In 2014, Apple still had almost half of the school market, but Google had them in its sights. By 2016, according to FutureSource, a financial markets research company, Chromebooks had a 58 percent of the education market. Despite Apple and Microsoft's best efforts, Chromebooks are continuing to dominate schools.
Why? Part of it is price. You can get a good Chromebook for a few hundred dollars. Apple has nothing in its price range. Microsoft said it was competing with its new Surface Laptop and Windows 10S, but the price alone, $999, makes it a non-starter.
Since their first introduction many decades ago, we learnt that distributed systems enable use cases we couldn’t even think about before them, but they also introduce all sorts of new issues.
When these systems were rare and simple, engineers dealt with the added complexity by minimising the number of remote interactions. The safest way to handle distribution has been to avoid it as much as possible, even if that meant duplicated logic and data across various systems.
But our needs as an industry pushed us even further, from a few larger central computers to hundreds and thousands of small services. In this new world, we’ve had to start taking our head out of the sand and tackling the new challenges and open questions, first with ad-hoc solutions done in a case-by-case manner and subsequently with something more sophisticated. As it often happens with technology, we have first found ad-hoc solutions in a case-by-case manner. As we find out more about the problem domain and design better solutions, we start crystallising some of the most common needs into patterns, libraries, and eventually platforms.
So rc3 was smaller than usual, and now rc4 is a bit bigger than usual.
However, it's not outrageously so, and the reason for it all is fairly clear: the networking pull just missed rc3, so it's all in rc4 instead. That, along with the media pull, accounts for the bulk of the changes (the networking side has more commits, while the media side has more lines changed due largely to some SVG work in the documentation).
Renesas has started volume shipment of its first R-Car system-on-chip (SoC) incorporating Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)-based software. AGL is a cross-industry effort to develop a fully open software stack for the connected car.
Renesas has started volume shipment of its first R-Car system-on-chip (SoC) incorporating Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)-based software. AGL is a cross-industry effort to develop a fully open software stack for the connected car.
Linux Foundation automotive group using open source to enable in-car infotainment
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation and focused on connected vehicles, recently revealed the latest infotainment platform, Unified Code Base (UCB) 4.0, alongside a new Virtualization Expert Group (EG-VIRT) dedicated to developing a virtualized architecture capable of consolidating multiple applications onto a single in-car computer.
The group does not integrate open source with proprietary products. Instead, AGL builds 70% to 80% of a base infotainment platform. The remaining portion can be customized by automakers to make it feel like their own brand.
I was curious this weekend how Mesa's development was trending this summer so yesterday I ran some fresh GitStats on the growing Mesa code-base.
Per GitStats, Mesa has seen 94.862 commits from around 800 different authors. The total code-base is up to 2,207,022 lines of code, but keep in mind via GitStats that includes code comments, blank lines, documentation, etc.
The third release candidate for the upcoming Mesa 17.2 stable release is now available.
Last week AMD developers landed experimental NIR support inside RadeonSI as ultimately a step towards ARB_gl_spirv support for this OpenGL Gallium3D driver in being able to re-use the NIR/RADV code-paths. I decided to take the experimental NIR support through a spin to see if it impacted various titles at this point.
Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has written another weekly blog post summarizing his work on the VC4 driver stack as well as the new VC5 driver code-base.
The biggest news this week is that I’ve resolved the window movement performance on Raspbian. After all my work on improving vc4 performance for overlapping CopyArea to parity with SW rendering, the end-user experience was still awful. It turned out that openbox just had a really naive event loop for window movement, so each pixel of motion of the mouse that got reported resulted in a window movement, even if there were 100 of those queued to the window manager in a stream.
You may have favorite video editor to edit your videos but there is no harm to try something new, its initial release was not that long, with time it made some great improvements. It can be bit hard to master this video editor but if you are not new in this field you can make it easily and will be total worth of time.
Exa is a lightweight, fast and modern replacement for the popular ls command on Unix-like operating systems. It is written in Rust programming language and comes with several additional features not available in the traditional ls command. Importantly, its options are similar, but not exactly the same, as for ls command as we shall see later on.
A new upstream version of UDisks2 was released on Thursday (July 3rd) -- version 2.7.2. This is only a minor release and contains mostly bug fixes, but it has some new features, mostly for working with filesystems and partitions.
There are over 100 different kinds of text editors available on Windows and macOS. There are some alternatives to Microsoft Office for Linux OS, but when it comes to finding a light minimalist text editor, Linux users do not have such a wide variety of choices.
Being a professional or an amateur writer, a student, a person who just needs to make some notes, there is always a need to write down some important stuff. For this purpose there’s an app you can install on any of your machines and use for writing texts of any kind.
Last month I looked at three Linux clients for my music player daemon (MPD) music server: ncmpcpp, Sonata, and GMPC. This month I'm looking at Cantata, recommended by two kind readers, and I really, really like what I see.
Because Cantata is a Qt-based application, I decided to have a look at the documentation before installing it.
Riot is a free, open source, and multi-platform client based on the Matrix protocol. To understand better, think of Matrix as the protocol and Riot as the client. Matrix is a decentralized, secure, messaging protocol. It has the benefit of using HTTP / JSON APIs, is capable of sending and receiving messages with full end-to-end encryption, WebRTC VoIP / video calling, and maybe most importantly, integration capabilities. Matrix was built to integrate with IRC servers and other communication protocols, meaning you can use the Riot client as an IRC bouncer. You can read more of the details on what separates Matrix from Riot on their FAQ.
One method you can use to get Widgets on your Linux desktop is Conky but setting up custom configurations can be a bit too technical for some people. A simpler way to achieve the same goal, although less technically complex ones, is to use Screenlets.
Screenlets is an open source Python-based tool that allows you add widgets to your desktop. It supports adding numerous screenlets including RSS readers, weather, countdown, clock, folder view, sensors, calendars, a Conky-like system information widget, among others widget options.
Vivaldi is the new web browser compare to other famous browsers, the initial release of Vivaldi was in January, 2015. It has improved a lot and evolved since the first release. Basically it is based on the open-source frameworks of Chromium, Blink and Google's V8 JavaScript engine and has a lot of great feature which I will table later. It is known to be the most customizable browser for power users, debuts features that make browsing more personal than ever before.
Fans of old FPS games like Doom and Quake might be very interested in DUSK [Steam]. An FPS about discovering just what lurks beneath the earth.
River City Ransom: Underground [GOG] released for Linux originally in February, sadly the developer said they would send over a review key and never did. Now it's available on GOG so I've had a chance to take a look.
Epic Games has pushed out Unreal Engine 4.17, which is exciting for Linux gamers especially thanks to Vulkan renderer improvements.
Unreal Engine 4.17 features a major Vulkan refactoring that improves the stability, now uses the "SM5" feature level by default, and various other improvements for Unreal Engine via Vulkan both on mobile and the desktop.
Looks like the post I started on Steam asking for a Linux port of GOKEN [Steam, Official Site] is going to bear fruit, as it's confirmed to be coming our way now.
Here's a pretty fun classic! GOG have released Alien Rampage from 1996 and it comes with a Linux version thanks to DOSBox.
The Digital Electricity activity in GCompris aims at creating and simulating a digital electric schema. Currently, there exists a “Free Mode”, where a user can freely create and check the working of a circuit on their own. During the final month of the GSoC period, I will be adding a “Tutorial Mode” alongside the existing free mode. The tutorial mode is aimed at teaching the users how the individual components work in a digital circuit.
After last week’s rollercoaster ride (if you haven’t seen it, check the news, then the update!), it was hard to get back into making releases and writing code. Yet, here is the release candidate for Krita 3.2.0.
Property bindings are one of the most interesting features of the QML language. In QML, when we set a value on a property, the right hand side expression isn’t evaluated just once to produce a value, like in a ordinary imperative language.
CppCon is the annual conference for the C++ community: five days packed with over 100 talks, as well as inspiring keynotes, panel discussions, hallway chats, fun evening events and much more. CppCon is a project of the Standard C++ Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to support the C++ software developer community and promote the understanding and use of modern, standard C++ on all compilers and platforms.
A few years ago, I started to write software which primary audience is going to be blind musicians. I did a small presentation of the UI at DebConf15.
Most of the functionality is in a compiler-alike backend. But eventually, I wanted to create a user interface to improve the interactive experience.
So, the problem again: which toolkit to choose which would be accessible on most platforms? Last time I needed to solve a similar problem, I used Java/Swing. This has its problems, but it actually works on Windows, Linux and (supposedly) Mac. This time around, my implementation language is C++, so Swing didn't look that interesting. It appears there is not much that fullfils these requirements. Qt looked like it could. But since I had my bad experiences already with Qt claiming accessibility they really never implemented, I was at least a bit cautious. Around 10 years ago, when Qt 4 was released, I found that the documentation claimed that Qt4 was accessible on Linux, but it really never was until a very late 4.x release. This information was a blatant lie, trying to lure uninformed programmers into using Qt, much to the disservice of their disabled users. If you ask a random blind Windows user who knows a bit about toolkits, they will readily tell you that they hate every app written in Qt.
For years, I fell into the habit that the age of innovation in desktop environments had ended because of users protesting new releases of GNOME and KDE, and the lukewarm response to Ubuntu's Unity. After about 2012, the largest innovations on the desktop appeared to be coming from Linux Mint, half of whose efforts were devoted to MATE, a fork of GNOME 2, which was first released in 2002, and half to developing Cinnamon as a full- featured desktop,a process now well-advanced.
Armed with this view, I frequently characterized Plasma 4 as a kitchen-sink desktop, more concerned with cramming in any remotely useful feature than in improving the user experience. In marked contrast to GNOME 3, Plasma 4 frequently repositioned features. Particularly in the Systems Settings, new features were dumped in an Advanced tab, and took several releases to be suitably positioned.
Meanwhile, Plasma 5 came out in 2014. It was discussed mostly in terms of updating Plasma to use the Qt 5 toolkit and streamlining the code. Moreover, because KDE projects have different releases schedules, most distributions were slow to switch to Plasma 5. I saw it in virtual machines, but I rarely used it for prolonged periods.
The 2017 edition of Akademy was held in Almería, Spain. Starting officially on the 22nd of July and ending on the 27th, the weekend was dedicated to talks, as is customary. The rest of the following week, from Monday to Thursday, was dedicated to workshops and BoFs — Birds of a Feather — sessions in which community members interested in the same things meet and work together.
This year's event attracted over 110 attendees. Attendees traveled mainly from Europe, but also from North and South America, and Asia. Over the weekend, visitors were able to attend over 40 different talks on all kinds of topics, ranging from developing applications for mobile phones to best ways for collaboration between communities.
At last week's annual GUADEC GNOME developer conference, the state of the GTK4 tool-kit was a hot discussion item.
Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has written a new GTK+ blog-post to discuss the happenings from the developer meetings last week. When it comes to the current GTK3, they are going to focus on API stability now but will introduce new APIs where worthwhile like in the areas of color emoji support and client/server-side negotiation protocol support for Wayland.
Last week at GUADEC in Manchester, the GTK+ maintainers and interested folks met for a working session during the unconference days.
Georges already did a nice job summarizing the results in his blog post, which you should read (if only to see some pictures of the assembled GTK+ folks).
Ultimate Blue is designed to make desktop better, it's dark theme which is easy on eyes and looks great at the same time. It is compatible with Gtk 3.20/3.22/3.24 and available for Gnome, Unity, Cinnamon, Xfce, Mate and so on, it also has Gnome Shell theme. Obsidian icons used in the following screenshots. If you find any issues with this theme then report it to developer and hopefully it will get fixed in the next update. If you are using other distribution you can directly download theme from its page and install it manually in ~/.themes folder or /usr/share/themes/. You can use Gnome-tweak-tool to change themes.
went with the 4 GB version of Debian's latest stable release, because I didn't want to get stuck trying to get a mininal net installation ISO of latest testing going (with trying to figure out which additional firmware would be needed for WiFi, and I was pretty sure something like that would be nessesary). Installation was pretty pain-less except for one thing: Everything on the screen was rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise (more on this later). After having read reviews of people installing Linux on similar devices and claiming external USB keyboards and powered USB hubs are essential, this was refreshingly simple, after all.
Sabayon is a binary based distribution based on the source based distribution Gentoo. In English that means that the developers of Sabayon built a distribution off of Gentoo that no longer has a primary focus of building packages strictly from source, but rather, has it’s own repositories of packages that have been precompiled and are available for download through a new package manager they call Entropy; so even users who are new to GNU/Linux can use Sabayon without the steep learning curve of Gentoo.
Tech Data’s Technology Solutions business has been appointed the distributor of Red Hat Mobile Application Platform in Australia and other five Asia-Pacific countries.
Tech Data will also distribute Red Hat’s solution in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
The distributor said it will be looking to invest in additional sales and technical resources to enable partners in positioning Red Hat Mobile Application Platform to their customers.
A large number of prominent technology and other firms — among them IBM, Red Hat, Lexis Nexis, SAS, Unisys, Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton and PwC — have attended presentations that detailed a plan to build a system that uses data mining to implement US President Donald Trump's "extreme vetting" to screen immigrants coming into the US.
Twice a year, a new version of Fedora is released. The entire Fedora community is a part of the process, from packaging new updates, creating wallpapers, hosting our websites, and spreading the word at conferences and events. Fedora is a big community, and a few groups help lead in different areas of the community. These groups offer guidance and direction in technical and non-technical areas of Fedora. After every release, a round of elections for these groups begins. Nominated Fedora contributors from across the project campaign for different seats on the three leadership groups. Election week is this week!
The Atomic Working Group is responsible for Fedora’s new container cloud platform, currently consisting of Fedora Atomic Host and the Fedora Layered Images Build System & Repository (FLIBS). As Atomic is now one of the three primary spins for Fedora, the WG spends most of its time on releases and integrating new container technologies into the OS. We are building the immutable infrastructure of the future, helping make Fedora the best free platform for automating thousands of servers.
Starting today, the Fedora 24 Linux operating system officially reached end of life and it will no longer receive security or software updates. Users are now urged to upgrade to a supported release, such as Fedora 25 or the newly launched Fedora 26
This post is part of a series intended to provide those new to Bodhi with an introduction to some Bodhi basics. This post hopes to both introduce the life cycle of an update in Bodhi, as well as to outline the proposed addition of a ‘batched’ request intended to reduce update churn. If you’re a seasoned Bodhi user, you can jump to the Proposed revisions to an update’s life cycle section.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) made another round of decisions on Friday concerning Fedora 27 and the future.
First up, in regards to the proposal for dropping the Fedora i686 kernel support to effectively do away with new Fedora x86 32-bit installations (but keeping 32-bit user-space packages for those wanting them), they are going to see what the proposed Fedora Special Interest Group (SIG) comes up with.
After our CentOS vs Ubuntu comparison and the requests we get, it’s finally time to compare Debian and Ubuntu. These 2 distros are used both as a desktop OS and as a server, so we’ll compare both use-cases.
Ubuntu is based on Debian Stable, so naturally, they are similar in many ways. However, they still have differences. Our comparison will focus more on the differences, but we’ll include the similarities too, so you can better compare them and decide which distro is better for you. This is a controversial comparison, so we expect as much input from you as possible. Leave a comment below, please.
Today I called "time" on my postings to any forum other than the Ubuntu Forums. Quite simply I have had enough of those users that hide behind anonymous user-names who seem to only post in a manner that belittles anyone that has an opinion which differs from themselves. Such users take postings far too literally in order to provoke an argument. I think troll is the word that I am looking for here. A recent reply to one of my posts caused me to lose several hours sleep as I was finding it very hard not to think about how to reply to something that had upset me so much. In other words: "Why do I bother to post?"
John Zannos, a prominent figure in the open source world, has left Canonical and joined open networking technology company Inocybe as chief revenue officer.
Direct Deploy gets your solutions deployed easier and faster. The feature allows you to create Juju cards which will add the specified bundle or charm to a new model and then open directly into the deployment flow. At this point they simply need to complete the deployment flow and will have a deployed solution without having to manually add or modify the model pre-deploy. To see Direct Deploy in action click on the image below or on this link.
Canonical on Monday published two Ubuntu Security Notice (USN) advisories to inform users of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems about the availability of new kernel updates.
The Artful development cycle is full speed ahead to the Ubuntu 17.10 release in October. As you may have heard, we’re switching the default desktop from Unity to GNOME Shell in this cycle. With such a significant change, we need all the eyeballs we can get on every part of the desktop experience. As usual we will have our regular testing cycles and automated checks that the QA team runs through.
We are also organising a set of mini-events which we’d love to get our community’s help with. First up is the Desktop Fit & Finish Sprint on August 24th and 25th. Some members of the Ubuntu desktop team will be camped out in the Canonical London office for that Thursday and Friday, and we need your help.
One of my older netbook computers, an Acer Aspire V5, is still being used by my partner. It still runs Windows 7, but it has been acting up very badly recently, and I finally decided that rather than spend a few hours trying to get it to limp along a while longer for her again, I would just trash everything on it and install Linux Mint for her.
Besides the obvious step of dumping Windows, there is another big step for me in this. I am not going to make my usual multi-boot Linux configuration on this netbook, I am only going to install Linux Mint, and let it use the entire disk as it sees fit.
Habey’s new 3.5-inch, PoE-ready “EMB-3200” SBC which offers NXP’s i.MX6, also drives a Linux- and Android driven, 7-inch “OPC-4207” touch-panel system.
Habey, which recently released a Kaby Lake based BIS-6862, has now turned to an ARM (now called arm) system-on-chip for its EMB-3200 SBC and EMB-3200-driven OPC-4207 touch-panel computer. No OS support is listed for the NXP i.MX6 based SBC, but the fanless, open frame OPC-4207 runs Android 6.0.1, Debian 8, or Yocto based Linux 3.14.
Neurotechnology startup Rythm is building Morpheo, an open-source and secure initiative to help develop machine learning models for automatic and predictive diagnosis of sleep disorders.Morpheo will explore and provide sleep clinicians with a free online software that will automatically analyze sleep patterns and help improve and speed diagnosis related to sleep. Morpheo will also enable software developers and machine learning experts as they create models for the diagnosis of other illnesses. Rythm jointly announced Morpheo with Ãâ°cole Polytechnique and the Université Paris Descartes with €5 million in funding from the French government and BPI, a French investment bank.
Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: T-Mobile Austria picks Huawei for optical transport boost; TrueSpeed wins investment for rural rollout; BT qualifies to bid for US government work.
Lumina Networks, Inc. launched today in the software-defined networking (SDN) market, through its acquisition of assets associated with the SDN Controller product family from Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. Along with a leading SDN Controller solution, powered by OpenDaylight™, Lumina brings a talented team of network software engineers and existing customer engagements with some of the world’s largest service providers. Offering the Lumina SDN Controller, applications and Network Development (NetDev) Services, Lumina is the catalyst that brings open software networking out of the lab and into production networks.
Lozano chimed in again later that day, thanking everyone again for their feedback, but still refusing to disable the Kite links by default.
Mozilla is testing a new service that makes it dead simple and quick for people to semi-securely share files with anyone on the Internet.
Send, as the service is called, allows senders to encrypt any 1-gigabyte or less file and upload it to a Mozilla server. The service then creates a link with a long, complex string of letters in it that's required to download and decrypt the file. Mozilla will automatically delete the encrypted file as soon as it's downloaded or within 24 hours of being uploaded, even if no one has downloaded it.
It's not yet official, but the Firefox 55.0 open-source and cross-platform web browser is now available for download on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Mozilla's Firefox 55 web browser is now deemed stable while Firefox 56 enters beta and Firefox 57 is the new nightly build.
LibreOffice in its latest version, 5.4, has added incremental improvements to make its integrated applications easier to use.
This week, open technology and knowledge advocates around the world mourned the execution of Bassel Khartabil, an open web advocate and close friend of many in the Global Voices community. Bassel was reportedly sentenced to death in November 2015, at which point his whereabouts and condition became unknown. His wife Noura Ghazi learned this week that he was executed in 2015.
Anyone involved in STEM education labs or out of education research, may be interested in the new DIY open source microcentrifuge, which has been created by Jason Wu called the Polyfuge.
Watch the demonstration video below to learn more about the Polyfuge which allows you to construct your very own micro centrifuge system and is perfect for STEM education laboratories and other research and has been created to help make biology lab equipment more accessible to students around the world.
As you may already know (if you don’t, please check these older posts) openQA, the automated testing system used by openSUSE runs daily tests on the latest KDE software from git. It works well and uncovered a number of bugs. However, it only tested X11. With Wayland starting to become usable, and some developers even switching to Wayland full time, it was a notable shortcoming. Until now.
Why would openQA not run on Wayland? The reason lies in the video driver. openQA runs its tests in a virtual machine (KVM) which uses the “cirrus” virtual hardware for video display. This virtualized video card does not expose an interface capable of interfacing with the kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), which is required by kwin_wayland, causing a crash. To fix it, “virtio”, which presents a way for the guest OS to properly interface with the host’s hardware, is needed. Virtio can be used to emulate many parts of the VM’s hardware, including the video card. That would mean a working DRM interface, and a working Wayland session!
Every front-end developer has had the frustrating experience of delving backwards through a code base for a bug fix to determine what, exactly, a mysterious var is defined as. Ensuring types between components cuts off these time-consuming issues before they occur. It helps reduce the margin for error and improves readability, allowing the opportunity to create elegant JavaScript with minimal runtime errors. Which brings us to TypeScript—a superset of JavaScript that lets you add in strongly-typed classes to your front-end application.
[...]
Developed by Microsoft, TypeScript is an open-source language and compiler that runs both in the browser (through SystemJS with transpiling on the fly) and on NodeJS. Its intention is to address JavaScript’s shortcomings for large-scale application development.
The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute has launched a new effort to gauge real world reactions to driverless vehicles by disguising a human driver to look like a car seat.
The video opens with a guy rapping on the window of a van.
"Brother, who are you?" the person holding the camera says. "What are you doing? I'm with the news, dude."
You can see hands holding the steering wheel from the bottom, but the man inside the Ford van, dressed in a full driver's seat costume—including a face mask—doesn't react.
“Students from class 6 to 12 are being trained to be able to pass on their knowledge to their parents, grandparents and others in the family who have been deprived of it. The child becomes a guru to them,” Javadekar said, adding “that is how we can completely eradicate illiteracy from the country”.
Today, the coastal city of Haithabu is an archaeological site in Germany on the Baltic Sea. But the people who munched on that dried cod roughly 1,000 years ago were living under Danish rule in a cosmopolitan port city. Haithabu was a key stop on a lively sea trade route that brought tasty treats and trinkets like walrus tusks from distant lands. Though there is ample evidence of this kind of trade 800 years ago, University of Oslo environmental biologist Bastiaan Star and his colleagues have pushed that date back at least 200 years, and possibly 400, just by sequencing cod DNA. This dramatically changes our understanding of long-distance trade in Northern Europe during the Viking Age.
Two of the UK’s foremost research organisations will lose much of their business to Amsterdam if the city is successful in securing the relocation of the EU’s medicines regulator, the Netherlands’ formal bid for the prized agency claims.
Amsterdam, which has been tipped as an early favourite to secure the European Medicines Agency (EMA), says in its application submitted to the European commission that losing the agency will prove a double blow to London when Brexit forces its move.
“The relocation of the agency will have considerable impact, not only because it has to move its headquarters and personnel, but also because the relationship with the UK Medicines Health and Regulatory Agency [MHRA] will change and potential risks need to be minimised in the event of a hard Brexit”, the document says.
Last month we reported that Raptor was planning to launch a new POWER workstation and now they have revealed their system specifications and pre-order details.
The Talos II workstation is built using POWER9 processors, is one of the first systems supporting PCI Express 4.0, supports DDR4 memory, is designed to be very secure and open, and uses the OpenBMC firmware.
This morning I was on a call with AMD and they are now able to confirm they have reproduced the Ryzen "segmentation fault issue" and are working with affected customers.
AMD engineers found the problem to be very complex and characterize it as a performance marginality problem exclusive to certain workloads on Linux. The problem may also affect other Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD, but testing is ongoing for this complex problem and is not related to the recently talked about FreeBSD guard page issue attributed to Ryzen. AMD's testing of this issue under Windows hasn't uncovered problematic behavior.
Over the weekend, we talked about an issue surrounding AMD's Ryzen-based processors on Unix-based OSes. Today, we learn a lot more about what's going on, as well as which products are actually affected. But first, let's get the upside out of the way: this bug is rare, and requires very specific conditions. The vast majority of users are not going to experience an issue, but it's at least an issue to be aware of.
Chip IP designer ARM Holdings has released a video that rebrands itself as “Arm” and promises to bring “happiness for everyone.”
Eleven months after UK based semiconductor IP designer ARM Holdings was acquired by Japanese technology giant Softbank Group for about $31 billion, Arm has quietly rebranded itself with a hipper, lower-case “arm” logo. The strapless new look first debuted in a platitude rich Aug. 1 YouTube video (see below) spotted on Underconsideration.com’s BrandNew page. The name change seemed to have been challenged by a bit of indecision, judging by the recent edit history on Arm’s Wikipedia page (see Aug. 7, 2017 screenshot farther below), and the Arm website shows some examples of ARM, Arm, and arm. In an email to LinuxGizmos, Phil Hughes, Arm’s Director of Public Relations, wrote: “basically arm is all lowercase for the logo and when used in text is Arm.”
Oracle announced on Aug. 3 that it is joining SafeLogic in an effort to develop a much needed FIPS 140-2 module for the open-source OpenSSL cryptographic library.
OpenSSL is widely used to help secure internet communication and infrastructure, though it currently is lacking a critical module for government standards, known as FIPS 140-2. The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2 is a U.S. government cyber-security standard used to certify cryptographic modules.
For once, some good news about women in the cybersecurity field: A new survey shows that despite the low number of women in the industry, many feel empowered in their jobs and consider themselves valuable members of the team.
The newly published "Women in Cybersecurity: A Progressive Movement" report — a survey of women by a woman — is the brainchild of security industry veteran Caroline Wong, vice president of security strategy at Cobalt, who formerly worked at Cigital, Symantec, eBay, and Zynga.
Wong says she decided to conduct the survey after getting discouraged with all of the bad news about women being underrepresented, underpaid, and even harassed in the technology and cybersecurity fields. The number of women in the industry has basically plateaued at 11% over the past few years.
The risk to GPS has caused a number of countries to take a second look at terrestrial radio navigation. Today there's broad support worldwide for a new radio navigation network based on more modern technology—and the system taking the early lead for that role is eLoran. As Reuters reports, South Korea is preparing to bring back radio navigation with eLoran as a backup system for GPS, and the United States is planning to do the same.
MalwareTech, the cyber security researcher who halted the WannaCry ransomware virus earlier this year and was arrested in Las Vegas last week, will be released on bail today and will travel directly to Milwaukee for a court appearance tomorrow in the Eastern District of Wisconsin – Update: the arraignment is rescheduled for 10am on Monday, 14 August. After 24 hours of no information about his arrest, and a flurry of international news coverage, it was reported that MalwareTech, who lives in the UK and who was in the US for Defcon, was not a flight risk and will be allowed out on $30,000 bail.
Btrfs isn't the only Linux file-system taking some heat but the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is now having a tough week with three CVEs going public.
A central themes in the 2016 report was issues that arose from the Mirai botnet and the takeover of numerous insecure IoT devices. Although those record-setting DDoS attacks were vastly different from 2017’s outbreak of WannaCry ransomware and the destructive NotPetya malware, the events share a similar root cause: leaked exploits and source code. IoT botnets and data-encrypting malware were of course common before those incidents however the September 2016 release of the Mirai source code and the April 2017 release of NSA exploits exacerbated the crime.
The Toronto Sun reports that professor Jordan B. Peterson suspects political reasons may have been behind Google's recent decision to shut down his gmail account, which kept him from uploading new videos to his popular youtube channel. Peterson became famous months ago when he posted a video critical of Canada's proposed bill C-16 that he argued would compel Canadians to use gender-neutral pronouns at risk of fines and imprisonment.
In a memo to employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the employee who penned a controversial memo that claimed that women had biological issues that prevented them from being as successful as men in tech had violated its Code of Conduct, and that the post had crossed “the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
He added: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”
Pichai’s wording appears to indicate that the employee is likely be fired, which some inside and outside the company have been calling for. A Google spokesperson said the company would not confirm any firing of an individual employee, but others have been let go for violating its Code of Conduct in the past.
Google has fired James Damore, an engineer who wrote a controversial essay arguing that the company has gone overboard in its attempts to promote diversity. Damore confirmed the firing in an e-mail to Bloomberg.
“At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership,” Damore wrote in an internal posting that went viral within the company over the weekend. The posting was subsequently leaked to Gizmodo. However, he argued, that’s “far from the whole story.”
Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead.
A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.
On February 16, federal employees at an arm of the US Department of Agriculture received an email from one of their bosses on how to talk about climate change under the new administration. The gist was clear: Don’t talk about it. According to emails obtained by the Guardian, Bianca Moebius-Clune, the director of soil health, sent employees at the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) a list of terms to avoid in the future. The NRCS is the federal office that oversees farmers’ land conservation.
Staffers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) service responsible for helping American farmers with conservation efforts were instructed by top officials to avoid the term "climate change" shortly after President Donald Trump took office, according to emails (pdf) obtained by the Guardian.
In a bold new strategy unveiled on Monday in the Guardian, the US Department of Agriculture – guardians of the planet’s richest farmlands – has decided to combat the threat of global warming by forbidding the use of the words.
Under guidance from the agency’s director of soil health, Bianca Moebius-Clune, a list of phrases to be avoided includes “climate change” and “climate change adaptation”, to be replaced by “weather extremes” and “resilience to weather extremes”.
[...] today’s banking is essentially a big Ponzi scheme, under the more formal names of “fractional reserve” and “quantitative easing”.
The proposed account freezes extend the ability for states to suspend account withdrawals – which currently exempt insured deposit accounts that hold less than 100,000 euros. The plan would allow the suspension of payouts for five working days, with a possible extension of 20 days allocated for “exceptional circumstances”. Existing EU legislation allows for states to initiate a two-day suspension of certain payouts in the event of potential bank failure – with deposits explicitly excluded.
The Commonwealth Bank has blamed coding errors in a software update for its Intelligent Deposit Machines for its allegedly falling foul of Australian money-laundering and terror-financing laws.
Warring Tories flushing Britain down the Brexit toilet couldn’t navigate their way out of a bathroom with an open door.
The mockery echoing across the Channel and Irish Sea is the sound of our impending national doom.
Gobsmacked diplomats representing the EU’s 27 other countries are warning that Britain has zero chance of successfully negotiating a deal until it knows what it wants.
And with the Tory government’s irreparably, fatally split such a united response is impossible.
So ultimately, the question remains: Is he building a political base or a user base? Maybe the answer is just, yes.
This is partly attributable to the nature of House districts: GOP gerrymandering and Democratic voters’ clustering in urban districts has moved the median House seat well to the right of the nation.
After six months of infighting, investigations and legislative failures, President Donald Trump is trying to combat new signs of weakness in his Republican base and re-energize his staunchest supporters.
I REMEMBER having my mother once buying me books to cultivate my reading habit when I was a child. It started off with Enid Blyton, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle. This was the 1990s, when such hardcover books were priced at a mere RM9.90.
Looking at book prices now – God, I feel old.
But one book I read during this period was apparently a controversial one for a standard three pupil. It was Enid Blyton's The Land of Far Beyond, which told of a bunch of children and adults suddenly having their burden of sin appearing on their backs, and having to find Jesus to remove it.
[...]
Let's open up the conversations, open up the talks, write the books, watch the movies, and not censor anyone's point of view.
If not, well, there will always be Piratebay.
Ever since “fake news” found its place among the various explanations used by the Clinton campaign and supporters to account for their candidate’s loss, there has been a quiet but concerted effort on the part of establishment media, technology, and telecommunications companies to thwart the surging popularity of independent media.
The rise of the independent media has been hugely detrimental to the once privileged position of the mainstream media, who have now lost the trust of the vast majority of Americans and – along with that trust – their ability to control political and social narratives.
The Canadian Transportation Agency and an air passenger rights activist are engaged in an online battle that pits freedom of expression against a government agency's right to delete negative comments from its social media accounts.
Gabor Lukacs has won 24 of 27 court cases against the agency. Recently, he posted "5 Reasons not to Trust the Canadian Transportation Agency" on the agency's Facebook page.
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a digital rights advocacy group, on Monday urged US federal trade authorities to investigate VPN provider AnchorFree for deceptive and unfair trade practices.
AnchorFree claims its Hotspot Shield VPN app protects netizens from online tracking, but, according to a complaint filed with the FTC, the company's software gathers data and its privacy policy allows it to share the information.
Worryingly, it is claimed the service forces ads and JavaScript code into people's browsers when connected through Hotspot Shield: "The VPN has been found to be actively injecting JavaScript codes using iframes for advertising and tracking purposes."
The Government Accountability Office last week published a report that, among other things, weighs in on the pros and cons the NSA/CYBERCOM “dual-hat” system (pursuant to which the Director of NSA/CSS and Commander of CYBERCOM are the same person). The report deserves attention, but also some criticism and context. Here’s a bit of all three.
At the outdoor hacker camp and conference SHA2017, which is taking place in the Netherlands, NSA whistleblower William Binney gave the talk, “How the NSA tracks you.”
As a former insider, Binney knew about this long before Snowden dropped the documents to prove it is happening. Although he didn’t say anything new, Binney is certainly no fan of the NSA’s spying — he calls the NSA the “New Stasi Agency.” If you are no fan of surveillance, then his perspective from the inside about the “total invasion of the privacy rights of everybody on the planet” will fuel your fury at the NSA all over again.
In today’s cable program, according to Binney, the NSA uses corporations that run fiber lines to get taps on the lines. If that fails, they use foreign governments to get taps on the lines. And if that doesn’t work, “they’ll tap the line anywhere that they can get to it” — meaning corporations or governments won’t even know about the taps.
In its 14-page filing, which was submitted Monday morning, the Center for Democracy and Technology claims that the company displays persistent cookies and works with various other entities for advertising purposes, among other alleged unsavory practices.
The new Data Protection Bill is designed to sign European privacy rules into British law, as well as update the existing Data Protection Act which has not changed since 1998.
National identity cards are an emotive topic. In the UK, the ID card debate raged for years before and after the authorities there passed a law in 2006 to introduce them. Five years later, a change of government saw the law being repealed as a result of widespread public concerns. The Irish government seems to be adopting a different approach. It is introducing ID cards for its population while denying that it is doing so, perhaps in an attempt to dodge the heated arguments that raged in the UK.
The research showed that even glimpsing the Facebook logo or the pleasing blue-on-white colour scheme was enough to get the dopamine pumping in frequent users and might actually kick them off on a social update binge.
The British government will adopt the regulation while the country remains in the EU and mirror it once it leaves, and has announced a new Data Protection Bill that will bring the regulations into UK law. The bill will likely be introduced in Parliament between the return from summer recess on 5 September and the end of 2017.
In most countries organising an illegal demonstration on Facebook might get you a fine or, if you’re unlucky, a short jail sentence.
But there is one place where it can actually help get you the death penalty.
In Saudi Arabia today there are 14 pro-democracy demonstrators who face execution after being caught up in protests against the royal family which turned violent.
Iranian refugee and journalist Behrouz Boochani, who is also on Manus Island, said the asylum seeker concerned had a long history of mental illness and distress.
He was reportedly jailed following a mental breakdown at the regional processing centre, but was released, only to be found wandering the streets of Lorengau without clothes.
"He was homeless in the street and in a very bad situation," Mr Boochani told Fairfax Media on Monday.
11 House Representatives chastise the FCC for attempting to destroy internet freedom The 11 Representatives are:
Kathy Castor (D-FL) Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) Diana DeGette (D-CO) Mike Doyle (D-PA) Joseph P. Kennedy III (D-MA) Doris Matsui (D-CA) Jerry McNerney (D-CA) Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) John Sarbanes (D-MD) Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) Peter Welch (D-VT)
"As participants either in the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 or in decisions on whether to update the Act, we write to provide our unique insight into the meaning and intent of the law."
[...]
"Since we voted for the Telecommunications Act in 1996, Americans rejected the curated internet services in favor of an open platform. Now, anyone with a subscription to an ISP can get access to any legal website or application of their choice. Americans’ ISPs no longer pick and choose what online services their customers can access."
Fifteen Democrats led by Sen. Ed Markey (Mass.) in a letter Thursday to Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai asked that he provide more time for comments, citing the unprecedented number of comments on the rules.
A company that tracks ISPs and data caps in the US has identified 196 home Internet providers that impose monthly caps on Internet users. Not all of them are enforced, but customers of many ISPs must pay overage fees when they use too much data.
BroadbandNow, a broadband provider search site that gets referral fees from some ISPs, has more than 2,500 home Internet providers in its database. This list includes telecommunications providers that are registered to provide service under the government's Lifeline program, which subsidizes access for poor people. BroadbandNow's team looked through the ISPs' websites to generate a list of those with data caps.
The data cap information was "pulled directly from ISP websites," BroadbandNow Director of Content Jameson Zimmer told Ars. "For those that have multiple caps, we include the lowest one and an asterisk to show that they have regional variation."
BroadbandNow, which is operated by a company called Microbrand Media, plans to keep tracking the data caps over time in order to examine trends, he said.
Btw, yes, it also bothers me that WIPO calls its database Global BRAND Database. Trade marks and brands are not the same!
The European Court of Justice (the ECJ, “the European Supreme Court”) ruled three years ago that anything published openly on the web may be freely reused by anyone in any way on their own website. This ruling didn’t get anywhere near the attention it deserved, as it completely reverses a common misconception – the idea that you can’t republish or reuse something you happen to come across. The ECJ says that an open publication on the web exhausts the exclusivity of a work as far as the web is concerned, and that further authorization or permission from the rightsholder is not required for any reuse on the web after that, commercial or not.
Internet provider Grande Communications and the RIAA continue their fight in court. Much of the battle thus far has centered around evidence of copyright infringement. In a new filing at a Texas District Court, the ISP stresses that the RIAA's evidence is misleading, as it doesn't prove any actual distributions of the contested works.
The Re:Create Coalition is offering a strong counter view to recent demands from copyright groups, urging the US to add strong copyright protections to the NAFTA negotiations. The coalition argues that if strong copyright enforcement is a central issue, fair use and safe harbor protections should be included as well, to maintain a proper balance.