Akash is a blockchain-powered, open, and decentralized compute marketplace, which enables you to monetize your business's underused server capacity. With up to 85 percent of the world's compute capacity sitting unused in data centers, there's a lot of compute out there.
We definitely consider ourselves early adopters of containers, and we started packaging services in them almost as soon as Docker released its first production-ready version in the summer of 2014. Many of the customers I talk with are just now beginning — or thinking about beginning — such journeys, and they want to know everything we know. They want to know how we make it work, and how we architected it. But part of the process, I like to stress, is that they need to know what we learned from where we struggled along the way.
Industry veterans have cast predictions far and wide on what to expect in 2018. And while we can’t ensure every prediction will come true, many would agree that the container industry will continue to grow as it maintains support for businesses looking to leverage new technologies and platforms. In fact, the application container market is projected to grow from $762 million in 2016 to $2.7 billion by 2020 according to 451 Research.
With this explosive growth, it’s easy to understand why some individuals are seeing Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry as competitive projects. The reality? While there is some functional overlap between the two, they ultimately serve complementary purposes that work toward the same goal. By taking approaches that leverage both projects, organizations are actually making it easier to manage their entire cloud environment.
The explicitly flash-focused F2FS file-system is the latest noteworthy pull request on its way to the mainline Linux 4.17 kernel.
F2FS maintainer Jaegeuk Kim says most of this past round of development was focused on performance tuning and critical bug fixes for low-end devices. But there's also some new features and we surely love any and all performance work.
The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.17 merge window and that set of driver updates includes a variety of new product support.
Perhaps most significant is that the Razer Blade stealth laptop will now have working multi-touch support with Linux 4.17. Multi-touch should be squared away thanks to an independent contributor while we still wait to see how Razer's Linux laptop play will eventually pan out.
The HID updates for Linux 4.17 also include supporting the third-generation Wacom Intuos BT, a ~$100 USD pen tablet. Additionally there is support for the NSG-MR5U and NSG-MR7U Sony remote controls.
Longtime Linux sound system maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has sent in his album of updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel.
First and foremost with the Linux 4.17 sound updates is the USB Audio Class 3.0 support we previously wrote about on Phoronix. USB Audio Class 3.0 (UAC3) is a 2016 audio-over-USB specification promoted as "USB Audio over USB Type-C" and brought power management improvements, additional interrupt sources, new descriptors, and other changes while still maintaining backwards compatibility with UAC2. UAC3 is now supported by the mainline Linux kernel plus for the existing UAC2 support they now have working jack detection.
The 4.16 development cycle is shaping up to be a relatively straightforward affair with little in the way of known problems and a probable release after nine weeks of work. In comparison to the wild ride that was 4.15, 4.16 looks positively calm. Even so, there is a lot that has happened this time around; read on for a look at who contributed to this release, with a brief digression into stable kernel updates.
As of this writing, 1,774 developers have contributed 13,439 non-merge changesets during the 4.16 development cycle. That work grew the kernel by about 195,000 lines overall. By recent standards, 4.16 is a relatively calm cycle, and certainly calmer than the 14,866-changeset 4.15 cycle. Still, that is quite a bit of work to integrate in nine weeks.
Energy-aware scheduling — running a system's workload in a way that minimizes the amount of energy consumed — has been a topic of active discussion and development for some time; LWN first covered the issue at the beginning of 2012. Many approaches have been tried during the intervening years, but little in the way of generalized energy-aware scheduling work has made it into the mainline. Recently, a new patch set was posted by Dietmar Eggemann that only tries to address one aspect of the problem; perhaps the problem domain has now been simplified enough that this support can finally be merged.
In the end, the scheduler can most effectively reduce power consumption by keeping the system's CPUs in the lowest possible power states for the longest time — with "sleeping" being the state preferred over all of the others. There is a tradeoff, though, in that users tend to lack appreciation for saved power if their systems are not responsive; any energy-aware scheduling solution must also be aware of throughput and latency concerns. A failure to balance all of these objectives across the wide range of machines that run Linux has been the bane of many patches over the years.
Kernel developers go to some lengths to mark read-only data so that it can be protected by the system's memory-management unit. Memory that cannot be changed cannot be altered by an attacker to corrupt the system. But the kernel's mechanisms for managing read-only memory do not work for memory that must be initialized after the initial system bootstrap has completed. A patch set from Igor Stoppa seeks to change that situation by creating a new API just for late-initialized read-only data.
The most straightforward way to create read-only data is, of course, the C const keyword. The compiler will annotate any data marked with const, and the linker will ensure that it is placed in memory that ends up being marked read-only. But const only works at build time. The post-init read-only data mechanism, adapted from the grsecurity patch set, takes things a step further by marking data that can be made read-only once the system's initialization process has completed. Data structures that must be set up during boot, but which need not be modified thereafter, can be protected in this way.
Once initialization is completed, though, the (easy) ability to create read-only data in the kernel goes away. At that point, any additional memory needed must be allocated dynamically, and such memory is, by its nature, dynamic. So, while a kernel subsystem may well allocate memory, fill it in, and never change it again, there is no mechanism in place to actually block further modifications to that memory.
Linus Torvalds recently released version 4.16 of the Linux kernel. These releases typically occur every nine to ten weeks, and each one contains the work of more than 1,600 developers representing over 200 corporations, according to the 2017 Linux Kernel Development Report, written by Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman. In this series, we’re highlighting some of the developers who contribute to the kernel.
Steven Rostedt, Open Source Programmer at VMware, maintains the Real Time Stable releases of the Linux kernel, among other things. Rostedt is one of the original developers of the PREEMPT_RT patch and began working on it in 2004 with the goal of turning Linux into a real-time designed operating system. He is also the main author, developer, and maintainer of Ftrace, a tool designed to help developers find what is going on inside the kernel. According to the Ftrace wiki, the tool can be used for debugging or analyzing latencies and performance issues that take place outside of user-space.
From several of the pull requests covered on Phoronix this week for the in-progress Linux 4.17 kernel, there are many areas seeing improved hardware/device support with this next kernel upgrade, including the input drivers.
Last month I wrote about Phoenix RC Flight Controller support coming to Linux. That flight controller is modelled after radio controllers for model airplanes/helicopters/drones and designed for the Phoenix RC model aircraft/drone simulator on Windows, but thanks to a passionate independent developer, is now being supported on Linux. I was surprised by the interest indeed in this driver/controller support.
DXVK 0.41 is now available as the library for Wine users to have Direct3D 11 implemented over Vulkan for generally allowing higher performance than Wine's own D3D11-over-OpenGL layer.
DXVK continues making great progress for getting D3D11 over Vulkan. DXVK 0.41 improvements include a slight reduction to the overall CPU overhead, better GPU saturation for deferred contexts, and a configurable HUD. There are also bug fixes to get better in spec with SPIR-V and fixes for the games World of Warships and Nier: Automata, among other fixes.
NVIDIA has released a new version of their Video Codec SDK that serves as CUDA-based, cross-platform video encode and decode functionality that ultimately succeeds their VDPAU Linux video decode stack for GPU video coding needs.
Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the charge recently on the open-source Mali T700 GPU driver that was called "Chai" but has been renamed to "Panfrost" is now pursuing a "half-way driver" approach to testing their knowledge of the hardware's command stream.
A long available tool has been AMD's ROCm HIP that allows converting CUDA code to portable C++ code that in turn can be executed on Radeon GPUs. There is now work on getting the upstream LLVM Clang compiler's CUDA toolchain support to also support HIP.
HIP's hipify tool can convert CUDA code to HIP for execution on NVIDIA/AMD GPUs. HIP also consists of a portable C++ language for execution across GPU vendors. Those not familiar with HIP can learn more via its ROCm tool repository.
What initially got me digging into the LLVM/Clang upstreaming work was seeing on Thursday: [CUDA] Add amdgpu sub archs. Clang's CUDA code now not only listing NVIDIA GPU micro-architectures but also the Radeon GPU generations backed by the LLVM AMDGPU compiler back-end.
There's a lot of ARM work that has built up for the Linux 4.17 development cycle.
Weblate 2.20 has been released today. There are several performance improvements, new features and bug fixes.
GraphicsMagick is a free open source, modern and powerful software suite for processing images. It was initially derived from ImageMagick, however, over the years, it has grown to be a fully independent project, with a number of improvements and additional features. It runs on all Unix-like operating system such as Linux, MacOS, and also runs on Windows.
It offers a useful and efficient assortment of tools as well as libraries that allow for reading, writing, and manipulating your images in more than 88 well known formats (such as GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PNM, and TIFF).
Sometimes you want to issue a curl command against a server, but you don't really want curl to resolve the host name in the given URL and use that, you want to tell it to go elsewhere. To the "wrong" host, which in this case of course happens to be the right host. Because you know better.
Many people have seen music visualizations before, whether in a music player on their computer, at a live concert, or possibly on a home stereo system. Those visualizations may have been generated using the open-source music-visualization software library that is part of projectM. Software-based abstract visualizers first appeared along with early MP3 music players as a sort of nifty thing to watch along with listening to your MP3s. One of the most powerful and innovative of these was a plugin for Winamp known as MilkDrop, which was developed by a Nullsoft (and later NVIDIA) employee named Ryan Geiss. The plugin was extensible by using visualization equation scripts (also known as "presets").
Sometime later, a project to implement a cross-platform, MilkDrop-compatible, open-source (LGPL v2.1) music visualizer began: projectM. The main focus of the project is a library (libprojectM) to perform visualizations on audio data in realtime—using the same user-contributed script files as MilkDrop—along with reference implementations for various applications and platforms. The project, which began in 2003 and was first released in 2004, is of interest to many for its creative and unique visuals, its use by media-player projects, and its interesting design and features. After years of development and contributions, the project stalled, but now there are efforts to rejuvenate and modernize the code.
As a journalism student, I deal with both print but also multimedia forms of journalism, on a daily basis.
Generally speaking, I have always used various Adobe software for my needs, such as Audition for my audio, and Premiere for my video while in school, but I know that there is plenty of awesome and free (albeit I will concede, rarely as fully-featured) software out there that could be used to substitute. One example, is Flowblade.
Flowblade is a GNU/Linux exclusive, which is pretty cool really, given that nowadays many of the tools and applications people use on GNU/Linux are available for other systems as well. Thankfully, Flowblade is pretty sophisticated, so many may find it to be more of a suitable replacement for other software, than expected from an exclusive.
Not to be dismissive and say that all GNU/Linux exclusive software is terrible or anything, but its a fairly common opinion of less than stellar software attempting to emulate its Windows counterpart.
We’ll compare different Linux Package Managers. Between all Linux distributions, one of the things they share is the need to be able to install new software packages onto the system. Depending on the distribution, various package managers are available, allowing the user to install, manage, and remove packages easily and quickly. Package managers are very good at streamlining installs, with common installation locations and configurations. In this article, we will discuss the different available package managers, what distributions they can be used on, and what makes each unique. We will cover Debian-Based Package Managers, RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-Based Package Managers, and other custom designed package managers.
Linux based operating systems are very popular among programmers, developers and server administrators. But still, there are many new programmers unaware of the power of Linux and it’s flexibility. I’m talking about those programmers who’ve just started the career and been a Windows user for a long time.
A source code editor is a program specifically designed for editing source code of computer programs. It can be a stand-alone application or part of any IDE or web browser. It is the most important tool for programmers because editing a source code is the main job for a programmer.
Ready to become a Necromancer? Undead Horde [Official Site] from 10tons is starting to look really damn good and it's coming to Linux.
The medieval grand strategy title/kinslaying-simulator has been made free to get for a limited time. There’s also a general sale of all of its DLC.
How does it feel to be a god? You can find out as the indirect god sim 'Crest' released last month with Linux support.
A day later than intended, but here's another look at some good Linux games that are currently going for cheap.
Robocraft [Steam], the free to play build and battle game will now allow you to reconnect to certain games if you get disconnected.
Some of the major changes include: the Science Institute has been renamed the Hawking Institute, you can now adjust the Birth Control Policy for domes, the max zoom-out distance has been increased (woo!) so you might not need to resort to a mod now, the way colonists pick workplaces has been optimized, colonist will no longer take a long walk to their death for work and rover pathfinding has improved as well.
A few days ago Valve reworked the main navigation bar in its Steam Store and removed a direct link to buy Steam Machines, the Linux-based boxes it hailed as an open alternative to macOS or Windows PC gaming.
Ultimately, Valve has a hard task ahead in reviving Steam Machines: it’ll have to court not just customers, but also hardware makers and game developers to support its platform. It’s good to know that it hasn’t yet given up on an alternative OS specifically for gamers, but don’t hold your breath in wait for new Steam Machine from your favorite PC assembler.
Earlier this week, we were quick to notice that Valve had quietly removed the link to Steam Machines from the front page of the Steam Store. Now, Valve has spoken publicly about this decision, stating that it was part of a “routine cleanup” and admitting that while the Linux powered mini-PCs “aren’t exactly flying off the shelves”, Valve still wants Linux to be at the forefront of gaming in the future.
For one of our customers at Centricular we were working on a quite interesting project. Their use-case was basically to receive an as-high-as-possible number of audio RTP streams over UDP, transcode them, and then send them out via UDP again. Due to how GStreamer usually works, they were running into some performance issues.
NixOS released version 18.03 "Impala" yesterday. Highlights include "core version changes: linux: 4.9 -> 4.14, glibc: 2.25 -> 2.26, gcc: 6 -> 7, systemd: 234 -> 237"; "desktop version changes: gnome: 3.24 -> 3.26, (KDE) plasma-desktop: 5.10 -> 5.12"; the Nix package manager now defaults to 2.0 and more.
For fans of the NixOS Linux distribution that makes use of the Nix package manager, version 18.03 "Impala" is now available.
Using most any Arch Linux distro usually involves balancing the desire for hands-on control of the operating system from scratch against the attraction of convenient installation and maintenance processes. Bluestar Linux is one of the few Arch distros that gets the balancing act right.
Bluestar Linux is a GNU/Linux distribution that features up-to-date packages, an impressive range of desktop and multimedia software in the default installation, and a live desktop DVD. The live session capability is one of Bluestar's more enticing qualities.
The live session feature lets you easily check out its operation on your own hardware before actually installing the OS to your hard drive. Even better, the installation uses the Calamares installer for a smooth, automated setup. Most other Arch installations require manual installations that involve a command line nightmare. Often that leaves hopeful users frustrated when critical components fail to work on their gear.
The Open Brand Project is a collaborative effort to evolve our corporate logo and brand system. A cross-functional team of in-house designers collaborating with Pentagram, a well-known international design consultancy, are working together to simplify and modernize our logo.
The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps developers easily and quickly develop, build, and deploy container-native applications in nearly any infrastructure, public or private. But as you move from development to a large scale production environment, monitoring and security take center stage.
The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated 27 Live ISOs, carrying the 4.15.14-300 kernel.
This set of updated isos will save about 929 MB of updates after install. (for new installs.)
It has only been a few years since DNF replaced Yum as the default Fedora package-management tool; that was done for Fedora 22 in 2015, though DNF had been available for several earlier Fedora releases. Since that time, DNF development has proceeded; it started a move from Python/C to all C in 2016 and has made multiple releases over the years. From an outsider's perspective, no major changes seem necessary, which makes the announcement of DNF 3, and a move to C++, a bit surprising to some.
For many years, Yum was the package-management front-end for many RPM-based distributions, including Fedora and RHEL. But it suffered from poor performance and high memory use; part of that was attributed to its iterative dependency solver. DNF was meant to fix those problems. It uses the libsolv dependency resolution library developed by openSUSE, by way of the hawkey library.
Though it wasn't a perfect drop-in replacement for Yum, DNF did replace it. But, even though DNF performed better, often much better, than its predecessor, the project continued to focus on making it faster. Ultimately, that's a large part of the reasons behind DNF 3.
Fedora 28 has just been released in its beta version. That means it isn’t likely to be completely free of bugs and that you have a chance to participate in ensuring that it’s ready to go public on May 1.
This news won’t be particularly surprising to the more enthusiastic Fedora users. Fedora’s release cycle is a fairly regular after all. Every six months, more or less, a new Fedora release is published. Many Fedora users have come to expect to see them around May Day and Halloween each year. Yet, while not surprising, the news is still exciting because of a number of new and enhanced features.
While Ubuntu developers have decided to no longer enable auto-suspend by default as set with the new GNOME 3.28 desktop when running on AC power, Fedora developers are still debating the issue.
While there is certainly overlap between Fedora/RedHat developers and those working on GNOME, including those that sanctioned this upstream change during the GNOME 3.28 cycle, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now been summoned to voice their opinion on the matter as well as the Fedora Workstation special interest group.
After being at Canonical for a decade (aside from a brief stint at Gazzang), Dustin Kirkland who most recently served as the company's VP of Product, is joining Google.
Dustin Kirkland managed the product teams for Ubuntu server, cloud, desktop and IoT the past five years while he's been an open-source developer since the late 90's and continues to maintain many Ubuntu packages himself. Dustin is a highly-skilled developer and manager while now he will be focusing his efforts on the Google Cloud.
In 2016, Canonical, Nextcloud and WDLabs introduced the Nextcloud Box, the first IoT style device running with snaps out of the box. Besides sales of nearly 2K boxes before Western Digital shut down their research division WDLabs late last year, the snap been extremely popular with some days hitting over 10,000 downloads. Its installed base is estimated to be over 8000, making it a popular way to run a private cloud. Read our guest blog by Nextcloud’s Jos Poortvliet on to learn more about Nextcloud, the Box and how snaps help thousands of Nextcloud users keep their data under their control.
Canonical released today the beta development version (a.k.a. Final Beta) of its upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, along with the second beta for opt-in flavors.
While many of the opt-in Ubuntu flavors participated in last month's beta release, this is the first time Ubuntu 18.04 LTS gets a public beta build that users can actually download and install on their personal computers if they plan on becoming early adopters ahead of the official release later this month.
Lubuntu Bionic Beaver Final Beta (soon to be 18.04) has been released!
Thanks to the hard work of the Lubuntu team, we are pleased to announce the final beta!
The Xubuntu team are happy to announce the results of the 18.04 community wallpaper contest!
We want to send out a huge thanks to every contestant; last time we had 92 submissions but now you all made us work much harder in picking the best ones out with a total of 162 submissions!
IEI’s 3.5-inch “Wafer-ULT3/ULT4” SBC runs on Intel 6th or 7th Gen Core U-series CPUs, and offers triple display support, SATA III, 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, 2x mini-PCIe, and -20 to 60€°C support.
A few days back we reported that Google is planning to release mid-range Pixel smartphones for price-sensitive markets like India.
Now, the latest rumor from China hints towards the launch of a lower-end Pixel 3 phone. This handset is most likely to be powered by Android Go, which is basically a stripped down version of Android, customized to run on low-spec hardware.
Google’s Pixel smartphone lineup isn’t the best-selling smartphone line in the world. In fact, it’s nowhere close, with recent estimates suggesting that Google sold just 3.9 million Pixel phones globally in 2017. To put that in context, Apple sells more smartphones than that in a single day when new iPhone models first go on sale. But what the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL lack in sales, they make up for in adoration from hardcore Android fans. That makes sense, of course, since Google’s Pixel phones are the only handsets that offer a pure Android experience and receive new software updates as soon as they’re made available.
Google has already released the Android P developer preview, giving developers access to software that would run the Google Pixel 3 devices. The search engine giant hasn’t yet officially confirmed the existence of third-generation Pixel phones, neither have there been too many Google Pixel 3 leaks. But folks at XDA Developers have found first references to Google Pixel 3 in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Differences in organizational design don't necessarily make some organizations better than others—just better suited to different purposes. Any style of organization must account for its models of ownership (the way tasks get delegated, assumed, executed) and responsibility (the way accountability for those tasks gets distributed and enforced). Conventional organizations and open organizations treat these issues differently, however, and those difference can be jarring for anyone hopping transitioning from one organizational model to another. But transitions are ripe for stumbling over—oops, I mean, learning from.
Open source at its heart and essentially a web server technology, Nginx (pronounced: engine X) is the company that would like to have its name capitalised in the media but can’t, because it’s not an acronym.
Spectrum, a group communication platform that launched last year, has gone fully open source, according to an announcement from developer Max Stoiber. The software, which is hosted on GitHub, is licensed under a 3-clause BSD license.
In contrast to other commercial projects in which open sourcing is a goodwill gesture prior to the end of active development—such as with the opening of webOS following the abrupt discontinuation of the HP TouchPad—Spectrum appears very much ready to react to tickets and pull requests on GitHub. Spectrum's existing hosted option will continue to be offered even after the release of the code.
Netflix's cloud performance engineering team has released FlameScope, a performance visualization utility that allows programmers and system administrators to analyze CPU activity by generating a subsecond-offset heat map in which arbitrary spans of time can be selected by the user for further analysis by selecting a portion of the heat map, for which a flame graph is generated for corresponding block of time.
At the 2018 Open Networking Summit North America, Huawei introduced the new Dual Modes, Multi-Protocols, Multi-Instances (DMM) open source project—a protocol stack framework—which elevates different protocol stacks for networking application developers. DMM is a Fast Data Project and a part of the FD.io community, which is tailored for open source software and aims to provide high-performance networking solutions. Leveraging Huawei's expertise in providing cost-effective network solutions to customers, DMM will make it possible to use diverse protocol stacks for different apps, as well as simplify the process of developing a new protocol stack. This new framework will provide the enterprise industry with a more open, pluralistic, and reliable networking solution.
I spend most of my time at the Debian booth. People swing by the booth and they talked about their experience with Debian. It was fun to meet them all. Prior to the conference I created a wiki page to coordinate Debian booth at exhibition which really helped.
I met three Debian Developers - Chow Loong Jin (hyperair), Andrew Lee æÂŽåÂ¥ç§⹠(ajqlee) and Héctor Orón Martínez (zumbi). Andrew Lee and zumbi also volunteered at Debian booth from time to time along with Balasankar ‘balu’ C (balasankarc). Hyperair was sitting at HackerspaceSG booth, just two booth across from us.
To help you control the amount of data Facebook can gather about you, we have updated the Facebook Container extension to include Instagram and Facebook Messenger. This way, users of these sites, can also benefit from the tracking protections of the Facebook Container.
We’re in the middle of our Firefox Quantum Extensions Challenge and we’ve been asking ourselves: What makes a great extension?
Great extensions add functionality and fun to Firefox, but there’s more to it than that. They’re easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to find. If you’re building one, here are some simple steps to help it shine.
Our fourth and final SEO experiment for MDN, to optimize internal links within the open web documentation, is now finished. Optimizing internal links involves ensuring that each page (in particular, the ones we want to improve search engine results page (SERP) positions for, are easy to find.
In case you don’t know what Fluent is, it’s a localization system designed and developed by Mozilla to overcome the limitations of the existing localization technologies. If you have been around Mozilla Localization for a while, and you’re wondering what happened to L20n, you can read this explanation about the relation between these two projects.
With Firefox 58 we started moving Firefox Preferences to Fluent, and today we’re migrating the last pane (Firefox Account – Sync) in Firefox Nightly (61). The work is not done yet, there are still edge cases to migrate in the existing panes, and subdialogs, but we’re on track. If you’re interested in the details, you can read the full journey in two blog posts from Zibi (2017 and 2018), covering not only Fluent, but also the huge amount of work done on the Gecko platform to improve multilingual support.
Imagine you wanted to have your store’s web page work in 2D, and also take advantage of the full range of AR and VR devices. WebXR will provide the foundation you need to create pages that work everywhere, and let you focus on compelling User Experiences on each of the devices.
In a recent blog post, we touched on one aspect of progressive WebXR, showcasing a version of A-Painter that was adapted to handheld AR and immersive VR. In this post, we will dive a bit deeper into the idea of progressive WebXR apps that are accessible across a much wider range of XR-supported devices.
The WebXR Device API expands on the WebVR API to include a broader range of mixed reality devices (i.e., AR/VR, immersive/handheld). By supporting all mixed reality devices in one API, the Immersive Web community hopes to make it easier for web apps to respond to the capabilities of a user’s chosen device, and present an appropriate UI for AR, VR, or traditional 2D displays.
It’s been three weeks and we’ve almost run out of sports metaphors. We’re happy to announce that after three rounds and thousands of votes you have crowned uBlock Origin March Addonness champion for the second year in a row!
LibrePlanet, the yearly free software conference organized by the Free Software Foundation, took place a week ago. Among the many great talks and workshops, David Thompson, a core Guix developer also working as a DevOps, presented many aspects of Guix and GuixSD in his talk, Practical, verifiable software freedom with GuixSD (video, slides).
For years, embedded device manufacturers have been illegally using Linux. Typically, they use Linux without publishing their device's source code, which Linux's GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) requires them to do. Well, guess what? Another vendor, this time Symantec, appears to be the guilty party.
This was revealed when Google engineer and Linux security expert Matthew Garrett was diving into his new Norton Core Router. This is a high-end Wi-Fi router. Symantec claims it's regularly updated with the latest security mechanisms. Garrett popped his box open to take a deeper look into Symantec's magic security sauce.
What he found appears to be a Linux distribution based on the QCA Software Development Kit (QSDK) project. This is a GPLv2-licensed, open-source platform built around the Linux-based OpenWrt Wi-Fi router operating system.
Give impact mapping a try and let us know how it works for you. You can use any mind map software to create your first impact map, but you might prefer to start with pen and paper and sticky notes, or even a nice clean whiteboard.
If you follow me for a long time, you know I've been doing Python for more than ten years now and even wrote two books about it. So while I'm obviously biased, and before writing a reply, I would also like to take a step back and reassure you, dear reader, that I've used plenty of other programming languages those last 20 years: Perl, C, PHP, Lua, Lisp, Java, etc. I've built tiny to big projects with some of them, and I consider that Lisp is the best programming language. ðŸË⦠Therefore, I like to think that I'm not overly partial.
Unfortunately, they only provide them in Microsoft Word DOCX format.
The piece is written for journalists but it applies to users as well. Never assume things like follower counts, product ratings, retweets, likes, or shares mean much of anything, because these numbers are easily gamed. Focus on ideas and credibility, not arbitrary statistics, when determining whether something is legit.
The rate at which research productivity has fallen in semiconductors is significantly higher than in other areas of the economy (6.8% vs. 5.3%) [Page 46]:
The report highlights the Agriculture Department's (USDA) decision to roll back rules on school meals and to lobby in favor of the Environmental Protection Agency undoing a ban on a pesticide known to cause nerve damage in children.
Peanut butter and chocolate. Rice and soy sauce. Milk and cookies. When two good things get together, they can create something even better.
That’s the case with quantum information—the marriage of quantum physics and computing theory. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has contributed to much of its history and is helping to shape its future.
“We have been there from the beginning,” says NIST physicist Carl Williams, who has directed much of the agency’s efforts in this field since the early 2000s. “We can now see quantum information moving from a purely scientific field to a technological one.”
Intel might not be able to fix the second version of the Spectre flaw that affects more than 230 models of its processors, due to how difficult it is to remove the vulnerability.
The microcode revisions to fix the Spectre Varian 2 flaw in chips from the Bloomfield Xeon, Clarksfield, Gulftown, and Yorkfield families of chips to name a few, are marked as stopped due to several reasons.
A few days back we covered the heated exchange on the kernel mailing list over the path being pursued by the Linux kernel "lockdown" patches. Those back and forth messages between Google's Matthew Garrett and Linus Torvalds have now spilled over into a blog post by Garrett.
Linus Torvalds isn't against the kernel lockdown patches, he just is against it being explicitly enabled with UEFI SecureBoot and can't be easily turned off in that scenario. Matthew Garrett has written a blog post to lay out the case for UEFI SecureBoot with the lockdown functionality.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC, Commission, or we) will conduct a public hearing to receive information from all interested parties about potential safety issues and hazards associated with internet-connected consumer products. The information received from the public hearing will be used to inform future Commission risk management work. The Commission also requests written comments.
Today, Cisco's Talos security research group revealed five security vulnerabilities in NeuroWorks, a Windows-based software that is used in multiple electroencephalogram systems sold by Nautus. The Windows-based Natus Xltek NeuroWorks 8 software uses hospitals' Ethernet networks to connect to EEG devices and integrate with patient data systems, and it is vulnerable to attacks that could allow remote code execution—allowing an attacker to gain access to the data on the device and to other systems on the hospital network—and denial of service. The systems hosting the software could then be used to stage wider attacks on hospital networks.
At least five U.S. pipeline companies have said their electronic communications systems were shut down over the past few days, with four confirming the service disruptions were caused by a cyberattack. Energy Transfer Partners LP, Boardwalk Pipeline Partners LP, Chesapeake Utilities Corp.’s Eastern Shore Natural Gas and the TransCanada Corp.-operated Portland Natural Gas Transmission System were among the companies affected by data outages, while Oneok Inc. said it disabled its system as a precaution.
The Enhanced Tactical Flow Management System (ETFMS) appeared to be the culprit. By going squiffy, it makes it harder for air traffic controllers to compare the demand for airspace in different parts of its jurisdiction making it harder to take action to avoid an ‘air jam'.
The Linux Foundation IT team has been working to improve the code integrity of git repositories hosted at kernel.org by promoting the use of PGP-signed git tags and commits. Doing so allows anyone to easily verify that git repositories have not been altered or tampered with no matter from which worldwide mirror they may have been cloned. If the digital signature on your cloned repository matches the PGP key belonging to Linus Torvalds or any other maintainer, then you can be assured that what you have on your computer is the exact replica of the kernel code without any omissions or additions.
"Open-source code is widely used in application development, which is fine, but OSS libraries are often updated in response to security evens (e.g. Heartbleed), so knowing what open-source code is in a product is critical to being able to maintain it," Horvath said.
The number of records breached dropped nearly 25% globally in 2017, but ransomware breaches still cost organisations US$8 billion, with human error responsible for two-thirds of compromised records.
So given that the weapon itself is not firm evidence it was Russia that did it, what is Boris Johnson’s evidence? It turns out that the British government’s evidence is no more than the technique of smearing nerve agent on the door handle. All of the UK media have been briefed by “security sources” that the UK has a copy of a secret Russian assassin training manual detailing how to put nerve agent on door handles, and that given the nerve agent was found on the Skripals door handle, this is the clinching evidence which convinced NATO allies of Russia’s guilt.
In September 2007, in the dark of night, warplanes crossed the Syrian border and bombed a covert nuclear reactor. Recently, Israel took responsibility for the bombing mission that obliterated the Syrian reactor.
The Israeli announcement was unnecessary if it was intended to be an admission of responsibility. The origin of the bombers had never been a mystery. As early as 2008, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh began a report on the bombing with the line “Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission.” Even the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report on the bombing said that the building had been “destroyed by Israel in September 2007.”
That the nuclear reactor was bombed by Israeli planes is clear. That the building the Israeli planes bombed was a nuclear reactor is far less clear.
As Uber-Hawk John Bolton prepares to take over as national security adviser on Monday, Ray McGovern looks back at when Bolton was one of the “crazies” in the George W. Bush administration.
In Sacramento, California, on March 18, police bullets killed Stephon Cark, an unarmed black man. The police misbehaved, but the real culprit was racial hatred, evident already in the recent wave of police killings of mostly black men.
Stephon Clark died as did black people who died at the hands of Klu Klux Klan raiders during the Reconstruction era,(1) as did thousands of blacks lynched over the course of decades, as did so many killed in dozens of massacres carried out by white people between the Civil War and the 1920s. (2)
Activists and potential victims sought relief from the long terror campaign. On December 9, 1948 the UN General Assembly approved its “Convention on … the Crime of Genocide.” Responding, the left-leaning Civil Rights Congress in 1951 delivered a 240-page petition to the General Assembly. Its title was: “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People.”
Such overwhelming dependence on intelligence, most of it unknown to the public, has inevitably led to comparison with the fake intelligence which was used to justify the Iraq invasion
The revelation that the British government likely had contacts with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and the 17 February Martyrs Brigade during the 2011 war in Libya – groups for which the 2017 Manchester bomber and his father reportedly fought at that time – raises fundamental questions about the UK’s links to terrorism.
Indeed, a strong case can be made for a devastating conclusion: that the UK is itself a de facto part of the terrorist infrastructure that poses a threat to the British public.
Foreign minister Alistair Burt told Parliament on 3 April that: “During the Libyan conflict in 2011 the British government was in communication with a wide range of Libyans involved in the conflict against the Gaddafi regime forces. It is likely that this included former members of Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and 17 February Martyrs Brigade, as part of our broad engagement during this time.” This is the first time the government has admitted to having contacts with these groups at that time.
The latest Israeli slaughter of Gazans falls into the category of shooting fish in a tank. Indeed, as tens of thousands of Gazans protested the longest occupation in modern history and demanded their historical Right to Return, last Friday, March 30, Israeli snipers raised their rifles repeatedly and, from behind a wide-buffer and an electrified fence, opened fire on the Palestinians.
President Trump has backed off his plan to soon withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the administration would not put an “arbitrary timeline” on withdrawal. Earlier this week, Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, said, “The hard part, I think, is in front of us.” Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports U.S. forces have been spotted setting up front-line positions outside the strategic northern town of Manbij, where U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led forces are facing off against Turkish-backed Syrian fighters.
“Everybody got it wrong“ is the dominant corporate media refrain on the war on Iraq. Officials had intelligence that no one could have suspected was flawed. Reporters were swayed by persuasive government evidence. And alas, it went awry.
The clear-eyed remember that not everyone got it wrong. There were plenty of people who said the Iraq invasion, besides being illegal, besides being based on deceit, would be a human rights, political and ecological disaster. Those people just weren’t on television.
Who was? An endless round robin of retired military and intelligence officials, with reporters fawning over them rather than challenging them. As Cokie Roberts, then of ABC News’ This Week, put it to David Letterman, “I am, I will just confess to you, a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff, and they say it’s true and I’m ready to believe it.” It’s hard to picture a TV journalist making such a statement today—or is it?
We’re joined now in studio by Jeff Cohen; he’s associate professor of journalism and director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College. He’s also co-founder of the group Roots Action, author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, and the founder of FAIR. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jeff Cohen.
Before he launched a major economic reform on April 2, Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno cushioned it with a disclaimer: “Under no circumstances,” he said, would the plan “affect the poorest, neediest sectors” of the country. At least one needy sector is already upset, however. A few days earlier, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lost his internet connection at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he’s been holed up since seeking refuge in 2012 against extradition to Sweden to face an investigation, subsequently dropped, for alleged sexual assault.
For more than a week, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been barred from the online community after the Ecuadorian embassy in London cut off his internet access.
According to the embassy, the decision to eliminate Assange's internet privileges came about after the 46-year-old Australian violated an agreement that stated he would not interfere with Ecuador's relationship with other countries.
[...]
"It's part of the attack on information," Glover told show hosts Garland Nixon and Lee Stranahan. "It's part of the attack on something that was revealed… something that revealed what is happening in life… we are so disengaged."
Plenty of women are whistleblowers, and plenty more work for the organisations that aid them. So why do we rarely hear about these women? And who are they?
In 2010, British journalist Sarah Harrison, then in her mid-20s, began working for WikiLeaks, the website created by Julian Assange to help expose large-scale injustices and cover-ups. It was the year that the site received and published some of its most explosive information to date; the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary and Cablegate were a collection of classified documents that were leaked out of the American military by Chelsea Manning, including a video showing the killing of civilians in a 2007 Baghdad airstrike. It was also the same year that Julian Assange was accused of sexual assault by two women in Sweden.
This is the rare moment a beautiful baby elephant was filmed GIGGLING with joy during a game with a keeper.
The six-month-old calf was being entertained by her park carer at Maevang Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand , at the time - and appears to be having the time of her life.
As the keeper drags a basket along the ground in the footage, the elephant can be heard giggling before playfully running around the enclosure.
The Internet, and the various protocols that made up the early Internet, solved its use cases. It was adaptable to all manner of exciting and unforeseen new use cases because it started from a foundation of basically working.
Bitcoin has failed every aspiration that Satoshi Nakamoto had for it. As I note in chapter 2 of the book, Satoshi said in his release notes for Bitcoin 0.1:
Elsevier has reported a median pay gap of 40.4%, more than twice the UK average of 18.4% and the highest yet reported by a publisher. The company’s mean pay gap stands at 29.1%, also well over the UK average of 17.4%.
Bonuses are awarded to a higher percentage of men (56.5%) than women (45.7%), and the bonuses are higher for men, with a median bonus pay gap of 47.5% and a mean of 30%.
The European Commission dropped a surprise announcement last week that following the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union ("Brexit"), British domain owners may no longer be entitled to keep their ".eu" domain names. Not only will it no longer be possible for United Kingdom residents or organizations to register or renew these domain names, but the remaining period for which existing domain names have been registered could also be cut short as soon as Brexit occurs—which is currently scheduled for March 30, 2019. Unless a transitional arrangement is negotiated in the meantime, this could mean the loss of the content associated with over 300,000 domain names.
The availability of a special domain name may seem like a relatively minor inconvenience compared to some of the other likely outcomes of Brexit for the United Kingdom, including effects on the cost of good and services, incomes, and migration levels. But unlike most of those changes (and as significant as those are), the deletion of .eu domain names would carelessly impact the expressive content of thousands of domain owners, along with the ability for unknown millions of users to use the websites and other services hosted at those domains.
David Miliband has urged Labour to back calls for a new referendum on Brexit in the latest in a series of prominent interventions in domestic politics.
Labour's former foreign secretary said the only way to "avert the damage of Brexit" was to give the public another say on the final deal, setting himself at odds with his party's official stance on leaving the European Union.
He joins former prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair, and Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable in calling for another vote on Brexit - something both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have ruled out.
A crowdfunding campaign for Briskman created after she lost her job raised more than $30,000 in its first three days.
The Herndon-based company then forced her to resign, claiming that her posting of a photo of the incident on her Facebook page (which did not mention her association with Akima) violated the company’s social media policy.
[...]
Akima did not respond to phone calls or emails requesting comment.
It’s called “autocratic capture” he said. And it happens in countries like Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Hungary, and Thailand, where the private sector helps silence dissent because it’s good for business, Kistler said.
“There’s no reason to believe that it cannot happen here as well,” he said, “and we should be particularly worried about autocratic capture in Virginia, where so many businesses rely on government contracts.”
"It is un-American to let the government use your own tax dollars to buy your off-duty obedience," she said.
A court in northern Germany decided Thursday to release ousted Catalan regional president Carles Puigdemont from detention on bail of €75,000.
The court will still evaluate Spain’s extradition request for Puigdemont, but not based on Spain’s charge of rebellion. The court found this charge to be “inadmissible” because such an offense in Germany would have to include “violence,” which the court said “is not the case here.”
Thus, the remaining charge of misuse of public funds will be considered in the extradition decision.
Whether it’s assault rifles, racial justice, immigration or fossil fuels, the US is rocked by conflicting narratives and rising passions. In a recent national poll, 70 percent of Americans say the political divide is at least as big as during the Vietnam War.
In December, I completed a year-and-a-half book tour in over 80 towns and cities in United States. From Arizona to Alaska to North Dakota to Georgia, I heard a worry in common from people active in struggles for justice. They talk about the political polarization they see around them.
Many assume that polarization is a barrier to making change. They observe more shouting and less listening, more drama and less reflection, and an escalation at the extremes. They note that mass media journalists have less time to cover the range of activist initiatives, which are therefore drowned out by the shouting. From coast to coast activists asked me: Does this condition leave us stuck?
My answer included both good news and bad news. Most people wanted the latter first.
So people are alarmed when they see—for the first time since 1950—that this administration wants to put a citizenship question in the census, without any kind of testing.
Embattled Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt has a new public relations mess on his hands regarding the possible misuse of emergency sirens in heavy traffic. President Trump can add the reassignment of EPA Special Agent Eric Weese to a growing list of stories that threaten to derail messaging for his environmental agenda. Mr. Pruitt is accused of replacing the 16-year veteran — previously the lead agent in charge of his security detail — after he rebuffed efforts to abuse the use of emergency sirens. CBS confirmed its story with multiple sources on Thursday after viewing a letter by Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Tom Carper of Delaware.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is scheduled to testify before Congress on April 10 and April 11 about the social network’s role in up to 87 million people’s compromised information during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, according to NPR. A potential conflict: Members of congressional committees who will question Zuckerberg have been recipients of massive campaign contributions from Facebook’s Political Action Committee (funded by Facebook employees) and individual Facebook employees, according to findings by the Campaign for Responsive Politics, as reported by USA Today.
On the House committee, Republicans got roughly twice as much as Democrats, counter to the broader trend in Facebook campaign gifts. Of the $7 million in contributions to all federal candidates tied to the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social network, Democrats got 65% to Republicans' 33%.
That may be. But if Facebook wants to truly explain why all this has happened—why terrorists have been radicalized on Facebook, why fake news has proliferated, why foreign actors can buy political ads, and why data gets passed around with minimal oversight—Zuckerberg is the only person qualified to provide the real answer: This is how Facebook was designed to work.
If you were an established YouTube star with millions of followers, the policy didn't change things. But smaller channels on the edges of YouTube's thresholds were shut out, as this Guardian piece from January details.
Although YouTube acknowledged in January a significant number of channels would be affected by the change, it said 99% of affected channels were making less than $100 per year in the last year.
To this end, the NBI has curated a list of 1,600 websites that allegedly contain child pornography. Unfortunately, allegedly is the operative word, as such blacklists are notorious for their inaccuracy.
To wit, analysis of a previous version of the NBI’s blacklist found that fewer than one percent of the flagged sites contained material classifiable as child pornography, and fewer than four percent even contained links to illicit sites.
The Russian government called Facebook's removal of accounts, pages and ads from the Internet Research Agency "censorship."
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told news outlets Thursday the move is hostile toward Russian mass media and that the government finds it regretful.
Facebook announced Tuesday it removed 138 Facebook pages and 70 accounts linked to the IRA — the organization that meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Facebook also removed 65 Instagram accounts.
Earlier, Google News service terminated the transmission of FAN content starting from October 26, 2017 without giving any reasons. The Russian telecommunications watchdog Roskomnadzor asked the company for explanations, adding that the FAN was an officially registered Russia mass media. The suspension was canceled in the evening of November 4, 2017.
One could forgive the average reader for thinking reporters covering bots had been replaced by bots. The formula is something we’ve seen a million times now: After a controversial story breaks, media outlets insist that “Russian bots” used the controversy to “sow discord” or “exploit tensions”; a “Russian bot dashboard” is offered as proof. (These “dashboards” let one see what Russian bots—automated online persona controlled by the Kremlin—are allegedly “pushing” on social media.)
The substance of the concern or discord is underreported or ignored altogether. Online conflict is neatly dismissed as a Kremlin psyop, the narrative of Russia interference in every aspect of our lives is reinforced, and one is reminded to be “aware” of Russian trolls online.
[...]
Another benefit of the “Russian bots agitate the American public” stories is they prevent us from asking hard questions about our society. After a flurry of African-American Twitter users alleged a racist double standard in the coverage of the Austin bombings in March (which killed two people, both of them black), how did NPR address these concerns? Did it investigate their underlying merit? Did it do media analysis to see if there was, in fact, a dearth of coverage due to the victims’ race?
[...]
Nothing to see here! There’s a problem in our society—systemic racism in American media—and rather than an examination of whether it’s affecting coverage here, what the listener gets is yet another boilerplate story about “Russian bots,” the degree, scope and impact of which is wholly unknown, and likely inconsequential. Hesitant to cite Hamilton 68 by name (perhaps because its co-founder mocked this very kind of story a few weeks prior), NPR reporter Ewing simply cites “dashboards and online tools” as his source.
Which ones? It doesn’t really matter, because “Russian bots support X” reports are a conditioning exercise more than a story. The fact that this paint-by-numbers formula is still being applied weeks after the primary source’s co-founder declared himself “not convinced on this bot thing” and called the story “overdone” demonstrates this. The goal is not to convey information or give the reader tools to better understand the world, it’s to give the impression all unrest is artificially contrived by a foreign entity, and that the status quo would otherwise be rainbows and sunshine. And to remind us that the Enemy lurks everywhere, and that no one online without a blue checkmark can be trusted.
The Kremlin is crying foul on Facebook, accusing the social media giant of censorship after it took down more than 200 pages and accounts that were run by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency — the "troll factory" that is under indictment for interfering in the 2016 U.S. election.
Fake news is apparently everywhere. All over Europe, legislators and officials are trying to regulate content with "fake news" legislation and directives, as though the term could somehow be narrowly-defined enough that regulation could even have a positive effect. All these new laws and demands for cooperation from tech companies are sure to generate plenty of negative effects, not the least of which is these laws will become tools for censorship and a super-easy way to silence dissent.
It's not just a European thing. It's happening in nations around the world. Countries already known for heavy-handed control of the internet are using "fake news" to seize even more control of news outlets and communications platforms. Countries generally viewed as more generous with their rights are lining themselves up for authoritarian mission creep by setting themselves up as the final arbiter of real/fake news.
Britain’s broadsheet press has recently gone into meltdown over the easily debunked Cambridge Analytica conspiracy theory, in which shady data-miners are alleged to have manipulated the political views of the masses via Facebook. Yet a recent attempt to control political discussion by another social-media giant was met largely with a shrug. Yes, when it came to Twitter’s permanent ban on right-wing rabble-rouser and ex-English Defence League frontman Tommy Robinson, these worriers about the political power of Silicon Valley didn’t protest; if anything, they cheered.
he Iranian-American woman who opened fire at YouTube’s headquarters this week appears to have lashed out after she felt the company had censored her often bizarre videos— a motive that many found perplexing in Iran, where YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are blocked.
Nasim Aghdam, who posted videos under the online name Nasime Sabz, opened fire at YouTube on Tuesday, wounding three people before killing herself. Her father said she was angry at the video-sharing website because it had stopped paying for her videos, which promoted exercise, animal rights, and a vegan diet.
Consider the fig leaf: a little piece of foliage that’s shielded the genitals of famous biblical figures and nude sculptures for centuries. It’s a plant that’s become synonymous with sin, sex, and censorship. And in large part, we have art history—and the artists determined to portray nudity even when it was considered taboo—to thank for that.
Take Michelangelo’s famous sculpture David (1501–04), a muscular, starkly naked depiction of its namesake biblical hero. The work scandalized the artist’s fellow Florentines and the Catholic clergy when unveiled in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in 1504. Soon after, the figure’s sculpted phallus was girdled with a garland of bronze fig leaves by authorities.
Women in China are covertly resisting government crackdowns on discussions over their Me Too movement with a clever workaround.
The phrase “rice bunny” (ç±³åâ¦â), pronounced as “mi tu,” has popped up on social media networks after censors removed posts that mentioned sexual harassment or the hashtag #MeToo. While those phrases are heavily monitored, Rice Bunny isn’t.
In addition to the rice and bunny emojis, social media users also use the phrase in popular hashtags #ç±³åâ¦âä¸Âèƽå¿Ë# (“Rice Bunny Never Forget”) and #ç±³åâ¦âåŨä¸ÂÃ¥âºÂ½# (“Rice Bunny In China”). Social media users have used them in campaigns, forums and various accounts on platforms like Weibo and WeChat to discuss topics such as opportunity inequality, domestic violence and sexual harassment. The new phrase is harder for censors to follow, as “rice” and “bunny” are both common enough words that banning them from a platform would be too difficult.
Catholic groups fear further censorship of religious books, including a state-sponsored re-working of the Bible, and materials both physically and on the internet after China's government banned online Bible sales.
They are concerned that Beijing will bring its heavy internet censorship squarely into the world of religious literature.
Hong Kong academic Ying Fuk-tsang believes that President Xi Jinping's "new era" will target online circulation of the Bible, religious books and other religious publications.
"With the implementation of the revised regulations on religious affairs, the religious world on the internet will surely become a target in the next wave of rectification," said Ying, director of the divinity school of Chung Chi College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
t is unclear when the madness will end. Just some days ago, the US government announced that it planned on asking all visitors applying for a visa to release their telephone numbers, email addresses and social media history.
The move, yet to be confirmed, is not altogether surprising. It follows President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of more intense vetting of foreigners in the quest for better security. The latest proposal comes six months after the Trump administration first announced that applicants for immigrant visas would be asked for social media accounts.
This means that some 14 million people who apply for a US visa each year will be subjected to the new rule. These are tourists, spouses, parents, professors and activists who will - above and beyond the disclosure of private details like salary, assets and bank account details - show their social media history before they are allowed to visit the US.
The Facebook news feed is public and Messenger is private…right? Not quite: Facebook routinely scans your Messenger conversations, and in some cases human employees may review them.
It turns out the most oppressed demographic in this country is the one with power, guns, unions, extra rights, and plenty of civil immunity. Law enforcement agencies around the country currently besieged by public records requests are having their fears assuaged and brows unfurrowed by the nation's largest provider of automatic license plate reader technology.
Earlier this year, the EFF and public records clearinghouse MuckRock joined forces to file approximately 1,000 public records requests with agencies partnering with Vigilant. Apparently this influx of up to one additional records request per agency has pushed law enforcement to its limits. Vigilant Solutions has stepped up to let law enforcement officers know it has their back during this ongoing national nightmare.
Most of us have heard that the Internet started as a research project initiated by the ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency under the US military conducting advanced research, especially focusing on counter-insurgency and future war scenarios. A common version of this story is that the Internet was originally intended to be a decentralized network, a network with no central hub necessary for its operation, where individual nodes might be taken out without disrupting the traffic, which would just reroute itself through other nodes. A TCP/IP network may indeed work like that, but the true origins of the Internet are far darker.
In the 1940ââ¬Â²s and 50ââ¬Â²s, Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetics became very popular. Wiener was a mathematician who worked for the American military during WWII. The gist of cybernetics is that all systems maintain themselves through feedback between their elements. If one could understand the nature of the feedback that keeps them stable, one could predict their future behaviour. The beauty of this theory is that systems could consist of human beings and machines, and it did not in fact matter if a given element was one or the other; as the systems were supposed to stabilize naturally just like ecosystems, it should be possible to set down mathematical equations they’d need to fulfill to serve their role in the system.
In 2014, security researchers discovered a number of cell tower spoofers in operation in the DC area. Some may have been linked to US government agencies, but there was a good chance some were operated by foreign entities. This discovery was published and a whole lot of nothing happened.
Three years later, Senator Ron Wyden followed up on the issue. He sent a letter to the DHS asking if it was aware of these rogue Stingray-type devices and what is was doing about it. As was noted in the letter, the FCC had opened an inquiry into the matter, but nothing had ever come of it. As the agency tasked directly with defending the security of the homeland, Wyden wanted to know if anyone at the DHS was looking into the unidentified cell tower spoofers.
The Department of Homeland Security has finally confirmed what many security specialists have suspected for years: cell-phone tracking technology known as cell-site simulators (CSS) are being operated by potentially malicious actors in our nation's capital.
DHS doesn't know who's operating them or why, or whether these fake cell towers are installed elsewhere in the country. While EFF has its hunches, one thing is for certain: the federal government and cell-service providers have been sitting on their hands for far too long. Now is the time to fix the underlying problems with our worldwide cellular communications infrastructure.
In November 2017, Sen. Ron Wyden sent DHS a letter [PDF] demanding information regarding the use of CSSs by foreign spies in Washington, D.C. In March, DHS finally responded that it had indeed observed “anomalous activity…. That appears to be consistent with International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catchers.” Although this information was reported to other federal agencies, DHS investigators did not validate or attribute the activity to anyone or any specific device.
The Cambridge Analytica fire has tarnished Facebook’s reputation like nothing else. Its boss is being continually being asked to justify the actions of the company in the past and what’s coming in the future.
A senior DHS official, Christopher Krebs, said in the letter that the agency had "observed anomalous activity" that was "consistent" with IMSI catchers in Washington DC, but it wasn't sure who was behind the spying. The DHS also noted it needed more funding to better detect these devices.
We may need Tor, "the onion router", more than we ever imagined. Authoritarian states are blocking more and more web sites and snooping on their populations online—even routine tracking of our online activities can reveal information that can be used to undermine democracy. Thus, there was strong interest in the "State of the Onion" panel at the 2018 LibrePlanet conference, where four contributors to the Tor project presented a progress update covering the past few years.
According to panelist Nathan Freitas of the Guardian project, many people are moving from virtual private networks (VPNs) to Tor. And in turn, the open research done by the Tor community is being used by VPN providers to improve their own security. Some background here may be useful: a lot has been heard over the past few years about VPNs. Worries about snooping have led businesses and individuals to install them, but they weren't really designed for anonymous Internet use. Their goal is not to prevent attackers from knowing that person A communicated with person or site B—which is crucial connection information that anonymous Web users are trying to hide—but just to encrypt the communications themselves. VPNs are also designed to be integrated into organizations' internal networks, more than for standalone use on the Internet.
While the calls themselves and SMS message contents were not captured, the time of messages and the time and length of phone calls was recorded by Facebook. Schroepfer said that Facebook will now delete all call and SMS logs older than one year.
Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer has now confirmed that Cambridge Analytica had access to data on 87 million users — mostly from the United States.
Previous reports had estimated this figure to be around 50 million people, whose data may have been shared with analytics firm. It’s not the first time when the social networking giant has had to publicly increase previous estimates of its blunders on the platform.
Earlier this week, in an interview with Vox, Mark Zuckerberg tried to answer some hard questions put in front of him. In the same process, he ended telling about the ethnic cleansing issue in Myanmar and how Facebook detected people’s sensational messages sent via Messenger.
This sparked some obvious questions regarding Facebook’s Messenger-related data policies. Now we have answers as a result of Facebook’s statements given to Bloomberg.
The company is reeling from news that a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm used ill-gotten data from millions of users to try to influence elections. Facebook says as many as 87 million people may have had their data accessed — an increase from the 50 million disclosed in published reports.
Facebook Inc. said data on most of its 2 billion users could have been accessed improperly, giving fresh evidence of the ways the social-media giant failed to protect people’s privacy while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the information.
In mid-March The New York Times, along with The Guardian and The Observer, reported that Cambridge Analytica and its British counterpart SCL had harvested the data of 50 million Facebook users through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, which offered personality quizzes. At the time, when Facebook users installed apps connected to the platform, they also exposed data from many of their friends to the app developer. When the news broke, Facebook confirmed only that 270,000 people had downloaded that app, but until now had never refuted reports that 50 million users' data had been accessed.
Facebook said it now thinks up to 87 million people, mostly in the United States, may have had their data improperly shared by political targeting firm Cambridge Analytica.
And many more — most users, in fact — probably had their public information scraped by outside companies, it says.
In a blog post, chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer wrote: "Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way."
Adopting GDPR on a global scale would likely be a massive headache for Facebook as it would need to do some serious policy changes and potentially change how it currently stores data.
Furthermore, data is Facebook's moneymaker so if it suddenly gave its global audience of some 1.5 billion people the option to have the data it holds on them deleted, the social network could lose its largest source of revenue in one fell sweep.
Zuckerberg has long talked about Facebook as a new kind of nation, and his comments have played into a larger debate over how to give users a stake in the platforms they populate. But it’s worth remembering that years ago, Facebook did try to become a democracy — and nobody showed up.
These tests include making the Facebook camera the default option when a user chooses to update their profile status; making Stories the default sharing destination any time a user uses the Facebook camera’s Snapchat-style augmented reality features; and floating a window of Facebook Stories with large preview tiles right at the top of News Feed.
Privacy advocacy groups have been urging Facebook and its Silicon Valley competitors such as Alphabet Inc’s Google to apply EU data laws worldwide, largely without success.
Amid growing pressure to remove bad actors from Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that the company would likely release more information about problematic content posted to the service during elections. But to ensure the accuracy of the data, Zuckerberg said, the reports will likely come after the elections are over. The move could help government officials, academic researchers, and concerned citizens understand whether Facebook’s increased attention to abuse is working — but the timing could make it harder for grasp what’s happening when it arguably matters most.
The scrapers were at it long enough, Zuckerberg said, that "at some point during the last several years, someone has probably accessed your public information in this way."
Facebook isn’t backing down from Stories despite criticism that it copied Snapchat and that Instagram Stories is enough. Instead, it’s committed to figuring out how to adapt the slideshow format into the successor to the status update. That’s why today the company is launching three significant tests that make Facebook Stories a default way to share.
Many mind-numbing questions are still being asked about the details of Facebook data farming and the role of firms such as Cambridge Analytica. However, one big question raised by ‘Datagate’ is not being asked nearly enough: whatever happened to investigative journalism?
Both the government and Microsoft agree that the newly passed CLOUD Act renders the lawsuit meaningless. In US v. Microsoft, federal law enforcement clashed with Microsoft over the validity of a Stored Communications Act warrant for data stored on a server in Dublin. The CLOUD Act creates clear new procedures for procuring legal orders for data in these kinds of cross-border situations. In last week’s motion to vacate, DOJ disclosed that it had procured a new warrant under the CLOUD Act.
Badawi was jailed in 2012 for writing about freedom of speech. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, of which he has so far endured 50 – which nearly killed him.
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According to advertising experts, Saudi Arabia has spent upward of $1 million on a pro-Saudi advertising blitz across the UK capital – and it is hard to miss, complete with larger-than-life billboards on major arterial roads, advertising in newspapers and vehicle-mounted billboards as well as social media sundries. The campaign, designed to promote a prince “bringing change to Saudi Arabia” and “opening Saudi Arabia to the world,” does not seem to have worked. According to surveys, one in three Britons said they didn’t want the prince to come.
His wife, Ensaf Haidar, will receive the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism at a June 24 gala on his behalf. She now lives in Sherbrooke, with their three children.
More than 50 leading AI and robotics researchers have said they will boycott South Korea’s KAIST university over the institute’s plans to help develop AI-powered weapons. The threat was announced ahead of a UN meeting set in Geneva next week to discuss international restrictions on so-called “killer robots.” It marks an escalation in tactics from the part of the scientific community actively fighting for stronger controls on AI-controlled weaponry.
Henry, who faces deportation to El Salvador, at an ICE detention center in Manhattan (Demetrius Freeman for ProPublica)
Henry had finished his overnight shift in the jail cafeteria on Tuesday and was lying on his bunk listening to Spanish rap when he was called up to the administrative office. Immigration officials wanted to offer him a chance to be moved into protective custody. Henry had been waiting on this offer for the eight months he had been in jail, an informant locked up with the same gang members he informed on. But now, he was unsure whether to accept the extra protection.
The call came in response to a story published Monday by ProPublica and New York Magazine. It detailed Henry’s recruitment into the gang MS-13 as a child in El Salvador, his journey to the U.S. to plead for asylum at 15, and his decision to become an informant at 17. For nearly a year, he helped police and the FBI arrest members of his gang clique on Long Island until immigration enforcement arrested him last August for gang ties, using the same information he gave police. Labeled a snitch, he faces deportation to a country overrun by the gang that has marked him for death. Today is his final immigration hearing.
As youth activism rises across America, a high-school senior discusses her peers’ recent victory over sex discrimination.
Student organizing is gaining momentum across America — the National School Walkout is proof that a change is happening among young people, and it’s happening fast.
High school students are making a difference on issues, and in communities, of all different sizes. In fact, students in my school district achieved a huge victory just last week. By standing up against a sexist dress code across different high schools in Kenosha, Wisconsin, we showed how student activism anywhere can start off small and then achieve big changes.
I am a member of the Women’s Empowerment Club at Indian Trail High School, which engages in activism to make our school a fairer and more equal learning environment. This year, we agreed on the need to take aim at our school district’s sexist dress code.
Thousands of Google staff have been speaking out against the company’s work for “Project Maven,” according to a New York Times report this week. The program is a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to deploy machine learning for military purposes. There was a small amount of public reporting last month that Google had become a contractor for that project, but those stories had not captured how extensive Google’s involvement was, nor how controversial it has become within the company.
Outcry from Google’s own staff is reportedly ongoing, and the letter signed by employees asks Google to commit publicly to not assisting with warfare technology. We are sure this is a difficult decision for Google’s leadership; we hope they weigh it carefully.
This post outlines some of the questions that people inside and outside of the company should be mulling about whether it’s a good idea for companies with deep machine learning expertise to be assisting with military deployments of artificial intelligence (AI).
Accountability begins at home. But nothing happens if no one's willing to make the first step. Officers who witnessed another officer's brutal act had plenty to say about it, but apparently not to anyone who mattered.
Recordings obtained through records requests by NJ.com contain three hours of candid conversations between officers about the actions of Cataret, New Jersey police officer Joseph Reiman. Reiman is a military veteran and the mayor's youngest brother. Officer Joseph Reiman is also responsible for 20% of the department's force deployment.
One officer described a chaotic scene when he arrived at an arrest last year to find a bruised 16-year-old cuffed and face down in a bed of rocks with "blood all over the f-----g place."
A second described his appalled reaction on seeing the injured teen at Carteret police headquarters. Another said the incident was "indefensible."
On March 25, bloggers, journalists and activists gathered at a private party in Addis Ababa—the capital of Ethiopia—to celebrate the new freedom of their colleagues. Imprisoned Ethiopian writers and reporters had been released in February under a broad amnesty: some attended the private event, including Eskinder Nega, a blogger and publisher whose detention EFF has been tracking in our Offline series.
But the celebration was interrupted, with the event raided by the authorities. Eskinder, together with Zone 9 bloggers Mahlet Fantahun and Fekadu Mehatemework, online writers Zelalem Workagegnhu and Befiqadu Hailu, and six others were seized and detained without charge.
The eleven have now finally been released, after 12 days of custody. It remains a disturbing example of just how far Ethiopian police are willing to go to intimidate critical voices even in a time of supposed tolerance.
For years we've discussed how incumbent ISPs like Comcast have spent millions of dollars quite literally writing and buying shitty, protectionist laws in more than twenty states. These laws either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks, or in some cases from even engaging in public/private partnerships. It's a scenario where ISPs get to have their cake and eat it too: they get to refuse to upgrade their networks in under-served areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), but also get to write shitty laws preventing these under-served towns from doing anything about it.
ISPs and beholden lawmakers shoveled these bills through state legislature without much challenge. But as deployments like Google Fiber began highlighting how these laws actually harm efforts to improve competition (especially restrictions on public/private partnerships, essential in lower ROI areas), passing such legislation has become more challenging. In some states, that has forced companies like AT&T to try and hide competition-killing provisions in unrelated traffic or other bills.
This dance of dysfunction has been particularly interesting in Colorado, however. While lobbyists for Comcast and CenturyLink managed to convince state leaders to pass such a law (SB 152) in 2005, the legislation contains a provision that lets individual Colorado towns and cities ignore the measure with a simple referendum. With frustration mounting over sub-standard broadband and awful customer service, more than 86 cities and towns and more than 30 counties have already overturned the law as it applies to their localities.
If you've been napping, the Ajit Pai run FCC has been busy gutting decades-old media consolidation rules just to grease the skids for Sinclair's planned $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune. The deal, if completed, would give Sinclair ownership of 230 broadcast stations, reaching 72% of the public with what's generally considered facts-optional "news" on a good day. Consumer advocates and media watchdogs have been warning about the negative impact such media consolidation has on competition and local reporting for decades, largely to yawns and eye rubs from many in the tech sector.
The importance of limits on media consolidation have seen renewed attention as the United States tries to get a hold of its previously-ignored disinformation problem(s). Last week Deadspin published a video highlighting how Sinclair forces its reporters to parrot factually-dubious commentary in a relatively creepy fashion, much of it blasting any critical reporting on the Trump administration as "fake news":
ESPN3 comes along with many cable television packages that include ESPN's TV channels. The content for ESPN3 has always been the sort that isn't popular enough to air on the channels, but which might interest some customers. College games and niche sports make up the bulk of the lineup. But now ESPN will remove some of that content and put it behind a $5/month paywall, asking customers used to getting this content free, bundled with their cable subscription, to instead pay another $60 per year for it. Same content, more money, all while further reducing the value of an ESPN cable subscription, where ESPN still makes most of its money.
A law intended to stop people from making off-brand DVD players now means that security researchers can’t warn you about dangers from the cameras in your bedroom; that mechanics can’t fix your car; and that your printer won’t take third party ink.
It’s been 20 years since Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 of that long, gnarly hairball of a law bans “circumvention” of any kind of copyright lock. Originally that meant you couldn’t tweak your DVD player to play out-of-region discs, nor descramble the cable channels you haven't paid for.
While there are absolutely far too many Techdirt posts featuring celebrity(?) Lindsay Lohan in these pages, most of them deal with one specific issue: her lawsuits against Take Two Interactive. At issue was a character Lohan insisted infringed on her likeness rights because the character is a drunk driver, public-fornicator, and has a backstory as a child actress. If Lindsay wants to insist that her own history lines up with that sort of backstory, I guess I won't argue with her, but the character has many other aspects that clearly have nothing to do with Lohan. Instead, the character is a parody of the sort the GTA series is famous for, with the target in this case being young celebrity stars and starlets. Coming along for the ride was Karen Gravano, who participated in a reality show about the wives of reported mobsters. Gravano sued over another character in the series with her filings essentially mirroring Lohan's. Take Two won both lawsuits, both on First Amendment grounds and due to the court finding that the characters were composite parodies, not representations of either Lohan or Gravano. Both plaintiffs appealed.
It would be the largest internet filter Europe has ever seen - reading every single piece of text uploaded to the internet, and watching every video. An algorithm will decide whether what you want to post will be seen or not.
In practice, the vague wording of the draft Directive would make a huge number of online platforms uncertain about whether or not they are breaking the law. This means that many platforms are likely to err on the side of aggressive filtering rather than getting embroiled in long and extremely expensive legal battles.
Not all user-generated content sites are Google/Youtube. Many fringe culture sites, like LGBTQ+ dating apps are smaller operations that would sooner limit their users’ activities rather than risk being taken to court. Wouldn’t this homogenise the rich cultural landscape that we benefit from in the EU? Surely, in this age of fierce fighting for gender equality, we shouldn’t be allowing new laws that unfairly restrict the activities of minority groups.
The sum reflects proceeds from the sale of Spotify stock Tuesday, when the streaming service went public, as well as the higher value of Sony’s remaining stake in the company following the listing, according to a regulatory filing. Sony sold 17 percent of its holdings.
Police in Florida have announced the arrest of a couple said to be involved in a 'pirate' TV box operation. The pair sold Android boxes utilizing third-party Kodi addons while promising customers "Free TV For Life". The operation was backed up by brazen and in some cases bizarre online advertising campaigns, yet zero effort was spent trying to conceal identities.
The piracy liability case between the RIAA and Internet provider Grande Communications continues, but only based on the contributory infringement claim. Texas District Court Judge Lee Yeakel fully adopts the earlier recommendation from the Magistrate Judge, despite objections from both the RIAA and Grande.
Popular pirate streaming link site Primewire has become unusable. Instead of directing visitors to copies of the latest TV-shows and movies, the site points them to malicious advertisements. Whether this is intentional or the result of a hostile takeover is unknown.