Chinese computer company Chuwi plan to release an Ubuntu powered laptop.
The Chuwi LapBook 12.3 is a thin, all-metal clamshell notebook with a 12.3-inch 2K display.
Never heard of Chuwi? Me either.
Though the company is far from a household name it carving out a name for its self making a slate of well-received Windows 10 tablets, and 2-in-1’s — one of which even dual-boots with Android.
And now they’re apparently turning their attention to Ubuntu.
Microsoft's Edge browser is the subject of an amusing new bug report, alleging it somehow manages to screw up printing strings of numbers.
The report on Microsoft's developer portal describes the issue where PDF files printed through Edge will display numbers and text incorrectly when exported.
"Edge displays PDF correctly but printed content differs notably," the bug notice reads. "Printed content depends on selected printer, on printer settings, and on used computer (please try a different setup if first result looks correct)."
The report includes a pair of examples in a numbered table. The first table is sequentially numbered from 1-140. The second table, which is said to have been printed in Edge through the "print-to-PDF" function, has the boxes numbered out of sequence with the first six as "1,1,4,4,4,7".
If you're in data center or cloud IT circles, you've been hearing about containers in general and Docker in particular non-stop for a few years now. With the release of Docker 1.0 in June 2014, the buzz became a roar.
All the noise is happening because companies are adopting Docker at a remarkable rate. At OSCon in July 2014, I ran into numerous businesses that were already moving their server applications from virtual machines (VM) to containers. Indeed, James Turnbull, Docker's VP of services and support, told me at the conference that three of the largest banks that had been using Docker in beta were moving it into production. That's a heck of a confident move for any 1.0 technology, but it's almost unheard of in the safety-first financial world.
Among the many new features for Linux 4.12 are two new I/O schedulers in mainline: the long-standing BFQ (Budget Fair Queueing) and Kyber, a new I/O scheduler developed at Facebook. Here are some initial benchmarks of these I/O schedulers on the Linux Git code as of this past week.
Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few moments ago the release and general availability of a new set of maintenance updates for the Linux 4.10, as well as the long-term supported Linux 4.9 and 4.4 kernels.
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes have been submitted for the Linux 4.12 kernel merge window.
There are plenty of KVM changes as usual for this next kernel cycle. Some of the work for KVM on ARM includes improved PMU support and virtual interrupt controller improvements. MIPS meanwhile has picked up basic support for hardware virtualization when using Imagination P5600/P6600/I6400 or Cavium Octeon III hardware.
I'm announcing the release of the 3.18.52 kernel.
All users of the 3.18 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 3.18.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.18.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...
After announcing earlier today the release of the Linux 4.10.15, 4.9.27 LTS and 4.4.67 LTS kernels, Greg Kroah-Hartman also released yet another maintenance update for the Linux 3.18 kernel series.
The Linux 3.18 branch continues to be marked as [EOL] - End of Life - on the kernel.org website, but it also continues to receive large patches that contain numerous improvements and miscellaneous bug fixes. Linux kernel 3.18.52 being the latest in the series, it changes a total of 97 files, with 741 insertions and 346 deletions, according to the appended shortlog.
Linux has made great strides over the years, advancing far beyond where it was when it started. But one redditor recently wondered if Linux was suffering from outdated kernel design. He asked his question in the Linux subreddit and got some interesting answers.
The latest Linux 4.12 merge window pull request worth talking about is that of the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates.
The Linux Foundation announced a new software project under its Hyperledger open consortium aimed at creating a collaboration tool for building blockchain business networks -- or smart contracts -- and their deployment across a distributed ledger.
The new project, called Hyperleder Composer, is a modeling language based on JavaScript and with REST API support, that allows non-developers and developers to model their business network. The language also supports modeling of relationships and data validation rules.
Emil Velikov has announced the availability of Mesa 17.1 RC4 for some final testing, with the final release of Mesa 17.1 due in approximately 24 hours.
This RC released fixes around 36 bugs and it enables AMD Polaris 12 support for both OpenGL and Vulkan. It also fixes other general bugs with radv (AMD), i965 (Intel), anv (Intel) and other various fixes.
While we were waiting for the final Mesa 17.1.0 3D Graphics Library to hit the streets this past weekend, Collabora's Emil Velikov is today announcing the availability of the fourth and last Release Candidate (RC) milestone.
Including a total of 35 changes, which were implemented since last week's Mesa 17.1.0 Release Candidate 3 build, this fourth RC of the highly anticipated Mesa 17.1 stable series is here to fix the remaining blockers before the final release hits the streets, which should happen in the next 24 hours from the moment of writing.
The fourth release candidate for Mesa 17.1.0 is now available.
The list of accepted fixes for Mesa 17.1-RC4 can be found via Mesa-dev.
We are happy to announce the April 2017 release of coreboot, version 4.6.
In this article, I'll look at a shortcoming of command-line interfaces—discoverability—and a few ways to overcome this problem.
I love command lines. My first command line was DOS 6.2, back in 1997. I learned the syntax for various commands and showed off how to list hidden files in a directory (attrib). I would carefully craft my commands one character at a time. When I made a mistake, I would proceed to retype the command from the beginning. One fine day someone showed me how to traverse the history using the up and down arrow keys and I was blown away.
The process of upgrading OpenStack releases can be challenging, given the many moving parts and the cadence of releases.
Worms W.M.D [Steam, Official Site] has just received a fresh update to add in a free game mode about battling with Forts, an apparent fan-favourite mode from earlier games.
You pick an animated fort, a special tactical item of your choice like a Sentry Gun or a Health Crate and then it's all-out war. Forts also get a flag composed of your Steam profile picture, I can see that being abused...
I absolutely adored Broforce after completing it, so I'm really happy that Hot Guns [Steam, Official Site] supports Linux as it does remind me of it. The game released recently without much fanfair, which is a shame as it's great.
In another case of a game developer seemingly not caring about the Linux version, The Culling [Steam] is currently broken on Linux with no reply from the developer when asking about it.
You probably saw the tags on github already. I’m happy to make it official and to announce the release of Cinnamon 3.4.
I’d like to thank all the developers and designers who worked not only on Cinnamon 3.4, but in the redesign of the Spices website and the maintenance of the Cinnamon Spices themselves.
I'm glad to announce the release of KStars 2.7.7 for Linux, Mac, and Windows!
In this release, Robert Lancaster dedicated a lot of time to improving KStars What's Interesting Tool (WIT). It is now significantly improved and offers a rich educational experience to explore the heavens! Users can now explore many naked eye and deep sky objects, in addition to addon catalogs offered by KStars such as the Sharpless Catalog.
Users wishing to have more fine control on what objects to observe and/or image should be using the Observation Planner that enable filtering of objects with custom constraints and limits. For casual users looking to find out what's interesting tonight, then this tool is the optimal choice.
The GNOME Project is preparing these days to release the second and last scheduled point release for the latest GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, and some of the core components and apps are already receiving new versions.
That's right, we're talking about GNOME 3.24.2, which should be out in the coming days, around the date of May 10, 2017, bringing various small enhancements and bug fixes to some of the components distributed as part of the GNOME 3.24 Stack. The Evolution email and groupware client is, again, among the first to be updated.
System76's CEO Carl Richell is reporting today on some of the upcoming changes the Linux hardware company plans to make in regards to the look and feel of the GNOME desktop environment shipping with the next major Ubuntu release.
As you are very much aware by now, Canonical is moving away from their unique and gorgeous Unity user interface to the GNOME 3 desktop environment for the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, due for release later this year on October 19, 2017.
ââ¬â¹Bodhi Linux is essentially one of those distributions which try to bring your old PC back to life but at the same time, tries to make it look like it is still keeping up with the latest trends in Design and Interface. And with every new release, its community is growing larger and larger. We will look at the latest release which comes with a new theme and more bug fixes (more on this later).
4MLinux provides a lot of software in a small package. For system maintenance it is good choice to have on hand. For multimedia, miniserver, and mystery it provides a useful selection of software, but there are other distributions that focus on only one of those tasks and do it better by being more focused. That is not to say that 4MLinux is bad, but it tries to do too many different things at once. To be completely honest, I think 4MLinux would be a stronger offering if it were 3MLinux and dropped the mystery aspect entirely. Maybe including just solitaire or some other light game to have as a diversion while maintenance tasks run and use the space freed up by removing the games to include some of the optional extension applications by default.
Xubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus is a pretty good release. It comes with a fully functional live session, and even the installed system offers a foxy, fair and balanced experience. You have your codecs, media support, printing, great performance, stability, and whatnot.
On the down low, the Bluetooth stack is one big disappointment, and the default looks can be improved. There were a few small issues throughout, but nothing major. What makes Xubuntu less glamorous than it should be is its brother, Kubuntu. I was so impressed with the Plasma release that I just don't have sufficient fanboyase - that's the enzyme that makes nerds go wild - in my noob glands to feel all giddy. It's a case of not being able to fall in love on the account of already being taken, so to speak.
Well, if you ignore me and my mood swings, as a standalone product, Xubuntu Zesty is a nice free offering. It's mature, robust and fast. Battery life can be better, it sure can shine more on its own without extra pimping, and Bluetooth, we go back to Bluetooth. Anyway, as far as Ubuntu and its kin go, the spring season is a pretty good one. This one gets a very juicy 9/10. And that would be all. Off you go. Play play, test test.
PC/OpenSystems LLC and Black Lab Software are proud to announce today the release and immediate availability for download of the Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11 operating system.
Now that netOS become Black Lab Enterprise Linux, and that the OS is free for download again, the team prepared the latest release with dozens of exciting new features and several flavors. Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11 appears to be the first stable series to ship with Black Lab Studio Linux, Black Lab Enterprise Linux for Education, and Black Lab Enterprise Linux for IoT editions.
GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton is once again the first to built a Linux-based operating system powered by the latest stable kernel, and today he announced the availability of ExTiX 17.5 Build 170508 using the Linux 4.11 kernel.
To our knowledge, ExTiX 17.5 Build 170508 looks to be the first stable, production-ready GNU/Linux distribution to ship with Linux kernel 4.11. The operating system is dubbed by the developer "The Ultimate Linux System" for a reason, and today's release is based on packages from Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 "Jessie," Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" and Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus).
While we were waiting for the final Mesa 17.1.0 3D Graphics Library to hit the streets this past weekend, Collabora's Emil Velikov is today announcing the availability of the fourth and last Release Candidate (RC) milestone.
This is the first in a series of posts in which the frontend hackers want to report to the OBS community about the progress they have made developing the web user interface and the API of the OBS. You can expect these posts to come in roughly every 2 weeks, and we very much hope you enjoy them!
Enterprise adoption of containers and microservices continues to grow, driven by increased developer efficiency and support microservices. This type of architecture, however, does not come without challenges. And this week during Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, Red Hat Inc. announced OpenShift Application Runtimes to mitigate those obstacles and accelerate a cloud-native environment.
“One of the things that has continued to be an actual challenge, at least a perceived challenge in the minds of would-be microservices architects, is: ‘How do I manage all the stuff?’” said Mich Piech (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of middleware at Red Hat.
OpenStack got some play at last week’s 2017 Red Hat Summit, with keynote speakers giving the open-source infrastructure project nods. But there remains some mystery as to how much OpenStack customers are consuming from Red Hat Inc.’s offerings.
“OpenStack manages resources — whether its compute, network, storage resources,” said Jim Whitehurst (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Red Hat.
How serious is Red Hat about OpenStack? Serious enough that when it announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11, the latest version of of its massively scalable and agile Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, at OpenStack Summit, it based it on February's OpenStack "Ocata" release.
The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform furthers its partnership with Amazon Web Services with a new integration that makes it easier for developers to build and deploy apps in containers.
Last week open source company Red Hat held its annual summit. I didn't actually attended the event, but I took the opportunity to follow along virtually. Many of my analyst friends were there, and between their missives, some back-channel conversations and interaction with their AR/PR team, I got a pretty good handle on what was up.
This comes at an interesting time for Red Hat. Its original business, Red Hat Linux in all its flavors, is going well, but newer open-source initiatives (OpenStack, OpenShift, Docker, etc.) have muddied the waters and created a requirement for Red Hat to embrace different areas.
Historically, I’ve found Red Hat a difficult organization to engage with. They seem to get a little prickly about criticism (whether constructive or not), and defensiveness seems to be something of a core operating model for them. That said, having a view of the event from a distance gives me a chance to tell it like I see it.
In Free and Open Source Software culture, conferences became an important part of the community. Most of the projects or communities do the work over this beautiful thing known as the Internet, people are taking part from the warmth of their home. Conferences are the only time when we all get a chance to meet, discuss new ideas, share the knowledge among ourselves. Conference speakers are generally the volunteers who agree to spend a lot of time to prepare and then give the talk, do the QA session. This also involves a lot of travel, for any mid-sized to a big conference, you will always find at least couple of speakers traveling half of the world to give those talks.
Grml is a Debian based live system focusing on the needs of system administrators. This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian testing (AKA stretch) and is the first Grml release using systemd as its init system. As usual it also incorporates up to date hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.
The OpenStack Summit 2017 event kicked off today in Boston, MA, and Canonical's CEO Mark Shuttleworth was there to discuss the upcoming plans for Ubuntu on the desktop, cloud computing, and IoT (Internet of Things).
The Canonical and Ubuntu founder was interviewed there by theCUBE, who were very curious to know what is the state of Ubuntu Linux these days, now that Mark Shuttleworth shocked the Open Source community when he announced last month that development of the Unity interface is shut down, along with the convergence vision.
Mark Shuttleworth has reiterated that the Ubuntu desktop “remains really important” to Canonical.
He made the comments in an interview with The Cube at the OpenStack Summit 2017 taking place in the USA this week.
Asked to describe the current state of Ubuntu following last month’s announcement that Canonical is to end investment in Ubuntu Phone, Unity 8, convergence, the Ubuntu founder admitted that Ubuntu ‘failed’ to take Ubuntu mainstream in personal computing.
As you may have heard me mention in the latest episode of the Ubuntu Podcast, I’ve been ankle deep in GNOME extensions these past few weeks. Why? Well, like many of you I have made a preëmptive switch to GNOME Shell now that Unity is being left to the cobwebs.
At OpenStack Summit, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth revealed in an interview that the recent changes in the Linux and cloud power were to ready Canonical for an IPO.
In early April, Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu Linux was ending its " investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell." Ubuntu had long been a cloud power, and it's been building its Internet of Things (IoT) reputation. Soon thereafter, Canonical CEO Jane Silber announced she was stepping down and that Shuttleworth would return as CEO.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W was announced on February 28th. I started trying to get one as soon as I saw the announcement. I finally succeeded on May 3rd.
Those two months of delay and frustration say a lot about the overwhelming demand for the Raspberry Pi in general, and the Pi Zero models in particular, so I will start with a brief description of that before getting into the main hands-on portion of this post.
It appears that the OpenWRT and LEDE communities are about to vote on a proposal covering many of the details behind merging the two projects (which forked one year ago) back together. The plan appears to be to go forward with the OpenWRT name, but with the LEDE repository; domain names would be transferred to SPI.
Raspberry Digital Signage is an operating system designed for digital signage installations on the Raspberry Pi: it displays a full-screen browser view restricted to a specified (web) resource.
SiFive announced free downloads and tools for rapid evaluation of its “fully synthesizable” RISC-V based Coreplex E31 and E51 cores on a $99 FPGA dev board.
The 64-bit RISC-V ISA (instruction set architecture) was developed at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, and subsequently became the basis of a University of Cambridge sponsored lowRISC open-source SoC project in mid-2014.
We’ve told you in an earlier post that the Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) this year would bring a free device giveaway, but we didn’t have more information in place at the time. Now, a trusted source has provided an insider tip about the TDC: the free device giveaway prize for 2017 will be a Samsung Gear S3 smartwatch. As for whether the prize is the Gear S3 Frontier or Gear S3 Classic, we do not know – so you could be looking at an LTE-capable smartwatch (Gear S3 Frontier or Gear S3 Classic LTE) or a WiFi-only model (Gear S3 Classic, non-LTE), but the smart money is probably on the WiFi only model. There could be a choice involved with this free device giveaway, but we’ll have to wait for more details to confirm.
Images of Google's new operating system — which is being built from the ground-up and may power the next-generation of smart devices — recently surfaced online.
Google, never one to compete in a market with a single product, is apparently hard at work on a third operating system after Android and Chrome OS. This one is an open source, real-time OS called "Fuchsia." The OS first popped up in August last year, but back then it was just a command line. Now the mysterious project has a crazy new UI we can look at, so let's dive in.
Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux—it uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called "Magenta." With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0. Dumping Linux might come as a bit of a shock, but the Android ecosystem seems to have no desire to keep up with upstream Linux releases. Even the Google Pixel is still stuck on Linux Kernel 3.18, which was first released at the end of 2014.
Symphony, the Google-backed chat tool touted as the “Bloomberg Killer” has the backing of the vast majority of investment banks – Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Jefferies, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Nomura and Wells Fargo have all invested – and it now has big asset managers like BlackRock and Citadel.
While the secure cloud-based chat tool gets most of the headlines, there’s a sister, non-profit organisation called the Symphony Software Foundation, which promotes open-source software collaboration and is quietly capturing the attention of financial services organisations by uncovering coding talent. Gabriele Columbro, an executive director at the firm, says that open source development creates opportunities for developers that just wouldn’t be there otherwise.
Today’s software world is growing ever more cloudy and every more fragmented. We have myriad programming languages, numerous application platforms and services-oriented architectures (yes, but not the dusty ones of yesteryear!)
[...]
Composable infrastructure is right for this because, for instance, not every data store is right for every customer, he pointed out. And open-source is the source of many of these parts, he said. “Google uses open source to build critical parts of our infrastructure. Google Cloud is an extension of that. Developers will build their own tools using Python or Go… programming languages we invented that are the foundation for cloud computing around containers.”
Virtualisation has been a hot topic in telecommunications for nearly half a decade, and security concerns have remained an ever-present feature. This is not surprising given the extent to which NFV/SDN is transforming the industry and the many ‘known unknowns’ this entails.
As networks migrate from hardware to software, and ‘walled gardens’ turn into much more open cloud-like architectures, so security risks increase.
Throwing open source software development into the mix adds a further layer of complexity.
The Open Desktop Ratings service is a simple Flask web service that various software centers use to retrieve and submit application reviews. Today it processed the 3000th review, and I thought I should mark this occasion here. I wanted to give a huge thanks to all the people who have submitted reviews; you have made life easier for people unfamiliar with installing software much easier. There are reviews in over a hundred different languages and over 600 different applications have been reviewed.
As announced in a press release and blog post, the core database and its "associated visualization libraries" are available under the Apache 2.0 license. But enterprise-level features like the high availability, LDAP, ODBC, and horizontal scaling functionality—many of which debuted in the 3.0 version released earlier this month—will be kept close to the chest.
SAN JOSE, California —Although it’s not May 4, the annual day of celebration to honor the iconic “Star Wars” movie, it still seems fitting to talk about Sprint’s new open source project, called C3PO. Last week at the 2017 NFV World Congress, Sprint revealed it’s working with Intel on the open source project the companies believe will result in a more flexible and scalable 5G control plane. C3PO stands for CUPS [control and user plane separation] for packet optimization.
Dell's drive into open networking accelerated on Monday with the announcement of the first switches to ship with OS10, the company's network operating system that's based on open source.
At Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, the company introduced two data-center switches running OS10 Enterprise Edition, an enhanced version of the open-source OS that Dell announced early last year.
The software is based on technologies from the Linux Foundation and the Open Compute Project and is already available through an extended beta to customers who already have hardware. The Enterprise Edition is a complete software platform, including Dell's networking stack, but its open-source foundation means it can be extended with third-party software, said Jeff Baher, Dell EMC's executive director, networking.
ApacheCon North America is right around the corner. Everyone is looking forward to this year’s event May 16-18 in Miami. There’s plenty new to see, hear, and do this year but that’s not the only attraction for developers.
The annual conference of The Apache Software Foundation is where users and contributors meet face-to-face to collaborate on the next generation of cloud, Internet, and Big Data tech. The Apache community is huge and has upwards of 4500 committers. There is ample opportunity to meet MVPs and project heroes plus swap war stories with fellow developers in the trenches.
oSC17 is just around the corner, and if you want to be part of making it awesome you can now sign up to become a volunteer!
Volunteers are invaluable to conferences, and they play a major role in creating a pleasant conference atmosphere for attendees.
Kamailio World features a range of talks about developing and using SIP and telephony applications and offers many opportunities for SIP developers, WebRTC developers, network operators and users to interact. Wednesday, at midday, there is a Dangerous Demos session where cutting edge innovations will make their first (and potentially last) appearance.
[...]
On Saturday I'll be giving a workshop about the Debian Hams project and Software Defined Radio. On Sunday I'll give a talk about Free Real-time Communications (RTC) and the alternatives to systems like Skype, Whatsapp, Viber and Facebook.
Some of us remember when running any production workload on Linux was considered living dangerously. My, have times changed. Last week, I spent some time at the largest-yet Red Hat Summit, along with about 6,000 other attendees. All three big public cloud vendors had booths on the expo floor — in fact, Microsoft was a platinum sponsor. Cisco, HPE, IBM, Juniper, Oracle and other household names jockeyed for attention with the likes of Big Switch, Black Duck and NuoDB.
OpenStack Summit -- The OPNFV Project, an open source project that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing, today announced China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance, a 50+-member alliance focused on increasing the readiness of SDN/NFV, and Netscout, a leading provider of business assurance, have joined the project.
This is a final reminder: if you intend to apply for a DebConf17 bursary and have not yet done so, please proceed as soon as possible.
Bursary applications for DebConf17 will be accepted until May 10th at 23:59 UTC. Applications submitted after this deadline will not be considered.
The OpenStack Summit kicked off here today with multiple announcements and an emphasis on the evolution of the cloud deployment model.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said during his keynote that there has been a 44 percent year-over-year increase in the volume of OpenStack deployments, with OpenStack now running on more than 5 million compute cores around the world.
The OpenStack Foundation is on a mission to clear up a number of misconceptions about the open source cloud platform, particularly those pertaining to its often predicted demise.
The deadline for submitting refereed track proposals for the 2017 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) has been extended until May 13. "The refereed track will have 50-minute presentations on a specific aspect of Linux "plumbing" (e.g. core libraries, media creation/playback, display managers, init systems, kernel APIs/ABIs, etc.) that are chosen by the LPC committee to be given during all three days of the conference." LPC will be held September 13-15 in Los Angeles, CA.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) announced a EUR 25m funding of MariaDB, the company behind the fastest growing Open Source database, to support the company’s next stage of growth and database innovation. This EIB operation is guaranteed under the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), a key element of the European Commission’s Investment Plan for Europe, aiming at reviving investment in strategic projects around Europe.
MariaDB, a Menlo Park, California-based provider of the MariaDB open source database, raised €25m in funding.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) provided the funding, which is guaranteed under the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI).
The European Investment Bank (EIB) has given €25 million in funding to open source database provider, MariaDB.
This investment has been offered in order for MariaDB to increase its global client base as part of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), a long term plan drafted by the European Commission.
As open source database architecture continues to grow in popularity, one of the bigger developers in the area has picked up some funding to target the opportunity.
The European Investment Bank likes what it sees in MariaDB, putting €25m into the open source database for expected growth in the coming years.
The European Investment Bank’s (EIB) activities throughout the EU have proved quite interesting in recent years.
The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.2.7, the seventh minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family, targeted to enterprises and individual users in production environments.
When I was in late high school, which was in the early days of this blog, I had recently switched to Linux and was essentially an evangelist, singing its praises and loudly cursing the misdeeds of Microsoft with respect to the desktop market; many of my blog posts at that time were in that vein. In the nearly 8 years since then, I, my blog, Linux, Microsoft, and the consumer device market have all evolved and matured: I've become less evangelistic and more realistic about many things (or so I'd like to think), my blog has correspondingly shifted focus in various ways, Linux distributions have become less of a "wild west" than they were 8 years ago and have gained more support for popular things like proprietary video drivers and game platforms like Steam, Microsoft has been more open about supporting free and open-source software initiatives, and the consumer device market has shifted much more toward mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets which are very different from the desktops, laptops, and netbooks of 8 years ago (the latter of which doesn't really exist anymore as it once did). That said, I recently read a post on Slashdot (original article by Brian Fagioli of Betanews) about how Microsoft is locking the configuration settings for changing the default browser (Microsoft Edge) and search engine (Bing) choices in Windows 10 S, which is its version of Microsoft Windows 10 designed for lower-end hardware used in schools. For the sake of old times, I thought it might be nice to post about it, but hopefully with a bit more nuance than what I was capable of 8 years ago (and with the benefit of having seen the last 8 years of intervening technological development).
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Overall, I don't think Microsoft really has the leverage to ensure total dominance of its own web browser that it did 16 years ago. Too many ordinary consumers have moved onto other browsers and other platforms entirely. The default browser issue will only affect the rare cases of opening specific locally-hosted HTML and similar files, so for all other cases, users can put their preferred browser shortcut on the main screen or menu of Microsoft Windows 10. While it certainly pays to be vigilant about anticompetitive behavior and trends toward proprietary software, I don't see a need to hyperventilate like I might have 8 years ago.
Alan Kay, famed computer scientist, once said, "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." I'd argue that's as true today as it was in 1982 when he said it. However, what's changed between then and now is that hardware has gotten faster, smaller, and most importantly: cheaper. it's now possible to buy a full computer for $5.
With big companies driving down prices for their own products, it's grown a manufacturing ecosystem capable of producing production-grade hardware that's cheap enough and accessible enough that it is now within reach of normal individuals. This accessibility and affordability are helping drive things like crowdfunding and the maker movement, but they're also giving way to more individuals being able to participate in open source through open source hardware.
Oracle has hit out at IBM and Red Hat Middleware for their continued opposition to its proposed plan to make Java modular.
Mark Reinhold, Oracle’s Java Platform chief, has called IBM’s position on the Java 9 Module System (JPMS) "disappointing", "surprising" and a threat to Java.
IBM has suggested it will vote against the JPMS JSR that Reinhold leads – JSR 376. The result for the Community vote on JPMS is due to be announced on June 8.
Last week Azul Systems released a new version of its Zing runtime for Java. With the new version of Zing comes a new JIT compiler dubbed "Falcon" for offering faster Java performance.
UML (Unified Modeling Language)6 is the de facto standard for representing object-oriented designs. It does a fine job of recording designs, but it has a severe problem: its diagrams don't convey what humans need to know, making them hard to understand. This is why most software developers use UML only when forced to.1
For example, the UML diagrams in figures 1 and 2 portray the embedded software in a fax machine. While these diagrams are attractive, they don't even tell you which objects control which others. Which object is the topmost controller over this fax machine? You don't know. Which object(s) control the Modem object? You don't know.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report last week providing its estimate on the economic impact of the Canada – EU Trade Agreement. While the Liberal government made CETA its top trade priority when it came into office (and the Conservatives claimed that the deal would add $12 billion to the Canadian economy), the PBO report concludes that the economic benefits will be modest at best.
Back in March, Mike wrote about how Eli Lilly's demand for $500 million "compensation" from Canada for rejecting two of its patents was finally thrown out. This was a long-running story, and was widely-regarded as a crucial test. Had Eli Lilly won, people suggested, it would have opened the floodgates for many such corporate sovereignty claims. Some also claimed that Eli Lilly's defeat showed what is officially known as the "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS) system was actually working well, and needed neither abolishing nor tweaking.
More than 8,000 Flint residents received notices from the city threatening to impose tax liens for six months' worth of unpaid water bills, a local NBC affiliate reported on Tuesday.
City officials say that they have no choice but to take the strong measures. The state of Michigan stopped subsidising Flint's water in March after the state Department of Environmental Quality found Flint's lead levels tested within federal limits. That subsidy paid $40m to pay for roughly two-thirds of the residents' water bills.
CloudLinux's Mykola Naugolnyi announced today the availability of new stable kernels for the CloudLinux 7, CloudLinux 6, and CloudLinux 6 Hybrid operating systems.
The updated kernel is available for download right now from the production repository of the CloudLinux 7, CloudLinux 6 Hybrid, and CloudLinux 6 operating systems, versioned 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.47. It replaces kernel 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.44 on CloudLinux 7 and Hybrid, as well as kernel 2.6.32-673.26.1.lve1.4.25 on CloudLinux 6.
Hackers compromised a download server for a popular DVD-ripping software named HandBrake and used it to push stealthy malware that stole victims' password keychains, password vaults, and possibly the master credentials that decrypted them, security researchers said Monday.
Google's OSS-Fuzz bug-hunting robot has been hard at work, and in recent months, over 1,000 bugs have been exposed.
According to Chrome Security engineers Oliver Chang and Abhishek Arya, software engineer Kostya Serebryany and Google Security program manager Josh Armour, the OSS-Fuzz bot has been scouring the web over the past five months in the pursuit of security vulnerabilities which can be exploited.
Tunisian media and human rights activist Sami Ben Gharbia was interrogated for six hours on May 3 by Tunisian authorities who asked him about his role in the release of the presidency's action plan on a controversial economic reconciliation draft law.
Upon his arrival at the Central Investigation Brigade of the National Guard in L’Aouina, Ben Gharbia was primarily questioned about the source of the Presidency of the Republic’s leaked action plan lobbying in the law's favor. He was also questioned extensively about the inner workings of Nawaat, the Tunisian independent media and transparency NGO that he co-founded in 2004.
The multimillion-pound support is part of €£5.3bn (€6.3bn) given to the coal industry every year by 10 European countries, which account for 84 per cent of the continent’s carbon dioxide emissions, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) said.
On Monday, the company confirmed it employed staff, “whose role it is to help politicians and governments make good use of Facebook”.`
As if we needed another reason to want the legacy media to die screaming all alone in an ill-reputed nursing home, National Public Radio has just added one more to the planet-sized pile. NPR, which just Wednesday released an anti-WikiLeaks attack editorial disguised as a movie review, has made a deliberate attempt to tarnish WikiLeaks’ 100% perfect record of authentic and accurately-vetted releases by going out of its way to report that the publishing organization had posted nine gigabytes of partially inauthentic documents.
The case - brought by Austria's Green party over insults to its leader - has international ramifications as the court ruled the postings must be deleted across the platform and not just in Austria, a point that had been left open in an initial ruling.
About a year and a half ago, we wrote about how the new European "General Data Protection Regulation" (GDPR) was potentially very problematic for free speech. That is, well-meaning "data protection" folks wrote up the GDPR, but it appears they did so with little thought towards what the impact might be on free speech. So, specifcally, when they include something like a right to "erasure" for certain information, you can understand, from a privacy standpoint why people may want certain data and information to be deleted from certain databases. But bring that over to the open web, rather than private databases, and you're talking about a censorship tool around a "right to be forgotten" system.
To deal with this kind of potential problem, rather than doing the smart thing and fixing and clarifying the GDPR, Europe has left things up to each member country to try to sort things out on their own, and to explore how to set their own data protection rules in a manner that will obey the GDPR but also avoid stomping out free expression. Unfortunately, it's unclear that many of the states are taking that balancing act very seriously. The UK quietly put up a comments request with all answers due by this Wednesday (and, of course, by the time this all gets sorted out, who's to say if the UK will even still be in the EU... but...).
Helen Lovejoy’s signature Simpsons line can now be used to accurately summarise the latest developments to the government’s Digital Economy Bill. The proposed legislation, which was first introduced to Parliament in July, has always aimed to enforce age verification on pornographic websites so that they cannot be accessed by children under the age of 18. On Sunday, however, new measures were announced; all websites that do not implement age verification will be banned in the UK.
“The government is committed to keeping children safe from harmful pornographic content online and that is exactly what we are doing,” said Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. “Only adults should be allowed to view such content.” The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has been appointed to enforce these measures.
Network operator Cloudflare came under fire last week from ProPublica, which wrote a lengthy article arguing that the Internet company "helps serve up hate on the Web." According to ProPublica, Cloudflare does this by providing service to any website operator and failing to provide anonymity to people who complain about racist or otherwise abusive online content.
In response, Cloudflare has changed its abuse-reporting system to allow for anonymous complaints. But the company says it still has no intention of taking steps that it says would effectively censor the Internet.
China certainly has the resources to complete this huge project by 2018, its planned launch date. And once those 300,000 entries are available to "guide and lead the public," it's hard not to think that accessing the rival Wikipedia will be made so hard that most people will give up trying, and stick with the new Chinese Encyclopedia. At that point, the Chinese authorities will indeed have created a "Great Wall of culture" to complement that Great Firewall of China, both designed to keep out all those inconvenient ideas.
I’ve renewed my subscription to Private Internet Access, and intend to continue using the service indefinitely.
The problem with swearing on a stack of FBI statements is these assertions are completely meaningless. The FBI's a well-oiled terrorist-crafting machine at this point, so it can come up with whatever number of ISIS-linked plots is needed to further the agenda of multiple government agencies.
As for "open terrorism investigations," it would be much more helpful if the FBI didn't term nearly everything it does an "investigation," even when there's nothing worth investigating. As we've covered here before, there are a few different types of investigations the FBI engages in, starting with something that looks a whole lot like an investigation (in terms of information the FBI can obtain), but really isn't. These "investigations" are called assessments, and it takes almost nothing at all to get one of these underway. Emily Hockett and Michael German of Just Security explain how the guidelines for assessments changed radically after the passage of the FISA Amendments Act in 2008.
During the past two years, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has targeted ever larger numbers of travelers' smartphones and laptops for searches as they cross the border into the country.
U.S. courts have generally upheld a so-called border search exception to the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, allowing CBP to search electronic devices without a court-ordered warrant. In April, a group of lawmakers introduced legislation to require warrants to search devices owned by U.S. citizens and other legal residents, but for now, the law allows for warrantless device searches.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court will meet privately to discuss the controversial privacy question of whether the authorities need a court warrant to force mobile phone companies to divulge their customers' cell site data. This data shows where you were (according to a cell tower) and when you made a call. This information can paint a canvas of one's whereabouts, yet it's not constitutionally protected material because it's viewed as an ordinary business record held by the telcos. Courts have largely interpreted this to mean that the authorities can get the data without probable-cause court warrants.
Every relationship has its rough edges, places where actions scrape, and through constant repetition, rub raw. Those tender spots can heal if left alone and if the parties are wiling to listen. But where the irritation continues, this raw spot becomes a wound that never closes, forcing a choice between continuing pain and a painful separation.
It all began so promisingly with Facebook. Back in 2007 it presented itself as the social calendar of America’s elite universities. That Ivy League allure made it irresistible to the students at America’s second-and-third-tier colleges, so as Facebook lowered its velvet rope, millions, then tens of millions crowded in.
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Yet Netscape (and Microsoft, which eventually triumphed against the upstart) never provided the server infrastructure to host those pages - a skill far beyond the average Web surfer. So the promise of a Web built by everyone for everyone got lost in the rush to a commercial Web favouring browsing and buying over creating and sharing.
When Facebook came along, offering a free and easy-to-use outlet for a decade’s pent-up demand to share, of course we leapt at it, signing on the dotted line without bothering to read the fine print. The devil’s in those details.
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People have to be convinced of the need to change before they’ll move on. But if what we know now is insufficient to inspire a transition away from Facebook, what will it take?
Someone I know recently packed all of his earthly belongings into his sedan, then shared the photo. Sixteen years of marriage had ended, and he had to begin again. Although he felt sad and lonely, things could not go on as they had, and he took this for a new beginning, a time to heal old wounds. We can change, he seemed to be saying. We just have to be willing to try.
Politicians and electioneers are betting big that at this general election, your data is going to be more important than ever when it comes to swaying your vote in their favour.
We are undoubtedly well into the “big data” age. The amount of information we create and make available about our daily lives is growing exponentially. Businesses, governments and other organisations are becoming increasingly adept at analysing it to learn about us, predict our behaviour and sell us things.
Don't listen to the telecom lobby. Congress' vote to repeal the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) broadband privacy rules has a profound impact on your online privacy rights.
According to those who supported the repeal, the rules never took effect (they were scheduled to do so throughout 2017), so the repeal doesn't change anything. You hear it from the likes of AT&T as well as lawmakers like Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), the author of the legislation who was asked about it at a recent town hall. You are hearing it now in state legislatures that are working diligently to fix the gap Congress created.
But that argument is meant to distract you from the real issue - you had a legal right to privacy from your broadband provider, and when Congress repealed the broadband privacy rules using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), Congress diminished that right and may have hamstrung the FCC from enforcing it in the future.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Sen. Joel Anderson (R-Alpine) have introduced a California bill to protect drivers’ privacy by allowing them to cover their license plates while parked to avoid being photographed by automated license plate readers (ALPRs).
The legislation will be considered by the California Senate Transportation and Housing Committee on Tuesday, May 9, 2017. EFF Investigative Researcher Dave Maass will testify as a witness in support of the bill.
Police should not have unilateral power to decide which privacy invasions are in the public interest.
If the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a San Diego-based Republican state senator have their way, it will soon become legal for Californians to cover their license plates while parked, as a way to thwart automated license plate readers.
Those devices, now commonly in use by law enforcement nationwide, can capture license plates at a very high rate of speed, as well as record the GPS location, date, and time that a particular plate is seen. Those plates are then run against a "hot list" of stolen or wanted cars, and a cop is then alerted to the presence of any vehicle with match on that list.
Oakland could become the next community in California to adopt an open and rigorous vetting process for police surveillance technology.
All too often, government executives unilaterally decide to adopt powerful new surveillance technologies that invade our privacy, chill our free speech, and unfairly burden communities of color. These intrusive and proliferating tools of street-level surveillance include drones, cell-site simulators, surveillance cameras, and automated license plate readers.
Remember: We don’t know much at this stage, so this post has a lot of assumptions.
Two separate bills submitted to parliament last month include measures such as linking accounts to users’ national identification numbers to create a user database, charging registration fees when signing up for accounts, and establishing an Egypt-only Facebook-style platform.
The department, in a notice published Thursday in the Federal Register, said it was seeking public comment on the requirement. But it also said it is requesting a temporary go-ahead from the White House budget office so the plan can take effect for 180 days, beginning May 18, regardless of those comments.
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Affected applicants would have to provide their social media handles and platforms used during the previous five years, and divulge all phone numbers and email addresses used during that period. U.S. consular officials would not seek social media passwords, and would not try to breach any privacy controls on applicants' accounts, according to the department's notice.
Governor 'Ahok' Purnama had said people were being deceived if they believed the Quran forbids Muslims from voting for non-Muslims
The Italian Ambassador to Nigeria, Fulvio Rustico, says his country is ready to partner with Nigeria to combat the menace of human trafficking.
In an open letter released on Wednesday, the human rights group said Ottawa must “renew and intensify efforts” to push Riyadh to free Badawi, who was arrested almost five years ago, on 17 June 2012.
The trio is charged with multiple crimes stemming from violation of that law, as well as claims they made false statement and attempted to tamper with witnesses during the investigation.
As director of the Pacific Media Centre taking part in the Southeast Asian Consultative Roundtable on a Special Mechanism for the Protection of Safety of Journalists, I raised a plenary question about the “silence” over West Papua violations and got an informative answer from Atnike Sigiro of Forum Asia.
But then back to the silence.
In California, the future of criminal case management is now. But the future appears to be broken, and "now" is looking much worse than the recent past. Odyssey is the state's buggy new case management software -- one that's been keeping people from being released, putting people with dismissed charges in jail, and otherwise making the criminal justice system even more horrible than usual. Tyler Technologies, the creator of the software, has called this transition "challenging." (It's also called this rolling cockup a "transition," so…)
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At this point, being booked in Alameda County is to be forcibly subjected to a malfunctioning criminal justice slot machine. Maybe it will pay off for a few people, but the odds are still on the house. A system that's already largely broken doesn't need assistance from outside vendors' buggy software.
Seventy-five years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. While the order avoided naming any particular ethnic group, the president and his advisers intended it to target Japanese-Americans. Military officials “evacuated” Americans of Japanese ancestry to “relocation centers.” One hundred and twenty thousand men, women, and children had just days to divest themselves of all they owned — their homes, farms, and businesses — and take only what they could carry to far-flung prison camps from Arkansas to California. For years afterward, people like my grandmother Bette Takei (née Sato), were forced to live behind barbed wire, under the gaze of armed guards.
A shocking video shows a man body slamming an elderly woman to the ground before hurling her into a swimming pool.
The unidentified woman, who was walking her two dogs, appeared to be asking a group of pool party-goers to turn down their music.
As she approaches the group of people, who are believed to be in their late teens or early 20s, a woman is heard in the background yelling: 'Throw her in!'
Taser Inc.'s quiet takeover of evidence generation and storage -- through extensive body camera offerings -- was put on public display when the company rebranded as Axon. The company was willing to give away cameras in exchange for something far more lucrative: software licensing and footage access fees in perpetuity.
Axon even nailed down a choice URL: Evidence.com. This is the portal to law enforcement body camera footage stored in Axon's cloud -- the real moneymaker for Axon. The cameras are just the gateway drug.
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The EULA may be boilerplate, but the situation is anything but normal. Horowitz doesn't care much for the fact that Axon's storage of court records and discovery documents is controlled solely by Axon by forcing users to waive a great deal of their rights in exchange for access.
There's no shortage of existing laws protecting law enforcement officers. So, of course, there's no shortage of new legislation being introduced to further protect a well-protected subset of government employees. Using a nonexistent "War on Cops" as impetus, legislators all over the nation are submitting bills designed to make harming a cop more of a crime than harming anyone else.
This isn't just happening at the state level. Last year, Colorado representative Ken Buck introduced a federal "Blue Lives Matter" law, which would have turned attacks on cops into "hate crimes." The bill is a ridiculous extension of protection to officers who aren't in any more danger than they were a decade ago, histrionic statements by various federal officials notwithstanding.
Comedian John Oliver has once again asked his viewers to fight on behalf of net neutrality, and the Federal Communications Commission website wasn't able to handle the immediate influx of angry comments.
On HBO's Last Week Tonight, Oliver yesterday announced a new URL, gofccyourself.com, that redirects to the FCC proposal to eliminate net neutrality rules. (Clicking "Express" is the easiest way to submit a comment.) The comments website promptly crashed, making it difficult or impossible to file comments last night and this morning. The comments site has started working, but only intermittently.
Back in 2014, you might recall that John Oliver's HBO show "Last Week tonight" aired an outstanding piece on net neutrality. In it, Oliver compared then FCC boss Tom Wheeler to a dingo, explained why a neutral internet was important, and trashed much of the flimsy logic giant ISPs like Comcast use to consistently justify anti-competitive behavior. The piece was so immensely successful at explaining an incredibly complicated and relatively wonky subject, it drove a record number of annoyed consumers to the FCC commenting website -- where they demanded the FCC step up and defend the open internet.
On Sunday, protesters from the Protect Our Internet campaign went around Pai’s neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, and distributed door hangers at nearby homes, prompting people to be aware of their neighbor’s efforts to limit internet freedom. The flyers feature a black-and-white photo of Pai, along with a short description of the chairman’s background and how his proposal would roll back open internet rules.
The net neutrality fight is unfortunately back, and just as he did three years ago, comedian John Oliver has devoted a segment of his show Last Week Tonight to call out the importance of the open internet and encourage viewers to comment on the new proposed rules.
It's no secret that big cable companies don't like to compete against each other, as it's more profitable to be the only company in town than to build networks in places already dominated by another cable provider.
Oracle voiced support on Friday for Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai’s controversial plan to roll back the agency's net neutrality rules.
The February 2015 milestone was a major victory for those who believe the Internet is a global public resource that belongs to all users, not select corporations. The order meant individuals were free to say, watch and make what they want online, without meddling or interference from Internet service providers. It was good news for business owners, web developers, entrepreneurs and anyone who streams, clicks and creates content online.
UK tabloids including The Mirror, Daily Mail, The Sun and The Express are reporting that people watching Kodi streams risk ten years in jail. Despite that being a false claim spawned from a click-bait agenda, dozens of other publications sadly followed up by reporting the same 'news'. Today, the Sunday Express upped the stakes by reporting that TorrentFreak readers could be going to prison too.
This week EFF is in Geneva, at the Thirty-Fourth session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), to oppose a Broadcasting Treaty that could limit the use of video online. Ahead of this meeting, word was that delegations would be pushing hard to have a diplomatic conference to finalize the treaty scheduled at WIPO's October Assembly. In combination with initial uncertainty about whether the new United States administration would be maintaining its opposition to a diplomatic conference, we knew that it was important for EFF to be there to speak up for users.
The Broadcasting Treaty proposal simply doesn't make sense. It proposes to create a new layer of rights over material that has been broadcast over the air or over cable, in addition to any underlying copyrights over such material. Such rights would increase the cost and complexity of licensing broadcast content for use online, and create new and artificial barriers to the reuse of material that isn't protected by copyright at all, such as governmental and public domain works.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Dancing Baby" copyright case has been going on for nearly a decade now in one way or another, and its last stop will be the US Supreme Court.
On Thursday, though, the US solicitor general and the US Copyright Office recommended against the court taking the case. That increases the chances the 9th Circuit ruling from last year, which was a mixed bag from EFF's point of view, will stand and remain law.
"The court of appeals correctly held that liability under the DMCA requires actual knowledge or willful blindness," state the government lawyers in their brief (PDF).
The Appeals Court has denied a request from former Megaupload user Kyle Goodwin to intervene on his behalf. The sports videographer has been trying to get his files back for years and hoped to force a decision from the District Court, but this has proven unsuccessful. As a result, his files will remain under lock and key.
One of the tactics employed by ABS-CBN is targeting the domains of ‘pirate’ sites. On several occasions, the TV outfit has found courts willing to step in with ex parte orders, based on allegations of copyright and trademark infringement.