Olimex has launched its open source, Alwinner A64 based Teres-A64 laptop kit for $284, and unveiled a SOM204 form factor that will debut on an A20 COM.
Back in February, Bulgaria-based Olimex, which is known for its open spec OLinuXino SBCs like the Allwinner A64 based A64-OLinuXino, announced an open source laptop kit based on the same quad-core, Cortex-A53 SoC called the Teres-1. The Ubuntu Mate-supported laptop kit took longer than expected, but it’s finally here as the Teres-A64, selling for 240 Euros ($284) instead of 225 Euros.
The Olimex Teres I is a small laptop designed to run open source software… and which features open source hardware as well. We reported on the Teres I when the hardware design was finalized earlier this year. Now the laptop is available for purchase for 240 Euros (about $284).
As a part of their monthly routine, Microsoft released the Patch Tuesday update on October 10. But other than the necessary security patches and bug fixes, it also brought BSODs to some Windows users.
Two books helped me come to some sort of understanding about the art of being an architect. I read them a long time ago, but I still dip into them from time to time: 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, by Richard Monson-Haefel; and Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design, by Diomidis Spinellis and Georgios Gousios.
What's interesting about them is that they both have multiple points of view expressed in them: some contradictory—even within each book. And this rather reflects the fact that I believe that being a systems architect is an art or a discipline. Different practitioners will have different views about it. You can talk about computer science being a hard science, and there are parts of it that are, but much of software engineering (lower case intentional) goes beyond that.
The same, I think, is even more true for systems architecture: you may be able to grok what it is once you know it, but it's very difficult to point to something—even a set of principles—and say, "that is systems architecture." Sometimes, the easiest way to define something is by defining what it's not: e.g., search for "I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
The simplest method to deploy and operate Kubernetes on Ubuntu is with conjure-up. Whether the substrate is a public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc) private virtualized environments (VMware) or bare metal, conjure-up will allow you to quickly deploy a fully functional, production-grade Kubernetes.
This week we’ve been playing Wifiwars, discuss what happened at the Ubuntu Rally in New York, serve up some command line lurve and go over your feedback.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 4.13.6, 4.9.55, 4.4.92, and 3.18.75 stable kernels. As usual, they contain fixes throughout the tree, so users should upgrade.
I'm announcing the release of the 4.13.6 kernel.
Lucas Stach has sent in the Etnaviv DRM driver changes to DRM-Next for the Linux 4.15 kernel. This is one of the bigger pull requests for this reverse-engineered, open-source Vivante graphics driver.
This community-driven Vivante graphics driver continues to become more capable and feature complete with each kernel cycle. For Linux 4.15 the new work includes landing GPU performance counter support, which is important for developers in being able to analyze/tune the performance. They've been reverse engineering the Vivante performance counters for a while and now it's ready to go for Linux 4.15. There are experimental patches currently for libdrm in making use of the new API.
Feature development for Mesa 17.3 will be over soon in order to get this quarterly update to Mesa3D shipping next month.
Release manager Emil Velikov is planning to issue the feature freeze and first release candidate next Friday, 20 October. That will mark the deadline for getting major features/improvements into Mesa 17.3, after which point it will be reserved for bug fixes.
One regression fix since 1.19.4 (mea culpa), and fixes for CVEs 2017- 12176 through 2017-12187. C is a terrible language, please stop writing code in it.
Ouch, so basically a lot of potential for buffer overflows. Sadly, this is not the first time we have seen a big batch of X.Org Security vulnerabilities and security researchers in the past have generally characterized X.Org security as even worse than it looks.
Intel has been sending in feature updates for their Direct Rendering Manager driver of new material that will debut in Linux 4.15. A third and final feature update is expected next week for DRM-Next.
Our latest benchmarking of Intel's 8th Gen Core "Coffee Lake" processors entailed seeing how well the i7-8700K performs on a variety of modern Linux distributions. Tested for this comparison was Ubuntu 17.10, Antergos 17.10, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux, Debian Testing, Solus 3, and Fedora 26.
With these seven GNU/Linux distributions they were tested out-of-the-box following a clean install on the i7-8700K setup. Some highlights from these distributions include:
The Arch-based Antergos 17.10 rolling distribution has Linux 4.13.5, GNOME Shell, Mesa 17.2.2, GCC 7.2.0, and EXT4 by default.
There’s a new weather app in town and it does more than just tell the weather. Apart from being beautiful, it tells the news too and so far there are 8 different sources to choose from!
Coffee is a recent open source project with which you can keep yourself up to date with both news feeds from around the world and the weather.
It features a minimalist User Interface with a well-thought-out icon set and color scheme. The weather section is neatly separated from the news feed section and the settings panel is simple and intuitive enough to require no formal training.
Hi folks am here with another interesting topic called RTV (Reddit Terminal Viewer) – A Simple Terminal Viewer For Reddit. It’s built in python using the curses library.
When it come to CLI utility, i very much interested to dig more on that since i prefer CLI (Command Line Interface) most of the time instead of GUI. Not only me, many of NIX guys are there in the same mentality.
Gtk applications are more and more using GAction and GActionGroup and it’s easy to see why. They are stateful, allow parameters when activating, and can be inserted into the widget hierarchy using gtk_widget_insert_action_group(). The latter is useful so that you only activate actions (or toggle button sensitivity) in the portion of the user interface that makes sense.
One thing to consider is what your strategy will be for using GActionGroup. One way is to encapsulate the GActionGroup by using GSimpleActionGroup. Another, which I prefer, is to implement the GActionGroupInterface. Although, this requires much more boilerplate code.
What's interesting with this one, is that players can make and submit their own cards to get accepted into the game. On top of that, any cards you earn in-game can outside of the starter deck be freely sold on the Steam Market, so the economy is controlled by players.
Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers released with Linux support years ago, but it's taken until now for GOG to add the Linux version.
Love your adventure games? It seems KING Art Games are developing a new one called Shakes & Fidget which is on Kickstarter.
King Art previously developed The Book of Unwritten Tales, The Dwarves, Battle Worlds: Kronos and more. They have a good history of Linux support and it seems this will be no different.
Also, it turns out there is a temporary workaround to get water looking nice again. Since it's not actually an issue on all maps. With thanks to this post on the ARK forum, here's what to do.
First, you need to have "The Center - ARK Expansion Map" (free) installed. Annoyingly, all the normal methods of trying to install it failed, they just loaded ARK or showed me the Steam page for the free DLC inside the in-game overlay and nothing happened. I tried many other ways, but the only thing that worked was opting into the Steam Beta Client which somehow suddenly made it work.
Vigilantes [Steam, Official Site] seems like a rather interesting turn-based tactical RPG, inspired by strategy games from the 90s.
A reader pointed out that the FAQ for the Amazon Lumberyard [Official Site] game engine no longer lists Linux support, so I reached out to Amazon to see what's going on.
A desktop environment is a suite of tools which make it easier for you to use your computer. Linux users have a choice of many different desktop environments, all with their own styles and strengths. Here, we’ve created a list of the 10 best linux desktop environments.
Hi, I'm Sean! I'm an Xfce core developer, Xubuntu Technical Lead, and long-time Linux user. I love solving problems ... and maintaining a desktop environment means there's no shortage of those.
couple of days ago, the much awaited Plasma 5.11 desktop was released by KDE developers. The major features of this release were better notifications, redesigned settings app, improved task manager, and new Vault app. Soon after this release, KDE Neon developers also shipped their brand new release, i.e., KDE Neon 5.11.
On a side note, we recently published our list of most beautiful Linux distributions, which features KDE Neon at #5. Do check it out.
We also wanted to make it easy for visitors to power up their devices, so we placed plugs and USB charging stations all over our booth. Our visitors came, sat, chatted, re-charged their bodies, minds and devices, while at the same time finding out why KDE is the driving force behind many a software project. This turned out to be winning idea. A lot of people came by the "Power up!" space, and the buzz gave us the chance to demonstrate exactly how KDE could also power up their software and hardware projects. Many still perceive KDE exclusively as the creator of a desktop, but, at the ripe age of twenty, KDE is much more than that.
Two weeks, two posts. Lets see how long I can keep up with this!
Last weekend I was part of the KDE Edu Sprint 2017 in the Endocode offices in Berlin, just a couple of days before the Qt World Summit, which was actually my first KDE Edu sprint (if you do not count Randa 2014). It was great as always to meet other KDE developers working on educational projects and I think we got a lot of work done.
While my primary focus going into the sprint was to work on macro support in Kig (there were many open bugs regarding macros), Aleix Pol's initial remarks helped me realize it was better to "take advantage of the fact that we were all at one place, and work on things you cannot do back home" so I decided to see what others were doing and try to help with that as well. Since Sandro Andrade was working on testing KDE Edu builds in Windows using Craft and I had been working on generating Craft recipes from Portage ebuilds, I finished a script that translates portage ebuilds from Gentoo's Portage tree into Craft recipes. This will automate low-hanging fruits like applications that basically only depend on KDE frameworks and Qt5 libraries. I committed this script to the development scripts repository in case someone finds them useful. It is a very experimental script so you are welcome to improve it!
The Solus distribution [Official Site] developers are a clever bunch, with their Linux Steam Integration [GitHub] software package and snaps, they are hoping to "relieve the pressure on distributions for supporting gaming".
When I say snaps, I'm talking the snap package system, specifically from version 2.28 onwards which supports something called "base" snaps. You can read more about the idea behind base snaps here.
The rethinkdb‘s website has (finally) been updated and Gentoo Linux is now listed on the installation page!
Meanwhile, we have bumped the ebuild to version 2.3.6 with fixes for building on gcc-6 thanks to Peter Levine who kindly proposed a nice PR on github.
The LibreOffice packages were uploaded to my repository last Friday, so you probably already have that installed. Never hurts to mention it for those people who did not subscribe to my RSS feed.
Alibaba Cloud customers will soon be able to harness the power and flexibility of Red Hat’s open source solutions following a tie-up between the two companies.
The tie-up will see Alibaba Cloud join the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program, joining a host of other big name tech companies who offer Red Hat-tested and validated solutions.
Chinese internet giant has joined Red Hat's cloud partner ecosystem and will offer the latter's open source products to Alibaba Cloud customers as well as host Red Hat customers on its cloud platform.
Alibaba Cloud has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program, the tech giant has announced. Through the partnership, Alibaba cloud will offer Red Hat open source solutions to Alibaba’s global customer base.
Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing giant, will start selling Red Hat’s business software globally, the two companies said late Wednesday.
Many Fortune 500 companies run Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems on their own servers. They may also opt to run it on third-party cloud data centers run by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft msft , or Google goog because Red Hat already has formal ties to those three companies. Now, Red Hat is also allied with Alibaba and its Aliyun cloud.
Red Hat rht Linux and other Red Hat business software will be available from Alibaba’s cloud within months, the two companies said. The news was announced at an Alibaba tech conference in Hangzhou, China.
ââ¬â¹To the delight of its users, the team of developers in charge of the Fedora project officially announced the availability of the beta version of Fedora 27. This new version, which incorporates several important innovations, is distinguished mainly by the absence of an alpha version. However, the Fedora team points out that significant efforts have been made to make this intermediate step unnecessary and to provide a quality product.
So I am really happy to announce another major codec addition to Fedora Workstation 27 namely the addition of the codec called AAC. As you might have seen from Tom Callaways announcement this has just been cleared for inclusion in Fedora.
For those not well versed in the arcane lore of audio codecs AAC is the codec used for things like iTunes and is found in a lot of general media files online. AAC stands for Advanced Audio Coding and was created by the MPEG working group as the successor to mp3. Especially due to Apple embracing the format there is a lot of files out there using it and thus we wanted to support it in Fedora too.
Fedora is now able to bundle and offer a specific AAC audio codec implementation as a package for its Linux distribution.
With Fedora always striving for free software and ensuring its legal state is in order due to Red Hat's control, it was only earlier this year Fedora was legally allowed to begin offering full MP3 support for both decode/encode along with AC3 support while last year it received H.264 support. The latest multimedia expansion for Fedora is now being able to distribute an AAC codec.
When I got started contributing to open source communities it was with the Fedora Project and specifically the Docs team. I have not been anywhere near as active with Fedora lately and I miss it. I still consider myself an active Ambassador with each class I teach but I have not really contributed through content or formal activities lately. I am actually looking for a new challenge though, rather than returning to an old stomping ground, and probably with a smaller project. I dabbled in an Apache Hadoop ecosystem project for a bit and I still follow that mailing list but I never really got into that community. Melding open source and security is ideal, though I have really enjoyed the past year where I jumped into automation with Ansible and containers with OpenShift. The search continues.
GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton recently released a new version of his ExTiX Linux distro, which he dubs as "the Ultimate Linux System," based on Ubuntu 17.10 and Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch."
Tagged as Build 171012, ExTiX 17.8 is the most recent update of the GNU/Linux distribution, which appears to be the first to be based on Canonical's upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, but also borrowing some packages from the repositories of Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" OS.
The last big milestone in Ubuntu 17.10 development process was the release of Beta 2 that witnessed the participation of Ubuntu’s flagship edition which now ships with GNOME desktop environment. In a way, it was the first chance to try the new and polished features.
“Adam Conrad, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team is pleased to announce that artful has entered the Final Freeze period in preparation for the final release of Ubuntu 17.10 next week,” the Ubuntu Fridge announcement reads.
Adam Conrad, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team is pleased to announce that artful has entered the Final Freeze period in preparation for the final release of Ubuntu 17.10 next week.
The Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) GNU/Linux operating system is only six days apart and, according to the release schedule, it just entered Final Freeze development stage on Thursday, October 12, 2017.
Work on Ubuntu 17.10 begun six months ago, on April 20, when the toolchain was uploaded to the repository, with the main goal of replacing our beloved Unity user interface with the latest GNOME 3 desktop environment. Two Alpha and Beta milestones later, Ubuntu 17.10 is now officially in Final Freeze stage.
Technologic’s open-source, 7-inch “TS-TPC-7990” panel PC runs Linux on an i.MX6, and offers optional WiFi, BT, Nimbelink, supercap, and cabinet.
The TS-TPC-7990 touch panel is designed for HMI applications like industrial automation, medical, automotive, self-service kiosks, and retail point-of-sale terminals. The panel PC is built around NXP’s tried-and-true i.MX6 SoC in either single-core Solo or quad-core Quad Cortex-A9 models. It uses a custom mainboard instead of Technologic’s new i.MX6 based TS-7970 SBC or TS-4900 COM.
Olimex unveiled a new “SOM204” form factor for computer-on-modules and previewed an open spec, Allwinner A20 based “A20-SOM204” COM built in the new format.
Last week Olimex announced it was standardizing all future computer-on-modules on a new “SOM204” form factor with an 204-pin SODIMM edge connector. It also previewed the first SOM204 module: the “A20-SOM204,” based on the Allwinner A20 SoC. The module will ship in November with an evaluation board at prices comparable to that of the company’s earlier A20-SOM, says Olimex. Schematics for the A20-SOM204 COM and A20-EVB204 carrier board are already available for free download.
Like the computer the new smartphone, called Librem 5, runs PureOS, a Linux-based operating system. Purism markets the phone as the truly pure GNU+Linux-based smartphone product.
While Android is based on Linux too, PureOS is based on GNU free software and Debian Linux distribution and is entirely open source. This means that Librem 5 owners can, for example, change the Linux distribution to something else if they don't like PureOS.
Oh. One more bit. I was the first to also tell you that Google won the battle of the century for the OS of all high tech - when Android was passing Windows (all devices, not just smartphones, but PCs included). Nobody else told you that either. It is now becoming apparent to many experts that Google owns the tech world via Android. Who told you first? The dude who saw how Windows was truly collapsing and that iOS was never a threat to Google's world domination plans. Yeah, we'll return to those issues in coming years no doubt. Goodbye Windows smartphones and by darn it, good riddance too! Ballmer gone. Elop gone. Lumia gone. Windows smartphone OS gone. Now when can we see Microsoft the company gone too, please, next?
Daniel Vetter has sent in the latest feature pull request of new drm-misc-next material for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.15 kernel cycle.
This latest batch of miscellaneous Direct Rendering Manager updates include continued core work around atomic mode-setting, HDMI CEC control support for the adv7511 driver, remote control support for the sii8620 driver, improved HDMI and A31 chip support in the Sun4i DRM driver, and some new driver activity too.
Back in 2014, we struggled to fill out our top 10 roundup of Linux-based robots and padded the list with conceptually similar autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In addition, many of those robots were proprietary or open source only on the software side. Today, however, it’s easy to fill out a top 10 list of Linux-based terrestrial robots that are open source in both software and hardware. In fact, we were forced to leave a number of worthy projects waiting in the wings.
The latest open source Linux robot to hit the scene — the Turtle Rover — won funding on Indiegogo only last week. This four-wheeled bot, which is larger and more sophisticated than typical wheeled robots like the popular, dual-wheeled GoPiGo, was designed to mimic Martian rovers. Another major player here is the recently rev’d, dual-wheeled TurtleBot 3.
Like most of our entries, these models are wheeled robots built around the Raspberry Pi. With the advent of the quad-core, WiFi-enabled RPi 3 model, we’ve seen far more advanced, and sometimes semi-autonomous Pi-based robots, in addition to the numerous RPi-based toy designs of recent years. Other SBCs have also inspired robot designs, especially the BeagleBone and BeagleBone Blue, which is especially suitable for robotics projects.
While open source hacker boards have expanded Linux robot development in recent years, a larger influence is the optimization of Linux platforms such as Ubuntu for interaction with the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) middleware. A number of our top 10 robots include ROS integration.
Aaeon’s rugged “Boxer-6639M” industrial PC supports 6th or 7th Generation Intel CPUs and provides 8x USB, 6x RS-232/422/485, 3x GbE, and 4x PoE ports.
Over the last year, Aaeon has spun off a number of similar versions of its fanless, Linux-ready Boxer-6xxx line of fanless industrial PCs. The new Boxer-6639M is so similar to last year’s Boxer-6639 and the recent Boxer-6839 that it seems it could just as easily have been an optional SKU to either instead of a separate product. The new model does have one unique superpower, however: 4x 802.3at-compliant GbE PoE ports for up to 80W Power-over-Ethernet, which join the existing 3x standard GbE ports.
The Touch runs all sorts of Android apps, from Skype to calendars to games for kids. At MWC, we were able to use it at a distance rather than touching the projection when it was in wall projection mode. Holding a finger up in the air created a circular cursor on the projection that could be used to select things with a pinching gesture.
There's no denying that Minecraft is a favorite game for millions. And being written in Java enables it to run on a variety of platforms, including Linux. With a huge modding community, there are countless Minecraft tinkerers out there who would love to be able to get under the hood and play around with the source code themselves. Unfortunately, the source is not available to the general public.
But there's good news. Minecraft's popularity has led to many attempts to recreate the game, and others in a similar vein, as open source software. Interested in a free Minecraft alternative? Here's a quick look at some clones and derivatives out there that you really ought to check out.
Exclusive The company that writes the open-source software for three-quarters of the world's Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) email servers has a plan that could kill off proprietary chat services like Facebook's WhatsApp. And that means you, too, Slack.
German open-source software-as-a-service operation Open-Xchange acquired the IMAP developer Dovecot three years ago, and announced today at the OX Summit in Brussels that it wants to integrate chat into the bundle.
German Linux company SUSE Linux is well-known for its Linux and other open source solutions. It is also known for producing videos for geeks and debuting them at its annual SUSECon conference.
This year, in Prague, was no different. The company, which marked its 25th year on 2 September, came up with two videos, one to mark the occasion and the other all about Linux and open source.
Open source technology has been around for decades. Driven by passionate developers and engineers, the open source movement is a hotbed of innovation and collaboration - but what does 'open source' actually mean?
'Open source' as a term is most commonly used to refer to software where the creators have made the source code freely available online. Anyone is free to view, download, use and even modify it. This has led to thriving communities on code-hosting sites like Github, where devs contribute to each others' work, joining forces to build and improve applications on their own time.
Notwithstanding that ITes companies have the highest number of software engineers, major contribution towards open source code writing is made by developers in product firms such as Amazon, while services firms like TCS and Cognizant are fast catching up, says a survey.
According to a survey by talent acquisition start-up Belong, Amazon had the highest number of registered users on Github, followed by Cognizant, TCS and Microsoft.
The survey covered 75,000 Indian engineers that have a presence on GitHub — one of the largest communities where software developers host and review code.
This also makes compliance easier; with proprietary software, you have harsh compliance clauses with large fines. Worse is what happens with some open core products that ship as a mix of GPL and proprietary software; these can breach a license and put customers at risk. And, as Gartner points out, an open core model means you get none of the benefits of open source. A pure open source licensed product avoids all these issues. Instead, you have just one compliance rule: If you make modifications to the code (not configuration, logos, or anything like that), you have to share them with those you distribute the software to if they ask.
Clearly open source is the better option. It is easier to pick the right vendor (with whom you won't be stuck), plus you benefit from more security, a stronger focus on customers, and better support. And finally, you'll know you're on legally safe footing.
MEF and the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) are officially working together, the organizations announced today at the SDN and NFV World Congress. MEF has joined ONAP as an associate member. And the Linux Foundation, which hosts ONAP, has joined MEF as an auditing member.
A trade body counting Orange and Telefónica as members has joined the Linux Foundation’s Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project to use open source approaches in virtualisation.
Stock control or inventory management is the process of specifying and quantifying the shape and percentage of goods you hold in stock. By knowing what you have, and where, you can save money and improve your service to customers.
There is myriad free software to choose from, many of which are free to use and totally open source. We have highlighted 13 that are worth considering for your business.
For more free software, see our free software downloads. See all of our IT Business tutorials.
the engine that powers the modern containerization movement that's sweeping across application development. Today, let's take a look at the top three open source tools that are essential to building containerized apps.
"Some years ago we set up a lab situation for running apps in Berlin," says Schade. "We set up Cloud Foundry there, we used it, and we now have a very stable platform and a lot of knowledge – they are a kind of a role model now for the company where we try to adapt things as much as it’s possible in a huge company like Volkswagen."
Too long, didn’t read? In a few words: our GIMP development + ZeMarmot production is currently funded barely above 400 € per month, this doesn’t pay the bills, my main computer broke today and Aryeom’s graphics tablet has been working badly for some time now. We are a bit bummed out.
We are excited to announce the release of pfSense€® software version 2.4, now available for new installations and upgrades!
pfSense software version 2.4.0 was a herculean effort! It is the culmination of 18 months of hard work by Netgate and community contributors, with over 290 items resolved. According to git, 671 files were changed with a total 1651680 lines added, and 185727 lines deleted. Most of those added lines are from translated strings for multiple language support!
pfSense 2.4.0-RELEASE updates and installation images are available now!
There's a new version available of pfSense, the popular BSD-based operating system common to network appliances / firewalls / routers.
Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.
Python is one of the most amazing languages one can learn to code. Python is very simple to learn when compared to some other languages out there, but yet, it’s still very powerful, and is one of the most widely used languages for some programs and websites you may not even know used it, such as:
The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.21.0. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.
For fans of the Rust "safe, concurrent, practical systems language", the Rust 1.21 update is available today with some modest updates and additions.
Learning new skills can be helpful if you are looking to change careers. In case you end up learning a skill that’s in heavy demand, it turns out to be something that brings immense benefits and stay with you lifelong. In case you’re a programmer, learning a new programming language helps you expand your career opportunities. One also needs to have the knowledge of top programming languages to make correct choices.
GitHub, also called “Facebook for Programmers,” has completed a decade this year. Today, it has become a go-to place for developers to share their code with others, indulge in collaborative approaches, etc. It’s now home to 24 million total users and 1.5 million organization.
At the company’s annual GitHub Universe user conference, company’s CEO Chris Wanstrath made his final keynote address on Wednesday. Earlier in August, he announced that he’d step down as company’s CEO as soon as a worthy replacement is found.
APIs are becoming a very popular and a must-know if you are any type of developer. But, what is an API? API stands for Application Programming Interface. It is a way to get one software application to talk to another software application. In this article, I’ll go over the basics of what they are and why to use them.
Nom Nom Nom! I happened to be snacking on chips while trying to think of a name for my REST API talk coming up at APIStrat in Portland. Similarly, the act of consuming or using a REST API means to eat it all up. In context, it means to eat it, swallow it, and digest it — leaving any others in the pile exposed. Sounds yummy, right?
But this success has come with “unintended consequences,” Fadell said, like the way social platforms so relentlessly hijack our minds. Users would obviously love to have free things, he added, but Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest want to make money. The user isn’t the customer for these services—it’s Coca Cola, Nike, or whoever is buying ads targeted at you.
Video games have been steadily becoming more realistic since their first creation. Conversations about this progress has mostly centered around graphical enhancements and tech such as virtual reality that strive to better immerse the player in the fictional world in which they play. But graphical and visual enhancements aren't the only form of realism in which video games have progressed. More unsung have been the enhancements in pure data and detail in these games. For this type of progress, one need only look to management-style simulations games, such as those of the sports realm. In games centered on managing sports franchises, the depth of detail that has emerged has become somewhat breathtaking. Baseball sims, such as the excellent Out of the Park series, are an example of this as is the equally deep Football Manager series for soccer fans.
In September 2016, we learned that the University of New Hampshire was going to use $1 million that an incredibly frugal librarian saved while working as a library cataloger for 50 years to buy a new scoreboard for its stadium.
Now, an enraging investigative piece by Craig Fehrman in Deadspin reveals how the university cynically planned to spin its decision to blow $1m of this librarian's generous gift on a useless frippery for its ill-starred football team while only directing $100k of his donation to the library he loved.
Someone is going to commercialize a general purpose, universal quantum computer first, and Intel wants to be the first. So does Google. So does IBM. And D-Wave is pretty sure it already has done this, even if many academics and a slew of upstart competitors don’t agree. What we can all agree on is that there is a very long road ahead in the development of quantum computing, and it will be a costly endeavor that could nonetheless help solve some intractable problems.
A US cancer group has provided a series of recommendations to the South African government on ways to improve the country’s draft national intellectual property policy, including greater transparency, voluntary licensing, and the use of compulsory licences.
The Union of Affordable Cancer Treatment (UACT) wrote a letter to the South African Minister of Trade and Industry raising concerns about the South African draft national policy on intellectual property.
What is it exactly that makes not storing sensitive customer data unprotected on an Amazon server so difficult for some people to understand?
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 adults (read: almost everybody) similarly just sitting on an Amazon server without protection. Time Warner Cable (4 million impacted users) and an auto-tracking firm named SVR Tracking (540,000 users) also did the same thing.
Equifax isn't the only credit-reporting behemoth with a website redirecting visitors to fake Adobe Flash updates. A security researcher from AV provider Malwarebytes said transunioncentroamerica.com, a TransUnion site serving people in Central America, is also sending visitors to the fraudulent updates and other types of malicious pages.
As Ars reported late Wednesday night, a portion of Equifax's website was redirecting visitors to a page that was delivering fraudulent Adobe Flash updates. When clicked, the files infected visitors' computers with adware that was detected by only three of 65 antivirus providers. On Thursday afternoon, Equifax officials said the mishap was the result of a third-party service Equifax was using to collect website-performance data and that the "vendor's code running on an Equifax website was serving malicious content." Equifax initially shut down the affected portion of its site, but the company has since restored it after removing the malicious content.
The airline operates three data centres in Chicago, Denver and San Francisco, which collectively house nine Oracle converged Oracle SuperClusters, as well as HP blade servers running Oracle Linux.
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Unix engineering senior manager Marshall Weymouth told the recent Oracle Openworld 2017 conference that the airline's security team wanted the Windows and Linux teams to synchronise their patch cycles.
Thanks to containers and microservices, the way we are building software is quickly changing. But as with all change, these new models also introduce new problems. You probably still want to know who actually built a given container and what’s running in it. To get a handle on this, Google, JFrog, Red Hat, IBM, Black Duck, Twistlock, Aqua Security and CoreOS today announced Grafeas (“scribe” in Greek), a new joint open-source project that provides users with a standardized way for auditing and governing their software supply chain.
hyattHyatt said its cyber security team discovered signs of unauthorized access to payment card information from cards manually entered or swiped at the front desk of certain Hyatt-managed locations between March 18, 2017 and July 2, 2017.
The hackers [sic] had “full and unfettered access” to the information for four months last year, before the Australian Signals Directorate was tipped about the breach in November.
This is an interesting security vulnerability: because it is so easy to impersonate iOS password prompts, a malicious app can steal your password just by asking.
On Wednesday, security researcher Randy Abrams visited the Equifax site to contest bad information in his credit report and was attacked by malicious software that tried to get him to download a fake Flash updater that was a vector for an obscure piece of malware called Adware.Eorezo.
The alternative is not good—meaning that you had no idea of the DDOS attack, and now you’re playing cloud security whack-a-mole to fend off the attack until you can put more permanent solutions in place. Of course, other types of breaches could be much worse, in terms of their impact on the enterprise.
On Thursday, the Associated Press released the first audio recording of the sound that some diplomats say they heard during mystery attacks in Havana, Cuba. Those attacks have so far left 22 Americans with a puzzling range of symptoms, from brain injuries to hearing loss.
President Trump has threatened to retaliate against NBC, following NBC’s report that Trump is seeking a tenfold increase in the United States’ nuclear weapons arsenal. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” The federal government licenses television airwaves through the FCC. Trump went on to tweet, “Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!” The threats drew immediate concerns Trump is undermining the First Amendment. This is constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams.
In Syria, the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS in Raqqa said Wednesday it will not accept a negotiated withdrawal to end the fighting in the northeastern Syrian city that was once ISIS’s de facto capital. Thousands of civilians remain trapped in the 2.5 square miles still controlled by ISIS. Activists say more than 1,000 civilians have already been killed since the U.S.-led offensive to seize control of the city began in June. The journalistic monitoring group Airwars says dozens of civilians have reportedly been killed in the last week, including in a barrage of airstrikes on October 6, which reportedly collapsed a number of apartment buildings, killing up to 40 people. Meanwhile, in eastern Syria, tens of thousands of civilians have been displaced by fighting against ISIS in Deir ez-Zor. This is Alaa, speaking from a makeshift refugee camp.
America’s 2 million truckers have long been mythologised in popular culture. But self-driving trucks are set to lay waste to one of the country’s most beloved jobs – and the fallout could be huge
The rise is remarkable because there has been quite a bit of unfavorable news about Bitcoin in recent weeks. China, one of the biggest markets for Bitcoin, is shutting down trading. The Bitcoin community faces ongoing acrimony over how to scale the Bitcoin network. A contentious fork split the Bitcoin network in two in August, and there might be another schism in the Bitcoin community come November.
Though it didn't feel like it at the time, the years preceding 2017 now resemble an economic golden age for the UK. After the damage imposed by the financial crisis and excessive austerity, Britain recovered to become the fastest growing G7 country. Real earnings finally rose as wages increased and inflation fell (income per person grew by 3.5 per cent in 2015).
And then the Brexit vote happened. Though the immediate recession that the Treasury and others forecast did not materialise, the UK has already paid a significant price. Having previously been the fastest growing G7 country, Britain is now the slowest. Real earnings are again in decline owing to the inflationary spike caused by the pound's depreciation (the UK has the lowest growth and the highest inflation - stagflation - of any major EU economy). Firms have delayed investment for fear of future chaos and consumer confidence has plummeted. EU negotiator Michel Barner's warning of a "very disturbing" deadlock in the Brexit talks reflects and reinforces all of these maladies.
From the knuckles upwards, at least three of his fingers were missing. Frostbite last winter, he said. Some of his toes had gone too. Someone had found him unconscious with hypothermia, and he had spent months in hospital before once again living on the street. He said he needed €£17 for a one-night stay in a hostel: I gave him a fiver and some cigarettes, and we talked some more.
David Davis, the Brexit secretary, has been threatened with legal action over his refusal to publish 50 secret studies commissioned on the impact of Brexit.
Lawyers acting for the Good Law Project, which is bringing the action jointly with the Green party MEP Molly Scott Cato, wrote to the Brexit department and Treasury on Thursday demanding the release of the documents. They said that failure to do so within 14 days would result in the issue of judicial review proceedings before the high court in an attempt to force their release.
The 50 studies into the impact of Brexit on different industries were commissioned earlier this year but the government has argued that publishing them could damage the UK’s negotiating position with Brussels.
Jolyon Maugham QC, who runs the GLP, said he would not bring the case without believing it had “good, serious prospects” of succeeding. He said he had received legal advice that the government may have a duty under common law to publish the studies into the potential impact on jobs and living standards.
“It seems to me the government’s reluctance to release these studies is born not of its ability to damage our negotiating position but what’s politically expedient,” he said.
A top Facebook executive said Thursday that the company regrets how Russian influence on the social network played out in the run-up to last year's presidential election.
Amidst the hellish chaos of the Donald Trump catastrophe, it’s more essential than ever to understand how he got into the White House and who put him there. Then we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
In her recent blame-everybody-else-while-doing-nothing screed, “What Happened,” Hillary Clinton fingers James Comey, the Russians and Bernie Sanders.
But, in fact, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry put this madman in office.
This trio of multi-millionaire corporate Democrats won the presidential races of 2000, 2004 and 2016. Then they lay down, said hardly a word and did even less as they let George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump rule the land.
The Victorian Women’s Trust, a not-for-profit organisation that supports women and girls through research and advocacy, has been banned by Facebook from advertising a tote bag for sale as part of a fundraising drive.
America’s commitment to freedom of speech, embodied in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, is under increasing pressure everywhere from liberal university campuses to the White House. Now even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) appears torn over which side it should be on in the new free-speech wars.
The ACLU has long been a beacon of liberty in the Western world, whose commitment to free speech for all puts to shame pallid imitators such as the UK’s misnamed Liberty lobby group. If the ACLU joins the retreat from an absolute defence of free speech, then…
The trouble centres on the ACLU’s defence of free-speech rights for the ‘alt-right’ and neo-Nazis, most notably around the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that ended with an anti-fascist protester being run down and killed.
Rose McGowan had a hold placed on her Twitter account Wednesday night, an act that quickly sparked outrage among the many users who have been following her posts ever since news first broke of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
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She added a screenshot from a message from Twitter telling her that she had violated their terms of service and she would be locked out for 12 hours once she deleted certain tweets. She posted the message late Wednesday night.
“It's going to be a big challenge to recognize that the world is shrinking.” This quote comes toward the end of Chinese contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei's Human Flow, a documentary built around intuitive contradictions: It's a production of massive scale that, at the same time, is most intent on capturing the small details of the lives affected by the global refugee crisis. Ai understands that his images, of refugees wrapped in glimmering golden thermal blankets and boats invisible in the darkness but for a mass of orange life vests, represent the unfortunate but inescapable iconography of our time.
In a Columbus Day scandal for the ages, a measured but provocative essay reconsidering the evils of colonialism got the axe a month after its publication. First, critics of Portland State University political science professor Bruce Gilley’s “The Case for Colonialism” launched a 10,000-signature petition. Then, there were mass resignations from the board at the Third World Quarterly. Next, an apology from the author—and finally, what did it in, per the publisher: “serious and credible threats of personal violence…linked to the publication of this essay.” From whom, they don’t say.
More libel-related bullshittery happening on the internet. And, again, Eugene Volokh is on top of it. Between him, Paul Levy of Public Citizen, and Pissed Consumer, we've seen a huge amount of shady-to-completely-fraudulent behavior by lawyers and rep management firms exposed. This is more of the same, although it doesn't appear anyone in the SEO business was involved.
Jordan Wirsz is an investment manager with a problem. He's previously gotten in trouble with state regulators for running investment schemes without a license. It's not a huge problem, but it's enough to make people think twice before trusting him with their money.
On the flip side of that support was her Twitter wrath toward Ben Affleck, who released a statement denouncing Weinstein this week. “You lie,” she said in one tweet, tagging the actor’s Twitter handle. McGowan has spent considerable time over the past few days calling out Affleck and other powerful individuals whom she believed had prior knowledge of Weinstein’s behavior.
Overnight on Thursday, one of those tweets got McGowan temporarily suspended for the platform. The actress posted an image of a message she received from Twitter to her Instagram account:
Apple iPhone X’s Face ID and TrueDepth camera are the new talks of the town. This feature is also expected to arrive on iPad Pro next year. The newest flagship from Apple doesn’t include the Touch ID fingerprint sensor which has been the companion of the home button since years.
Via Josh Taylor, we learn of the recently released "Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity Matching Services", which is a fancy way of saying that the federal government and Australian state and territory governments had agreed to work together on a big face recognition surveillance system. But the truly incredible thing is that these Australian governments have decided to try to out-Orwell Orwell, by arguing that pervasive facial recognition is actually... good for privacy.
Back in 2015, the Israeli government hacked into the computers of Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm that develops the antivirus of the same name. What they found was beyond anything expected – they discovered hacking tools that originated from the US National Security Agency.
Germany’s BSI federal cyber agency said on Wednesday it had no evidence to back media reports that Russian hackers used Kaspersky Lab antivirus software to spy on U.S. authorities.
The company has revealed that it will begin teaching the system by feeding thousands of videos into its computer vision model alongside official photos of porn stars. Pornhub will tag vidoes based on the results of this effort, with users requested to “upvote” or “downvote” the porn star tags attached to the video.
The new system is designed to complement the existing setup, whereby viewers manually tag videos.
Anthony Novak alleges federal civil rights violations in the aftermath of his 2016 arrest by the police department of Parma, just south of Cleveland. The agency issued an advisory last year to citizens saying the page wasn't real and that "the public should disregard any and all information posted on the fake Facebook account."
Parma police announced an investigation into the page the day it was created. Novak, 28, took the page down less than 12 hours after putting it up. Officers sent Facebook a letter requesting that the Menlo Park, California-based company shut the page down, and they issued a subpoena to obtain Novak's identity.
When you've got an official narrative to deliver, you need everyone to pitch in to keep it from falling apart. No one can say ICE didn't try. The Trump administration -- bolstered by supporting statements conjecture from DOJ and DHS officials -- has portrayed undocumented immigrants as little more than nomadic thugs. Unfortunately, there's hardly any evidence available to back up the assertion that people here illegally are more likely to commit serious criminal acts.
Back in February, shortly after Trump handed down immigration-focused executive orders, ICE went all in on arresting undocumented visitors and immigrants. Included in this push was a focus on so-called "sanctuary cities" like Austin, Texas, which had vowed to push back against Trump's anti-immigrant actions.
In mid-August, Ronan Farrow, an NBC News contributor, had secured an interview with a woman who was willing to appear on camera, in silhouette, her identity concealed, and say Harvey Weinstein had raped her, according to four people with close knowledge of the reporting. It was a pivotal moment in a testy, months-long process of reporting a story that had bedeviled a generation of media and Hollywood reporters.
Farrow had a lot of material already. In March, he had acquired a damning and much-coveted audio recording in which Weinstein admits to having groped an Italian model. He had interviews with former executives and assistants who’d worked closely with Weinstein who spoke about the culture of harassment and abuse he perpetrated. And now he had someone ready to accuse Weinstein of rape, on camera.
In Hollywood, new revelations about Harvey Weinstein have surfaced, showing his studio, Weinstein Company, knew for at least two years that he had been paying off women who accused him of sexual harassment and assault. Weinstein has been fired from the company, as a slew of women have come forward to accuse Weinstein of sexual harassment, assault and rape. Among his accusers are some of Hollywood’s top actresses: Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Rose McGowan. Many are now asking why Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance refused to prosecute Weinstein after he confessed to groping Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez in an audio recording captured in a 2015 NYPD sting operation. One of Weinstein’s lawyers at the time donated $10,000 to Vance’s election campaign only days after Vance decided not to prosecute the case. We’ll have more on Harvey Weinstein after headlines.
In 2013, a British man was arrested for planning to kidnap and brutally murder a soldier. The suspect, who had a criminal history, had posted messages on social media in support of violent jihad. In a search of his residence, the police had found a bag containing a hammer, a kitchen knife and a map with the location of a nearby army barracks.
Shortly after his arrest, the suspect was interviewed by a counter-terrorist police officer. The interviewer wanted him to provide an account of his plan, and to reveal with whom, if anyone, he has been conspiring. But the detainee – we will call him Diola – refused to divulge any information. Instead, he expounded grandiloquently on the evils of the British state for 42 minutes, with little interruption. When the interviewer attempted questions, Diola responded with scornful, finger-jabbing accusations of ignorance, naivety and moral weakness: “You don’t know how corrupt your own government is – and if you don’t care, then a curse upon you.”
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The new interviewer does not answer directly, but something about his opening speech triggers a change in Diola’s demeanour. “On the day we arrested you,” he began, “I believe that you had the intention of killing a British soldier or police officer. I don’t know the details of what happened, why you may have felt it needed to happen, or what you wanted to achieve by doing this. Only you know these things Diola. If you are willing, you’ll tell me, and if you’re not, you won’t. I can’t force you to tell me – I don’t want to force you. I’d like you to help me understand. Would you tell me about what happened?” The interviewer opens up his notebook, and shows Diola the empty pages. “You see? I don’t even have a list of questions.”
“That is beautiful,” Diola says. “Because you have treated me with consideration and respect, yes I will tell you now. But only to help you understand what is really happening in this country.”
For those who wonder why it’s taken the United States so long to get justice at Guantánamo’s war court, Mark Fallon, the former NCIS special agent entrusted to help build cases, offers an explanation in his frustratingly censored memoir, “Unjustifiable Means.”
In short, the book subtitled “The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon and U.S. Government Conspired to Torture” makes the case that the U.S. military and spy agency contaminated some cases with interrogations that were untrustworthy and unprofessional, if not unlawful.
The book will be available for purchase Oct. 24.
Thanks to an investigation by Norwegian newspaper VG, a long-running child porn operation by Australian police has been (inadvertently) uncovered. An IT specialist at VG was monitoring forum activity and only stumbled on law enforcement's involvement on accident.
In comparison to the FBI's takeover of the Playpen site, the Taskforce Argos operation was epic. The FBI held onto the seized Playpen seizure for only a couple of weeks. The Australian police served as replacement administrators for eleven months.
The government's turn as child porn site administrators began with the arrest of two men in the United States, one of them a Canadian citizen. Both were apparently actively abusing children as well as running the dark web site. According to data gathered by investigators, Childs Play had more than a 1 million registered users by the time it was shut down. (Estimates suggest fewer than 5,000 accounts could be considered active, however.) Based on estimates from multiple countries now involved in the law enforcement action, the eleven-month hosting effort has resulted in nearly 1,000 suspects being identified. Some have already been arrested.
The Federal Communications Commission is considering whether it should collect more accurate data about broadband deployment in the US, but cable and telecom lobby groups are urging the FCC to maintain the status quo.
Currently, the FCC's "Form 477" data collection program requires Internet service providers to identify the census blocks in which they provide residential or business Internet service and the maximum speeds offered in each block. ISPs are also supposed to identify the census blocks that are near enough to their networks that they could provide service within a reasonable timeframe.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai still hasn't publicly responded to President Trump's call for NBC and other networks to have their FCC licenses challenged, and Democratic lawmakers are stepping up the pressure.
Comcast is increasingly making demands in TV programming contract negotiations that would force its smaller rivals to raise their minimum cable TV prices, a lobby group for small cable companies told the Federal Communications Commission yesterday.
The American Cable Association (ACA), which represents nearly 800 small and medium-sized cable operators, asked the FCC to investigate the practice and prohibit it under its program access rules.
While the lack of competition in residential broadband gets plenty of well-deserved attention, the business broadband market in the United States may be even worse. Just one of three companies (Verizon, AT&T, or CenturyLink) dominate what's dubbed the business data services (BDS) market, which connects everything from cellular towers to ATMs to the broader internet. According to the FCC's own data (pdf), 73% of the special access market is controlled by one ISP, 24% of markets usually "enjoy" duopoly control, and only a tiny fraction of markets have more than two choices of BDS providers.
We've already noted how, despite some empty promises by Sprint and Japanese-owner Softbank, the company's (second) attempted merger with T-Mobile will be a notable job killer. How bad will the damage be? At least one analyst predicts the total number of jobs lost could be more than the total number of people Sprint currently employs (around 28,000). Other analysts estimate the deal could kill something closer to 20,000 jobs, and even the most optimistic tallies put the job damage at somewhere closer to 10,000 lost positions -- most of them either in retail (as duplicate stores are closed) or among redundant management positions.
The Pirate Bay the first major website caught running crypto coin miner. Last month, it was found that the website was running a JavaScript-based miner that mined Monero digital coins using your CPU power.
Back then, the miner was tested only briefly to find out the economic potential of mining. Now, the website has started mining again using the embedded code. This time, the miner runs through an ad script, instead of being embedded in website’s core code.
Section 108 of copyright law doesn't get very much attention (though, we did just mention it in regards to an archive of Howard Stern/Donald Trump interviews). It's the part of the law that grants some fairly narrow exceptions to copyright for libraries and archives. In short, it was a recognition that libraries and archives are good and important things, and copyright law under the 1976 Copyright Act would basically make them illegal. Rather than fixing the fact that copyright law was too broad, Section 108 simply carved out a few important exceptions. Many of those exceptions are, unfortunately, under attack from all the usual sources.
However Section 108 is important to protect until we fix wider problems with copyright law. Of course, some parts of 108 have rarely, if ever, been tested. The Internet Archive is looking to fix that. It just announced that it is making a bunch of books published between 1923 and 1941 available on the Archive. As you may know from the handy dandy public domain term chart at Cornell, thanks to the 1976 Copyright Act (and various extensions) tons of works that should have been in the public domain long before now have been locked up and unavailable. The key date is 1923. Works before that are clearly in the public domain. After that, it gets... fuzzy.
Popcorn Time creator Federico Abad is part of a new team prepping a BitTorrent and blockchain powered YouTube competitor. In just under two weeks time, Flixxo will begin its token sale, kicking off a platform that will reward users for both creating, producing, and distributing content using BitTorrent.