Linux has improved by leaps and bounds over the last decade, and more and more people have come to appreciate its power and flexibility. But a redditor recently wondered what it was like to run Linux ten years ago, and he got some very interesting responses from Linux veterans.
Late last year F2FS picked up multiple device support for this Flash-Friendly File-System. This F2FS multi-drive capability isn't native RAID support like Btrfs but just allows a single F2FS file-system to span multiple devices. But it's more than that in that block allocation and the garbage collection policy is modified to boost I/O performance by taking advantage of the multiple SSD/flash devices.
In a ground-breaking development, the Linus Foundation and 50 other companies announced the launch of an open-source Internet of Things (IoT) interoperability framework to standardise and simplify edge computing through the new open-source consortium EdgeX Foundry. IoT hasn’t enjoyed the predicted positive market growth due to lack of conformity and fragmented edge computing development resulting in non-compatibilities of applications and security reservations. Adapting IoT technology to business needs is fraught with difficulties and integration issues due to separate development and discordant systems. The evolution of edge computing, however, provides a standardised framework in which to integrate business applications of significant value-adds or standalone systems.
If you follow the developments of Linux world closely, you must be knowing about the Year 2038 bug. This problem exists because the latest time that can be represented in Unix’s signed 32-bit integer time format is 03:14:07 UTC on Jan. 19, 2038. After that, the C programs that use the standard time library will start to have problems with dates.
Last week I posted initial Radeon RX 580 Linux benchmarks and even AMDGPU overclocking results. That initial testing of this "Polaris Evolved" hardware was done with the fully-open Radeon driver stack that most Linux enthusiasts/gamers use these days. The AMDGPU-PRO driver wasn't tested for those initial articles as it seems to have a diminishing user-base and largely focused for workstation users. But for those wondering how AMDGPU-PRO runs with the Radeon RX 580, here are some comparison results to DRM-Next code for Linux 4.12 and Mesa 17.2-dev.
Luminance HDR is an open-source tool that lets you create and edit high-dynamic-range images (HDR) on Linux, Windows and macOS. The app recently got its first major update in several years and I figured it was something a few of you might wanna know about (and hey, we’ve featured a couple of other photography tools recently).
A new stable update of the open-source and cross-platform SMPlayer media player was announced recently, versioned 17.4.2, for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows.
SMPlayer 17.4.2 is now the latest stable release of the popular media player applications, and it looks like it ships with various exciting improvements and new features. One of these is support for using the ffhevcvdpau decoder from the MPlayer project, but only on Linux-based operating systems.
Gyazo is a screen capturing application with which you can quickly take quality shots of your screen and also create GIFs on the fly with a simple click.
It is as simple to use as another screen capture tool we wrote on earlier, Peek, but Gyazo seems to have an edge in terms of functionality, customizability, and extension; at least, for now.
It's been more than two months since the MPlayer-based MPV open-source video player received an update, and the development team is proud to announce the immediate availability for download of MPV 0.25.0.
MPV 0.25.0 is a major milestone and comes with significant changes, such as the fact that starting with this release, all future versions of the player will be tagged on the master branch. Also, this is the first release of MPV to drop support for Mac OS X 10.7 and earlier builds.
In case you’re not aware, Kodi is an awesome open source home theater software. The releases of TinkerOS have, to date, offered patchy performance for Kodi. There’s now a real alternative with Asus’s recent release of an Android image.
This walk-through explains how to install FTMC, a fork of Kodi, on the Tinker Board under Android. FTMC is notable for providing hardware acceleration and supporting more features on Rockchip mainstream chips, including the RK3288 System on Chip found on the Tinker Board. There’s quite a few steps to get FTMC up and running here, but it’s worth it!
As expected, today KDE announced the availability of the fifth maintenance update to the current stable, yet short-lived KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems, versioned 5.9.5.
KDE Plasma 5.9.5 is here more than a month after the release of the KDE Plasma 5.9.4 update, which most probably many of you use on your favorite GNU/Linux distributions. But the time has come to update your installations to KDE Plasma 5.9.5, the last point release in the series, adding more than 60 improvements across various components.
The GStreamer 1.12 major release is coming next month, but Collabora's Olivier Crête is sharing with us today some of the most important new features implemented so far by various developers.
Collabora made several contributions to the widely-used open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework, and now that many of you already managed to get an early taste of the new features coming with the GStreamer 1.12 release during the RC (Release Candidate) testing phase, let's take a look at the upcoming changes.
GStreamer is great for all kinds of multimedia applications, but did you know it could also be used to create studio grade professional audio applications? For example, with GStreamer you can easily receive a AES67 stream, the standard which allows inter-operability between different IP based audio networking systems and transfers of live audio between profesionnal grade systems.
Void Linux, an open-source, general-purpose GNU/Linux distribution based on the monolithic Linux kernel, is the latest operating system to adopt the Flatpak application sandboxing technologies.
Offensive Security, the developers of the BackTrack-derived Kali Linux open-source, security-oriented operating system announced the availability of the Kali Linux 2017.1 rolling release.
Since Kali Linux become a rolling distro, the importance of such updated images was never the same, but Kali Linux 2017.1 appears to be a major release of the ethical hacking distro, adding a bunch of exciting new features and improvements to the Debian-based operating system.
Offensive Security has updated the Kali Linux images with new features and changes. Termed Kali Linux 2017.1, this release comes with support for wireless injection attacks to 802.11ac and Nvidia CUDA GPU. You can simply update your existing installation by running few commands if you don’t wish to download the updated images from Kali repos.
openSUSE Board Chairman Richard Brown informed the community about a major version number change for upcoming releases of the openSUSE Leap operating system.
As some of you might know already, openSUSE Leap 42.2 is the current stable release of the GNU/Linux distribution based on the sources of the commercial SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) operating system designed for enterprises, and the next scheduled release is openSUSE Leap 42.3, which is currently in development.
It has been a long time since our last status update! The reason is the end of the previous sprint caught quite some of the YaST Team members on vacations and, when the vacation period was over, we were so anxious to jump into development to make YaST another little bit better that the blog post somehow fell behind.
But it’s time to pay our (reporting) debts. So these are some of the highlights of the 33th development sprint that finished on April 11th.
A year after buying application connectivity startup 3scale Inc., Red Hat Inc. is making the technology that it obtained through the deal available in a new form geared toward tech-savvy firms.
Unveiled on Thursday, Red Hat 3scale API Management – On Premise runs on the company’s OpenShift Container Platform and is designed to be deployed inside Docker instances. It’s an alternative to the original cloud version of 3scale for organizations that wish to keep their operations behind the firewall. The software should be particularly appealing to government agencies and firms in regulated industries, which often can’t move certain workloads off-premises due to security obligations.
Today, April 26, 2017, the developers behind the Debian-based Q4OS GNU/Linux distribution announced the release of the fourth stability and security update of the Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" series.
Q4OS 1.8.4 comes almost two months after the release of the previous point release, and besides incorporating all the security patches backported from the upstream repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" operating system series, it adds an exciting new feature, namely the integration of alternative desktop environments.
Devuan and Debian need not defer to the Open Source Initiative regarding what is Open Source, since the OSI is just using Debian's Free Software Guidelines. Debian's Free Software Guidelines are a definition of Free Software, not specifically Open Source. At the time they were created, RMS personally approved of them as "a good definition of Free Software".
There I said it. So, naturally, I am feeling a little sad that Unity is retiring from its role as the default Ubuntu desktop. It will be replaced by (the also-awesome) GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 17.10 onwards.
For the past 6 and a half years I, like millions of Ubuntu users, have been able to rely on Unity. From Qml to Compiz, from controversy to controversy, the Unity desktop has held firm. As (arguably) the one element that helped to define and mould the Ubuntu identity it’s only natural that one wonders what Ubuntu is without it.
Canonical's Adam Conrad announced that Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) is officially open for development, and it looks like the first daily build ISO images are already available for download.
Ubuntu 17.10 daily build images are available to download.
GNOME Shell’s stock experience is fairly vanilla, but with the right ingredients you can give it an entirely different flavour. GNOME Layout Manager is a new script in development that takes advantage of this malleability.
ââ¬â¹Qiana Studio is a Ubuntu and Linux Mint based system for multimedia productions. It comes with many powerful tools and applications that make it a media creation powerhouse. The developers seek to make a lightweight - but powerful A/V-distro basing on Linux Mint! Let us take a look at this distro if it's worth your time.
Prepare to run Android at blazing fast speeds on a new Raspberry Pi-like computer developed by Huawei.
Huawei's HiKey 960 computer board is priced at US$239 but has some of the latest CPU and GPU technologies. Google, ARM, Huawei, Archermind, and LeMaker all played roles in developing the board.
The HiKey 960 is meant to be a go-to PC for Android or a tool to develop software and drivers for the OS. The board development was backed by Linaro, an organization that develops software packages for the Android OS and ARM architecture.
Bash Bunny is a Debian Linux computer with a USB interface designed specifically to execute payloads when plugged into a target computer. It can be used against Windows, MacOS, Linux, Unix, and Android computing devices. It features a multicolor RGB LED that indicates various statuses and a three-position selector switch: Two of the positions are used to launch payloads, while the third makes Bash Bunny appear to be a regular USB storage device for copying and modifying files.
Archermind and LeMaker have launched a “Hikey 960” 96Boards CE SBC for AOSP using HiSilicon’s 4x -A73, 4x -A53 Kirin 960 SoC, and featuring M.2 expansion.
The Hikey 960 design from Linaro’s 96Boards.org is now available from Archermind and LeMaker, which sell the boards via their Alpha Star and Lenovator sites respectively. The SBC is also available on Amazon ($240) and Seed ($239), among other venues. The open source boards comply with the same 85 x 55mm 96Boards CE spec adopted by LeMaker’s Hikey SBC, and run Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Linaro plans to add Linux support over time (see farther below).
The 96Boards organization has announced the official launch and shipping of the HiKey 960.
A CDN, or content delivery network, is a network of strategically placed servers located around the world used for the purpose of delivering files faster to users. A traditional CDN will allow you to accelerate your website's images, CSS files, JS files, and any other piece of static content. This allows website owners to accelerate all of their own content as well as provide them with additional features and configuration options. These premium services typically require payment based on the amount of bandwidth a project uses.
However, if your project doesn't justify the cost of implementing a traditional CDN, the use of an open source CDN may be more suitable. Typically, these types of CDNs allow you to link to popular web-based libraries (CSS/JS frameworks, for example), which are then delivered to your web visitors from the free CDN's servers. Although CDN services for open source libraries do not allow you to upload your own content to their servers, they can help you accelerate libraries globally and improve your website's redundancy.
Reactide is an Integrated Development Environment built for React, which intends to make React development easier for Software Engineers. The project has been widely praised, amassing over 6,000 stars on GitHub.
Today, Airbnb’s design team open sourced its internal library for writing React components that easily render directly to Sketch. Instead of trying to get Sketch to export to code, the Airbnb team spent its time on the opposite — putting the paintbrush in the hands of the engineer.
The supersonic growth of Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers in the past few years owes much to open-source communities that fed them cutting-edge tech free-of-charge. Now telecom is mimicking this strategy through involvement with the Linux Foundation, according to Scott Raynovich (@rayno) (pictured, right), guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio.
The countdown until ApacheCon North America has begun. The blockbuster event will be in Miami this year and runs May 16-18. The Apache community is made up of many niche communities and ApacheCon offers something for all of them.
Here, Roman Shaposhnik, Director of Open Source, Pivotal Inc., who is heading the Apache IoT track at the ApacheCon conference, gave us a sneak peek of what the Apache Internet of Things community can look forward to at the event.
Last week, the OpenStack Foundation announced the results of its ninth user survey. OpenStack users responded in record-breaking numbers to participate, and their voices as revealed in the data tell the real story of OpenStack. The OpenStack community is growing, thriving with new users, deployments, code contributions, and collaborations, all on the rise. User diversity is expanding across geographies and organizational sizes. And OpenStack's ability to integrate with innovative technologies is paving the way for advancements not even dreamed of just five years ago.
With its openly stated operational remit of ‘aggressive acquisitions’ (albeit positively aggressive), Oracle is (very) arguably a firm known for buying, swallowing, acquiring those companies it decides to consume.
Maybe i haven't talked about it enough on the lists, but since i've been maintaining the various mozillas in the portstree (cvs log says i started around firefox 3.6.something... 7 years ago. *sigh*) a lot of things changed, so i wanted take the 6.1 release as an occasion to sum up the various ways one could run which version of which firefox on which version of OpenBSD.
Last week we reported that after reorganization, Libreboot was considering rejoining GNU and was seeking input from its community to determine the amount of support it had for such a move. From reading the comments posted both on our article on FOSS Force and on Libreboot’s website, it comes as no surprise that the project’s core members feel they have the necessary consesus to proceed.
Last night, FOSS Force received an email — sent jointly to us and Phoronix — letting us know of the decision.
Rather than repeat what’s already been written and said on the subject (for that, follow the first link above), we’re publishing a slightly edited version of the email, which will pretty much bring everyone up to date on the situation.
Wikitribune will combine professional journalism with volunteers to offer 'factual and neutral' articles. It will be offered ad-free and free-to-use, relying on donations, as Wikipedia does.
The service will require the same levels of fact-checking as Wikipedia, with sources cited and linked. Which basically is going to screw Donald Trump in the most splendid way.
Wikitribune says it will be transparent about its sources. It will post the full transcripts of interviews, as well as video and audio, "to the maximum extent possible."
Cory Doctorow's new book Walkaway centers on the rise of a counterculture built on open-source technology that fabricates nearly everything from the "feedstock" provided by the refuse and wreckage of a world ravaged by climate change and economic ruin.
Now two biomedical ethicists are calling for the creation of new human rights laws to ensure people are protected, including “the right to cognitive liberty” and “the right to mental integrity”.
“You still can’t drink the water, you still can’t cook with the water and bathing. ... You get bumps and rashes from the water,” said Jones, 39, as he showed the red marks on his neck in the parking lot of the water station at the far north end of Flint. “It’s still a struggle, a day-to-day struggle. Even if we get cases of water, you don’t know how long that’s going to last.”
Groundwater that has lingered in Earth’s depths for more than 12,000 years is surprisingly vulnerable to modern pollution from human activities. Once in place, that pollution could stick around for thousands of years, researchers report online April 25 in Nature Geoscience. Scientists previously assumed such deep waters were largely immune to contamination from the surface.
A representative for Irish midwives said they want relocation but they do not want any religious order to have a say in modern hospitals.
Ally Murphy, of the Irish Midwives Association told Breakfast Newstalk that they want what is best for Irish women.
She was speaking as the controversy over the decision to give ownership of the new €300m National Maternity Hospital to the Sisters of Charity rumbled on.
After Microsoft officials dismissed evidence that more than 10,000 Windows machines on the Internet were infected by a highly advanced National Security Agency backdoor, private researchers are stepping in to fill the void. The latest example of this open source self-help came on Tuesday with the release of a tool that can remotely uninstall the DoublePulsar implant.
Ultimately, St. Jude Medical's stock plunged as much as 10 percent in the aftermath. The company launched a lawsuit against MedSec and Muddy Waters, and the three firms skirmished in the press again when MedSec's findings were allegedly reproduced by security firm Bishop Fox. What's more, the second set of researchers claimed they could take over the pacemakers at a distance of around 10 feet.
From a security perspective, Unicode domains can be problematic because many Unicode characters are difficult to distinguish from common ASCII characters. It is possible to register domains such as "xn--pple-43d.com", which is equivalent to "ðpple.com". It may not be obvious at first glance, but "ðpple.com" uses the Cyrillic "ð" (U+0430) rather than the ASCII "a" (U+0061). This is known as a homograph attack.
A new strain of malware targeting Linux systems, dubbed "Linux/Shishiga," could morph into a dangerous security threat.
Eset on Tuesday disclosed the threat, which represents a new Lua family unrelated to previously seen LuaBot malware.
The GrSecurity initiative that hosts various out-of-tree patches to the mainline Linux kernel in order to enhance the security will no longer be available to non-paying users.
GrSecurity has been around for the better part of two decades and going back to the 2.4 kernel days. In 2015 the stable GrSecurity patches became available to only commercial customers while the testing patches had still been public. That's now changing with all GrSecurity users needing to be customers.
This change is effective today, April 26th 2017. Public test patches have been removed from the download area. 4.9 was specifically chosen as the last public release as being the latest upstream LTS kernel will help ease the community transition.
Anyone here use grsecurity and have any thoughts about this?
Donald Trump's administration has taken a tough stance on WikiLeaks in recent weeks. US officials told CNN last week that the Justice Department has prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a news conference on Thursday that Assange's arrest is a "priority" of the administration.
But no Trump administration official went further in condemning the group than CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who, in a speech two weeks ago, called WikiLeaks a "hostile intelligence service." Pompeo's comments immediately drew attention to a tweet from July 2016 in which he linked to the WikiLeaks document dump of emails from the Democratic National Committee. Critics used the tweet to call out Pompeo for his dramatic reversal on WikiLeaks.
Mike Pompeo, in his first speech as director of the CIA, chose to declare war on free speech rather than on the United States’ actual adversaries. He went after WikiLeaks, where I serve as editor, as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” In Pompeo’s worldview, telling the truth about the administration can be a crime — as Attorney General Jeff Sessions quickly underscored when he described my arrest as a “priority.” News organizations reported that federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring charges against members of WikiLeaks, possibly including conspiracy, theft of government property and violating the Espionage Act.
NOAM CHOMSKY: If the charge is true, he should be honored for it. Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden carried out heroic, courageous acts. They fulfilled the responsibility of somebody who takes citizenship seriously—that is, who believes that the people of a country ought to know something about what their government is up to. OK? Like if their government is carrying out murderous, brutal attacks in Iraq, people should know about it. Takes us back to Martin Luther King’s talk in 1967. If the government is, and corporations, too, incidentally, are listening in to your telephone conversations and what you’re doing, you know, tapping this discussion and so on, we should know about it. Governments have no right to do things like that. And people should know about it. And if they think it’s OK, fine, let them decide, not do it in secret. And I think people wouldn’t agree to it. That’s why it’s kept secret. Why else keep it secret? You know? And these are people who exposed it at great risk to themselves. So those are heroic, courageous acts. If WikiLeaks was abetting them, more power to them. That’s what they should be doing.
Inventions to contribute to the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals have been rewarded. A reactor which converts carbon dioxide into ethanol, a method for the detection of pesticides and contaminants in food, and renewable leather created from bacteria won the heart of the jury.
Shareholders will be asked to approve a huge payout for Mayer, as Yahoo is currently being sold to Verizon, the US’s largest telecom company, for $4.49bn
On Oct. 30, 2016, Canada signed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union. Just one day later, Bill C-30: An Act to implement the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the European Union and its Member States and to provide for certain other measures was introduced.
Among other changes, Bill C-30 introduces significant amendments to the existing regulatory scheme by which generic drugs are granted market authorization and new provisions for extending the term of certain pharmaceutical patents. The following provides a brief overview of the upcoming changes for pharmaceutical patents.
It's difficult for me to read Jonathan Taplin's cri de coeur about Google and other technology companies that have come to dominate the top tier of successful American corporations without wincing in sympathy on his behalf.
But the pain I feel is not grounded in Taplin's certainty that something amoral, libertarian and unregulated is undermining democracy. Instead, it's in Taplin's profound misunderstanding of both the innovations and social changes that have made these companies not merely successful but also—for most Americans—vastly useful in enabling people to stay connected, express themselves and find the goods and services (and, even more importantly, communities) they need.
Electronic commerce is booming but mostly for high income economies, speakers said at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which is holding a weeklong event on digital trade. Technical assistance is needed for developing countries to hop on the e-commerce train, they said, as UNCTAD launched a platform designed to help developing countries navigate the arcane of electronic trade.
The Trump administration unveiled what it called the biggest tax cuts “in history” on Wednesday in a move that will simplify the US tax system, slash taxes for businesses large and small (including his own), eliminate inheritance taxes and set the president on a collision course with Congress over the likely $2tn-plus cost of the proposal.
Critics immediately called it “basically a huge tax cut for the rich”.
"But over the last few years we’ve been issuing alarms about the UK, US, Hungary and Poland. What’s begun to emerge is that we really think there is a global emergency around civil space, that for a variety of reasons governments and sometimes non-state actors are going out of their way to shut down the ability of citizens to collectively organise and mobilise."
How did big media miss the Donald Trump swell? News organizations old and new, large and small, print and online, broadcast and cable assigned phalanxes of reporters armed with the most sophisticated polling data and analysis to cover the presidential campaign. The overwhelming assumption was that the race was Hillary Clinton’s for the taking, and the real question wasn’t how sweeping her November victory would be, but how far out to sea her wave would send political parvenu Trump. Today, it’s Trump who occupies the White House and Clinton who’s drifting out to sea—an outcome that arrived not just as an embarrassment for the press but as an indictment. In some profound way, the election made clear, the national media just doesn’t get the nation it purportedly covers.
He will explain that Donald Trump, compromised by ancient deals with Russian mobsters, and perhaps even blackmailed by an unspeakable KGB sex tape, made a secret deal. He'll say Trump agreed to downplay the obvious benefits of an armed proxy war in Ukraine with nuclear-armed Russia in exchange for Vladimir Putin's help in stealing the emails of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and John Podesta.
Voice over IP (VoIP) apps such as Facetime, Viber, Skype, WhatsApp, and Messenger have been all but unusable from Egypt for the last few days. The recent wave of VoIP app blocks is pushing more and more Egyptians to use VPN – inevitably, VPN is now a trending search for Egypt region mobile app stores and Google search. Back in 2016, Egypt also banned the encrypted messaging app, Signal – though Signal was able to come up with an ingenious workaround.
Today, 25 April 2017, the European Parliament Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) voted on the draft Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). In a surprise move, the Committee voted to prohibit filtering of uploads by video-sharing platforms. This position, adopted by a majority of 17 to 9, will be the position of the Parliament in its upcoming negotiations with the EU Council, which aim to finalise the text.
Over the past two months, the photo-sharing app Instagram, and its parent company, Facebook, have trained their controversial censorship policies on, of all places, the Museum of Fine Arts.
Instagram has removed three images the museum posted to promote its ongoing photography exhibition, “Imogen Cunningham: In Focus.”
The France-based NGO has today released its 2017 World Press Freedom Index, detailing that in democracies media freedom is proving to be increasingly fragile. “In sickening statements, draconian laws, conflicts of interest, and even the use of physical violence, democratic governments are trampling on a freedom that should, in principle, be one of their leading performance indicators,” the organization says.
Media freedom has declined throughout Southeast Europe (SEE), but the erosion of the rule of law has been most visible in Macedonia, non-governmental organisation Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in its latest World Press Freedom Index report released on Wednesday.
The survey ranked Macedonia 111th out of 180 countries worldwide, up seven positions compared to last year's edition.
Two experts on freedom of expression of the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights condemned today the practice of censorship and internet blocking in Venezuela, as well as the detention, attacks and stigmatization of journalists and media workers covering the recent protests in the country.
“We urge the Government to immediately release all those who have been detained for their journalistic work and for the exercise of their freedom of expression,” stated the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, and the Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Edison Lanza.
To residents of Maryland, catching an occasional glimpse of a huge white blimp floating in the sky is not unusual. For more than a decade, the military has used the state as a proving ground for new airships destined for Afghanistan or Iraq. But less known is that the test flights have sometimes served a more secretive purpose involving National Security Agency surveillance.
According to The Intercept, the NSA tested a blimp at an airfield near Solomons Island in Southern Maryland back in 2004. It’s the latest revelation to be published from the site’s “Snowden Archive.”
The surveillance hawks — it would appear — are never satisfied. When it comes to harvesting the data of American citizens, their mantra seems to be “too much is never enough.” The most recently revealed tool in the considerable arsenal of the surveillance state is a three-engine blimp equipped with eavesdropping apparatus.
As the online magazine The Intercept is reporting, the 62-foot diameter airship — ominously named the Hover Hammer — was fitted “with an eavesdropping device” back in 2004. The Intercept published a classified document on Monday as part of the Snowden Archive. That classified document shows that the Hover Hammer “can be manned or remotely piloted and has already done demonstration flights up to 10,700 feet” including a test in which “the airship launched from an airfield near Solomons Island, Maryland and was able to intercept international shipping data emanating from the Long Island, New York area, including lines of bearing.” Just to clarify, both Maryland and Long Island, New York, are in the United States, so the fact that the Hover Hammer intercepted “international shipping data” is considerably less than the whole story. In sweeping up that data, the “Digital Receiver Technology model 1301 receiver onboard the airship” undoubtedly also picked up domestic communications — including mobile phone calls, texts, mobile data traffic, and presumably WiFi and other signals.
A 62-foot-diameter blimp deployed by the US National Security Agency was able to “intercept international shipping data emanating from the Long Island, New York, area” after taking flight from Solomons Island, Maryland, according to a classified NSA document published on Monday.
A new document made public this week via Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents reveals a fascinating aim of signals intelligence program: The agency, it turns out, monitored international scientific developments in hopes of detecting “nefarious” genetic engineering projects more than a decade ago.
SIGINT is intelligence collected by monitoring electronic and communications signals. In 2013, documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the agency’s reliance on this kind of intelligence to provide insight into the capabilities and intentions of foreign entities, as well as domestic targets. In the years since, documents have continued to trickle out of the Snowden leak that shed additional light on those efforts.
The arrest warrant shows a detailed breakdown of all her movements and locations from waking up through the time she was killed. From the sync locations and activity monitor, investigators were able to produce a timeline down to the minute of when she left for the gym, the duration of her trip home, when she walked into the garage, her intermittent moving around in the home, and when her body stopped moving.
In 2014, after concluding its investigation, the F.T.C. called on Congress to protect consumers against the unchecked collection and marketing of their digital data. The F.T.C. report detailed how some of the companies classify consumers in data-driven social and demographic groups for marketing purposes with labels like “financially challenged,” “diabetes interest” and “smoker in the household.” The concern is that such classifications could be used to limit fair access to financial services or health insurance.
The F.T.C. recommendation, which was endorsed in a separate report by the Obama administration, was not taken up in Congress.
They have ample means to do so: the immense data trail you leave behind whenever you place something in your online shopping cart or swipe your rewards card at a store register, top economists and data scientists capable of turning this information into useful price strategies, and what one tech economist calls “the ability to experiment on a scale that’s unparalleled in the history of economics.” In mid-March, Amazon alone had 59 listings for economists on its job site, and a website dedicated to recruiting them.
Throughout the election campaign, the most extremist Islamic leaders tried to influence the vote by manipulating the religious sentiment of voters (pictured). This led to many street demonstrations, which often turned violent.
"They want to adopt laws inspired by Sharia, and their demands will become more and more radical," Sinta Wahid warned. This trend represents a serious threat to national unity and to the pluralist spirit on which the country was founded.
Abdul Qader, who was working in Riyadh, was allegedly set on fire following dispute with a family member of his employer.
This confirms what security expert Bruce Schneier has said for years -- that this is security theater, not meaningful security.
In the first publicly known filing to the Hague court against Duterte, Jude Sabio submitted the 77-page complaint that says the president has “repeatedly, unchangingly and continuously” committed extra-judicial executions or mass murders over three decades, amounting to crimes against humanity.
She still has not been allowed to know the exact charges for which she was convicted, Ratcliffe said.
US government attorneys are appealing a Chicago immigration judge's decision to grant asylum to Amos Yee.
That means 18-year-old Yee remains in US custody. The judge concluded in March that Yee had a "well-founded fear" of being persecuted upon return to Singapore. He was first detained by US immigration authorities in December at O'Hare International Airport.
No date has yet been set for the challenge, which will be heard at the High Court in London.
The High Court has granted Lauri Love permission to appeal against his extradition to the United States.
Liberty have also been granted permission to intervene in the appeal. A hearing date has still to be scheduled.
Clashes erupted in Berkeley, CA today as anarchists and antifascists fought with members of the Alt-Right, neo-Nazis, and Trump supporters. Trump supporters openly carried anti-Semitic signs, fascist symbols, and gave neo-Nazi salutes.
Police had stated the day before that they would search people coming into the park for weapons and other items that could be used for “rioting,” however it was clear that police by and large had failed to do so – much less police the area. Law enforcement also set up plastic barriers in the park that gave the Trump supporters access to a “stage” area, in effect, protecting them from counter-demonstrators and enforcing a permit, although one was never obtained, as they focused on policing antifascists.
In Berkeley, California, at least 20 people were arrested as fights broke out between white nationalist Trump supporters and antifascist protesters during competing rallies on Saturday. Photos show some of the Trump supporters posing with the Nazi salute. Police say at least one person was stabbed during the clashes. Several more were injured. In one instance, a known white supremacist was videotaped punching a young antifascist woman named Louise Rosealma in the face. The man who is seen punching her is Nathan Damigo, a former marine who founded the white supremacist organization known as "Identity Europa." For more, we speak with award-winning reporter Shane Bauer. His most recent article is titled "I Went Behind the Front Lines with the Far-Right Agitators Who Invaded Berkeley."
Back in 2012, it was discovered that a Massachusetts state drug lab technician had falsified thousands of tests submitted as evidence in criminal cases. Technician Annie Dookhan was able to "produce" three times as many test results as her coworkers, mostly by never actually testing the submitted substance -- something that went unquestioned for far too long. Dookhan went to jail for three years, but many of those convicted on faulty evidence spent far more time locked up.
Dookhan's prolific fakery resulted in a list of 40,000 cases possibly tainted by her work. This list was turned over to prosecutors, who managed over the next few years to trim it down to 23,000 possibly-tainted convictions. Faced with the daunting task of sorting this all out and notifying former defendants, the district attorney's office decided the best approach was to do as little as possible.
In late March U.S. intelligence sources announced that terrorist organizations have found a novel and deadly way to smuggle explosives onto airplanes utilizing everyday laptops. Though officials declined to provide additional details, some believe that the intelligence highlighting the new threat was the result of President Trump’s raid on an Al Queda compound in Yemen that left at least 14 Al Queda fighters. Navy SEAL Ryan Owens was also killed in the raid. The President called it a “winning mission,” and officials said the mission’s stated purpose, to gather information, had been accomplished.
For years the traditional cable and broadcast industry has gone to great lengths to deny that cord cutting (getting rid of traditional cable TV) is real. First, we were told repeatedly that the phenomenon wasn't happening at all. Next, the industry acknowledged that sure -- a handful of people were ditching cable, but it didn't matter because the people doing so were losers living in their mom's basement. Then, we were told that cord cutting was real, but was only a minor phenomenon that would go away once Millennials started procreating.
Of course none of these talking points were true, but they helped cement a common belief among older cable and broadcast executives that the transformative shift to streaming video could be easily solved by doubling down on bad ideas. More price increases, more advertisements stuffed into each minute, more hubris, and more denial. Blindness to justify the milking of a dying cash cow instead of adapting.
If you want to take the temperature on where the craft beer brewing industry is on the convergence of an exploding industry and the greater use of trademark law, you need only look at what intellectual property lawyers are saying. We had just discussed a Q&A with several IP attorneys in wine country lamenting on how trademark law is throwing up roadblocks to a likewise expanding wine industry and the need for a more nuanced interpretation of marketplaces within the alcohol industries. Even within the craft beer industry itself, IP attorneys are starting to recognize that the industry has a problem.
The files on Megaupload should have just been backups for Goodwin, but unfortunately he experienced a hard drive failure just days before the 2012 Dotcom arrest. That means the "backup" files on Megaupload are the only copies available for some of his material. In addition to losing video that he provided to parents of their kids' sports achievements, he's been unable to complete a documentary he was making about a girls' soccer team in Strongville, Ohio. OhioSportsNet also lost its promotional videos and other news packages.
Kim Dotcom has filed a formal complaint with police in New Zealand after FBI director James Comey arrived in the region for a conference. Dotcom's complaint says that Comey should be urgently interviewed over the unlawful removal of hard drive clones obtained following the raid on Megaupload in 2012.
For some reason, there has been a sub-war raging for more than a decade between anti-piracy groups and fans who create free subtitles for content so other regions can enjoy that same content. While much of this war has been fought for years on the anime front of all places, the conflict has spread to mainstream movies and television as well. And it is a painfully dumb war to fight at all for the content creators, whose publishers have failed to provide the subtitle translations that are obviously in demand, and which would open up new markets at no cost for them. Instead, they typically choose to scream "Copyright infringement!" at these fans instead.
In the past few weeks, we've written a few times about this weird urgency among some in Congress to rush through a pretty major change to Copyright Office oversight. I wrote a deep dive piece over at The Verge discussing the issues at play, but Congress is pushing a bill to stop the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, from appointing a new head of the Copyright Office. Instead, the Congressional plan is to make the position a political appointee, nominated by the President, and approved by Congress. In that Verge piece, we explained why it was a major change, and scratched our heads at the fact that there appears to be no reason for pushing for this change other than (1) the legacy copyright industries know that their lobbying power will mean that the appointment will be to their liking and (2) they fear who Hayden might appoint. But, what's really odd is how quickly Congress is trying to push this through. As if the matter is incredibly urgent. There have been no hearings on the matter. There's been no public discussion on the pros and cons of such a move. Just a mad dash by a bunch of people in Congress to make this change official before Hayden can appoint someone.