Ever since Satya Nadella took the helm at Microsoft in 2014, his PR people have been grooming him to be an Inspiration Thought Leader, preaching Transformation to the TED Talk classes. This took another step with the global launch of his book Hit Refresh, a "masterpiece" of how to scale up the "growth mindset”. [must-read]
Whether this therapeutic Davos-speak is helpful to Microsoft or not remains to be seen - but some things at the company never change. Like answering big strategic questions, and the endless in-fighting that sees products snuffed out.
Munich's administration is investigating how long it would take and how much it would cost to build a Windows 10 client for use by the city's employees. Once this work is complete, the council will vote again in November on whether this Windows client should replace LiMux, a custom version of the Linux-based OS Ubuntu, across the authority from 2021.
The FSFE's Kirschner said that any switch to Exchange should not take place without the council's explicit approval.
Kirschner said that councillors had agreed in February to hold off on any actions to scale back the use of open-source software until the costs of doing so were known.
Something weird just happened. Linux – the sprightly insurgent of operating systems – just saw its market share double. According to NetMarketShare, its share of the desktop jumped from around 2.5 percent in July, to nearly 5 percent in September.
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That’s a significant bump, putting it within reach of MacOS, which purportedly dominates 6.29 percent of the market. But can it be believed?
Before we dive into the figures, it’s worth talking about NetMarketShare. This service is one of a handful (with rivals including StatCounter, Clicky, and W3Counter) that tries to make sense of the fractured computing landscape.
Its methodology is pretty straightforward. It looks at visitor records from literally tens of thousands of websites, recording hundreds of millions (if not billions) of page visits, in order to determine what operating system and browser people are using.
The latest figures from Netmarketshare suggest that open source operating system Linux has overtaken MacOS in usage for the first time - although the apparent surge has been questioned.
Open source operating system Linux has overtaken MacOS for the first time in terms of global marketshare of operating system.
The latest figures from netmarketshare.com show that the install-base for Linus Torvald's creation has leapt in popularity recently, being installed at the time of writing on 4.83 per cent of desktops globally.
This moves it ahead of Apple's Mac OS X 10.12, which stands at 3.8 per cent.
This is where we smell the rat as it represents a total 2.5 per cent swing away from Windows overall, consistent with everything that is Windows going down and everything else going up.
Every month Valve put out their hardware survey, inside it shows off the market-share of operating systems and Linux has continued to decline.
It has been some time since I have written about installing Linux on systems with UEFI firmware, and I have recently gotten several questions about how to do this. So I think this is a good time for a brief refresher on this topic.
In my opinion, the state of UEFI firmware configuration today is still pretty chaotic - as far as I can tell every OEM has their own peculiar way of handling UEFI configuration, and the differences between them are anything but trivial.
Neither does it appear to be Google's Chrome OS, which tends to be under-represented in NetMarketShare and StatCounter desktop operating system numbers, being counted as Linux. Mind you, that would be fair, since Chrome OS is based on Linux.
Microsoft has explained how a cascading series of cockups left some of its Northern European Azure customers without access to services for nearly seven hours.
On September 29, the sounds of "Sacré bleu!" "Scheisse!" and "What are the bastards up to now?" were, we're guessing, heard from Redmond's Euro clients after key systems went down between 1327 and 2015 UTC. Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Azure Backup, App Services and Web Apps, Azure Cache, Azure Monitor, Azure Functions, Time Series Insights, Stream Analytics, HDInsight, Data Factory and Azure Scheduler, and Azure Site Recovery were all titsup.
The problems started when one of Microsoft's data centers was carrying out routine maintenance on fire extinguishing systems, and the workmen accidentally set them off. This released fire suppression gas, and triggered a shutdown of the air con to avoid feeding oxygen to any flames and cut the risk of an inferno spreading via conduits. This lack of cooling, though, knackered nearby powered-up machines, bringing down a "storage scale unit."
The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project, which is focused on open source blockchain technology, divides its work into five sub projects. Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf said Hyperledger’s technical steering committee must approve each new sub project, and it’s looking for projects that “represent different thinking.”
The first five projects are: Fabric, Sawtooth, Indy, Burrow, and Iroha.
“Every one of these projects started life outside of Hyperledger, first, by a team that had certain use cases in mind,” said Behlendorf. Each project must bring something unique to the open source group, and its technology must be applicable to other companies.
New kernel patches have been posted for enabling Thunderbolt networking support.
Among the many features of Thunderbolt is the ability to support networking over the Thunderbolt cable. The Linux kernel, however, has yet to properly support this functionality. Mika Westerberg and others at Intel have been working to add this support.
As an effort to drive service provider and vendor collaboration around open networking, the Linux Foundation has launched its Open Source Networking Days (OSN) series of events.
Hosted and organized by local open source networking communities and The Linux Foundation, the event will feature vendors and projects including ONAP, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, DPDK, FD.io and PNDA.
Long-term-support (LTS) editions of the Linux Kernel will henceforth be supported for six years, up from the current two.
News of the extension emerged at the “Linaro Connect” conference at which Googler Ilyan Malchev announced it, saying he had Linux royalty Greg Kroah-Hartman's permission to break the news.
Malchev works on Google's Project Treble, an effort to ease the work required to upgrade devices to new versions of Android. Treble emerged in May 2017, when our own Andrew Orlowski opined that the project “gives Google greater control over pushing out Over The Air updates” rather than leaving them to handset-makers.
At Linaro Connect, a mobile Linux conference, Google senior staff engineer Iliyan Malchev announced that the Linux kernel team had agreed to extend Linux's Long Term Support from two to six years. This is an enormous deal for Android embedded Linux and Linux Internet of Things (IoT) developers.
Why? Malchev explained for Android programmers: "All Android devices out there [...] are based of the LTS kernel. The problem with LTS is it's only two years. And so, by the time the first devices on a SoC [System on a Chip] hit the market, you have maybe a year, if you're lucky, of LTS support. And, if you're not, it's over. Greg Kroah-Hartman [the Linux kernel maintainer for the Linux stable branch] has given me permission to announce he will extend LTS to six years, starting with kernel 4.4."
Mesa 17.2.2 is now available.
In this release we have:
In build and integration system, we add a dependency on libunwind when running make distcheck, as this is optional for libgallium but we want to catch any problem. As consequence, also force LLVM 3.3 in Travis when building Gallium ST Other, as this is the minimum required version we want to test. On the other hand, we link libmesautil into u_atomic_test, as this is required by platforms without particular atomic operations. In this sense, there's a patch to implement __sync_val_compare_and_swap_8, required by 32-bit PowerPC platforms. Finally, there is also a fix to build in armel devices.
As expected, Mesa 17.2.2 was released today by Igalia's Juan Suarez Romero.
As mentioned last week, the S3TC patent has now expired. With the S3 Texture Compression no longer encumbered by a patent, support for it is being added to mainline Mesa.
Rejoice as S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) support now resides within Mesa Git following its patent expiry on Monday.
It's not yet merged to mainline Mesa, but Eric Anholt of Broadcom has spent the past week wiring up more of the OpenGL functionality for the in-development VC5 driver stack for the next-generation Broadcom graphics hardware.
Last winter we covered work being done out of the Imperial College in London on the wild results when fuzzing OpenGL shaders in uncovering issues in multiple OpenGL drivers, including the Mesa drivers. The scholarly results were recently published of this testing within Automated Testing of Graphics Shader Compiler
AMD has announced the Embedded Radeon E9170 graphics processor, which is quite an interesting petite GPU.
The NVDLA hardware architecture is based upon their "Xavier" automotive processor. Their open-source support for NVDLA appears fairly complete with including Linux drivers, test suites and a simulator, and complete with the Verilog and RTL for this deep learning hardware architecture.
NVIDIA has launched their first beta driver in the 387 series for Linux.
The 387.12 beta Linux driver was just announced as their newest feature release. While ushering in a new driver series, this 387.12 release is mostly comprised of Vulkan updates and fixes.
My Nvidia GTX 460 v2 card just died after six years of service after attempting to restore it. It was the last known Nvidia card that could work out of box with open source driver.
For those wanting to see some fresh Linux CPU benchmarks with various AMD Ryzen and Intel Core processors, here are some benchmarks with Ubuntu 17.10 paired with its Linux 4.13 kernel build.
I've been working on some tests as part of a larger comparison for our upcoming Intel Coffeelake benchmarks. For those just wanting to see how various Intel/AMD CPUs are running on Ubuntu 17.10, here are those numbers. This is also with the latest BIOS on all of the motherboards, including the most updated AGESA code, for those interested in the evolving Ryzen performance.
More benchmarks and more CPU tests coming up shortly on Phoronix in our Coffeelake reviews, so just take this as a teaser or however you wish.
TimeShift is a system restore tool for Linux. It provides functionality that is quite similar to the System Restore feature in Windows or the Time Machine tool in MacOS. TimeShift protects your system by making incremental snapshots of the file system manually or at regular automated intervals.
PipeWire is a free and open source application created by Wim Taymans who works as the Principal Engineer at Red Hat and is the co-creator of the GStreamer multimedia framework.
It has been built from scratch with a particular focus on supporting Wayland and Flatpak in a bid to modernize audio and video processing. This includes support for single frame screenshots, screen capture, local desktop recording to video, and maybe even native casting of Wayland desktops to TVs and Monitors!
Community voting has opened in the LibreOffice mascot competition.
The contest launched back in June, with LibreOffice inviting the community to submit their designs for use a potential project.
Four months on and the contest now moves on to the next stage: shaving the slew of submissions down to a succinct shortlist of only the strongest entries.
Geary 0.12 has been released, the first major update of the app since 2016. It features, among other changes, improvements to the rich text composer.
Digium, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Asterisk open source PBX project, announced the release Asterisk 15 on Oct. 3, pushing the 13 year—old effort into the world of video conferencing.
Asterisk is well known as the standard in open source audio communications and features an expansive ecosystem and installed base. Asterisk 15 extends the power of Asterisk by adding enhanced multi-party video conferencing and collaboration capabilities. With Asterisk 15, business application developers can now create custom audio and video communication solutions within one platform, bridging the gap between modern web-based communications and legacy telephony solutions.
The Evergreen community is proud to announce the release of Evergreen 3.0.0, highly-scalable software for libraries that helps library patrons find library materials and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate those materials, no matter how large or complex the libraries.
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Evergreen 3.0.0 requires PostgreSQL 9.4 or later and OpenSRF 3.0.0 or later.
Evergreen 3.0.0 represents the culmination of a four-year project to create a web-based staff interface for Evergreen. It includes contributions from at least 45 individuals and 8 funding institutions across the globe.
GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is first and foremost, as its name suggests, a photo manipulation program; however, sometimes the lines blur between photo manipulation and airbrushing, material emulation, graphic design, and even layout. In other words, GIMP isn't just for photos.
Artists use and abuse GIMP for all kinds of visual work, and one of the things that makes that possible is its extensibility. You can add to GIMP through plugins, scripts, and brushes. To make it even easier, GIMP happens to accept both GIMP brush files and Adobe Photoshop brush files, so the available selection of brushes is staggering.
Mailspring is a free, open source desktop email client for Windows, Mac and Linux. It's a fork of Nylas Mail, but with a native core and better performance.
David Airlie has managed to squeeze a bit more performance out of Feral Interactive's Mad Max Vulkan port with one line of code change to RADV.
Silicon Zeroes [Steam, itch.io], a puzzle game where you end up building a CPU from developer PleasingFungus Games is out with Linux support. There's also a demo available, we can be found on the itch store page.
Divided We Fall [Steam, Official Site] is a close-combat multiplayer game about building a good squad and executing well thought-out tactics. It has Linux support and you can try it free for 2 days, although it didn't work for me.
The latest Linux patch for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III [Steam] is now out and it brings all the patches from the Windows version.
The latest expansion to the historical grand strategy game will be focused on the many interesting and prosperous nations of the Middle East.
This will be the developer, Game Of Edan's first game, so hopefully it goes well. It sounds like they're working on this by themselves as well, which is impressive.
In need of a new puzzle game? Operator Overload [Steam] might be the one to really make your brain sweat and it had same-day Linux support.
The game is due for release on November 10th and it will again have same-day Linux support.
It's no secret that I love classic gaming. It seems like every other month, I write about an emulation project or some online version of a 1980s classic. The system that defined my youth was the Nintendo Entertainment System, or the NES. Its chunky rectangle controller and two-button setup may seem simple today, but back then, it was revolutionary. My hands still even form to the awkward controllers automatically like they did back in middle school.
Railway Empire [Steam] is a new simulation game coming out next year from Gaming Minds Studios and Kalypso Media Digital. It will have Linux support and they've released a new video to show it off.
Gaming Minds Studios previously worked on titles like Grand Ages: Medieval, Patrician IV and a few more titles. What makes me a little wary is that none of the titles they've developed were well received. Hopefully this time will be different.
Crazy Justice [Official Site, Fig], a cel-shaded third-person shooter being developed with Unreal Engine plans to have Linux support, it looks damn good too!
I'm always on the look out for more good simulation games and Stable Orbit [Steam, Official Site] seems like it could be quite good.
That's right, even though we don't know what their last Linux port hint was about, Feral Interactive have begun teasing another new Linux port.
We are happy to announce the release of KDevelop 5.2 Beta! Tons of new stuff entered KDevelop 5.2, a bigger blog post show-casing all the features in 5.2 will follow when we release the final version. Here's a brief summary of what's new in this version...
Even with the introduction of new Linux desktop environments over the years, GNOME and KDE remain major players in the Linux desktop arena. Both desktops are mature, and come with a rock solid history of innovation and have legions of users.
In this article, I’ll compare GNOME and KDE’s stark differences. I’ll also explain the strengths and weaknesses between the two desktops as well.
A little over a month ago I asked KDE contributors to submit proposals for goals that KDE should focus on over the next 3 to 4 years. I am very happy with the proposals that were submitted from different parts of the community. A lot of work and thought went into them and they all would make great focus areas for KDE over the coming years.
It's been a long time! I have been very busy with my PhD but this particular semester I have more time to volunteer to KDE so I thought the fact that the Ohio Linux Fest was happening close to me was a good opportunity to do some KDE promo in USA.
I ended up being caught up in the middle of many deadlines just before the event, so I had very little time to prepare the promo material that I was going to show. I was somehow able to modify some Plasma artwork that was available for ISO sizes just in time for printing for the Ohio Linux Fest. I also borrowed a laptop with modest hardware, where I had Neon 5.10 running.
I’m very pleased with the results: An idle Plasma Desktop doesn’t wake up the CPU, which is something we worked on avoiding for years. Furthermore, idling, I get a battery drain rate of less than 4 watt, which is pretty exceptional. Bottom line: Our work hasn’t been in vain and shows that Plasma is pretty well optimized to get the most out of your battery. This is especially interesting for Plasma Mobile of course, but benefits laptop users as well. It’s a nice example how our work on convergence benefits all users. And polar bears.
The improvements covered a few months ago about better half-tiling support in GNOME have finally been queued.
For the imminent Mutter 3.26.1 point release and adjoining changes queued for the upcoming GTK+ 3.22.23 update, the "smarter" half-tiling improvements are present.
If you want to stretch your Linux desktop acumen from the Debian Linux lineage to Arch Linux, Archlabs might be a better choice than Parabola.
Arch Linux is something of a black sheep when it comes to installing and configuring a Linux distribution. It presents a few more stumbling blocks than other Linux options, which could make it a less welcome alternative to some users. Arch Linux distros are notorious for their intense installations and sometimes-challenging software management processes.
Distros based on Arch Linux usually are not good choices for newcomers to the Linux operating system. Users need a better handle on how Arch Linux works to use Arch-based distros successfully. Considerable background reading is necessary for things to make sense with minimal frustration.
I have offered that cautionary advice numerous times in reviews of less-well-known Linux products, and recent experiences prompted it once again. I discovered two seemingly worthy distros that provided an opportunity to revisit the trials and tribulations of working with Arch Linux derivatives.
feren OS, a Linux Mint-based distro, is one of the most beautiful options around for a distro hopper. feren OS ships with Cinnamon desktop environment, WPS productivity suite, and Vivaldi web browser. The developers of this operating system have just launched the new snapshot for 32-bit and 64-bit devices.
Version 17.09 of the NixOS Linux distribution built around the Nix package manager is out with a new release.
We announce the Final Beta release of forthcoming Q4OS Scorpion operating system, allowing anyone to see how it performs. A preliminary release date for the stable new Q4OS Scorpion version is scheduled to October 10, 2017, so if nothing exceptional will occur in the next few days, the new Q4OS Scorpion version will be released very soon.
Anybody is invited to install Q4OS Scorpion and report bugs and glitches for us to be able to make the final release as perfect as possible, you can download the final beta live CD's for x64 and i686-pae CPU architectures from the dedicated Testing releases page.
Earlier in the series, we discussed Red Hat’s (RHT) fiscal 2Q18 earnings and the likely impact of the dollar on its top-line growth. Red Hat provides the open-source-based Linux OS (operating system), which powers financial trading platforms, many corporate servers, and Google Android phones. Open-source software is gaining popularity, as it doesn’t tie users to particular vendors.
The open-source model promises innovation, cost savings, and competitiveness in the IT (information technology) space, as the below presentation by Rackspace shows. However, as everything is free in the open-source model, how do open-source companies like Red Hat generate revenues? The answer lies in support and technical services. As the majority of open-source companies don’t sell products, they make money by providing technical support and consulting services, as is the case with Red Hat.
Earlier in the series, we discussed how Red Hat (RHT) is poised to benefit from its dominance in Linux to push OpenStack. In the past, Red Hat partnered with Microsoft (MSFT) to distribute Linux OS for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
Earlier in the series, we discussed Red Hat’s (RHT) better-than-expected fiscal 2Q18 earnings as well as its role in the popularization and adoption of open source software. Leading enterprise software companies who were earlier wary of open source software have jumped on the bandwagon. For example, Microsoft (MSFT) is increasingly turning towards Linux and the open source software movement.
I’ve just wrapped up and I wanted to say thanks for the support throughout the process in having a nice place. Thanks to the staff of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru: Giohanny Mueck, Felipe Solari, Corrado Daly and Walter Segama. Congrats to the initiative of the Fedora Diversity team to foster more women involve in Linux. In addition, thanks to the help of Chhavi in the design and Bee for the help in planning the event. These were our FWD peruvian speakers:
Last week, Korora 26 was released. This is a Linux distribution based on Fedora 26, which was released back in July. That's the problem with using an operating system that is based on another operating system -- it can seem like you are never truly up to date. Case in point, today, Fedora 27 Beta sees release.
True, this is pre-release software, but recent Fedora Beta releases have been very stable, so it should be fine to run on a non-production machine. Just be aware that there can be bugs and the potential for data loss. If you are comfortable with using a beta operating system, you are in for quite the treat. Fans of Fedora can finally experience GNOME 3.26 -- the default desktop environment on version 27 of the distro. In addition, Fedora 27 Beta now supports TRIM on encrypted solid state disks.
After being delayed by two weeks due to bugs, the beta of Fedora 27 is shipping this morning.
Fedora 27 Beta ships with a variety of updates as outlined in this morning's Fedora 27 feature overview ranging from the latest GNOME components to plenty of "under the hood" work.
From the desk of Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller: The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 27 Beta, the next big step towards our exciting Fedora 27 release in November.
The Fedora Project just released the beta version of Fedora 27, including Fedora Workstation and Fedora Atomic Host. Since Fedora ships with three editions, you may be wondering: where’s Fedora 27 Server beta?
Joining the Fedora Project is one of the best choices I have ever made. I am glad I discovered the amazing world of free and open-source software. I am grateful for many opportunities provided. I am proud for my contributions to the project and the community.
The Fedora Project has an amazing community - its contributors, who connect from all parts of the globe, contribute their time, talent and skills for the benefit of millions of users worldwide.
Ansible packages are no longer shipped in EPEL-7 as they have been included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extras (and similarly in CentOS-7 and hopefully Scientific Linux 7.4).
With the upcoming release of Ubuntu 17.10, I was curious to see how its performance compares to that of the three-year-old Ubuntu 14.10. Here are some benchmark results showing how an Intel ultrabook/laptop performance has evolved on Linux during that time.
Ubuntu's wiki page this morning temporarily played host to a bit of info from religious group Computers4Christians, whose aim is to propagate the use of its operating system to spread the word of the Lord.
It is not known who is behind the hijack.
While many open-source advocates might appear to be on a mission from God already, these ones literally are. C4C's homepage hijack said the body's operating system "seeks to lead unbelievers to a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and nurture believers in discipleship".
We used this opportunity to talk about our next round of LTS releases, LXC 3.0, LXD 3.0 and LXCFS 3.0, all to be released early next year. What kind of breaking changes we may want to do at that time and how we expect support to work for them.
Do you have five, 10, or even 15-year-old consumer electronic devices that still work but are not connected to the internet and don't get software updates from the manufacturer? Should you just swap those tired, old devices for new Internet of Things-enabled versions—even though they still work? Of course not! The rise of the open source hardware movement and the availability of free and open source software allows us to bring new life into our retro electronic devices. With off-the-shelf components, we can reduce electronic waste and bring our old TV, stereo receiver system, or air conditioner into the IoT era.
Converting a Raspberry Pi into a smart remote control using the open source add-on board ANAVI Infrared pHAT and open source software is easy.
Axiomtek’s rugged “ICO300-83B” is a fanless DIN-rail PC with a Celeron N3350 SoC, 2x mini-PCIe, 4x USB 3.0, and up to 4x isolated RS-232/422/485 ports.
Axiomtek’s Intel Apollo Lake based ICO300-83B computer can be considered a more advanced version of its entry-level, Bay Trail Atom based ICO-300-MI, but it has more in common with the more advanced, Braswell based ICO310 design. Among other similarities, the ICO300-83B has the same compact, 155 x 110 x 48mm footprint as the ICO310, as well as up to 8GB DDR3L RAM, 2x GBE ports, and 4x USB 3.0 ports.
With its open source nature, Linux gives One Digital Media the ability to finely tune all aspects of their digital signage media players. We are able to remove all but the most important components, leaving a small secure footprint that is able to run on low-cost, low-powered hardware, yet still, deliver high-performance full HD video playback.
Axiomtek’s “Q7M311” Qseven module runs on Intel Apollo Lake SoCs, and offers 4K and dual displays, -20 to 70€°C support, plus PCIe, SATA, GbE, USB, and DP.
Axiomtek’s Q7M311 module joins a growing list of Intel Apollo Lake based computer-on-modules that comply with the 70 x 70mm Qseven form factor (see farther below). Like most of them, this is an extended temperature module, in this case providing -20 to 70€°C support. The COM runs Linux or Windows 10 on a dual-core, 1.1GHz/2.4GHz Celeron N3350 or quad-core, 1.1GHz/2.5GHz Pentium N4200, both with 6W TDPs.
SiFive has taped out and started licensing its U54-MC Coreplex, its first RISC-V IP designed to run Linux. The design lags the performance of a comparable ARM Cortex-A53 but shows progress creating a commercial market for the open-source instruction set architecture.
LEDE 17.01.3 is the newest release of the Linux Embedded Development Environment that is derived from OpenWRT and intended as a complete firmware replacement for various routers and other devices.
A refresh of Google's critically acclaimed Pixel smartphones is expected Wednesday when the company holds its annual product launch event at the SFJAZZ center in San Francisco.
Although their features won't be known officially until Google raises the curtain on the phones at the event, leaks -- including photos -- have given the public a good idea of what's to come.
Intrinsyc’s “Open-Q 660 HDK” dev kit runs Android 7 on the Snapdragon 660 with 64GB eMMC, and extensive wireless, camera, and sensor features.
Intrinsyc’s Open-Q 660 HDK development kit showcases Qualcomm’s new 14nm fabricated Snapdragon 660, the most powerful member of the Snapdragon 600 family. The 170 x 170mm Mini-ITX style kit costs $999 without options like a 5.7 inch smartphone display and 8- and 13-megapixel cameras. The open frame design offers plenty of I/O, but few real-world coastline ports.
Comcast’s involvement in open source was a gradual process that evolved over time. The company eventually created two open source program offices, one for the NBC business and another for the cable side of the business, which is the subject of this profile.
Concepts such as decentralizing strategy, delegating direction, and fierce transparency in communication are part of the backbone of successful open source projects. In my presentation at Open Source Summit EU in Prague, I will explore how these concepts are not only applicable to volunteer-run organizations but can also help growing corporations avoid some of the coordination overhead that often comes with growing teams and organizations.
We’ll look at some of the key aspects of how project members collaborate at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF). After that, we’ll take a closer look at German FinTech company Europace AG, which decided to move toward self-organization two years ago. We’ll highlight parallels between Europace AG’s organizing approaches and those of open source projects.
As the city was in the midst of various programmes to mark Gandhi Jayanti on Monday, the district resource centre of the Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) at Jagathy was engaged in an unrelated, yet purposeful, venture.
The office was buzzing with activity as many people turned up, armed with their laptops, to observe Software Freedom Day by resolving to switch over from proprietary software to free and open-source software (or FOSS). Officials of KITE (formerly IT@School project) also installed, free of cost, the GNU/Linux-based operating system Ubuntu, customised for the IT@School project, for those who attended the ‘free software install fest.’
Among those who participated in the programme were students, researchers and government officials, each curious in discovering opportunities that existed beyond the clutches of proprietary software.
Since 2009, I have transitioned from being the founder of the world's largest Hadoop user group in Japan to becoming the co-founder and CTO of a Treasure Data in the U.S. Along the way, I learned that other open-source champions – or really anyone – can build a successful tech company. Here's how I found success in my journey.
Oath, Inc., the Verizon subsidiary that's been the owner of record of Yahoo since June, has released some important Yahoo code as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The project, called Vespa, was originally based on code Yahoo inherited with its acquisition of AlltheWeb in 2003. The software is used across all Yahoo websites, including Flickr, for everything from handling search queries to serving ads.
"Over the last couple of years we have rewritten most of the engine from scratch to incorporate our experience onto a modern technology stack," Jon Bratseth, an architect with Vespa said in a blog post. "Vespa is larger in scope and lines of code than any open source project we've ever released. Now that this has been battle-proven on Yahoo's largest and most critical systems, we are pleased to release it to the world."
More vendors are releasing tools using Kubernetes to increase interoperability among solutions and make it easier to manage HIT multi-cloud environments.
The EFF is speaking out against abusive lawsuits from copyright holders that aim to expand copyright liability for neutral platforms, such as third-party Kodi add-on distributors. The digital rights group calls out two recent lawsuits against TVAddons where the operator of the service is being held accountable for offering downloads of open source add-ons.
THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION (EFF) is concerned about legal activity around piracy-enabled Kodi boxes and wants to know where the line is being drawn between companies that sell innocent platforms, the vagabonds that install add-ons onto them and the people who share pirated material.
Last week in the UK a man plead guilty to selling piracy-able boxes, but he wasn't happy about being singled out.
"These boxes are available from all over the place, not just me, but it's the downloading of software to watch channels that is apparently causing the problem," he said at the time.
The Joint Research Centre (JRC) has released the software of its SUMO maritime surveillance tool, which is helping to protect our oceans by detecting ships engaged in illicit activities.
SUMO (Search for Unidentified Marine Objects) automatically scans large numbers of satellite images for the presence of ships. The results can be cross-checked with other maritime data to identify suspicious vessels.
Oath Inc., the Verizon company that has owned Yahoo since June, announced that Vespa is now available as open source on GitHub. According to a company blog post, making the big data processing and serving engine open source is a step further in Oath’s commitment to opening up its big data infrastructure to developers.
Take note, indie game developers: We're less than a week away from the start of the first-ever Open Jam, a 72-hour game jam dedicated to promoting open source games and game development tools. We'll reveal the theme on our jam page this Friday morning, October 6, at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time (4:01 a.m. UTC).
A three-day games jam with an emphasis on using open source game development tools and a requirement to open source the resulting games starts on October 6th.
Two weeks ago, member of the Docker team and Open Source community were in Los Angeles for a Moby Project Summit alongside Open Source Summit North America (previously known as LinuxCon). This was the 3rd Moby Summit edition since Solomon Hykes introduced the Moby Project: a new open-source project to advance the software containerization movement at DockerCon 2017 in Austin.
This summit is for container users who are actively maintaining, contributing or generally involved in the design and development of the Moby Project and it’s components: runC, containerd, LinuxKit, Infrakit, SwarmKit, HyperKit, DataKit, VPNKit, Notary, libnetwork, etc.
At last, the GHM 2017 video recordings are now online, along with presentation slides and abstracts.
At Mozilla we were born out of, and remain a part of, the open source and free software movement. Through the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program, we recognize, celebrate, and support open source projects that contribute to our work and to the health of the Internet.
Our major initiative in the past few months has been the launch of “Global Mission Partners: India”, a pilot scheme to bring the Mission Partners track of MOSS to particular regions of the globe which have strong open source communities. The initial application period has just closed, and our India committee will shortly begin the work of assessing the over a dozen applications we have received.
Mozilla has announced the latest recipients of its Open Source Support grants, totaling $539,000. The web tech company regularly helps out smaller projects, and this round in particular favored ones aimed at safety and security.
Then I presented Hadoop as one solution to handle BigData.
We look at how to deploy OpenStack on hyper-converged infrastructure and how HCI suppliers’ products can support deployment of the open-source cloud in the datacentre
Java EE 8 arrived last month rather later than expected – but it landed in time for Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne, which are taking place this week in San Francisco, California.
Enterprise-flavored Java hasn't seen an update since June 2013. Linda DeMichiel, Java EE 8 specification lead at Oracle, recounted the long road to delivering the update in a session on Monday at the JavaOne conference.
"Java 8 is the next and probably last step in the Java EE brand for the enterprise platform here at Oracle," said DeMichiel, in reference to Oracle's plan to turn Java EE 8 over to the Eclipse Foundation.
Bob Quillin sold his company StackEngine to Oracle in December 2015 and has been at Oracle ever since, helping to mature Oracle's container strategy. StackEngine was a container management startup that was building technology to enable container operations for enterprise-grade requirements.
Buys Cloud Native Computing Foundation board seat; gets praise from Linux Foundation director
The talk will focus on two similar solutions implemented in Linux and OpenBSD kernels, designed to prevent a program from calling syscalls they should not call to improve security of software.
In both kernels (Linux and OpenBSD), unwanted syscalls can be blocked and the offending program terminated, but there are some differences between Linux and OpenBSD’s solution of the problem.
During my talk, I will analyze the differences between two similar techniques that are present in Linux and OpenBSD kernels that are used to mitigate security bugs (that could be used to attack software and escalate privileges on a machine).
The latest release in the FreeBSD 10 series is now available with some work backported from FreeBSD 11 and other improvements/fixes.
FreeBSD 10.4 happens to be the operating system's first release with full support for eMMC storage. FreeBSD 10.4 also has improvements to its AES-NI driver, better Intel Kabylake device support, em networking driver improvements, various Wake-On-LAN (WoL) improvements to different drivers, updated firmware/microcode files, and more.
FreeBSD 12.0 will have initial support for ZFS Channel Programs (ZCP) for running administrative tasks on the file-system via Lua.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce availability of FreeBSD 10.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/10 branch, building upon the stability and reliability of 10.3-RELEASE and introducing new features.
OpenSSH 7.6 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.
I did an interview with the Software Freedom Conservancy to discuss why I try to contribute to the Conservancy whenever I can. Because I believe many more free software communities deserve to have a home for their project at the Conservancy.
Please support the Software Freedom Conservancy by donating so they will be able to provide a home to many more communities. A donation of 10 US dollars a month will make you an official sponsor. Or donate directly to one of their many member projects.
Even though Oracle is based in the heart of Silicon Valley (I can see its offices from my own office window as I type this), the company has become sort of anti-Silicon Valley. It tends to represent the opposite of nearly everything that is accepted wisdom around here. And its latest crusade is against open source technology being used by the federal government -- and against the government hiring people out of Silicon Valley to help create more modern systems. Instead, Oracle would apparently prefer the government just give it lots of money.
First, some background: over the past few years, one of the most positive things involving the federal government and technology has been the success of two similar (but also very different) organizations in the US government: US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F. If you're completely unfamiliar with them there are plenty of articles describing both projects, but this one is a good overview. But the really short version is that both projects were an attempt to convince internet savvy engineers to help out in the federal government, and to bring a better understanding of modern technology into government. And it's been a huge success in a variety of ways -- such as creating federal government websites that are modern, secure and actually work. And even though both programs are associated with President Obama, the Trump administration has been adamant that it supports both organizations as well, and they're important to continuing to modernize the federal government. The offices are not politicized, and they have been some of the best proof we've got that government done right involves smart, dedicated technologists.
The graphics chipmaker, which was known for most of its existence as a maker of video cards for PC gaming, suddenly finds itself at the center of multiple technological revolutions, including self-driving cars, AI, VR, the internet of things, and more.
NeuBtracker* is equipped with two cameras: One tracks the unrestrained behavior of the zebrafish larva while the other automatically remains pointed at the transparent head, and consequently the brain, to record fluorescence images. "This approach makes it possible to observe neuronal activity during unrestrained behavior. We can test the larvae in different environmental conditions and can immediately analyze the effects," says Prof. Dr. Gil Westmeyer from the Institutes of Biological and Medical Imaging (IBMI) and Developmental Genetics (IDG) at the Helmholtz Zentrum München as well as the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Munich School of Bioengineering (MSB) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
[...]
The new instrument is a so-called open-source microscope.
The latest work hitting LLVM 6.0 is support for the Myriad ma2x8x class of processors and some other missing Myriad CPUs.
For one, Oracle is making the Java EE technology compatibility kits (TCK), which ascertain if an implementation is compliant with Java, available via open source. Eclipse Executive Director Milinkovich called this “a very fundamental change to the dynamics of this ecosystem.”
The Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) version 9 is now generally available bringing with it a number of new features to help make Java more modular and efficient. At the JavaOne conference in San Francisco on Oct. 2, Mark Reinhold Chief Architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle outlined some of the new Java 9 enhancements and provided insight on what's next.
"Java 9 is here," Reinhold said. "That means that Jigsaw is here."
Project Jigsaw is an effort that Oracle has been talking about since September 2010, just after the company completed its' acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Jigsaw is an effort to turn Java into a more modular stack, including a module subsystem to help make the programming language more efficient.
For programmers and software developers, the Internet forums provide a great place to exchange knowledge and seek answers to concrete coding conundrums. Alas, they are not always the source of accurate information.
Google News took the unusual step of confirming its use of the imageboard site 4chan as a news source on Monday. The admission followed Google News' propagation of an incorrect name as a potential shooter in the tragic Las Vegas shooting on Sunday night.
A reporter from tech-news site The Outline posted the full text of an e-mail he received from an unnamed Google representative. Reporter William Turton said that he had not discussed any "attribution terms" before receiving Google's e-mail, which confirmed that the Google News service was bombed into automatically reposting a false shooter's name.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched a small metal sphere into low Earth orbit. Equipped with four external radio antennas, Sputnik 1 not only revolutionised telecommunications, but helped to kick-start the space race. We take a look at local reactions to the news.
From almost the moment their discovery was announced, everyone agreed that the first sighting of gravitational waves was going to win a Nobel Prize. The only questions were when and who would receive the honor. Both of those questions have now been answered. When is now, and who turned out to be three individuals who contributed to the project in very different ways.
Today, the Nobel Prize committee has honored three US biologists for their role in unravelling one of biology's earliest mysteries: how organisms tell time. Microbes, plants, and animals all run on a 24-hour cycle, one that's flexible enough to gradually reset itself, although it can take a few days after transcontinental travel. The biological systems responsible for maintaining this circadian clock require a lot of proteins that undergo complex interactions, and the new laureates are being honored for their use of genetics to start unraveling this complexity.
iPhone 8 and 8 Plus models haven't been available long, but a couple of users have reportedly experienced major problems. According to a 9to5Mac report, a Taiwanese iPhone 8 Plus owner claims her device split open while charging, and a Japanese owner of an iPhone 8 Plus claims the handset arrived already cracked open. The tech outlet ifeng includes images of the Taiwanese owner's device in its report.
An audit released late last week by the New York state comptroller’s office found the state’s Education Department, which regulates nursing, failed to investigate top-priority complaints against nurses in the time allowed by law.
It also found nurses’ backgrounds were not adequately checked and that they were not properly monitored for criminal behavior after licensure.
All of these findings confirm those in a ProPublica investigation into New York’s nursing regulations published in April of 2016.
[...]
The recommendations include streamlining and more closely tracking investigations, strengthening controls over “moral character” requirements for nurses and researching the best practices of other states.
The Universities Allied for Essential medicines (UAEM) evaluated 15 Canadian research-intensive universities on their contributions to biomedical research on neglected health needs, access to medicines, and education concerning access and innovation issues. The results show that for a number of those universities, this contribution is sub-optimal.
Opioids now kill over 100 Americans every day. In a single year, opioids kill more Americans than died in the entire Vietnam and Iraq Wars. And while the underground drug trade is fueling this epidemic of medicalized self-destruction, the flow of black-market opioids is inseparable from its above-ground counterpart—the pharmaceutical companies that peddle the legal and FDA-approved pain killers like OxyContin and Vicodin. And now workers on the front lines of this crisis are challenging the nation’s biggest pushers to stop pumping deadly drugs into their neighborhoods.
The World Health Organization today announced the new leadership team for the UN agency, with a range of geographic representation and a majority of women in the top posts.
Three members of Congress are demanding answers after a St. Louis scholar's new book revealed details of how the U.S. government sprayed, injected and fed radiation and other dangerous materials to countless people in secret Cold War-era testing.
The health ramifications of the tests are unknown. Lisa Martino-Taylor, an associate professor of sociology at St. Louis who wrote "Behind the Fog: How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans," acknowledged that tracing diseases like cancer to specific causes is difficult.
But three congressmen who represent areas where testing occurred — Democrats William Lacy Clay of Missouri, Brad Sherman of California and Jim Cooper of Tennessee — said they were outraged by the revelations.
Innovation is vital for the development of medicines, but innovation without proper access to them is pointless, Roberto Azevêdo, Director-General of World Trade Organization has said. Several other agency heads spoke at the same event, where World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed the importance of universal health coverage.
The Intercept's Sharon Lerner is the best journalist on Trumpian science appointees going, and her piece on Michael Dourson, whom Trump wants confirmed as the EPA's second most powerful executive as Director of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is a scorcher.
Even by Trumpian standards, Dourson is a piece of shit work. He currently runs the high-profile greenwashing consultancy Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA) whose clients are a rogue's gallery of the country's most lethal polluters: Dow Chemical, CropLife America, the American Chemistry Council, the American Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries and more.
TERA's stock in trade is manufactured sciencey numbers showing that pollution isn't harmful. In that regard, TERA excels, routinely asserting the harmlessness of industrial waste products that every independent researcher considers dangerous and/or deadly.
Last week, attorney William Wehrum appeared before a federal court to argue against new standards meant to protect workers from airborne silica dust, which is so fine that particles can penetrate deep into the lungs and cause health problems, such as fatal lung disease and cancer.
This week, Wehrum will appear before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee because President Trump has nominated him to head the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) clean air program, where he worked under the Bush administration a decade ago.
The new silica rules cut the amount of cancerous dust allowed in the air at industrial facilities in half. Trade unions say standards should be even lower, and labor leaders lashed out at the Trump administration for putting workers' lives on the line when officials delayed implementation of the rules earlier this year.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is fuming over Philip Morris International's (PMI) efforts to go smokeless—and the second-hand moves it's using to do it.
As cigarette sales decline worldwide, the tobacco giant is scrambling to restructure and embrace potentially more profitable “smoke-free” products. The revamp involves setting up an $80 million foundation called the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. In the next 12 years, the foundation aims to rope in health and government organizations and “advance smoking cessation and harm-reduction science and technology.”
Our team has previously posted about DNS vulnerabilities and exploits. Lately, we’ve been busy reviewing the security of another DNS software package: Dnsmasq. We are writing this to disclose the issues we found and to publicize the patches in an effort to increase their uptake.
Dnsmasq provides functionality for serving DNS, DHCP, router advertisements and network boot. This software is commonly installed in systems as varied as desktop Linux distributions (like Ubuntu), home routers, and IoT devices. Dnsmasq is widely used both on the open internet and internally in private networks.
Sometimes old fixed bugs come back to bite us. That's the case with CVE-2017-1000253, a Local Privilege Escalation Linux kernel bug.
As the US reportedly conducts a denial-of-service attack against North Korea's access to the Internet, the regime of Kim Jong Un has gained another connection to help a select few North Koreans stay connected to the wider world—thanks to a Russian telecommunications provider. Despite UN sanctions and US unilateral moves to punish companies that do business with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, 38 North's Martyn Williams reports that Russian telecommunications provider TransTelekom (âÃâ¬Ã°Ã½ÃÂâõûõÚþÃÂm) began routing North Korean Internet traffic at 5:30pm Pyongyang time on Sunday.
Credit reporting agency Equifax announced on Oct. 2, that the forensic investigation of its data breach has revealed that an additional 2.5 million Americans were impacted.
Equifax first publicly announced on Sept. 7 that it was the victim of a data breach that exposed personally identifiable information on 143 million Americans. After a forensic investigation completed by security firm FireEye's Mandiant division, the number has now grown to 145.5 million.
A multi-year effort to update the internet's overall security has been put on hold just days before it was due to be introduced, over fears that as many as 60 million people could be forced offline.
DNS overseer ICANN announced on Thursday it had postponed the rollout of a new root zone "key signing key" (KSK) used to secure the internet's foundational servers after it received fresh information that indicated its deployment would be more problematic than expected.
[...]
No matter what the reason, it is an indication of how incredibly difficult it is to update the internet on a network-wide basis. Just look at IPv6.
Google researchers have discovered seven serious vulnerabilities in Dnsmasq, a lightweight, widely used DNS forwarder and DHCP server for small computer networks.
Technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) have allowed an increasing number of devices to be controlled by mobile devices. But as Ars has reported in the past, BLE devices also can be a privacy and security risk. And as Alex Lomas of Pentest Partners found recently, some of these vulnerable devices are of a very personal nature. Lomas discovered that he could relatively easily search for and hijack BLE-enabled sex toys—a pursuit he named "screwdriving" (after the Wi-Fi network finding practice of "wardriving").
Just because your resume says you exposed the personal data, including Social Security numbers, of some 143 million Americans while practicing unsafe security, it doesn't mean you can't score a multi-million dollar contract with the Internal Revenue Service. That's the case even if your name is Equifax and you're being contracted by the IRS to "verify taxpayer identity" to combat fraud.
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) decision to bar federal agencies and departments from using Kaspersky Lab software was primarily based on open-source information, a department official said Tuesday.
The revelation, contained in an updated page about the 2013 hack, is the result of new information and the forensic analysis of an unnamed security consultant. Previously, Yahoo officials said about one billion accounts were compromised. With Yahoo maintaining roughly three billion accounts at the time, the 2013 hack would be among the biggest ever reported.
"We recently obtained additional information and, after analyzing it with the assistance of outside forensic experts, we have identified additional user accounts that were affected," Yahoo officials wrote in the update. "Based on an analysis of the information with the assistance of outside forensic experts, Yahoo has determined that all accounts that existed at the time of the August 2013 theft were likely affected."
The company, which along with AOL is now part of a Verizon subsidiary called Oath, disclosed Tuesday that a 2013 hack had potentially stolen the information of all of its 3 billion users at the time — or triple the number of vulnerable users it had earlier reported.
Just over a year ago, Yahoo admitted that it had been hacked in 2013, and estimated that 500 million accounts had been compromised (the company blamed state-sponsored actors, and federal prosecutors have indicted two Russian spies for ordering the operation). Now the company has admitted that all three billion of its accounts were affected.
Yahoo on Tuesday said that all 3 billion of its accounts were hacked in a 2013 data theft, tripling its earlier estimate of the size of the largest breach in history, in a disclosure that attorneys said sharply increased the legal exposure of its new owner, Verizon Communications.
Lomas demonstrated the attack by wandering the streets of Berlin, compromising Lovesense Hush buttplugs. He also demonstrated that he could attack and compromise his father's BLE-enabled hearing aid, controlling what sound was played, allowing him to put voices in his father's head, or selectively alter his hearing.
It’s hopefully well known by now that Bluetooth’s baby brother, BLE, isn’t exactly stellar when it comes to security. What you save in battery life and complexity comes at the price of easy discoverability and exploitability. Whilst BLE does have support for security, it is rarely implemented. When it is implemented it’s often done poorly.
Banks and other financial institutions, including PayPal and Ebay, have been targeted frequently by crooks, as has the government’s tax collection agency HMRC - which often appears to be the source of emails promising lucrative tax rebates.
But the government’s National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of GCHQ, has said that fewer than five per cent of other public sector organisations have taken sufficient steps to prevent similar attacks, by using the validation protocol known as DMARC.
In the wake of the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, authorities remain reluctant to call shooter Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old real estate developer from Nevada, a terrorist. Shortly after 10 p.m. on Oct. 1, Paddock opened fire from his 32nd floor hotel room at Mandalay Bay and Casino in Las Vegas, killing 59 and wounding over 500 of the 22,000 gathered for the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival happening across the street.
Police blew open Paddock’s hotel room door to find him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, as well as at least 10 suitcases filled with 23 rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammo. A subsequent search of his home 80 miles away in Mesquite, Nev., turned up 19 more guns, but no motive. ISIS claimed credit for the attack, but investigators have found no evidence connecting the two.
For all their faults, corporate media, by and large, do not usually report the unverified claims of random trolls—unless those trolls happen to be ISIS, or ISIS-linked media.
In the emotionally and politically charged hours after terror attacks or other mass violence, when demagogues both in US right-wing media and within ISIS itself seek to blame Muslims to promote their shared “clash of civilizations” narrative, the media seem more than willing to play along and spread the specter of ISIS responsibility without any objective basis.
Comparing testimony from Vietnamese women and American soldiers, Gina Marie Weaver, in her book Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in The Vietnam War, finds that rape of Vietnamese women by American troops during the US invasion of Vietnam was a “widespread”, “everyday occurrence” that was essentially “condoned”, even encouraged, by the military, and had its foundation in military training and US culture. She explores why US rape in Vietnam was so common, and why this aspect of US behavior has been virtually “erased” from “narratives of the war”. She stresses the issue is also important as rape in the US military continues at a high level today, having been mostly transferred away from foreign populations and onto female American soldiers.
There have been 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days in the United States. You’ll note you don’t hear about mass shootings in Australia, Japan or for the most part the United Kingdom, or other civilized countries whose politicians have not been bought by 10 major gun manufacturers.
The United States continues to be peculiar in handing out powerful magazine-fed firearms to almost anyone who wants one and not requiring background checks on private purchases even if these are made at gun shows or by persons with a history of mental illness. 80% of civilian-owned firearms world-wide are in the US, and only Yemen vaguely competes with us for rates of firearm ownership; Yemen is a violent mess with Shiite insurgencies, al-Qaeda taking over cities from time to time, tribal feuding, southern separatism and US drone strikes. And even it has fewer guns per person than the USA.
Wake up, America.
We are not the land of the brave or the home of the free.
We are the land of the gun and the home of the free market.
Stephen Paddock’s killing spree last night in Las Vegas will not change anything – except the bottom line for numerous gun manufacturers.
Ca-ching, people!
Scores of American companies are going to clean up over this!
Sunday night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas killed 59 and left more than 500 wounded. In previous weeks, American citizens have faced loss of life and massive property damage in Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas, and the U.S. Virgin Islands from Hurricanes Maria, Irma and Harvey.
Of course, other places in the Caribbean suffered their own devastating blows from these major hurricanes: Cuba, Barbuda, Dominica, Antigua, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, British Virgin Island, St. Martin, Monserrat, Guadaloupe, St. Kitts and Nevis.
But this Category 4 hurricane was but a prelude for what was to come in September. Five hurricanes—Irma, Jose, Katia, Lee, and Maria—would form. Four would become major hurricanes. Two of the storms, Irma and Maria, would reach Category 5 status and bring widespread devastation, especially in the Caribbean islands, and to a lesser extent in the mainland United States.
Puerto Rico is devastated. Two hurricanes plunged the island into darkness and despair. Crops perish in the fields. The landscape of ruined buildings and towns resemble Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped on it. Over three million people are desperate for food, water, electricity and shelter.
After a slow start, the Trump Administration is now speeding up the flow of supplies to the island. A top US general has been given command of the relief efforts. And, like so many others, Yarimar Bonilla watches with a broken heart as her native Puerto Rico struggles. This noted social anthropologist—a scholar on Caribbean societies—says the hurricanes have made an already bad fiscal and economic crisis worse, and she sees darker times ahead unless major changes are made in the structure of power and in Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States.
Last night on NBC, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz made a spontaneous statement expressing her frustration with insufficient relief efforts that went viral. Before you read my interview with Yarimar Bonilla please take two minutes to watch this video. You will understand even more clearly Ms. Bonilla's explainer of what is happening in Puerto Rico.
At $50 a barrel, the low price of crude oil has slowed some of the oil production in the US, especially in regions that are costly to develop, like the Arctic. But US oil producers aren't bearing the whole brunt of low prices, because federal and state governments provide tax breaks that stimulate oil production despite low prices.
The tax situation isn’t unique to the US—China, the EU, and India also offer a variety of flavors of tax breaks to fossil fuel producers, despite their recognition of the need to address climate change. Although the US has signaled its intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, tax breaks that fund more fossil fuel production don't help the rest of the globe to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
Environment secretary Michael Gove yesterday told Conservative Party conference that an ‘exit from Brexit’ is not an option.
The ‘there is no alternative’ line is no great surprise. The appointment of Michael Gove as Environment Secretary, with his long history of involvement with American and UK neoliberal think tanks, has heightened concerns that Brexit is a ‘shock doctrine’ event.
Gove’s renewed claims yesterday that we can have a ‘green Brexit’ also stretch credulity.
According to our analysis, removing, attacking and undermining environmental and labour rights regulations was a likely motive for many of those at the heart of the Leave campaign. A motive hidden in plain sight but rarely reported.
In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included emails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers.
Hurtling towards a “hard Brexit,” Britain is likely to leave the European Union in March 2019 without tariff-free access to the bloc’s single market. And it looks like the UK is going to lose a lot if that happens, according to a study by global law firm Baker McKenzie and economic consultancy Oxford Economics.
We know the New York Times has to lower its standards for conservative columnists; otherwise, they would never have any on their opinion pages. But they might have gone too far with Bret Stephens. The guy apparently knows literally nothing about the economy, and is so ignorant he doesn’t even know how little he knows.
In his latest column, he touts the good economic news under Donald Trump: “The Dow keeps hitting record highs, and the economy is finally growing above the 3 percent mark.”
If someone in your home state contracts hepatitis A, a dangerous disease that attacks the liver, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention needs to know about it. Health departments in neighboring states probably need to know about it, too, since the person may have contracted the virus from contaminated food or water in one of those states. The CDC, state and local health departments, and other organizations must routinely share public health data like this so they can control the spread of a range of infectious diseases. As straightforward as this may sound, though, it’s a massively complicated data-management challenge.
So it’s noteworthy that in analyzing this remark about the boss, the Post‘s Nicole Lewis doesn’t say that Sanders is wrong, exactly. Instead, she says that “he has made a habit of relying on simplified statistics that are provocative but do little to illuminate the complexities of the US economic system.” Or as she says of a similar statement Sanders made about US (not global) wealth, “While technically correct, the condensed soundbite lacked nuance about wealth accumulation and debt in the United States.”
If you’re going to be badmouthing the owner of the Washington Post, in other words, you better have plenty of nuance and illuminate those complexities.
For years, the identity of the owner of one of the largest holdings of Puerto Rican debts has been a mystery.
That mystery has finally been solved, with the help of the The Baupost Group, who unmasked themselves to The Intercept. The Baupost Group, a Boston-based hedge fund managed by billionaire Seth Klarman, owns nearly a billion dollars of Puerto Rican debt, purchased under a shell company subsidiary and hidden from public scrutiny. Baupost acquired the debt through an on-paper Delaware-based corporation named Decagon Holdings LLC, whose beneficial owner had been unknown until now.
Over tweets this weekend, President Trump confirmed that his administration’s underwhelming response to Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico is a symptom of these American citizens’ second-class status. Trump resorted to the racial stereotype that people of color “want everything to be done for them.” But this statement couldn’t be further from the truth. Boricuas on the island and the mainland have rallied to help each other in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
My family and friends are giving back since they were one of the few lucky ones. They’re all safe. My parent’s house flooded, but there was no structural or heavy damage. They have enough food and power — for now — thanks to a generator (until the gas runs out).
President Trump arrived in Puerto Rico on Tuesday and immediately began lauding himself and his administration for their response to Hurricane Maria. But mixed in with the self-congratulation were several references to how much relief efforts were costing.
“Our country has really gone all out,” Trump said. “It’s not only dangerous, it’s expensive. But I consider it a great honor.”
Trump then explained that Director of the Office of Management and Budget “Mick Mulvaney is here, and Mick is in charge of a thing called budget. I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you are throwing our budget out of whack. We spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and that’s fine. We saved a lot of lives.”
Beyond the gross inappropriateness of “joking” about the money the U.S. government is spending even as American citizens continue to die in Puerto Rico, Trump’s attitude is incredibly bad economics. Moreover, his administration, Mulvaney definitely included, knows this.
Two days ago, eleven days into the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, a typically divisive tweet from Donald Trump struck a very sensitive cultural and political chord when, in response to the Mayor of San Juan’s plea for help, he said that islanders “want everything to be done for them [by the US] when it should be a community effort”. As we have come to expect, his words, which followed Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke’s injurious claim that this was “a good news story” because of a low number of reported deaths (so far), reproduced and inflamed historically racist tropes that have devalued Puerto Rican lives as second-class, undeserving, geopolitical waste.
How can you ever possibly excuse violence against people peacefully and non-violently doing whatever they're doing. Sure this referendum was considered illegal (and it may be legitimate to ignore the result, or legal prosecution of the initiators) but how can that ever possibly be an excuse for half a population peacefully doing whatever they are about to do?
Rex Tillerson wanted to quit as Secretary of State and openly called Trump a moron at a high-level meeting where the president was not in attendance. He was talked into staying on, according to reports, by other cabinet members including Vice President Mike Pence.
Much of this is being carried out stealthily, in closed sessions, with as little public notice as possible.
Due to social media, the mainstream media can no longer hide what happens. But they can attempt to frame our perceptions of it. What happened yesterday in Catalonia is that paramilitary forces attacked voters who were trying to vote. The mainstream media has universally decided to call the voters “protestors” rather than voters. So next time you go to your polling station, apparently what you are doing is protesting. This kind of distortion through misuse of language is absolutely deliberate by professional mainstream journalists. In a situation where thousands of peaceful voters were brutalised, can anybody find a single headline in the mainstream media which attributes responsibility for the violence correctly?
[...]
Sky News every half hour is repeating the mantra that the Catalan government claims a mandate for Independence “after a referendum marred by violence”, again without stating what caused the violence. In general however Sky’s coverage has been a great deal better than the BBC; Al Jazeera has been excellent.
I strongly suspect that were it not for social media, UK mainstream media would have told us very little at all. This is an object lesson in how the mainstream media still seek to continue to push fake news on us in the age of citizen journalism. They no longer have a monopoly on the flow of raw information; what they can do is to attempt to distort perceptions of what people are seeing.
Blatant hypocrisy aside, the Trump Administration's use of personal email accounts isn't just a low-flying middle finger to public records laws. It's also a stupidly insecure method for handling sensitive communications.
Days after recent revelations that Jared Kushner, a presidential advisor and the president's son-in-law, had set up a personal e-mail account to conduct White House business, someone with access to that domain (ijkamily.com) changed the domain’s mail exchange (MX) records so that they now point to a Trump Organization server.
Carmen Yulin Cruz is the outspoken mayor of San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, who was publicly denounced by Donald Trump for pointing out the federal government's inaction during the worst humanitarian disaster in modern US history. Trump went on to characterize Puerto Ricans -- chest deep in sewage raw sewage with no fresh water, no homes, no power and no gasoline -- as "wanting everything done for them."
Chomsky wrote “After Pinkville” -- areas like Song My were then colored pink on American military maps -- in 1969. Almost half a century later, the question is: Have things improved? After all, in Ken Burns’s new Vietnam extravaganza, his 18-hour documentary on that war, he seems to have captured the zeitgeist of the moment by carefully changing the word “murder” in the script for the My Lai episode to “killing.” “At lunch, Burns defended his change," wrote the New Yorker’s Ian Parker,"on the ground that My Lai continues to have ‘a toxic, radioactive effect’ on opinion. ‘Killing’ was the better word, he said, ‘even though My Lai is murder.’” To be thoroughly upbeat, perhaps by 2067 Americans will finally be able to take “murder” straight on television when it comes to My Lai.
Careless handling of sensitive emails isn't just a problem for Trump's top advisor, Jared Kushner. Having rolled into office on the echoing cries of "Lock her up!" Trump's team nonetheless continued to use private email accounts for official correspondence. Kusher did this twice: using both a Republican National Committee account as well as another personal email address.
It's a security issue as well as a transparency issue. Personal email accounts -- while convenient (and conveniently opaque) -- are little more than attack vectors for cybercriminals and state-sponsored hacking. Making this security problem worse are Trump team legal reps, who can't seem to stop communicating with staffer-spoofing accounts.
Monday, Facebook handed over some 3,000 ads, which it believes were bought by Russia, to congressional investigators. While they haven't been made public, more information is coming out about the ads, accounts, and pages that were said to be controlled by a Russian "troll farm" called the Internet Research Agency.
Many of the ads weren't supporting specific candidates, but rather seem meant to stoke division around flash points in American society, particularly around immigration and race relations. 470 different pages and profiles were linked to the Internet Research Agency, according to Facebook.
I followed the deletion procedure again and in 2 weeks (you can’t immediately request deletion apparently) I’ll check to see if the account is really gone. I’ve updated the password so at least the deletion process can’t be interrupted by whoever has that password (probably lots of people - it’ll be in a ton of dumps where databases have been hacked).
If it’s still not gone, I hear you can just post obscene and offensive material until Facebook deletes you. I’d rather not have to take that route though.
As Congress considers passing an Internet censorship bill in the name of fighting sex trafficking, groups that work closely with trafficking victims have been warning Congress that the bill could put trafficking victims in even more danger. It’s essential that lawmakers listen to those groups before passing a law that could do more harm than good.
In today’s House subcommittee hearing on these proposals, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) asked whether the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693) or its House counterpart, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (ASVFOSTA, H.R. 1865), would do anything to address the problem of sex trafficking.
According to Spiegel Online, the NetzDG law applies to all sites – big or small – meeting the legal definition of a social network. The law, which was proposed in April and passed a month later, might not only target social media giants such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but also platforms like Reddit, Flickr, Tumblr, Vimeo, VK, and Gab.
If you've been following the slow progress of the European Commission's proposal to introduce new upload filtering mandates for Internet platforms, or its equally misguided plans to impose a new link tax on those who publish snippets from news stories, you should know that the end game is close at hand. The LIBE (Civil Liberties) Committee is the last committee of the European Parliament that is due to vote on its opinion on the so-called "Digital Single Market" proposals this Thursday October 5, before the proposals return to their home committee of the Parliament (the JURI or Legal Affairs Committee) for the preparation of a final draft.
Karen Bradley, the UK’s Culture Secretary, today gave a speech at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, where she outlined her vision to make the UK the “safest place in the world to go online.”
The UK government’s strategy gravitates around three main points. First, it intends to propose a code of conduct for social media companies to abide by. It also wants to encourage social media companies to design products with a “safety first” ethos. Finally, it plans to emphasise online safety education in schools.
Bradley described the code of practice as “guidance” and “voluntary minimum standards,” although didn’t go into specifics, other than they’re aimed at tackling “major issues such as trolling and abuse.”
Although Amos Yee is no different from a typical political activist, the State’s quick reaction to silence and jail the teen is a cause for concern. Singaporeans fail to understand that the absence of free speech to be critical of ideologies and a big government is a slippery slope towards an authoritative dictatorship. An imperative to prevent Singapore from mirroring the Venezuelan political crisis
There are obviously a lot of mixed motivations behind the push for SESTA -- the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act -- with many of those motivations based on good intentions of actually stopping sex trafficking. Of course, we've explained in great detail how SESTA isn't likely to help at all, and is quite likely to make the problem worse. It also seems clear that many of those lining up in support of the bill see it as a wedge -- a way to slowly dismantle intermediary liability protections for platforms on the internet. And thus, some just see it as a way to attack Google and Facebook out of a general dislike for those companies -- without realizing (or without caring) just how much damage it will do to free speech online and the platforms that enable such speech. We've also been perplexed by SESTA supporters using completely bogus stats to insist the problem of sex trafficking is much larger than it truly is. As we noted, sex trafficking is both very real and an absolute tragedy for those caught up in it and their families. But we should be realistic about the actual scope of the problem -- and many SESTA supporters aren't actually able to do that.
Ruth from Openmedia writes, "This Thursday legislators in the EU Parliament are voting on proposals in the EU for mass content filters, and restrictions on links, all in the name of 'updating copyright.
Enter LBRY, a new online protocol designed to facilitate decentralized and censorship-free content sharing. They are among the entities who have “backup up” — i.e., copied — the Berkeley lectures before the full impact of the Justice Department’s ADA damage.
He says the Berkeley videos are just the start of what LBRY has planned. He wants the site to be YouTube — but without the content restrictions.
LBRY uses a new technology that operates like Bitcoin. It’s “decentralized,” meaning videos posted are stored on thousands of computers around the world. That makes it nearly impossible for governments — or even Kauffman himself — to remove them. He acknowledges that with no censorship, his invention may end up hosting videos of bad things — beheadings, child porn, who knows what else. But he argues that if he creates a system with censorship, “it allows us to keep the bad stuff out, which is great, but it also allows dictatorial regimes to keep content off. Do we want to make videos available to the people in Turkey, Iran and China? We say yes.”
In a long-awaited decision on whether and how Europeans' private data can be protected from the roving eyes of the NSA, the Irish Commercial High Court this morning declared that "standard contractual clauses" —the procedure that tech companies like Facebook use to try to satisfy European privacy laws—should be reviewed by the European Union's top court, the Court of Justice (CJEU).
The decision hands the court a key question that could affect millions of users and the business practices of Facebook and other tech giants: should tech companies be allowed to send the personal data of European customers across the Atlantic if they can’t guarantee that, once in U.S. data centers, the information won’t be vacuumed up by NSA surveillance?
Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity czar, said on Tuesday that the government should end using the Social Security number as a national identification method.
"I believe the Social Security number has outlived its usefulness," said Joyce, while speaking at The Washington Post's Cybersecurity Summit. "Every time we use the Social Security number, you put it at risk."
The ACLU is going to court to fight government warrants seeking info on thousands of Facebook users who interacted with a Facebook page related to Inauguration Day protests. The resulting arrests have generated several extremely broad search warrants seeking communications and other personal information from Facebook and the protest site's hosting provider.
For awhile, the targets of these warrants could only be guessed at, thanks to the gag order attached to the Facebook warrants. The gag order was finally lifted by the DOJ less than a day before it was due in court for oral arguments. It wasn't Facebook securing a win so much as it was the government avoiding a loss -- a possibly-precedential ruling on gag orders in Washington, DC courts.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month issued a notice that it is storing social media information on immigrants, including lawful permanent residents and naturalized U.S. citizens, apparently indefinitely, in a government database that contains “Alien Files” (A-Files). This is an invasive new feature of DHS’s previously known programs on collecting social media information. DHS’s collection and storage of this sensitive information will chill and deter the free speech and association of immigrants to the United States, as well as the U.S. persons who communicate with them.
Railing against the use of encryption by criminals has always been an exercise in futility, but it’s a great way to sound tough. What better way to assert your power as a law-enforcer than by demanding the impossible?
The problem is, there’s a line between swagger and overt foolishness, and for some reason politicians are increasingly deciding to hurl themselves over it — witness, for example, Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull declaring earlier this year that “the laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”
The British home secretary, Amber Rudd, has now decided to follow the path of Turnbull by proudly announcing not only that she doesn’t understand how end-to-end encryption works, but that she does not need to understand it in order to fight it.
Yesterday, the ITRE (‘industry') Committee of the European Parliament has adopted its Opinion on the ePrivacy Regulation. This Opinion is pretty much the same calamity that has been adopted last week by the IMCO ('consumers protection') Committee, calling for a general bypassing of users' consent. Fortunately, these are just 'opinions' and will not bind the LIBE (‘civil liberties’) Committee voting on its final Report on 11 October. Still, these Opinions clearly reflect how some Members of the European Parliament are ready to sell out our privacy to big firms. Call them now to reverse this trend.
“Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us.” Thus, in 1996, John Perry Barlow laid out his manifesto, the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in which he encapsulated a philosophy flowing through the heart of worldwide web. His was a vision that would come to dominate the internet today, a thread that went from Timothy Leary to Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs to our current tech giants.
Such is the dominance of this philosophy that it has spawned a new creed, “dataism”. The central principle of this dogma is the free flow of data, unrestricted and unregulated. This libertarian view of information uniquely sought to attach freedom to a concept – the flow of information – rather than to a human liberty. It provided the ideological architecture for the internet that we know today – ubiquitous and pervasive, that leaves a data trail in its wake.
The book focuses on surveillance, as a key counter-terrorism tool, and introduces the rather disturbing term, 'dataveillance,' which is defined as "the systematic monitoring of people's actions or communications through the application of information technology." The text discusses the definition of privacy as an important conceptual framework. Part I of the book sets out theoretical aspects and Part II focuses on four case studies of EU counter-terrorism data surveillance. As the author puts it, the book seeks to examine current theories and details three important limitations the fundamental right to data protection faces, "its interconnectivity with privacy, its linking with secondary legislation and the elusiveness of its content."
What is it about companies (or their contractors) leaving consumer data publicly exposed on an Amazon cloud server? Verizon recently made headlines after one of its customer service vendors left the personal data of around 6 million consumers just sitting on an Amazon server without adequate password protection. A GOP data analytics firm was also recently soundly ridiculed after it left the personal data of around 198 million citizens (read: most of you) similarly just sitting on an Amazon server without protection. Time Warner Cable also recently left 4 million user records sitting in an openly-accessible Amazon bucket.
Since late 2016, the Transport for London has been running a pilot scheme, providing wifi to passengers while logging and retaining all the wifi traffic coming in and out of its access points, compiling a massive dossier on every tube-rider who had wifi turned on for their devices, whether or not they ever accessed the wifi service.
In a document obtained under a Freedom of Information request, TfL plans to make €£322m "over the next eight years by being able to quantify asset value based on the number of eyeballs/impressions and dynamically trade advertising space."
A TfL spokesperson also refused to rule out selling "aggregated customer data to third parties." While the UK has some good data protection laws thanks to the EU, it also inherited the EU's train-sized loophole, which is that companies that collect customer data can do anything they want with it, so long as they "de-identify" it first -- though the EU Directive does not establish what it means to de-identify a data-set, nor do many computer scientists believe that this is possible (with very good reason).
Since there seems little hope that the Trump administration will increase privacy protections for non-US citizens, or rein in the spying of the NSA, companies such as Google and Facebook may well need to keep all personal data regarding EU citizens entirely within the EU if they wish to operate there in the future. They will doubtless resist such a move, but the threats of new laws being imposed on them, not to mention more billion-dollar fines, show that the EU is in no mood to compromise when dealing with US Internet companies. The whole Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield saga is a reminder that, even though the US is the undisputed leader in many other areas of Internet policy, when it comes to privacy, it is the EU that sets the pace.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is set to push the premiers of the country's states and territories to agree to set up a national facial recognition database.
New FISA court documents have been handed over to the EFF as the result of its long-running FOIA lawsuit. The new pile of documents is, unfortunately, very heavily-redacted, forcing readers to extrapolate a lot from the missing data.
One of the few released FISA court docs leaving anything legible concerns the NSA's use of pen register/trap-and-trace orders to collect content, rather than just dialed phone numbers. The NSA (along with the FBI) has been admonished for its abuse of these orders before, thanks to its insistence any numbers dialed are fair game, even if they could be construed as partial contents of calls -- i.e., communications.
What the NSA liked to scoop up were "post cut through dialing digits" -- any numbers dialed after the phone number itself. These numbers could contain such things as credit card numbers, menu selections for automated services, and other information that could not be considered a dialed phone number.
Privacy experts and digital rights advocates want the House of Representatives to reform a loophole to National Security Agency surveillance authority set to expire in December that allows the intelligence community to collect and search data on U.S. citizens without a warrant.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a Tuesday letter called on the House Judiciary Committee to close that loophole in legislation the committee is drafting to reauthorize Section 702 of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FISA). Section 702 lets the NSA surveil without a warrent foreign nationals communicating with U.S. persons. Critics say it sweeps up data on potentially tens of millions of Americans, which the intelligence community can search under the pretext of national security.
In the news recently was a report from TfL about their WiFi data collection. Sky News reported that TfL “plans to make €£322m by collecting data from passengers’ mobiles”. TfL have later denied this but the fact remains that collecting this data is trivial.
More than a month back, the Supreme Court of India ruled that privacy is a fundamental right to every Indian citizen. It was a huge win for every privacy advocate, but it was one of the big battles in the whole fight for right to privacy. Even though governments are using public money to develop software infrastructure, almost none of them are Free Software. There is a current campaign happening for having publicly financed software developer for people to be Free Software. No one knows what is going on in the closed source infrastructure, and if people point out the issues, they are getting punished. If you never heard about Aadhaar project in India, feel free to visit this site to learn about how much destruction it is bringing in.
Facial recognition, fingerprinting, and retina scans—all of these and more could be extracted from travelers by the government at checkpoints throughout domestic airports. Please join EFF in opposing the dangerous new bill, sponsored by Senator Thune (R-SD), which would authorize this expanded biometric surveillance.
The TSA Modernization Act (S. 1872)would authorize the U.S. Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to deploy "biometric technology to identify passengers" throughout our nation’s airports, including at "checkpoints, screening lanes, [and] bag drop and boarding areas."
When the Department of Justice handed down remedies for the Seattle Police Department's excessive use of excessive force, it told officers they would need to dial back their penchant for deadliness. Just prior to the DOJ's civil rights investigation, the PD was responsible for 20% of the city's homicides. The DOJ recommended officers work on their de-escalation tactics, as well as partake in training meant to steer officers away from viewing anything strange (medical conditions, mental health issues, drug impairment, behavioral crises) as something to be shot at or beaten.
Seattle PD officials adopted the DOJ recommendations and altered the department's use of force policies. Rather than comply or quit, several police officers decided to file a federal lawsuit against the DOJ. The officers asserted a nonexistent right (the "right" to make it home alive) and hammered an existing right (the 2nd Amendment) to it in hopes of persuading a federal court that using less force less often somehow violated their right to keep and bear arms.
The crowdfunded lawsuit didn't get very far. The district court pointed out the 2nd Amendment does not create a "right" to defend yourself, much less attempt to guarantee officers' personal safety. Gun ownership is regulated, not a free pass for cops to violate PD use of force policies as they see fit. It also tossed a variety of other rights violations claims, noting these were even more tenuously connected to the officers' protest of the new use of force policy than the 2nd Amendment claims.
Kim Dotcom’s civil forfeiture case will not be heard before the Supreme Court this term, America’s highest court ruled on Monday.
The civil forfeiture case was brought 18 months after 2012 American criminal charges related to alleged copyright infringement against Dotcom and his now-shuttered company, Megaupload. In the forfeiture case, prosecutors specifically outlined why the New Zealand seizure of Dotcom’s assets on behalf of the American government was valid. Seized items include millions of dollars in various seized bank accounts in Hong Kong and New Zealand, the Dotcom mansion, several luxury cars, four jet skis, two 108-inch TVs, three 82-inch TVs, a $10,000 watch, and a photograph by Olaf Mueller worth over $100,000.
The US Supreme Court has denied the petition of Kim Dotcom and his former Megaupload colleagues over millions of dollars in seized assets. While this means that all legal options in the US have been exhausted, Dotcom's legal team now plans to take the issue to New Zealand and Hong Kong, where most funds are being held.
The justices left in place a lower court ruling that the U.S. government could seize up to $40 million in assets held outside the United States as part of a civil forfeiture action being pursued in parallel with criminal charges for alleged copyright violations and money laundering.
While the "main event" in the never-ending case of the US Justice Department against Kim Dotcom continues to grind its way ever so slowly through the wheels of justice, one element has basically concluded. And this was the part that should concern you even if you think that Kim Dotcom was completely guilty of criminal copyright infringement. The issue here is that as part of the arrest of Dotcom and his colleagues, the US "seized" many of his assets. Now, when the government seizes assets, it's a temporary thing. They have a certain period of time to hold onto it. Afterwards, they either need to give those assets back or file a separate case to attempt to "forfeit" those items (i.e., keep them forever). Here's where things get a little bizarre. Because Dotcom was fighting extradition in New Zealand, the "deadline" for the US to continue holding the seized assets was approaching -- so they filed the separate case against his stuff. Because it's a civil asset forfeiture case, the case is literally against his stuff, and not against Kim Dotcom (and, yes, this is as weird and nonsensical as it sounds). But there was a twist: because Dotcom was still in New Zealand, the Justice Department said that he was a "fugitive" and thus couldn't even protest the forfeiture of his stuff. Unfortunately, both the district court and the appeals court agreed.
The FBI loves its counterterrorism work. Loves it so much, it's pretty much abandoned all pretense of being a law enforcement agency. It acts as though it's somewhere between the NSA and the ATF: interested mostly in picking through surveillance dragnets and running sting operations that turn people who have trouble with basic skills like holding down jobs into national security threats.
But it can't score anti-terrorism goals on unguarded nets without a crew of informants. It works with immigration authorities to coerce visiting foreigners into providing the agency with intel. It goes further than that, though. It also operates a witness protection program for informants/witnesses actually involved in actual terrorist activity.
In April, the Trump Administration launched what it called the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) hotline, with a stated mission to “provide proactive, timely, adequate, and professional services to victims of crimes committed by removable aliens.” But internal logs of calls to VOICE obtained by Splinter show that hundreds of Americans seized on the hotline to lodge secret accusations against acquaintances, neighbors, or even their own family members, often to advance petty personal grievances.
The logs—hundreds of which were available for download on the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement web site despite containing extremely sensitive personal information—call to mind the efforts of closed societies like East Germany or Cuba to cultivate vast networks of informants and an atmosphere of fear and suspicion.
The rallying of white supremacist extremism in the US has caused fear and confusion for much of the general public. It's clear that the ascension of Donald Trump and the mass mobilization of white supremacist movements are inextricably linked, and so, over the past year, the desire to "understand" white supremacist groups has been a pinned topic in the mainstream media. In a scramble to understand the now-emboldened (though by no means new) evils, many people are searching for resources. Centrist cable networks and news media sources have sought out nonprofits, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), among others, to explain organizations that have been designated as "hate groups."
Unfortunately, the nonprofits that the media are turning to for answers are not without ideological complexities of their own. For example, the ADL in particular, positions itself as "liberal," but is in many ways virulently right-wing, allying itself with powerful conservative forces in the US and Israel. The ACLU and SPLC, meanwhile, are largely dominated by white liberal politics, which often leads them to make misleading claims under the guise of faux humane objectivity.
To my own astonishment, and after a full 36 hours of hard thinking to try and escape this conclusion, I am in intellectual honesty obliged to reconsider my lifelong support for the European Union, due to the unqualified backing of the EU Commission for the Spanish Government’s dreadful repression in Catalonia.
This is very difficult for me. I still much favour open immigration policy, and the majority of Brexiteers are motivated at base by racist anti-immigrant sentiment. Certainly many Brexiteers share in the right wing support for Rajoy’s actions, across Europe. I have been simply stunned by the willingness of right wingers across the internet, including on this blog, to justify the violence of the Spanish state on “law and order” grounds. It is a stark warning of what we might face in Scotland in our next move towards Independence, which I have always believed may be made without the consent of Westminster.
[...]
The European Commission is obliged to abide by this Charter by Article 51. Yet when the Spanish government committed the most egregious mass violation of human rights within the European Union for a great many years, the EU Commission deliberately chose to ignore completely its obligations under the European Charter of Fundamantal Rights in its response. The Commission’s actions shocked all of intellectual Europe, and represented a complete betrayal of the fundamental principles, obligations and basic documents of the European Union.
But this is something Securus has pushed for a long time. Back in 2015, Securus finally dropped a clause in its contracts that mandated correctional facilities using its equipment move to video-only visits. But that doesn't mean jails aren't still heavily encouraged to ban in-person visits. The pivot to video doesn't just generate an absurd amount of income for the communications provider. It also pads the pockets of prisons.
Ajit Pai has been confirmed by the Senate as the Chairman of the FCC in a 52-41 vote. He has technically only been acting Chairman this whole time, as the process of confirmation generally lags well behind the succession process at the agency; the former Chairman, Tom Wheeler, stepped down shortly before the new Presidential term began, marking Pai’s de facto promotion. The vote today is his de jure assumption of the role.
[...]
The vote wasn’t strictly along party lines, which is a little surprising. Joseph Manchin (D-WV), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Gary Peters (D-MI), and Jon Tester (D-MT) all voted to confirm, despite Democratic leadership tending to condemn Pai’s actions against net neutrality and privacy. While these four Democrats gave ayes, no Republicans were to be found in the “nay” column.
The US Senate today gave Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai another term on the FCC.
Pai would have had to leave the FCC at the end of 2017 if the Senate hadn't approved President Donald Trump's request to give Pai a new term. Pai, who has proposed deregulating broadband providers and eliminating net neutrality rules, received a new five-year term retroactive to July 1, 2016.
T-Mobile USA has agreed to stop claiming its 4G LTE network is faster than Verizon Wireless', after the advertising industry's self-regulation body agreed with Verizon that T-Mobile's claim was unsupported.
The National Advertising Division (NAD) "recommended T-Mobile discontinue claims that it has the fastest 4G LTE network" and "also recommended that T-Mobile discontinue claims that its LTE network is 'newer' than Verizon's and that Verizon's LTE network is 'older,'" the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council said in an announcement Thursday.
Australia's Bureau of Statistics has released its latest Internet and mobile figures for Australia, dated June 2017, but do the numbers tell the whole story?
We've noted how large ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are covering all their bases in their endless quest to kill popular (some would say necessary) net neutrality protections. They've successfully lobbied FCC boss Ajit Pai to vote to kill the existing rules later this year, despite the massive public opposition to that plan. But they're also lobbying Congress to draft a new net neutrality law they publicly insist will solve everything, while privately hoping you're too stupid to realize will be entirely written by their lawyers and lobbyists -- ensuring it has so many loopholes as to be effectively useless.
In case those first two options don't work, large ISPs are also -- for the third time in as many years -- looking for the Supreme Court's help. ISPs lost their first attempt to overturn the Title II net neutrality order last year when the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia shot down their complaints (which included insisting that net neutrality rules violated their First Amendment rights). ISPs lost again earlier this year when the courts shot down their en banc appeal.
In March, more than 31 European Community Networks (CNs) wrote an open letter to EU policy-makers, stressing the need for an adaptation of the European legal framework aimed at helping these citizen-driven initiatives flourish, thus supporting alternative, democratic and sustainable ways to meet the goals of broadband policies. But rather than opening the door to a much-needed diversification of the telecom ecosystem, European governments only seek to reinforce the dominant positions of incumbent players. As the EU gets closer to a deal over the future of European telecom regulation, the EU Parliament must resist the pressure and reaffirm its commitment to the public interest.
If you've seen current FCC Ajit Pai's name in print so far this year, it's probably for any number of his extremely anti-consumer, telecom industry friendly positions. Like his attempts to kill net neutrality, his support of gutting consumer broadband privacy protections, his efforts to protect the cable industry's cable box monopoly from competition, efforts to dramatically reduce media consolidation rules, his defense of prison phone monopoly price gouging, or the way he's making it harder for Americans to get affordable broadband.
To obfuscate this arguably-lopsided agenda, Pai has been busy trying to portray himself as somebody notably other than the revolving door regulator he actually is.
For example, Pai has repeatedly insisted that he's a heroic advocate for closing the digital divide, even while simultaneously weakening broadband deployment standards and eroding all oversight of historically-despised mono/duopolists like Comcast. Similarly, Pai spent many of his first months in office insisting he'd be breathlessly dedicated to transparency, yet the FCC boss has already been sued for refusing to document his communications with incumbent ISPs regarding net neutrality, or to provide hard data on why his agency appears to have hallucinated a DDoS attack.
Denuvo DRM has graced our pages many times in the past year or so. The DRM once thought to be unbreakable and heralded as the end of piracy has taken a precipitous downward path in reputation. Games using the DRM slowly began being cracked in months, then weeks. The ability to crack Denuvo then sped up, with cracking times dropping to a week, five days, a couple of days. Through it all, Denuvo worked furiously to patch its software, all while proclaiming that a week or so's protection is worth it to game developers as they protect their games during the all important initial release window.
The prediction now is e-commerce will be the normal way of conducting trade in the future, according to Lee-Makiyama. If intellectual property rights are sometime considered as a market entry barrier, in access to medicines for example, in copyright and trademarks, mostly used in e-commerce, IP is a market maker, he said. Without IP rights, “supply is not there,” he said, adding that it is the legal environment that allows products to exist.
The creation of a comprehensive IP regime is finally on the horizon in Myanmar. In July, draft bills on trade mark, copyright, patent and industrial design were sent to the legislative committee for deliberation. Implementing regulations are expected to come in later this year. Local lawyers believe that the trade mark law will have the most take up for brand owners. However, they share concerns of the judiciary’s lack of specialised IP experience
Bugs in the European Union copyright reform were discussed during the 6th edition of the annual Warsaw CopyCamp held last week. Liability of platforms and special intellectual property rights on snippets were the poster child for bad legislation. But the activists, academics and internet companies also expressed concerns over a general backlash on internet openness and internet freedom.
We cover many petty intellectual property lawsuits here at Techdirt. After a while, you kind of become somewhat numb to them and the only mildly ridiculous lawsuits seem sort of... meh. But every once in a while you run into a real doozy, the sort of lawsuit that really gets the anger juices flowing. The copyright infringement lawsuit brought by author Dr. Keith Bell against King's College and its football coach, Jeff Knar, is one of those lawsuits.
A timeline is required here, for reasons that will become readily apparent. In 1982, the year I happen to have been born (skypoint for myself), Bell published a 72 page book called Winning Isn't Normal. The book is supposed to be of motivational nature, prodding the reader to win at sports, games and life, or something. Fast forward to 2015, when the Twitter account for Northeastern State University's baseball team tweeted out an image of a single page from the book. Also in 2015, King's College coach Knarr retweeted that tweet. Now fast forward to late 2017, when Knarr and the school are being sued by Bell for that retweet.
As you may be aware, the US, Canada and Mexico are "renegotiating NAFTA" for reasons that don't entirely make sense, but we'll leave that aside. Either way, opening up that process has created an opportunity for Hollywood to attack the internet, and they've rushed right in. And, despite promises to the contrary, it appears that Hollywood may have succeeded in getting the Trump administration's US Trade Representative to back its dangerous plans. To fully explain this requires a bit of a history lesson. A few decades back, Hollywood realized that what it couldn't get Congress to pass, it could force upon the US through "international trade agreements." Much of the history of what happened is detailed in the excellent 2002 book, Information Feudalism by Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite. The very short version is this: international trade agreements have mostly been negotiated without much fanfare or attention, often in secret, with handshake deals in backrooms. And since "trade agreements" are about industry and commerce, trade negotiators often spend most of their time listening to industry representatives to figure out what they want, rather than looking at what's best for everyone as a whole.
Sci-Hub, which is regularly referred to as the "Pirate Bay of Science," faces one of the strongest anti-piracy injunctions we have seen in the US to date. A magistrate judge in Virginia has recommended a broad order which would require search engines and Internet providers to block the site.
As people get used to the wave of copyright trolling that has flooded the Internet in recent years, fewer cases hit the headlines. Every now and again, however, a special case appears, such as the one in Canada where a 60-year-old woman has been accused of downloading porn several times. She's reportedly terrified, but should age be the only defense against these scare tactics?