It’s always a good idea to start a new year with renewed intentions to be even better users and administrators of our Linux systems. For auld lang syne (for the sake of old times), let's touch on some of the ways we might improve our system practices in 2018.
Linux Journal was a print magazine for 17+ years, then a digital one for the next 7+. What shall we be now? That's the Big Question, and there are many answers, some of which are already settled.
Fifteen years later, 2 billion smartphones have shipped worldwide, and Microsoft’s mobile OS share is just 1%.
Amazon's cloud business quietly just took a big step outside the cloud.
Last month, soon after Amazon Web Service's giant tech conference, the company started offering its enterprise customers a new version of the Linux operating system it calls Linux 2. The new product marks a departure for the cloud-computing juggernaut, as the software can be installed on customers' servers rather than run from Amazon's data centers.
Amazon will rent access to Linux 2 to its cloud customers. But it's also making the software available for companies to install on their servers. There they can use it to run many of the most popular server software programs and technologies, including Microsoft's Hyper-V, VMware, Oracle's VM VirtualBox, Docker, and Amazon's Docker alternative, Amazon Machine Image.
The noticeable spike in Apache-powered domains in May 2013 was caused by the largest hosting company of the time, GoDaddy, switching a large number of its domains from Microsoft IIS to Apache Traffic Server (ATS) . GoDaddy switched back to using IIS 7.5 a few months later.
Today, Apache still has the largest market share by number of domains, with 81.4 million giving it a market share of 38.2%. It also saw the largest gain this month, increasing its total by 1.53 million. This growth was closely followed by nginx, with a gain of 1.09 million domains increasing its total to 47.5 million. While Microsoft leads by overall number of hostnames, it lags in 3rd position when considering the number of unique domains those sites run on, with a total of 22.8 million.
For nearly as long as Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been in operation there has been a Amazon Linux operating system that runs on it. Initially Amazon Linux was just an optimized version of Red Hat's community Fedora Linux, adjusted to work on AWS, but it has evolved over the years.
DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams so they can build, test, and release software more quickly and reliably. The concept of DevOps is founded on building a culture of collaboration between IT and business teams, which have historically functioned in relative siloes. The promised benefits include increased trust, faster software releases, and the ability to solve critical issues quickly.
That said, implementing a successful DevOps organization requires IT leaders to think more broadly about how to spur a cultural and organizational shift within both their team and the broader organization, as opposed to simply deploying new technologies. A successful DevOps strategy requires a merged focus from both development teams and operational teams on what the company needs to meet its digital transformation objectives. Thus, it is about breaking down siloed groups of people and responsibilities, and—in their place—building teams that can multitask on technical issues and goals.
The 4.14.11, 4.9.74, 4.4.109, and 3.18.91 stable kernel updates have been released with another set of significant fixes and updates. Note that 4.14.11 also includes the remainder of the kernel page-table isolation patches.
Yesterday I posted the first benchmarks of the performance impact of these x86 PTI security changes that landed in the Linux 4.15 kernel just days ago. As outlined in that article, most of the slowdowns attributed to the page table isolation come down to slower I/O but not universally as it largely depends upon the I/O workload as well as the speed of the actual storage device. In most desktop-ish workloads, the impact of enabling x86 PTI is much less like with not seeing much of a change for gaming.
While at the moment with the mainline Linux kernel Git tree AMD CPUs enable x86 PTI and are treated as "insecure" CPUs, the AMD patch for not setting X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE will end up being honored.
The patch covered in the aforelinked article has not been merged through to Linus Torvalds' Git tree. Instead, as of a short time ago, is now living within the tip/tip.git tree. In there is also defaulting PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION to on and other recent fixes around x86 Page Table Isolation (PTI) support.
Over the past day you've likely heard lots of hysteria about a yet-to-be-fully-disclosed vulnerability that appears to affect at least several generations of Intel CPUs and affects not only Linux but also Windows and macOS. The Intel CPU issue comes down to leaking information about the kernel memory to user-space, but the full scope isn't public yet until the bug's embargo, but it's expected to be a doozy in the data center / cloud deployments. Due to the amount of interest in this issue, here are benchmarks of a patched kernel showing the performance impact of the page table isolation patches.
For downloading files directly from the Linux command line, there are two utilities that immediately come to mind: wget and cURL. They share a lot of features and can easily get many of the same tasks accomplished.
Though they share similar features, they aren’t exactly the same. These programs fit slightly different roles and use cases, and do have traits that make each better for certain situations.
After a beta version in September and a release candidate in October, there is finally a release of KBibTeX 0.7. A tag has been set and tar balls have been published.
The only changes compared to the release candidate are attempts to fix online search issues with Google Scholar and IEEE Xplore.
There are about two months now that AtCore reached its beta stage and we release it with the test client. On my Docker Hub account, the image of AtCore(Master and Beta) was pulled more than 30 times, and based on my Analytics data the AppImage, Windows and MacOs versions were downloaded 30 times.
ââ¬â¹The browser market has always been hot with some really great offerings. Even though the Google-owned ‘Chrome’ holds the biggest share in the browser market, some of us might find it a little unsafe since it is not open-source. Nevertheless, here we compiled a list of the best open source web browsers for you.
The Calamares project as a reminder aims to be the universal installer framework for Linux systems that is distribution-agnostic and already used by Manjaro and KaOS and OpenMandriva. Calamares 3.2 is being worked on as the installer framework's next major release.
Now that we're into 2018, a Calamares 3.2-RC2 release has been made available and they hope to officially ship Calamares 3.2.0 in March.
It’s a new year, and the Calamares 3.1 series has reached 3.1.12, and I’ve been saying that it’s time to switch to Calamares 3.2 development in earnest for some time now. Let’s revisit the Calamares 3.2 plan, and talk about the next three months.
It has been a full year here at the Fedora Magazine, and now it is over, we are looking back at some of the awesome content from our contributors. Here are some of the best articles from our contributors that are useful for system administrators.
The Wine maintenance release 2.0.4 is now available.
While the Linux world is waiting impatiently for the major Wine 3.0 release, which was promised to use by the end of 2017, the Wine team announced today the availability of Wine 2.0.4.
Wine 2.0.4 is the fourth stability and bugfix release of the Wine 2.0 stable series of the open-source compatibility layer capable of running Windows apps and games on Linux-based and UNIX-like operating systems.
While Wine 3.0 is expected to be released later this month, Wine 2.0.4 is available right now as the current stable release for running Windows programs on Linux.
Continuing our tradition and a day later than last year, the Linux 2017 GOTY Awards are now open for nominations.
I love space, I love how mysterious and dangerous it is and to be able to fly around in a game like Helium Rain [Steam] is fantastic. I decided to have a chat with the developer and they’re very positive about Linux gaming.
We’ve covered Helium Rain here a few times before, so hopefully some of you will be familiar with it. Without further rambling, let's begin!
Sometimes, late at night, I endlessly browse the internet to find Linux games worth covering. I don't always find something, but last night I came across the tactical third-person shooter Task Force [Steam, Official Site].
To my surprise, the Steam store page has Linux system requirements, so I dug a little deeper.
GOG have rescued another classic game, this time it's Death Gate and it comes with a Linux version wrapped up with DOSBox.
Originally released in 1994, this retro adventure game is loosely based on The Death Gate Cycle series of books from Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
Insurgency: Sandstorm the newest FPS game from New World Interactive is now entering a closed-alpha phase. The sad news is that Linux (and Mac) will see a delayed release. There's quite a lot of information to parse in their latest blog post, so I will only highlight some of the big stuff.
Over the last couple of days, Valve has faced some criticism from Linux players after reports came in that automatic VAC bans were being passed down to those with ‘catbot’ in their Linux username. For those who don’t know, a catbot is an aiming cheat for Team Fortress 2, for a while it went undetected by the VAC anti-cheat system, but recently the ban hammer finally came down on those players. This led to some of them claiming foul play on VAC’s part.
So it seems that the report below was incorrect. I initially wrote that Valve was banning Linux users with Linux usernames that included the word ‘catbot’, but Valve has said those claims were a “tactic employed by cheaters to try and sow discord and distrust among anticheat systems”.
Valve has responded to accusations that it is automatically banning Linux Steam accounts simply for having certain phrases in their usernames, calling the claims "a tactic employed by cheaters to try and sow discord and distrust among anticheat systems".
The reports first surfaced over the weekend, when some users took to Valve's github bug repositories claiming that Steam accounts on Linux featuring the phrase "catbot" were being banned by Valve's anti-cheating software.
"Catbot" is a name associated with a type of nuisance, auto-aim cheat bot, often seen in the likes of Team Fortress 2. Reports suggested that all Linux accounts with "catbot" in their name were being blanket banned by Valve, regardless of whether cheating had occurred.
Valve software engineer John McDonald made the statement on the associated Reddit story, and you can read it in full here. He says simply "the bug report is incorrect," and hypothesises that it and many other posts in the thread are an attempt to foment distrust of anticheat systems.
If you're in the mood to pick up some cheap games the Humble Staff Picks Bundle: Scribble is now available and it has a few Linux games.
With the recently published Initial Benchmarks Of The Performance Impact Resulting From Linux's x86 Security Changes, one of the common questions that came up is whether gaming performance is adversely affected by the x86 Page Table Isolation changes recently merged to the Linux kernel.
After languishing for nearly half a decade, I recently dusted off the code for VWM. Although the original release worked well, it never quite satisfied my technical idealism. There were lots of things I wanted to implement, fix, or clean-up, but none of them were trivial. But let me digress for a bit…
What is VWM? Viper Window Manger (VWM) is a lightweight window manager for the console. You heard right! VWM is a window manager for the console. It’s built on top of libviper which is a convenience layer on top of ncurses and a GTK-like framework for rapidly creating console programs.
Coming one and a half months after the KDE Plasma 5.11.4 release, KDE Plasma 5.11.5 is here with more than 30 bug fixes and improvements across various of its components, such as the KWin window and composite manager, KScreenlocker screen locker, Oxygen and Breeze themes, Plasma Discover package manager, as well as Plasma Desktop, Plasma Workspace, and Plasma Addons.
"Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.11.5. Plasma 5.11 was released in January with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience," reads today's announcement. "This release adds a three week's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important."
Over the second half of 2017, KDE has been going through the ambitious effort of having its community propose and choose goals for the next 3-4 years.
These goals have been set now, and I was thrilled to learn that my proposal on Streamlined onboarding of new contributors was chosen and many other KDE contributors believed this was a goal worth pursuing in the near future and voted for it.
The other two proposals that were selected are Top-notch Usability and Productivity for Basic Software and Privacy.
While many are waiting impatiently for the release of the KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS desktop environment, the KDE community announced today on Twitter a new feature of KDE Plasma 5.13.
Yes, you're reading it right, we're talking about KDE Plasma 5.13, the version of the Linux desktop environment that will be coming after KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS, which is hitting the streets at the end of the month, on January 30, 2018.
A short-lived branch, KDE Plasma 5.13 will be released on June 12, 2018, and it appears that it brings better web browser integration by allowing users to control and monitor various aspects of their web browser like playback, downloads, and tabs.
One of the new features being worked on by KDE developers in the new year is better desktop integration with web browsers.
Expected to arrive with Plasma 5.13 is better desktop integration with Chrome/Chromium browsers and potentially Firefox too (there is an experimental Firefox add-on here). From the Plasma shell even with a minimized browser window you can now start/pause/mute any playing content, monitor browser downloads from the notification panel, and also find open browser tabs via Plasma's "Run Command" utility.
After a very long time, the KMyMoney development team is about to start the release cycle for the first release of its personal finance manager application based on KF5/Qt5. Various reports show us that people are already using the master branch in their production environment, as several team members have also done for at least a few months.
It's my pleasure to announce the first stable release of BuildStream.
BuildStream is the developer-focused project for creating a flexible and extensible framework for modelling of build and continuous integration pipelines in YAML format. BuildStream itself is written in Python.
It has been an engaging year for the Linux and open-source community. For example, Ubuntu ended Unity 8 development as well as their plans towards convergence and switched to using GNOME. Slack OS virtually rewrote its binaries to be Debian-based; Kali Linux became more popular, and Skype finally released a Linux version worth writing home about.
With such an eventful 2017 for most Linux distributions, I imagine many of our (potential) readers are wondering which Linux distributions have been the hottest this year, and probably why.
Linux is known to serve the needs of everyone. If you’re having some old desktop or laptop, there are many lightweight Linux distros that you can install and enjoy a lag-free computing experience. From a variety of options, you can choose Puppy Linux, Lubuntu, or Linux Lite. You can also install Arch Linux or Debian and use a lightweight desktop environment.
Some of you might be running insecure Windows XP on your old computers due to machine’s outdated hardware configuration. But, you don’t need to do that anymore. There are tons of Linux distributions that are specifically built to cater the needs of such laptops and desktops. Apart from being lightweight, these operating systems are fast and secure.
The launch of Amazon Linux 2 marks Amazon's most concerted foray in to the enterprise yet, a move that is some suggest fear will see it compete against Red Hat.
In their current form, these technologies are relatively new. They bring a lot of useful capabilities to IT operations. They also require management capabilities to evolve alongside. Hybrid cloud management needs functions like self-service access under policy-based control, metering and billing, intelligent workload placement, system image provisioning, capacity planning, governance, and lifecycle management—features that often go above and beyond what’s baked into the cloud infrastructure. At the same time, hybrid cloud management needs to fulfill its overarching goal of providing consistency across hybrid infrastructures.
Our journey to OpenShift across multiple clouds has taken three parallel paths: Changing our culture, rethinking the application lifecycle, and evolving our infrastructure. This post, the last one in our 3-part series, describes how we're working around the infrastructure differences of our various clouds.
The two virtual private server (VPS) hosting providers Linode and Vultr have been offering server instances of Fedora Server with Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) enforcement disabled by default. New instances deployed with Fedora Server 27 now enable SELinux in enforcing mode by default; aligning them to the upstream Fedora defaults.
SELinux is a mandatory access control system managed by a set of security policies that the Kernel use to limit what processes and users can do on the system. One of Fedora’s differentiating features compared to other Linux distributions is its well-maintained and low-friction default SELinux policy set.
In the Juju GUI 2.11.1 release, we are excited to bring a new feature we’ve been working on for a while now: the shell in the GUI.
The GUI is a powerful tool, but at times the command-line is necessary. For instance, the ability to SSH into a unit helps for debugging processes or accessing data directly. Running debug-hooks is another: if a unit is stopped during one of its hooks and you need to see if you can get it up and running, sometimes debug-hooks is your best bet.
However, not all developer situations have the CLI available. If you’re accessing your environment from Windows, getting to the tools you need from the CLI isn’t trivial.
To address these cases, we’ve developed the jujushell functionality.
Linspire is a Linux distribution that’s designed to be easy for Windows users to learn. In fact, the original developers used to call the operating system Lindows, before changing the name.
About 16 years ago, a for-pay Linux distribution caused quite a stir all because of its name -- Lindows. Yes, someone actually thought kicking the billion dollar hornets nest that is Microsoft by playing off of the "Windows" name was a good idea. To be honest, from a marketing perspective, it was brilliant -- it got tons of free press. Microsoft eventually killed the Lindows name by use of money and the legal system, however. Ultimately, the Linux distro was renamed "Linspire." Comically, there was a Lindows Insiders program way before Windows Insiders!
After losing the Lindows name, the operating system largely fell out of the spotlight, and its 15 minutes of fame ended. After all, without the gimmicky name, it was hard to compete with free Linux distros. Not to mention, Richard Stallman famously denounced the OS for its non-free ways. The company eventually created a free version of its OS called Freespire, but by 2008, both projects were shut down by its then-owner, Xandros. Today, however, a new Linspire owner emerges -- PC/OpenSystems LLC. And yes, Lindows is rising from the grave -- as Freespire 3.0 and Linspire 7.0!
Do you remember the Lindows Linux distro, which aimed to make the process of using Linux and running Windows applications on Linux much easier? For those who need a refresher, Lindows based its Windows compatibility on Wine API. Then, it developed program named CNR to serve as a GUI-based means to download/install applications. Later, Microsoft sued Lindows, Inc. and the case was settled after the Lindows trademark was transferred to Microsoft, changing the name to Linspire.
GTK 3.22 is a major stable release for GTK3. From there on, the theming engine and the APIs are stable. This is a great milestone for GTK3. It also means Linux Mint 19.x (which will become our main development platform) will use the same version of GTK as LMDE 3, and distributions which use components we develop, such as Fedora, Arch..etc. This should ease development and increase the quality of these components outside of Linux Mint.
With the recent release of Linux Mint 18.3, attention has now shifted to the Linux Mint 19.x series which will represent the biggest update the Linux distribution will have seen since 2016. The first of the four releases of the new series, simply known as Linux Mint 19, will be dubbed Tara and all subsequent releases of the series should also begin with the letter T with the second letter going further through the alphabet for each release, for example, the Linux Mint 18 releases were called Sarah, Serena, Sonya, and Sylvia.
Unfortunately, 2017 was not the much-fabled year of the Linux desktop. Hell, that might not ever happen. With Windows 10 being such a disappointment for many, however, it is definitely a possibility. Maybe 2018 will be the year...
One such desktop operating system that consistently delights users is Linux Mint. Today, we get some information about the upcoming version 19. The biggest news is that it will be called "Tara." If you aren’t aware, the operating system is always named after a woman.
The Linux Mint Translation Guide is ready.
Last summer the embedded Linux OpenWRT and LEDE projects voted in favor of re-merging their efforts while now in 2018 that effort is coming back together now that the logistics have been addressed.
The re-merged project is unifying under the long-standing OpenWRT branding rather than the "Linux Embedded Development Environment" (LEDE). The project will be governed using rules established by LEDE following their creation of that fork in 2016.
Creating amazing projects is easy with a Raspberry Pi, but first you need to plug it in and set up Raspbian, the default operating system.
This guide will get you up and running in no time.
The Raspberry Pi is a wonderful microcomputer that brims with potential. With a Raspberry Pi you can build robots, learn to code, and create all kinds of weird and wonderful projects.
Hackers and enthusiasts have turned Raspberry Pi boards into fully automated weather stations, internet-connected beehives, motorised skateboards, and much more. The only limit is your imagination.
The OpenWrt and LEDE projects have announced their unification under the OpenWrt name. The old OpenWrt CC 15.05 release series will receive a limited amount of security and bug fixes, but the current LEDE 17.01 series is the most up-to-date.
Both the OpenWrt and LEDE projects are happy to announce their unification under the OpenWrt name.
After long and sometimes slowly moving discussions about the specifics of the re-merge, with multiple similar proposals but little subsequent action, we're happy to announce that both projects are about to execute the final steps of the merger.
The new, unified OpenWrt project will be governed under the rules established by the LEDE project. Active members of both the former LEDE and OpenWrt projects will continue working on the unified OpenWrt.
LEDE's fork and subsequent re-merge into OpenWrt will not alter the overall technical direction taken by the unified project. We will continue to work on improving stability and release maintenance while aiming for frequent minor releases to address critical bugs and security issues like we did with LEDE 17.01 and its four point releases until now.
Old pre-15.05 OpenWrt CC releases will not be supported by the merged project anymore, leaving these releases without any future security or bug fixes. The OpenWrt CC 15.05 release series will receive a limited amount of security and bug fixes, but is not yet fully integrated in our release automation, so binary releases are lacking behind for now.
Yesterday, OpenMobile, the company behind the ACL app, shut down their operations and switched off their website. For those that are not familiar with ACL, it stands for Application Compatibility Layer and it essentially enables Android apps to run on non-Android operating systems including Tizen, Linux, and others.
The contract between OpenMobile and Samsung was up for renewal, which Samsung chose not to renew. According to people familiar with the situation, this was the major reason for the company needing to close its doors – as Samsung was a major source of funding for the business.
iant tech Google is always making efforts to break new grounds. Since August 2016, when the mysterious Fuchsia OS was discovered as a seemingly random open-source code posted on Github by Google, several experiments have been carried out. Its been a year since the operating system has been worked on and contributed to by the developer community.
The developing community here that created Fuchsia OS was a Zircon microkernel built by Google, rather than the usual Linux kernels where Android and Chrome OS are held together.
Developers can now test out Google's mysterious Fuchsia operating system on its high-end Pixelbook.
Google has been developing the new Fuchsia OS in the open for the past year, which has caused intrigue because it hasn't explained what the Linux-free system is for, and whether Fuchsia could in future replace for Chrome OS or Android.
All those contributions are leading to growth in open source in general. In its 2017 Octoverse report, GitHub, the largest online repository for open source projects, reported that it now has more than 24 million users and more than 25 million public repositories.
Of course, some among those 25 million public repositories are more important than others. In several areas, open source projects have become the dominant technology, and IT professionals who want to keep their skills relevant need to at least be familiar with these projects.
Here are ten open source projects that, in light of current trends, will likely be particularly important for IT pros to know in 2018.
Each year, when we look back at the top government articles on Opensource.com, we see interesting case studies of government technology policies or implementations. Our most popular stories from 2017 aren't about adopting open source to solve technology problems. Instead, they demonstrate how governments and citizens are coming together through open source to solve human problems.
The Flashrom utility that's associated with the Coreboot project for reading/writing/erasing/verifying flash chips commonly for motherboard BIOS/UEFI/firmware chips has reached its long-awaited v1.0 milestone.
Shortly after Richard Stallman launched the GNU project in 1984, which marked the start of the free software movement, he wrote a manifesto explaining the project's goals.
Stallman stated repeatedly that he intended to create "free" software, but did not define what "free" meant. It was easy for readers to assume Stallman was referring simply to price, rather than control over source code, but that is what actually mattered to him. This uncertainty engendered a lasting ambiguity that endures to the present, when some uninformed computer users continue to assume that "open source" simply refers to software that costs no money.
All over the world, snow researchers and snow scientists dig holes in the snow. They look at the snow crystals, feel for strong and weak layers, and take measurements in order to predict and better understand avalanches. But snow science recently took an about-face, thanks to the open-source software known as SnowPilot.
Doug Chabot of the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center launched the SnowPilot Project during the winter of 2003-2004 after software developer Mark Kahrl wrote the program, hoping to find a way for researchers to collaborate and share their data on snow.
“Avalanche forecasters and snow researchers all over the world, they record snow pit data,” Chabot said. “We all dig holes in the snow and say what we see using a common language.”
But what Chabot realized in the early 2000s was that a large portion of snow data was being put away in desk drawers, never to be used. So he asked the question, what if we create a platform where researchers can enter their data into a worldwide database? And what if that database is accessible to everyone?
Perhaps the clearest way working on open source projects can assist in your job search is by giving you project experience. If you are a student, you may not have many concrete projects to showcase on your resume. If you are working, perhaps you can't discuss your current projects due to privacy limitations, or maybe you're not working on tasks that interest you. Either way, scouting out appealing open source projects that allow you to showcase your skills may help in your job search. These projects are great eye-catchers on resumes and can be perfect discussion topics in interviews.
In addition, many open source projects are kept in public repositories, such as GitHub, so accessing the source code is easy for anyone who wants to become involved. Also, it makes your publicly accessible code contributions easy for recruiters and other individuals at potential employers to find. The fact that these projects are open allows you to demonstrate your skills in a more concrete manner than simply discussing them in an interview.
Mapzen, a mapping platform company lauded among developers and civic hackers for its open-source approach, is shutting down.
For fans of the company, there’s a bright spot: because its data and code is open and users will still be able to run the projects they built using Mapzen tools, as well as some of the company’s tools, on their own. They have until Feb. 1 — the day the company will shut down its APIs, services and support — to grab what they need.
But for the admirers of the company, there is still a silver lining: as the data and code is available in open source and users will still be able to run the projects they built using Mapzen tools, as well as some of the company’s tools. Until February 1, when the company will shut down its APIs and support, users are free to grab all that they require.
Mozilla said last week it would delete all telemetry data collected because of a bug in the Firefox crash reporter.
According to Mozilla engineers, Firefox has been collecting information on crashed background tabs from users' browsers since Firefox 52, released in March 2017.
Firefox versions released in that time span did not respect user-set privacy settings and automatically auto-submitted crash reports to Mozilla servers. The browser maker fixed the issue with the release of Firefox 57.0.3.
Newsletter #11 is finally here, even later than usual due to an intense week in Austin where all of Mozilla’s staff and a few independent contributors gathered, followed by yours truly taking two weeks off.
DragonFlyBSD should now have initial support for Intel's latest-generation "Coffee Lake" graphics.
With these recent Intel CPUs having effectively the same graphics hardware as Kabylake but just renaming the "HD Graphics" to "UHD Graphics", the DragonFlyBSD support addition mainly comes down to adding in the new PCI IDs, similar to some of the other open-source Intel graphics driver patches elsewhere.
LLVM/Clang 6.0 has been branched, thus making LLVM/Clang 7.0 open for development on master.
The LLVM 6.0 branching has taken place a few weeks earlier than is traditionally done to satisfy an unnamed, large user of LLVM to jive with that company's internal testing processes. The branching / feature development is now over but the release candidates will not begin until mid-January.
A few days before the Christmas holiday, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) made a peace offering of sorts in an ostensible effort to resolve its trademark dispute with the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).
In September last year, SFLC sued the SFC claiming that the SFC trademark "Software Freedom Conservancy" is confusingly similar to the SFLC's "Software Freedom Law Center" trademark.
The SFLC was formed in 2005 to provide legal services for open-source projects. And in 2006, it helped set up the SFC, so it could provide infrastructure support – including legal services – for open-source developers.
That shared history and similarity of purpose has made the intellectual property dispute between two organizations rather confusing to folks in the open source community.
Bitcoin core developer Jimmy Song will open source write his book, Programming Bitcoin, to be published by O’Reilly in the Fall of 2018. Mr. Song acknowledges and tells of his discussion with noted bitcoin evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos about the best way to put together a book of this kind. Mr. Antonopoulos’ Mastering Bitcoin was also put out in open source as it was being written, allowing for comments, corrections, additions by the ecosystem. It too was eventually published by O’Reilly. In fact, Mr. Antonopoulos wrote the publisher, explaining why Mr. Song was the appropriate choice for the project.
“Farm from anywhere” is a phrase we’re likely to hear more and more of as technology enables easier access to fresh, locally grown food. We just wrote about Babylon Micro-Farms, a remote, hydroponic farm you can keep inside your living room. There’s also a healthy urban farming market: thanks to companies like Farmshelf and Smallhold, restaurants, schools, and the average consumer get better access to fresh food and more involved in the food production itself.
For university and college faculty, the start of a new year means it is once again time for our inboxes to be flooded with e-mails from students asking "Do I really need the textbook?" or "May I use an older edition?" And for good reason. The cost of textbooks has risen by 1,041 per cent since 1977, more than triple the rate of inflation. Textbooks can cost anywhere between $50 and $450 for a single course, accounting for up to 40 per cent of a postsecondary student's educational costs.
As a faculty member, I have witnessed firsthand the impact of exorbitant textbook costs on my students' educational outcomes (for a glimpse, follow the hashtag #textbookbrokeBC). According to my latest research, published in the International Review of Research on Open and Distributed Learning, 54 per cent of B.C. students do without at least one of their required textbooks, while 27 per cent take fewer courses and 17 per cent drop courses, all because of high textbook costs. What is more, these students are more likely to hold a student loan, be working more hours a week and self-identify as a visible minority.
The pre-print database for scientists to test the peer review waters was set up in 1991 as a relatively simple electronic bulletin board on a single computer.
Twenty-six years later, the site arXiv.org has surpassed a full billion downloads of papers – and receives more than 10 million submissions each month, they said. Scientific giants like Stephen Hawking and the physicists of the LIGO facility at Caltech have even debuted some of their latest publications on the site.
The organizers of the database, which is housed at the Cornell University Library, said that the pre-print method is helping to push discovery and intellectual cooperation.
‘Tis the season for people and communities to reflect and set goals- and the Rust team is no different. Last month, we published a blogpost about our accomplishments in 2017, and the teams have already begun brainstorming goals for next year.
Last year, the Rust team started a new tradition: defining a roadmap of goals for the upcoming year. We leveraged our RFC process to solicit community feedback. While we got a lot of awesome feedback on that RFC, we’d like to try something new in addition to the RFC process: a call for community blog posts for ideas of what the goals should be.
As open source software becomes more and more ubiquitous and popular, the Rust team is interested in exploring new and innovative ways to solicit community feedback and participation. We’re commited to extending and improving our community organization and outreach- and this effort is just the first of what we hope to be many iterations of new kinds of community feedback mechanisms.
Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.
Once upon a time, standards were our friends. They provided industry-accepted blueprints for building homogeneous infrastructures that were reliably interoperable. Company A could confidently build an application and — because of standards — know that it would perform as expected on infrastructure run by Company B.
Standards have somewhat fallen out of favor as the speed of digital innovation has increased. Today innumerable software applications are created by innumerable developers at an accelerating pace. Standards — once critical for achieving interoperability — have failed to adapt in this brave new world.
[...]
The bottom line is that we need to accept that “the only constant is change.” Innovation in software can bring many good things, but we need to learn how we can eliminate the silos, guard against new ones forming, create better interoperability, and simplify operational complexity. The examples above show that by taking a programmatic approach to standards, this degree of interoperability can be achieved even today.
Disqus started showing a red notification symbol at the bottom of every post. The notification is just a distraction aimed at increasing engagement with the comments. It's ugly and I don't like the distraction is introduces to my posts. This is my primary complaint.
Beyond that, there are just small annoyances. E.g. I don't need another inbox to maintain and I think the UI is a little ugly.
An electricity-conducting, environment-sensing, shape-changing machine the size of a human cell? Is that even possible?
Cornell physicists Paul McEuen and Itai Cohen not only say yes, but they've actually built the "muscle" for one.
With postdoctoral researcher Marc Miskin at the helm, the team has made a robot exoskeleton that can rapidly change its shape upon sensing chemical or thermal changes in its environment. And, they claim, these microscale machines – equipped with electronic, photonic and chemical payloads – could become a powerful platform for robotics at the size scale of biological microorganisms.
Artificial light is often seen as a sign of progress: the march of civilization shines a light in the dark; it takes back the night; it illuminates. But a chorus of scientists and advocates argues that unnaturally bright nights are bad not just for astronomers but also for nocturnal animals and even for human health.
Using two types of "designer" quantum dots, researchers are creating double-pane solar windows that generate electricity with greater efficiency and create shading and insulation for good measure. It's all made possible by a new window architecture which utilizes two different layers of low-cost quantum dots tuned to absorb different parts of the solar spectrum.
"Because of the the strong performance we can achieve with low-cost, solution-processable materials, these quantum-dot-based double-pane windows and even more complex luminescent solar concentrators offer a new way to bring down the cost of solar electricity," said lead researcher Victor Klimov. "The approach complements existing photovoltaic technology by adding high-efficiency sunlight collectors to existing solar panels or integrating them as semitransparent windows into a building's architecture."
I was a visitor to his rural Mississippi county; worse, I was a reporter from New York City.
He summed up his skepticism this way: Every time Mississippi made national news, it seemed like the reporters managed to find the one toothless person in the vicinity and shove him or her in front of the camera.
The sheriff had a point. And I had a challenge to conquer. The story I was onto was not going to flatter Mississippi. But I did promise him I would not go searching for the toothless.
In Maine, there’s a warehouse the size of a middle school gymnasium, stuffed with brand-new medical supplies and gently used medical equipment. Several pallets are piled with boxes of surgical sutures, still in their shrink wrap, each box worth hundreds of dollars. Tubs overflow with diabetes supplies and surgical instruments that may run hundreds of dollars apiece. There are bins of bandages and gauze and saline and ostomy bags and every other medical supply you can imagine. These materials, unexpired, could easily stock any hospital or clinic. But each item has actually been thrown away by a local medical facility.
The cost of health care has been rising for decades, and Americans are paying the price. In a recent Gallup poll, people cited the high cost of care as their No. 1 financial concern. It’s an enormous problem, and trying to solve it all at once brings on panic and paralysis. But after reporting for a year on the ways the medical industry blows through our money, I have one idea: Let’s end the egregious waste that’s draining our health care system.
The National Academy of Medicine has estimated the health care system wastes around $765 billion a year — about a quarter of what we spend. Eliminating all the waste could allow us to insure 150 million Americans, the Academy of Medicine said, and saving half of it could provide groceries for every household in the country for a year. Eliminating the waste would also stop our rising health care costs from eating up our wage increases. My premiums go up 9 percent next year. Same thing happened last year. Odds are your costs are rising, too.
A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.
Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel's virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.
Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features – specifically, PCID – to reduce the performance hit.
Intel chips have a massive design flaw, and both Microsoft and the Linux kernel developers are scrambling to fix it. The security hole can be patched, but the patches will make PCs (and Macs) with Intel chips slower.
We don’t know how much slowdown you’ll see yet, but one developer says a 5% slowdown will be fairly typical—at least on Linux—while certain tasks could experience slowdowns as high as 30%.
A researcher going by the name “Siguza” unveiled a 15-year-old security vulnerability in Apple’s macOS operating system that could allow an attacker to fully compromise the system. The researcher also published proof-of-concept zero-day code to his GitHub page.
Right now with the big mysterious security vulnerability causing the rush of the x86 Page Table Isolation work that landed in the Linux kernel days ago, it's believed to be a problem only affecting Intel CPUs. But at least for now the mainline kernel is still treating AMD CPUs as "insecure" and is too taking a performance hit.
Besides my initial benchmarks of the performance impact as a result of this x86 workaround in the Linux 4.15 kernel, I've been working on various other tests since yesterday and one of them was just seeing what happens on AMD hardware.
A critical security vulnerability has been reported in phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the MySQL database—which could allow remote attackers to perform dangerous database operations just by tricking administrators into clicking a link.
Discovered by an Indian security researcher, Ashutosh Barot, the vulnerability is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack and affects phpMyAdmin versions 4.7.x (prior to 4.7.7).
AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault.
I spent most of the last year reporting two sieges, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, which finally ended with the decisive defeat of Isis. This was the most important event in the Middle East in 2017, though people are already beginning to forget how dangerous the Isis caliphate was at the height of its power and even in its decline. Not so long ago, its “emirs” ruled an area in western Iraq and eastern Syria which was the size of Great Britain and Isis-inspired or organised terrorists dominated the news every few months by carrying out atrocities from Manchester to Kabul and Berlin to the Sahara. Isis retains the capacity to slaughter civilians – witness events in Sinai and Afghanistan in the last few weeks – but no longer has its own powerful centrally organised state which was what made it such a threat.
As anti-government demonstrations enter their second week in Iran and spread to several key cities, President Donald Trump tweeted it’s ”TIME FOR CHANGE!” and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley called for an emergency meeting to discuss the developments. “Despite the attention that these anti-government protesters have gotten over the past week, there was no indication … that this was a repeat of 2009. … This was not a mass uprising,” says Tehran-based reporter Reza Sayah. We also speak with Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, who notes a new budget deal in Iran’s parliament that would cut government payments to the poor and raise fuel prices 50 percent was “the straw that broke the camel’s back” prior to the protests.
A new document released by the FBI appears to support WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange's assertion that rape charges [sic] against him in Sweden were trumped up to silence his organization.
At roughly 3AM London time, Julian Assange sent another cryptic tweet featuring a 60-character code along with a link to the music video “Paper Planes” by Maya Arulpragasam (A.K.A. “M.I.A.”).
The New York Times made sure the Hillary Clinton State Department had plenty of advance warning before a damaging “Cablegate” dump was released by Wikileaks.
The feud between New York Times and WikiLeaks has reached a new high as WikiLeaks alleges that the Times warned Hillary Clinton’s State Department of their release schedule for the “Cablegate” diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks in 2010.
On December 22, a federal appeals court ruled that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) did not properly follow procedures when it banned importing elephant “trophies” – including heads, tusks, or other parts – from Zimbabwe in 2014. While the ruling was aimed at an Obama Administration policy, its impact will likely influence how the Trump administration treats trophy hunting across Africa.
Trump’s USFWS made waves in November when it announced that it was overturning the Obama-era ban, and would allow imports of elephant trophies from Zambia and Zimbabwe, the latter which was undergoing a coup at the time.
An in-depth investigation of Vietnamese Samsung production facilities peels back the shrink-wrap of Big Tech to reveal an extremely vulnerable, mostly female workforce that may be sacrificing its neurologic and reproductive health in digitized Dickensian workshops to make cutting-edge smartphones.
Back in 2012, I read an article in the New York Times that stopped me in my tracks. We were still in the midst of the jobless recovery, yet, the Times noted that “…the economy now produces as many goods and services – more, in fact – than it did before the downturn officially began in December 2007. But it does so with almost five million fewer jobs.”
The New York Times (“The Trump Effect: Business, Anticipating Less Regulation, Loosens Purse Strings,” 1/1/18) had an article touting the fact that businesses are investing more under Donald Trump than before he was elected. It notes that non-residential investment has risen at an annual rate of 6.2 percent in the first three quarters of 2017. Reporters Binyamin Appelbaum and Jim Tankersley attribute this increase to a removal of regulations, leading to a newfound sense of confidence among investors.
There are two important points worth noting about this increase in investment. First, it is not an especially rapid rate of growth. There have been many periods in both the recent and more distant past when it grew at a more rapid pace.
There is a scene in George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel 1984, where the protagonist, Winston Smith, is having a conversation with a philologist by the name of Syme. Syme is involved in a government effort to restructure the language spoken by the novel’s upper classes, those who have power or work for the ruling party. The language is called “Newspeak.” Syme’s job is to get rid of dangerous words. Here is how he describes his task: “We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. … The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime [having unorthodox thoughts] literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
The UK government uses fake content & sockpuppet accounts on social media to infiltrate activist groups & “destroy” enemies, former hacktivist Mustafa Al-Bassam claims. A shadowy unit is known to target the Middle East, he says.
Al-Bassam, who uses the alias TFlow, was a black hat hacker and one of the six core members of hacktivist group LulzSec. He is now a researcher and Computer Science PhD student at University College London, and says social media sites such as Twitter, BlogSpot and YouTube are being used by British intelligence agencies to pursue geopolitical goals.
Labour has demanded Theresa May reverse the appointment of Toby Young to the board of the new universities regulator because of what it said was a history of “homophobia and misogyny”.
It was announced last weekend that Mr Young, a right-wing journalist who has helped establish a number of free schools, is to join the board of the newly-created Office for Students.
The move sparked an angry backlash after it emerged Mr Young had previously criticised wheelchair ramps in schools as a sign of “ghastly inclusivity” and claimed working-class students at Oxford University were “universally unattractive” and “small, vaguely deformed undergraduates”.
The resistance among many - and not just those on the left - to the idea of gifting the loathsome Toby Young the taxpayer-funded sinecure of a seat on the board of the new Office for Students has now reached critical mass, so much so that the Guardian has picked up on some of the deficiencies in his candidature highlighted here on Zelo Street. Tobes has sounded appropriately regretful. But he’s not out of the woods yet.
[They] have started a crowdsourcing campaign to raise $500,000 to try to buy Gawker out of bankruptcy.
Because prudence is always in short supply but stupid is the world's foremost renewable resource, an ousted director of a Tennessee culinary school is appealing the dismissal of a defamation suit he brought against his replacement for things a journalist said.
The original lawsuit didn't live long, fortunately. Heavily quoting a Tennessean article by journalist Jim Myers, Tom Loftis -- the former head of the culinary school at the Nashville university -- sued Randy Rayburn (Loftis' replacement) over things Myers said.
Loftis apparently expected his status as a private person (given more reputational protection by courts than public figures) to overcome the deficiencies of his lawsuit. But the deficiencies won and Loftis lost, having failed to show how words written by Jim Myers were somehow libelous statements issued directly by Randy Rayburn.
Eugene Volokh has an incredible -- and incredibly disturbing -- story about how Jia Yueting, a Chinese billionaire, appears to have convinced a Washington state court to issue an unconstitutional gag order against a critic who lives in Washington state. Jia is famous for his company LeEco in China, as well as his attempt to create an electric car giant competitor to Tesla in the US called Faraday Future. Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about how Faraday Future was flailing with a series of incredible stories leaking out of the company. A large number of top execs were fleeing the company and there were reports of questionable activities, including Jia demanding that Faraday Future employees design a car for LeEco, without payment or credit. In the past year, it does not appear that things have gotten much better for Jia, and he was just ordered to return to China to deal with debts that appear to be piling up.
Indonesia’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Ministry is set to implement a new $14 million Internet censorship system from Wednesday. The new system will automatically block pornography and other content deemed to be unsuitable by the government, following years of manual monitoring which has failed to adequately police the abundance of illicit online content.
The ministry’s Information Applications Director General Semuel Pangerapan said the machine is equipped with artificial intelligence that will crawl websites and use keywords to detect inappropriate content.
One of the world’s most valuable start-ups got that way by using artificial intelligence to satisfy Chinese internet users’ voracious appetite for news and entertainment. Every day, its smartphone app feeds 120 million people personalized streams of buzzy news stories, videos of dogs frolicking in snow, GIFs of traffic mishaps and listicles such as “The World’s Ugliest Celebrities.”
Now the company is discovering the risks involved, under China’s censorship regime, in giving the people exactly what they want.
The makers of the popular news app Jinri Toutiao unveiled moves this week to allay rising concerns from the authorities. Last week, the Beijing bureau of China’s top internet regulator accused Toutiao of “spreading pornographic and vulgar information” and “causing a negative impact on public opinion online,” and it ordered that updates to several popular sections of the app be halted for 24 hours.
In response, the app’s parent company, Beijing Bytedance Technology, took down or temporarily suspended the accounts of more than 1,100 bloggers that it said had been publishing “low-quality content” on the app. It also replaced Toutiao’s “Society” section with a new section called “New Era,” which is heavy on state media coverage of government decisions.
The College Fix continues to report on the frustrating case of “Deplorable Radio,” a radio program broadcast until recently from Swarthmore College’s KUMM station. The conservative radio show was yanked from the airwaves almost immediately after one of the hosts used the word “tranny” live on-air. The station manager initially claimed that the usage of that word, which is a reputedly offensive term for transgender individuals, violated federal law; station officials later walked back this claim yet listed several other administrative reasons that the show was pulled from the airwaves, such as having an unapproved guest on the show and failing to log telemetry data per the station’s guidelines.
Newsweek ran a story Tuesday suggesting that President Donald Trump's habit of blocking people on Twitter was comparable to the blackout of entire sites instituted by Iran earlier this week.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the Trump administration has upped diplomatic pressure on Iran, demanding the regime stop blocking access to social media sites like Twitter and Instagram that were being used by protesters to organize demonstrations.
Iranian authorities have blocked Instagram and other social media platforms in response to a wave of street protests across the country this week.
The clampdown has resulted in Tor users climbing from around 6k at the beginning of December to over 10,000 at the last count as citizens seek to circumvent the controls, according to official stats.
The Islamic Republic's government has blocked Telegram and Instagram amid demonstrations, initially about economic conditions, in which at least 22 people have lost their lives.
As protests over economic instability and government censorship persist in Iran, the Hassan Rouhani government has reportedly wielded its favorite suppression tactic: blocking the internet.
Multiple reports say the government was blocking internet on mobile networks starting on Dec. 30, including social media services like Instagram and messaging services like Telegram, to try and stop the protesters from organizing and amplifying their message. This is the biggest anti-government public demonstration since 2009.
The United States on Tuesday urged Iran to stop blocking online social media and advised its citizens to set up virtual private networks, or VPNs, to circumvent censorship.
Steve Goldstein, the State Department's under-secretary for public diplomacy, denounced Iran's attempts to restrict net access and urged Iranians to find a way to log in.
"People in Iran should be able to access these sites through VPN," he said, adding that the State Department's own Farsi language Facebook page has around 700,000 subscribers.
The government of Iran has shut down mobile internet access and blocked apps including Telegram and Instagram after days of protests that exploded into widespread civil unrest. According to the Washington Post, at least two people are reported dead during the demonstrations, "the largest in Iran since an uprising over disputed election results shook the country eight years ago."
The protests began as demonstrations against Iran's precarious economic situation - a weak oil market has undermined growth and promises of reform by President Hassan Rouhani - but quickly became focused on the theocratic government. Activists in the streets demanded Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei step down, while some even demanded the return of Iran's pre-1979 monarchy.
Snowden said that state surveillance is "never about privacy. It's about power."
It is not yet an official policy because censorship is not openly accepted by the current authorities, but de facto vetoes on artistic expressions are increasing due to moralistic pressures in Brazil.
The offensive affects the artistic world in general, not just the shows or exhibitions that have been directly canceled in recent months.
“This affects all our work, because it dissuades us from fear of reactions and the sponsors will now think ten thousand times before supporting a work of art,” said Nadia Bambirra, an actress, theater director and acting coach.
With the New Year came a new law on online hate speech in Germany, forcing Twitter and Facebook to remove content more quickly in some cases. The AfD party, no stranger to stirring the online pot, is crying "censorship."
These are just some of videos put on restricted status by YouTube. All come from Prager University, run by radio-talk-show host Dennis Prager, who in October filed a lawsuit against Google alleging censorship of conservatives. Now upping the ante, Prager demands a preliminary injunction that would prohibit YouTube from restricting viewer access to its videos absent evidence of graphic nudity, violence, profanity, obscene material, hate speech, or anything that would be considered "objectively" offensive.
Presenting U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh with a free speech issue of "profound importance," Prager on Friday even nodded in court to the thoughts of net neutrality supporters.
No, but it will record whatever it sees or hears. There are ways to block radio signals (to make sure that Haven can not send out any notification), but that is an expensive step for an attacker to make. You can keep the phone inside of your hotel locker to record if anyone opens up the locker or make it watch your hallway at the house. Government agencies love to see what is inside of our computers/house(s), but they don’t like get recorded while doing so.
The NSA said its attrition rate among those specializing in science, technology and math is 5.6 percent, but, according to the newspaper, the agency's attrition rate for hackers and those working in the watch center is about 8 or 9 percent.
The National Security Agency is losing its top talent at a worrisome rate as highly skilled personnel, some disillusioned with the spy service’s leadership and an unpopular reorganization, take higher-paying, more flexible jobs in the private sector.
The National Security Agency is facing an exodus of talent to more lucrative and flexible jobs in the private sector, The Washington Post reports.
Current and former U.S. officials cited in the report said that hundreds of hackers, engineers and data scientists have left the spy agency since 2015, with low morale among the factors blamed for the loss of expertise.
There are nearly 100 pages of long, detailed complaints in the document [PDF] turned over by the DHS in response to the Knight Institute's' FOIA request. The incidents detailed are troubling, seemingly going beyond what's needed to actually secure the nation's borders. Multiple complaints show intrusive searches and questioning are routine, even if the destinations traveled to are equally routine.
It‘s basically a flip from the beginning of the year: In January, Facebook provided nearly 40 percent of publishers‘ external traffic; now that‘s down to 26 percent. And Google, which started the year at 34 percent, now generates 44 percent of traffic. Parse.ly‘s data comes from some 2,500 publishers that use its analytics service, including the Wall Street Journal, Time Inc., Mashable and Huffington Post.
The Supreme Court should recognize and give teeth to the critical, privacy-protecting limitations Congress placed on wiretaps, EFF told the court in an amicus brief we filed with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
When law enforcement officials wiretap someone’s cell phone, the law doesn’t allow them to tap any phone they want anywhere in the country. The Wiretap Act (also known as “Title III” because it comes from Title III of the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act) permits wiretapping, but only under the narrowest of circumstances and subject to restrictive requirements carefully drawn to protect extremely sensitive privacy interests.
The latest build numbered 17063 appears to omit the "skip" button on the screen where you are asked to enter a phone number to link your account. It's a feature that is handy for some of Windows' cross-device services such as Cortana, but should, theoretically be optional.
In Hollywood, more than 1,000 prominent actresses, writers and directors have launched a project aimed at combating sexual abuse and harassment in the film industry. The “Time’s Up” campaign follows on the heels of a torrent of allegations of rape, sexual assault and harassment against powerful men that began with reports into sexual abuse by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. The initiative seeks to raise $13 million for a legal defense fund to help working-class women bring sexual abuse charges. It also seeks to bring gender parity to Hollywood studios and talent agencies, while penalizing companies that tolerate persistent harassment. The campaign also seeks to end the use of nondisclosure agreements that silence victims. Among those participating are director Ava DuVernay, producer Kathleen Kennedy, and actors Natalie Portman, Reese Witherspoon, Cate Blanchett, Eva Longoria and America Ferrera.
The Sixth Circuit Appeals Court has now had the dubious privilege of hosting a legal challenge by Juggalos (as fans of the Insane Clown Posse are known). The case traces back to 2014, following the FBI's 2011 designation of Juggalos as a gang in its National Gang Threat Assessment report.
Rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court often come with great anticipation and attention, even true drama. Anxious crowds gather outside the court at dawn. Opinions first go out on paper to the waiting hands of television news interns, who sprint the documents to correspondents to be immediately deciphered on the air. Justices later announce their decisions in open court, and occasionally read aloud the opinions.
But when the court fixes mistakes in its opinions, it does so very quietly. No press releases. No public reading of corrections. For most of the court’s history, the justices have only signaled their fixes and edits by adding the word “modified” in small type to newly issued print and digital versions of the opinions.
The changes thus have proved hard to find — not just for the general public, but for lawyers and judges and scholars of the law.
Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, an advocacy group pushing for judicial transparency, thinks that’s a problem.
Something with a hint of retaliatory ugliness has reared its head in Laredo, Texas. Citizen journalist Priscilla Villarreal has been arrested for releasing information Texas law enforcement meant to keep secret. Villarreal -- a.k.a. Lagordiloca -- has been an unofficial fixture of Laredo nightlife for a few years now, cruising the town after dark to livestream footage of newsworthy events. She's well-known to local law enforcement, though not exactly well-liked, which may have something to do with her recent legal troubles.
There may be a significant shift in police interrogation methods over the next several years. The Marshall Project reports one of the nation's largest police consulting firms is abandoning a technique that has been used by a majority of law enforcement agencies over the last six decades. It's called the Reid Technique, and it's been linked to a large number of false confessions. But after fifty-plus years of religious reliance on the technique, the consulting firm says it's no longer going to be training officers to deploy it.
As part of our Documenting Hate project, we posted a story detailing how and why law enforcement agencies mishandle hate crime data, which they’re asked to report annually to the Federal Bureau of Investigations. We’re opening up the records we collected for that story so journalists can assess how their local law enforcement agencies they cover measure up.
In the course of our reporting, several large police departments told us that their lack of records on hate crimes reflected the fact that their citizens weren’t often the victims of such crimes. But our reporting found evidence of spotty record keeping across the country, in departments large and small. Some agencies, like Miami-Dade’s county police, told ProPublica that they had failed to fill out forms that would identify crimes as having a bias motivation, even when the evidence supported such a classification. Other agencies sent us records of crimes they marked as bias-motivated but were omitted from their reports to the FBI.
A decade ago, Congress gave officials at the Department of Homeland Security a year to build 60 miles of fence in the Rio Grande Valley to protect the Texas-Mexico border.
They faced determined resistance. Political leaders denounced the border fence as wasteful and ineffective. Landowners refused to sell their property for its construction. Environmentalists argued it would slice up habitat for endangered species in one of the most biodiverse regions in the country.
The officials found a savior in a politically savvy bureaucrat named Godfrey Garza Jr.
A shrewd county insider, Garza ran an obscure agency that had plans to repair 22 miles of crumbling dirt levees running along the Rio Grande, the riverine border between Texas and Mexico. Garza helped negotiate a deal: If Homeland Security would pay to fix the levees, the feds could build their fence on top of them.
A reclusive neo-Nazi who co-runs the white supremacist Daily Stormer website, and recently said Jewish children "deserve to die," has Jewish relatives on “both sides of his family,” his mother told Newsweek.
Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, who handles the technical side of Stormer alongside editor Andrew Anglin, said on a podcast last month that Jews were to blame for the website's loss of its dot com address after a white man allegedly killed peaceful protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August. Subsequently, the site has been forced to jump around the internet.
What do you do when you're faced by an existential, evolutionary shift that threatens your entire, overly-comfortable industry? Why you raise rates, of course! Comcast is one of six cable providers who have informed customers that they've raised the rates for the new year, despite the record-setting shift toward cord cutting during 2017. Everything Comcast offers is seeing price hikes of some kind, ranging from increases in the company's traditional channel bundles, a price increase for Comcast's standalone streaming platform, and even the fee charged for renting a modem (which is now $11 per month).
Although the District Court and Federal Circuit decisions reasonably cause concern among many patent prosecutors that the actions of a later attorney enforcing a patent during litigation could be used to establish an inequitable conduct ruling impugning the prosecuting attorney, we respectfully argue that Regeneron presents a rather nuanced fact pattern that should not be broadly applied—especially when the prosecuting counsel does not direct litigation strategy and tactics.
AgJunction Inc. (TSX: AJX) ("AgJunction" or the "Company"), through its wholly-owned subsidiary Novariant, Inc., a leader in automated steering and machine control technology for precision agriculture, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Western District of Texas against Raven Industries, Inc. ("Raven"). The lawsuit alleges that Raven products violate three AgJunction patents related to automated mechanical steering, implement steering and system calibration technologies.
"AgJunction has one of the most comprehensive steering and machine control IP portfolios in the industry," said Bob Barjesteh, vice president of intellectual property and general counsel for AgJunction. "These assets are critical components of our corporate strategy and integral to the success of our business and that of our partners. After several attempts to negotiate with Raven, we are left with no choice but to assert three of our patents, which are vital to hands-free steering and machine control functions."
It is a well-known fact that developing new drugs is a financially risky endeavor. The average cost of a new drug is $2.6 billion, including drug failures and time spent, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. To compound this daunting math, only 12% of drugs entering clinical trials result in an approved medicine.
Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1961 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2018, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2057.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.
For many years now, during the first week of January, we write a post about Public Domain Day. That's the day -- January 1st -- where works that have reached the statutory limit reach the public domain. The Public Domain Review has an excellent collection of the Class of 2018 -- showing what works entered the public domain this week in the "life plus 50" copyright countries (Canada, New Zealand, and many countries in Asia and Africa) and the "life plus 70" copyright countries (most of the EU, Brazil, Israel, Russia, Turkey, Nigeria). For life plus 70 countries, the works of Aleister Crowley and Winston Churchill are now in the public domain. For the life plus 50 countries, Rene Magritte's paintings, the song compositions of Woody Guthrie and Otis Redding, and the writings of Jean Toomer are now in the public domain -- among many others.
Except, as we note each and every year, there is no such "graduating class" in the US. Because, thanks to Disney's heavy lobbying, copyright keeps getting extended and extended and extended. If you're interested, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University has also put together its depressing annual "What Could Have Entered the Public Domain..." list for the US, if the law had remained as it was prior to 1978, when the maximum length of copyright was 56 years. Under that setup, Josepher Heller's Catch-22, Salinger's Franny & Zooey and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land all would have entered the public domain. Grok that. Movies including Breakfast at Tiffany's, West Side Story, and The Guns of Navarone all would have entered the public domain as well.