Project.
GNOME Project is the Red Hat sponsored organization behind the well-known GNOME desktop environment, which will is used by default on numerous Linux-based operating systems, including Debian, openSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and even Ubuntu.
Looking for a light-weight, but capable operating system? It doesn’t get much lighter than Tiny Core Linux.
The disc image for the most basic version of this operating system is just 16MB, and it boots on most computers in a matter of seconds. But once it’s up and running, you can install all sorts of desktop applications including the Firefox web browser, GIMP image editor, of LibreOffice suite of office applications.
Slackel 7.0 Live Openbox beta1 has been released. Slackel is based on Slackware and Salix.
Includes the Linux kernel 4.4.38 and latest updates from Slackware's 'Current' tree.
The 64-bit iso image support booting on UEFI systems. The 32-bit iso image support both i686 PAE SMP and i486, non-PAE capable systems. Iso images are isohybrid Iso images can be used as installation media.
Today we are releasing the latest incremental release of Black Lab Linux 8. Black Lab Linux 8.2 has had major work done in terms of stability. We have over 270 bug fixes in this release. With this release we ship in 4 desktops, Unity, XFCE, Mate and LXDE. As an incremental release, 8.2 is available for free download immediately.
Black Lab Software, through Roberto Dohnert, informs Softpedia today about the release and immediate availability for download of the second maintenance update to the Black Lab Linux 8 operating system series.
Black Lab Linux 8.2 comes almost two months after the launch of the first point release, and while it still uses the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel from the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, it fixes over 270 bugs discovered during this time.
OpenELEC 8.0 (internal version 8.0.0) release has been published. Users running older OpenELEC releases or with auto-update disabled will need to manually update. If you would like to update from an older OpenELEC release please read update instructions/advice on the Wiki before updating. Manual update files can be obtained from the downloads page.
OpenELEC 8.0 was released this weekend as the newest version of this mediacenter / multimedia focused Linux distribution.
OpenELEC 8.0 pulls in the Linux 4.9 kernel, Mesa 17.0, and a wealth of other packages. OpenELEC 8.0 is paired with Kodi 17.1 for serving your multimedia needs.
Ask a Red Hat salesperson what is her favorite product to sell, and she’ll probably tell you OpenShift. Close on its heels, however, is Ansible, the open source automation platform Red Hat acquired in late 2015. Ansible has been on a tear of late, quickly rising to become the hottest devops tool in the market.
Netflix should finally support their HTML5 player in Firefox 52 on Linux. This version has already landed in Fedora and been there for a couple of weeks and we’ve already received complaints from users who are confused. Both Netflix and Mozilla claim it should work, but it doesn’t for them.
The Fedora Diversity FAD (a.k.a. Fedora Activity Day, or a sprint) took place during the weekend of DevConf, 27-29 January. The original planning for this FAD started in August 2016, after the Flock 2016 conference. At Flock, the Diversity Team held a panel with open discussion about diversity and inclusion efforts in Fedora. Based on the feedback received during and after the panel, it was a priority for us to continue working on the objectives we had established before Flock. For the FAD, a majority of the Fedora Diversity Team was present along with a few others.
Fedora users are spoilt for choice when it comes to terminal emulators. From the default gnome-terminal, to xterm, konsole, terminator, or tilda, there is certain to be a terminal emulator that suits your workflow. However, in Fedora 26, there is a new choice available to Fedora users: Tilix (previously named Terminix).
Tilix is a tiling terminal emulator that closely adheres to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). This new terminal on the block feels and behaves very much like the majority of the new GNOME applications available — think GNOME Builder, but dedicated just to your terminal. It also features a great range of features, including tile-able panes, the ability to set different profiles for each pane, and the ability to save the tabbed layouts. CHeck out the Features Page on the Tilix website for more info on all the features of this terminal emulator.
So what is Bitcamp? Bitcamp is an MLH sponsored Hackathon. A Hackathon is more or less as one of this year’s attendees’ tweeted: “Bitcamp is like woodstock for nerds!!”.
I am also a member of translation group of Fedora (ex-L10n now G11n).
From April 11 to 17 we'll have a vFAD (virtual Fedora Activity Day) to translate Fedora 26. You can read here in MailingList and here in wiki's page for more information.
The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the third release candidate of the installer for Debian 9 "Stretch".
Debian Installer Stretch RC3 has many fixes, a slight upgrade to its Linux 4.9 kernel, expanded speech synthesis support, support for new ARM devices/boards, a fix for resizing an NVMe device, and much more.
The Debian Installer team, through Cyril Brulebois, is pleased to announce today, April 10, 2017, the immediate availability of the third Release Candidate of the installer for upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system.
Canonical, the company backing the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has fine-tuned the kernel for better performance on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud, reportedly providing 30 percent faster bootups in a smaller package.
The London-based company said it has been working with AWS -- which has provided Ubuntu for years among its many Linux distros -- to improve "the world's most popular cloud OS, on the world's most popular public cloud."
Hey, Ubuntu users: If you haven’t heard yet, Canonical killed off any hopes of releasing Unity 8 with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS next year. Instead, Ubuntu will release 18.04 with the GNOME desktop. While some die-hard Ubuntu fans may have a case of inconsolable angst, this is actually not as bad of a thing as it may seem.
After announcing that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will ship with GNOME as the default desktop environment, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has shared some details regarding Ubuntu’s future. In a Google+ post, he made clear that Canonical will be investing in Ubuntu GNOME with a motive to deliver an all-GNOME experience. One should also note that despite the demise of Unity 8, Snaps and Ubuntu Core are here to stay.
Taking a step back from the whole thing about Canonical no longer developing the Unity 8 user interface and switching Ubuntu to the GNOME desktop environment next year with the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it's time to take a look at what's coming to Ubuntu 17.04.
In only two days from the moment of writing this article, on April 13, 2017, Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) will become the 26th release of the popular Linux-based operating system, which Canonical will support with security and software updates for only nine months, until January 2018.
Ubuntu 17.04 has been in development for the past six months, and it's currently in its Final Freeze period, during which all Ubuntu developers are preparing for the final release of the operating system, making sure they have yet another uneventful launch on Thursday afternoon.
This list is by no means exhaustive. If you’ve spotted a tweet, blog post or other rant from someone who should be on this list, let me know via the Tip Form and I’ll add it in.
So, for a company as intrinsic to the Ubuntu community as purple wallpapers, Alan Pope and unmaintained wiki pages, last week’s Unity-shaped bombshell must’ve landed like a lead balloon at their HQ in Denver, Colorado, USA.
And yup; it did. Mark Shuttleworth’s announcement that Unity is being discontinued left them feeling ‘shocked and surprised’.
Following on the shocking news that Canonical stopped the development of the Unity 8 user interface, along with its Ubuntu Phone, Ubuntu Tablet, and Ubuntu Convergence visions, UBports Marius GripsgÃÂ¥rd prepared a Q&A on YouTube.
We already told you last week that the UBports founder made the very bold decision of taking over the development of Unity 8 to provide better support for various of the devices on which users can install the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.
We’ve been fond of Linux Mint for its ability to present a friendly interface to the average end user, while having a stable foundation of Debian and Ubuntu underneath. In this review, we looked at LinuxMint 18.1, dubbed Serena. We found a solid operating system that can run into problems in edge case scenarios.
Mint offers a number of user interface options, keeping each variant in sync with a release.
Part of Linux Mint’s appeal is as an alternative to Canonical’s Ubuntu, which features the unpopular Unity interface. Last week, Canonical announced it was killing Unity and returning to Gnome, which Mint offers as well, which should make things interesting going forward.
The $12, open source “Hornbill” dev board runs FreeRTOS on an ESP32 wireless module, and is available in several Hornbill kits.
A Bangalore, India based startup has successfully funded its ESP32-based, IoT-oriented “Hornbill” boards and dev kits on Crowd Supply. The Hornbill boards are built around Espressif’s open source ESP-WROOM32 reference module, which is based on its similarly open source ESP32 system-on-chip. This follow-on to Espressif’s hugely popular ESP8266 SoC incorporates a faster, dual-core Tensilica LX6 MCU and adds BLE and sensors in addition to the previous WiFi. The same ESP-WROOM32 module has been used by other development kits such as Olimex’s ESP32-CoreBoard.
WileyFox is rowing its users away from the wreckage of the Cyanogen disaster, with some help from Ricardo Cerqueira, Cyanogen Inc’s former director of engineering.
Britain’s only mass market phone maker is engaged in a mortal battle with HMD’s Nokia brand at the low end of the market. Today, the former released an update to Nougat 7.1.1 that further disentangles its users from Cyanogen OS.
ZTE isn't quite known for its wearables because it hasn't really offered any — at least, not any running Android Wear. The company is hoping to turn that around now that smartwatches and wearables have become a veritable thing in the mobile industry, and as companies of all sorts are investing in their own devices in this space, ZTE has committed to trying its hand.
Android Wear 2.0's release has been delayed multiple times, and aside from a few watches that have just hit the market, there aren't many affordable ways to get Google's latest wearable OS right now. The good news is, a new option arrives in about two weeks via ZTE, which is making its first-ever Android Wear watch. It's called the Quartz, and it will be available on April 21 via T-Mobile for just $200. You can also get it online starting April 14th.
Looking for a new smartphone? There are dozens upon dozens of great options on the market today, but finding the best of the best can be a bit difficult. We’ve seen some great launches through the year and more should be coming soon too, so let’s take a look at the best Android smartphones you can buy as of April 2017.
I’ve been an iPhone user since 2011. Back then, it was never really a question whether I’d choose iOS or Android as a smartphone platform. My friends had iPhones, my coworkers had iPhones—anyone who was anyone, really, had an iPhone.
But that was more than half a decade ago. Nowadays, Android is really on equal footing with iOS (and in fact, the two borrow, steal, and share “new” features so often you’d think they were teenage sisters sharing the same wardrobe). And after so many years on iOS, I felt the time was right to give Android a try full time. As a gadget writer and reviewer, I’ve sampled dozens of iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices over the years, but I’d never truly given a non-iOS device a long-term trial. Until now.
My first smartphone was an iPhone 4, purchased shortly after its debut in 2011. Since then, I’ve used and reviewed dozens of smartphones, both Android and iOS (and Windows Phone, too). While I dabbled for days or weeks at a time on a new phone, though, I never fully committed to a non-iOS operating system long term until recently. Since December, I’ve been using a Huawei Nexus 6P as my main device, running the latest version of Android (currently Android 7.1.2, Nougat).
Some of today’s most dynamic and innovative free and open source software (FOSS) projects boast significant investment and involvement by well-known cloud service and solution providers. We are launching a survey to better understand the perception of these solution providers by people engaging in open source communities.
In both enterprise and tech, FOSS adoption and deployment rates today reach 78%, with 65% of companies also contributing to FOSS projects, according to The Future of Open Source survey (2016 and 2015). Leading edge, innovative organizations make even greater investments in open source, fielding software stacks comprised of over 90% FOSS (Gartner.)
Open source luminary Eric S. Raymond has given the world eight “Hacker Archetypes” that he thinks offer useful ways to categorise your colleagues and by doing so help them to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
Raymond says he thinks that's a worthwhile exercise because a friend of his says categorising people helps her to work with young martial artists.
Just how martial arts and IT cross over is anyone's guess, but let's get into the categories anyway.
For fans of BeOS-inspired Haiku OS, the operating system now has Mesa 17.0 and LLVM 4.0 for the latest graphics driver and compiler support.
A new, unofficial project at Google is XRTL, creating a cross-platform real-time rendering library, with support for Vulkan and other graphics APIs.
Kubernetes is distinguished from similar container orchestration systems, such as Apache Mesos and Google Swarm, by its Google heritage. Kubernetes was inspired by Borg, the very advanced internal datacenter management system used by Google for a decade. Nearly all of Google's services run in containers, both internal and external services such as Gmail, Google search, Google Maps, MapReduce, Google File System, and Google Compute Engine. Think of Borg as the giant brain that manages Google's datacenters as a single pool of resources to fuel Google's giant fleet of services, and manages them so efficiently it saves Google the cost of an entire datacenter.
The Battery Open-Source Software (BOSS) Index -- believed to be the first of its kind in the open-source community -- highlights the increasing reliance on freely available, open-source technology by big and small enterprises alike, and also the challenges in building commercially viable companies on top of these projects.
It’s not often that one of the world’s leading software companies decides to develop a major new operating system. Yet in February 2016, Google began publishing code for a mysterious new platform, known as Fuchsia.
Google has officially said very little about Fuchsia, and the company did not respond to my request for comment. But since it’s being developed as an open source project, its source code is entirely in the open for anyone to view. Indeed, anyone can download Fuchsia right now and try to run it.
Last September we wrote about RoundCube-Next being woefully behind schedule even after they raised more than one hundred thousand dollars for this massive overhaul to the RoundCube webmail software. Sadly, not much has changed since and the project has yet to see any Git commits in 2017.
A Phoronix reader -- and backer to RoundCube's IndieGoGo campaign that raised $103,541 of their $80k USD goal from 871 backers -- pointed out that the project remains at a stand-still. The GitHub repositories haven't seen any activity in months. The RoundCube Server hasn't been touched since last November, the mail application and client side code since October, etc.
My life is filled with conundrums.
One of those conundrums is the fact that I spend a huge amount of my time promoting and advocating free and open-source software. Yet in order to reach a large audience with that advocacy, I end up needing to use social networks (such as Twitter and Google Plus) which are—not free software.
If I'm going to be speaking at a conference about GNU, Linux and other free software-y topics, I announce it on Twitter. And, perhaps rightly so, my freedom-loving friends toss a little (usually good-natured) mockery my way for doing so.
America is seeing a retail meltdown, with even stalwart brands like Macy's and Sears in bad shape. Target is looking to open source as a means of weathering the collapse.
Amazon and other online shopping options are, of course, part of retail's difficulties. But there's more to it than that. While overall retail spending is growing steadily but slowly, retailers are hurt by the rise of e-commerce, oversupply of malls and a shift in discretionary spending away from buying and toward acquiring new experiences.
Golden Code Development Corporation today announced it has released its FWD technology as open source software. FWD is an alternative to Progress OpenEdge, featuring a range of unique enhancements that add new capabilities to ABL applications. Powerful code analytics, automated transformation tooling and a Java-based runtime enable organizations to modernize their applications and deploy them in the web in a fraction of the time of existing approaches.
My friend and colleague Stormy Peters just launched a challenge to the community – to blog on a specific community related topic before the end of the week. This week, the topic is “Encouraging new contributors”.
I have written about the topic of encouraging new contributors in the past, as have many others. So this week, I am kind of cheating, and collecting some of the “Greatest Hits”, articles I have written, or which others have written, which struck a chord on this topic.
Ultimately, systemd's spread is symbolic of something more than systemd itself. It shows a radical shift in thinking by the Linux community. Not necessarily a positive one, either.
More screenshots of Firefox’s Photon redesign have surfaced online. The new screenshots continue to reveal more details about the upcoming redesign, including the purpose of the library button, the behaviour of side panels, and the new-look main menu.
It was only a handful of years ago that the only time the topic of containers came up were at obscure open source conferences or, more usually, when someone was looking for a place to put the bulk load of gourmet kale they’d just opened for their on-site employer-supplied kitchen. Containers were plastic things with lids and, while handy, didn’t generate much excitement.
At Mozilla we were born out of, and remain a part of, the open source and free software movement. Through the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program, we recognize, celebrate, and support open source projects that contribute to our work and to the health of the Internet.
A casual search for similar projects in the UK will turn up the British governments ‘progressive’ approach for adopting OpenOffice… not quite the open API ecosystem that they are envisaging in Italy. That being said, the work carried out at Gov.UK and technology at GDS is arguably just as progressive.
Unesco, the UN’s education, science and cultural organisation, is throwing its weight behind the Software Heritage project. Unesco will help the project become more widely-known, by (co)organising debates and conferences, and with other promotion activities.
The Software Heritage project started in 2016 by Inria - France's national computer science institute. The institute is a public organisation which promotes the collaboration of scientists on computing sciences and mathematics.
Sharing and reuse of IT solutions is one of the key instruments to achieve the Digital Single Market, and for interoperable eGovernment services, said Gertrud Ingestad, Director-General of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT). "Sharing and reuse should become the default approach in the public sector," she said in her opening address at the Sharing and Reuse Conference in Lisbon on 29 March.
Marc Frouin and Eduardo Renard from Niryo want to make sure everyone can learn robotics and programming, and enjoy the benefits or robotics in their lives. Their robot Niryo One was built to push the idea that functional robots can be low-cost and user-friendly. Niryo One is currently running a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund their first run of production components.
The Kotlin programming language continues to be developed by JetBrains and while it originated as a new language built atop the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), there is now experimental support for native compilation.
With the tech preview offered last week, the Kotlin/Native initiative allows compiling Kotlin directly to machine code, thereby not relying upon any virtual machine. This Apache2-licensed compiler is based atop LLVM for code generation.
About a week ago there where 2 articles on LWN, the first coverging memory management patch review and the second covering the trouble with making review happen. The take away from these two articles seems to be that review is hard, there’s a constant lack of capable and willing reviewers, and this has been the state of review since forever. I’d like to counter pose this with our experiences in the graphics subsystem, where we’ve rolled out a well-working review process for the Intel driver, core subsystem and now the co-maintained small driver efforts with success, and not all that much pain.
The D language, long an underdog among programmers, got a significant boost this past week when its developers received permission to relicense its reference compiler as an open source project.
DMD, the reference compiler for D, has been encumbered by legacy licensing, courtesy of Symantec. The license made it problematic to distribute the compiler in conjunction with other open source software -- for instance, in a Linux distribution -- and often sparked confusion about what it permitted.
Because software solutions rarely operate in a vacuum, integration is a necessary fact of life for many developers. Sometimes it’s easy. Anyone who has integrated an application into Slack, for example, will have been treated to an incredibly smooth experience. In many cases it’s as simple as filling in a form (a URL or two, an authentication key) and hitting the Submit button. That’s plain awesome.
We are at the beginning of what is arguably the greatest business metamorphosis in a generation. As more organizations become essentially software companies, they need developers to write the cloud apps that will enable them to thrive as they evolve.
As a developer, you’re at the forefront of this transformation, determining how to integrate cloud-based applications and infrastructure into your business. You are changing the way companies interact and engage with your users, their community, and their customers. You are the fundamental shift in how organizations are building out a new way of business.
The new production release of Mender 1.0, an open-source tool for updating embedded devices safely and reliably, is now available. Mender's developers describe the tool as the "only open-source over-the-air (OTA) software updater for embedded Linux devices that integrates both an updater client and deployment management server", both of which are licensed under Apache 2.0.
The Portable Computing Language (POCL) has issued a new release of their open-source CPU-based OpenCL implementation.
This new version of POCL continues relying upon LLVM and with this release adds support for LLVM/Clang 4.0 and 3.9.
This poor guy did nothing wrong but book a flight on United. He shouldn’t have been assaulted and kidnapped because of that.
I think everyone should check their itineraries to make sure United flies only their dead-heading employees until they go bankrupt.
I was recently involved in investigating a problem that turns out to be a complete SNAFU which nicely illustrates the chaos that is the PC platform. It’s about the NX/XD bit. Let’s start with a bit of history.
One of the few themes that comes up time and time again when we talk about security is how bad people tend to be at understanding what's actually going on. This isn't really anyone's fault, we're expecting people to go against what is essentially millions of years of evolution that created our behaviors. Most security problems revolve around the human being the weak link and doing something that is completely expected and completely wrong.
This brings us to a news story I ran across that reminded me of how bad humans can be at dealing with actual risk. It seems that peanut free schools don't work. I think most people would expect a school that bans peanuts to have fewer peanut related incidents than a school that doesn't. This seems like a no brainer, but if there's anything I've learned from doing security work for as long as I have, the obvious answer is always wrong.
In its 2017 malware forecast, SophosLabs warned that attackers would increasingly target devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) – everything from webcams to internet-connecting household appliances. Late last week, we saw another example of how the trend is playing out.
Uninitialised variables are a critical attack vector that can be reliably exploited by hackers to launch privilege escalation attacks in the Linux kernel, according to research at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Input-based attacks like Buffer Overflows, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and XXE are common in today’s software. And they do not go away. But why is that? Shouldn’t one assume that existing frameworks handle input correctly, and free developers from struggling with correctly implementing input handling over and over again? Sadly, the answer is no.
So we've talked repeatedly how the shoddy security in most "internet of things" devices has resulted in increasingly-vulnerable home networks, as consumers rush to connect not-so-smart fridges, TVs and tea kettles to the home network. But this failure extends well beyond the home, since these devices have also resulted in historically-large DDoS attacks as this hardware is compromised and integrated into existing botnets (often in just a matter of minutes after being connected to the internet).
Whether it's the ease in which a decidedly-clumsy ransomware attacker was able to shut down San Francisco's mass transit system, or the fact that many city-connected devices like speed cameras often feature paper mache security, you can start to see why some security experts are worried that there's a dumpster fire brewing that will, sooner rather than later, result in core infrastructure being compromised and, potentially, mass fatalities. If you ask security experts like Bruce Schneier, this isn't a matter of if -- it's a matter of when.
McAfee revealed some details of the attack just before the weekend
Namely, NIDS such as Bro, Moloch, Snort, and Suricata were found to be ineffective against the researchers’ proofs of concept.
The stakes are especially high for the financial industry, where an estimated $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through COBOL systems. The language underpins deposit accounts, check-clearing services, card networks, ATMs, mortgage servicing, loan ledgers and other services.
While a recently released copy of John Tower’s FBI file dealt mostly with the background check performed by the FBI, it also includes several important revelations concerning the Senator. While most reviews of his nomination process and the scrutiny that he received focused on allegations of heavy drinking and womanizing …
In 1951, the federal government began paying increased attention to emergency planning, both for natural disasters, warfare or even invasion of the United States. This included a plan to provide for short-term emergency funds for critical agencies like the CIA. The proposal was initially tabled until the Agency Emergency Plan was ready.
Four months after an Islamic State suicide bomber killed 28 Christian worshipers in Cairo, the group struck Egypt’s Christians again—this time with a double church bombing on Palm Sunday that left at least 44 dead and scores injured. The attacks, only hours apart, targeted a church in the Delta city of Tanta as well as a church in Alexandria where Coptic Pope Tawadros II was leading a service. It was the single deadliest day of violence directed against the Middle East’s largest Christian community in decades.
When the ISIS claim of responsibility came within hours of the attacks, it wasn’t a surprise. For months, the Islamic State has been accelerating the import of Iraq-style sectarian tactics to Egypt. In doing so, the group hopes to destabilize the Middle East’s most populous country and expand the reach of its by now clearly genocidal project for the region’s minorities.
Experts fear the proximity of the two events will give damaged coral little chance to recover.
As the temperature rises, vast areas of permafrost begin to thaw, allowing dead vegetation and the bodies of countless millions of animals to decompose.
The associated release of greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide adds to global warming, causing more permafrost to melt in a vicious upward spiral.
By adopting an in-app payment model, Microsoft is moving into a territory well-trodden by so-called freemium mobile apps.
To make all of this happen, we're introducing Minecraft Coins, which players can buy using in-app purchases with real currency on their device
London is ancient yet new. It is as much city-state as city, with a culture and economy that circulate the world. London manages to be Los Angeles, Washington and New York wrapped into one. Imagine if one American city were home to Hollywood, the White House, Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Broadway. London is sort of that.
As President Trump’s presidency nears its first 100 days, Trump and his campaign are facing multiple investigations over whether the campaign colluded with Russian officials to influence the 2016 presidential election. In a Democracy Now! exclusive, we speak with a man who has been at the center of much discussion of Russian election meddling: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Just before the Democratic National Convention last July, WikiLeaks published 20,000 internal emails from the Democratic National Committee. Then, between October 7 and Election Day, WikiLeaks would go on to publish 20,000 of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, generating a rash of negative stories about the Clinton campaign. Intelligence agencies have pinned the email hacking on Russians. WikiLeaks maintains Russia was not the source of the documents.
French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron on Monday described rival Marine Le Pen as “the true face of the extreme right” for playing down France’s role in rounding up Jews for deportation during World War II, Le Figaro reported.
In response to Le Pen’s comments on Sunday, when she said France was “not responsible” for rounding up 13,000 Jews at a Paris stadium, Macron said: “Marine Le Pen is truly the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen,” the former leader of the National Front who used anti-Semitic rhetoric.
He added: “It’s this face [of the extreme right] that I am fighting.”
As U.S. Tomahawk missiles soared over the Mediterranean toward Syria’s al-Shayrat airbase, speculation was already flying about how the attack would affect the thaw in U.S.-Russia relations anticipated since Donald Trump took office. Was this a first sign that America’s new president was willing to stand up to Putin?
Arguably the more critical factor in the equation is Russia. To understand the Kremlin’s response to the U.S. strike, and to the preceding chemical attack in Syria, it’s important to face some brutal truth about Russia in Syria.
The U.S. warned Russian forces about the coming strike because we knew they were there. We knew Russians were at Shayrat airbase since at least November 2015. This is why Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that this strike was “on the brink of combat clashes with Russia”: We were bombing a base from which he knew Russian forces guided operations.
In 1981, the CIA took exception with newspapers reporting that Frank Sturgis was a former CIA employee. Herbet Hetu, the Agency’s then-Director of Public Affairs, had such a problem with the reporting that he wrote to the editors of several newspapers to try to issue a correction. The first letter, dated January 6, 1981, was sent to the editor of The Washington Star objecting to an article that had been published that day.
Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute testified at a Senate Intelligence Committee last week, giving his insight into Russia's propaganda machine. Like everyone else in Washington, the Senate is trying to determine how much of a role the Russian government might have played in the recent election. An FBI investigation into Trump's ties with Russia is ongoing.
Watts noted Russia's attempts to influence American thinking isn't really new, nor is it solely tied to Trump's unlikely political success. He points out he began seeing major inroads being made almost three years ago. Here at Techdirt, we noticed the stateside spread of the Russian troll army, confronted directly here by Karl Bode in response to a stream of pro-Russia comments on one of his articles.
Also of concern to many (although in varying degrees) is "fake news." Much of what's considered fake news tends to be in the often-partisan eye of the beholder, but a growing network of conspiracy theory sites and news outlets with Russian government ties aren't helping. Watts states this is simply more the same Cold War tactics by the Russian government, but with the advantage the internet's built-in instant amplification power.
Germany has formally announced its draconian push towards censorship of social media. On March 14, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced the plan to formalize into law the “code of conduct”, which Germany pressed upon Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in late 2015, and which included a pledge to delete “hate speech” from their websites within 24 hours.
Online video platforms (most notably YouTube and Facebook) have surpassed television in audience count, making these media extremely important in terms of how they represent society. They constitute a place of public expression, run by private companies, which permit many persons, cultures, subcultures, and social groups to exist, to communicate among themselves, and to be seen. Certainly there are initiatives and free alternatives, but none of them can hope to reach the level of presence of these platforms.
LiveJournal claimed it was immune from copyright liability because it removed the photos. Mavrix claimed that the site's use of voluntary moderators removed the safe-harbor provision. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Mavrix to a degree, but the court wants to know how much influence the moderators had on what was and was not published. With that, the court sent the case back to a lower court in Los Angeles to figure that out, perhaps in a trial.
Late last week an important, but disappointing, ruling came down from the 9th Circuit appeals court. The ruling in the case of Mavrix Photographs v. LiveJournal found that volunteer moderators could be deemed agents of a platform, and thus it's possible that red flag knowledge of infringement by one of those volunteer moderators could lead to a platform losing its safe harbors. There are a lot of caveats there, and the ruling itself covers a lot of ground, so it's important to dig in.
“More and more, sane people, rational liberal people, are standing up to them and just pointing out to where Sharia leads - look at the Islamic state. Look at what Boko Haram did...This is all happening in the name of Islam.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali said she believes Islamophobia is a “manufactured” term that inadvertently “carries water” for extremists.
“We can’t have that open discussion, we can’t stop the injustices, if we say everything is ‘Islamophobic’, and hide behind a politically-correct screen.”
‘This artwork will be removed from subsequent printings, digital versions, and trade paperbacks and disciplinary action is being taken.’
Because he is now a central figure in India's television business as CEO of Star India, it's easy to forget how alien Uday Shankar was to it on the day he took the job almost exactly a decade ago. The only jobs he had held till then was that of a journalist and editor.
Starting as a beat reporter with The Times of India in Patna, Shankar worked many jobs in journalism before rising to the top at the Rupert Murdoch-owned entertainment behemoth.
When you hear the words Russia and Internet, you probably think of Kremlin-backed hacking. But the Internet is also a powerful tool for President Vladimir Putin’s opposition. Last month, the Internet helped spark Russia’s largest anti-government protests in five years. Russia responded by blocking access to websites that promoted demonstrations.
This is part of a larger story. Just a few years ago, Russians had a mostly free Internet. Now, Russian authorities would like to imitate China’s model of Internet control. They are unlikely to succeed. The Kremlin will find that, once you give people Internet freedom, it’s not so easy to completely take it away.
Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas they don’t like. Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.
Just days after Montreal prosecutors cut loose 35 suspected Mafia members rather than disclose the details of Stingray device use by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the RCMP is admitting that, yes, it does use Stingrays.
It's not like it's not known the RCMP owns Stingrays. It has for nearly a decade now. It's just that it would rather not discuss it in court… or in public… or in public records responses.
The official revelation occurred in Ontario, and it didn't come as the result of a multitude of alleged criminals being released back into the general population. Instead, the (unwelcome) discussion of the RCMP's cell tower spoofers was prompted by a CBC investigation into "suspicious signals" and apparent cell phone tracking around the nation's capital.
The Internet Society has called for the full encryption of the internet, decrying the fact that securing the digital world has increasingly become associated with restricting access to law enforcement.
In a blog post aimed at the leaders of the G20 economies, ISOC CEO Kathryn Brown argues that the digital economy "will only continue to thrive and generate opportunities for citizens if the Internet is strong, secure, and trusted," adding: "Without this foundation, the global digital economy is at risk."
About 10 years after TVs began to be ubiquitous in American homes, television broadcasting was a staggering financial success. As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, the industry’s revenue, more than $1 billion a year, was rising 9 percent annually, even in a recession. The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: not by serving the public interest above all but by airing a lot of dumb shows and “cajoling and offending” commercials. “When television is bad, nothing is worse,” he said.
That speech would become known for the pejorative that the FCC chairman, Newton Minow, used to describe TV: he called it “a vast wasteland.” It’s a great line, but there are other reasons to revisit the speech now, about 10 years after the emergence of another communications service—Facebook—that has become ubiquitous in American homes, a staggering financial success, and a transmitter of a lot of pernicious schlock. What’s striking today is why Minow said the vast-wasteland problem mattered—and what he wanted to do about it.
Some 1 million papers show what the U.S. knew, or didn't know, about Israeli leaders' health, IDF maneuvers and Moshe Dayan's celebrity status
Spying tools and operational protocols detailed in the recent Vault 7 leak have been used in cyberattacks against at least 40 targets in 16 different countries by a group Symantec calls Longhorn. Symantec has been protecting its customers from Longhorn’s tools for the past three years and has continued to track the group in order to learn more about its tools, tactics, and procedures.
The tools used by Longhorn closely follow development timelines and technical specifications laid out in documents disclosed by WikiLeaks. The Longhorn group shares some of the same cryptographic protocols specified in the Vault 7 documents, in addition to following leaked guidelines on tactics to avoid detection. Given the close similarities between the tools and techniques, there can be little doubt that Longhorn's activities and the Vault 7 documents are the work of the same group.
Longhorn, as Symantec dubs the group, has infected governments and companies in the financial, telecommunications, energy, and aerospace industries since at least 2011 and possibly as early as 2007. The group has compromised 40 targets in at least 16 countries across the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa, and on one occasion, in the US, although that was probably a mistake.
British visitors to the US may be asked for social media usernames and passwords and their phone’s address book under new border checks being considered at US airports.
British travellers to the United States face the uncomfortable choice of handing over personal information, including social media passwords and mobile phone contacts, or running the risk of being denied entry to the country, under a new “extreme vetting” policy being considered by the Trump administration.
Such scams work either by cloning an account — stealing the information from someone's profile and then using it all to set up a new account that is actually controlled by someone else — or by hacking into and taking control of an old one.
Both techniques give scammers the ability to send messages, posing as someone's friend. Once that happens, a range of different hoaxes, cons and scams are possible.
The site's data tools allow anyone to head into the site and see everything it has collected — including locations, activity, personal data and everything you've ever said to anyone else.
One, reportedly a doctor, didn't want to go. So they summoned guards to the plane, knocked him unconscious, then dragged his comatose body off the flight in front of screaming passengers.
Of course, terrorists and religious fanatics are very real threats to a free and open society. But so are our politicians.
That's the bar that must be hit to lose immunity: to be so unreasonably forceful that the usual defensive ploys won't work. Deputy DeGiovanni decided he'd pick on some foreigners and now he's going to be paying Stephens for the injuries he caused and the career he ended (Stephens was an auto mechanic but lost his job after suffering the debilitating injuries). No one abuses their power this way unless they think there's a good chance they'll get away with it. DeGiovanni played the odds and lost.
Surprising nobody, FCC boss Ajit Pai has been privately meeting with large broadband providers, informing them he'll be taking an axe to net neutrality protections soon. What exactly this will look like isn't yet clear, especially given the massive support for the rules, and the fact that Pai can't just roll back net neutrality (and the FCC's Title II reclassification) without justifying it to the courts.
[...] despite the support, in much of the US, building out municipal networks just isn’t possible. More than 20 states have passed laws banning local governments from starting their own broadband service, largely at the behest of internet providers that want to avoid competition at all cost.
Modern tractors, essentially, have two keys to make the engine work. One key starts the engine. But because today's tractors are high-tech machines that can steer themselves by GPS, you also need a software key — to fix the programs that make a tractor run properly. And farmers don't get that key.
Portugal's parliament has approved a bill that will restrict how Digital Rights Management is applied to some creative works, including those in the public domain or funded by public entities. Even when DRM is present, citizens will be able to circumvent the protection for education and private copying purposes.
Sunday’s local government saw the installation of completely new faces to the Helsinki city council, as electors elevated candidates from the Feminist and Pirate parties to office. The Centre's evergreen ex-MP and minister Paavo Väyrynen also returned to municipal politics running on a Christian Democratic ticket.
The Pirate Party won its first two seats in the municipal elections held on Sunday, after coming up empty-handed in the first three elections organised after its foundation in 2008.
Arto Lampila won a seat on the Jyväskylä City Council with a tally of 147 votes and Petrus Pennanen a seat on the Helsinki City Council with a tally of 1,048 votes. Both Lampila and Pennanen are deputy chairpersons of the Pirate Party of Finland.
The law introduces new hurdles that only big internet companies can handle, making it much harder for new startups to raise funding and grow, experts and stakeholders warn
If left undisturbed, the Fourth Circuit’s decision enables the Government to obtain civil forfeiture of every penny of a foreign citizen’s foreign assets based on unproven allegations of the most novel, dubious United States crimes
Over the past few years we've covered what may seem like a side issue in the many legal issues facing Kim Dotcom, but it's an important one: is the US able to legally take all of his money and stuff, despite (1) him not being found guilty of anything and (2) that stuff not being anywhere near the US? As we've said, even if you think Dotcom is guilty of horrible crimes and should rot in jail, how the US is going about taking his assets should concern you massively. The fact that courts have blessed the DOJ's actions doesn't make it any less concerning.
On Friday, Dotcom (along with some powerhouse legal help) asked the Supreme Court to review this issue. The real issue here is one that we've covered a lot in other contexts: civil asset forfeiture, in which the US seizes and sues stuff rather than people. That's why this lawsuit is not actually against Kim Dotcom (there are other such lawsuits), but rather the United States v. All Assets Listed in Attachment A (no, really, that's the case). Of course, "Attachment A" is all of Dotcom's assets, mostly in Hong Kong. But the situation with Dotcom takes the normal questions about asset forfeiture and adds layer upon layer of complexity.