Linux serves — of that there is no doubt — literally and figuratively. The open source platform serves up websites across the globe, it serves educational systems in numerous ways, and it also serves the medical and scientific communities and has done so for quite some time.
I remember, back in my early days of Linux usage (I first adopted Linux as my OS of choice in 1997), how every Linux distribution included so many tools I would personally never use. Tools used for plotting and calculating on levels I’d not even heard of before. I cannot remember the names of those tools, but I know they were opened once and never again. I didn’t understand their purpose. Why? Because I wasn’t knee-deep in studying such science.
In the comments to my recent post about dumping Windows and installing Linux Mint, in just 10 minutes, someone asked for an article about how to actually do things in Linux.
That's certainly a fair request, and a good point -- I am perhaps more guilty than many others of frequently writing about how easy it is to install Linux, but not about how wonderful it is to actually use Linux.
According to Net Applications' Netmarketshare, the Linux market share on the desktop as judged by browser interactions may now be above 3%.
The company is reporting a 3.37% Linux marketshare for August 2017, a rise from 2.53% a month prior and the first time they have reported the Linux desktop marketshare above 3%.
According to the latest stats on NetMarketShare, Linux now accounts for 3.37% of the operating system market. It has more than doubled its share since December 2015 and has seen a drastic rise over the last couple of summer months. Since 2015, Windows has largely stayed around the 90% mark while macOS has dropped from a high of 8% in October 2015 down to 5.94% in August.
NetMarketShare’s stats include data on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD; it’s presumed that Chrome OS factors into the Linux statistics because it runs the Linux kernel. Suppose that Chrome OS is included, this would explain why there has been such a bump for Linux in the month of August: It’s probably due to students or schools buying Chromebooks in time for the school year.
While the Ryzen CPUs have been available for a few months now and the higher-wattage Threadripper and EPYC processors are now available too, the Linux thermal driver remains missing in action and it's looking less likely that it will materialize for Linux 4.14.
The Linux 4.14 merge window should open this weekend, unless the Linux 4.13 cycle is unexpectedly stretched by an additional week.
For those with a system containing the new Realtek RTL8822BE wireless chipset, initial support for it will be found with the upcoming Linux 4.14 LTS kernel.
The RTL8822BE is a new ASIC from Realtek supporting 802.11ac, MU-MIMO, and Bluetooth 4.1. There are USB and PCI Express versions of this wireless adapter.
Mesa 17.2 was supposed to be released earlier this month but the release process has been extended and we're now up to the sixth release candidate for testing.
Fotoxx is an open source image editing and collection manager robust and powerful enough for professional use.
With a focus on editing images taken with a digital camera, it is excellent at managing large photo collections while packing alongside a thumbnail browser, image search using any meta data and (partial) file names, support for batch operations, RAW file import, and a comprehensive set of edit functions including crop, red-eye removal, among other operations.
ClipGrab is an open source download application with which you can search for and download videos from several famous websites like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. It also has an inbuilt video converter to handle formats like MPEG, WMV, and MP3, among others. It features a fairly simple User Interface with a panel to display results of link searches alongside related videos.
You can grab videos either by searching for them within the application or by pasting the video URL into the URL field. You can also download videos in their original format or convert them to other supported formats using the file format drop-down menu (depending on whether the website you’re downloading from allows the option or not).
Hatsune Miku is now 10 years old, but I do not use the Vocaloid Software, because it is non-free. It’s note editor that is not fully accessibile. The other Singing Computer from Milan Zamazal is no longer maintained and only supports English and Czech languages and singing-mode.scm is broken in modern distributions of GNU/Linux.
PiCluster provides a simple approach to managing Docker containers across multiple hosts. I am pleased to announce PiCluster 2.1! This release contains many improvements and new features to the 2.x branch. Let’s dive into what is new!
Here are my notes on using yacc, particularly as regards creating parsers for config files and such.
The Wine development release 2.16 is now available.
Wine 2.16 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems.
Wine 2.16 introduces support for pasting metafiles in RichEdit, better support for grayscale PNGs, support for safety features in library loading, better handling of GdiPlus transforms, DirectWrite rendering improvements, and 19 known bug fixes.
Songbringer [GOG, Steam], a rather beautiful adventure and exploration RPG with procedural worlds has released for Linux, here's my thoughts.
War Thunder [Official Site], the free to play cross-platform MMO may gain Vulkan support in "the near future" the developers have said.
Remember Advanced Wars? Well, TINY METAL [Official Site] is a "spiritual successor" and the good news is that the developers have plans for a Linux version.
Touting much gridiron action, Axis Football 2017 [Official Site] is the latest installment in the American Football franchise. I took the game for a spin and have a few thoughts to share.
Nidhogg 2 [Steam, Official Site], the sequel to the indie hit of 2014 may not come to Linux and the developer has listed reasons why. Hopefully people can help get this going.
Card City Nights 2 [Steam, Official Site] is an all new adventure game that mixes in a card-based battle system and tomorrow it releases with day-1 Linux support.
Feral Interactive has delivered a punctual release of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen for Linux and macOS gamers.
Feral Interactive have released XCOM 2: War of the Chosen [Steam, Feral Store] a little earlier than expected, as it’s out right now!
Advantech’s Linux-ready “DPX-S445” is a casino gaming SBC with 7th Gen Core CPUs, triple displays, and a PCIe x16 connector for 8x additional displays.
Its open-source real-time server for games and apps, Nakama, is designed to power modern real-time social gaGaming: #CardCityNights, #Avorion, #XCOM 2, #Casino #Gaming SBC, #Nakama http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/104376mes in the vein of Clash Royale, typically requiring the technology and expertise in limited supply outside the big studios.
The latest KDE Plasma 5.10.5 is available for Kubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" at 24 August 2017. It's available via Kubuntu Backports PPA. For your information, the latest Plasma itself released at 22 August. Now, if you're a Kubuntu 17.04 user, you can upgrade your Plasma either fully or just partially for some components you like! Read the simple instructions below.
In this post I intend report the final status of my GSoC project (obviously). My goal for this summer was to add Polkit support in KIO and integrate the upgraded library in dolphin. And well, I have accomplished most (not all :| ) of my goals.
KF5 port is now more complete than in KTorrent 5.0: Multimedia, search, scanfolder, ipfilter, stats, scripting, syndication (rss) plugins are now ported to Qt5. The only missing bits are webinterface plugin and plasmoid.
SDDM is a Qt based Display Manager used by multiple desktops, but most importantly (certainly for the PlanetKDE crowd), KDE.
It's been a while since last having anything to report on the Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) but that changed with today's v0.15 release of this Qt5-powered log-in/display manager.
“Status icons” go by a few different names. A lot of people know them by the area where they appear, which gets described as the “system tray” or “notification area”. Whatever you call it, it’s the place where a string of little icons often gets shown, typically by applications that are running in the background.
GNOME 3.26 removes the legacy tray area still used by some desktops apps. We ask whether this decision is really as big of a deal as it sounds.
This is the second BETA of our 8.2 release; a mid-year version bump to enhance hardware support and capabilities. This beta addresses issues in our OVA image, a Broadcom WIFI firmware vulnerability for Raspberry Pi 3 and Zero W users, and MPEG issues seen with some nVidia cards. It also adds support for the inexpensive Xbox ONE (DVB-C/T/T2) USB tuner (about €12 on eBay), and LibreELEC settings gains new options for changing the embedded Samba server Workgroup and adjusting the SMB protocol versions supported for security and SMB share compatibility. Kodi is bumped to 17.4 final.
With the Power Use, RAM + Boot Times With Unity, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE, Budgie and KDE Plasma tests this week, many expressed frustration over the heavy KDE packaging on Ubuntu leading to the inflated results for the Plasma 5 desktop tests. For some additional reference, here is how KDE Plasma (and GNOME Shell) compare when running on Ubuntu 17.04 vs. openSUSE Tumbleweed.
As computing trends like virtualization, containers or edge continue to create churn in the industry, companies are hard-pressed to maintain a competitive edge. Rob Young, manager of virtualization product and strategy at Red Hat Inc., says his company’s position as an operating system agnostic to the computing infrastructure, virtual or otherwise, enables it to deliver value no matter where the market goes.
“If you look at the dynamic in the market, a lot of people think there’s virtualization or containers, but this is really a symbiotic, complementary relationship. … Because Red Hat is already comfortable operating in this open-source environment in this way, we think we’re just in a very good position to lead in both areas,” Young said.
Ansible is a valuable configuration management tool for many IT shops that use Red Hat products. But there's still room for deeper Red Hat-Ansible integration down the line.
Today's IT leaders need honesty, humility, and an understanding of these classic principles, says Red Hat CIO Mike Kelly
I heard the name Qubes OS as an Operating System which was built while keeping security in mind, and also they used Fedora as the base Operating System. A reasonably secure operating system is the tagline and they also have a few testimonials in the site, I guess the most famous one is the following tweet.
The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.9.8
On Wednesday 30th August, the upstream OpenStack community officially announced the release of OpenStack Pike. Pike represents the 2nd release of OpenStack this year after Ocata was released back in February and it shows that the innovation and progress in OpenStack shows no signs of slowing just yet. With recent big announcements from Google, Amazon and VMware it is important that OpenStack continues to develop and offer a real, open alternative to public cloud platforms for organisations wanting to operate application infrastructure in house.
The first Ubuntu 17.10 Beta release is finally here. It was preceded by Ubuntu 17.10 Alpha 2 that brought tons of hot features for Ubuntu MATE, whose developers called it their most “Super” alpha ever.
Following the tradition, the first Beta release hasn’t witnessed the participation of default Ubuntu release, which will now ship with GNOME desktop environment. This brings us to the participating flavors Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio and Xubuntu.
The first Ubuntu 17.10 beta releases are now available to download. Among the various Ubuntu flavours taking part in this round of testing are Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu and Ubuntu Budgie, whose changes we highlight below.
I'm happy to announce that Kubuntu Artful beta 1 milestone released today, having passed all the mandatory testing, thanks to lots of testers! Thanks so much to each of you.
If possible, we'll also be participating in Beta 2 with the next round of KDE bug-fix releases for the last testing milestone before release of Kubuntu 17.10 on 19 October 2017.
Release notes: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/Beta1/Kubuntu
Intrinsyc’s Open-Q 626 SOM and Mini-ITX Dev Kit run Android 7.1 on an octa-core -A53 Snapdragon 626, and offer WiFi, BT, GPS, and extended temp support.
Intrinyc’s Open-Q branding has been applied to both SBCs, such as the recent Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 based Open-Q 835, and computer-on-modules such as the older, Snapdragon 820 based Open-Q 820. The tiny, 50 x 25mm Open-Q 626 SOM is a SODIMM-style COM running Android 7.1 “Nougat” (and “soon,” Linux) that showcases the computer vision capabilities of the Snapdragon 626. It’s also available in a sandwich-style Mini-ITX development kit with optional camera and display (see farther below).
Ricoh’s compact “Theta V” 360€° camera runs Android on a Snapdragon 625, and offers WiFi, Bluetooth, and 4K imaging and live streaming.
Ricoh opened preorders for its Theta V 360€° camera for $429, with shipments due in September. This update to the $349 Theta S has a similar 130.6 x 45.2 x 22.9mm footprint and 121-gram weight, but offers far greater image quality. The camera leverages an improved imaging algorithm, as well as dual 12-megapixel 1/ 2.3-inch sensors, to produce 3840 x 1920 (4K) resolution @ 30fps videos or stills, up from the 1920 x 960 pixels on the Theta S. Onboard WiFi and Bluetooth enables live, up to 4K streaming, as well as remote shooting.
Seeed’s “ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array for Raspberry Pi” add-on has 4x mics and a 12-LED ring to offer Echo-like voice detection and directional capabilities.
There are an increasing number of software solutions available for adding voice agent technology to the Raspberry Pi, including options for the Alexa agent found on the Amazon Echo, the Google Assistant technology available on Google Home, and even IBM Watson voice services. Yet, typical microphone add-on boards are often not up to the task of accurate voice detection especially in multi-speaker environments. Seeed Studios has a solution in the form of a $24.90 ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array for Raspberry Pi.
From the outside, open source projects may seem somewhat messy and chaotic with no obvious central leadership or reporting structure. But most successful open source projects actually have a great deal of structure and method behind their technical decision-making.
If you explore the Wiki pages of EdgeX Foundry, you will see several references to the project’s architectural “tenets”. These are the principles that guide how the project’s contributors and technical steering committee decide what changes are accepted into the project, what features will be pursued, and ultimately what technology the group will advance together.
Steam Link compatibility with Samsung QLED TV is not new and this is probably why its official announcement at IFA 2017 in Berlin didn’t cause a media frenzy. With Steam Link, game streaming can now be done directly on the Samsung QLED TV. A few weeks ago, there were some challenges in its usage while still in beta but Samsung has tackled all these hassles before it was officially announced today.
One of the first office document editing apps in the Tizen Store were the hancom office apps. The developers have now released two apps from their development: one is Hancom Office Viewer that comes preloaded on all Tizen Smartphones and another one is Hancom Office Editor, which is available on Tizen Store for all Tizen Smartphones. Best app for view and edit any document, pdf, excel etc. type files. Totally supports Microsoft Office documents: .doc / .docx / .txt / .rtf / .dot / .dotx; Spreadsheet: .xls / .xlsx / .csv / .xlt / .xltx; Presentation: .ppt / .pptx / .pot / .potx / .ppsx / .pps; PDF: .pdf.
Idaho National Laboratory has released multiple new open-source software projects that are freely available to the public and open to collaboration directly with researchers and engineers outside of the laboratory. Fostering widespread distribution of this software will accelerate the adoption of these technologies within industry and fuel innovation in other research organizations that may build on them.
New Delhi, Aug 31 (PTI) A plan to create an open source data platform for "smart agriculture" was mooted by the Department of Biotechnology in a two-day conference that concluded today.
It has been envisaged that the data platform FarmerZone will help cater to the needs of farmers by providing market intelligence, weather predictions, and information on soil, water and seed requirements.
The Department of Biotechnology (DBT), under the Ministry of Science and Technology, convened the Smart Agriculture Conclave here in partnership with the UKs Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Research Councils UK (RCUK), India.
dApps, or decentralized apps, are open-source applications built on top of a blockchain. But here’s the thing – users usually can’t interact with these dApps unless they have tokens issued by these projects. For example, both Augur, a decentralized prediction market and REXMLS, a free global listing network for real estate, require tokens to interact with.
There's a new release of OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service platform for cloud computing. The new release, Pike, isn't chock-full of new features, as OpenStack's focus for the next several releases will be on stability, scalability, performance and ease-of-use.
Actually, this is a good time for the platform's developers to step away from any mad rush to add new features and concentrate on improving the basics. Back in April, when we reported on Open Stack's ninth User Survey, we noted that although use of the platform was on the rise, in some cases user satisfaction was declining, most likely over usability issues.
Android is mainly considered an open source mobile operating system, but there are a number of closed source elements that hundreds of millions of people use every day. The actual requirements of Android is that the kernel be open sourced for the public. This is enforced by the GPL but sadly this is one of those gray areas where someone actually needs to take legal action to enforce it. Some companies have violated this time and time again, and a new petition is calling for the developers of Phoenix OS to do the right thing.
For those who are unaware, Phoenix OS is one of the only full desktop versions of Android that is still being maintained. We’ve covered another popular platform, RemixOS, on a number of occasions but even they dropped out recently to focus on being a 2B2 company. This has left a lot of people to look towards Phoenix OS as their desktop Android solution, but there’s one glaring flaw here. The developers have yet to release the source code for the kernel that’s being used.
Back when Datamation first started making lists of open source software that could replace expensive proprietary applications, most commercial software came in a box and required a flat fee for purchase. These days, with the advent of cloud computing and software as a service, most applications require a regular monthly or yearly subscription.
Those subscriptions make it seem like software has become more affordable. After all, $10 or $20 a month doesn't seem like a lot. But when you add up those repeating fees, users often pay more under the new subscription plans than they did under the old flat-fee arrangements. If you use a lot of different applications, those fees can quickly add up. And it can be particularly hard to justify the expense for a piece of software that you only use once in a while.
Lately, I have been revising some of the OpenStack community’s processes to make them more sustainable. As we grew over the last seven years to have more than 2,000 individual contributors to the current release, some practices that worked when they were implemented have begun causing trouble for us now that our community is changing in different ways. My goal in reviewing those practices is to find ways to eliminate the challenges. OpenStack is developed by a collection of project teams, most of which focus on a feature-related area, such as block storage or networking. The areas where we have most needed to change intersect with all of those teams, such as release management and documentation. Although the teams responsible for those tasks have tended to be small, their members have been active and dedicated. At times that dedication has masked the near-heroic level of effort they were making to keep up with the work load. When someone is overloaded in a corporate environment, where tasks are assigned and the performance and workload of team members are reviewed regularly, the employee can appeal to management for help. The solution may be to hire or assign new contributors, change the project schedule, or to make a short term trade-off that incurs technical debt. However, open source projects are largely driven by volunteers, so assigning people to work on a task isn’t an option. Even in a sponsor-driven community such as OpenStack, where many contributors are being paid to work on the project overall, sponsors typically give a relatively narrow mandate for the way their contributors can spend their time. Changing the project schedule is always an option, but if there are no volunteers for a task today, there is no guarantee volunteers will appear tomorrow, so it may not help. We must use a different approach to eliminate the need for heroic effort.
The stakes are always high when it comes to software security, which is why the ongoing debate over open-source vs. proprietary tends to be passionate.
But the stakes rise to a new level when it comes to the security (and integrity) of a nation’s voting systems. Which makes a recent, relatively civil, squabble over the topic – 15 months out from the next national US election – both passionate and significant.
There isn’t much debate that something needs to be done to make voting systems – more than 8,000 jurisdictions in the 50 states – more secure.
While the US intelligence community concluded that Russian hackers were “probably unsuccessful” in tampering with votes in last year’s presidential election, that doesn’t mean they didn’t try, or that their chances of future success are low.
...Microsoft for buying everyone dinner
I attended my first FrOSCon in St. Augusting, Germany. It’s one of the bigger Free Software events in Germany. Supposedly, the Chemnitzer LinuxTage is one of the few events which are bigger than FrOSCon. I thought it’s time for me to attend this event, so I went.
At Mozilla, we believe that to influence positive change in diversity and inclusion (D&I) in our communities, and more broadly in open source, we need to learn, empathize, innovate, and take action. Open source is missing out on diverse perspectives and experiences that can drive change for a better world because we're stuck in our ways—continually leaning on long-held assumptions about why we lose people. Counting who makes it through the gauntlet of tasks and exclusive cultural norms that leads to a first pull request can't be enough. Neither can celebrating increased diversity on stage at technical conferences, especially when the audience remains homogeneous and abuse goes unchallenged.
We want DREAMers to continue contributing to this country’s future and we do not want people to live in fear. We urge the Administration to keep the DACA program intact. At the same time, we urge leaders in government to enact a bipartisan permanent solution, one that will allow these bright minds to prosper in the country we know and love.
Mozilla Firefox browser is moving to “web extensions” and is dropping support for the legacy XPCOM & XUL add-ons. This means that every single add-on you have on your browser won’t work with Firefox +57 unless it was rewritten using this new technology.
This is bad news for a lot of us. Thousands of add-ons won’t be used anymore because of this. A lot of developers do not plan to invest more time in porting their add-ons into the new technology. However, things have to move on. Mozilla’s point of view is that it’s time to drop this legacy technology and move into more modern ways of creating add-ons.
Hi all, The 1st NetBeans code donation from Oracle to Apache is complete and http://bits.netbeans.org/download/apache-donation/ApacheNetBeansDonation1.zip is the first code drop. Everyone is welcome to look at the code, which will be imported into the Apache NetBeans repository. The 1st code donation, i.e., the NetBeans Platform + the Java SE tooling, which includes the new Jigsaw and JShell features, comprises around 45,000 files (around 4 million lines of code) to be transferred from Oracle to Apache. Hereby we are at step 5 of the process outlined below. Mentors, can you create the official Apache NetBeans repository so that we can import the code into it. Many thanks, Geertjan
America this weekend by reportedly doing a fresh round of layoffs and it's sounding like it could affect a number of heads.
Thelayoff.com/Oracle is once again a vibrant discussion board today with word that massive layoffs are set for Friday, 1 September, and sound squarely aimed at their hardware division, SPARC. There are many reported Oracle employees stating notification of a FedEx shipment tomorrow from Oracle headquarters, widely expected to be their termination papers, etc.
The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.4.1, the first minor release of the new LibreOffice 5.4 family, which was announced in early August, and LibreOffice 5.3.6, the sixth release of the mature LibreOffice 5.3 family, which was announced in January 2017.
LibreOffice 5.4.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts and early adopters, while LibreOffice 5.3.6 is targeted at conservative users and enterprise deployments.
This first beta of the development of GhostBSD 11.1 release is ready for testing. All MATE and XFCE image is available with i386 and amd64 architectures. We hope to see a lot of people helping to test this next release.
Following the AMD Threadripper Linux tests of this week today I finally had a chance to try out some of the BSDs with this 16 core / 32 thread system.
With the AMD Threadripper 1950X with Gigabyte X399 AORUS Gaming 7 is how I was running these tests. Initial targets were with TrueOS (formerly known as PC-BSD, the desktop-oriented branch of FreeBSD) and DragonFlyBSD.
I followed Preparing a diff and Making your first patch (OpenBSD) to submit my first OpenBSD patch. Guess what? just few hours later, dmesg source file was changed base on my code. Although the final modification is not my code, it is still a great pleasure that I contribute my own effort to help make OpenBSD better!
Estonia is considering the issue of crypto-tokens, which would make it (almost) the first country to attract investment through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). The scheme would let buyers of the new estcoin hold a stake in the Estonian economy.
The estcoin would be based on the Ethereum infrastructure, a public open-source blockchain specifically developed to facilitate smart contracts.
The Digital Agency of Belgium’s Walloon Region is promoting smart farming. At the Libramont agriculture, forestry and agri-food fair and exhibition this week, the agency co-organised a section showcasing nine companies that have developed innovative ICT uses for farming.
The U.S. District Court recently ruled in favor of Artifex – developer of Ghostscript which is an open-source PDF interpreter and against Hancom Office – a South Korean developer of ”office” apps. The Northern District of California said that General Public License (GPL) can be treated like a legal contract, and developers can sue if the obligations of these licenses are not followed. This ruling provides strong legal support to the enforceability of open source licenses.
"The Compliance Industrial Complex" is a term that evokes dystopian imagery of organizations engaging in elaborate and highly expensive processes to comply with open source license terms. As life often imitates art, many organizations engage in this practice, sadly robbing them of the many benefits of the open source model. This article presents an economically efficient approach to open source software license compliance.
Open source licenses generally impose three requirements on a distributor of code licensed from a third party:
The Genomic Open-source Breeding Informatics Initiative (GOBII), a global project funded by an $18.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is helping bridge the gap [between crop breeders and the growing populations they feed in developing countries]. The project – a partnership between an Ithaca-based hub of researchers at The Institute of Biotechnology, Cornell and the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) and other hubs in agricultural research centers in Mexico, India and Philippines – is making state-of-the-art genomic breeding techniques available to everyone. In May, GOBII released its first products, which include a data management system to organize and access huge amounts of genomic information, and user interface tools for efficient breeding.
“The purpose of the project is to help transform breeding programs in the developing world by implementing the most current methods being used by all major ag-tech companies around the world,” said Liz Jones, GOBII director. “
Supporters of the move claim that a system of local seed rules would be complicated to navigate. That's a fair point, but it's hard to believe Big Ag really cares about farmers that much.
Why have we written yet another web framework for Node.js? I am committed to making the Node.js platform faster, more stable and more scalable. In 2016, myself and David Mark Clements started Pino, which was designed to be the fastest logger for Node.js, and it now has four active maintainers and an ecosystem of hundreds of modules.
Fastify is a new web framework inspired by Hapi, Restify and Express. Fastify is built as a general-purpose web framework, but it shines when building extremely fast HTTP APIs that use JSON as the data format. These are extremely common in both web and mobile software architectures, so Fastify could improve the throughput of the majority of applications.
A few years ago, I wrote that DevOps is the movement that doesn't want to be defined.
DevOps is built for agility and handling change. In this year’s Skill Up survey, Packt found that Python is one of the primary languages used by DevOps engineers. In this article, Richard Gall explores why Python is such a popular part of the DevOps toolchain.
DevOps is a way of thinking; it’s an approach, not a specific set of tools. And that’s all well and good – but it only gives you half the picture. If we overstate DevOps as a philosophy or a methodology, then it becomes too easy to forget that the toolchain is everything when it comes to DevOps. In fact, DevOps thinking forces you to think about your toolchain more than ever – when infrastructure becomes code, the way in which you manage it, change it is constantly.
With the soon-to-be-released LLVM 5.0 there is the initial AMD Zen scheduler model for the compiler to benefit Ryzen / EPYC processors. But now already hitting the LLVM development code for LLVM 6.0 is a revised scheduler model.
A new promotion from the porn site offers 5,000 US university students of legal age a free, four-month membership to Brazzers.com.
Pope Francis has revealed that he sought the help of a psychoanalyst for six months when he was 42 and the leader of the Jesuit order in Argentina during the country’s military dictatorship.
The pope’s disclosure was made in a book based on 12 in-depth interviews with the French sociologist Dominique Wolton, to be published next week.
California could become the first US state to legalise magic mushrooms, as early as next year if proposed legislation is passed. The move, known as a ballot measure in the US, was filed last week with the state Attorney General's office.
President Trump on Aug. 10 said the nation’s opioid epidemic was officially a national emergency.
More than three weeks later, Trump is dealing with a natural disaster.
Hurricane Harvey has displaced tens of thousands, leading Trump to declare federal emergencies in Texas and Louisiana. The decisions have freed up funding to help people who have lost their homes to rising waters.
In contrast, nothing has happened yet since Trump’s declaration on opioids. No paperwork has been issued formally declaring an emergency, and no new policies have been announced.
One reason is that there’s no established procedure for an emergency related to opioid abuse, which is new territory for the federal government.
The opioid epidemic is a chronic problem, and national emergencies are usually only intended to provide short-term relief.
It’s not just Tory MPs alarmed by this week’s news that Theresa May believes she’s “in this for the long-term”, anyone who cares about the future of the NHS is desperately worried that this Prime Minister intends to go on and on.
What have we seen this summer in our NHS?
A huge increase in the number of occasions expectant mums are being turned away from over stretched, under staffed maternity units; almost 40,000 patients left stranded on trolleys in overcrowded A&E departments and shockingly over four million now on the waiting list for operations.
The Galveston National Laboratory in Texas, which contains samples of some of the most deadly and incurable diseases, has issued a statement reporting itself safe five days after Hurricane Harvey struck on Friday amid safety concerns for a lab built in one of America’s most active hurricane zones.
T
he Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a futuristic new approach to treating cancer, clearing a Novartis therapy that has produced unprecedented results in patients with a rare and deadly cancer. The price tag: $475,000 for a course of treatment.
That sounds staggering to many patients — but it’s far less than analysts expected.
The therapy, called a CAR-T, is made by harvesting patients’ white blood cells and rewiring them to home in on tumors. Novartis’s product is the first CAR-T therapy to come before the FDA, leading a pack of novel treatments that promise to change the standard of care for certain aggressive blood cancers.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a new cancer therapy developed by the pharmaceutical company Novartis that experts hope may revolutionize the way doctors treat cancer—but the half-million dollar price tag has sparked a national conversation the costs of life-saving treatments.
We've well established that the internet of things (IOT) market is a large, stinky dumpster fire when it comes to privacy and security. But the same problems that plague your easily hacked thermostat or e-mail password leaking refrigerator take on a decidedly darker tone when we're talking about your health. The health industry's outdated IT systems are a major reason for a startling rise in ransomware attacks at many hospitals, but this same level of security and privacy apathy also extends to medical and surgical equipment -- and integral medical implants like pacemakers.
After a decade of warnings about dubious pacemaker security, researchers at Medsec earlier this year discovered that a line of pacemakers manufactured by St. Jude Medical were vulnerable to attacks that could kill the owner. The researchers claimed that St. Jude had a history of doing the bare minimum to secure their products, and did little to nothing in response to previous warnings about device security. St. Jude Medical's first response was an outright denial, followed by a lawsuit against MedSec for "trying to frighten patients and caregivers."
As the Internet of Things (IoT) begins to enter the mainstream, concerns about the impact such “smart” devices will have on users’ privacy are growing. Many of the problems are obvious, but so far largely anecdotal. That makes a new paper from four researchers at Princeton University particularly valuable, because they analyze in detail how IoT devices leak private information to anyone with access to Internet traffic flows, and what might be done about it. Now that basic privacy protections for Internet users have been removed in the US, allowing ISPs to monitor traffic and sell data about their customers’s online habits to third parties, it’s an issue with heightened importance.
Back in 2012, we wrote about Onity, the company that makes a huge percentage of the keycard hotel door locks on the market, and how laughably easy it was to hack its locks with roughly $50 of equipment. Surprisingly, Onity responded to the media coverage and complaints from its hotel customers with offers of fixes that ranged from insufficient (a piece of plastic that covered the port used to hack the door locks) to cumbersome (replacing the circuit boards on the locks entirely) and asked many of these customers to pay for these fixes to its broken product. Many of these customers wanted to sue Onity for obvious reasons, but a judge ruled against allowing a class action suit to proceed. That was our last story on the subject.
At first glance, the Instagram security bug that was exploited to obtain celebrities' phone numbers and e-mail addresses appeared to be limited, possibly to a small number of celebrity accounts. Now a database of 10,000 credentials published online Thursday night suggests the breach is much bigger.
Dmitry Sklyarov, Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy, security researchers for Positive Technologies, based in Framingham, Mass., found the Intel kill switch that has the ability to disable the controversial Intel Management Engine (ME).
Experts have been wary of the Intel ME because it is an embedded subsystem on every chip that essentially functions as a separate CPU with deep access to system processes and could be active even if the system were hibernating or shut off.
A coalition of Saudi Arabia, the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, with minor support from several other Middle Eastern nations, has relentlessly bombed Yemen since March 2015. This August, the coalition ramped up the ferocity of its airstrikes, killing dozens of civilians.
On August 23, the US/Saudi coalition bombed a hotel near Yemen’s capital Sanaa, killing 41 people, 33 of whom—80 percent—were civilians, according to the United Nations.
Then on August 25, the coalition bombed homes in Sanaa, massacring a dozen civilians, including eight members of the same family.
Major Western media outlets have, however, obscured the responsibility Saudi Arabia, and its US and European supporters, bear for launching these airstrikes.
There is clear evidence of a world increasingly steeped in conflict and violence: The degradation of U.S.-Russian relations, territorial tensions in the South China Sea, the hostile rhetoric between North Korea and the United States, an escalation of the border conflict between China and India, growing tension between Israel and Iran, and the continuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Ukraine; among other hostilities around the globe yielding death and destruction.
A key point to grasp is that the US-Iran relationship has been problematic for many decades. Its strains long predate 9/11 to the coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh's elected leadership in 1953, decades of support for the subsequent Shah's regime, and the multiple upheavals of the late 1970s which culminated in the Iranian revolution of 1979. The sudden collapse of the Shah’s order, seen by Washington as a vital and irreplaceable ally in the intense cold-war rivalry with the Soviet Union, was a heavy geopolitical blow. A seminal event in the aftermath made it even more traumatic: the detention by young revolutionaries of fifty-two American diplomats and their family members in Tehran, a hostage incident which lasted 444 days.
The US's frustrated impotence in a key security dispute left a bitter residue, which makes the nuclear deal negotiated during Barack Obama’s second term of office all the more remarkable. That helped avert a dangerous confrontation over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Nothing is settled, however. For the moment, Trump’s Washington is focusing most security attention on North Korea. But Iran remains a potent background concern, and recent developments could well spark a sudden crisis.
The Clinton 45 administration would be loaded with top globalist ruling-class and imperial operatives from Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations. A dangerous Russophobic war hawk and a dedicated enemy of left popular nationalism in Latin America, Mrs. Clinton might well have initiated significant direct and dangerous military conflict with Russia in Syria or Ukraine and already orchestrated a U.S overthrow of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. She would be doing this to the measured applause of CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Just how much a President Hillary’s likely mass-murderous militarism would reflect her strong ideological commitment to the American Empire Project (never forget her U.S. Senate vote to let George W. Bush criminally invade Iraq if he wanted to [he did]) and how much it would reflect a “wag the dog” need to deflect attention from domestic political chaos is an interesting question.
This week, the Trump administration revoked President Obama’s Executive Order 13688, which limited the scope of a federal program that allows state and local police departments to obtain military equipment free of charge – and without oversight or training in how to use it. After spending 34 years as a police officer, I’m convinced that the 1033 Program has been one of the single greatest contributors to the public losing trust in law enforcement.
Scrapping Executive Order 13688 means police departments will again have unfettered access to high caliber guns, grenade launchers, and armored vehicles, among other forms of military equipment. During a time when criminal justice and police reform have bipartisan support, this decision shows a clear misunderstanding both of what Americans want and, more perilously, of what’s truly effective at improving public safety.
A very senior Israeli intelligence delegation, a week ago, visited Washington. Then, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke into President Putin’s summer holiday to meet him in Sochi, where, according to a senior Israeli government official (as cited in the Jerusalem Post), Netanyahu threatened to bomb the Presidential Palace in Damascus, and to disrupt and nullify the Astana cease-fire process, should Iran continue to “extend its reach in Syria.”
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Belatedly, Israel has understood that it backed the wrong side in Syria – and it has lost. It is not really in a position to demand anything. It will not get an American enforced buffer zone beyond the Golan armistice line, nor will the Iraqi-Syrian border be closed, or somehow “supervised” on Israel’s behalf.
When David Cameron made his case for airstrikes in Syria in 2015, he explicitly ruled out sending in UK ground forces to fight Islamic State. Yet the following year British soldiers were photographed on the ground, reportedly fighting alongside Syrian rebels. All without any disclosure to parliament.
How is this possible?
The answer comes through the use of special forces. As far as the government is concerned, the operations of any units that come under the command of the Director of Special Forces are exempt from public disclosure and scrutiny. In theory, this means British troops can operate anywhere in the world without the public or parliament ever knowing about it, let alone getting the chance to debate or vote.
This may not seem unreasonable at first glance. After all, aren’t we talking about a very small number of elite troops carrying out a similarly small number of ‘quick-in, quick out’ operations? We could hardly equate missions like ending the Iranian embassy siege in 1980 or the rescue of British soldiers captured by the ‘West Side Boys’ in Sierra Leone in 2000 with full-blown military interventions. And secrecy has arguably been understandable to avoid compromising these missions and endangering the personnel involved.
Numerous media outlets (e.g., CNN’s Reliable Sources, 9/18/05) vowed to do better in the future—though within months, reports on poverty and the poor had retreated to background levels, and CNN (2/27/06) was approvingly reporting on how New Orleans had ripped out the carpet at the convention center to “[bring] it back ahead of schedule,” even as at least half of the city’s actual residents remained displaced.
Twelve years later, as Hurricane Harvey has wreaked devastating flooding across southeast Texas, reporters’ ability to notice the nearly one-third of Americans living in or near poverty has again been put to the test. And though direct comparisons with Katrina are tough—Harvey is a different storm, playing out over days of rising waters instead of mere hours, and Houston chose not to call for residents to evacuate as New Orleans did in 2005—news coverage has revealed some of the same blind spots that have plagued reporting on previous natural disasters.
In 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Louisiana, Rice was photographed shoe shopping in New York City.
At the time, the story that she had spent thousands of dollars in an expensive Manhattan retailer was broken by the New York Daily News.
In her 2011 memoir, 'No Higher Honor', Rice admitted she should not have done that.
The memoir confirmed she had travelled to New York to see a play on Broadway, and then done some shoe shopping Ferragamo.
Clearly, Harvey is a natural disaster of monstrous proportions. Its destructiveness is the hottest topic on TV coast-to-coast and around the world. Still, cynics of climate change say natural disasters, like hurricanes, are normal and nothing more than nature’s way. The evidence, however, points in another direction; climate change is no longer simply nature doing its thing. It’s lost purity of the force of nature, only nature.
Similar to the record setting massive meltdown of Arctic ice in a flash of geologic time, fierce storms and zany weather patterns are setting all-time records, hyper-speeding nature’s time clock. In point of fact, bigger/faster all-time records have become the norm, racing ahead of nature, prompting the question: Why is this happening?
The likely answer is: The human footprint is driving climate change to hyper speed; in some instances 10xs faster than climate change over the past millennia.
Hovering Hurricane Harvey, loaded and reloading with trillions of gallons of water raining down on the greater Houston region—ironically the hub of the petroleum refining industry—is an unfolding, off the charts tragedy for millions of people. Many of those most affected are minorities and low-income families with no homes, health care or jobs to look forward to once the waters recede.
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While Trump tweets and hopefully reconsiders his earlier cruel budget cuts for FEMA and other life-saving federal agencies – such as the Centers for Disease Control and the EPA – the people are swinging into action on the ground. May they swing into wise and just action in the next elections – both as new candidates and, high horizon, informed voters. For there is a much better America to be had.
The rains were going to come eventually. It was only a matter of when, and how bad.
With flooding from Tropical Storm Harvey still inundating Houston — exacting a toll of 31 deaths and incalculable damage so far — the city is left asking what could have been done to prevent the extent of the catastrophe, or at least diminish its effects. One of the questions is why federal funding that should have been in place to help Houston deal with flood mitigation never arrived.
Houston and surrounding Harris County, in Texas, had many ambitious proposals for flood mitigation projects lined up, but couldn’t afford them. And, despite the efforts of one of the city’s congressional representatives, Capitol Hill declined to fund the cash-strapped local governments.
Texas communities that have long experienced health problems from nearby oil refineries and chemical plants are now facing the fossil fuel industry’s longer-term impacts: storms made more severe by climate change and the painful recovery process that follows their landfall — a recovery made far worse by industrial contamination.
A number of low-income communities that sit on the fence-lines of the Gulf Coast petrochemical industry have been hit particularly hard by Hurricane Harvey. On Thursday morning, Hilton Kelley stood at a makeshift first responders headquarters in Port Arthur, Texas, directing out-of-state rescue professionals to parts of his neighborhood where he knew people were probably still trapped. A curfew put in place from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. was just ending and the streets were eery and barren, with a few alarms going off in nearby buildings. Kelley’s home had filled with a foot and a half of water, and his wife and granddaughter had taken shelter at his soul food restaurant, Kelley’s Kitchen.
Two explosions shook a flooded chemical plant near Houston early Thursday, sending a plume of black smoke into the air and triggering an intense fire that continued to burn.
Authorities warned that further blasts were likely to occur on site since chemicals weren't being stored at the appropriate temperatures after the facility lost power following Hurricane Harvey.
So, conservative ideas have triumphed in Texas. A business-friendly environment has been created, based on free-market principles, deregulation, and a return to 10th amendment freedoms just as the Founders designed them, because the best government is the one that is closest to the people.
This week, diesel truck engine company Cummins made an unusual announcement. In addition to several new high-efficiency diesel engines, it also showed off an all-electric truck called the Concept Class 7 Urban Hauler EV. The truck is just a concept at the moment, but it’s coming in the nick of time—just as Tesla is about to announce its own semi EV.
Employers added only 156,000 jobs in August as the pace of hiring slowed, according to the Labor Department report Friday. The unemployment rate crept up to 4.4% from the 16-year low of 4.3% reached last month, as fewer adults reported that they had a job during the month. The Labor Department also revised down earlier estimates for job growth in both June and July by a total of 41,000 jobs, suggesting that the labor market is not quite as strong as it appeared to be a month ago.
But Biss is countering his capitalist opponent by picking as his running mate someone who is Pritzker’s direct opposite: a democratic socialist.
At a rally Thursday night, Biss announced that Chicago Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, would be his running mate.
Pop quiz: which UK industry is approximately equal in size to sewing machine manufacturing, yet claims to have swung the Brexit vote?
You may have guessed it – it’s the fishing industry. The vociferous complaints of loss of control, sovereignty and access to our waters and fish have become the symbolic talisman of the Brexiteers. But would people have felt the same way seeing Nigel Farage aboard a sewing machine, or a lawnmower – another economic equal?
The UK must not be "blackmailed" into agreeing a Brexit "divorce" bill before trade talks begin, Liam Fox has said.
Talks should begin soon "because that's good for business", the international trade secretary added.
EU negotiator Michel Barnier has said trade talks are still a way off, due to slow progress on other key issues.
The disgraced former Defence Secretary Liam Fox has accused the EU of “blackmail” in the Brexit talks. This puzzles me. The disgraced former Defence Secretary has repeatedly asserted that the EU is desperate for a trade deal with the UK, and that German manufacturers of Mercedes and BMWs will insist that the UK leaving the EU brings no interruption in free trade, with no concomitant requirements for the UK to comply with EU practice.
But if the UK’s hand is so strong, and the EU’s hand is so weak, then the EU surely is in no position to “blackmail” the UK?
The disgraced former Defence Secretary has never struck me as a man of great intellect. It is perhaps unsurprising that it has not occurred to him, that to accuse your negotiating partner, in the most public manner possible, of blackmail, is not a tactic designed to inculcate the cooperative spirit necessary in any complex negotiation. Worse than that, “Blackmail” is a cry of “please don’t hurt me, I am weak on this one”. Fox contrives to be both insulting and inept all at the same time. It really is quite astonishing that a man who is both entirely incompetent, and has the corruption and inanity of the Werritty affair permanently inscribed on his record, is in office.
But the most incredible thing of all is that, standing in Japan next to Theresa May, the disgraced former Defence Secretary looks competent and assured by comparison. The collapse of the UK is not a pretty sight.
Having exposed that the government has undertaken secret studies into the impacts of Brexit on at least 50 sectors of the economy, Molly has put in a freedom of information request for further details. She wrote to the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, requesting he release the findings of any studies the government have carried out into the potential impacts of Brexit. In a response, the Department of Health or the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) revealed they had “conducted analysis of over 50 sectors” but did not offer to share any findings.
The grim tale of America’s “subprime mortgage crisis” delivers one of those stinging moral slaps that Americans seem to favor in their histories. Poor people were reckless and stupid, banks got greedy. Layer in some Wall Street dark arts, and there you have it: a global financial crisis.
Dark arts notwithstanding, that’s not what really happened, though.
France's tax authority is seeking 600 million euros ($715 million) from Microsoft's local subsidiary for billing French customers from Ireland, the weekly L'Express reported on Wednesday. The magazine reported that the bills concerned internet advertising and keywords for internet searches.
Despite a considerable presence in France, Microsoft paid only 32.2 million euros in corporate tax there last year, according to L'Express.
Trump’s talking about changes to tax policy and, unsurprisingly, he’s found a way to present cuts to corporate taxes as being good for everyone: New jobs! Higher wages! What won’t cutting the social contributions of wealthy corporations bring us! Will the press see through it? We’ll talk about myths about corporate taxes with Sarah Anderson. She directs the Global Economy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies, co-edits the IPS web site Inequality.org, and is lead author of now 24 annual reports on CEO pay.
Donald Trump’s ability to issue presidential pardons has been the ultimate weapon looming over Robert Mueller’s investigation. Trump could potentially pardon himself of any crimes. More important, he could dangle a pardon to his former staffers to encourage them not to supply Mueller with any incriminating information on Trump. Mueller is apparently handling his investigating like the prosecution of a mob boss, pressuring underlings to flip on the boss. Trump’s advantage is that, unlike a mob boss, he can give out an unlimited number of get-out-of-jail-free cards. Trump has reportedly mused in public about using the pardon — and his pardon of Joe Arpaio flaunted his willingness to use it on behalf of a political ally, even in outrageous fashion.
California secession efforts are plentiful this year, but tech billionaire Tim Draper wants to go old school: Just split the Golden State into three.
Draper spent more than $5 million in 2014 on an unsuccessful effort to qualify a ballot measure asking voters to divide California into six states. He never gave up on the idea, though.
His newest measure, filed Friday, says the “political representation of California’s diverse population and economies has rendered the state nearly ungovernable.”
“The citizens of the whole state would be better served by three smaller state governments while preserving the historical boundaries of the various counties, cities and towns,” Draper wrote in the proposed measure’s statement of findings.
Tony Blair is clearly a piece of work. Incidentally, I’ve known about him for decades before he became well-known.
Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish equivalent of the elite English private school Eton (the former’s alumni include the composer Michael Tippett, the winner of the Nobel Prize in economics Angus Deaton, Churchill’s foreign secretary John Simon, the actress Tilda Swinton, the golfer Tommy Armour, the gay climber and child psychiatrist Menlove Edwards (who committed suicide after living a difficult personal life), and numerous legal figures and army generals). Blair was at Fettes from 1966 to 1971.
A good friend of mine during my undergrad days in the late 60s/early 70s had the misfortune (his term) to attend Fettes the same time as Blair.
My Old Fettesian undergraduate friend, like me a future university teacher, moved in very different circles from Blair at Fettes (admittedly my friend was a couple of years older), who at that point had seeming thespian aspirations and gloried in the nickname “Emma”.
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Why put up with this Tory Little Englander pantomime, just to get votes from a xenophobic, and largely elderly and less educated, base, when you can have the option of voting for a flat-out neoliberal party, now unburdened by having jettisoned both Little Englanderism– Conservatives belonging to the 1% view this confining xenophobia as a drag on wealth that has been parked offshore in places like Panama and on lucrative deals to be made with dictators from balmier climes), and also Corbyn’s Labour (which, dear oh dear, wants a return to all that outdated socialist stuff)?
Eight years ago, Google was on top of the world. People across the political spectrum saw the search giant as a symbol of high-tech innovation. During the just-completed 2008 presidential campaign cycle, candidates as diverse as Ron Paul, John McCain, and Barack Obama had all made pilgrimages to Google's Mountain View headquarters to burnish their reputations for tech savvy.
If we are willing to be honest, there was no ambiguity in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” The word “again” says we aren’t great any more but we used to be. It is an aspiration to go back to the past, to the time when we were great. When was that? Trump has never said. But we all know what he meant – again, if we’re willing to be honest.
If you began last weekend early, you may have missed Trump’s Friday afternoon pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. The man Trump affectionately calls “Sheriff Joe” had been convicted of criminal contempt in July for ignoring a court order to stop racial profiling Hispanics. The president, thus making his condoning of racial profiling official, had foreshadowed the pardon a few days before at a campaign-style rally in which he shamelessly exhorted his hero-worshippers to join him in condemning Democrats, unsupportive Republicans, the media and just about everyone else except Sheriff Joe, white nationals and Vladimir Putin.
Seven members of Donald Trump's cybersecurity team, including an Indian-origin data scientist, have resigned, accusing the United States (US) president of ignoring the pressing national security matters.
In a group resignation letter, the members of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), whose purview includes national cybersecurity, cited both specific shortfalls in the administration's approach to cybersecurity, and broader concerns that have undermined the "moral infrastructure" of the US, Fortune reported.
"You have given insufficient attention to the growing threats to the cybersecurity of the critical systems upon which all Americans depend, including those impacting the systems supporting our democratic election process," the letter reads.
Still, a segment broadcast on Fox Wednesday night deserves some of our attention. That’s because it was an interview with a far-right video blogger from California, Keith Campbell, whose work, which consists mainly of stalking left-wing activists, had attracted almost no attention until Sunday, when he was beaten by anti-fascist activists in Berkeley.
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As a result, a 54-year-old fringe activist who spends his days crashing far-left events for the benefit of his 878 YouTube subscribers has become a hero to millions of Fox News viewers. Images of Campbell being thrashed are now also Exhibit A for supporters of Donald Trump who argue that the president was right to condemn “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” after the killing of an antiracist protester by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, this month.
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Shane Bauer, who shot the most widely shared video of Campbell’s beating, observed in Mother Jones that images of violence carried out by a small number of anti-fascists drew press attention almost entirely away from the fact that the vast majority of the thousands of antiracist demonstrators were peaceful.
Everything you need to know about “fake news” happened on July 19, 2017. That was the day the media stopped in its tracks and turned like well-coiffed, bronzer-addicted lemmings to collectively hurtle themselves into the abyss of infotainment. It was a truly telling moment because they actually had to hit the pause button on the morphine drip of TrumpTV to carry the live feed of O.J. Simpson’s piddling parole hearing in a Nevada conference room.
Amazingly — or, perhaps, predictably — this utterly inconsequential event was carried by CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and ESPN. That’s right, this scandalous ghost of obsessions past received the same treatment as a spectacular terrorist attack or a deadly hurricane or a political assassination.
But, no … it was just O.J. pandering to a parole board. As expected, he was granted his release for a crime unrelated to the famous murders, troubled investigation and showy trial that made him America’s first news-cycle superstar. And it provided a strangely poetic full-circle moment for the media.
In her short tenure, Weiss (pictured, right) has given the paper exactly what it apparently wanted when it hired her. She has churned out a series of trite, shallow, cheap attacks on already-marginalized left-wing targets that have made her a heroine in the insular neocon and right-wing intelligentsia precincts in which she, Stephens, and so many other NYT op-ed writers reside.
Exactly as she was doing a decade ago as a “pro-Israel” activist at Columbia and thereafter at various neocon media perches, her formula is as simple as it is predictable: She channels whatever prevailing right-wing grievance exists about colleges, Arabs or Israel critics (ideally, all of those) into a column that’s supposed to be “provocative” because it maligns minority activists or fringe positions that are rarely given platforms on the New York Times op-ed page.
On Wednesday, the New York Times wrote about a Google-funded think tank terminating an entire team run by an anti-monopoly scholar who was critical of Google’s practices. It is an important story about how corporate interests, by virtue of their position inside key outlets of communication, can influence what information flows to the general public.
Now, The New York Times Company, the newspaper’s governing body, needs to figure out what to do about a similar problem at its own publication.
On Tuesday, ride-sharing company Uber announced the hiring of Dara Khosrowshahi as its new CEO, replacing Travis Kalanick. Khosrowshahi, an Iranian immigrant, previously spent 12 years as CEO of travel company Expedia.
Sky is to stop broadcasting Fox News in the UK after low audience figures, the media firm has said. 21st Century Fox, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, said the channel was being withdrawn as it was not commercially viable. The decision was not related to Fox's takeover bid for Sky, a source told the BBC. Culture secretary Karen Bradley has previously said she may refer the bid to competition regulators. "[Fox] has decided to cease providing a feed of Fox News Channel in the UK," a company spokeswoman said.
Ed Miliband has claimed that evidence against the Murdochs being allowed to take full control of Sky is growing, and there is an “overwhelming” case for the government to launch a full investigation into how the proposed deal would affect broadcasting standards in the UK.
Imagine a media organisation where senior employees at its biggest-selling Sunday paper were convicted of criminal acts including phone-hacking and perverting the course of justice. Then imagine that the same organisation, having claimed a few years later to have cleaned up its act, is revealed to have its most high-profile TV station rife with claims of sexual harassment by its former chief executive and onscreen star, as well as allegations of widespread racial harassment – both the subject of legal action and US federal investigation.
Imagine also that the TV station was a byword for bias and slanted coverage and that as recently as May this year it falsely besmirched the name of a murdered Democratic staff member by claiming he, not the Russian government, had leaked thousands of emails from the Democratic party during the presidential campaign. Imagine that it had then withdrawn the story, but three months on taken no action against those responsible nor apologised to the dead man’s parents, who had publicly explained how the claims their son was a traitor had added to their grief. Imagine also that the media organisation was unique among commercial organisations in its combined power over newspapers, radio and TV in the UK.
In any fair and just world, the notion that this media organisation was fit and proper to be given greater power over the media landscape in the UK would be dead in the water. But, no doubt in part because the relevant media organisation is 21st Century Fox, run by the Murdochs, the idea that it should get 100% control of Sky is not yet dead.
Monopolistic tech giants are increasingly acquiring massive amounts of control over the manner in which the public is obtaining and communicating information.
“Every day I see people waking up to the power of Google, Facebook and Amazon. We have to do something as a people, we have to do something through our government and address the power of these companies. The number of congressmen and others making statements on Capitol Hill about this is growing very rapidly. The number of businesses who are saying that something must be done about the power of these companies and the way they use their power.”
A tweet suggesting that the devastation of Hurricane Harvey was "instant karma" for the red state of Texas has cost a University of Tampa professor his job — making him just the latest academic fired for off-duty speech.
The recent furor over a Google-funded think tank firing an anti-Google scholar has inspired Gizmodo journalist Kashmir Hill to tell a story about the time Google used its power to squash a story that was embarrassing to the company.
The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.
Hill thought that seemed like a big story, so she contacted Google's PR shop for confirmation. Google essentially confirmed the story, and so Hill ran with it under the headline: "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers."
Barry Lynn, the critic of monopolies fired this week from the New America Foundation, insisted in emails to his superiors that pressure from Google got him and his Open Markets program terminated. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the think tank’s CEO, has denied that Google played any role in Lynn’s termination from the think tank.
Last night, New America released three emails from Slaughter to Lynn. They reference two separate events: an anti-monopoly conference organized by the Open Markets program in June 2016 that featured Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as the keynote speaker, and a series of communications in June and July 2017, involving the termination of Lynn and his group.
The newfound free speech crusaders borne of the January, 2015 murders of 10 Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris sought to promulgate a new, and quite dangerous, standard. It was no longer enough to defend someone’s right to express their ideas while being free to condemn those ideas themselves: long the central tenet of the free speech movement (I defend their right to free speech even while finding them and their ideas repugnant). In the wake of the Hebdo killings, one had to go much further than that: it was a moral imperative to embrace and celebrate the ideas under attack and to glorify those who were expressing them, even to declare ourselves to be them (#JeSuisCharlie).
As a result, criticizing the content of Charlie Hebdo’s often-vile cartoons became virtually blasphemous. It became common to demand that one not only defend the right of the cartoonists to publish them but also, to show “solidarity,” one had to re-publish those cartoons no matter how much one objected to their content – thus adopting that speech as one’s own. Opposition to lavishing these cartoonists with honors and prizes was depicted as some sort of moral failure or at least insufficient commitment to free speech rights, as evidenced by the widespread, intense scorn heaped on the writers who spoke out in opposition to bestowing Charlie Hebdo with an award at a PEN America gala.
A dangerous conflation was thus imposed between the right to express Idea X and one’s opinion of Idea X. Of all the articles I’ve written in the last several years, perhaps the most polarizing and anger-generating were the ones I wrote in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings: one article which rejected the demand that one must celebrate and even re-publish Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons by criticizing those cartoons and illustrating the results of applying this new, dangerous standard (celebrate offensive and blasphemous cartoons by re-publishing them) universally; and then a series of articles defending the PEN America writers who objected to the Charlie Hebdo award on the ground that one could simultaneously defend free speech while refusing to praise, honor and glorify those whose speech rights were under attack.
his week, Amnesty International had its eyes on Cuba for two reasons. The first involved concern for Internet censorship on the island, and the second focused on the fate of graffiti artist Yulier Rodríguez Pérez, better known as Yulier P.
AI conducted an investigation using data from the Online Open Interference Observatory between May and June 2017, in which 1,458 websites were surveyed from eight locations in Havana, Santa Clara and Santiago de Cuba. The goal, officials said, was to “increase transparency and raise public debates about the legality and ethics of information control.”
After being finger printed and charged with sedition by Thailand's Police Technology Crime Suppression Division in early August, Pravit Rojanaphruk, a Thai journalist, stepped out of its Orwellian confines to make a dramatic point about censorship under military rule. He extended his arms and opened his ink-stained fingers for waiting photographers to snap. "This is the first time I was made to look like a criminal," he said.
Pravit was back with the police cyber sleuths on Aug. 18 to hear more charges stemming from a clutch of political comments, critical of the junta, posted on his Facebook page, which has 24,500 followers. But the 49-year-old columnist is defiant, despite the threat of a 14-year jail term for violating Article 116 of Thailand's criminal code, which covers sedition. "This is the price I have to pay for criticizing the junta," he said.
"One of the greatest strengths of the United States is a belief that speech, particularly political speech, is sacred," wrote Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in a 2013 blog post. Both then and now, the CDN and Web security company has protected websites from denial-of-service attacks that aim to drown out targets with fake traffic. Prince vowed that this service would be available to anyone who wanted it.
"There will be things on our network that make us uncomfortable," Prince wrote. But "we will continue to abide by the law, serve all customers, and hold consistently to a belief that our proper role is not that of Internet censor."
Radical amendments in favor of lowering the protection of our communications have been tabled on the draft ePRivacy Regulation, mainly by Members of European Parliament (MEPs) from the right wing. Today, La Quadrature du Net publishes its positions against such dangerous shifts.
The latest agency that audits state spying in the UK, the Investigatory Powers Commission (IPCO), formally started operating today.
IPCO is the latest incarnation of the public sector snooping regulator, the body previously having been called the Interception of Communications Commissioner’s Office (IOCCO).
In plain English, IPCO is supposed to ensure that UK state spying, covering everything from covert police operations to GCHQ's bulk cable-tapping and decryption exercises, is carried out in accordance with the UK's notably fast and loose laws on this sort of thing.
A new watchdog charged with regulating state surveillance has started work, with the aim of keeping in check the state’s ability to spy on its own citizens.
An expanded watchdog charged with regulating the intelligence services and surveillance by state agencies has officially begun work.
The role of the first investigatory powers commissioner, Lord Justice Fulford, combines the work of three former oversight bodies and will provide judicial checks on some investigations. His office, the IPCO, will employ about 70 staff, including 15 serving and retired judges.
Inspectors will check that the interception of phone calls, and the handling of agents, surveillance and powers permitting bulk collection of communications data are carried out within the law.
It marks the dawn of a new era of more rigorous oversight which is intended to keep the authorities' stronger investigatory powers in check.
Lord Justice Fulford has taken office as the first Investigatory Powers Commissioner (IPC), amalgamating the three watchdog roles which had previously overseen surveillance powers in the UK.
His role was created by the Investigatory Powers Act, also known by the epithet Snoopers' Charter, which became law at the end of last year.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU won a decision by the California Supreme Court that the license plate data of millions of law-abiding drivers, collected indiscriminately by police across the state, are not “investigative records” that law enforcement can keep secret.
California’s highest court ruled that the collection of license plate data isn’t targeted at any particular crime, so the records couldn’t be considered part of a police investigation.
Uncle Sam's intelligence agencies have embarked on the next stage of their plan to retain spying powers over US citizens: getting Donald Trump onboard.
Knowing what we do about Donald's approach to policy issues, it seems unlikely that the American president is aware of what is going on. But somehow he has been persuaded to revive a civil liberties oversight body that was torn apart for criticizing a controversial spying program that requires reauthorization by Congress at the end of the year.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has been dead for over a year. After it concluded that several of the NSA's spying programs were unconstitutional back in 2014, the intelligence services set about shutting it down. And they succeeded.
What if there were no prices on anything in your local supermarket, because everything in the entire selection was priced individually just for you, and the food prices would vary with your habits, the time of day, and hundreds of other factors? That time may not be as far off as most would expect.
In June, Twitter discontinued its support for Do Not Track (DNT), the privacy-protective browser signal it has honored since 2012. EFF argued that Twitter should reconsider this decision, but that call has gone unheeded. In response, EFF’s Privacy Badger has new features to mitigate user tracking both on twitter.com and when you encounter Twitter content and widgets elsewhere on the web. (More technical details are covered in the accompanying technical post.) How did we get here and what can we do about it?
We are deeply disappointed to learn that a powerful surveillance transparency reform bill in California has died in the Assembly Appropriations committee today. S.B. 21 sought to hold police departments accountable by giving the public a voice in how law enforcement acquires and deploys new surveillance systems. The bill would have required California sheriffs, district attorneys, and state law enforcement agencies to craft surveillance use policies and hold public meetings before they acquire or use new surveillance equipment and software, as well as to publish such policies online.
My view, then and now, is that the focus on symbols – mainly flags in 2015, now also statues — is misguided, but that, in matters such as these, since African Americans have the most at stake, they should call the shots.
The videos show how the beating unfolded, revealing its brutality and shocking speed from multiple perspectives.
On Aug. 12, white supremacists at the “Unite the Right” rally in downtown Charlottesville converged on counterprotesters outside the Market Street parking garage — a facility right next to the Charlottesville Police Department.
First, a white supremacist attempted to spear a counterprotester with the pole of a Confederate flag. Then, DeAndre Harris, a former special-education instructional assistant, swung a flashlight at the man, possibly striking him.
Donald Trump’s senior adviser, Steve Bannon, hastily left the White House a few days after the events in Virgina. By all accounts, he had planned to leave in the next few weeks. The Nazi rally in Charlottesville, greatly embarrassing for the Republican Party, hastened his departure. Bannon had come to Trump’s side a year ago from his perch at Breitbart News, a pillar of the Nazi-style American Right. He had shouted about the decline of white power and of the erosion of America’s role in the world. Bannon wanted Trump to withdraw from trade deals and to be more aggressive with U.S. military action abroad. Multilateralism and globalism remain the enemies for Bannon. His close association with the “alt-right”, the Nazi variant of the American Right, meant that Trump was being isolated increasingly from even moderate Republicans. Bannon had to go.
Earlier this week, we wrote about Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions bringing back the Defense Department's 1033 program, which helped militarize local police forces with surplus military equipment. We've been covering all sorts of problems with the 1033 program over the years, and people like Radley Balko have written entire books on the problem. And the previous ban on the 1033 only put a fairly narrow limit on the practice of militarizing police -- but now even those modest limits are gone.
What's truly incredible, however, is the complete nonsense being used to justify this. Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech about this on Monday, in which he trotted out his standard misleading and out-of-context stats, falsely claiming that there's some massive new crimewave across the country, when there's really just been a tiny bump after decades of decline in crime rates (the use of percentages by Sessions shows the he likely knows the absolute numbers are so meaningless that he has to mislead with percentages working off a small base).
18-year-old Amos Yee went up against the repressive Singaporean government with ideas and tactics he learned on YouTube. Then he fled to the US to seek asylum in the country that all but invented trolling. Now, he's stuck in an immigration detention center, in limbo. At a time when internet politics are global, which countries will defend the right to free speech?
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How Yee got here — and, indeed, why a citizen of a wealthy, sophisticated developed country would need to beg the US government for asylum at all — speaks to what happens when politics are global, but the right to express them is not. It’s a story about the regulation of the internet, and whether it’s reasonable for a government to grant its citizens the right to read and watch what they like online, but not express the views they form themselves. It’s about how a child’s blog can end up having lifelong repercussions; it’s about whether the Trump administration’s hard line on immigrants and refugees will extend to someone whom human rights groups around the world have described as a prisoner of conscience.
Nolan Cabrera, associate professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, has been involved from the beginning in resisting the controversial removal of ethnic studies from the Tucson Unified School District. I spoke to Cabrera on Aug. 26, after a U.S. District Court judge’s decision in favor of the restoration of the program.
Cabrera is a recipient of the prestigious education early-career award the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral fellowship and is a fellow for the American Association for Hispanics in Higher Education.
It was an evening in late July when an ICE guard told France Anwar Elias and several other Iraqi men in immigration custody in Arizona that they were going to be released. France described the feeling as, “going from death back again to life.” The men broke out in tears and embraced one another. Many of them had been in immigration custody for months, unsure of the future and frightened for what could happen if they were deported to Iraq, where they face near-certain persecution, torture, or death.
Hours later and only after the men shed their uniforms and changed into regular clothes, the guards broke the news that they were actually just being transferred to yet another immigration detention facility. Kamran Malik said that the news felt like “a knife through the heart.” He had already called his family to tell them that he was coming home, and they were waiting to celebrate.
A nurse was apparently dragged screaming from a hospital after she refused to let a police officer take a blood sample from a patient who was unconscious after a car crash.
In dramatic footage, Alex Wubbels can be seen being put in handcuffs, taken out of the facility and placed in a patrol car in the US while shrieking: "I did nothing wrong!"
Police officers reportedly insisted that the University of Utah nurse take the man's blood as he lay in a coma - or she would be arrested for impeding an investigation.
Ms Wubbels, who once competed as an Olympic skier, later released the video of her apparent arrest and the build up to it, in which she tells the officers they have no rights to the blood.
By all accounts, the head nurse at the University of Utah Hospital’s burn unit was professional and restrained when she told a Salt Lake City police detective he wasn’t allowed to draw blood from a badly injured patient.
The detective didn’t have a warrant, first off. And the patient wasn’t conscious, so he couldn’t give consent. Without that, the detective was barred from collecting blood samples — not just by hospital policy, but by basic constitutional law.
The mother of the five-year-old ‘Christian’ girl who complained her daughter had been placed with Muslim foster carers was herself born into the Islamic faith.
Court documents released on Wednesday show the girl’s maternal grandparents “are of a Muslim background but are non practising”.
Her mother had protested that her daughter is a Christian and should never have been placed with devout Muslim foster parents.
The dispute has caused a furore amid allegations the child’s foster carers had taken a necklace from her that contained a cross and refused to allow her to eat her favourite meal - spaghetti carbonara - because it contained pork products.
At a court hearing on Wednesday, a federal judge agreed to delay accused leaker Reality Winner’s trial until March. The delay will allow Winner’s lawyers and expert witnesses to acquire the required security clearances needed to access classified information that the government may use against her in court.
A potentially critical pre-trial battle, however, is brewing right now, according to court documents filed on Tuesday. Winner — the 25-year-old Air Force veteran and ex-NSA contractor indicted under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking a top-secret document — has accused the FBI of violating her Miranda rights. Winner’s lawyers are arguing that any alleged confession should be barred from a jury trial.
“Because Winner was not read her Miranda rights prior to law enforcement questioning,” Winner’s lawyers said in a memo supporting their motion, “any statements elicited by law enforcement from Winner during the encounter must be suppressed, as should any evidence obtained as a result of those statements.”
Reality Winner, the suspect in the National Security Agency leak investigation, is asking a judge to throw out the initial statements she made to FBI agents when she was arrested her at her Augusta home, arguing they didn’t advise her of her Miranda rights.
An organization led by former U.S. intelligence officials has selected legendary journalist Seymour Hersh to be the recipient of an annual award for integrity and truth-telling, named for the late CIA analyst Sam Adams.
David Clarke, the controversial outgoing sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, is expected to take a job in the Trump administration, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Clarke resigned as sheriff on Thursday. A regular presence on Fox News, Clarke has become a well-known figure in conservative circles in recent years. He is also an avowed supporter of President Donald Trump, and he spoke at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last year.
But why, at the 11th hour and well after other tech giants joined the fight, is Apple speaking up now? And why, for that matter, is it speaking up at all?
"We are talking about a very different type of social system that we live in. We’re talking about a corporatocracy." (Video, 7 mins)
"Today whether it is your smart television that you have in your home or whether it’s your smart phone you have or smart watch that you’re wearing or a smart teddy bear that your children are playing with or a smart pill that you swallow that sends information from within you. All these modern technologies work in the same way. They work by gathering data – information about us. And that’s an aspect that were not going to change, that’s a fact of life. The real question is who owns and controls these technologies, and the data and the insight that is being gathered about us?
Now if we can answer that question with ‘we do, as individuals’ there’s no problem here. We have individual sovereignty. We own and control them and we are getting smarter about ourselves. But if the answer is that corporations own and control these technologies and this data then they are getting smarter about us and by extension if this data is available to governments as we know that it is from the Snowden revelations then we are talking about a very different type of social system that we live in. We’re talking about a corporatocracy."
So we've noted time and time again how the vast majority of consumers support net neutrality, and the current rules on the books protecting it. Survey after survey (including several from the telecom industry itself) have found net neutrality has broad, bipartisan support. To try and undermine this reality, ISPs have spent more than a decade trying to frame the desire for a healthy, competitive internet -- free of entrenched gatekeeper control -- as a partisan debate. And they've largely been successful at it, sowing division and derailing discourse on a subject that, in reality, isn't all that controversial in the eyes of the Comcast-loathing public.
Comcast has sued the state of Vermont to try to avoid a requirement to build 550 miles of new cable lines.
Comcast's lawsuit against the Vermont Public Utility Commission (VPUC) was filed Monday in US District Court in Vermont and challenges several provisions in the cable company's new 11-year permit to offer services in the state. One of the conditions in the permit says that "Comcast shall construct no less than 550 miles of line extensions into un-cabled areas during the [11-year] term."
The lock provisions mean that only the company who sells the machines has access to the codes to repair them. Tampering with the digital locks is prohibited by intellectual property {sic} rules enshrined in trade agreements.
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"User rights and flexibility in the laws must be treated equally in the digital and analog world," Geist told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Estonian Council Presidency has doubts about introducing an extra copyright for news sites in the EU, but generally supports turning internet platforms into censorship machines to try to prevent copyright infringement, leaks reveal.
Techdirt has been covering the slow and painful attempts by the EU to make its copyright laws fit for the digital age for nearly four years now. Along the way, there have been some good ideas, and an astonishingly bad one that would require many online services to filter all uploads to their sites for potential copyright infringements. Despite the widespread condemnation of what is now Article 13 in the proposed Copyright Directive, an important new leak (pdf) published on the Statewatch site shows that EU politicians are still pushing to make the censorship filters mandatory.