System76 sells really great Ubuntu Linux laptops, but there has been one glaring issue -- the machines aren't exactly svelte. Don't get me wrong, the notebooks aren't ridiculously large or heavy, but compared to, say, a new MacBook Pro, there is a very big difference.
Many people have been anxiously awaiting a thin and light System76 laptop, and I am happy to say that it is finally here. The newest version of the Galago Pro notebook is very elegant, featuring an aluminum body and HiDPI display. But is the whole package worth your money?
I haven't encountered this issue myself on any of my Ryzen Linux boxes, but it seems there are a number of Ryzen Linux users who are facing segmentation faults and sometimes crashes when running concurrent compilation loads on these Zen CPUs.
The promise of automation always has been its ability to manage a wide range of tasks across all your systems, whether they're in your own data center or somewhere in the cloud. But in order to automate, you need to know what you have, and that's getting harder these days.
We've all come across orphaned cloud VMs and instances, perhaps spun up for a quick test by a developer, created as a bit of shadow IT or merely forgotten during the press of the latest product release. Regardless of why they were created and forgotten, these instances pose quite a few risks to your time, security and budget. After all, the meter's pretty much always running on cloud instances, orphaned or not.
Microsoft has apologised for accidentally releasing a pair of Windows builds that caused serious problems for customers.
The company has admitted it didn’t intend to release the dodgy software, which affected both desktop and mobile users.
The company said after Windows 10 was released, Microsoft began creating obstacles to other security solution manufacturers and devised new methods to force users to forgo third-party software in favour of Windows Defender.
On 1 July, along with the Linux version, support for TV Skype clients will be gone and with it, support for Windows Phone 8 and 8.1, Windows RT and the messaging app for Windows 10 Mobile.
Er… Only that’s it; there’s no mention of if, much less when, Linux users will be able to experience the (admittedly terrible) changes.
For a cross-platform communication service trumpeted as being “available everywhere, so you can go anywhere”, skipping an entire platform is a bit of an oversight.
Microsoft signs off their announcement by poking the penguin in the eye, saying Skype “…can be with you for all life’s moments, no matter where the world takes you—on your favorite devices, to smart speakers, and beyond.”
Just not if my ‘favorite devices’ run Linux though, aye?
Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the availability of a new set of updated kernels for the long-term supported Linux 4.9, 4.4 and 3.18 kernel series, as well as the latest Linux 4.11 kernel branch.
As expected, Linus Torvalds announced on Sunday evening the release and general availability of the fourth RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel series.
According to Linus Torvalds, the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.12 remains fairly calm, containing pretty much the same "standard distribution of patches" like all other previous RCs. That could be because most of the kernel developers have already started their summer vacations.
For the Qt 5.10 release at the end of the year there will be initial support for Vulkan following the cross-platform tool-kit's existing support for Direct3D 12. The Vulkan support is a step in the right direction but will likely be a few releases if not until Qt6 before seeing more thorough Vulkan API support.
As some of you may have heard, one of the new features in Qt 5.10 is the introduction of a set of basic Vulkan enablers. Now that Qt 5.9 is out, it is time to take a look at what this covers (and does not cover) in practice. In order to keep things fun and easy to read, this is going to be split into a series of shorter posts. It must also be mentioned that while the new features mentioned here are all merged to the dev branch of qtbase, there is no guarantee they will not change until the release of Qt 5.10.
In addition to having some fresh Radeon Linux vs. Windows GPU driver numbers as an added bonus as we celebrate Phoronix's 13th birthday this week are some fresh macOS vs. Linux OpenGL performance figures.
A new upstream version of UDisks2 was released on Friday (June 2nd) -- version 2.7.0. People following the recent development of UDisks2 and our recent blog posts [1] [2] should know that this is a big version bump which can only mean one thing: the pull request changing UDisks to use libblockdev where possible was merged! Which is almost 100 commits with changes.
Many of us here are familiar with GitHub, but some of us have been looking for a good, open-source client application for the platform. This is where XDA Senior Member k0sh stepped up and created FastHub. Not only is it fast, easy to navigate, beautifully designed, and open-source, but you can download it from the Play Store or the XDA Labs repository.
Virtual Programming has revealed their latest noteworthy Linux game port: Micro Machines World Series.
Micro Machines World Series is a racing game of the Micro Machines micro-vehicles. The game has team battle strategies, NERF guns, catapults, and more to make an interesting, action-packed, family-friendly racing game.
In 1976, Gerald Ford was president, the average house cost $43,000, and a pair of guys named Steve started selling computers under the name Apple. Oh, and for those lucky enough to have access to a DEC PDP-10 mainframe, you could play one of the first computer games: ADVENT, better known to most as Colossal Cave Adventure. Now, decades later, the well-known developer Eric S Raymond has brought Adventure back from the dead as an open-source program.
After teasing us with the upcoming release of the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III port for Linux, SteamOS, and macOS operating systems, Feral Interactive announced today the system requirements for all supported platforms.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III is a superb game with astonishing graphics and effects, so you might guess that you'll need a powerful gaming rig to really enjoy the game, which is created by Relic Entertainment and Sega in partnership with Games Workshop and ported by Feral Interactive to Linux and macOS.
Dawn of War III [Steam] arrives on Linux tomorrow and we now know exactly what kind of system is needed to run it, come check it out.
Colony Survival [Steam] is a new voxel RTS coming to Linux sometime this summer and the developers are asking for Linux testers.
So, for a couple of weeks I decided to go back and play a game that has been on Linux for a while: Shovel Knight. I initially expected a difficult but enjoyable experience but it was not meant to be. Here's a video detailing the highlights (depending on your perspective) of the journey.
The Plasma team had a mammoth 2.5 hour meeting to discuss some of the aspects of the Plasma releases going forward. Much of the debate was around when to do an LTS release and we’ve gone with Plasma 5.12 due in January. There will continue to be a couple of 5.8LTS releases in 2018 and more as necessary. We’re picking up 5.12 as an LTS at the request of openSUSE who wanted it for their next Leap release. We also banned new features which might affect the Wayland port unless they’re already functional in Wayland. Here’s the full list.
Kubuntu users would be pleased to hear that the first point release of the KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment series is now available in the Kubuntu Backports PPA of the Kubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system.
Jonathan Riddell has shared some early planning details for the current KDE Plasma 5.11 cycle as well as early details for Plasma 5.12.
First up, Plasma 5.12 is slated to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) release when it debuts in January 2018. Plasma 5.12 will be supported for at least two years. It's expected that Plasma 5.12 will require Qt 5.9.
KDE developer and KDE Neon maintainer Jonathan Riddell is today announcing that the next LTS (Long Term Support) series of the KDE Plasma desktop environment will be version 5.12, due for release in January 2018.
A meeting was held recently by the KDE Plasma development team to decide what version of the desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions will become LTS to replace the current long-term supported KDE Plasma 5.8 series, which should reach end of life on April 10, 2018, with the KDE Plasma 5.9.8 LTS release.
Today, I released the first development snapshot (3.25.2) of what will be GNOME Tweak Tool 3.26. Many of the panels have received UI updates. Here are a few highlights.
Before this version, Tweak Tool didn’t report its own version number on its About dialog! Also, as far as I know, there was no visible place in the default GNOME install for you to see what version of GTK+ is on your system. Especially now that GNOME and GTK+ releases don’t share the same version numbers any more, I thought it was useful information to be in a tweak app.
In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 33 commits, with 5011 lines added and 8140 lines removed.
I am really happy and excited to be accepted as Google Summer of Code Student by GNOME and i will be working on integrating Todoist to GNOME To Do. Todoist is a widely used and popular Online Task Manager App. To be honest, this wouldn’t have been possible without the support I received from people in GNOME and especially my mentor feaneron who answered my every single query, even the silliest of them ( I am sorry Georges :P). I am really excited to be a part of such an helpful and knowledgeable group of people and hope to make best of this opportunity and learn lot of new things
We’ve looked at ways to make GNOME Shell look like Unity before, but a new theme from the b00merang project provides what is perhaps the closest clone yet. It’s a Unity 7 GNOME Shell theme that faithfully recreates the look of the Ubuntu desktop shell in GNOME, BFB-included! Naturally this change is a cosmetic one and only skin deep.
Dash to Dock, the hugely popular desktop dock for GNOME Shell, has been updated with multi-monitor improvements, a new click action, and various bug fixes.
Love the look of GNOME's Adwaita theme but don't like its excessive padding? Adwaita Tweaks is a modified version of Adwaita that solves this.
Gentoo is known for being somewhat complex to manage, making clusters of gentoo machines even more complex in most scenarios. Using the following methods the configuration becomes easier.
By the end of this you should be able to have a default hiera configuration for Gentoo while still being able to override it for specific use cases. What makes the method I chose particularly powerful is the ability to delete default vales entirely, not just setting them to something else.
Red Hat has assumed the role of de facto open source leader, driving and nurturing hundreds of communities across the world. One could argue that, at the core, Red Hat isn’t a software company at all. In fact, our best asset is our ability to curate open source communities, bringing to bear the efforts of thousands of contributors, committers, and testers to enterprises in a reliable, secure package that can solve some of the most demanding IT challenges.
Red Hat cloud architect Julio Villarreal-Pelegrino says you don't need to know OpenStack to succeed at implementing it.
At one time, OpenStack was going to be the open source answer to proprietary cloud computing. OpenStack clouds would proliferate – didn't Rackspace and HP already offer public versions – and undercut the offerings of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine?
I’m very exciting when I got the email that I was accepted by Fedora in GSoC2017. I will work for the idea – Migrate Plinth to Fedora Server – this summer.
Hello people of the world! Let me give you another update of the Fedora Modularity project.
We the Fedora Respins-SIG are happy to announce new F25-SELF2017 Updated Lives. (with Kernel 4.11.3). This iso are so named in support of the upcoming SouthEast Linuxfest. CHECKSUM512-20170606 is the correct file for these images.
The development team of the Debian-based Grml Linux operating system announced the general availability of the final release of the Grml 2017.05 operating system, codenamed "Freedatensuppe."
You could recently read reviews of different flavours of Ubuntu 17.04 on Linux notes from DarkDuck blog: Ubuntu MATE, Kubuntu, Lubuntu.
And you all remember the recent announcement from Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical that Ubuntu 17.10 will be the last version of Ubuntu coming with Unity Desktop Environment. It means that more attention in the Linux – and especially the Ubuntu – community is now on the Ubuntu GNOME version. I've never reviewed this version of Ubuntu yet.
Let's see what it is like. I downloaded the ISO image of Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 64-bit, which is 1.5 GB in size and "burnt" it onto the USB stick using the dd command.
This month we have a selection that might please those of you who like games, with apps like OpenSpades and Pin Town. Our selection is really diverse, from graphics editor Vectr to AnimationMaker, there’s a snap for everyone. Using IRC? Now there’s a snap client for that too!
And if the word snaps doesn’t ring a bell, 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 and we’re excited to showcase some good examples of these each month.
Canonical released new kernel security updates for all of its supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).
I’m yet to experience Ubuntu or GNOME on a HiDPI screen, so I can’t attest to how well things currently work, but I do know that some big improvements are coming.
Ubuntu is switching to GDM as the default display manager for both Ubuntu 17.10 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. GDM will replace LightDM and the Unity Greeter.
Those downloading the very latest Ubuntu desktop ISO of 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" for testing will find that it now boots to the GNOME Shell desktop and also provides an option for running GNOME on Wayland.
There’s a new default desktop in GNOME Shell, which replaces Unity 7, which in turn brings with a raft of changes, like a new notification system, a new online accounts hub, a new control centre, and so on.
Another week, another development snapshot of the Black Lab Enterprise Linux operating system surfaces on the web for those willing to install it on their personal computers and take it for a test drive.
Bodhi Linux developer Jeff Hoogland is pleased to announce the release and immediate availability of the second minor update to the Bodhi Linux 4 operating system series, versioned 4.2.0.
Coming a little over four months after the release of Bodhi Linux 4.1.0, this minor update is here to add the Swami Control panel by default, upgrade the kernel packages to the Linux 4.10 series, but only on the 64-bit variant of the distribution, as well as to include all the latest security and software updates released upstream.
Amazon released its AWS Lambda based “AWS Greengrass” IoT stack for Linux devices including the Raspberry Pi offers cloud sync and messaging while offline.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has launched AWS Greengrass software that enables AWS compute, messaging, data caching, and sync capabilities to run on connected devices such as IoT gateways. Designed for ARM and x86 based devices that run Linux, AWS Greengrass was released in a preview version back in December, and is now available in its first official release. Little seems to have changed since the December announcement, including the tiered pricing model, but Amazon now lists several specific pre-certified Linux boards (see farther below).
The Source code for Tizen 4.0 first milestone (M1) has been released.
During the Tizen Developer Conference, Curtis Sasaki, VP of Ecosystems for Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center, shared more about the company’s new ARTIK announcement and its vision for IoT ecosystem. Samsung newly introduced its next-generation ARTIK™053 modules that are designed to speed up the process companies go through between product development and launch.
With work done most recently to Android and Mesa, the iMX6 platform can handle Android without any proprietary "blobs" and lays the ground-work for the upcoming iMX8 platform that will hopefully be met by similar level of support. Buffer modifier support was the last area of work for freeing the platform for handling a blob-free experience.
The OnePlus 5, the follow-up to the excellent OnePlus 3T Android smartphone, launches on June 20. In classic OnePlus style, the OnePlus 5 will debut via an online livestream that starts at 5pm UK time (12pm EDT), as well as at several pop-up events in London, New York, and other cities in Europe.
HTC gave customers many reasons to forgo the HTC 10 and opt for the U11. The new handset is an upgrade from last year's device in nearly every crucial way: it performs better, has a longer battery life, keeps Android's adoptable storage feature, and supports dual, always-on wake words with "OK Google" and "Alexa."
The surprising utility of Edge Sense is also a plus, even if it seems gimmicky. Some users may not need any more buttons, pressure sensors, or other methods of input on the body of their smartphones. But if you have that one program or app that you want to access quickly, Edge Sense is a seamless and convenient way to do so.
Finding a feature-loaded Android Wear smartwatch under $200 is getting more difficult with each new product release.
There's the $349 LG Watch Sport, equipped with LTE and Android Pay compatibility. There's also the $369 Huawei Watch 2, which offers excellent battery life but lacks any cellular connectivity. Or, for a little less, you can pick up the fitness-focussed Polar M600 for $329.
It seems manufacturers have settled on pricing devices over $300 -- well, expect for ZTE. The company is known for making low-end and mid-range smartphones that work but are priced well below the rest of its competitors. With the ZTE Quartz smartwatch, the company's approach is no different: Load it up with features and specs at an affordable price.
Google is giving the open-source community another tool for continuous delivery and cloud deployments. This week, Google released Spinnaker 1.0, an open-source multi-cloud continuous delivery platform, which companies can use for fast, safe and repeatable deployments in production.
Back in November 2015, Netflix and Google collaborated to bring Spinnaker, a release management platform, to the open-source community. Since that initial release, Spinnaker has been used in several organizations like Netflix, Waze, Microsoft, Oracle, and Target.
VC-backed startup Colu is open-sourcing its banking infrastructure known as Bankbox in an effort to remove the technical barriers and reduce costs for central banks that want to issue digital currencies.
The Israeli firm’s technology was previously based on the bitcoin blockchain, but the company is overhauling its approach for its Colored Coins initiative, evolving into a more blockchain-agnostic platform.
While few organisations are able to adopt open source tools and technologies for everything IT at present, it is "unwise" not to at least consider doing so as much as possible – and it will be "unforgivable negligent" to fail to do this within a few years.
This is the view of Paul Miller and Lauren E Nelson, authors of Forrester Research's "Open Source Powers Enterprise Digital Transformation" report.
Founded last year, and based in the Slovak capital of Bratislava, Frinx claims to offer a "fully supported" version of OpenDaylight and is one of a crop of new companies that sees a business opportunity in open source technology.
For anyone that's forgotten, OpenDaylight is an open source SDN platform that is managed by the Linux Foundation. The project includes some of the biggest names in the technology industry, with Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) and ZTE Corp. (Shenzhen: 000063; Hong Kong: 0763) all listed as "platinum" members on the organization's website.
This year on June 29, FreeDOS will turn 23 years old. That's pretty good for a legacy 16-bit operating system like DOS. It's interesting to note that we have been doing FreeDOS for longer than MS-DOS was a thing. And we're still going!
There's nothing special about "23 years old" but I thought it would be a good idea to mark this year's anniversary by having people contribute stories about how they use FreeDOS. So over at the FreeDOS Blog, I've started a FreeDOS blog challenge.
Fast forward to the present and Torvalds’ open source operating system has been adapted for use in embedded components, routers, access points, devices and data center applications — all important aspects of generating, transmitting and receiving the huge amount of data produced by the booming Internet of Things.
Software Freedom Conservancy proudly welcomes coreboot as Conservancy's newest member project. coreboot is is an extended firmware platform that delivers a lightning fast and secure boot experience on modern computers and embedded systems.
Coreboot has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy as a member project.
The Software Freedom Conservancy as a reminder is the non-profit working to promote FLOSS projects and takes care of managerial tasks and other non-development/documentation related tasks for the project. Basically, member projects are absorbed by this non-profit and provide some legal representation, among other services.
The developers behind LZ4m plan to use this new compression algorithm for a real-world in-memory compression system. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any code for LZ4m yet nor much more besides this white paper for the 2017 IEEE conference. Hopefully we will learn more soon and see a useful code drop. Thanks to markg85 pointing out this work.
This LZ77-derived open-source data compression library used by all the major web browsers has made much progress since its public debut in 2015 for HTTP compression and other purposes.
The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 59 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.
Google promoted Chrome 59 to the stable channel today for Linux, macOS, and Windows. This is an exciting update for Linux users.
The next stable update to Chromium uses GTK3 by default. This means Chromium 59 is able to adopt more of the underlying GTK theme of the desktop.
The Tor Browser Team is proud to announce the first stable release in the 7.0 series. This release is available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.
This release brings us up to date with Firefox 52 ESR which contains progress in a number of areas:
Most notably we hope having Mozilla's multiprocess mode (e10s) and content sandbox enabled will be one of the major new features in the Tor Browser 7.0 series, both security- and performance-wise. While we are still working on the sandboxing part for Windows (the e10s part is ready), both Linux and macOS have e10s and content sandboxing enabled by default in Tor Browser 7.0. In addition to that, Linux and macOS users have the option to further harden their Tor Browser setup by using only Unix Domain sockets for communication with tor.
If you've been reading source-changes@, you likely noticed the recent creation of the netbsd-8 branch. If you haven't been reading source-changes@, here's some news: the netbsd-8 branch has been created, signaling the beginning of the release process for NetBSD 8.0.
We don't have a strict timeline for the 8.0 release, but things are looking pretty good at the moment, and we expect this release to happen in a shorter amount of time than the last couple major releases did.
NetBSD developers are preparing to release the version "8.0" of their operating system in the near future.
We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler 0.3.0.
GNU Taler is a free software electronic payment system providing anonymity for customers. Payments can in principle be made in any existing currency, or a bank can be launched to support new currencies. Merchants are not anonymous, and--due to income-transparency--the state can perform effective tax audits.
Among the lesser-known GNU projects is Taler, which is trying to be a free software electronic payment system. Today marks its v0.3 release, but it only works so far with toy currencies.
We organised an FSFE information booth on Linuxwochen Wien from 4 to 6 of May and at Veganmania at the MQ in Vienna from 24 to 27 May. Like every year it went very well and especially at Veganmania we could reach many people not yet familiar with free software. Since during the Veganmania there was a Wikipedia event in Vienna at the same time we even encountered some people from all over the world. For example an FSF activist from Boston in the US.
Public administrations have to understand the importance of ICT for their core processes, and must be able to implement ICT themselves, a Dutch government advisory group says. Dutch politicians, policy makers and officials are underrating the importance ICT, the group writes: ‘Government digitalisation requires a radical reversal of attitude.’
[...]
The report, published in April, is written by 13 ICT policy experts from the commercial and public sector. They recommend following the UK’s 'Government as a Platform policy'. This includes embracing open ICT standards and breaking-up large-scale ICT projects into small reusable services and components. The group promotes the agile development method, experimenting and creating public development projects that involve citizens and the private sector.
According to Diego Piacenti, a former VP at Amazon who heads the Digital Transformation Team, the 3-year plan outlines the technological vision of a public sector operating system. Key words include agile development methods, mobile first, security, interoperability, scalability and reliability, he writes, adding that “open source and collaboration are the new paradigm.”
The National Plant Genetic Resources Centre (NPGRC-Tanzania), in collaboration with Hivos, Bioversity International, Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Africa and other partners are currently implementing a project, which explores possibilities of the 'open source seed systems'.
When someone mentions open source, you automatically think software, an open source software movement, which was a response to increased concentration of power of a few large multinational profit oriented corporations, limiting innovation by making software a proprietary resource.
After our group of friends founded a small open hardware community in El Salvador a few years ago, we felt alone in the region. The open hardware movement had developed in a creative explosion of projects and (thanks to the popularization of 3D printing and digital technologies such as Arduino) under a common understanding of how to develop new physical products.
The open source hardware movement has been gaining momentum since 2010 with new industries joining the community at a rapid pace. In fact, the maker and 3D printing markets are expected to become a US$ 8.5 billion market by 2020.
HHVM 3.20 is released! This release improves compatibility with PHP7, and adds a couple new features. Packages have been published in the usual places; see the installation instructions for more information.
Facebook developers have released HHVM 3.20 as the newest release of their alternative PHP interpreter and also what serves for their Hack programming language.
There were around 10 participants, and all of them wrote code before in various languages. A few had previous experiences with Python. Because of different Operating Systems, and also not being able to install things on a corporate laptop, my idea of using Microsoft Azure notebook service in this session helped. This also made sure that all of us were using the same version of Python (3.6) and the same environment.
The federal science agency discontinued a funding stream for graduate students in environmental science because of administrative workload.
This is not how rational people make decisions, but it is how software engineers decide to use MapReduce.
Britain’s universities are being dragged down by falling levels of research funding and employing fewer highly qualified staff than their international rivals, according to the compilers of a prestigious world university league table.
The QS world university rankings for 2018, published on Thursday, show the majority of British universities slipping down its table, with 57 of the 76 UK institutions receiving lower ratings than last year despite British universities occupying four of the top eight places.
“Put simply, this year’s results indicate that the UK’s universities are becoming less competitive as research-driven institutions,” said Jack Moran, rankings auditor for QS, a London-based higher education thinktank.
The UK’s relative performance has deteriorated because of weaker research performance, with fewer research citations received from fellow academics, and lower scores on academic reputation at home and abroad, according to QS researchers.
Britain’s fight with Europe has far-reaching implications, stretching all the way into outer space.
In January, the UK announced that it would send its star astronaut, Tim Peake, to the International Space Station for a second time. But the trip is now in doubt, according to the Financial Times, which reports (paywall) that the UK has denied a request to increase its contributions to the European Space Agency (ESA).
After having disclosed information about CIA’s spyware tool Athena only last week, WikiLeaks has published new information from Pandemic, another alleged CIA project that “targets remote users by replacing application code on-the-fly with a trojaned version if the program is retrieved from the infected machine.”
Part of the Vault 7 series of documents that were either leaked following an inside job or stolen from the CIA by hackers, Pandemic basically turns Windows machines from a targeted network into Patient Zero. It then covertly infects other computers linked to the system by delivering infected versions of the requested files. Because it is very persistent, the original source of infection is difficult to detect.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will force European organisations to expand their cyber workforce, causing demand to outstrip the supply of expertise.
Two in five governments and companies will expand their cybersecurity divisions by more than 15 per cent in the next 12 months, according to a survey by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, or (ISC)2. This will lead to a shortfall of 350,000 cyber workers across the continent by 2022.
Europe's cyber workforce will expand faster than any other region in the world. Demand is driving record salaries with 39 per cent of UK cyber workers commanding annual salaries of more than €£87,000.
uCareSystem Core is a thin utility that automates the basic system maintenance activity, in other hand it will reduce system administrator task in many ways and save some good amount of time. It doesn’t have any GUI and offers purely command line interface to perform the activity.
This morning on the stage of TC Sessions: Justice, Matt Mitchell of CryptoHarlem discussed his views on the link between surveillance and minority oppression and the importance of taking a preventative approach to security and privacy. Mitchell, a specialist in digital safety and encryption, is dedicating time to creating Protect Your Org, a free, open source, tool for all organizations to prepare for inevitable data breaches.
A survey of 500 IT decision-makers in British companies that have more than 250 employees has found that 42% are stockpiling digital currencies, like Bitcoin, in anticipation of a ransomware attack.
Security cameras manufactured by China-based Foscam are vulnerable to remote take-over hacks that allow attackers to view video feeds, download stored files, and possibly compromise other devices connected to a local network. That's according to a 12-page report released Wednesday by security firm F-Secure.
The BND document entitled "Saudi Arabia - Sunni regional power torn between foreign policy paradigm change and domestic policy consolidation" singled out Saudi Arabia's defense minister, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as trying to strengthen his place in the royal succession while putting Saudi Arabia's relationship with erstwhile regional allies in jeopardy.
"The careful diplomatic stance of older members of the Saudi royal family has been replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention," the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) said.
The spy agency accused bin Salman, second in line to the throne, and his father, King Salman, as trying to create an image of Saudi Arabia being the leader of the Arab world. The BND added that bin Salman's quest to cement his place in the nation's leadership could also irritate other members of the royal family.
The conversation about Islamic extremism should begin with “Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states that have funded and fuelled extremist ideology,” Jeremy Corbyn has said.
The accusation is common: that the House of Saud is allowing a flow of money to finance ISIS. But the Saudi government has completely rejected the “false allegations”, dismissing them as a “malicious falsehood”.
We can’t answer this one with absolute certainty, since any financing is highly secretively. All we can do is weigh up the documents and research that are currently available.
The Islamist terrorist who attacked a police officer outside the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris on Tuesday was an award-winning journalist who previously worked as freelancer for Swedish public radio, Swedish media outlets reported on Wednesday.
The suspect in the attack, 40-year-old Algerian-born Farid Ikken, is said to have moved to Sweden in 2004 after marrying a Swedish woman.
US coastal areas are set to be deluged by far more frequent and severe flooding events if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t slashed, with rare floods becoming the norm for places such as New York City, Seattle and San Diego, new research has found.
House Republicans on Thursday are poised to pass legislation that would roll back numerous financial regulations passed by Democrats after the 2008 financial crisis.
Theresa May has a "major weakness" because she does not understand the business world, a former head of Number 10's policy unit said.
Baroness Cavendish, David Cameron's former policy chief, said the prime minister "needs to get an awful lot more sophisticated about giving business confidence."
"I think she has a major weakness, which is she's not very interested in business and she doesn't understand business terribly well, I suspect," she told BBC2's Newsnight. "And I think neither does her inner circle.
To imagine Republicans might turn on Trump over the Russia scandal to the point of deposing him from office is to misunderstand how they have been thinking about Trump and the presidency all along.
About one out of every four of those killed by drones during that time where blithely labeled “other militants,” by the CIA. In other words, the CIA had no idea whom they were killing.
On the morning of the U.S. presidential election, we pointed out that there were three scenarios for what might transpire that night, each of which were about equally likely.
Psephologists had puzzled for long hours over quite what last minute polling analysis had led Jeremy Corbyn to begin his final marathon day campaigning in Glasgow, and then pass through Runcorn, Colwyn Bay, Watford, Harrow and Wealdstone before the big Islington homecoming.
Such people are not experts on West Coast Main Line stations.
While Theresa May spent her last campaign day private-jetting between what expensively commissioned internal research indicated were seats that could still be swung her way, Team Corbyn’s strategy was less "our private polling indicates" and more "let’s get off every third stop".
British Prime Minister Theresa May's pledge to weaken human rights protections to fight terrorism is outrageous and a gift to autocratic strongmen globally, Amnesty International head Salil Shetty said on Wednesday.
In the final days of an election campaign that has been interrupted by terror attacks in London and Manchester, May has stepped up her rhetoric against Islamist extremism, pledging to ensure security services had the powers they needed.
"What I’ve been clear about is if human rights law gets in the way of doing those things which I think are necessary as the threat evolves then we will change those rules," she said on Wednesday, the eve of the election.
Canvassers out today on a frantic door-knock to get their vote out will often hear that heart-sinking refrain: “What’s the point? Voting makes no difference.” Or “I’m not political”, as if it were an optional hobby. Earnest volunteers may want to wring the necks of the apathetic, the clueless and the idle who are so hopelessly indifferent to the value of democracy.
But pause a moment and consider how right people are to be dubious. Whether they precisely know it or not, phlegmatic non-voters may intuit how useless most votes will be today. Under our grotesque voting system very few ballot papers will make a difference to the result. First-time voter? Here's everything you need to know in one handy guide | Hannah Jane Parkinson Read more
In 2015 the Conservatives won with a seven-point lead, but so distorted is our electoral system that the Electoral Reform Society says if just 639 voters in only six Tory seats had switched their vote from Tory to Labour, there would have been a hung parliament. Just 639!
Labour voters are said to be more likely to be put off going out to vote if it is raining. But is it true?
“Bands of rain or showers affecting the UK, with the risk of hail and thunder on Thursday,” says the Met Office. Traditionally, this is said to be bad for Labour, as its voters are supposed to be more likely to be put off by the rain. Shami Chakrabarti, a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, blamed the rain in Copeland for Labour’s defeat in the by-election there in February, because Labour voters are less likely to have cars.
But is it true? It seems to be true in the United States, where a 2007 study of 14 presidential elections found an association between turnout and the weather. An inch of rain reduced turnout by 1 percentage point. This tended to hurt the Democratic candidate more than the Republican, and may have helped George Bush beat Al Gore in 2000.
VPN websites, like that of Private Internet Access, are actively being censored by internet service providers (ISPs) in the United Kingdom (UK). The website blocks were first put into place by UK ISPs on government order in an effort to censor pornography in 2014. Since then, more ISPs have joined in default blocking. However, research has shown that the blocks are overreaching – with 1 in 5 websites being blocked when the censorship program first rolled out. UK ISPs initially incorrectly blocked everything from civil rights blogs to used car sales sites; what’s worse, these blocks are on by default.
Open Rights Group, a London-based organization, created a tool at blocked.org.uk that allows you to check whether or not a website is being blocked by UK ISPs. This crucial tool has revealed that most UK ISPs block Private Internet Access by default if the content filter is on.
Christians around the world are being slaughtered by Islamists. They need our solidarity.
[...]
All of this is simply the manifestation of a reality about Islamist militants that we have long known from their actions in Syria and Iraq: their special hatred for Christians, whom ISIS recently declared its ‘favourite prey’. Wanton rape, torture and murder have all played a part in the concerted effort of religious cleansing in the Middle East and anywhere else Islamists have been able to gain a foothold. However much such ideologues violently loathe and attempt to attack the West, it pales in comparison, both in terms of scale and intensity, with the bloody persecution of Christians across the world, and most especially in the Middle East.
The European Union is seeking to make it easier for police and law enforcement agencies to retrieve electronic evidence from US tech firms, including directly from cloud storage.
In the wake of terrorists attacks across Europe, the European Commission is proposing new legislation to speed up the transfer of crucial data from companies such as Facebook and Google, even when it is stored in another EU member state – which is often a slow process.
The EC is set to propose three options that will form the basis of a future legislative proposal.
Interesting law-journal article: "Surveillance Intermediaries," by Alan Z. Rozenshtein.
A top Uber executive who reportedly obtained the medical records of a woman who was raped by her Uber driver was only fired after journalists learned of the incident, it emerged on Wednesday.
An Uber executive obtained the medical records of a rape victim in India, according to a report.
Such an app will supplement and not replace Denmark’s eID (NemID), explains the country’s Agency for Digitisation (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen - DIGST). “If the public accepts the application, they can use the app for mobile banking, but also to access numerous public web services that require NemID access”, the agency writes on its website.
The reporter who made the allegation stood by his account when contacted by Ars today.
Honesty about this is our best shot of doing anything about it.
Months after they were abducted, human rights activists say police appear to have taken an uncharacteristically ‘casual’ approach to their cases
Aaron Cantú, a staff writer at the Santa Fe Reporter, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he participated in a riot while working as a journalist during protests in Washington, DC on Inauguration Day.
Cantú faces eight felony counts—including inciting a riot, rioting, conspiracy to riot and five counts of destruction of property. The grand jury handed up the indictment last week.
Theresa May is vowing to tear up human rights laws that stand in the way of her fight against terrorism.
In a speech this evening, the Prime Minister called for greater powers to restrict the movement of terror suspects - even if authorities are unable to convince a judge the measure is needed.
May also called for longer prison sentences for people convicted of terrorist offences and promised to make it easier to deport foreign terrorists back to their home countries.
Theresa May has declared she is prepared to rip up human rights laws to impose new restrictions on terror suspects, as she sought to gain control over the security agenda just 36 hours before the polls open.
The prime minister said she was looking at how to make it easier to deport foreign terror suspects and how to increase controls on extremists where it is thought they present a threat but there is not enough evidence to prosecute them.
The last-ditch intervention comes after days of pressure on May over the policing cuts and questions over intelligence failures, following terror attacks on London Bridge, Manchester and Westminster.
A federal jury Wednesday awarded $6.7 million to a woman who was raped repeatedly by a guard when she was being held in the Milwaukee County Jail four years ago.
The guard, Xavier Thicklen, was acting under his scope of employment when the sexual assaults occurred and therefore Milwaukee County is liable for the damages amount, the jury determined.
The jury also found there was "no legitimate government purpose" to shackle the woman during childbirth labor, but jurors did not find she was injured and therefore awarded her no monetary damages, according to Theresa Kleinhaus, a Chicago attorney who litigated the case with other attorneys from the firm.
That ignores history. You'll recall that the FCC's original 2010 rules were demolished by the Verizon lawsuit, with the courts saying that the FCC couldn't impose such rules without first classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II. So in 2015, former FCC boss Tom Wheeler did precisely that. Walking back that decision means stripping out the legal authority to actually enforce net neutrality, and Comcast certainly knows this. In fact we've repeatedly noted how the government's plan is to effectively gut privacy, net neutrality and other broadband consumer protections, and to replace them with the policy equivalent of wet tissue paper.
Amazon, Etsy, Kickstarter, Mozilla and Vimeo all intend to hold a day of protest on 12 July in opposition to plans by Donald Trump’s newly appointed telecoms regulator to neuter tough 2015 rules meant to protect “net neutrality” – the concept that all traffic should be equal online.
To date, the most remarkable aspect of the Denuvo story was the very brief stint it had as a successful DRM. Brief is the operative word, of course, as the past six months or so have seen Denuvo's vaunted status devolve into one more typical of DRM stories, with defeats for the security software coming at rates measured in days and weeks of a game's release.
But now things have taken a turn towards the ironic. A security software firm called VMProtect, which makes software to protect against reverse engineering and developing cracks of applications, is accusing Denuvo of having used its software without properly licensing it. This is the kind of thing that folks who support DRM tend to call piracy. And, thus, Denuvo may have "pirated" another company's software to make its anti-piracy DRM.