The US is falling behind in the supercomputer race, but no matter where a supercomputer is running, one thing remains true: It's running Linux.
In the latest Top500 Supercomputer competition, which was revealed in June 2017, 498 out of 500 supercomputers were running Linux. Of the remaining two, both ran Unix.
These were a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX near the bottom of the list. These machines came in at 493 and 494. Since the November 2016 Top500, these supercomputers have dropped by over 100 places. At this rate, Linux will score a clean sweep in the next biannual Top500 competition.
When the first Top500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993, Linux was barely more than a toy and hadn't adopted Tux as its mascot yet. Starting in 1998, when it first appeared on the Top500, Linux quickly dominated supercomputing.
Thanks to a new operating system called Popcorn Linux, the Navy may be able to speed systems development and cut maintenance.
Developed by engineering researchers at Virginia Tech with support from the Office of Naval Research, Popcorn Linux can compile different programming languages into a common format.
The operating system takes generic coding language and translates it into multiple specialized program languages. Then it determines what pieces of the code are needed to perform particular tasks and transfers these instruction “kernels” (the “popcorn” part) to the appropriate function, ONR officials said.
Chips for video systems might be programmed in one language and those for networking functions in another. These multicore processors improve computing speed, but they also force programmers to design or upgrade applications based on what programs run on which processors. That means complex systems like battlespace awareness and artificial intelligence that require specialized processors must be manually adjusted so components can interact with each other.
Last year when I got my Acer Chromebook 11 (C740), I wrote a tutorial to teach you guys how to remove Google Chrome OS and install a GNU/Linux distribution of your choice, but things got boring.
So after a few months, I reinstalled Chrome OS using a recovery image that Google provides on their website for this sort of things, which I wrote on a USB flash drive and booted from my Chromebook. Recently, I got bored again, and so I decided to install Ubuntu on my Acer Chromebook 11 (C740) using Crouton.
Google's Chrome OS is one of the world's most misunderstood computing platforms. Chromebooks are foundationally different from traditional PCs, after all -- and consequently, there are a lot of misconceptions about how they work and what they can and cannot do.
Since people are always asking me whether a Chromebook might be right for their needs, I thought I'd put together a quick guide to help any such wonderers figure it out. Whether it's you or someone you know who's curious, the following three questions should help shed some light on what the platform's all about and for whom it makes sense.
Chromebooks are continuing to make an impact on the market and as a result, more Chromebooks are getting announced and almost on a monthly basis now. One of the most recent Chromebooks to be announced (April 2017) was the Lenovo Flex 11 Chromebook. This is a Chromebook which looks to combine the standard Chrome OS experience with a device that is durable and hardworking. While also looking to ensure the price is competitive by Chromebook standards. In this case, the Lenovo Flex 11 Chromebook is priced at $279.99 for the baseline model.
It’s almost 9 years I am using GNU/Linux as my default Operating System. The first time I used GNU/Linux was in 2008, when I wanted to crack the password of the computers of my school in order to install and play the games I wanted. So my first contact with GNU/Linux was through OPHCrack. I was absolutely impressed when I could get the password of the computers of my school in less than ten minutes. I was 14 and I think I wanted to be a hacker. Goals changed through time, though.
After running a crowdfunding campaign in 2015 to raise money for a laptop that runs free and open source software, Purism has been able to ship a limited number of 13 and 15 inch laptops, and the corporation is taking pre-orders for a 2-in-1 tablet.
Is distro hopping a dying sport or have I just gotten too old?
When I first started to use Linux I was the quintessential cliche distro hopper. I swapped and switched flavor of Linux seemingly every other day, certain that at some point I’d find the right fit and stop, content with at whatever combination of distro base and desktop environment I’d hit upon.
System76 continues working on improvements to the GNOME stack as part of their transition in-step to using it over Unity 7, in line with Canonical's decision to switch Ubuntu over to GNOME and abandon their grand Unity 8 ambitions.
It has been a few years since last running any Linux hardware surveys on Phoronix, as overall the ecosystem has rather matured nicely while of course there are still notable improvements to be had in the areas of GPUs and laptops. (Additionally, OpenBenchmarking.org provides a plethora of analytic capabilities when not seeking to collect subjective data / opinions.) But now we are hosting the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey to hopefully further improvements in this area.
Let us accept the fact – “Managing Docker on different Infrastructure is still difficult and not portable”. While working on Docker for Mac, AWS, GCP & Azure, Docker Team realized the need for a standard way to create and manage infrastructure state that was portable across any type of infrastructure, from different cloud providers to on-prem. One serious challenge is that each vendor has differentiated IP invested in how they handle certain aspects of their cloud infrastructure. It is not enough to just provision n-number of servers;what IT ops teams need is a simple and consistent way to declare the number of servers, what size they should be, and what sort of base software configuration is required. Also, in the case of server failures (especially unplanned), that sudden change needs to be reconciled against the desired state to ensure that any required servers are re-provisioned with the necessary configuration. Docker Team introduced and open sourced “InfraKit” last year to solve these problems and to provide the ability to create a self healing infrastructure for distributed systems.
The board is designed for HPC workload environments requiring parallel computing processing performance. Up to 72 cores for optional support and 100Gb/s node interconnect. Six slots for DDR4, 2400Mhz registered ECC DIMMS to achieve a capacity of 384G.
At GitHub we recently revamped how we do DNS from the ground up. This included both how we interact with external DNS providers and how we serve records internally to our hosts. To do this, we had to design and build a new DNS infrastructure that could scale with GitHub’s growth and across many data centers.
ServiceMaster Global Holdings Inc., which owns consumer brands such as Terminix, Merry Maids, Furniture Medic and ServiceMaster Clean and Restore, deploys 75,000 service trucks to residential driveways each day. Five years ago, the company was taken private by an equity firm, and new leadership, including a new CIO, was brought in to modernize its operations. When it returned to the public market in 2014, the company had completely overhauled its approach to IT.
In my "Hodge Podge" article in the October 2016 issue, I mentioned how much I love the Synology NAS I have in my server closet (Figure 1). I got quite a few email messages from people—some wanting more information, some scolding me for not rolling my own NAS, and some asking me what on earth I need with that much storage. Oddly, the Linux-running Synology NAS has become one of my main server machines, and it does far more than just store data. Because so many people wanted more information, I figured I'd share some of the cool things I do with my Synology.
Ubuntu has a long history in the cloud. It is the number one guest operating system on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. In fact there are more Ubuntu images running in the public cloud than all other operating systems combined.
Ubuntu is a free operating system which means anyone can download an image, whenever they want. So why should cloud providers offer certified Ubuntu images to their customers?
It’s difficult to compare programming languages and platforms, of course, but this was the analogy that most frequently came to mind last week. Cloud Foundry is unlikely to be as popular as it was shortly after it launched, when it was the only open source PaaS platform available. But this says little about Cloud Foundry, and more about the platform market which – like every other infrastructure market – is exploding with choice to the point of being problematic. It also ignores the ability for the Cloud Foundry foundation to actively embrace this choice via the addition of Kubo.
The Ubuntu OpenStack team is pleased to announce the general availability of the OpenStack Pike b2 milestone in Ubuntu 17.10 and for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS via the Ubuntu Cloud Archive.
There’s no doubt, in the IT world, microservices are sexy. But just because you find something cool and attractive doesn’t mean it’s good for you. And it doesn’t mean you know how to use it properly.
"Proprietary will have to either get on board or be left in the dust."
The council is led by Chris Liddell, a top aide to Trump and the former chief financial officer of Microsoft.
The FAS said Microsoft should act to change the alleged restrictions it imposed on users of anti-virus software from third parties.
As yet it's not clear if this is satisfactory for either Mr Kaspersky or the EC, as it only seems to partly answer the accusations.
Linus Torvalds took to the stage in China for the first time Monday at LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen China in Beijing. In front of a crowd of nearly 2,000, Torvalds spoke with VMware Head of Open Source Dirk Hohndel in one of their famous “fireside chats” about what motivates and surprises him and how aspiring open source developers can get started. Here are some highlights of their talk.
While waiting for my motherboards to arrive for the new Core i7 7740X and Core i9 7900X, I've been re-testing many of my AMD/Intel boxes with Ubuntu 17.04 on the latest Linux 4.12 kernel for comparison to Intel's new high-end processors. Here is a look at 12 of the existing systems when running on the Linux 4.12 kernel as well as all of the systems have the latest BIOSes, etc.
Given the continued flow of KHR_no_error patches hitting Mesa 17.2 Git by Valve developers, here is a fresh comparison using the just-updated Padoka PPA with comparing the impact of using this support via the MESA_NO_ERROR=1 switch.
The Baikal renderer is a newly-released, open-source implementation of the AMD Radeon ProRender API. Baikal has evolved into a fully-functional rendering engine and its only hardware requirement is on OpenCL 1.2.
Here is some more complementary data to this week's Vulkan vs. OpenGL On Linux With Core i5, Core i7, Ryzen 7.
With having the Intel Xeon Skylake + Radeon RX 470 box powered up yesterday/today with the latest Linux 4.12 + Mesa 17.2-dev stack for the new Mesa KHR_no_error testing, afterwards I kicked off some fresh benchmarks with that system for OpenGL vs. Vulkan using the Phoronix Test Suite.
For those curious about the state of the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) vs. OpenGL (RadeonSI) performance with different Intel and AMD CPUs, here are some fresh benchmark results with the current Vulkan-supported prominent Linux game titles of Dota 2, Mad Max, Talos Principle, and Dawn of War III. During this opportunity for the tests across Core i5 / Core i7 / Ryzen 7 hardware were also CPU usage analytics.
As this is a new blog on Fedora Planet, let me start off by introducing myself briefly. My name is Maxim Burgerhout, and I have been a Fedora contributor for quite some time. Truth be told though, I haven’t been able to spend much time maintaining my packages over the past couple of years. As a different way of giving back, I want to start sharing some experiences with open source software in a specific niche: screencast creation, and video editing.
If you’re sick of Skype for Linux’s lack of progress, or rankled by the imminent retirement of the older (but superior) Qt Skype client, there’s a GNU alternative in town called Ring.
GNU Ring is a cross-platform, privacy-minded communication app that is fast gaining a following in FOSS and security-conscious circles.
Open-source office suite LibreOffice is inching closer to providing automatic updates in-app. Daily builds of LibreOffice for Linux with a new automatic updater built-in are available for testing, LibreOffice developer Markus Mohrhard announced today.
LibreOffice developer Markus Mohrhard recently announced that his work on the new automatic updater for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.0 office suite for Linux is finally ready to see the light of day.
Nylas Mail was (I guess still is, but I can’t be bothered keeping track of tenses in this heatwave) a cross-platform desktop email client built using the world’s most popular application development framework, Electron.
Thanks to a fairly decent set of smarts the app could handle multiple accounts, do unified inboxes, mail snoozing, undo send, and a bunch other stuff.
Tilda is a free, open source, highly customizable and configurable GTK based drop down Terminal emulator for Unix-like operating systems. Unlike other traditional Terminals like gnome-terminal (Gnome), Konsole (KDE), MATE Terminal (MATE), xterm and many others, Tilda has no border window and is hidden until a key or keys pressed. Its design was inspired from the classical Terminals used in first person shooter games, Quake, Doom and Half-Life to name a few. It doesn’t has border window, menu bar, title bar, and minimize or maximize buttons. It can be pulled up and down when a key is pressed. Tilda is popular among developers and those who are using Terminal mostly to perform all tasks.
Alexander Wolf released today Stellarium 0.16.0, a new major update of the open-source and cross-platform planetarium software for GNU/Linux, Android, macOS, and Windows platforms.
Stellarium 0.16.0 is a stable version that introduces some exciting new features, such as a RemoteSync plugin that lets users run multiple instances of the application, supports non-spherical models for solar system objects like small moons and asteroids, and new Skycultures, including Belarusian and Hawaiian Star Lines.
Keep tracking the password is one of the big challenge to everyone now a days since we has multiple password like email, bank, social media, online portal, and ftp, etc.,.
Password managers are become very famous due to the demand and usage. In Linux so many alternatives are available, GUI based and CLI based. Today we are going to discuss about CLI based password manager called pass.
ââ¬â¹Watching your favorite TV shows and movies series is what you all guys do every day. Flash, Iron Fist or Moana and many more awesome movies and tv shows that we love to watch. The problems come when you are traveling. Many of your shows or movies are restricted to a particular region and cannot be accessed when you are traveling or want to just quickly watch that awesome flash punch from an episode of 1 month old.
When I created a list of Alternative Evernote Clients for Linux, the formerly known NeverNote was on the list as NixNote since it hadn’t gained a “2” to its title yet. It has been 4 months since and I decided to give the app its own review for you guys. Without further ado, let’s get to it.
NixNote2 (also called NixNote) is an unofficial client of Evernote for Linux. It possesses most of the features Evernote provides including the use of Notebooks, tags, themes, emails, and multiple accounts.
Not too long ago I reviewed Grive2 as an alternative Google Drive client for Linux. Today, I’ll introduce you to Grive, a Docker implementation for the Google Drive client, Grive2.
Docker (if you don’t already know what it is), is a tool designed to benefit both system admins and developers thanks to its use of containers. Docker’s containers provide a way for developers to create and distribute their apps using containers.
ââ¬â¹We all encounter many times the boot related problems and most of them are simply related to GRUB. Many people find it way too hard sometimes to enter long commands or search forums to find the way they can solve it. Today I am going to tell you how to use a simple, small software to solve most of the boot related problems. This tool is known as Boot Repair Tool. Now no more talk and get to work.
The Wine development release 2.11 is now available.
Wine 2.11 has arrived as the latest bi-weekly development release for this program to handle Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems.
Building off Wine 2.10 with its initial Android graphics driver support is now support for OpenGL within Wine's Android driver.
The Wine 2.11 development release is now officially available with more Android work and other fixes.
Marek Olšák's changes to make Rocket League and Witcher 2 happy on the RadeonSI OpenGL driver are now in place.
Ashes of the Singularity [Steam] is aiming to have Vulkan support in August, which paves the way for Linux support in future.
Serious Sam 3: BFE has been upgraded (for now, the non-VR version) against the Serious Sam 2017 "Fusion" engine changes, which means Vulkan for this latest Croteam game.
Croteam continues sticking to their word on bringing Vulkan and more to their collection of games via this Serious Sam "Fusion" 2017 work. This Fusion update has arrived for Serious Sam 3: BFE, which on top of the Vulkan support and upgraded engine also comes a number of "smaller and bigger changes" that were made to the game at the same time. There have been some gameplay improvements, some levels made more difficult, various rendering fixes, editor enhancements, and much more.
Last year Valve showed off a prototype of their new "knuckles" controllers for Steam VR while now it appears they are getting to the stage of shipping dev kits to VR developers.
For those hardware enthusiasts looking for a cheap purchase, you might want to know that Amazon and GAME have discounted the Steam Link and Steam Controller.
AereA is an action RPG with heavy musical influences. You weapons make music, you're a disciple of the Great Maestro Guido and your home base is a great big musical hall. You play as one of four characters, which can be played with up to four people in local co-op.
CryENGINE 5.4 is slated for release next month and will finally roll out a Vulkan renderer.
The Culling [Steam] had been left broken on Linux for quite some time, but as promised the developers have tried to fix it. It now works, well, sort of anyway. When I say it works, I mean it loads, but it's still very broken.
Cossacks 3, a real-time strategy game from GSC Game World and a remake of the Cossacks: European Wars from 2001, is now available for Linux.
This RTS game was first released for Windows last September while a number of Phoronix readers have been writing in this week about it finally hitting an open beta period on Steam. This comes after Cossacks 3 for Linux was delayed several times, to which the developers apologize. The macOS port of Cossacks 3 also remains a work-in-progress.
Kona [Steam, Official Site, GOG], the environmental survival and adventure game has been updated in the hopes of fixing some major Linux issues, but it still has problems.
SAELIG [Steam] is a very interesting looking strategy, role-playing, simulation, and trading game that is planning a Linux release. It's seeing a slight delay, but the communication from the developer has been great.
Following the 5th release 5.5.0 published in March 2017, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.6.0 of digiKam Software Collection. With this version the HTML gallery and the video slideshow tools are back, database shrinking (e.g. purging stale thumbnails) is also supported on MySQL, grouping items feature has been improved, the support for custom sidecars type-mime have been added, the geolocation bookmarks introduce fixes to be fully functional with bundles, the support for custom sidecars, and of course a lots of bug has been fixed.
digiKam 5.6 is now available as the latest version of this open-source photo management software aligned with KDE/Qt.
Sounds like déjà vu? You are right! We used to have Facebook Event sync in KOrganizer back in KDE 4 days thanks to Martin Klapetek. The Facebook Akonadi resource, unfortunately, did not survive through Facebook API changes and our switch to KF5/Qt5.
Robert Kaye is definitely a brainz-over-brawn kinda guy. As the creator of MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz and AcousticBrainz, all created and maintained under the MetaBrainz Foundation, he has pushed Free Software music cataloguing-tagging-classifying to the point it has more or less obliterated all the proprietary options.
In July he will be in Almería, delivering a keynote at the 2017 Akademy -- the yearly event of the KDE community. He kindly took some time out of packing for a quick trip to Thailand to talk with us about his *Brainz projects, how to combine altruism with filthy lucre, and a cake he once sent to Amazon.
IMEs also need to provide libraries for every version of GTK and Qt as well. If an IME is not updated to support the latest version, you won’t be able to use the IME in applications using the latest version of GTK or Qt.
It’s based on ROSA Image Writer which has served KDE neon and other projects well for some time. This adds ISO verification to automatically check the digital signatures or checksums, currently supported is KDE neon, Kubuntu and Netrunner. It also uses KAuth so it doesn’t run the UI as root, only a simple helper binary to do the writing. And it uses KDE Frameworks goodness so the UI feels nice.
Linux enthusiasts on the hunt for a reliable USB image writer will be pleased to hear that a new app is in development.
The plainly named ‘ISO Image Writer‘ is a new app by Jonathan Riddell, a prominent KDE developer and project lead of the KDE Neon software stack.
The new app, Riddell says, is based on the Qt5 ROSA Image Writer, a cross-platform USB image writer that is recommended by KDE Neon, among other Linux distributions.
System76's kernel engineer Jeremy Soller announced that he's been working on bringing encrypted Home folder support in the GNOME desktop environment for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.
Last month, the Denver-based computer reseller specializing in the sale of laptops, desktops, and servers pre-loaded with the Ubuntu Linux operating system revealed their plans for preparing a consistent GNOME experience for their computers powered by Ubuntu 17.10 later this year when the OS launches officially.
CEO Carl Richell reported on some of the upcoming changes that the Linux hardware company plans to make in this regard, improving both the look and feel and the under-the-hood functionality of the GNOME desktop environment, which will ship by default with the next major Ubuntu release.
GNOME's Mutter 3.25.3 window manager / compositor is now available as the newest release in the path towards GNOME 3.26.
So we just released the third development release of Maps in the 3.25 series (leading up to 3.26.0 in September).
Some new noteworthy new features and fixes made it in. We gained a couple of new keyboard shortcuts
GNOME 3.25.3 is now available as the latest stepping stone towards September's release of GNOME 3.26.
Matthias Clasen has informed the community via an email announcement that the third milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment is now ready for public testing.
After a one day delay, GNOME 3.25.3 is now available, and it's the third development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment that could be used by default in popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) or Fedora 27, both due for release later this year. It brings a bunch of updates and new features to several of its components and apps.
Well, let me be frank. Ever since gtk-3.0 I've been skeptical of it, especially of the theming aspect. In gtk-2 we had (and still have) many themes ranging from trash to excellent, almost every kind of taste could have been satisfied. Not so in gtk-3. First issue is constant changes to theming API, meaning that despite there being hundreds of themes, only handful of them actually work right :( And among them, I still have yet to find one that would work on my fairly usual 15,6ââ¬Â³ laptop screen with 1366Ãâ768 px resolution. Basicaly I have two issues.
I am very happy to be part of GNOME and Google Summer of Code 2017. First of all, thank you for all GNOME members for giving me this opportunity and Christian Hergert for mentoring and helping me in this project. In this post I will introduce my project and approach for doing this project.
Goal of the project is to enhance Go to Definition and Global Search in GNOME Builder for C/C++ projects. Currently in GNOME Builder, using Go to Definition one can go from reference of a symbol to its definition if definition is there in current file or included in current file. In this project, Go to Definition will be enhanced and using that one can go from reference of a symbol to its definition which can be present in any file in the project. Global Search will also be enhanced by allowing to search all symbols in the project fuzzily right from search bar.
But let’s start from the beginning. Only 4 months ago, I was making my first steps as a contributor in the open-source world. One of the first things I discovered is how amazing and helpful the GNOME community is. I started by trying out a lot of GNOME apps and looking through the code behind them and that’s how I discovered Pitivi, a really great video editing solution. After my first patch on Pitivi got accepted, I was really hooked up. Fast forward a couple of patches and now I have the opportunity and great pleasure to work on my own project: UI for the Ken Burns effect, after being accepted for Google Summer of Code 2017. In this amazing journey, I’ve had some great mentoring: special thanks to Thibault Saunier (thiblahute), who is also my current mentor for GSOC 2017, and Alexandru Balut (aleb), who helped me along the way.
It’s been three weeks since the coding period for GSOC 2017 started, so it’s time to show the world the progress I made. A short recap: I’ve been working on building a user interface which allows simulating the Ken-Burns effect and other similar effects in Pitivi. The idea is to allow adding keyframes on x, y, width, height properties of a clip, much like we are doing with other effects.
There are plenty of free multimedia converters for Ubuntu available, with command-line champ FFmpeg arguably the most powerful of them all.
But this power comes with a complexity. Using FFMpeg to convert media through the command line can be intimidating and arcane.
Which is why FFMpeg frontends are popular.
The way the GtkActionMuxer works is by following the widget hierarchy to resolve GActions. Since the HeaderBar is a sibling to the content area (and not a direct ancestor) you cannot activate those actions. It would be nice for the muxer to gain more complex support, but until then… Dazzle.
Looking over this list, I notice that innovative, security-based, and community-developed distributions. However, I am not consistent in these preferences, since I do not include perfectly good alternatives like openSUSE or Linux Mint.
Still, one thing a list like this makes clear is that the total number of distributions might be declining, but the diversity of Linux variants is as strong as ever. Even if you don't find any of these choices to your liking, dig around and you should find several distributions that you can live with.
Linux Lite is a beginner-friendly Linux distribution that is based on the well known Ubuntu LTS and targeted at Windows users. Its mission is to provide a complete set of applications to support users' everyday computing needs, including a complete office suite, media players and other essential applications.
The new version, Linux Lite 3.4, simplifies scheduling of software updates, installing third-party drivers and creating a restore point for the OS. Meanwhile, the new Lite Updates Notify application informs the user of all available updates. Users can set update reminders anywhere from once every hour to every three weeks.
It is time to arch our backs and explore the distroverse some more. That's a horrible pun, I admit, so I'll chase to the cut. Manjaro. It's a nerdy operating system, powered by sacrificial goats, curdled blood, enthusiasm, and heaploads of nerdiness. But then, over the years, it has slowly grown on me, becoming almost usable on a daily basis.
A new version is out, carrying the numerical identifier 17.0.1, and there are several desktop flavors available. In order to test the progress and change in Manjaro, I decided to continue with the Xfce version, and so we can compare to previous editions. Now, the system has a rolling update nature, so I could have just upgraded the installed instance on my Lenovo G50 box, but I decided to go for a full, fresh experience. We commence.
The Linux platform can do quite a lot of things; it can be just about anything need it to be and function in nearly any form. One of the many areas in which Linux excels is that of storage. With the help of a few constituent pieces, you can have a powerful NAS or cloud storage solution up and running.
But, what if you don’t want to take the time to piece these together for yourself? Or, what if you’d rather have a user-friendly, web-based GUI to make this process a bit easier. For that, there are a few distributions available to meet your needs. Once such platform is Rockstor. Rockstor is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) and cloud solution that can serve either your personal or small business needs with ease.
Rockstor got its start in 2014 and has quickly become a solid tool in the storage space. I was able to quickly get Rockstor up and running (after overcoming only one minor hurdle) and had SMB shares and users/groups created with just a few quick clicks. And, with the inclusion of add-ons (called Rockons), you can extend the feature set of your Rockstor to include new apps, servers, and services.
The Polish developers behind the Debian-based SparkyLinux GNU/Linux distribution were proud to announce today the general availability of the final SparkyLinux 4.6 release codenamed Tyche.
Remember that "openSUSE Tablet" last year that was seeking crowd-funding and even advertised by the openSUSE crew for being a Linux tablet as cheap as $200 USD? Sadly, it's not a reality while the company still appears to be formulating something.
OpenSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution continues picking up new functionality in a very punctual manner.
Just weeks after the last of the MP3 patents expiring and Fedora shipping full MP3 support, openSUSE Tumbleweed is now the latest distribution legally shipping MP3 support out-of-the-box. This comes with Tumbleweed using GStreamer 1.12 and enabling mpg123.
Users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system are getting a lot of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software applications lately as a total of seven snapshots were released this week.
openSUSE Project's Douglas DeMaio is back to report that openSUSE Tumbleweed is now powered by the latest Linux 4.11.6 kernel, and the GStreamer multimedia framework was updated to the major 1.12 series, adding out-of-the-box MP3 decoding support in the distribution.
A total of seven openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots featuring new software were released this week along with an upgrade to GStreamer that allows for mp3 decoding to work out-of-the box.
The newest stable Linux Kernel 4.11.6 is also available in the latest Tumbleweed snapshot 20170620.
Updates in the repositories from the 20170620 snapshot brought both the 52.2 versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, which fixed some critical vulnerabilities. Systemd 233 provided a package for a new systemd-umount binary and, with the update of dracut 044.1, supports the new compatibility rule. Fontconfig’s 2.12.3 version fixed the build issues with gperf 3.1 and on GNU Hurd. The Beta 2 version of LibreOffice 5.4 cleaned up the license string and got rid of the Oxygen theme. A removal of support for old, non-systemd distros was made available in the snapshot with libvirt 3.4.0.
I am not quick to buy new things, though I did replace my Dell Latitude D630 about three months ago with a newer Dell latitude E6440. My plan was to deprecate the machine and put it on a "reserve only" status. In my process of setting up the E6440, I found that I used my D630 still but quite differently, it became my home station machine and my E6440 would be my mobile machine that would return back to "base" where I would have it connect as a client to the D630 for keyboard and mouse. It was a rather nice arrangement.
Unfortunately, the hard drive died on the D630 and I needed to install openSUSE once again on it in order to continue to use my workspace as I have been. What is $50 on a new hard drive to restore my SuperCubicle, right?
[...]
I run KDE Plasma for my desktop. I've tried others but the customization options in KDE Plasma just fits my personal tastes best. I have also been real happy with the speed improvements of KDE Plasma in the last couple years and especially those of KDE Plasma 5.10 on Tumbleweed as of late.
With the pace of Tumbleweed having resumed to ‘almost daily snapshots’ I will to the review again weekly instead of bi-weekly. It’s just easier to remember what big updates came in like this. This week I will cover the 6 snapshots 0616,0617,0618,0619,0620 and 0622 (again, 0622 just passed openQA and you will get it shortly on the mirror). There was also a 0621 tested, but discarded by openQA.
Today, Red Hat is pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat Satellite 5.8, the last minor release of the Satellite 5 product line. Red Hat Satellite 5.8 builds upon 10 years of enterprise-proven successes, offering a complete lifecycle management solution to help keep Red Hat infrastructure running efficiently and with greater security, helping to reduce costs and overall complexity. Red Hat Satellite 5.8 is now available to all customers with an active Satellite subscription.
Today Red Hat Inc. announced that it was jumping into the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market with what it is calling the industry’s first production-ready fully open source HCI solution, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure. The new HCI solution is all about taking data center capabilities and squeezing them into smaller spaces such as branch offices and other remote facilities.
As major U.S. telecommunications providers get ready to launch their 5G networks, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said his company is poised to be a major benefactor of the shift.
"All the major telcos are going to a technology called OpenStack, and we're the largest provider of OpenStack, we're the largest contributor to that whole set of technologies, so we expect it could be quite large for us," Whitehurst told "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer on Wednesday. "In fact, three of the four large telcos in the U.S. already have eight-figure relationships with us in place, and those are really just scratching the surface with very small implementations."
Shares of open-source software specialist Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) opened 10.6% higher on Wednesday morning, lifted by a fantastic earnings report.
Red Hat's core business has always been based on Linux, which even now continues to show signs of growth.
Red Hat reported its first quarter fiscal 2018 financial results on June 20, with revenue coming in at $677 million for a 19 percent year-over-year gain. Net income was reported at $73 million, up from $61 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017. Looking forward, Red Hat provided second quarter guidance for revenue to be approximately $695 million to $702 million.
Red Hat Inc logoDrexel Hamilton reissued their buy rating on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in a research note released on Wednesday. Drexel Hamilton currently has a $127.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock, up from their previous price objective of $110.00.
When it comes to total compensation, including stock awards, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst saw a dip in fiscal 2017 earnings, according to a proxy statement.
The Flatpak open-source GNU/Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework has been updated with a new feature that should harden its security.
Alex Larsson has recently released Flatpak versions 0.9.6 and 0.8.7, which comes about two weeks after their previous point releases to implement a new feature that will avoid creating world-writable directories or setuid files, including in the Flatpak export functionality.
Several months ago, I wrote an article on the Fedora in-vivo upgrade mechanism using dnf. The upgrade went smoothly, going from version 24 to version 25 on my G50 laptop. Now, let us make this thing more challenging.
Today, I shall attempt to upgrade Fedora 23 to Fedora 25, a two-version skip, on my somewhat antiquated LG RD510 notebook, which also happens to have an Nvidia graphics card, and also using the relevant proprietary drivers. As promised, here we go. Let's see if we can match the success of the previous adventure.
Fedora uses Eye of GNOME to display images, but it’s a very basic program. Out of the box, Fedora doesn’t have a great tool for managing photos. If you’re familiar with the Fedora Workstation’s desktop environment, GNOME, then you may be familiar with GNOME Photos. This is a young app available in GNOME Software that seeks to make managing photos a painless task. You may not know that there’s a more robust tool out there that packs more features and looks just as at home on Fedora. It’s called gThumb.
Recently, I have started a discussion on the Server mailing list about building the Fedora 27 Server Edition using Modularity. Langdon White is already working on a change request. If that happens, there will be a lot of work in front of us. So let’s start with writing blog posts!
Release Candidate versions are available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests (for x86_64 only), and also as base packages.
We found multiple issues in the live images released at the weekend. Since then, I've been working on fixes for the worst problems. I've just published a new set of images as 9.0.1.
Debian developer and the team lead of "debian-cd" Steve McIntyre announced on the project's mailing list that he and his team worked hard during the past 72 hours or so to rebuild all the live images of the new Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" release.
Launched this past weekend, Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" is now the most stable and advanced release of the acclaimed Linux-based operating system, shipping with tons of new features and updated technologies. The OS has been in development for the past two years.
Continuing in our benchmarks of Debian 9, here is a comparison when re-testing 6.0.10 "Squeeze", Debian 7.11 "Wheezy", Debian 8.8 "Jessie", and the newly-released Debian 9.0 "Stretch".
I’ve done my first upgrades to Debian stretch at this point. The results have been overall good. On the laptop my kids use, I helped my 10-year-old do it, and it worked flawlessly. On my workstation, I got a kernel panic on boot. Hmm.
Unfortunately, my system has to use the nv drivers, which leaves me with an 80Ãâ25 text console. It took some finagling (break=init in grub, then manually insmoding the appropriate stuff based on modules.dep for nouveau), but finally I got a console so I could see what was breaking. It appeared that init was crashing because it couldn’t find liblz4. A little digging shows that liblz4 is in /usr, and /usr wasn’t mounted. I’ve filed the bug on systemd-sysv for this.
Canonical's Benjamin M. Romer announced that a new kernel livepatch is now available for users of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems using the service, addressing the recently disclosed "Stack Clash" vulnerability.
As reported this week, Canonical already managed to update the kernel packages of all of its supported Ubuntu Linux releases, including Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), and Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) patching multiple security flaws, including CVE-2017-1000364.
As part of the switch over to the GNOME Shell desktop environment by default for Ubuntu 17.10, they are also abandoning the LightDM display/log-in manager in favor of GNOME's GDM.
We intend to target a 4.13 kernel for the Ubuntu 17.10 release. The Ubuntu 17.10 Kernel Freeze is Thurs Oct 5, 2017.
A developer who worked with the Ubuntu Phone project has outlined the reasons for its failure, painting a picture of confusion, poor communication and lack of technical and marketing foresight.
Simon Raffeiner stopped working with the project in mid-2016, about 10 months before Canonical owner Mark Shuttleworth announced that development of the phone and the tablet were being stopped.
It’s Season Ten Episode Sixteen of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson, Martin Wimpress and Joey Sneddon are connected and speaking to your brain.
The VIA Mobile360 Surround View Sample Kit, which runs Android on an octa-core SoC, provides real-time 360€° vehicle monitoring, recording, and tracking.
VIA Technologies has unveiled an embedded computer kit for commercial vehicles that integrates inputs from 4x automotive-grade Sharp FOV-190 or FOV-50 cameras. The VIA Mobile360 Surround View Sample Kit uses VIA Multi-Stitch Technology to “seamlessly combine the camera feeds on the fly and create an all-encompassing 360€° view that can be displayed locally or remotely,” says the company. Options include ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) speed detection, collision warning, blind spot warning, and lane departure warning.
Win Enterprises unveiled a “PL-81210” networking appliance that runs Linux on a dual-core Atom x5-E3930, and offers mini-PCIe, mSATA, and up to 4x GbE.
Win Enterprises has launched a low-end networking appliance with three or four Gigabit Ethernet ports, a WAN port, and mini-PCIe expansion. The fanless, PL-81210 runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4 on a dual-core Intel Atom x5-E3930 from the most recent Apollo Lake generation.
Minnowboard.org is prepping an open spec “MinnowBoard 3” SBC with a quad-core Apollo Lake, 4GB LPDDR4, 8GB eMMC, 3x M.2 sockets, and an RPi connector.
The Intel-backed Minnowboard.org project has posted preliminary specs for an open-spec MinnowBoard 3 model to follow the recently shipped MinnowBoard Turbo Quad. Due to ship in the fall, the community-backed MinnowBoard 3 stands out with a 14nm Apollo Lake Atom, three M.2 sockets, and an “RPI” adapter. The only RPI we know of is Raspberry Pi, or more specifically, its much copied 40-pin expansion connector.
Thecorpora’s Scratch-ready “Q.bo One” robot is based on the RPi 3 and Arduino, and offers stereo cams, mics, a speaker, and visual and language recognition.
In 2010, robotics developer Francisco Paz and his Barcelona-based Thecorpora startup introduced the first Qbo “Cue-be-oh” robot as an open source proof-of-concept and research project for exploring AI capabilities in multi-sensory, interactive robots. Now, after a preview in February at Mobile World Congress, Thecorpora has gone to Indiegogo to launch the first mass produced version of the social robot in partnership with Arrow.
The 21st century is a period where connectivity is the main technological idea. People and “things”, as well as “things” and “things”, can connect easily without obstacles and this is the main plot of the IoT ecosystem, which is currently being expanded globally. The driving force of the IoT ecosystem is the operating system of devices and it is consistently evolving. Tizen is an open source, Linux-based Operating System (OS), that is compatible with numerous devices such as smartphones, wearable, smartwatches, TV and IVI devices.
Officially, the Tizen version of Xender app was unveiled on the 8th of May and it can be downloaded from Tizen store. This app was ranked fifth in the list of most popular Tizen apps/games for May 2017 despite only being a few weeks old. Within the first few weeks of its official release, the Tizen version of Xender app got over 150,000 downloads and at some point was ranked among the top 3 apps in the Tizen Store.
The world of technology is consistently growing and many difficult tasks are becoming increasingly easier. You no longer need a code to create, apply and measure interactive digital experiences. IntiuFace is the ultimate platform for building interactive digital experiences. You can now build apps and interact with them using Tizen-based Samsung Smart Signage device (SSSP4). You can also interact with any connected objects found among connected IoT devices.
I would strongly consider the OnePlus 5 if I were in the market for an Android phone, but it's not an outright, clear-cut decision. That's because I prefer phones that get timely updates directly from Google, and only the Google Pixel fits that bill.
However, if you don't mind getting Android updates a little later, the OnePlus 5 is a clear winner for its price tag. Sure, you wouldn't get as many features as you would with the Galaxy S8, but most of those features seem expendable after using the OnePlus 5.
The OnePlus 5 has the features and performance that make a smartphone great, and I'd strongly recommend it to anyone and everyone.
You can preorder the OnePlus 5 now from OnePlus' website or buy it when it goes on sale on June 27.
Motorola’s G series has been the benchmark for exceptional budget smartphones, and the lesser-known Moto E series strives to do the same to do the same at an even lower cost. With the latest entry — the Moto E4 — Motorola hits the ball out of the park with an impressive phone that offers plenty of value for $130. There will always be some compromises on budget devices, and the Moto E4 is no different. But price is very much the spotlight of this phone, and it’s quite competitive given the solid features you get. In our Moto E4 review, we’ll take a deeper look at what Motorola cut, what it kept, and how it all works in the end.
The Moto E4 is fine. It's not particularly good looking or powerful, nor is it filled with features. When you think a generic smartphone, this is kind of what you think of.
And yet, for $129, I would probably recommend it, warts and all, over any other phone. At $70 on Verizon's prepaid service, it's an absolute steal. Here's why.
One of the most common reasons people give for not contributing (or not contributing more) to open source is a lack of time. I get it; life is challenging, and there are so many priorities vying for your limited attention. So how can you find the time in your busy life to contribute to the open source projects you care about?
In the interest of full disclosure, I should warn you that I was late getting this article to the editors because I couldn't find the time to work on it. Take my advice at your own risk.
Findings from an Open Source Survey designed by GitHub together with researchers from academia, industry, and the community, provide interesting insights about the attitudes, experiences, and backgrounds of those who use, build, and maintain open source software. The full results are available as an open data set available on GitHub.
As interest in the Python programming language increases, a new open-source project wants to help developers start building applications in the language. Dash, created by the online data analytics and visualization solution provider Plotly, is a Python library for analytical, web-based applications.
This week, Google open-sourced a project intended to cut down on the amount of work in configuring a deep learning model for training. Tensor2Tensor, or T2T for short, is a Python-powered workflow organization library for TensorFlow training jobs. It lets developers specify the key elements used in a TensorFlow model and define the relationships among them.
Google, in a partnership with IBM and Lyft, recently announced a new open-source project called Istio. Istio’s purpose is to provide a uniform way to connect, secure, manage, and monitor microservices for application development.
In my series on becoming more open, I've written about selecting teammates for an open project, working with people that have different personalities, and encouraging front-line decision-making.
Networks have become indispensable infrastructure in modern society. The danger is that these networks tend to be closed, proprietary, complex, operationally expensive and inflexible, all of which impede innovation and progress rather than enable them. Presenting an alternative vision—that networking can serve the public interest—is the Open Network Operating Sytem, or ONOS Project. ONOS is an open-source, software-defined networking (SDN) OS for service providers that has scalability, high availability, high performance and abstractions to simplify creation of apps and services. The platform is based on a solid architecture and quickly has matured to be feature-rich and production-ready.
The telecommunications space has conventionally used proprietary hardware and software to deploy solutions from various vendors. Using multiple vendors enabled telecom operators to open source some network functions, but not to the extent usually fastened to open source software.
Proprietary and open source programs are made of codes written by programmers. A proprietary program is a closed source, meaning it is owned by a developer, restricted to a licensing agreement and cannot be copied. An open source program, as the name suggests, is an open source, meaning it can be copied and modified under the developer’s license.
The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit is the premier open source technical conference in North America, gathering 2,000 developers, operators and community leadership professionals to collaborate, share information and learn about the latest in open technologies, including Linux, containers, cloud computing and more.
All Systems Go! is an Open Source community conference focused on the projects and technologies at the foundation of modern Linux systems — specifically low-level user-space technologies. Its goal is to provide a friendly and collaborative gathering place for individuals and communities working to push these technologies forward.
One of the biggest open source events in the world is right around the corner, and the full schedule has now been announced. The Open Source Summit -- Sept. 11-14 in Los Angeles, CA -- features more than 200 sessions, with additional breakout sessions throughout the day covering technical, leadership, and professional open source tracks.
We are very pleased to announce that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has committed support to DebConf17 as a Platinum sponsor.
When traveling, I make an effort to visit the local hackerspace. I understand that this is not normal behavior for many people, but for us (free / opensource advocates) is always a must.
The Node.js Foundation will be talking more about why companies are turning to Node.js for digital transformation and Node.js best practices during the above mentioned free webinar on July 12 at 11am PT with Rick Adams, Senior IT Manager with Lowe’s Digital. The conversation will highlight other key findings from the Forrester report.
I was a nobody. With some encouragement, enough liquid courage to override my imposter syndrome, and a few hours of mentoring, I'm now doing big projects. The next time you're sitting at a table with someone new to your field, ask yourself: how can you encourage them? You just might make the world better.
Thank you Dale. And thank you Theo.
We've had the linkkit components in the tree for a while, but it has taken nearly 20 rounds between rpe/tb/myself to get the last few bits finished. So that the link kit is cleanly used at reboot, but also fits in with the practices kernel developers follow.
Norway’ Brønnøysundregistrene (Brønnøysund Register Centre), the government agency managing many of the country’s public registers and digital information exchange systems, is developing a semantic catalogue which it will make available as open source software in autumn. The tools are intended for Norway’s public sector, that can use them to for task involving public and not-public datasets.
There’s open-source software, open-source pharma research, and open-source beer. Now, there are open-source seeds, too. Breeders from Göttingen University in Germany and Dottenfelderhof agricultural school in Bad Vilbel, Germany, have released tomato and wheat varieties under an open-source license. Their move follows similar schemes for sharing plant material in India and the United States, but is the first that provides legal protection for the open-source status of future descendants of plant varieties.
Imaging data is increasingly important in the healthcare and life science industries, with artificial intelligence able to train itself to detect needles in the hay and arrive at verdicts that would take humans significantly longer. Such projects typically work on siloed data however as there is no real central repository that allows data types to be linked and shared among the research community.
Researchers from the University of Dundee, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge hope to rectify that via a new repository called the Image Data Resource (IDR), with their work described in a recently published paper.
Current satellite imaging only allows us to look at various disconnected locations. Planet’s always-on, daily imagery provides a global monitoring capability never before possible. Frequent satellite imagery is often a critical component to understanding our increasingly complex, interconnected world. Use Planet’s timely imagery to monitor and understand global activity and patterns of life.
The AXIOM Beta is an open source camera developed by Apertus, which was successfully funded on Indiegogo in 2014. Progress went a little quiet, but they’ve now released an update.
If you don’t know what the AXIOM camera is, then don’t worry – you’re probably not alone. It’s a project started by independent film-makers looking to create a cinematic film camera that would last and keep ahead of rapidly advancing technology.
However, when it comes to hardware tinkering, programming knowledge is a must. To take care of this issue, developers have been trying to create what’s called visual programming languages. Many of them are already popular, including the likes of Node-Red and NoFlo, and others are budding.
One such new visual programming language for Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and other development boards is XOD. In an email sent to Fossbytes, the creators of XOD programming language told that they’ve added graphical functionality and functional reactive principles. XOD language, XOD IDE, and library sources will be open sourced and published on GitHub once it’s launched.
The second alpha release of the upcoming PHP 7.2 is now available for testing.
PHP 7.2 Alpha 2 contains a number of fixes, updated SQLite3, SQLite3 support for writing to blobs, some compatibility improvements, and other work as outlined via the NEWS file. This second alpha comes just a few weeks after the first PHP 7.2 alpha.
At FOSSASIA, we had many professionals attending the talks, and the kids were having their own workshops. There were various other Python talks in different tracks as well.
The language that finds itself on the top of the mountain is Java. Being around open source software for over 15 years, this was not always the case. Early on, we did not see a lot of interest in Java developers, but boy has that changed. It is the definitive leader in the application space currently. While the numbers have not grown in the last six quarters, the sheer overall number is impressive. On average, companies are asking for Java skills in over 1 in 3 job postings focused on FLOSS. Quite a feat for a language that did not register on the radar years ago. And, based on its heavy use with Android, it would not be a surprise to see this number increase in the future.
Another language that is used prominently in the application space is C++. While its numbers can't quite compete with that of Java, it still commands a large marketshare in this arena. Whereas Java is asked for in 1 of 3 postings, C++ is required in 1 of 4. Much like that of Java, its numbers have remained relatively stable over the last six quarters. C++ has always been heavily utilized, and even though Java has superseded it, it remains a highly relevant language.
A new minor version 0.2.3 of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN.
It's never easy to admit when you do things wrong, but making errors is part of any learning process, from learning to walk to learning a new programming language, such as Python.
Here's a list of three things I got wrong when I was learning Python, presented so that newer Python programmers can avoid making the same mistakes. These are errors that either I got away with for a long time or that that created big problems that took hours to solve.
It seems like every day I'm coming across a new project written in Python.
And really, this should be no surprise. Python is a general-purpose language which works great in a variety of environments; it abstracts away a lot of the complexities of underlying systems, which giving you access to them whenever you need them. While both the language itself and toolchain around it help make it a great language for beginners, it is powerful enough to run some of the world' most complex websites and applications, including entire data centers with the OpenStack project.
Paul Royall, the editor at BBC News for the 6pm and 10pm bulletins, said there had been a “technical system crash” seconds before the start of the programme. This led to the director having to switch to a backup system.
The service will use two fully automated, 15-passenger, all-electric shuttles manufactured by French firm NAVYA to transport students, faculty and staff on a nonstop two-mile route between the Lurie Engineering Center and the North Campus Research Complex on Plymouth Road.
The university plans to deploy two of the shuttles, manufactured by French startup Navya, to service a two-mile route between the Lurie Engineering Center and the North Campus Research Complex on Plymouth Road. The shuttle can carry a maximum of 15 passengers, and lacks a steering wheel or pedals. The vehicles are being deployed in partnership with Mcity, the university’s 32-acre testing facility automakers and tech startups often test their self-driving cars.
Because parenting is hard, Farnum has decided to see if the state can't pick up his parenting slack. He has introduced a ballot measure that would ban retailers from selling phones to preteens, even indirectly. If this anesthesiologist can find 300,000 like-minded idiots willing to follow him into legislative infamy, his proposal could possibly become law.
Distracted driving laws and the crusade against distractions in the car have a history that goes back many years. Generally, the trend has been to try to ban each new distraction that comes along, and to seek to place the blame on device makers and automakers for not figuring out how to reliably disable those devices. There was even a ruling in California that made it illegal for a driver to use a mapping app. But now, the state of Colorado has done something unexpected, and perhaps even... reasonable.
The state has made it legal to text while behind the wheel, unless it's done in a "careless or imprudent manner." While the new law does give a reprieve to those who use their phones in a safe manner (e.g., while at red light, or stopped in traffic), it also significantly increases the penalties for those who run afoul of the "carelessness" provision. As we've written before, there are many potential distractions inside a vehicle, and eliminating them all would be impractical, if not impossible. So this new law puts the focus on the dangerous behavior instead of the potential distraction itself, holding the driver responsible for unsafe actions.
The Online Trust Alliance on Tuesday released its 2017 Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll.
Among its findings: Consumer services sites have the best combined security and privacy practices.
FDIC 100 banks and U.S. government sites are the least trustworthy, according to the audit.
A warning about a massive earthquake off the coast of California has been sent 92 years late. A computer error caused the US Geological Survey (USGS) to issue the false alarm about the magnitude 6.8 quake. The quake actually took place in 1925 when it laid waste to the city of Santa Barbara and caused 13 deaths. In a statement, the USGS said its computers had "misinterpreted" data causing the alarm to be wrongly issued.
Wall Street is finally starting to realize there's a storm brewing on the horizon for the nation's biggest cable companies. Cable stocks took a notable dip this week after MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett downgraded the entire cable sector because of worries surrounding cord cutting and streaming video competition. Moffett, who not that long ago used to mock cord cutters for being irrelevant basement dwellers, has seen the light -- more recently noting that 2016's 1.7% decline in traditional cable TV viewers was the biggest cord cutting acceleration on record.
Following countless rumors about PowerVR-maker Imagination Technologies, the company has formally announced today it's selling itself.
The rise and fall of FireWire—IEEE 1394, an interface standard boasting high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer—is one of the most tragic tales in the history of computer technology.
By 2100, rising temperatures mean we can only choose between “more of this” and “a lot more of this.” The best-case, most-aggressive-emissions-cutting scenario limits warming to just below 2€°C above pre-industrial times. Even there, we would expect the share of the population experiencing dangerous heat to rise from 30 percent to 48 percent.
The baseline for comparison, however, shouldn’t be this Senate draft, or the bill that passed the House. The question is whether the GOP legislation improves on Obamacare and current coverage. It doesn’t come close—unless, of course, you happen to believe that we provide too much help to the poor and elderly, and not enough tax cuts to the wealthy.
One of the biggest scandals in American politics right now is that 13 Senate Republicans are developing a health-care bill that will impact one-sixth of the economy and the livelihoods of millions of Americans, and nobody knows the details.
Here on Techdirt we've written much about the way Western pharma companies fight for their "right" to charge unaffordable prices for medicines in emerging and developing economies. In particular, they routinely take governments and local generic suppliers to court in an attempt to shore up highly-profitable monopolies on life-saving drugs. But to be fair, it's not only poorer people who are dying as a result of Big Pharma's desire to maximize profits: Western drug companies are equally happy to charge even higher prices in richer countries -- notably in the US. That's old news. But there is a pharmaceutical saga unfolding that manages to combine all the worst aspects of this kind of behavior, and to throw in a few new ones.
The United Nations Human Rights Council today adopted a resolution on the right to health in relation to the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including a call for medicines and vaccines access for all. The resolution also requested the UN human rights commissioner to report on the right to health.
Theranos told its investors that it has reached a tentative settlement with former business partner Walgreens and will pay out less than $30 million in the agreement, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The drugstore giant filed a searing lawsuit late last year against the beleaguered blood-testing company. Walgreens was seeking $140 million—presumed to be the amount it invested in a 2012 deal with Theranos to host blood-testing ‘Wellness Centers’ in its stores. In court filings, Walgreens alleged that Theranos had broken all its promises and “failed to meet the most basic quality standards and legal requirements” of their partnership.
Red Hat, Debian, and CentOS have all announced that they have patched the recently discovered "Stack Clash" Linux vulnerability in the kernel packages for their supported operating systems.
Canonical today announced that it released a new kernel security update for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system series to patch the infamous Stack Clash vulnerability discovered recently by Qualys Research Labs.
Today, June 22nd 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the Brutal Kangaroo project of the CIA. Brutal Kangaroo is a tool suite for Microsoft Windows that targets closed networks by air gap jumping using thumbdrives. Brutal Kangaroo components create a custom covert network within the target closed network and providing functionality for executing surveys, directory listings, and arbitrary executables.
The documents describe how a CIA operation can infiltrate a closed network (or a single air-gapped computer) within an organization or enterprise without direct access. It first infects a Internet-connected computer within the organization (referred to as "primary host") and installs the BrutalKangaroo malware on it. When a user is using the primary host and inserts a USB stick into it, the thumbdrive itself is infected with a separate malware. If this thumbdrive is used to copy data between the closed network and the LAN/WAN, the user will sooner or later plug the USB disk into a computer on the closed network. By browsing the USB drive with Windows Explorer on such a protected computer, it also gets infected with exfiltration/survey malware. If multiple computers on the closed network are under CIA control, they form a covert network to coordinate tasks and data exchange. Although not explicitly stated in the documents, this method of compromising closed networks is very similar to how Stuxnet worked.
The Brutal Kangaroo project consists of the following components: Drifting Deadline is the thumbdrive infection tool, Shattered Assurance is a server tool that handles automated infection of thumbdrives (as the primary mode of propagation for the Brutal Kangaroo suite), Broken Promise is the Brutal Kangaroo postprocessor (to evaluate collected information) and Shadow is the primary persistence mechanism (a stage 2 tool that is distributed across a closed network and acts as a covert command-and-control network; once multiple Shadow instances are installed and share drives, tasking and payloads can be sent back-and-forth).
The vulnerability is present in Unix-based systems on i386 and amd64 architectures. Affected Linux distributions include Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, CentOS and Gentoo. Solaris is owned by Oracle. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are also impacted. Qualys has been working with distributions and vendors since May to get the vulnerabilities fixed, and the updates are just beginning to be released. Administrators need to act promptly to update affected machines with the security updates.
Radio station 3aw reports that dozens of pole based traffic calming measures are infected and that this came as a surprise to the local minister and Road Safety Camera Commissioner when radio reporters told him about it.
The WCry ransomware worm has struck again, this time prompting Honda Company to halt production in one of its Japan-based factories after finding infections in a broad swath of its computer networks, according to media reports.
The automaker shut down its Sayama plant northwest of Tokyo on Monday after finding that WCry had affected networks across Japan, North America, Europe, China, and other regions, Reuters reported Wednesday. Discovery of the infection came on Sunday, more than five weeks after the onset of the NSA-derived ransomware worm, which struck an estimated 727,000 computers in 90 countries. The mass outbreak was quickly contained through a major stroke of good luck. A security researcher largely acting out of curiosity registered a mysterious domain name contained in the WCry code that acted as a global kill switch that immediately halted the self-replicating attack.
Researchers at CyberArk Labs have discovered a new way of gaining access to the innards of Windows 10 64-bit systems that can bypass existing safeguards, including the kernel patch protection known as PatchGuard that Microsoft developed to improve system security.
Technology pioneer John McAfee believes that every home internet router in America is wide open to cyberattacks by criminal hackers and intelligence agencies. He makes the claim speaking after revelations from WikiLeaks that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) targets the devices.
What's old is new again: an exploit protection mechanism for a known flaw in the Linux kernel has fallen to a new attack targeting an old problem.
Register for next month's expo for the public sector DevOps community to hear key speakers from the front line of public sector digital transformation and see the latest technologies at first hand.
Andrew Martin, DevOps lead in a major government department, has been added to the line-up of speakers to talk about the importance of getting the approach to security right with open source software.
If plugging in an infected bulb is too much hassle, the authors also demonstrate how to take over bulbs by war-driving around in a car, or by war-flying a drone.
The network of machines are operated by the individual franchises, but share a common infrastructure from German software company Scheidt and Bachmann.
Security researchers at Qualys recently disclosed new techniques to exploit stack allocations on several operating systems, even in the face of a number of security measures. Qualys was able to find numerous local-root exploits — exploits which allow local users of a system to gain root privileges — by applying stack allocation techniques against various pieces of userspace software.
The open-source Let's Encrypt project has been an innovating force on the security landscape over the last several years, providing millions of free SSL/TLS certificates to help secure web traffic. Aside from the disruptive model of providing certificates for free, Let's Encrypt has also helped to pioneer new technology to help manage and deliver certificates as well, including the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME).
Documents published Thursday purport to show how the Central Intelligence Agency has used USB drives to infiltrate computers so sensitive they are severed from the Internet to prevent them from being infected.
More than 150 pages of materials published by WikiLeaks describe a platform code-named Brutal Kangaroo that includes a sprawling collection of components to target computers and networks that aren't connected to the Internet. Drifting Deadline was a tool that was installed on computers of interest. It, in turn, would infect any USB drive that was connected. When the drive was later plugged into air-gapped machines, the drive would infect them with one or more pieces of malware suited to the mission at hand. A Microsoft representative said none of the exploits described work on supported versions of Windows.
On June 22, 2017, WikiLeaks released a new cache of documents detailing four tools allegedly used by the CIA as part of its ongoing “Vault 7” campaign. The leaked tools are named “EzCheese,” “Brutal Kangaroo,” “Emotional Simian,” and “Shadow.” When used in combination, these tools can be used to attack systems that are air-gapped by using weaponized USB drives as an exfiltration channel. Per the documentation, deployment of the tool takes place by unwitting targets; however, the use of such tools could also easily be deployed purposefully by complicit insider actors.
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This exploit works against Windows 7, 8, and 8.1; the current CVEs surrounding this technique are currently unknown.
A massive trove of Microsoft's internal Windows operating system builds and chunks of its core source code have leaked online.
The data – some 32TB of installation images and software blueprints that compress down to 8TB – were uploaded to betaarchive.com, the latest load of files provided just earlier this week. It is believed the data has been exfiltrated from Microsoft's in-house systems since around March.
The leaked code is Microsoft's Shared Source Kit: according to people who have seen its contents, it includes the source to the base Windows 10 hardware drivers plus Redmond's PnP code, its USB and Wi-Fi stacks, its storage drivers, and ARM-specific OneCore kernel code.
Anyone who has this information can scour it for security vulnerabilities, which could be exploited to hack Windows systems worldwide. The code runs at the heart of the operating system, at some of its most trusted levels.
Earlier this month a number of British universities, including University College London and Ulster University reported that their systems had been hit hard by a ransomware attack.
Although initially it was thought likely that the attacks had entered the universities' servers via poisoned emails (it's very normal to see ransomware being spread via malicious email attachments), it transpires that the actual vector for infection was malvertising instead.
More details can be found in this technical article by researchers at Proofpoint, who believe that an AdGholas drive-by malvertising campaign helped infect the universities with the Mole ransomware, taking advantage of an exploit kit.
The deal, estimated to be worth $2 to 3 billion, has been approved by the State Department, the sources said.
The sources, who requested anonymity as the deal has not been formally announced, said the sale of 22 predator drones being manufactured by General Atomics is "a game changer" for US-India relations as it operationalises the status of "major defence partner".
Like many 30-somethings, Alen Hirmiz has tattoos. His – a large one of a cross and one of Jesus on each arm – bear witness to his Christian faith. His sister and family are now afraid they could endanger his life.
On June 11, a Sunday, immigration agents detained Mr. Hirmiz in front of his shocked parents at the family’s home in suburban Detroit. He’s now waiting in a holding facility in Youngstown, Ohio, where – barring an emergency stay – he will be sent back to an Iraq he hasn’t seen since he was a teenager.
A man who barged into a Washington, DC, pizzeria with an AR-15 rifle to "self-investigate" an Internet conspiracy theory was sentenced to four years in prison today.
District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said "the extent of the recklessness" exhibited by 29-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch was "breathtaking," according to a report by ABC News. Welch pled guilty in March to charges of transporting a firearm across state lines and assault with a dangerous weapon.
Prosecutors seeking to justify a lengthy sentence (and the abuses that had already occurred) in the Chelsea Manning case insisted the documents she leaked had caused serious damage to those exposed by them. They said this even as multiple government officials admitted the most the United States had suffered was some embarrassment.
Former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced that he is establishing an energy-focused think tank to provide research and analysis for state and local governments, industry leaders, and NGOs.
The organization, called Energy Futures Initiative (EFI), aims to provide analytical and technical reports on a wide variety of energy-related topics. The first eight topics that EFI will address are listed on its website and cover areas from “Modernizing the North American Energy Sector” to “Decarbonization of Energy Systems” and “Evolution of Natural Gas Markets.”
I've installed 1 kilowatt of solar panels on my roof, using professional grade eqipment. The four panels are Astronergy 260 watt panels, and they're mounted on IronRidge XR100 rails. Did it all myself, without help.
A regulation from the Obama administration that would have allowed foreign-born entrepreneurs who raise investor cash to build their startups in the US won't be allowed to go into effect.
The Department of Homeland Security will file an official notice to delay the International Entrepreneur Rule for eight months. The intention is to eliminate the rule entirely, according to sources briefed on the matter who spoke to The Wall Street Journal.
Blockchain is making inroads into the insurance sector with the announcement of new initiatives aimed at expanding the use of the digital ledger technology.
Last week’s news of the initiative between American International Group Inc. and Standard Chartered Bank P.L.C. was the latest in a recent run of activity around the insurance sector’s potential use for the budding technology.
These companies wouldn’t have customers if better public alternatives existed. It can be hard to find a water fountain in Manhattan, and public transit in American cities ranges from mediocre to nonexistent. But solving these problems by ceding them to the private sector ensures that public services will continue to deteriorate until they disappear.
Hundreds of tower blocks in England have similar cladding to that used in the Grenfell Tower fire disaster, Downing Street has admitted.
Migrant rights activist Bheem Reddy Mandha said several people had already sent their families back in the past four months. "The men have become forced bachelors," he said.
The last one of these is particularly problematic. Macron has adopted a surprisingly muscular style in his first few days as French President, most famously in his handshake with Donald Trump, and won't want to be seen backing down from his promise to seek expert scrutiny of CETA before ratification. Looks like there's life in that cheesy CETA saga yet.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has resigned effective immediately, following an indefinite leave of absence that was announced just last week. Kalanick said that the leave of absence was to grieve for the recent death of his mother.
While reviewing Mylan’s tax filings, Reuters dug up an intriguing investment by the pharmaceutical company: refined coal.
Since 2011, the company has purchased 99-percent stakes in five US companies that process coal to make it cleaner burning. Mylan then sells the coal at a tax-deductible loss and earns tax credits, intended to incentivize cleaner energy production. Over the last six years, the drug maker has earned hundreds of millions in tax credits that have lowered its already very low tax rate and raised its overall bottom line.
Electronic invoicing is one of the key projects in Italy’s Digital Agenda, AGID adds. Since the beginning of this year, the FatturaPA system can be used for free by companies and citizens to send invoices.
Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka has refuted the general impression that the Indian IT industry is overly dependent on H-1B visas
It's a year since the referendum in which the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, and it's safe to say that no-one yet knows how this is going to turn out.
This month's general election has only served to heighten the sense that much of the Brexit process is still unknown - particularly the final destination. So what has changed in the past year?
Well, in terms of the process, in March the UK triggered Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, the formal route out of the EU that has never been put to the test before.
And - after an unexpected UK election that produced an unexpected result - formal face-to-face negotiations on the terms of divorce finally began earlier this week.
It was supposed to be a “big and generous” offer that would start the negotiations off on the right foot. Theresa May would even personally brief EU leaders on her plan for how to safeguard the rights of 3.2 million EU citizens residing in the U.K. ahead of its official publication to reassure them.
Good idea? No. At least not the way she went about it. The U.K. prime minister leaves Brussels today with the EU27 more annoyed than they were before she arrived.
Partly this is about style. May is not the world’s best communicator. Telling EU leaders over dinner not to worry and that no families will be split up because of Brexit only riled the other leaders sat around the table — and EU citizens in the U.K. who are still worried about their future status. Their private reaction, briefed out by aides later, was: Why are we even talking about families splitting up? Is this how far we’ve fallen?
In one of the several low points of her stunningly inept general election campaign, Theresa May warned that Jeremy Corbyn would be “alone and naked” in the Brexit negotiating chamber. This week, though, it is Mrs May herself who has been revealed as Brexit’s empress with no clothes. Everything about her performance in Brussels over the last two days has underlined both the larger national tragedy of Britain’s decision to leave the EU and the deepening personal failure of Mrs May’s attempts to deliver it.
Mrs May went to this week’s Brussels summit promising a “fair and serious” offer on the rights of EU citizens in the UK, and of UK citizens in the EU, after Brexit. She met a humiliating response. The EU-27 told her these were not matters for a summit but for the negotiations. Angela Merkel said the proposals were no breakthrough. Emmanuel Macron said there was a long way to go. Even Donald Tusk, often a friend of Britain, called them “below expectations.” Meanwhile in Britain, EU citizens’ groups dubbed the plan pathetic, and George Osborne revealed that Mrs May had unilaterally prevented a fairer and more serious offer immediately after the referendum last June because that would strengthen her leadership election chances.
More than 50 Labour politicians, including frontbenchers, have signed a statement claiming young voters backed their party in 2017 because they wanted it to “stop the Tories in their tracks” over Brexit.
The group, made up of dozens of MPs, peers and MEPs on the left and right of the party, claimed the best way to do that was by “fighting unambiguously for membership of the single market”.
In an intervention that will increase the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn to further differentiate his position from that of the Tories, the politicians say “mere access” to the internal market will make working people poorer and hit revenues.
That will make it harder to “bring an end to years of damaging Tory austerity”, they say.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Much has changed in the country since then — a new prime minister, a resurgent Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, the Queen wearing a flag on her hat.
Here are some of the more notable numbers from the past year.
Theresa May was the sole cabinet minister to block a unilateral offer to EU citizens that they could remain in Britain in the days following the referendum, according to an editorial in the London Evening Standard.
The paper, edited by former chancellor George Osborne, reports that David Cameron had prepared an offer to give EU citizens certainty in the days following the referendum result last June.
Cameron had already resigned and a leadership contest was under way in the Conservative party, but May and Osborne were still in post as chancellor and home secretary.
A new undercover investigation has revealed that the Conservative Party may have broken election and data protection rules, urging people to vote for Theresa May under the guise of a phone poll.
A Channel 4 News reporter applied for a job with a secretive call centre in Neath, South Wales, run by a failed Tory council candidate and discovered marketing calls to marginal constituencies implying a vote for Theresa May was a vote for an orderly Brexit.
Call it summer EU-phoria.
There was a blazing sun overhead as European leaders arrived in Brussels for their summer summit Thursday, and the political outlook seemed just as bright, with an array of crises in check, economic indicators on the upswing across the Continent, and spirits lifted by a series of ballot-box triumphs.
Perhaps most importantly, the leaders arrived to tackle an agenda packed with issues that showed them not only unbowed by Brexit but even capitalizing on the U.K.’s impending departure to push forward in areas such as defense cooperation where London had long thrown up obstacles.
Summing up the optimism, Council President Donald Tusk said: “This is the 80th European Council in which I have participated as prime minister or European Council president, but never before have I had such a strong belief that things are going in a better direction.”
The Democratic Unionist Party broke off talks with Theresa May this week as it told her to spend €£2billion in Northern Ireland if she wants the party to prop up her minority Conservative Government.
The DUP demanded the cash – which works out as €£1,100 per person in the Province - as talks veered dangerously close to breaking down altogether.
The talks became so strained in the past few days that the DUP negotiators in Belfast refused to pick up the phone to the Prime Minister’s team for 36 hours, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
Westminster sources said they now hoped a “confidence and supply” deal could be agreed next week, days before Thursday’s key vote on the Queen’s Speech.
At the best of times, the White House must be a pretty chaotic environment to work in. And whatever your politics, it is probably fair to say that the present is not one of the better times. President Donald J. Trump is having an insanely difficult time both filling his administration with new hires, and keeping those new hires longer than a dishwasher at a chain restaurant. Life inside the White House sure seems to have gotten a lot weirder in the past few months. And we've found the stories that prove it.
The president’s attempt to intimidate James Comey didn’t merely backfire—it may also embolden hostile regimes to conclude his other threats are equally empty.
Hohlt also lobbies for numerous corporate clients. This year, he’s been registered to lobby on behalf of oil giant Chevron, the Motion Picture Association of America and a division of tobacco giant Altria, among others.
A group of mostly Democratic senators led by Al Franken (D-Minn.) today urged the Department of Justice to block AT&T's proposed $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner Inc. The senators' letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions predicts that "the combined company's unmatched control of popular content and the distribution of that content will lead to higher prices, fewer choices, and poorer quality services for Americans."
The Democrats couched their language a bit and said that the DOJ should block the merger if it "determine[s] that the substantial harms to competition and consumers arising from the transaction outweigh the purported benefits." But the senators made it clear that they believe the merger's potential harms will outweigh the benefits for consumers even if the government imposes conditions on the transaction.
From the outside, America’s alt right is a nebulous movement based on racism, nationalism, and white supremacy. In contrast, the tech elites in Silicon Valley look like a relatively worldly bunch, despite the calls from some quarters of the valley to break away from the plebeian masses of the US.
But despite their differences, strands of the two groups share strong links to “Dark Enlightenment,” an obscure neo-fascist philosophy started by a British academic in the 1990s.
Several US senators spoke out this week on the importance of net neutrality to innovation and free speech. They are right. The Internet has become our public square, our newspaper, our megaphone. The Federal Communications Commission is trying to turn it in something more akin to commercial cable TV, and we all have to work together to stop it.
Acting as a mediator, Kuwait has presented Qatar a long-awaited list of demands from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, four Arab nations that cut ties with Qatar in early June. A copy of the list was obtained by The Associated Press and translated from Arabic.
A Saudi coalition of states has placed 13 demands on Qatar to lift their blockade, including the closure of Al Jazeera and what it states are publications and websites "directly or indirectly supported by Qatar".
The list from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt also calls for Qatar to cut all ties with Iran, pay compensation to the petitioning states for "victims and losses" due to Qatari foreign policy and a 10-year "mechanism" to ensure Qatar sticks to the deal.
The media organisations the petition claims are "supported" by Qatar include Arabi21, al-Araby al-Jadeed, Sharq, and the London-based Middle East Eye.
Qatar has 10 days to accept the demands, it said.
David Hearst, Middle East Eye's editor-in-chief, said his organisation was not funded by Qatar - or any other state or group - and was here to stay.
The Hogan attack was a vanguard operation in the aggressive new reactionary philistinism and hatred of press freedom being nurtured by some of America’s super-rich which is encouraged as a political diversionary tactic by the US president.
But they all fade into the background once Thiel emerges. As the film explains, he donated $10 million to fund Hogan’s case against Gawker, intent on bringing down the site that had outed him back in 2007. And it’s at this point that Nobody Speaks shifts focus to the general threat wealthy and agenda-driven figures pose to a free press.
Yesterday we wrote about coal company Murray Energy and its CEO, Bob Murray, actually following through and suing John Oliver -- something that Murray's lawyers had threatened to do when Oliver and his team had reached out to Murray for a piece Oliver was doing on coal. The result of being threatened was that Oliver spent nearly half of the 24 minute segment on Murray, carefully detailing some of Murray's history and positions.
Murray is known for aggressively suing journalists and media organizations that run critical content about him and his companies. Between 2001 and 2015, he filed at least nine lawsuits against journalists and news outlets that published a negative advertisement from an activist group, claiming they maligned his character and threatened his employees’ jobs, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Most if not all never went to trial.
A top coal executive is suing John Oliver over the “Last Week Tonight” host's mockery of him during a segment on the decline of the coal industry.
This one is clearly no surprise at all, given that -- as we wrote about just a couple days ago -- Bob Murray and his company Murray Energy were threatening John Oliver with a SLAPP suit if Oliver's satirical report about the coal industry was used to "defame, harass, or otherwise injure Mr. Murray or Murray Energy." Of course, Oliver's report did no such thing... but, alas, Murray has now sued Oliver, HBO, Time Warner... and the writers of the story. The lawsuit was filed in West Virginia state court. In my original post, I suggested it might be filed in Ohio, where Murray Energy is headquartered, but it does also have operations in West Virginia as well. Either way, as with Ohio, West Virginia is a state with no anti-SLAPP law.
We've covered a lot of ridiculous defamation lawsuits here at Techdirt. A ton. MANY. We like covering them so much we bought the company. But this defamation lawsuit passed on to us by Adam Steinbaugh is just baffling. Even more baffling, it's been filed with professional representation. Its attempt to fashion a libel lawsuit out of nothing bears far more resemblance to those filed by plaintiffs with fools for lawyers.
In March of last year, Jim Myers of the The Tennessean wrote an article about some staff changes at a local university's culinary arts program. If this seems like extraordinarily innocuous subject matter, you're obviously not former director Tom Loftis or his legal representation. Loftis has formally shouted "defamation" in a crowded courthouse. But his accusations aren't levied against Myers or The Tennessean, but rather against someone featured in the article: new culinary arts director Randy Rayburn.
A Rhode Island legislative committee has approved a bill that would greatly expand the surveillance state through the deployment of license plate readers. For the first time in the US, these devices would be attached along Rhode Island highways and roads for the stated purpose of catching uninsured motorists from any state.
Currently, the forerunner for "worst" is one that makes a mockery of federal wiretap statutes. The laws governing government eavesdropping have been modified over the years with an eye on protecting something even more sacrosanct than someone's home: someone's private conversations. Wiretaps are only supposed to be used for felonies -- dangerous, possibly life-threatening criminal activities. They're supposed to be issued only when law enforcement has exhausted all other options and subjected to strict oversight to prevent their abuse. (Note: what's supposed to happen and what actually happens are two very different things.)
A year ago, the US Supreme Court announced guidance to lower courts in determining whether the prevailing party in a copyright lawsuit should be awarded attorney fees. Under US law, the losing side of a copyright suit can be ordered to pay the legal costs to the winners—no matter which side originally brought the case.
In a leafy Detroit suburb last March, federal authorities raided a one-story brick house. Their target: Rudy Carcamo-Carranza, a 23-year-old restaurant worker from El Salvador with two deportation orders, a DUI, and a hit-and-run.
The incident would have seemed like a standard deportation case, except for a key detail unearthed by The Detroit News: The feds didn’t find Carcamo-Carranza through traditional detective work. They found him using a cell-site simulator, a powerful surveillance device developed for the global war on terror.
Five days after his election, Donald Trump announced his plan to quickly deport up to 3 million undocumented immigrants—“people that are criminal,” “gang members,” “drug dealers.” How would he do it? How would he deport more people, more quickly, than any of his recent predecessors? The Carcamo-Carranza case suggests an answer: After 9/11, America spent untold sums to build tools to find enemy soldiers and terrorists. Those tools are now being used to find immigrants. And it won’t just be “bad hombres.”
Air travel already features some attributes of a police state. Metal detectors. Bomb-sniffing dogs. Pat-downs. A gloved TSA agent peering at your toothpaste. But it could get worse. What if your check-in also involved a face recognition scan?
Decades ago, Congress mandated that federal authorities keep track of foreign nationals as they enter and leave the United States. If the government could record when every visitor stepped on and off of U.S. soil, so the thinking went, it could easily see whether a foreign national had overstayed a visa.
The request came during Rosenstein's testimony before the Appropriations Committee -- the place where all government officials perform their most sincere acts of begging. Not that the FBI was likely to be faced with budget cuts -- not with a "law and order" president running the country and overseen by an Attorney General who appears to believe we're currently engulfed in a massive drug-and-immigrant crimewave.
A proposed law in California would require Internet service providers to obtain customers' permission before they use, share, or sell the customers' Web browsing history.
The California Broadband Internet Privacy Act, a bill introduced by Assembly member Ed Chau (D-Monterey Park) on Monday, is very similar to an Obama-era privacy rule that was scheduled to take effect across the US until President Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress eliminated it. If Chau's bill becomes law, ISPs in California would have to get subscribers' opt-in consent before using browsing history and other sensitive information in order to serve personalized advertisements. Consumers would have the right to revoke their consent at any time.
Remember Google Glass—Google's ultra-dorky, poorly supported, $1,500 face computer? Conventional wisdom said that the product was dead: it's not sold anymore, the website was more or less shut down in 2015, its Twitter and Facebook were deleted, and the OS stopped receiving updates. But someone at Google apparently still cares about this clunky little headset, and this week the device got both a firmware update and a companion app update.
A new law allowing the German police to hack into mobile phones for even minor crimes, is expected to be passed by the German parliament this week. Currently, the use of a “Staatstrojaner” – government trojan – is only permitted in order to prevent future terrorist attacks. Under the new law, the authorities will be allowed to implant surveillance malware to help secure convictions for over 70 types of crime. These include serious ones such as genocide, treason and murder, but also less serious crimes such as money counterfeiting, vehicle theft, computer fraud, rigged sports betting and tax evasion. Two kinds of trojans will be available. The first allows the authorities to eavesdrop on calls made with the mobile phone, whether using standard telephony or VoIP, while the second gives access to all information held on the device.
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The CCC demonstrated that placing trojans on a person’s system in order to carry out surveillance brings with it the risk that others will be able to exploit the same functionality, not least because of flaws in the code. Allowing the police and intelligence services to use malware to gather evidence is not only questionable for its assault on privacy, but inevitably undermines computer security too, which is never a good idea.
The British Internet provider O2 disputed the previous story that they don’t permit people to access tools that give them anonymity protection, like this VPN service. “You only need to show photo ID in one of our stores”, they said, via a link provided. So in order to be an anonymous and protected press source, you need to show a photo ID. You couldn’t make it up if you tried. Britain, what’s happened to you?
A selection of 36 data sources is integrated into the MongoDB database to understand all manner of issues in the city as they develop over time. They include 911 calls, the non-emergency 311 line, business licenses, building violations, Tweets, city traffic, weather, emergency vehicles, and environmental complaints.
That's from a story in the Guardian last year, so it's likely that the technology has moved on considerably since then. It's easy to think of more troubling extensions to the idea of scanning shoppers: for example, linking up to other databases of troublemakers and ne'er-do-wells, or to selfies derived from social networks.
As well as obvious privacy issues, explored in the Deutsche Welle report, a more general concern is the normalization this latest application of facial scanning might produce. Once cameras coupled with facial recognition software are routinely installed in everyday settings like supermarkets -- with appropriate warnings -- perhaps we will begin to accept them as the norm, and barely notice their silent spread to other locations and situations.
A classic case of asking forgiveness rather than permission, coupled with a deliberate attempt to circumvent the part of the process that would have caused the most problems for the MDPD's surveillance plans: the public's comments.
Once the document was posted publicly, the backlash began, led by a number of rights groups including the ACLU and the Defending Rights and Dissent Foundation. The surveillance system sought is repurposed Iraq War tech: a high-powered camera system mounted on an airplane that proponents and opponents both describe as a "DVR for real life." Capable of capturing a 32-square-mile area, the cameras don't provide much in terms of close-up detail, but do allow law enforcement agencies to track people's movements over a several hour period, whether in real-time or by replaying recordings.
In an escalation of the criminalization of protesters, an indigenous woman is facing several federal charges for her involvement in the Standing Rock protests last fall.
This kind of government secrecy is toxic to democracy. National security is important, but we will not survive if we become a country of secret court orders based on secret interpretations of secret law.
It's kinda fun having a president who wets himself on Twitter every time someone mocks him. Well, if you ignore all the devastation and injustice, anyway. But at least we still have the ability to mock --- in some places, making fun of your leader gets you real punishment. Teenager Amos Yee knows that all too well. He was arrested in Singapore for a handful of insulting videos he posted on YouTube. This is his story.
Raif’s own lawyer, Waleed Abulkhair, is another prisoner of conscience under the Saudi regime. He was jailed in 2014 after setting up a human rights organisation, Monitor of Human Rights. Abulkhair was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, followed by a 15 year ban on travel. The Specialised Criminal Court in Jeddah found him guilty of “undermining the regime and officials”, “inciting public opinion” and “insulting the judiciary.”
Hundreds of men swept up in the hunt for al-Qaida militants have disappeared into a secret network of prisons in southern Yemen where abuse is routine and torture extreme — including the "grill," in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Senior American defense officials acknowledged Wednesday that U.S. forces have been involved in interrogations of detainees in Yemen but denied any participation in or knowledge of human rights abuses. Interrogating detainees who have been abused could violate international law, which prohibits complicity in torture.
There is a lot to say about Maggie Michael and Maad al-Zikry’s deeply disturbing Associated Press story out early this morning—that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has operated (and may still be operating) a number of different secret terrorism detention centers in Yemen; and that there is evidence that dozens of individuals suspected of being al Qaeda (and/or AQAP) members were tortured and subjected to other abuses by UAE agents at those facilities. And most relevant here, the AP reports that the United States has played at least some role in these cases—which may include feeding questions to (and perhaps even observing) some of the interrogations; receiving intelligence from those interrogations; and even conducting subsequent interrogations of some of the same detainees by US forces themselves inside UAE detention centers. According to the AP, the Pentagon’s response has been to acknowledge the interrogations, to deny that any US personnel were directly involved in committing any of the alleged abuses; and, apparently, to otherwise wash its hands of responsibility for the actions of the UAE—even if those actions softened up the detainees for American interrogators and produced intelligence information shared with (and utilized by) the US intelligence community. (Never mind how troubling such an apparent “not our problem” response to this story is as a matter of policy, ethics, or, you know, basic human decency.)
As we noted in our original post, I expect that to be quoted in many other cases -- and a big one may be the ongoing attempts right now by the legacy entertainment industry to force ISPs to kick people off of their service based on accusations (not convictions) of infringement. Those cases, like this Packingham case, involve using a law to claim that people should be blocked from using the internet. And based on the quotes above, it seems quite likely that parts of the DMCA are clearly unconstitutional. The lawsuits -- mainly the BMG v. Cox ruling which is currently on appeal, and the more recent UMG v. Grande Communications (which follows the same basic outlines of the Cox case) -- involve arguing that 512(i) of the DMCA requires ISPs to kick users off their service entirely based on accusations of infringement. As we've explained, this already appears to be a twisted interpretation of 512(i), but now it appears there's a very reasonable chance that the Supreme Court could find 512(i) outright unconstitutional under the First Amendment for broadly blocking internet access in a way that harms free speech rights.
The Orange County (CA) District Attorney's office remains in the news. It's not often an entire prosecutors' office gets booted off a high-profile murder case, but that's what happens when misconduct occurs on a massive scale. An open-and-shut murder case with eight victims is now the DA's perpetual nightmare. Judge Thomas Goethals kicked the agency to the curb after uncovering repeated discovery violations committed by prosecutors.
But the problems go back further than this case. The office has hidden the existence of a law enforcement database from defense lawyers (and judges) for a quarter century -- a database holding all sorts of information about jailhouse snitches that may have made the difference in a number of cases.
A quarter-century of obfuscation followed by outright lying on the stand by prosecution witnesses is something you'd think would be addressed by a swift housecleaning. You'd be wrong. So far, there have been no announcements from the DA about pending investigations -- either into its own misconduct, or the repeated abuses of the jail's snitch program run by the local sheriff's office.
Crew of a Pakistani TV channel earned the wrath of students of an Islamic seminary for drinking water during the fasting period in Ramzan - the Muslim holy month of fasting.
The incident occurred on Tuesday day in the heart of capital Islamabad, where a team from Din News was beaten up by students of Madrasa Haqqania, Dawn reported.
The madrasa management claims the journalists were drinking water during the day and that they were initially asked to stop and beaten when they continued to drink water.
A reporter of the channel, Ali Usman, told the paper that he and five other team members were assigned to interview lawyer Salman Akram Raja who is representing Nawaz Sharif’s son Hussain Nawaz in the Panamagate corruption scandal.
A lawsuit against the two psychologists who devised a CIA torture program reached another new milestone last month, as three victims asked a U.S. court to rule in their favor and to find that the psychologists were liable for aiding and abetting the illegal program.
The ACLU has filed a motion asking the judge in the case to rule that James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a critical role in designing, implementing, and profiting from the CIA torture program. Our clients are Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a fisherman from Tanzania; Mohamed Ben Soud, a Libyan citizen who opposed the Gaddafi regime; and Gul Rahman, an Afghan citizen who died as a result of his torture.
In addition to high costs and the slow pace of digging up streets, one of the reasons Google Fiber is contemplating a pivot from fiber to next-gen wireless broadband is the boring old utility pole. As it stands now, new market competitors often have to navigate an archaic, elaborate and expensive process to attach fiber to poles. Quite often, attaching fiber requires having any other ISPs in the area notified in writing, then waiting for each one to move their own equipment piecemeal, one of several bureaucratic processes incumbents have long abused to slow down the arrival of new competitors.
Back when Verizon first began expressing interest in pivoting from broadband duopolist to media and advertising, you might recall that it launched a short-lived technology blog named Sugarstring. Sugarstring quickly made headlines for all the wrong reasons however, after it was revealed that Verizon was banning any new hires from writing about hot-button subjects like net neutrality, or the fact that companies like Verizon and AT&T are now bone-grafted to the nation's intelligence and surveillance apparatus.
Sugarstring is long-since dead, replaced in large part by Verizon's acquisitions of Yahoo and AOL, which also brought Huffpo, Engadget, and Techcrunch under the Verizon umbrella. And while Verizon itself has been busy using fake reporters to blatantly lie about the company's ongoing role in killing net neutrality, there's no indication (yet) that the company has pressured any of its own news outlets to quiet down on the subject. In fact, we've noted previously that some of the best reporting on net neutrality in recent months has originated at TechCrunch (this piece in particular is worth a read).
One reason for Karp and Tumblr’s silence? Last week Verizon completed its acquisition of Tumblr parent company Yahoo, kicking off the subsequent merger of Yahoo and AOL to create a new company called Oath. As one of the world’s largest ISPs, Verizon is notorious for challenging the principles of net neutrality — it sued the FCC in an effort to overturn net neutrality rules in 2011, and its general counsel Kathy Grillo published a note this April complimenting new FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to weaken telecommunication regulations.
Now, multiple sources tell The Verge that employees are concerned that Karp has been discouraged from speaking publicly on the issue [...]
Whether it's rolling back already agreed upon merger conditions, killing net neutrality, or eliminating broadband privacy protections, giant ISP lobbyists are having a field day under the Trump administration, slowly but surely stripping away oversight of one of the least competitive -- and most anti-competitive -- sectors in American industry. We've noted repeatedly that as giant cable providers like Comcast nab an ever larger monopoly over next-gen broadband services, the end result of this myopic pursuit will be even higher rates -- and even worse customer service -- for everyone.
But there's a problem in this quest to create a new, golden era of telecom sector monopoly dysfunction: individual states.
Charter has agreed to pay $13 million to New York State after failing to complete broadband construction that was required as part of its purchase of Time Warner Cable. Charter can get $12 million of that back if it completes the buildout under a revised schedule.
Charter was required to extend its network to 36,250 homes and businesses in the state within one year of the TWC merger being approved, but it only completed the buildout to 15,164 of them by the May 18 deadline, state officials said in an announcement Tuesday. The NY Public Service Commission is taking public comments on the settlement before giving it final approval.
A tiny Internet service provider has sued Comcast, alleging that the cable giant and its hired contractors cut the smaller company's wires in order to take over its customer base.
Telecom Cable LLC had "229 satisfied customers" in Weston Lakes and Corrigan, Texas when Comcast and its contractors sabotaged its network, the lawsuit filed last week in Harris County District Court said.
The Federal Communications Commission today said that a scammer named Adrian Abramovich "apparently made 96 million spoofed robocalls during a three-month period" in order to trick people into buying vacation packages. The FCC proposed a fine of $120 million, but it will give the alleged perpetrator a chance to respond to the allegations before issuing a final decision.
A company seeking to offer low-latency broadband from satellites yesterday received a key approval from the Federal Communications Commission.
"Over a year ago, OneWeb was the first company to seek approval to enter the US market with a system of high-capacity satellites that orbit closer to Earth than any satellite has ever before," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said before yesterday's vote. "The goal of this non-geostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) technology is to provide global, high-speed broadband service—and its use case is particularly compelling in remote and hard-to-serve areas."
In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”
The question is then who is the inventor? An answer is not given in the article, which simply states that a court or patent office would need to decide who was entitled to be named. This to me seems to miss an important point or two, as well as being a bit of a cop-out.
Firstly, let's say the invention is about the use of a specified material in a tail fin for an aircraft (why it has to be an unmanned drone is not clear to me, so let's leave that aside). The inventive concept, given that tail fins for aircraft are known, is the use of the specific material.
Person A has devised a system for identifying a material given a series of inputs. By itself this has nothing to do with the invention, so this person can be discounted as being the "actual deviser of the invention" (section 7(3), UK Patents Act).
An event held on the side of the World Intellectual Property Organization committee on traditional knowledge meeting last week looked at ways to move discussions forward in the light of the committee’s expected renewed mandate. Speakers explored different perspectives and possible new avenues for indigenous and local communities to protect and manage their knowledge and cultural heritage, without the threat of misappropriation.
The dispute concerned the attempt of Mr. Gillespie (later joined in the suit by Mr. Elliott) to acquire 763 domain names such as “googledisney.com” and“googlebarackobama.com”, all containing the word “google”. Google Inc. objected to the registration and filed a complaint of domain name infringement, or “cybersquatting”, before the US National Arbitration Forum. Upon refusal, the claimants petitioned the Arizona District Court for the cancellation of the Google trade mark on grounds of “genericide”. In other words, according to the claimants, the Google trade mark would have lost its uniqueness as it is used as a verb in common language. In fact, in the cross-motions for summary judgment, the claimants stated that the use of a trade mark as a verb, i.e. “I will google this”, constitutes genericness automatically. On grounds of insufficiency of evidence provided to support this argument, the District Court sided with Google and dismissed the claim. The claimants decided to appeal the judgment, focusing on two arguments in particular:
One of the world’s largest science publishers, Elsevier, won a default legal judgement on 21 June against websites that provide illicit access to tens of millions of research papers and books. A New York district court awarded Elsevier US$15 million in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub, the Library of Genesis (LibGen) project and related sites.
Judge Robert Sweet had ruled in October 2015 that the sites violate US copyright. The court issued a preliminary injunction against the sites’ operators, who nevertheless continued to provide unauthorized free access to paywalled content. Alexandra Elbakyan, a former neuroscientist who started Sci-Hub in 2011, operates the site out of Russia, using varying domain names and IP addresses.
The MPAA and RIAA have made their positions clear in submissions to the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations. Both want allies Canada and Mexico to commit to tightened copyright law, including restrictions on safe harbor provisions that go beyond current US practice.