Finally, I think it’s worth pointing out that Linux is not a product, it’s a community. Windows and Mac people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that. They’re used to venting frustration at Microsoft and Apple. If they do that in a Linux forum, they will most likely get flamed. It’s important to understand that attacking Linux is like attacking the entire community. Is Linux perfect? Hell no! Is there much room for improvement? Absolutely! How you present your critiques and/or ask for help makes all the difference in the world. I have found that a positive and constructive attitude goes a long, long way. I have had developers bend over backward to help me with a problem or point me to an alternative solution just because I came to them with respect and didn’t point fingers.
Distrohopping is a term some like to use for switching from one GNU/Linux distribution to another frequently, rather than sticking to one system. I’m no stranger to this, I’ve installed nearly every major and popularly known system you’ll come across – twice.
However, through my time trying all of these various distributions, I’ve learned a great deal and finally settled (I think) upon where I plan to stay, so I thought I’d share some tips for picking your long-term system, as well as some ideas depending on what you enjoy.
Privacy is an issue on many people’s minds these days, including those that run Linux on their computers. Linux has long had a strong reputation as a secure operating system, but there are still things that you can do to help protect your privacy while running Linux.
If you thought HPE was getting out of the cloud business, I couldn't blame you. In late 2015, HPE gave up on its public OpenStack-based Helion cloud. Then, early this year, all of HPE's OpenStack developers moved over to SUSE. So, was HPE bidding the cloud, and OpenStack in particular, goodbye? Nope.
In Boston this week at OpenStack Summit, HPE released HPE Helion OpenStack 5.0. This release Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based cloud is built on the OpenStack Newton codebase and adheres tightly to application programming interface (API) standards and services. Since OpenStack's open APIs are an important part of why it's popular with so many companies, that's no small matter.
The cloud is a central pillar of Cisco's overall business efforts, and one of the leading voices for the cloud at Cisco is Lew Tucker, vice president and CTO of cloud computing. Tucker also serves as the vice chairman of the OpenStack Foundation, helping to guide the open-source cloud platform forward.
The metric we all use for CPU utilization is deeply misleading, and getting worse every year. What is CPU utilization? How busy your processors are? No, that's not what it measures. Yes, I'm talking about the "%CPU" metric used everywhere, by everyone. In every performance monitoring product. In top(1).
The Linux Foundation is looking to boost access to real-time analytics with the adoption of the former Open Border Gateway Monitoring Protocol (OpenBMP) platform into the open source community under the new SNAS.io (Streaming Network Analytics System) initiative.
The Open BGP Monitoring Protocol (OpenBMP) collection framework is now being renamed and brought to the Linux Foundation as a new project known as snas.io.
The OpenBMP project defined itself as an open source implementation of the draft-ietf-grow-bmp-17 protocol. BMP is a protocol to monitor BGP sessions.
"BMP is intended to provide a convenient interface for obtaining route views," the IETF draft states. "The design goals are to keep BMP simple, useful, easily implemented, and minimally service-affecting. BMP is not suitable for use as a routing protocol."
Snas.io, a project that provides network routing topologies for software-defined applications, has joined the Linux Foundation.
The Snas.io project helps track and analyze network routing topology data in real time for those that are using border gateway protocol (BGP) as a control protocol, internet service providers, large enterprises, and enterprise data center networks using EVPS.
The kbuild updates for the Linux kernel aren't usually noteworthy but at least this time does bring a few LLVM/Clang related changes.
The Kbuild updates for Linux 4.12 does bring a patch from the LLVMLinux crew that continue working on being able to build the kernel under LLVM Clang as an alternative to GCC. Additionally, there is support to generate LLVM Assembly files. Aside from that, the pull request has other basic fixes/improvements but nothing too dramatic.
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang used the company's GPU Technology Conference to today announce the Volta V100 accelerator for data centers and HPC workloads.
The V100 as the first Volta-based graphics processor is quite a workhorse. The GV100 GPU has 21.1 billion transistors on a 815 mm2 die. The GV100 is manufactured on a 12nm TSMC process and adds on many features over the Pascal-based GP100. In some deep learning workloads, the V100 can be 2.4~3.7x faster than the already mighty powerful GP100.
Alex Deucher of AMD has posted the initial AMDGPU DRM/KMS kernel driver patches for bringing up graphics on the next-generation "Raven" APUs.
Collabora's Emil Velikov just announced a few moments ago the official availability of Mesa 17.1 as the latest stable and most advanced branch of the open-source graphics stack used by default in numerous Linux-based operating systems.
Mesa 17.1 is a massive update that introduces numerous improvements for almost all supported open source graphics drivers, including Intel i965, RadeonSI, as well as RADV and ANV Vulkan drivers.
We recently found AMD Vega 10 as well as Polaris 12 code in Linux drivers and now we have found hints of AMD Vega dual-GPU graphics cards in the drivers as well. We have been following leaks regarding AMD Vega for some time now and although it was speculated that there would indeed be a liquid cooled version, we did not see an AMD Vega dual-GPU in the works and this is surprising.
It is not the first time that a set of Linux drivers reveal a thing or two about unannounced products. In the latest leak they now indicate the existence of a liquid cooled Vega, which we already knew but also a dual-GPU version.
There’s a number of things that come to mind though, AMD might be pursuing a new Radeon Pro based dual-GPU product, but the existence of these entries in the drivers are interesting.
AMD employee and Mesa developer Marek Olšák is at it again, proposing a series of patches that would boost performance for AMD GPUs running the open drivers.
I had this lying around for some time but realized I never really announced it on the ML, so here it is!
Westfield is a new independent project that provides a Wayland protocol XML parser and generator for JavaScript.
Developer Erik De Rijcke announced Westfield as a "nearly fully compatible on the wire with the existing libwayland implementation", but libwayland is for C while Westfield is for JavaScript on client-side and Java server-side. Communication with Westfield is done using WebSockets.
The 2017 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (NVIDIA GTC) kicked off May 8 with a talk by Rama Hoetzlein, NVIDIA lead architect for GVDB Voxels. NVIDIA GDVB Voxels is a new open-source software development kit for generic representation, computation, and rendering of voxel-based data.
Last night well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olsak released a new patch series threading Gallium3D's pipe_context and initially is suitable for the RadeonSI driver. Given the performance gains he mentioned in the patch series, I was anxious to try out this new Gallium3D threading capability.
NetworkManager 1.8 is now available as the latest version of this widely-used network management component to Linux systems.
NetworkManager, the open-source network management tool used by default in numerous GNU/Linux distributions for allowing users to connection to various wired, wireless or mobile network connections, was updated to version 1.8.0.
NetworkManager 1.8 is a major release that introduces numerous improvements and new features over the NetworkManager 1.6 series. Prominent ones include more flexible configurations for hostname management, as well as support for more route options like mtu, lock-mtu, initrwnd, lock-initrwnd, cwnd, lock-cwnd, tos, window, lock-window, pref-src, src, initcwnd, and lock-initcwnd.
Three and a half months (and some 700+ commits) after NetworkManager 1.6, we’re pleased to announce NetworkManager 1.8 is ready. This release is generally focused on fixing bugs and addressing usability annoyances, yet it delivers some new features as well. Let’s have a look!
Version 2.3.2 has been released this evening, and it addresses a few big issues.
OpenShot 2.3.2 fixes a crash during undo/redo operations, another crash was fixed with the transform tool, better libopenshot version handling, a smaller package size, and a variety of other fixes.
A new release of the open-source video editor OpenShot is available to download. The update fixes 'a few big issues', according to its developer.
Are you a blogger? If so you may be interested to know that the open-source WordPress desktop app is now available as a Snap app. Released on Linux...
Canonical's David Callé is informing the Ubuntu community today that the Atom open-source and cross-platform hackable text editor loved by numerous developers can now be installed in Ubuntu Linux as a Snap.
Mark Shuttleworth promised to focus on advancing the develop of the Snappy technologies, which allow user to install Snap packages across multiple Linux-based operating systems, so we should see more and more popular apps packaged as Snaps.
Text editors aren't just something developers use to crank out code. Writers use them, too. A good text editor enables writers to focus on their words, but also packs other features that help them craft and publish their work more efficiently.
While popular among the techies, GitHub's Atom text editor has evolved into a solid editor for writers, too. That's thanks to Atom's 6,100+ packages, which greatly extend the editor's capabilities.
Let's look at three types of packages for the Atom text editor that writers of all stripes will find useful.
A big update to VidCutter, an open-source video trim, split and merge app, is available to download. VidCutter is a cross-platform Qt5 app for quick video trimming/splitting and merging video clips without the need to re-encode. The app is powered by FFmpeg, which available on almost all major Linux distributions.
Opera Software has announced that its desktop browser has been 'Reborn' with built-in Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp integration.
With its top-down fast action, Mantis Burn Racing [Official Site] looks like a fun game to play. Its developers have indicated they are open to a Linux port, so make your voices heard if you're interested.
If you’ve ever wanted to pretend you’re a wolf and try to survive out in the wild, then you’re in luck. WolfQuest [Official Site, Steam] allows you to do all that and more.
Limit Theory is one of those ambitious games where you can explore, trade and fight in a vast and beautiful environment. It’s taken a very long time for the game to be made but all the while the developer has kept with regular progress reports. The latest post speaks of quite a few technical hurdles they had to clear but also shows off a rather pretty gallery of images and effects that they’ve been able to manage after implementing fancier graphical tricks. You can see the results for yourself here, and they’re very encouraging.
Grab it for free now here, you have 1 day and ~22 hours left to redeem it. Once redeemed, you then also have a limited time to actually use the Steam key before it vanishes, with mine giving me 15 days.
It seems my last article about The Culling [Steam] got noticed by the developer, who reached out to me to confirm their commitment to Linux and they do plan to fix it.
After many, many delays and broken promises for a Linux beta, there has been some database activity that shows that just maybe Cossacks 3 [Official Site] will finally be on Linux sooner rather than later.
Developers looking to add GUIs to their embedded devices have a variety of open source and commercial options, with Qt generally leading the list. If you’re operating in severely constrained environments, however, especially for battery powered devices like wearables, the open source Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) should be given close consideration.
At the recent Embedded Linux Conference, Cedric Bail, a long-time contributor to the Enlightenment project who works on EFL integration with Tizen at Samsung Open Source Group, discussed some of the lessons learned in optimizing wearable apps for low battery, memory, and CPU usage. Bail summarized EFL and revealed an ongoing project to improve EFL’s scene graph. However, most of the lessons are relevant to anyone optimizing for wearables on any platform (see the ELC video below).
This year, KDE had great student engagement and a good level of commitment for all students so even if you followed all of these points, you may still have gotten a rejection email. We realize that this can be discouraging. However, we did our best to pick the students whom we think can fulfill the project's needs, and continue along in the future as KDE developers.
GNOME 3.24.2 is now available as the second and last planned point release to the GNOME 3.24 desktop series until the GNOME 3.26 debut in September.
As usual for GNOME point releases, GNOME 3.24.2 just includes bug/regression fixes and translation updates.
GNOME 3.24.2 has been released. The second stable update to GNOME 3.24 brings many bug fixes and translation updates. All distributions shipping GNOME 3.24 should upgrade.
Every now and then we let you in on some of the finest theme and icon sets because, like many other Linux users, we like to personalize our workstations. An appealing icon set, a well-thought out wallpaper, and an overall artillery of UI components go a long way to defining how well you enjoy using your computer.
If you’re like me but are discouraged by the stress of having to download all those themes you shouldn’t be any longer because I have come across a script that will fetch you over 10 beautiful GTK themes and all you have to do is query Git to get the script and then run it.
3.24.2 was just released and right before the release a nasty crash-on-exit bug appeared. Actually, the bug has been in there ever since Maps gained the ability to show your contact€´s addresses from GNOME Calendar/Evolution, but it was brought into daylight by the new version of GJS (our JavaScript engine, based on SpiderMonkey). The problem actually is that in the dispose vfunc of the ContactStore object (this is in our glue C code) we had forgotten to NULL out some pointer memebers when freeing the objects (with g_list_free and g_free) and dispose can be called multiple times and we probably got away before because GJS leaked these objects in the earlier versions. We got this bug report from Ubuntu by the way, in 17.04 the new version of GJS is already used. Thanks to Emmanuele Bassi for spotting this use-after-free bug, this is now fixed in the new version (and in master of course).
The fast moving Solus Project that is making some waves in the Linux distribution world has some new shiny things going on. Joshua Strobl, Solus Project Communications Manager has announced them in the latest This Week In Solus.
What’s that? – You might ask. Just have a look yourself. Click on the newly added ‘New image’ link on the OBS front page.
Worried about downtimes and maintenance windows of openSUSE services that you missed because there was no information provided? ;-)
Now is your chance to get informed about any (un-)expected downtime of any openSUSE service!
The openSUSE Heroes team is pleased to announce that status.opensuse.org is up and running as public status page, providing you with the latest updates about our infrastructure. We tried our best to get the page mobile friendly and easy to understand. Even RSS and Atom feeds are available. A big “thank you” to the team from Cachet, the open source status page system, for developing that great tool.
Oracle Chief Java Architect Mark Reinhold has lashed out at Red Hat, IBM for their declaration that they will cast an “explicit vote against” Java Specification Request (JSR).
Java Development Kit 9 had its planned release for July 27. However, with the latest turns of events, it is leading to speculations that the decision might delay the release of Java 9 beyond July.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the 14th annual Red Hat Summit will take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, May 8 - 10, 2018. Every year, Red Hat Summit brings together thousands of industry leaders, open source contributors, and Red Hat customers and partners, for a high-energy week of innovation, education, and collaboration focused on the future of enterprise technology.
Red Hat‘s (NYSE: RHT) OpenStack platform will work to facilitate cloud services at the Energy Department‘s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in support of scientific and computational research projects, ExecutiveBiz reported Tuesday.
The platform, in collaboration with Red Hat, K.K, a subsidiary of Red Hat, includes infrastructure and IaaS, and can operate with multiple types of systems.
Around a year and a half ago, Red Hat Inc. was tapped by its strategic advisory board to create a program that would demonstrate Red Hat’s methods of software building and implementation. The resulting Open Innovation Labs program has since partnered with a total of 12 organizations worldwide, on two continents.
The Energy Department‘s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has deployed Red Hat‘s cloud platform within the laboratory’s compute and data infrastructure to support scientific and computational research projects at ORNL.
In the coming year, open-source proponents anticipate that the worlds of containers, container orchestration and the dynamic infrastructure services underneath will all start to merge and work together.
“We have two powerful platforms [OpenStack and OpenShift] to solve problems, and we’ve moving them closer and closer together,” said Paul Cormier (pictured, right), president of products and technology, Red Hat Software, at Red Hat Inc.
This is the first entry written in English in my blog. I will allocate some ideas about Linux, Community and, more than anything, about Fedora.
I want to thank the Fedora Community to let me be part of this great project.
We in the Respins SIG are pleased to mention the latest series of Updated Live Respins carrying the 4.10.14-200 Kernel which IS patched for CVE2017-7895 [[rhsa]]. These respins use the livemedia-creator tool packaged in the default fedora repo and following the guide here as well as using the scripts located here.
The main aspect of the release is movement of several plugins from dnf-plugins-extras to dnf-plugins-core that became a part of core package or a separate sub-package. The release also provides new dnf option --enableplugin= , new option --userinstalled for REPOQUERY, and enables auto-detection of releasever from host if --releasever=/ is used. Additionally it fixes over 14 bugs in whole DNF stack, like a performance issue of VERSIONLOCK plugin, and added progress bar for download packages from command-line. For complete list of changes see DNF, DNF-PLUGINS-CORE and DNF-PLUGINS-EXTRAS release notes.
Corebird, a popular GTK Twitter client for Linux, is now available to install as a Snap app. At the time of writing this is not the latest Corebird 1.5, released last week, but the older Corebird 1.4.x release.
Ubuntu is working to improve the appearance of the Ubuntu Ambiance theme on GNOME Shell, adding window shadows, round corners and more.
Linux Mint’s Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Cinnamon 3.4, the latest stable update to the rather popular Linux desktop environment. Better yet you can already upgrade to or install Cinnamon 3.4 on Ubuntu using a PPA — no waiting required!
A couple of months ago we posted a blog inviting developers to contribute to the 3rd Eclipse Foundation IoT Developer Survey. The 2017 results are now published with a total of 713 respondents, from all over the world. The survey gives an insight into the current state of play in the making of the internet of things in 2017. As well as bigger trends about IoT adoption across various industries, the survey also provides a developer perspective on the methods they use today to build the IoT devices and solutions around us.
The official Ubuntu 17.04 ‘Zesty Zapus’ t-shirt is now available to buy from the Canonical store. Canonical release a new mascot tee twice a year. Each shirt bears the animal motif of the latest release on the front, and the name of the release and Ubuntu logotype on the rear.
Last month, it finally happened. Six years after its tumultuous switch from GNOME 2 to the homegrown Unity desktop, Canonical announced it was abandoning work on Unity. Going forward, the company will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME beginning with next year's 18.04 LTS release. This means Canonical is also abandoning the development of the Mir display server and its unified interface of Ubuntu for phones and tablets. The company's vision of "convergence," as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth termed it, has officially died.
We ask the person sitting across the table from us what it’s like to work at Canonical and they stare at their drink for a while contemplating the question: “Most companies purely want to make money,” says the Canonical employee, who we’ll call ‘DeepC’ as they want to remain anonymous. “Whereas I feel, in Canonical it’s been almost like… ‘play thing’ is the wrong word, but it’s kind of like a sandbox of ideas.”
The exciting and sometimes frustrating Canonical sandbox has lost a lot of its buckets and spades in the last month. The company that financially backs the Ubuntu distribution, which is used by tens of millions of Linux users, is in the process of a massive transformation.
[...]
To get to IPO, the company has decided to seek outside investment, as revealed by the Register, so within two days of the blog post, Canonical managed to run town halls explaining its IPO ambitions to staff scattered across the globe (the company has many remote workers living in over 80 countries), and announcing the departure of popular CEO, Jane Silber, and the return of Shuttleworth as chief executive officer.
Canonical has been one of the earliest visionary stalwarts igniting and driving early market enablement for 64-bit ARM server compute. With the commercial availability and support for Ubuntu Openstack on 64-bit ARM v8-A architecture, Canonical further accelerated the industry’s imagination for innovative platform architectures enabling the next generation of scale and automation.
If you haven’t heard of snaps yet, they are a new way for developers to package their apps, bringing with it many advantages over the more traditional package formats such as .deb, .rpm, and others. They are secure, isolated and allow apps to be rolled back should an issue occur. Also they aim to work on any distribution or device, from IoT devices to servers, desktops to mobile devices. Snaps really are the future of Linux application packaging!
PCCW Global, the international operating division of HKT, Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider, is collaborating with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu and CPLANE NETWORKS, the leader in multi-site OpenStack cloud orchestration, to create new cloud services for its customers.
Linksys, a networking company that makes both routers and modems, is now releasing a router / modem hybrid device that combines the two into one. While these kinds of devices aren’t exactly new, it is Linksys’s first shot at making one [...]
Congatec has launched a “ComX” standard for computer-on-module API and middleware spanning COM Express, Qseven, and SMARC form-factors.
At the Embedded Systems Expo & Conference (ESEC) in Japan this week (May 10-12), Congatec announced an “extended standardization initiative” called ComX. The proposed standard builds upon existing computer-on-module hardware standards such as COM Express, Qseven, and SMARC to standardize APIs and middleware, including its new Cloud API. The spec also includes some hardware standardization for COM integration with carrier boards.
This easy (“at your own risk”) hack can unlock a Nest thermostat’s “Cool” mode in heater-only installations, allowing control of a heater’s ventilation fan as though it’s an A/C.
Christmann’s “RECS|Box” evaluation platform and server enclosures can cluster up to 72 Toradex Apalis COMs, and offer GbE and KVM switching.
Toradex announced that Christmann Informationstechnik + Medien GmbH & Co. KG has launched several RECS|Box cluster-computing platforms for Toradex’s ARM-based, Linux-friendly Apalis computer-on-modules. The systems work with any of Toradex’s SODIMM-style, pin-compatible Apalis-brand modules, including the i.MX6-based Apalis iMX6, Tegra K1 based Apalis TK1, and the soon-to-ship, i.MX8-based Apalis iMX8, among others.
Intrinsyc’s “Open-Q 212” SBC runs Android 7 on a quad -A7 Snapdragon 212, and offers special audio features for developing voice controlled devices.
At Lime we have a mission to democratize wireless networks and to bring disruptive technology to the cellular market which will enable the service providers to deploy, maintain and upgrade their network at a fraction of today’s cost. Lime manufactures advanced RF integrated circuits called FPRFs (Field Programmable RF), also known as Software Defined Radios, which are fully programmable dual transceivers. Our chips cover all the cellular channels used globally, which makes them ideal for applications such as radio access for cellular and IoT.
Laput, a graduate student studying computer-human interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, built the gadget as part of a project he calls Synthetic Sensors. He says it could be used to do things like figure out how many paper towels you’ve got left, detect when someone enters or leaves a building, or keep an eye on an elderly family member (by tracking the person’s typical routine via appliances, for example). It’s being shown off this week in Denver at the CHI computer-human interaction conference.
Adlink’s rugged “AmITX-AL-I” is a thin Mini-ITX board based on Intel Apollo Lake. It offers triple and 4K displays, plus mini-PCIe, PCIe, and mSATA.
Adlink briefly announced the AmITX-AL-I when unveiling several Intel Atom E3900 “Apollo Lake” COMs back in November. The board now has a product page, although it’s still tagged as “preliminary.”
Fuchsia OS first emerged, albeit barely, last August. It runs an in-house developed microkernel that Google calls 'Magenta', which the company describes as targeting "modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of RAM with arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation".
Like the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S8, Google's Pixel comes in two sizes: Really Big and Just Right. The latter is the Google Pixel with a 5-inch Full HD display that fits comfortably in the palm of any hand.
We know that Google is working on a new Pixel line-up for 2017; leaks and rumours have been surfacing for a little while now and we even have codenames for them. The Pixel (2017) is apparently dubbed "Muskie", while its Pixel XL (2017) stable-mate is known as "Walleye". Meanwhile, a third device has been spotted with the name "Taimen", but no-one seems to know what it is just yet!
An Android anti-malware application from Panda Mobile Security has been updated after researchers discovered that an insecure update mechanism left users vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Tom Moreton, a security researcher at Context, found that an insecure update mechanism in the product, which is available via Google Play, could be exploited to allow an attacker in a position to modify network traffic to inject their own functionality into the application.
Android Experiments are some of the most creative open source projects that are based on the Android operating system; we see a few here and there throughout the year, some making a bigger impact than others, but as we near Google I/O 2017, Google has added a bunch to its website. Let’s have a look at what they are and what they do:
The early results on telecom's use of open source are in and it's been a bit of a bumpy road thus far. One thing is clear: The companies that are moving forward are those willing to get their hands dirty.
Speakers from BT, Orange and Telefónica said at last week's NFV World Congress in San Jose, Calif., that open source is a vital component to their NFV plans. As early adopters, though, they had to do some work. Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF), for instance, got around interoperability problems by taking the DIY approach.
With software-defined networking, network service providers can far more easily adopt zero-trust models for networking across shared infrastructures. One of the primary reasons people deploy SDN technologies is to achieve network microsegmentation of infrastructure, which implements fine-grain restrictions on which network entities -- physical or virtual machines, containers or network segments -- can talk to other entities.
Network microsegmentation is foundational to zero-trust architectures. In a microsegmented model, the network knows which systems are allowed to talk to which other systems, in which ways and under what circumstances. Network microsegmentation allows sanctioned traffic to pass, allows each network node to see only what it needs to talk to or listen to and hides the rest.
Yes, empathy is a key to open source success, according to folks at Red Hat Summit 2017. The idea rests on the notion that while development speed is great and innovation is necessary -- both hallmarks of open source work and modern app development, vendors said -- programmers must also stay aware about how next-generation technology can affect users.
The free and open software movement has found considerable mind share among today's enterprise organizations. But proponents of the open source philosophy will not stop at the business level -- they are finding new ways to apply the ideas behind open source to almost every aspect of people's lives.
Since apps can be used on smartphones to do things like schedule appointments at restaurants or at the hairdresser, a physician in Switzerland wondered why we couldn’t make appointments for emergency rooms as well.
“We all have the same problems in healthcare, it doesn’t matter where you live or where you work,” said Dr. Dorothée Rhein Straub (pictured, right), founder of easiER AG, a startup based in Zurich, Switzerland. She explained that when a patient is sick or injured, they are looking to be cared for as rapidly as possible without having to repeat the same information over many times to different people.
At the OpenStack Summit, the ex-NSA contractor talked about the downsides of proprietary software and their threat to people’s privacy. Snowden promotes the use of open source software for privacy including Tor, Tails, Debian, etc.
When over a decade ago the file sync and share movement was started by Dropbox and later joined by Google Drive, it became popular very fast. Having your data available, synced or via the web interface, no chance of forgetting to bring that important document or use USB sticks -- it was a huge step forward. But more than having your own data at hand, it enabled sharing and collaboration. No longer emailing documents, no longer being unsure if you got feedback on the latest version of your draft or fixing errors that were already fixed before. Usage grew, not only among home users but also business users who often used the public cloud without the IT departments' approval.
Yahoo often doesn't get enough credit for the contributions it has sent to the open source community during the past decade or so.
Besides the original development of Hadoop a dozen years ago, Yahoo has been an active participant in projects such as those listed on the company's Github page, in various Apache Software Foundation Communities, and in niche communities such as CPAN and others.
Yahoo's latest contribution is Athenz, an open-source platform for fine-grained access control that it released May 8. Athenz is a role-based access-control (RBAC) solution, providing trusted relationships between applications and services deployed within an organization requiring authorized access.
Brad Fitzpatrick, a software engineer at Google working on the Go programming language, is a life-long nerd.
His father worked at Intel, so he grew up steeped in technology. He started writing software in middle school, and he has been building and working with open source software for 19 years—over half of his life. Fitzpatrick's keynote at OSCON this year was based on bits of wisdom from half a life in open source.
Have you launched an open source project or are you considering doing so? Making a success of your project can involve everything from evaluating licenses to community outreach. The good news is that there are many free resources that can help you advance and protect your project.
A recent webinar called “Best Practices for Starting an Open Source Project” focused on this topic. Hosted by Capital One, the online event featured Mike Dolan, VP of Strategic Programs at The Linux Foundation, as well as Scott Nicholas, who is Senior Director in the same department and assists in the execution of The Linux Foundation’s annual Legal Summit and other legal programs.
Edward Snowden, former US NSA employee and self-styled information liberator, remains a highly contentious figure on the US political scene.
It was then perhaps curiously appropriate, if inadvertent, timing that he should make a guest telecast appearance from Russia to the OpenStack Summit in Boston on the same day that President Donald Trump was sacking FBI Director James Comey as the row over alleged connections to the Kremlin and the Trump campaign rumbles on.
The first week of community bonding is nearly over and already it’s quite an experience for me. Me and Alameyo were very nicely welcomed by members of the igniterealtime project which really took care of making us able to jump right into the project.
We’re happy to announce the results of the Mozilla Research Grant program for the first half of 2017. This was a competitive process, and after three rounds of judging, we settled on funding nine proposals in five countries for a total of $299,444. These projects support Mozilla’s mission to make the internet safer, more empowering and more accessible.
The Thunderbird e-mail client still has its supporters, but for the past couple of years, Mozilla has been making moves to distance itself from the project. In late 2015, Mozilla announced that it would be looking for a new home for Thunderbird, calling its continued maintenance "a tax" on Firefox development.
The future of Thunderbird is looking a little more certain. It's been announced that the Mozilla Foundation will serve as Thunderbird's "future home".
CockroachDB, an open source, fault-tolerant SQL database with horizontal scaling and strong consistency across nodes—and a name few people will likely forget—is now officially available.
Cockroach Labs, the company behind its development, touts CockroachDB as a “cloud native” database solution—a system engineered to run as a distributed resource. Version 1.0 is available in both basic and for-pay editions, and both boast features that will appeal to enterprises.
Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CockroachDB 1.0, the first open source, cloud-native SQL database. We’re also announcing a series B fundraise from investors who share our vision. The launch of 1.0 marks our graduation from beta to a production-ready database, designed to power business at any scale from the startup to the enterprise.
The European Investment Bank has decided MariaDB Corporation is worthy of €25 million funding under the European Commission’s Investment Plan for Europe.
Actifio, the Enterprise Data-as-a-Service (EDaaS) company, today announced enhancements to its existing EDaaS for Linux service with the release of its Change Block Tracking (CBT) feature for large datasets on Linux systems.
The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.3.3, focused on bleeding edge features, and as such targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters, and power users. LibreOffice 5.3.3 integrates over 70 patches, with an update of the Sifr monochrome icon set and several fixes for interoperability with Microsoft Office documents.
For all other users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.2.7, with the backing of professional support by certified professionals (updated list available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).
LibreOffice 5.3.3 is now available to download. This point update to the LibreOffice 5.3.x series is aimed at early adopters and includes many bug fixes.
Microsoft scrambled to get its Office 365 service back online after the cloud productivity suite was hit with a mid-day outage.
Loads of people reported that, at around 1245 PT, access to the service went out. Microsoft confirmed shortly after it was having problems, and said it was looking into the matter. Subscribers in New York, Denver, Texas, and Portland, in the US, were, for example, unable to access the service.
Microsoft loves to tell us it loves Linux. [Ed: That’s a lie. Like the lie about SQL Server “on Linux” (it’s untrue)]
I'm pleased to announce the first stable version artanis-0.2 here.
Artanis 0.2 has been released, a newer GNU project that's a web application framework written in Guile Scheme.
GNU Artanis is designed to be used for developing dynamic websites, web applications, web services, and other web resources. Artanis is dual-licensed under the GPLv3+ and LGPLv3+.
Few of us will ever live up to Richard’s spiritual example or follow every tenet laid out in The Gospel of Free Software. The best we mere mundanes can do is try — and work especially hard to avoid egregious sins like melting our jewelry down into raw gold and using it to build a golden Windows computer or something similarly evil.
We are releasing GIMP 2.8.22 with various bug fixes.
All platforms will benefit from a change to the image window hierarchy in single window mode, which improves painting performance when certain GTK+ themes are used.
It's not GIMP 2.10 or the GIMP 3.0 unicorn, but for those wanting the latest-and-greatest GIMP image manipulation program update, v2.8.22 is now available.
Having this year gone live with OpenEyes software devised by another trust, hospital body now looking to expand functionality and user base among other trusts
Bolton NHS Foundation Trust is committed to integrating a growing number of paper-based processes for optical care onto the OpenEyes open source patient record software that was initially developed by Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.
I've been trying to refresh my Haskell skills and Paul Callaghan recommended I read the paper "A History of Haskell: Being Lazy With Class", which I found (surprisingly?) fascinating.
Features are wonderful. When Node.js adds a new API, we can instantly do more with it.
Wouldn’t a larger standard library be more useful for developers? Who could possibly object to Node.js getting better? And who, even more strangely, would actually remove APIs, making Node.js objectively worse?
NVIDIA at their annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC'17) have provided more public details about the forthcoming CUDA 9 compute update.
Now that GCC 7 was released as stable last week, the GCC trunk/master code-base is back open for merging more feature work with the beginning of the GCC 8 development cycle.
A company behind 99.5 million nuisance calls has been fined a record €£400,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Keurboom Communications Ltd has been issued the ICO’s highest ever nuisance calls fine after more than 1,000 people complained about recorded – also known as automated – calls.
In conclusion, this research showed that exposure to social media cues triggers spontaneous hedonic reactions in frequent social media users. These spontaneous hedonic reactions to social media cues, in turn, appear to trigger social media cravings. Together, this might contribute to people's difficulties in resisting desires to use social media.
For those that didn't pick up a Steam Controller or Steam Link back during Valve's holiday sales, they are running a Steam Hardware sale the next few days.
Why bother making keyboards open source?
This is a question we hear often. People all over the world use keyboards every day, for a variety of purposes. At the core of all our keyboards is the ability to easily reconfigure any key to do any action. While normal typists make do with simple macros like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, programmers and gamers have much more advanced needs. People that use Adobe Photoshop or Premier often have special key bindings for most of their keyboard.
In counties with the longest life spans, people tended to live about 87 years, while people in places with the shortest life spans typically made it to only about 67, the researchers found.
The discrepancy is equivalent to the difference between the low-income parts of the developing world and countries with high incomes, Murray notes
Google supports a format called FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which it helped develop. Keys are available that work over USB, Bluetooth, and NFC, so they can be used with a smartphone or tablet in addition to a PC.
Cisco has patched a critical flaw in its IOS software that affected more than 300 models of routers and switches that was discovered after WikiLeaks exposed CIA documents.
"We've spoken to a few customers about it, a few enterprise clients, and thankfully it didn't any disrupt business for us," said one top executive from a solution provider and Cisco Gold partner who did not wished to be named. "I'm glad to know they fixed the issue. … Their devices will always be a big target for attackers because Cisco is everywhere."
Microsoft has released an urgent update to stop hackers taking control of computers with a single email.
The unusual bug, in Microsoft anti-malware software such as Windows Defender, could be exploited without the recipient even opening the message.
Researchers working for Google's Project Zero cyber-security outfit discovered the flaw at the weekend.
The fix has been specially pushed out hours before the software giant's monthly Tuesday security update.
The numbers are in, and judging by them, OSS-Fuzz, the program Google unveiled last December to continuously fuzz open source software, has been a success.
In five months the effort has unearthed more than 1,000 bugs, a quarter of them potential security vulnerabilities, Google says.
Apache Struts 2 is an open source web application framework for developing Java applications that has been in use since 2007. The recent Apache Struts 2 vulnerability affected vCenter Server 6.0 and 6.5, vRealize Operations Manager 6.x, vRealize Hyperic Server 5.x, and versions 6.x and 7.x of the Horizon Desktop-as-a-Service Platform.
Beyond being breathtakingly bizarre, the bug could potentially have serious consequences for architects, engineers, lawyers, and other professionals who rely on Edge to print drawings, blueprints, legal briefs, and similarly sensitive documents. Edge is the default application for viewing PDFs on Windows 10 computers. While the errors demonstrated above happened using the "Microsoft Print to PDF" option, multiple users report similar alterations when using regular printing settings. (And besides, the print-to-PDF option is the default printing method for the Microsoft browser.) The alterations depend on several variables, including the printer selected, the settings used, and computer being used. It's not clear how long this flaw has been active or whether it has already affected legal cases or other sensitive proceedings that use documents printed from the Internet.
The Tuesday updates for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge force those browsers to flag SSL/TLS certificates signed with the aging SHA-1 hashing function as insecure. The move follows similar actions by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox earlier this year.
Browser vendors and certificate authorities have been engaged in a coordinated effort to phase out the use of SHA-1 certificates on the web for the past few years, because the hashing function no longer provides sufficient security against spoofing.
Security reviews of modern Windows Active Domain infrastructures are – from our point of view – quite sobering. Therefore, we often look left and right, when, for example, examining the hardening of protection mechanisms of a workstation. Here, we often find all sorts of dangerous and ill-conceived stuff. We want to present one of these casually identified cases now, as it's quite an interesting one: We have discovered a keylogger in an audio driver package by Hewlett-Packard.
A keylogger is a piece of software for which the case of dual-use can rarely be claimed. This means there are very few situations where you would describe a keylogger that records all keystrokes as 'well-intended'. A keylogger records when a key is pressed, when it is released, and whether any shift or special keys have been pressed. It is also recorded if, for example, a password is entered even if it is not displayed on the screen.
The critical security vulnerability in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine affects a number of Microsoft products, including Windows Defender, Windows Intune Endpoint Protection, Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection, Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint, Microsoft Endpoint Protection, and Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection. These tools are enabled by default in Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and Windows Server 2012.
Google released OSS-Fuzz five months ago with a mission to make open-source projects stable, secure and reliable. Since then, the continuous fuzzing solution has found more than 1,000 bugs with 264 of them flagged as potential security bugs.
A Google-led initiative to find security vulnerabilities in popular open source projects has unearthed more than 1,000 bugs in various open source software in the five months since the effort was launched.
With shadowy botnet armies lurking around the globe and vigilante gray-hat actors inoculating susceptible devices, the appetite for Internet of Things security is stronger than ever.
Lately I’ve been spending some time fuzzing network-related Linux kernel interfaces with syzkaller. Besides the recently discovered vulnerability in DCCP sockets, I also found another one, this time in packet sockets. This post describes how the bug was discovered and how we can exploit it to escalate privileges.
If you were tuning in and out of FBI Director James Comey’s hearing before the House Intelligence Committee last Wednesday, you probably got an earful about Comey’s public statements on Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server, and you may have heard his staunch defense of Section 702 of FISA. But you might have missed the moment in which Comey and Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) threatened to topple one of the longstanding pillars of journalistic freedom.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday threatened to sue former Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on "day one" if he is chosen to replace James Comey as director of the FBI.
There were multiple reports Thursday saying Rogers, a former FBI official and former head of the House Intelligence Committee, is in consideration to be chosen as the Trump administration's nominee to head the FBI.
Hundreds of workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford nuclear site in Washington state had to “take cover” Tuesday morning after the collapse of 20-foot-long portion of a tunnel used to store contaminated radioactive materials.
The Energy Department said it activated its emergency operations protocol after reports of a “cave-in” at the 200 East Area in Hanford, a sprawling complex about 200 miles from Seattle where the government has been working to clean up radioactive materials left over from the country’s nuclear weapons program.
A vacant tunnel leading to a 60-year-old plutonium uranium extraction plant (called PUREX) on southeastern Washington’s Hanford Site has collapsed, according to reports. Hanford issued a warning to employees and ordered those in the vicinity to shelter in place while crews investigated the 20Ãâ20-foot cave-in above the tunnel.
The rain is done, and the flood is long over. The rest of the country moved on months ago, but North Carolina is still feeling the effects of Hurricane Matthew. Hundreds of families remain displaced, and critical infrastructure sits damaged. Its unmet need is enormous, the governor says, and they aren’t getting the money.
The University of Manchester's decision to cut 171 posts is due to "new government legislation and Brexit", a union has claimed.
The university says the job losses have to happen for it to be a world-leading institution and will offer voluntary severance wherever possible.
But the University and College Union (UCU) said the university was in "a strong financial position".
Britain’s largest university has set out plans to axe 171 jobs, mostly academic positions in the faculties of arts, languages, biology, medicine and business.
The University of Manchester blamed new government legislation and the prospect of Brexit as major factors threatening its future income and said it needed to “invest in our strategic priorities”.
But the University and College Union (UCU), which represents lecturers and researchers, said Manchester’s finances were in good health and that the university was making excuses in order to implement cuts.
Brexit negotiations will leave UK citizens in Europe in a far worse position than EU citizens in the UK, a group of British professionals living in Germany has warned.
There are about 100,000 Britons living in Germany. On Monday, discussions held by a group of about 50 of them in Munich focused on concerns that neither European nor British governments have fully understood the severity of the consequences of Brexit for people in their position.
Briton David Hole, who has lived and practised law in Germany since 1993, pointed out that the fact that EU citizens in the UK will still be part of the union will put them in a significantly stronger position than their British counterparts in Europe.
Investors should have seen this coming. The company’s financial disclosures before its IPO revealed large and growing losses. Snap warned investors that it was unsure when, if ever, it would reach profitability. And while its user base was highly engaged, its user growth slowed to its lowest level ever in the fourth quarter of last year.
Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc lost nearly a quarter of its value on Wednesday when its newly listed shares went into a nosedive after the company reported a $2.2bn loss and slowing growth.
Uber isn't a benign platform offering to ferry people from A to B via a simple app—it's a transportation service and as such must comply with the relevant rules, a law adviser at Europe's top court has said.
In a nonbinding opinion, advocate general Maciej Szpunar concluded that "the service offered by Uber cannot be classified as an 'information society service'." If the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) agrees with Szpunar, Uber will face a major regulatory setback that could hobble its expansion plans.
So far, however, Trump-Russia stories have gotten a huge amount of attention for two or three days at a time before the news cycle moves on to other topics. You may catch yourself thinking that surely the story is escalating to a breaking point … only to see Trump skate his way out of the mess. I really don’t have a prediction for how this particular development will unfold, but that history is worth bearing in mind.
Despite Trump’s desperation and the mistakes he seems to make every single day, it will take enormous outrage by the citizenry, and an act of enormous political will by their representatives, to bring a halt to this this authoritarian madness. Our government belongs to us — not to him. Unless we teach him this lesson, we deserve everything he does to us with the power he has so nakedly and corruptly seized in this slow-motion coup.
Former Digital Commissioner Oettinger let big business interests sabotage the project of tearing down of digital borders in key areas, leaving the Digital Single Market project with more holes than Swiss cheese.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer wrapped up his brief interview with Fox Business from the White House grounds late Tuesday night and then disappeared into the shadows, huddling with his staff near a clump of bushes and then behind a tall hedge. To get back to his office, Spicer would have to pass a swarm of reporters wanting to know why President Trump suddenly decided to fire the FBI director.
For more than three hours, Spicer and his staff had been scrambling to answer that question. Spicer had wanted to drop the bombshell news in an emailed statement, but it was not transmitting quickly enough, so he ended up standing in the doorway of the press office around 5:40 p.m. and shouting a statement to reporters who happened to be nearby. He then vanished, with his staff locking the door leading to his office. The press staff said that Spicer might do a briefing, then announced that he definitely wouldn't say anything more that night. But as Democrats and Republicans began to criticize and question the firing with increasing levels of alarm, Spicer and two prominent spokeswomen were suddenly speed-walking up the White House drive to defend the president on CNN, Fox News and Fox Business.
Up to 30 Tory MPs are set to learn if they will be charged with electoral fraud this week, the Mirror has learned.
Prosecutors are due to make an announcement on files they have received from 15 police forces before Thursday's deadline for candidates to declare whether they will stand in the upcoming election
A Mirror investigation revealed last March that two dozen Conservative MPs received help from battlebuses packed with party activists during the 2015 general election but failed to declare the cost.
In a follow-up report a six weeks later, Channel 4 News identified a further handful of Tory candidates accused of similar failings.
When the city of New Orleans had a century-old memorial to Jefferson Davis torn down before daybreak Thursday, a crowd of the Confederate leader’s sympathizers stood by, chanting: “President Davis! President Davis!”
A man adorned with rebel flags buried his face in his hand as the statue of Davis, the man who stands for the South’s lost cause, was hauled away by crane and truck.
If you’re unfortunate enough to live in Tory Britain, you might soon have to visit a Post Office to ID yourself if you want to get down-and-dirty online.
As you might have heard, the UK is about to have an election. One of the quirks of British democracy is that in the weeks leading up to the polls, parliament is dissolved.
On World Press Freedom Day on May 3, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on world leaders to ‘defend a free media’ and to put an end to ‘all crackdowns against journalists because a free press advances peace and justice for all.’ Yet the UN’s own senior officials are engaged in an ugly war against the media that has made a mockery of the Secretary-General’s message and the UN’s commitment to uphold Article 19 of the UN Charter that protects everyone’s right to freedom of opinion and expression.
The heads of both the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the Rome-based Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) have taken the unprecedented step of suing journalists for defamation – a highly unusual act because the UN and its employees enjoy immunity from prosecution, which means that in order to bring a case before a national court they have to surrender this immunity – which rarely happens.
As you hopefully know by now, we're currently facing a major lawsuit, brought against us in Boston, that we consider to be an attack on our First Amendment right to report on matters of public concern. If you support journalism and support the First Amendment, please consider donating to our survival fund, which is helping us to continue reporting on a variety of important matters, including new battles over net neutrality and encryption, not to mention many other battles over freedom of expression.
As we've noted, repeatedly, this case has been a huge distraction and has made it difficult for us to do the kind of work we've done for almost twenty years. If you wish to catch up, you can read about our initial filings in the case, including our motion to dismiss and our motion to strike under California's anti-SLAPP law. We also made additional filings concerning Section 230 problems with some of the claims against us. In addition, in early April we filed a reply to the opposition to our filings.
Look, let's just start with the basics: there are some bad people out there. Even if the majority of people are nice and well-meaning, there are always going to be some people who are not. And sometimes, those people are going to use the internet. Given that as a starting point, at the very least, you'd think we could deal with that calmly and rationally, and recognize that maybe we shouldn't blame the tools for the fact that some not very nice people happen to use them. Unfortunately, it appears to be asking a lot these days to expect our politicians to do this. Instead, they (and many others) rush out immediately to point the fingers of blame for the fact that these "not nice" people exist, and rather than point the finger of blame at the not nice people, they point at... the internet services they use.
Declassified CIA emails released to Michael Morisy show that the Agency believed that their online FOIA Reading Room had been taken down by a vicious cyberattack. Later emails admitted, however, that the attacks against the Agency’s website had been unsuccessful - and that the damage had been entirely self-inflicted.
Is Uber a transport activity or an information society service? Why does the answer to this matter? Why does all this matter?
To the first question, this morning Advocate General (AG) Szpunar has provided a response in his Opinion in Asociación Profesional Ãâ°lite Taxi v Uber Systems Spain, C-434/15, a reference for a preliminary ruling from Spain (Juzgado Mercantil No 3 de Barcelona).
According to the Coordinator of Information and Documentation of ELSAM, Ari Yurino, the transmigration program in Papua has evidently brought negative impact to the social life of Papuan natives. Due to the uneven transmigration and development program, it has caused the increase of number of migrants in Papua and the rise of horizontal conflict between the newcomers and the natives. Therefore, he said, the transmigration program must be terminated and its policy must be evaluated.
Rights groups fear Islamist hardliners are in the ascendancy in a country where most Muslims practise a moderate form of Islam and which is home to sizeable communities of Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, and people who adhere to traditional beliefs.
Mr. Basuki’s 16-point defeat last month was seen as a sign of the increasing power of Islamic conservatives, who have pressed for the adoption of Islamic law, or Shariah, throughout Indonesia.
[...]
He had been leading in the polls last year, but in September his campaign faltered when he tried to address attacks from Muslim hard-liners who argued that the Quran prohibited Muslims from voting for a non-Muslim. Mr. Basuki said those who made that argument were misleading Muslims, a statement that was interpreted by some as insulting the Quran.
Mr Purnama was accused of blasphemy for comments he made during a pre-election speech in September 2016. He implied that Islamic leaders were trying to trick voters by using a verse in the Koran to argue that Muslims should not vote for a non-Muslim leader.
The Department of Homeland Security is considering expanding its ban on electronic devices on US-bound flights from certain airports, according to a report by CBS News.
In March, the DHS banned on all devices bigger than a cell phone on US-bound flights from 10 airports located in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Terrorist groups were targeting commercial planes with "innovative methods" including "smuggling explosive devices in various consumer items," the DHS said at the time.
The US is reportedly looking at extending a ban on allowing laptops into the cabins of airlines to European countries and the UK.
Earlier this year we wrote about the nonsensical move by the Department of Homeland Security to ban laptops and tablets in the cabin on flights from a bunch of cities in the Middle East. The rumored reason was discoveries that terrorists had learned how to make bombs out of laptops. As we noted, this made almost no sense at all when you challenged any of the assumptions. But, never let logic and reason get in the way of a bit of inane security theater. Because now Homeland Security is about to announce that it's now banning laptops in the cabins on all flights from Europe (it's unclear if this will also apply on flights from the US to Europe, but it seems likely that European airports will reciprocate).
While this does answer one of the questions raised by the original ban ("why won't potential terrorists just fly out of other countries?") it still raises a host of other questions. Again: why won't this apply to flights from other countries? Or domestic flights? Or all flights? But, really, that just raises an even larger issue, which is that if you want to protect 100% of all flights 100% of the time from ever having a problem in which people might die, the answer is ground all flights and never let anyone fly anywhere ever. Problem solved. Of course, the cost of such a solution would be horrendous -- which is why we don't do it. But that's the key issue: all of these things involve tradeoffs. All too frequently, it appears that government officials -- especially those on the national security side of things -- don't care at all about the tradeoffs. They just care about blocking any possible attack no matter how unlikely or how remote the chance of such an attack might be, and without any consideration of the costs and inconveniences to everyone else. And, yes, it's reasonable to point out that a single attack would be very, very costly as well. And there's clearly a reason to protect heavily against attacks. But there's still a balance.
The Department of Homeland Security plans to ban laptops in the cabins of all flights from Europe to the United States, European security officials told The Daily Beast. The announcement is expected Thursday.
Initially a ban on laptops and tablets was applied only to U.S.-bound flights from 10 airports in North Africa and the Middle East. The ban was based on U.S. fears that terrorists have found a way to convert laptops into bombs capable of bringing down an airplane. It is unclear if the European ban will also apply to tablets.
DHS said in a statement to The Daily Beast: “No final decisions have been made on expanding the restriction on large electronic devices in aircraft cabins; however, it is under consideration. DHS continues to evaluate the threat environment and will make changes when necessary to keep air travelers safe.”
Well, that's only partially true. Obviously, the local law enforcement gets to make that decision, but there's nothing stopping a competent public official from telling law enforcement to knock it off and to answer a few basic questions from a reporter.
In an era where we're hearing more and more about both attacks on a free press, as well as the need for a stronger press, these kinds of shenanigans should not be allowed. In the past, when we've covered police arresting reporters, the courts have come out repeatedly in favor of the reporters (that whole First Amendment thing still matters). But that's of little use in the moment when police are dragging reporters off to jail for shouting questions outside a press conference.
A reporter was arrested on Tuesday night at the West Virginia Capitol for allegedly causing a disturbance by shouting questions to two Trump aides.
Dan Heyman had asked Health Secretary Tom Price and White House adviser Kellyanne Conway about coverage under the Republican healthcare plan.
The veteran health reporter wanted to know if domestic violence would be covered as a pre-existing condition.
He later said he "was trying to do my job". He nows faces a prison sentence.
Mr Heyman, who works for the Public News Service, spoke to reporters after being released by police.
He said that he had been following the Trump team's entourage through the capitol building while wearing his press badge and a shirt identifying his media outlet.
“First time I’ve ever been arrested for asking a question. First time I’ve ever heard of someone getting arrested for asking a question,” he said.
As Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price walked through a hallway Tuesday in the West Virginia state capitol, veteran reporter Dan Heyman followed alongside him, holding up his phone to Price while attempting to ask him a question.
Heyman, a journalist with Public News Service, repeatedly asked the secretary whether domestic violence would be considered a preexisting condition under the Republican bill to overhaul the nation’s health care system, he said.
No-knock warrants may have served a purpose when they first became a thing. It's not as though law enforcement's fear of evidence disappearing or a violent reaction to warrant service is completely unjustified. But no-knock warrants are being deployed extremely frequently, becoming the preferred method of warrant service any time drug sales are involved. The warrant requests are supposed to be subjected to a higher standard of review, but it's devolved to the point where officers are requesting no-knock warrants simply because the residence they're searching has locking doors and working toilets.
Now, cops and citizens are being killed or injured unnecessarily, simply because the SWAT team's armored personnel carrier seems like a waste of money if it's not deployed every six weeks or so. The higher standard is practically nonexistent, replaced by "upon information and belief" statements that work backwards from the desired form of warrant service.
This hasn't worked yet, but that's not going to keep anyone from giving it another try. Excolo Law, representing victims of the San Bernardino attacks (and others in similar lawsuits), is suing Twitter, Facebook, and Google for [sigh] "knowingly and recklessly" supporting terrorism.
The lawsuit, like others before it, claims the social media platforms aren't doing enough to prevent terrorists from using them for communication, not taking down reported posts fast enough, and otherwise making the world a more dangerous place simply by offering their services.
In what may be an attempt to bolster now ex-FBI director James Comey's oft-derided "Ferguson Effect" claims, the FBI has released a "study" that gathers facts feelings from law enforcement officers around the US and attempts to build a narrative somewhere between "life is unfair" and "there's a War on Cops." It's not a study. It's an opinion poll with the word "study" appended to it.
The first CIA captive subjected to what the U.S. government called "enhanced interrogation techniques" after the Sept. 11 attacks is choosing to testify about conditions inside the Guantanamo Bay detention center even if it could create legal problems for him later.
A Texas judge was reprimanded Monday for a Facebook comment left on a police department's Facebook page about the arrest of a black man accused of killing a white San Antonio Police Department officer.
"Time for a tree and a rope...."
AT&T has been dealt a blow in its attempt to avoid all regulatory oversight from the Federal Trade Commission, and the court decision could also play an important role in the debates over net neutrality and broadband privacy rules. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai yesterday welcomed the court decision and said it strengthens his argument that net neutrality rules should be overturned.
The FCC's public comments site struggled for hours Sunday night and Monday after comedian John Oliver called on HBO viewers to write in protest of Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to eliminate the current net neutrality rules. The FCC issued a statement yesterday attributing the downtime to DDoS attacks, without mentioning the influx of comments caused by Oliver's show.
An FCC spokesman did not immediately respond when asked by The Hill how the agency determined it had suffered a DDoS attack.
As previously noted, the FCC has begun fielding comments on its plan to dismantle net neutrality protections. As of the writing of this post, nearly 556,000 users have left comments on the FCC's plan to roll back the rules, which will begin in earnest with a likely 2-1 partisan vote on May 18. The lion's share of that comment total were driven by John Oliver's recent rant on HBO. Many others are the result of what I affectionately call "outrage-o-matic" e-mail campaigns by either net neutrality activists or think tanks that let people comment without having to expend calories on original thought.
We just got done noting that the FCC's commenting system crashed after comedian John Oliver's latest bit on net neutrality last weekend. Given that Oliver's first bit on net neutrality did the exact same thing, it didn't take long before the media wires were filled with stories about how a flood of outraged net neutrality supporters had crippled FCC systems. Again.
US campaigners rejoiced in 2015 when ‘net neutrality’ enshrined the internet as a free and level playing field. A vote on 18 May could take it all back
For several years now, cable giants Comcast and Charter have had their eye on jumping into the wireless business. Both companies gobbled up a large amount of spectrum at the FCC's 2008 700 MHz auction, but a few years later got cold feet after realizing that going solo in wireless would not only be incredibly expensive, but would require something called competition (gross). So in 2011, they struck a deal with Verizon Wireless, which bought the cable sector's spectrum for $3.6 billion, in exchange for a cozy cross-promotional relationship. As an unspoken part of that relationship, Verizon Wireless has been happily driving its unwanted DSL customers to cable, where they're often then sold Verizon Wireless service.
Last week comedian and "The Late Show" host Stephen Colbert found himself in a little hot water after he made an oral sex joke about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the tail end of his opening monologue. If you missed it, here's the relevant bit (the easily-offended can skip down the page).
The FCC this week has received hundreds of thousands of new comments on its proposal to dismantle net neutrality rules, and more than 128,000 of them are identical comments calling for the reversal of the Obama administration's "power grab." It seems likely that the influx of anti-net neutrality identical comments is coming from a bot, but the FCC hasn't addressed the matter publicly yet.
Both Oracle and Cisco (not coincidentally major ISP vendors) have come out in full-throated support of the FCC's plan to kill net neutrality. FCC boss Ajit Pai has been making the rounds the last few weeks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, trying to drum up support of his attack on broadband consumer protections. Pai met with Cisco, Oracle, Facebook and Apple in a number of recent meetings, but so far only Oracle and Cisco have been willing to enthusiastically and publicly throw their corporate fealty behind Pai's extremely-unpopular policies.
By now it should be clear to most Techdirt readers that new FCC Boss Ajit Pai envisions a future where there's little to no oversight of giant telecom duo/monopolies like Comcast. Pai has wasted no time making that dream a reality since taking office, having killed plans for more cable box competition, undermined FCC attempts to stop prison phone monopolies from ripping off inmate families, and paved the way for killing net neutrality. He's made no mystery of his overarching goal: replacing functional FCC oversight of broadband providers with the policy equivalent of wet tissue paper.
One of the most infuriating aspects of typical trademark disputes is how often the dire nature of the supposed infringement is ratcheted up in the threat rhetoric, while the eventual settlement reached seems laughably inconsequential. Bethesda, which has built a reputation for itself in terms of trademark bullying over its video game franchises, has been an example of this sort of thing in the past. When it decided that it owned the term "scrolls" generally after trademarking its Elder Scrolls franchise, it launched a dispute with developer Mojang over its game which was titled Scrolls. Much was made about the potential for customer confusion, except the eventual settlement allowed Mojang to keep the name for its game. One wonders why such a settlement would be agreed to by Bethesda were its original assertions remotely accurate.
After prevaricating for about three years, the European Union now seems to be about to ratify a treaty lifting copyright across borders for books in special format for visually impaired people. The European Blind Union saluted the agreement as great news for millions of people with visual disabilities but warned that a provision allowing EU members to impose economic compensation on organisations representing blind persons and libraries could run counter to the benefit of the treaty.
Megaupload, an online cyberlocker service run by Kim Dotcom, was shut down in early 2012 when Dotcom was charged with criminal copyright infringement. Dotcom's house in New Zealand was raided, and he was arrested. But his prosecution is on hold while New Zealand continues with years of extradition hearings.
The newly created sections 87f, 87g and 87h of the German Copyright Act provide for the exclusive right of press publishers to exploit their contents commercially for one year, thus preventing search engines and news aggregators from displaying excerpts from newspaper articles without paying a fee.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to rehear the case Usenet provider Giganews won against Perfect 10. The decision not only comes as a disappointment to the bankrupt magazine publisher but also to the MPAA and RIAA, who warned the court that the decision is a disaster for copyright holders.