Linux was a boon to me. I could do all my work from home, on my own system, without dialing into the campus computer lab—or trekking to campus in person if the modem lines were busy. My introduction to Linux was also my first taste of a new career option.
I graduated in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in physics but started my career as a Unix systems administrator. I never looked back.
Since then, I've "grown" with Linux. I've changed Linux distributions over the years, from SLS to Slackware to Red Hat to Fedora. I still run Linux on my desktop, but I've also introduced Linux to every organization that employed me.
Windows 10 S, Microsoft's new locked-down operating system that comes bundled with the Surface Laptop, won't allow you to change the default Web browser away from Microsoft's own Edge. Furthermore, Edge's default search provider can't be altered: Bing is all you get.
Curiously you can download other browsers from the Windows Store, such as Opera Mini, but Windows 10 S won't let you set it as the default browser: if you try to open an HTML file, or click a link in another app, it will always open in Edge, according to Microsoft's official FAQ on the topic.
After Tuesday's big launch of Windows 10 S, it emerged the software will force people to use Edge and Bing. How can that be?
What were you thinking, Microsoft? The company's just-released Surface Laptop is meant to challenge Chromebooks, but at a starting price of $999, who the heck will buy it? It sure won't be schools, which Chromebook dominates now.
[...]
Once upon a time, Microsoft made billions from locking people into its programs. Those days are long gone, and I don't see why Microsoft thinks it can come back.
How can one believe that Microsoft is really serious about competing with Google's Chromebooks in the education and home sectors when it launches a competitor that costs four times the amount?
It’s one thing to accept the existence of middleware in a situation where applications are being moved from a “legacy,” client/server, n-tier scheme into a fully distributed systems environment. For a great many applications whose authors have long ago moved on to well-paying jobs, containerizing the middleware upon which they depend may be the only way for them to co-exist with modern applications in a hybrid data center.
It’s why it’s a big deal that Red Hat is extending its JBoss Fuse middleware service for OpenShift. It’s also why Cloud Foundry’s move last December to make its Open Service Broker API an open standard can be viewed as a necessary event for container platforms.
Cloud technologies are influencing HPC just as it is the rest of enterprise IT. The main drivers of this transformation are the reduction of cost and the increase in accessibility and availability to users within an organization.
I'm announcing the release of the 4.10.14 kernel.
All users of the 4.10 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.10.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...
For those with an Intel Edison computer module, the mainline Linux kernel should be supporting its integrated Bluetooth capabilities as of the 4.12 kernel.
The Intel Edison with its dual-core Quark CPU has integrated Bluetooth 4 and WiFi. The WiFi has already been working with the mainline Linux kernel, but the Bluetooth has not been working.
More of Intel's enablement work for supporting five-level paging is being sent into the Linux 4.12 kernel.
Five-level paging is supported by future Intel hardware and is about raising the physical and virtual address space for Intel Linux systems. Right now Linux x86_64 is limited to 256 TiB of virtual address space and 64 TiB of physical address space. With 5-level paging, the virtual address space goes up to a 128 PiB limit and the physical address space can be 4 PiB.
David Airlie has submitted the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) feature changes for the Linux 4.12 kernel. The DRM changes this time around are particularly massive, driven by the addition of the initial Radeon RX Vega support.
Takashi Iwai has submitted the sound driver updates slated for the Linux 4.12 kernel.
New to sound for Linux 4.12 is a new API for hooking up jacks more generically, many Intel driver fixes, several new sound drivers, more HD audio quirks, support for dual codecs on some Gigabyte motherboards as well as Lenovo laptops, USB audio driver improvements, and more.
The platform-drivers-x86 updates were submitted this afternoon for the Linux 4.12 kernel and it's on the heavier side with a lot of new material for benefiting Intel-powered laptops/ultrabooks.
Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few moments ago the release of new maintenance updates for the Linux 4.10 and the long-term supported Linux 4.9 and 4.4 kernel series.
The Xen virtualization changes have been submitted for the Linux 4.12 merge window.
David Howells of Red Hat has requested Linus Torvalds pull his hardware module parameter annotation branch into the Linux 4.12 kernel. This is a needed step as part of his work on the "Kernel Lockdown" series for restricting access for allowing hardware resources be modified when in UEFI Secure Boot or other restricted mode.
A 60 byte payload sent to a UDP socket to the rpcbind service can crash its host by filling up the target's memory.
Guido Vranken, who discovered the vuln and created the “Rpcbomb” exploit, complains that he couldn't get action from the package maintainers, so he's written patches himself.
The Sovrin Foundation’s custom distributed ledger for independent digital identities — known as Indy — has been accepted into The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger incubation program, paving the way for a collaborative effort to improve blockchain technologies.
The cross-industry initiative, now known as Hyperledger Indy, aims to give people, organizations and things independent control over digital identities. The program also looks to serve businesses, providing solutions to digital identity in the enterprise.
Following on from the first RX Vega benchmark leak earlier this week, a Linux graphics driver patch has released, in which traces of the GPUs specs have been found. Cracking open the driver and scrolling through its many, many lines of code reveals the number of shader engines, compute units, texture mapping units and ROPs embedded in Vega 10.
Independent developer Pierre Moreau who has contributed to the open-source Nouveau driver in the past has published a rather interesting patch series today: SPIR-V support for the Clover Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker.
Nearly all Linux distros come with a graphical file manager tied to a particular desktop environment. KDE comes with Dolphin file manager, Gnome with Files, MATE with Caja, Cinnamon with Nemo, Xfce with Thunar, LXDE with PCManFM.
You're not, of course, stuck with the file manager that comes with your DE, if you prefer another one. For example, until recently I ran my Debian Xfce system with PCManFM rather than Thunar, while my wife stuck with Thunar even when MATE was her desktop environment.
Everyday checking our emails is an important job. We all receive many important emails from work, home, friends, from us (LinuxAndUbuntu) and many more. Here comes the job of email clients which periodically check our emails, stores them for offline access, let us quickly reply, see our calendar, address book, and many more awesome features. That's why today I am going to list out some of the top or best Linux email clients.
Collabora Productivity team, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, proudly announced today the release and general availability of Collabora Online 2.1 and Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) 2.1.
In an effort to make the collaborative editing experience even better, Collabora Online 2.1 is here to improve both the interoperability and scalability by rebasing the code on the recently released Collabora Office 5.3 office suite designed for enterprises and based on the LibreOffice 5.3 open-source office suite.
I've released man-pages-4.11. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
I've released man-pages-4.09. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
The developers of the Corebird native and modern Twitter client written in GTK+ for the GNU/Linux distributions were proud to announce the release and immediate availability of Corebird 1.5.
Corebird 1.5 is a stable update of the application, and quite a hefty one. It comes about three months after the second bugfix release in the 1.4 stable series to add a bunch of new features and improvements, but also to clean the code of unnecessary functionality or redesign parts of the graphical user interface (GUI).
Easy connection to the Internet over Wi-Fi is no longer a privilege denied Linux users. With a recent distribution on a fairly recent laptop, connecting your Linux laptop to an available Wi-Fi network is often as easy as it is with your phone.
It wasn’t always like this. Wi-Fi has long been a running joke among Linux laptop users. Many a user would wipe their hard drives and install Linux only to find that they couldn’t get online. I went through this when I first installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my Asus Eee PC. (Luckily, the Eee PC came with an RJ45 ethernet jack.)
It's been several weeks since last having any interesting new Linux game news to talk about, but Feral Interactive seems to be getting closer to announcing something new for gamers.
Want a chance to be the villain? Wish granted! Nefarious [Steam, Official Site], an action platform about kidnapping princesses has a Linux version and it's not bad.
Steam Audio, the new feature-filled audio solution from Valve is now supported directly in Unreal Engine 4 Valve just announced.
I've been testing out ATOM [Official Site], a new RPG that's currently on Kickstarter and they seem to have Linux support nailed down pretty well already.
Hellpoint [Official Site] is a good looking dark sci fi action RPG that's currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, they have a Linux demo ready and they've now put this demo on Steam for easy access.
They keep updating the demo too, so this is a new way to keep it up to date. The latest demo adds in a new big boss fight, to show off the action a bit more.
QNX has a long checkered history as an embedded operating system. QNX was always famous for being a real time operating system with a microkernel architecture. That is, kernel functions run as a set of coordinated tasks instead of as a single piece of code. A recent release of QNX 7 (see video, below) allows it to run on 64-bit desktop computers and [elahav] decided to tackle turning this embedded RTOS into a desktop operating system.
While it's been a number of Qt releases already since the Chromium-based WebEngine component replaced QtWebKit, some developers are still maintaining out-of-tree code for supporting QtWebKit.
Any user can enter their own piece of artwork; you do not have to be a K/ubuntu member. Kubuntu members will be voting on the wallpaper entries. The top ten wallpapers will be on the Artful ISO. The Kubuntu Council will deal with any ties.
GNOME 3.24.1 is now available to users of Ubuntu 17.04.
This is the first point release of the GNOME desktop environment since the stable GNOME 3.24 release in March.
The GTK+ tool-kit is the latest GNOME component being brought over to the Meson build system.
WebKitGTK+ has supported remote debugging for a long time. The current implementation uses WebSockets for the communication between the local browser (the debugger) and the remote browser (the debug target or debuggable). This implementation was very simple and, in theory, you could use any web browser as the debugger because all inspector code was served by the WebSockets. I said in theory because in the practice this was not always so easy, since the inspector code uses newer JavaScript features that are not implemented in other browsers yet. The other major issue of this approach was that the communication between debugger and target was not bi-directional, so the target browser couldn’t notify the debugger about changes (like a new tab open, navigation or that is going to be closed).
The story of my brave little Asus eeePC continues. In its lifetime, spanning eight years of heavy-duty use all over the world, this netbook has undergone a handful of upgrades, with the notable mention of Xubuntu Pangolin and more recently Trusty, both of which had served their purpose extremely well. But now, it is time for another upgrade.
So we have a single-core, two-thread Atom processor, plus 1GB RAM, on a platform that is almost eight years old. Tons of legacy data on the hard disk, including some semi-exotic software obtained outside the official repos. Intended operating system? Xubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus, which was merely decent the last time I tested it. But 'tis an Xfce distro, and it's an LTS. Challenge accepted.
Ultimate Edition targets Linux newcomers, but those trying it might need a bit more familiarity with Linux to get around some of the problems in running this not-so-ultimate Linux OS.
Once you get it up and running, however, the visual appeal might make up for the technical shortfalls. For example, this distro has nice desktop applets for monitoring system resources and other tools.
Kali Linux has gained a lot of popularity recently. And there is a reason for that. Hacking is back as the cool-thing-to-do in popular culture and this can be attributed significantly to the TV series Mr. Robot.
Kali is one of the few hacking focused Linux distributions and quite obviously, Mr. Robot’s popularity helped Kali Linux in getting new users. The graph below validates this claim.
The developers of the educational-oriented Escuelas Linux operating system are informing Softpedia today, May 3, 2017, on the availability of the Escuelas Linux 5.3 release.
Francesco Milesi, the creator of the Birds Linux distribution, has informed Softpedia today, May 3, 2017, about the immediate availability of a new version of his open-source operating system for students, Birds Linux 10.0.
It's been a while since we last heard from the Birds Linux project, but it looks like it's still being developed for educational purposes, and today's Birds Linux 10.0 release appears to be a major one that updates most of the pre-installed core components and applications to their latest versions.
Data protection solutions provider Datto has appointed Markus Rex to the newly created role of open source expert.
Rex was previously the co-founder and chief executive of ownCloud, an open source, self-hosted file synchronisation and sharing application platform, and chief technical officer of the Linux Foundation.
Here we go again! Only one week after our previous report, we already have a new bunch of (hopefully) exciting news. Let’s take a look to the outcome of our 34th Scrum sprint.
NethServer's Alessio Fattorini is informing Softpedia today, May 3, 2017, on the official release and immediate availability for download of the NethServer 6.9 operating system.
"There's a lot of innovation on AWS. This makes OpenShift more attractive to more developers, but it's also a storefront for Amazon features and products,"Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told Fortune during an interview at the Red Hat Summit tech conference in Boston. Whitehurst said he started discussing this plan with AWS chief executive Andy Jassy in January.
Red Hat released a new short film in their Open Source Stories series entitled, "Road to AI".
Red Hat announced new IT automation capabilities on May 3, including CloudForms 4.5 and an update for Red Hat Insights. The new releases debuted on the second day of the Red Hat Summit event in Boston.
While the first day of Red Hat Summit was largely about containers, the second day's focus is on automation. For Red Hat, automation comes in many forms, though in recent years the open-source Ansible IT automation platform has been the foundation. Red Hat acquired Ansible in October 2015 and has been working to integrate Ansible across its product portfolio ever since.
For quite some time I wanted to have tuned in Debian, but somehow never motivated myself to do the packaging. Two weeks ago I then finally decided to pick it up (esp. as mika and a few others were asking about it).
Raspberry Pi Foundation is today announcing that the 250,000th Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer (SBC) will be shipped this week, two months after its launch at the end of February.
Selling a quarter million Raspberry Pi Zero W units in only nine weeks is a major milestone for the project that designs and builds some of the most powerful single-board computers on the market, the Raspberry Pi. It also shows that users are interested in Pi Zero W's built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality.
More relevantly, this is now the second consecutive year that the first quarter of the year starts with unit sales actually down vs the same period the year before.
Forget illegal downloading; many Canadians are getting hooked on unauthorized streaming, according to a new study. This emerging type of piracy often involves a simple box running an Android operating system that's loaded with special software.
Instant Apps will let users enjoy instant app experiences on their smartphones without actually downloading a particular app for. Assuming it works as described, the feature will solve a bunch of problems.
In a press event in New Delhi, Smartron, an Indian startup aiming to build a product ecosystem in the country, announced the launch of srt.phone, following on its first Android smartphone – t.phone – launched in May last year.
The OpenIndiana crew maintaining this open-source Solaris/Illumos operating system is out with their first release of 2017 and it comes with new features and updated packages.
First of all, OpenIndiana Hipster 2017.04 is their first release adding support for USB 3.0 devices. In addition to the long overdue USB3 support, their Intel kernel mode-setting driver ported from the Linux kernel was reworked and should now work for most Intel graphics hardware.
Alexander Pyhalov from the OpenIndiana project, an open-source, community-driven illumos Solaris operating system that continues the vision of OpenSolaris, announced today, May 3, 2017, the release of OpenIndiana Hipster 2017.04.
OpenIndiana 2017.04 represents a new major update to the "Hipster" series of the distribution, implementing various new features and updating several core components and applications. The most prominent change of this release being the integration of support for USB 3.0 devices.
Bareflank 1.1 is now available as the newest release of this open-source lightweight hypervisor written in C++.
Bareflank 1.1 introduces its own new build system catered towards its needs, adds Windows 8.1/10 OS support, openSUSE 42.2 support, VMM isolation capabilities, multi-core support, VMCall support, the VMM can now be cross-compiled using LLVM/Clang, various SSE and AVX optimizations, and testing improvements.
As always, great people, great networking, interesting talks and workshops, tons of inspiration! Really helps to get perspective on my work + keep up with trends and industry standards. Plus this year I had an extra agenda to promote Red Hat and Fedora by giving a talk and distributing some swag.
ApacheCon North America is only a few weeks away -- happening May 16-18 in Miami. This year, it’s particularly exciting because ApacheCon will be a little different in how it’s set up to showcase the wide variety of Apache topics, technologies, and communities.
As we greet the month of May, it’s time to take another look at what the free and open source CMS space has in the pipeline.
In our April forecast, we welcomed the arrival of TYPO3 CMS 8, and anticipated the release of both Drupal 8.3 and Joomla 3.7 before the month expired — a goal realized when both Drupal and Joomla made their respective announcements.
As for the month ahead, here’s what to expect from the world of open source CMS.
LFNW 2017 is in Bellingham, WA this weekend...
It may sound counterintuitive to sell free software, but open source is a growing part of the Massachusetts tech industry.
With GRUB 2.02 released after five years in development, this GNU bootloader code has now been bumped for GRUB 2.03 as development begins with new features.
As of today, the version in Git master is now GRUB 2.03 for marking the new development cycle in the eventual road to GRUB 2.04. Since the version bump to GRUB 2.03 a few hours ago, a number of patches have begun landing that were queued until the 2.02 release.
GNU’s Jakub Jelinek has announced the release of GCC 7.1, which is the first stable release of GCC 7. This major release also marks the 30th anniversary of first stable GCC release. Talking about the new features, there’s experimental C++17 support, improvements in optimizers, emitted diagnostics, and Address Sanitizer, etc. You can download GCC 7.1 compiler from GNU servers.
At the huge FOSDEM developer meetup in Brussels in early February, I attended a panel where speakers discussed whether the use of “permissive” open source licenses like the Apache License is now outstripping use of “viral” licenses, such as the GPL. The discussion was spirited, with advocates associated with the Free Software Foundation pushing back on the assertion the GPL is “dying”.
The Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) has launched a collaborative project with five universities in India, United Kingdom, and the United States to help with the research on a debilitating neglected disease.
According to a DNDi’s press release, the project named “the Open Synthesis Network (OSN)” includes 25 undergraduate and master’s students in chemistry from the participating universities, expected to work on improving chemical compounds for the neglected disease visceral leishmaniasis.
Visceral leishmaniasis is a potentially fatal disease which is characterised by irregular bouts of fever, substantial weight loss, swelling of the spleen and liver, and anaemia, according to the World Health Organization.
Chemistry students are making compounds that may help treat diseases thanks to an open collaboration with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative.
The Open Synthesis Network (OSN) is a partnership between the non-profit research and development organisation Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) and five universities from the UK, US and India.
As more companies wade into the business of building artificial intelligence systems to help you drive (or do the driving for you), a startup founded by an ex-Apple computer vision specialist is open sourcing a huge dataset that can help them on their road to autonomy.
Mapillary, a Swedish startup backed by Sequoia, Atomico and others that has built a database of 130 million images through crowdsourcing — think open-source Street View — is releasing a free dataset of 25,000 street-level images from 190 countries, with pixel-level annotations that can be used to train automotive AI systems.
As the 3D printer market becomes more and more inundated with machines at a range of different price points, and as previously advanced features are now the standard for most 3D printers, it is getting more and more difficult for smaller manufacturers to find a niche. That doesn’t seem to have been the case for Aaron Louis Technology, however. It is soon to launch a crowdfunding campaign for its OP1720 and CL1720 3D printers, the latter of which is one of the first available open-source machines to offer a closed loop motor control system.
Some of us get our water for free from the tap. The rest pay for it — at the cost of roughly $100 billion a year.
The Xen paravirtualization mode is proving to be a constant source of serious vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to escape from virtual machines
The 2017 world has a solution to these problems. Use the cloud. Stuff as a Service is without question the way to solve these problems because it makes them go away. There are plenty who will naysay public cloud citing various breeches, companies leaking data, companies selling data, and plenty of other problems. The cloud isn't magic, but it lets you trade a lot of horrible problems for "slightly bad". I guarantee the problems with the cloud are substantially better than letting most people try to run their own infrastructure. I see this a bit like airplane vs automobile crashes. There are magnitudes more deaths by automobile every year, but it's the airplane crashes that really get the attention. It's much much safer to fly than to drive, just as it's much much safer to use services than to manage your own infrastructure.
A hacking group calling itself TheDarkOverlord (TDO) has tried, and failed (so far) to extort Netflix and several other companies after stumbling onto a server of unreleased content. TDO was apparently able to compromise the servers of an audio post-production company by the name of Larson Studios. Among the content acquired from the hackers were ten episodes of the as-yet-unreleased new season of the popular Netflix show "Orange is the New Black," which isn't supposed to see full release until June. Outside of some free advertising in the news media and some wasted calories, the group's efforts don't appear to have culminated in much.
Internet search engine Shodan provides enterprise security teams a wealth of information about open ports on servers and other internet-connected devices. Now, as part of a partnership with threat intelligence company Recorded Future, security analysts and researchers can work with Shodan to uncover systems manipulated to control malware-infected devices.
"Based on the numbers available on the websites looked at, the estimated number of Aadhaar numbers leaked through these four portals could be around 130-135 million and the number of bank accounts numbers leaked at around 100 million from the specific portals we looked at," the report said.
On April 26th Chris Lamb gave a talk at foss-north 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden on Reproducible Builds.
The interesting thing about this worm was just how convincing it was. The e-mail was great—it used the exact same language as a Google Docs sharing e-mail and the exact same "Open" button. Clicking on the link brought up an authentic Google log-in page, served up from Google's servers. Then you were presented a real Google OAuth permissions page, also from Google's servers. The trick was that the app claiming to be "Google Docs" wasn't really Google Docs. The screen showed a third-party app with the name "Google Docs" and a profile picture that matched the Google Docs logo.
The unidentified attackers exploited weaknesses in Signalling System No. 7, a telephony signaling language that more than 800 telecommunications companies around the world use to ensure their networks interoperate. SS7, as the protocol is known, makes it possible for a person in one country to send text messages to someone in another country. It also allows phone calls to go uninterrupted when the caller is traveling on a train.
It’s a question that has bewildered Americans again and again in the wake of 9/11, in reference to the Arab and Muslim worlds. These days, however, it’s a question increasingly asked about the reclusive North Koreans.
Let’s be clear: there is no doubt that the citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) both fear and loathe the United States. Paranoia, resentment and a crude anti-Americanism have been nurtured inside the Hermit Kingdom for decades. Children are taught to hate Americans in school while adults mark a “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month” every year (it’s in June, in case you were wondering).
North Korean officials make wild threats against the United States while the regime, led by the brutal and sadistic Kim Jong-un, pumps out fake news in the form of self-serving propaganda, on an industrial scale. In the DPRK, anti-American hatred is a commodity never in short supply.
A student from Devon has been found guilty of planting a homemade bomb filled with ball bearings on the tube, after a jury rejected his claim that it was meant to be a prank.
Damon Smith, 20, pleaded guilty to perpetrating a bomb hoax but said he intended the device to work as a smoke bomb to stop the train “for a bit of fun”. He pleaded not guilty to possession of an explosive substance with intent, contrary to the 1883 Explosive Substances Act. He decided not to give evidence at the trial.
Smith has Asperger syndrome and took a keen interest in weapons, which might have been connected to his condition, a jury at the Old Bailey in London heard during his five-day trial. He was also interested in gambling and Islam, and had collected photos of extremists, including the ringleader of the 2015 Paris attacks.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI director James Comey said that while he wouldn't "confirm whether or not there are charges" pending against the WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, the reason he "hasn't been apprehended is because he's inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London."
While speculation has long been that the U.S. government has a sealed indictment against Assange, the government refuses to openly say whether or not criminal charges exist against the man whose media organization has published troves of classified material, much of which has exposed secrets that paint the global superpower—and many of its top political leaders—in a negative light.
FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday that the radical transparency group WikiLeaks should not be considered a legitimate journalistic organization because it trafficked in “intelligence porn” and sought to damage the United States.
“There’s nothing that even smells journalistic about some of this conduct,” Comey told a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
FBI Director James Comey slammed WikiLeaks as “intelligence porn” on Wednesday, accusing the anti-secrecy group of serving as a conduit for Russian and other foreign intelligence agencies to publish stolen information intended to damage the United States.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey was asked why the United States had not charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with a crime. Comey said he had to be careful with his answer, because he did not want to confirm whether there were charges pending against Assange, but then responded: “He hasn't been apprehended because he is inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.”
Julian Assange's lawyer has asked a Swedish court to rescind a detention order against the WikiLeaks founder over an alleged rape and allow him to go to Ecuador to be safe from extradition to the US.
Assange, 45, has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, after taking refuge there to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape, which he denies.
He fears Sweden will in turn hand him over to the US to face prosecution over WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents in one of the largest information leaks in US history.
Wednesday 3 May marks World Press Freedom Day, amid a growing consensus that press freedoms are at risk internationally. Since 1993, the UNESCO-initiatied event has been used to draw attention to threats to free expression. The past year journalists have found themselves at severe risk in many countries, with the situation in Turkey, Syria and Azerbaijan being particularly acute.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Hillary Clinton on Wednesday to blame herself for losing the 2016 presidential election.
Assange sent a tweet Wednesday pushing back on Clinton a day after she blamed the anti-secrecy organization in part for her election loss.
On Thursday, CNN reported, citing unnamed US officials, that the Trump Justice Department has prepared charges against Assange based on supposed “proof” that WikiLeaks actively assisted former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in releasing classified documents exposing the agency’s vast and illegal spying operations.
At a press conference on Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions indirectly gave credence to the report, saying, “We’ve already begun stepping up our efforts [against leakers] and whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail.”
The Green Party is calling for an emergency intervention into the air pollution crisis ahead of the publication of the Government’s draft air quality plan [1].
Jonathan Bartley, Green Party co-leader, spoke at an assembly at a London school this morning and called on the Government to clean up the UK’s filthy air, which is linked to 40,000 early deaths every year.
“It's $1 billion of our US money, which we have to borrow to get. That's another whole topic...”
In a Wednesday interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC’s Mad Money, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple is creating a fund to promote advanced manufacturing in the United States, and seeding it with $1 billion to start.
For nearly a year now the British government has been acting like a drunk man in a bar trying to start a fight with a guy twice his size. Whenever one of his sober friends tells him to maybe tone it down a little, he shouts at him to shut up. Whenever they say he's in no fit state for this, he starts pushing them around and calling them names. But now the time for mouthing off is over and he has to actually fight.
Britain isn't powerless. On a good day, it's actually pretty strong. It is towards the bottom of the top tier of countries. It has a big market, big security spend and a willingness to use it, it has huge reserves of soft power and long-nurtured diplomatic influence. It has key global alliances, not least with the US. It has a seat on the Security Council, nuclear weapons, is in the G7, is well regarded at the WTO. It is part of the cultural life of almost every single person on this planet, whether it's because they watch Downton Abbey, or follow the Premier League, or listen to the Rolling Stones. It punches above its weight, as it always has done.
Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka announced the resignation of his government after a row with Finance Minister Andrej Babiš, local media reported Tuesday.
Sobotka, who has been leading the country’s coalition government since 2014, said it was not possible for him to continue to bear responsibility for Babiš, leader of the centrist ANO party.
FBI Director James Comey told a Senate panel on Wednesday that it would have been "catastrophic" for the bureau to not have disclosed in October, just 11 days before the presidential election, that the agency was revisiting the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal.
The founder of a strategic voting initiative that helped propel Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party into office in Canada believes Gina Miller’s campaign for tactical voting in the UK election has a “great chance” of blunting Theresa May’s bid to consolidate power.
Hisham Abdel-Rahman has already been in touch with Miller’s Best for Britain team, which launched its campaign last week with a €£300,000 war chest raised through crowdfunding.
“I would absolutely love to be involved and to come to Britain and help Gina. We’ve had one conversation already and I believe if the progressives get their act together they have a great chance,” said Abdel-Rahman, who is an IT consultant and self-confessed “political junkie”.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is concerned about a draft law in Germany that would impose massive fines on social networks that fail to quickly remove content of a “criminal” nature. RSF fears that the proposed law, which has been approved by the cabinet, could lead to excessive content removal and censorship and could set a precedent at the European level.
To avoid heavy fines, social networks would be tempted to delete content, possibly a great deal of content, thereby restricting free speech and obstructing freedom of information for users of social networks, which are now one of the main methods of accessing news and information.
Facebook last month stepped up its security to counter efforts by governments and others to spread misinformation or manipulate discussions for political reasons.
Zuckerberg said: “Over the next year, we’ll be adding 3,000 people to our community operations team around the world – on top of the 4,500 we have today – to review the millions of reports we get every week, and improve the process for doing it quickly.
[...] the new monitors would supplement the 4,500 people it already has on its community operations team.
But these claims cannot be confirmed, or even properly investigated. Authorities continue to deny access, including for journalists, to the conflict regions within Sudan.
Not surprisingly, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 2017 World Press Freedom Index ranked eight Arab countries as having a "bad" record regarding freedom of the press during past year. It also ranked nine other countries in the region as "very bad" for press freedom, four countries as "problematic" and only one country (Comoros) as "fairly good".
Journalists’ safety especially women journalists is becoming a serious problem that is effectively silencing them leading to self-censorship and even some women leaving the profession. It is however saddening that in many instances these threats remain unreported and are not taken seriously.
On World Press Freedom Day held this year under the banner “Critical Minds for Critical Times”, Gender Links calls for an end to gender based censorship in the news.
A Southern African advocacy NGO that has done extensive research on gender in the media, Gender Links joins the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism, Freedom of Expression Institute, Media Development and Diversity Agency, South African National Editors Forum in a robust debate today on challenges facing the media and its ability to effectively and independently represent citizens.
The 33 journalists and media workers murdered in the Americas during 2016 represent an increase in censorship and corruption in the countries of the Americas, according to the annual report of the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
When it comes to online privacy, the European data protection authorities tend to be quite interventionist as they try to police the movement of personal data within and out of the EU. The concerns over the Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield frameworks are one manifestation of this. Another is the increasing EU scrutiny of Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp.
US government requests for Facebook data are up, according to the company's latest biennial transparency report. Total requests jumped from 23,000 to 26,000, as compared to the first six months of 2016. Overall, it's an increase of about 12,000 requests over 2015's total.
At this point, Facebook is fielding about 1,000 more requests a month as compared to 2015. While there's not a whole lot of detail in the presented data, the social media platform is now able to report something it hadn't been able to do before the passage of the USA Freedom Act. Both of the 2016 reports now show what percentage of data requests come with a gag order attached.
A FidoNet system (node) usually consists of a mailer that does the exchange with other systems, a tosser that "routes" the mail to the recipients, and a reader with which you can finally read and write messages to others. Back in the old days I ran my mailbox on my Amiga 3000 with a Zyxel U-1496E+ modem, later with an ISDN card called ISDN-Master. The software used was first TrapDoor as mailer and TrapToss as a tosser. Later replaced by GMS Mailer as a mailer and MailManager as a tosser and reader.
[...]
Yes, FidoNet is maybe outdated technology, but it's still alive and I would like to get a FidoNet node running again. Are there any other FidoNet nodes running on Debian and give assistance in setting up? There are maybe some fully integrated solutions like MysticBBS, but I'm unsure about those.
James Comey testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee today where he faced an oddly-unified bipartisan group of senators irritated with the FBI (but for different reasons). Most senators took a large amount of the their time during the first round of questions to not actually ask questions, but to express their displeasure with the Clinton email investigation and the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation.
The opening statements varied depending on the party of the senator addressing James Comey. Comey had very few answers about various Trump-related investigations (which are still ongoing), but made the most of his opening statement by dodging the questions and making a sales pitch for the renewal of Section 702 -- the statute permitting the NSA's internet data/communications collection the FBI makes frequent use of.
According to Comey, the 702 collection is essential to national security. Possibly true. But not so essential that concerns about Fourth Amendment violations should be swept aside. This was only one of the sales pitches Comey managed to squeeze in during questioning.
A report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) yesterday provides a sobering set of statistics on the breadth and depth of US intelligence surveillance of targets both overseas and within the United States. Even after steps were taken to reduce the collection of phone call metadata—ending bulk collection of phone company records and limiting collection to specific requests against records held by telecommunications providers—the National Security Agency collected over 151 million phone call records while tracking only 42 targets.
Barack Obama's team used NSA technology to examine data gathered on tens of thousands of Americans abroad during the election, it has emerged.
Last year Russia passed a new surveillance bill that promised to bring greater security to the country. As is par for the course for these types of bills, the legislation did the exact opposite by not only mandating new encryption backdoors, but by also imposing harsh new data-retention requirements on ISPs and VPN providers. As a result, some VPN providers like Private Internet Access wound up leaving the country after finding their entire function eroded and having some of their servers seized. The end result? Russia's pledge to shore up security wound up making everybody in the country notably less secure.
And now Russia appears poised to dramatically up the ante.
A Florida judge has granted a motion to compel two suspects in an ongoing case to reveal their smartphone passcodes. Prosecutors were granted a motion to compel two defendants to give up their smartphone pin passcodes to search for evidence related to an extortion allegedly carried out by a couple, Victor and Voigt. The two devices in question are an iPhone and a Blackberry. The suspects’ attorneys argued that passwords are protected as testimonial content by the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution.
Judge rules that passcodes aren’t protected by the Fifth Amendment
A Miami-Dade county judge has ruled that two defendants in a sextortion case must provide police with the passwords to their respective iPhones so authorities can unlock the devices and execute a search warrant.
Whether or not courts can force individuals to give up passwords to their locked computers or phones is not a settled matter. In essence, the question it boils down to is: "Is giving up a password testimonial, and therefore in violation of the Fifth Amendment? Or is it more like being asked to give up a key to a safety deposit box?"
"For me, this is like turning over a key to a safety deposit box," said Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Charles Johnson, who ruled from the bench during a Wednesday hearing, according to the Miami Herald.
The Google Chrome browser extension can scan users' Facebook profiles and tell them the political parties that are advertising to them the most.
Belgium’s foreign ministry wanted Saudi Arabia to know it had voted to elect the kingdom to the UN Commission of Women’s Rights, leaked internal emails have reportedly revealed.
But think this through. The ABC has hired this inexperienced and unwise 26 year old on the understanding that she is Muslim - which sends her a message. Stay Muslim, or else your job is in danger.
[...]
The ABC seems to have no interest in hiring women who have left Islam or who have their head uncovered and thus are not identifiably Muslim.
Chesler is an emerita professor of psychology and women's studies at the City University of New York whose pioneering scholarship exposed the horrors of honor killing, forced marriages, and other brutalities women suffer in Muslim lands and beyond. She was invited to deliver a lunchtime lecture on "Worldwide Trends in Honor Killings" at a conference on "Violence in the Name of Honor: Confronting and Responding to Honor Killings and Forced Marriage in the West" on April 13-14, cosponsored by the law school and the Saudi-funded King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies.
In late December 1974, the New York Times published an article reporting a massive set of CIA operations conducted domestically and targeting American citizens.
Back in February, we had former top FCC staffer Gigi Sohn on our podcast and she laid out the likely strategy of Ajit Pai and Congress to kill net neutrality while pretending that they were protecting net neutrality. And so far, it's played out exactly according to plan. Each move, though, seems to be getting reported by most of the tech press as if it's some sort of surprise or unexpected move. It's not. There's a script and it's being followed almost exactly. So, as a reminder, let's go through the exact script:
About.com didn’t die of natural causes. It was killed by its CEO despite still being profitable. The story of why it had to die in order for this new thing to be born tells you a lot about the way the internet has changed since its earliest days.
“Social networks” have been around a lot longer than many folks realize. My own first experience was a “bulletin board system” back in the 80’s using a dial-up modem where you registered on a computer and could interact with, and send messages to other users on that system. This expanded into more mainstream email accounts and ushered in the era of AOL, CompuServe and others. These spun off into other community-based web sites which launched ideas into larger and larger platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and so on.
These platforms are “centralized” in the sense that there is only one entity responsible for your account access, and managing access to any content you choose to upload and share privately or publicly on their platform. Many users aren’t crazy at the idea of large entities controlling access to their content, which has resulting in many viral ownership claims that get recycled from time to time. It’s a valid concern, especially when the platform isn’t 100% clear on how they’ll use your content for additional monetization efforts.
One of the great stories in unintentional consequences in technology in the past few years has been Pokemon Go. The augmented reality game application has resulted in all kinds of legal action and consequences, including New York declaring playing it to be a sex offender parole violation, lawsuits stemming from players of the game wandering onto private property and annoying the residents there, and even the DOD releasing guidelines for safe Pokemon hunting.
Most businesses think protecting their intellectual property is their own responsibility, and it is. But what about when your intellectual property rights are violated by an evildoer? Who are you going to call?
MP3 decoding was already free and got recently included in Fedora. But now, encoding is also free according to Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS: "On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated." The Wikipedia MP3 article confirms that.
While the overzealous new rules were keenly disputed by the Open Rights Group (ORG) when a draft of the bill was published last year, the government refused to soften its approach.
As a result, in theory it's now possible for copyright holders to pursue criminal cases for an infringer of any size [...]
We talk a lot around here about the many problems with the copyright trolling industry. Those problems take several forms, but they can be best globalized as a problem of the copyright troll's basic business model. These groups claim to tackle piracy in defense of the content creators with whom they contract, but they do so not by spear-fishing confirmed infringers with sound evidence, but rather they cast as wide a net as possible based on flimsy evidence at best, all in the hopes of producing enough settlement money from scared recipients to make some coin. This bird-shot approach, to further mix my hunting analogies, inevitably creates serious collateral damage and exposes how poorly constrained the technology used to identify infringement is to reality.