Around two years ago, Samsung officially announced that they will be bringing full-fledged Linux support for Samsung Dex. The company later started testing Linux on different Galaxy devices. Earlier this year, Samsung added more devices to the program which was in beta at the time.
Now, out of nowhere, Samsung has decided to kill the Linux on Dex project. As per an email received by 9to5Google, Samsung plans to kill the project with the release of Android 10 Beta. Samsung has sent out emails to all the Beta testers today informing them about the change.
DeX is a feature on the Samsung Galaxy S, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Tab S series that differentiates Samsung’s flagship smartphones and tablets from the company’s competitors. DeX, which debuted back in 2017 with the Samsung Galaxy S8, lets users access a desktop mode UI, with support for Android apps, when connected to a monitor. Initially, DeX required a special accessory in the form of the DeX Station and later the DeX Pad, but with the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, Samsung made it work with any HDMI to USB Type-C cable, which means that it no longer required any specialized hardware. This significantly improved its versatility. The one real competitor to Dex is Huawei’s Easy Projection feature, which can also work wirelessly. However, Samsung still had a leg up over its Huawei thanks to the Linux on DeX feature.
Linux on DeX enabled the user to get a full-fledged desktop GNU/Linux environment up and running on the smartphone in DeX mode. Specifically, Linux on DeX supported a modified version of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for ARM64. Linux on DeX was first shown off all the way back at SDC 2017, and the company finally released a beta for download a year later. The feature was intended for developers and not for regular users, as only ARM64 packages could be used on Linux on DeX. It allowed developers to compile, build, and test Android apps on their smartphone itself. Max used Linux on DeX extensively on the Galaxy Note 9 and noted that it pushed the limits of the hardware at that time.
If you've been using Linux on DeX (aka Linux on Galaxy) to turn your Samsung phone into a PC, you'll need to make a change of plans. Samsung is warning users that it's shutting down the Linux on DeX beta program, and that its Android 10 update won't support using the open source OS as a desktop environment. The company didn't explain why it was shutting things down, but it did note that the Android 10 beta is already going without the Linux option.
The decision leaves users in a tough spot. This not only gave Linux fans a way to run their preferred computing platform from their phone, it was the only option that provided a full-fledged desktop OS (in this case, Ubuntu Linux). If you use Android 10, you'll have to revert to the considerably more limited DeX-optimized Android interface. While that should work for people who just want a larger canvas for their Android apps, it won't help if you were using Linux as a productivity tool.
In an email to the testers, Samsung has announced that it is ending the Linux on DeX beta program. It will no longer provide support for future OS and device releases, including the Android 10 beta. The team behind the app hasn’t offered any reasons for the shutdown of the program but thanked users for the interest and feedback.
Samsung announced the Linux on DeX app nearly a year ago as an experiment to augment the capabilities of its DeX platform. It enables select Galaxy devices to run full Linux OS in DeX mode when connected to an external monitor (or on the device’s display if it’s a tablet). The app has been in beta for the past year, and the company is now ending the program without releasing a stable version.
So we chose a different way — the open source way — and as a result, we've saved our technology budget more than $1 million.
But the cost savings are just the beginning. More importantly, our decision to adopt 4,000 Linux-powered laptops empowered our students in remarkable ways.
Here at Penn Manor School District, we've gained much more by using Linux and other open source software. And by infusing open principles and practices into our learning environment alongside open technologies, we've cultivated a vibrant and inclusive learning community for all students.
Red Hat may be synonymous with open source and the developer community, but the company also actively participates within industry standards processes. For example, it is working closely with the operator-led Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT), which was initiated in the LFN open source community but has now been embraced by the GSMA, as an attempt to harmonise on the many varied NFV infrastructure solutions and architectures. Furthermore, Red Hat supports the move for greater alignment in NFV software platform domain.
Low-code, visual-based programming environments are opening doors for new types of application developers. At the same time, new event-driven architectures are making such environments more responsive.
Node-RED, a visual flow-based programming tool, is one such environment attuned to these new development styles. After years of refinement, the open source Node-RED recently hit maturity with a 1.0 release.
I chatted with Nicholas O’Leary of IBM, who has pioneered the development of Node-RED. In this article, we’ll discover what this new release encompasses. We’ll also peek into the history of Node-RED, look into some fascinating IoT use cases and estimate the future Node-RED roadmap.
Girls Who Code were the winners of the first $50,000 IBM Open Source Community Grant. Girls Who Code is a nonprofit organization working to increase the number of women working in computer science.
Girls Who Code helps girls to learn more about computer science through after-school classes and summer courses. Along with the advancement of IT knowledge, women also gain confidence in their capabilities.
Announced at this week's All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC, the grant -- which will be awarded quarterly -- will see the winner receive $25k in cash and $25k in Cloud Credits in order to support their efforts dedicated to education and skill building for women, minorities, and/or under-served communities.
The inaugural grant is going to Girls Who Code, a non-profit organization working to increase the number of women working in computer science.
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Other finalists in this quarter's grant competition were Outreachy (Organized by the Software Freedom Conservancy), which sets up three-month paid internships on open source projects for people who ordinarily might not have those opportunities. And PyLadies, an international mentorship group of the Python Software Foundation, helping women become active in the Python open-source community.
ennifer Trelewicz, the former Director of the Systems & Technology Laboratory at IBM, has just joined the open-source and fully decentralised blockchain software, Credits.
According to AMB Crypto, Trelewicz has taken the post of Chief Business Officer, under which she is responsible for the external business sector of the firm.
Third quarter results at IBM showed group sales were down 3.9% to $18bn, although revenue from the acquired Red Hat was up a handy 20%.
That group drop though masked progress being seen in the cloud, with Cloud & Cognitive Software up 7.8% to $5.3bn. This part of the business includes cloud and data platforms that include Red Hat offerings, cognitive applications and transaction processing platforms.
The Global Technology Services segment – that includes infrastructure and cloud services and technology support services – was down 4.1% to $6.7bn. And Global Business Services, which includes consulting, application management and global process services was up 2.2% to $4.1bn – with consulting actually up 5% when broken down.
International Business Machines Corp. is expected to report third-quarter earnings after the market closes Wednesday. The results, which follow a string of quarterly revenue declines, will be the company’s first since it closed its $34 billion purchase of open-source software giant Red Hat. Here’s what to look for:
Intel developers have been working on the Cloud Hypervisor that is written in Rust and built atop KVM as an open-source VMM designed for running modern cloud workloads while being focused on just supporting modern software/interfaces and relying upon para-virtualized (VirtIO) devices without legacy support. This week marked a new release of this forward-looking KVM-based hypervisor solution.
While mid-way through the Linux 5.4 development cycle with RC4 due out on Sunday, a number of memory management fixes just hit the mainline kernel.
Andrew Morton's pull request was merged on Friday night and he noted, "Rather a lot of fixes, almost all affecting mm/"
Indeed there were memory management fixes in this pull ahead of 5.4-rc4. Changes include a zRAM race condition fix, avoiding access to uninitialized memory maps, allow dropping transparent huge-pages (THP) from the page cache, and other fixes in this area including the possibility of a kernel crash.
Screen recording comes in handy when creating a video tutorial, recording gameplay, live streaming or even something cool you just did and want to showcase it to others. Uses of a screen recorder are diverse and there are a ton of reasons to have one installed on your PC. In this article, we will provide a brief overview of five best screen recorders for Linux which include some basic as well as some advanced screen recorders.
Firefox's page translation feature will work offline, with a local library, rather than cloud-based translation services.
OBS Studio is software designed for capturing, compositing, encoding, recording, and streaming video content, efficiently. It is the re-write of the widely used Open Broadcaster Software, to allow even more features and multi-platform support. OBS Studio supports multiple sources, including media files, games, web pages, application windows, webcams, your desktop, microphone and more.
The Federal Aviation Administration is demanding answers from Boeing after receiving a 2016 electronic message exchange in which a test pilot talks of unknowingly having lied to regulators and discloses "egregious" problems with the flight control system that figured in two 737 Max crashes.
FAA Administrator Steve Dickson sent a terse letter Friday to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg requesting to know why the messages had only been delivered the day before, not months ago when Boeing had uncovered them. "I expect your explanation immediately," he writes.
It’s not that children are suddenly allergic to SpongeBob. (According to Parrot Analytics, Mr. SquarePants and his underwater antics remain the most in-demand children’s content in America.) But as Juenger puts it: The traditional American TV industry is “entering a period of prolonged structural decline,” as viewers migrate to platforms that feature fewer or no ads.
Saturday mornings, years ago relinquished by broadcasters, are now threatening to evaporate from the grip of cablers as well. This will prove to be a fertile area for existing streamers, as well as the soon-to-launch over-the-top offerings from Apple, Disney and WarnerMedia, among others. All of them are hungry for subscribers and eager to keep them shelling out monthly dollars.
It is time for another installment of Godot (previous entries: introduction, 2D). This time, I have dived into the world of 3D. The goal is to recreate parts of an old time favorite: Kosmonaut. Something I remember playing a lot on my dad’s 286 with amazing EGA graphics.
The state of the game when writing can be seen in the short screen capture below. This is more of a tech demo status than a full game at the moment, but I hope you will still find it interesting. You can also get the complete source code.
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Once we have a world with a track (the grid map), we add a player to the scene (the yellow blob in the image above – I need to learn Blender to create a proper ship). The player scene contains the ship – and the camera. This means that the camera follows the player automatically – very convenient.
The player script is responsible for this ship’s movements based on user input. Inputs can either be pressed for a long time, used for sideways movement, or just tapped (i.e. the release is ignored), used for jumping. Each of the inputs are mapped to a keyboard key (or other input device) in the Project Settings dialog, under the Input Map tab. This feels a bit awkward to me and makes me lose the feeling of flow – but I don’t know how to do it better.
Fresh off yesterday's Wine 4.18 release, Wine-Staging 4.18 is now available for those preferring the more experimental blend of Wine that incorporates various testing patches atop Wine.
Wine-Staging 4.18 is still around 850+ patches atop upstream Wine though not a lot of new patches over the past three weeks. Like with Wine 4.18, the staging release isn't too big either due to many Wine developers having been away last week for WineConf in Toronto.
PDXCON is now in full swing and the announcement are being handed out like candy. First up, Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio have announced Stellaris: Federations and Stellaris: Lithoids Species Pack.
As I suggested they would when setting Crusader Kings II permanently free (but not the DLC), Paradox Interactive have announced Crusader Kings III.
"Crusader Kings III is a grand medieval simulator where you are free to live out any plausible ruler fantasy that we could think of - but not without challenge." says Henrik FÃÂ¥hraeus, the Game Director. "Seeing its predecessor explode in popularity was very satisfying, especially considering that user friendliness was never our primary goal. Now we have a chance to address an even larger audience."
I think we all saw this coming when Paradox Interactive picked up the rights to Prison Architect, with Double Eleven taking on further development. The first proper DLC has been announced at PDXCON named Prison Architect - Psych Ward: Warden's Edition.
Psych Ward was previously a console exclusive DLC, so it's good to see it make it onto PC. However, it does include new added features not in the original DLC and it will launch along side a free content update for everyone. It's not exactly a small pack either, it actually sounds like it's going to be adding quite a bit to the game. Paradox also gave it a release date of November 21, so you won't exactly have long to wait to really find out.
Even more news from PDXCON! Harebrained Schemes and Paradox Interactive have now properly announced the BATTLETECH: Heavy Metal expansion to bring more destruction.
Paradox Development Studio and Paradox Interactive are expanding another of their grand-scale strategy games, with Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance announced during PDXCON.
Not just that, as they usually do they also confirmed a "significant" free content update will be released to all players. The free update will include a reworking of the resistance system, interface improvements to battleplans and air operations plus many other "quality of life improvements".
Bioshock 1 & 2 running through Steam play.
After starting off the celebration for Counter-Strike turning 20 back in June with the retro version of Dust II, Valve have now added a refreshed version of the map Cache and a themed Weapon Case and Sticker Capsule.
We're expecting some bigger updates to come but let's go over what they've already done.
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VNN's Tyler McVicker also released another of his highly speculative videos talking about lots of other things that could be pointing to a new operation. With a possible update coming that may include: custom Danger Zone modes, a new Danger Zone map, new Danger Zone weapons, co-op missions, hats and other wearable items, player taunts and more being speculated on.
I personally hope Valve do put out a big update, since their celebration so far has been a bit lacklustre. An old map, a refreshed map and some skins you have to pay for. Not exactly big or exciting really so far. Speaking personally again, I'm still very much enjoying Danger Zone so if they do expand it again I will be quite pleased.
In the 4.14 cycle we tried to do a 1:1 port of what used to be our Gtk2 desktop environment, avoiding visual changes. In the 4.16 cycle we plan to harmonize the appearance of certain elements that either became inconsistent through the port or already were inconsistent before (e.g. toolbars or inline toolbars).
We will also play with client-side decorations where we feel it makes sense (for instance replacing the so-called XfceTitledDialog, that is used for all settings dialogs with a HeaderBar version). Before anyone gets too excited (both positively or negatively): It is not planned to redesign more complex applications (like Thunar) with Headerbars in 4.16. We will however try to keep the experience and looks consistent, which means gradually moving to client side decorations also with our applications (please note that client side decorations are not the same as HeaderBars!). Through this change e.g. “dark modes” in applications will look good (see the part about the Panel below).
Now before there is a shitstorm about this change I would kindly ask everyone to give us time to figure out what exactly we want to change in this cycle. Also, switching to client-side decorations alone is not a big visual departure – feel free to also dig through the client-side decorations page if you want to read/see more on this.
Following this week's release of KDE Plasma 5.17, a new release of the independent kwin-lowlatency code has been re-based against version 5.17.
Distrotest is one site that provides a variety of Linux distributions that can be run directly on the browser. Or you can also run it on a remote desktop client application, for example using Remmina. So, you can try various linux distributions online without having to install it or make a live CD.
when I visited the distrotest. Apparently, there have been many new systems added. However, there are several new systems that caught my attention.
The article points out that Deepin is also a stand-alone desktop environment for any current Linux distribution -- and that it's one of the 248 operating systems available for online testing at DistroTest.net.
recently sold my MacBook Pro for a few reasons, but probably most importantly, macOS just wasn't wowing me anymore. While Apple's desktop operating system is good for basic users, it is far too limited for the more hardcore. Ultimately, I found my productivity was negatively impacted by macOS -- my workflow with Windows 10 and various Linux distributions was simply better.
Of course, with all of that said, macOS is much prettier than Windows 10 -- even Microsoft would confess to that. But is it more attractive than desktop Linux distributions? Well, that depends on the desktop environment. While there are plenty of beautiful DEs and launchers for Linux, only one really surpasses macOS in the looks department -- deepin.
The base group has been replaced by a metapackage of the same name. We advise users to install this package (pacman -Syu base), as it is effectively mandatory from now on.
Users requesting support are expected to be running a system with the base package.
The imminent release of pacman 5.2 brings build tools with support for compressing packages with zstd. To install these packages you need libarchive with support for zstd, which entered the repositories in September 2018. In order for zstd compressed packages to be distributed, we require all users to have updated to at least libarchive 3.3.3-1. You have had a year, so we expect you already did update. Hurry up if you have not.
Offline upgrades are now live on Pop!_OS 19.04, bringing faster, more reliable upgrades. When an upgrade becomes available, it is downloaded to your computer. Then, when you decide to upgrade to the newest version of your OS, the upgrade will overwrite the current version of your software. However, this is not to be confused with an automatic update; your OS will remain on the current version until you yourself decide to upgrade.
To upgrade to 19.10 from a fully updated version of Pop!_OS 19.04, open the Settings application and scroll down on the sidebar menu to the Details tab. In the About panel of the Details tab, you will see a button to download the upgrade. Once the download is complete, hit the button again to upgrade your OS. This will be the standard method of upgrading between Pop!_OS releases going forward.
Ubuntu 19.10—the 31st release of the consumer-focused Linux distribution—was released on Thursday, powered by GNOME 3.34 and version 5.3 of the Linux kernel, which includes support for AMD Navi GPUs, as well as Intel Gemini Lake CPUs and VIA/Zhaoxin x86 CPUs.
Other Linux distributions typically shy away from providing copyrighted code embedded into the ISO image due to legal or philosophical reasons, though Canonical is shipping NVIDIA GPU drivers out-of-the-box to ease configuration and improve performance for users of NVIDIA GPUs for gaming as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applications.
I just got the following error while trying to push to my [git-lfs]()-enabled repository:
Git Large File Storage is “an open source Git extension for versioning large files.” I use it on a number of our git repositories at Small Technology Foundation, including for the Site.js web site.
Everyone has an opinion on what NPM should do next, both as a company (npm, Inc.) and as the package manager (npm) made essential by Node.js. That's not surprising: More than 11 million JavaScript developers use npm (and associated npm registry) to build their applications, whether they use Node.js or not. It's also not a particularly easy question to resolve, given the turmoil npm Inc. has experienced over the past year, what with the introduction (and eventual departure) of CEO Bryan Bogensberger and employee unrest in his wake.
Talking to npm founder and Chief Open Technologies officer Isaac Schlueter, however, the right strategy for "building a sustainable engine behind an open source labor of love" might well be a return to npm's roots.
That’s the view of Aroma Rodrigues, a full-time Python developer at a major bank in India and a part-time software activist. She told delegates at last week’s PyConZA 2019, part of SA’s Open Source Week, that they can and should be doing more to use their skills for social good.
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For example, the US-based Knight Foundation, which was established to promote excellence in journalism, examined more than 10 million tweets from 700 000 Twitter accounts before, during and after the 2016 US presidential election. The study found that identified clusters of Twitter accounts linked back to more than 600 fake and conspiracy news sites repeatedly, often in ways that seemed to be co-ordinated, or even automated, in order to sway public opinion one way or another.
In an interview with ITWeb at the conference, Nkosi pointed out that although open source was about community, “we are not using it as community”.
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The word 'ubuntu' loosely translates to “I am because we are”. This, Nkosi asserted, was essentially the premise of open source software, which was about harnessing the collective power of the community.
Open source software and tools have long been a mainstay of the computing ecosystem, especially over the past two decades. From the popularity of Linux in the enterprise server environment to the Firefox browser, open source has found a successful place in the computing hierarchy. It should come as little surprise that open source AI software is finding significant popularity and use within the machine learning and deep learning ecosystem, as well.
In fact, much of the technology that powers AI is open source. This comes as a contrast to other enterprise technology, such as operating systems and databases that had their initial roots in closed, licensed software.
One of the first protest actions programmed by a new online activist group, calling itself Tsunami Democràtic, saw thousands of protestors coalescing on Barcelona airport Monday, in an attempt to shut it down. The protest didn’t quite do that but it did lead to major disruption, with roads blocked by human traffic as protestors walked down the highway and the cancelation of more than 100 flights, plus hours of delays for travellers arriving into El Prat.
For months leading up to a major Supreme Court verdict on the fate of imprisoned Catalan political leaders a ‘technical elite‘ — as one local political science academic described them this week — has been preparing to reboot Catalonia’s independence movement by developing bespoke, decentralized high-tech protest tools.
A source with knowledge of Tsunami Democràtic, speaking to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity, told us that “high level developers” located all around the world are involved in the effort, divvying up coding tasks as per any large scale IT project and leveraging open source resources (such as the RetroShare node-based networking platform) to channel grassroots support for independence into a resilient campaign network that can’t be stopped by the arrest of a few leaders.
The European Union aims to reduce carbon emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050. Former California Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order last year calling for the state, the fifth-largest economy in the world, to go carbon neutral by 2045. Meeting these goals, or even the less ambitious goals set by other governments, will require utilities to buy more energy from sustainable sources like wind and solar power. That shift is already creating logistical challenges for utilities. Unlike more predictable sources of energy, the energy produced by a wind farm can vary from day to day, forcing utilities to offload excess supplies and make up for shortages. The solar panels on residential rooftops that feed into the grid pose their own challenges because the grid wasn't designed to facilitate a two-way flow of energy.
To meet those technological challenges, the energy sector is turning to open source software. Open source, which anyone can modify or share, helped power the rise of internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Ostensible competitors worked together to develop software like the data-crunching platform Hadoop because it enabled them to solve difficult computing problems. Now all sorts of companies, ranging from Microsoft to Walmart to JP Morgan Chase use and make open source software.
But the energy industry has lagged behind others in using and creating open source software, says Loek Bakker, head of information management at Dutch energy distribution company TenneT. "The energy industry isn't known for being innovative," he says. "I think we're quite a traditional industry."
TenFourFox Feature Parity Release "16.1" (SPR 1) is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). As noted, this is a pure security update and there are no user-facing changes; the big under-the-hood change of those is that we are now pulling entirely from 68ESR, including locale data, certificate roots and so forth. There is also a small update to the ATSUI font blacklist. Assuming no issues, it will go live Monday evening Pacific time as usual.
We gained two new team members, Travis and Beatriz. And with Georg taking a short break, we’ve all had more to do that usual. Glean‘s really been working out well, though I’ve only had the pleasure of working on it a little bit.
Instead I’ve been adding fun new features to Firefox Desktop like Origin Telemetry. I also gave a talk at a conference about Data and Responsibility. Last December’s All Hands returned us to Orlando, and June brought me to Whistler for the first time. We held a Virtual Work Week (or “vorkweek”) a couple of weeks ago when we couldn’t find a time and the budget to meet in person, and spent it planning out how we’ll bring Glean to Firefox Desktop with Project FOG. First with a Prototype (FOGotype) by end of year. And then 2020 will be the year of Glean on the Desktop.
Going cloud for your storage needs comes with some baggage. On the one hand, it's cheap, elastic, and convenient - it just works. On the other hand, it's messy, especially if you are used to working with data management systems like databases and data warehouses.
Unlike those systems, cloud storage was not designed with things such as transactional support or metadata in mind. If you work with data at scale, these are pretty important features. This is why Databricks introduced Delta Lake to add those features on top of cloud storage back in 2017.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the speakers and program for Open FinTech Forum taking place December 9, 2019 at the Convene Conference Center in New York.
LF Energy, a nonprofit, vendor-neutral initiative from The Linux Foundation, whose mission is to accelerate the energy and electricity sectors’ worldwide decarbonization goals through open-source technology, announced the full agenda for its first global summit, NOW TO NEXT - The Power of Together, as well as the addition of Alliander, EDP, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and Unicorn as new LF Energy members.
NOW TO NEXT, which will be hosted in La Défense, Paris, on Nov. 4-5, will bring together leaders and innovators in the power and technology industries to discuss the global transition to clean energy. Industry leaders have realized that no one can meet decarbonization goals alone. Instead, we must work together to transition the 150-year-old power grid infrastructure to smarter and more efficient digital technologies that enable decentralized energy resources.
Percona, a leader in open source database software and services, today announced the results of its Open Source Software Database Survey. More than 830 members of the Percona community and customer base, representing small, medium and large companies from around the world, responded to questions regarding open source database usage and growth. The survey revealed that diverse tools and environments, including multiple databases and multi-cloud and hybrid environments, are transforming today’s datacenters.
Actually, these marketplaces have had some level of collaborative effort due to common development trends and regulatory compliance activity, but nothing like the kind of active open environment that exists in other spaces. The military community is specifically reluctant to adopt more open development methods due to the secretive nature of military capability disclosure. Yet there are areas in core platform development that can benefit from an open-source approach.
Digitally driven businesses face unprecedented complexity in protecting not only their own data and privacy but that of globally distributed customers, partners and employees using a variety of personal computing and mobile devices. WSO2 offers several new capabilities to help enterprises address these demands with the latest release of WSO2 Identity Server for identity and access management (IAM). Using WSO2 Identity Server, IT organizations now have an open source, API-driven, developer friendly solution for modernizing application security and delivering an enhanced user experience that encourages adoption.
Key industry leaders such as Air France, KLM, and Etihad Airways have participated in Winding Tree’s previous two #HackTravel hackathons, one in Prague in December 2018, and the second most recently in Lisbon in July 2019.
SalesAgility are delighted to announce that the 7th UK Open Source Awards (UKOSA) will take place on Thursday May 21st 2020. We're also delighted to announce that once again they'll be held in the Edinburgh University Computing faculty's Informatics Forum.
The awards are designed to recognise and celebrate the innovation, diversity, collaboration and creativity that are core components of Open Source software creation and maintenance. Previous winners have included contributors from several NHS healthcare projects, the Gnome project, Collabora (LibreOffice) and students from Edinburgh and Aberystwyth Universities.
Facebook has reported target “fix rates” (how often developers fix the bug flagged by a tool) of 70% to 80%, and Google strives for greater than 90% fix rates for its ErrorProne code analysis tool. By only deploying tools with high fix rates, these companies maintain the trust of developers and ensure that they continue to act on important issues found by these tools. But how do you know whether a new tool meets this threshold?
The best approach is to be data-driven. The developer tooling groups at these companies collect data on which bugs are getting fixed and support explicit developer feedback on tool results. This data is constantly monitored to flag tools that are underperforming so they can improve or remove them.
Principal Open Source Technologist Arun Gupta and Operations Manager Vicente explained the initiative in a blog post mentioning the credits were typically used for testing, storage, or CI/CD purposes. First beneficiaries include the Rust and Julia programming languages, Java community project AdoptOpenJDK, Java component repository Maven Central, and a couple of projects hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
AWS will offer promotional cloud credits to open source project maintainers that meet certain criteria. The move comes after repeated tensions with some companies.
AWS has announced its "Sponsorship of the Rust project", causing some initial excitement in the community. However, in reality it only amounts to a year of AWS "promotional credits."
"We're really excited to announce that AWS is sponsoring the Rust programming language," reads a statement by David Barsky (engineer on Rust runtime for Lambda), Arun Gupta (open source technical evangelist), and Jacob Peddicord (open-source engineer).
The intention of the OB-Labs initiative is to demonstrate an open framework for cloud-based broadband for carriers globally, and bring the promise of SDN and NFV to fruition. The demo at BBWF 2019 was built from a combination of open source from the OPNFV, ONAP, and Open Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA) projects and products from Nokia, Altice Labs, DZS, and VMware. A first of its kind demonstration, this implementation truly shows the power of a well-defined architecture and the agility of an open community.
Broadband World Forum 2019 -- Kings can be tyrants, but at least they give you an easy target to punch when something goes wrong and revolution follows. Telcos in a perpetual huff about the ruling trio of Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia could be in for a more slippery autocracy with the emergence of systems integrators, a cabal of tiny vendors and some unwieldy open source platforms.
Operators are worried, too. "Yes," said BT's Simon Fisher when asked during a panel session here if there is a danger of going from one form of lock-in to another. "You are squeezing complexity and cost into the software side of the business."
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"I guess the fear is that because ONAP is open source it will be easier for bad actors to explore (than a commercial solution) and, if widely adopted, worthwhile trying to hack," noted Crawshaw.
A new agreement between Broadband Forum (BBF) and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is set to ease the path to automated and open virtualised access networks. The roadmap sets forth how operators seeking to effectively use virtualisation and open source to increase agility can leverage open source and standardisation projects side-by-side to ease their migrations to automated access networks and enable seamless co-existence. As the broadband industry embarks on the next phase of broadband deployment, numerous new business opportunities are emerging that require rapid service instantiation, often across disparate, software-defined networks, and leveraging third-party applications.
In yet another example of open source groups working together, the Broadband Forum and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced on Monday that they have signed an agreement to mutually drive automation and virtualization across access networks.
Over the past several years, open source communities and standards development organizations (SDOs) have started to collaborate with each other in order to speed up the development of new applications and services while not duplicating each other's efforts.
As the broadband industry embarks on the next phase of broadband deployment, numerous new business opportunities are emerging that require rapid service instantiation, often across disparate, software-defined networks, and leveraging third-party applications. To take advantage of this untapped potential, operators are looking to interconnect different parts of their network with open source solutions and systems from various suppliers.
Fair elections are the lifelines of democracy, but in recent years election hacking has become a hot topic worldwide.
Machine learning research resource Papers with Code last week introduced Sotabench, a free and open website created to benchmark and rate the performance of state-of-the-art open source models from GitHub. Papers with Code is an open platform that aggregates ML papers, code, and evaluation tables and metrics from sources such as arXiv and GitHub.
Towo Labs, a Swedish startup aimed at simplifying ‘crypto self-custody’, has announced an investment from Xpring, Ripple’s developer initiative.
Xpring is described as an initiative by Ripple that will invest in, incubate, acquire and provide grants to companies and projects run by entrepreneurs.
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All open source code contributions will be subject to the normal code and security reviews of the involved repository maintainers.
Strapi, a Paris, France-based open-source CMS, raises $4M in seed funding to deliver on its vision of making content accessible to any platform while offering the only fully open-source, JavaScript-based, community-powered and 100% customizable Headless CMS which is entirely free for developers.The round was led by Accel and Stride.vc. Notable angel investors and open-source experts, Solomon Hykes (Founder of Docker), Guillermo Rauch (Founder of Cloudup, Socket.io, Next.js and Zeit.co) and Eli Collins (Ex-CTO at Cloudera), also participated in this round.
Strapi has become quite popular in the headless CMS space, with 500,000 downloads and 250 contributors to the open-source project. The first version was released on GitHub in 2015.
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The second RC build of the 12.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
Installation images are available for:
o 12.1-RC2 amd64 GENERIC o 12.1-RC2 i386 GENERIC o 12.1-RC2 powerpc GENERIC o 12.1-RC2 powerpc64 GENERIC64 o 12.1-RC2 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE o 12.1-RC2 sparc64 GENERIC o 12.1-RC2 armv6 RPI-B o 12.1-RC2 armv7 BANANAPI o 12.1-RC2 armv7 BEAGLEBONE o 12.1-RC2 armv7 CUBIEBOARD o 12.1-RC2 armv7 CUBIEBOARD2 o 12.1-RC2 armv7 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD o 12.1-RC2 armv7 RPI2 o 12.1-RC2 armv7 PANDABOARD o 12.1-RC2 armv7 WANDBOARD o 12.1-RC2 armv7 GENERICSD o 12.1-RC2 aarch64 GENERIC o 12.1-RC2 aarch64 RPI3 o 12.1-RC2 aarch64 PINE64 o 12.1-RC2 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/12.1/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "releng/12.1" branch.
A summary of changes since 12.1-RC1 includes:
o The loader.efi had been updated to use ioalign for compliance with UEFI specification 2.7A.
o A null pointer dereference bug had been fixed.
o A fix to SCTP to reset local variables to their initial values had been added.
o The ixgbe(4) driver had been updated to prevent a system crash when configuring EEE on X500EM_X devices.
o The sdhci(4) driver had been updated to fix a boot issue on Beaglebone SoCs.
A list of changes since 12.0-RELEASE is available in the releng/12.1 release notes:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.1R/relnotes.html
Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 12.1-RELEASE cycle progresses.
=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64 architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/12.1-RC2/
The partition layout is:
~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label) ~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label) ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the virtual machine images. See this page for more information:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU
To boot the VM image, run:
% qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \ -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \ -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev user,id=net0
Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.
=== Amazon EC2 AMI Images ===
FreeBSD/amd64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:
eu-north-1 region: ami-0186d6a5fbc8766f2 ap-south-1 region: ami-0b6bef3551f1b0f70 eu-west-3 region: ami-062495360178ede5e eu-west-2 region: ami-0ccfe49c85e5f8cc0 eu-west-1 region: ami-0e2730782e7462f98 ap-northeast-2 region: ami-053ddd72fc1feb00a ap-northeast-1 region: ami-06cd2e1981334f254 sa-east-1 region: ami-08acf6b9b1df41f34 ca-central-1 region: ami-064249d804369c668 ap-east-1 region: ami-020c406cb2f52030b ap-southeast-1 region: ami-08264f040bf980098 ap-southeast-2 region: ami-0da02f500e46cac8f eu-central-1 region: ami-05458e84d05b820e8 us-east-1 region: ami-06f6cbd134064befb us-east-2 region: ami-0cfe92105f4fee6a8 us-west-1 region: ami-0bb63fac9c5ec153a us-west-2 region: ami-00a29b19544968928
FreeBSD/aarch64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:
eu-north-1 region: ami-0ea4448b9b547107c ap-south-1 region: ami-07a9fd713466fe63f eu-west-3 region: ami-02e84241865e90f54 eu-west-2 region: ami-0b707024f9aadb94f eu-west-1 region: ami-0abf12b852be4e776 ap-northeast-2 region: ami-086547036e5a47816 ap-northeast-1 region: ami-038017fcbf85e7669 sa-east-1 region: ami-0da52f30dd7d86ef5 ca-central-1 region: ami-092ee6a89213c15a2 ap-east-1 region: ami-0db28099cf79bf65d ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0852402b94d58adf8 ap-southeast-2 region: ami-01f869cc877cef54f eu-central-1 region: ami-04d008006fdb7e720 us-east-1 region: ami-0411db3e8715d4352 us-east-2 region: ami-01e68c35d7ddcac3e us-west-1 region: ami-02dcdcd99bf7fde1f us-west-2 region: ami-09ce8334b595dff30
=== Vagrant Images ===
FreeBSD/amd64 images are available on the Hashicorp Atlas site, and can be installed by running:
% vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-12.1-RC2 % vagrant up
=== Upgrading ===
The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running earlier FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:
# freebsd-update upgrade -r 12.1-RC2
During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.
# freebsd-update install
The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.
# shutdown -r now
After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:
# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 11.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat11x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:
# shutdown -r now
Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:
# freebsd-update install
We are getting mighty close to the release of FreeBSD 12.1 as the next installment of FreeBSD 12 for 2019. It's looking like FreeBSD 12.1 will indeed be ready to set sail in early November.
FreeBSD 12.1 finally provides the LLVM OpenMP library (libomp) as part of the base compiler set, the LLD linker is now also used by i386, BearSSL has made it into the base system, and a variety of other package updates / new hardware support / improvements for FreeBSD 12.1.
John Tredennick, founder and former CEO of e-discovery company Catalyst Repository Systems, has accepted the challenge of bringing free, open source legal tech to an industry notoriously known as a slow tech adopter.
Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego have launched an open-source software called SeedMeLab, which provides a host of features for researchers across all disciplines to manage and disseminate their data products internally and externally from a personalized and branded data cloud with full ownership and control.
Under development and rigorous testing for past five years, SeedMeLab is a result of $1.3 million National Science Foundation (NSF) award to create a set of web-based building blocks that lets scientists seamlessly share and access preliminary results and transient data from research on a variety of platforms, including mobile devices. SeedMe is short for ‘Swiftly Encode, Explore and Disseminate My Experiments.’
“Offered as an open-source software or a managed service from SDSC, SeedMeLab eliminates content fragmentation—that is data, its context, and its discussion—and enables quick reference of data/research context that’s critical during research phase and very useful for long tail use of data products” said SDSC Visualization Group leader Amit Chourasia, principal investigator for the project. “SeedMeLab also boosts team productivity by facilitating knowledge transfer between lab members in a sustained way, and it is now available for researchers to overcome data management gaps that have been an issue in the past. SeedMeLab is an important stepping stone for researchers to realize FAIR data management in practice.”
A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate Tuesday would require the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which collects and models scientific data for weather forecasting purposes, to make certain operational weather models publicly available.
Under the Learning Excellence and Good Examples from New Developers, or LEGEND Act, NOAA would also “periodically review innovations and improvements” to operational models made by third parties and the public. The bill would give NOAA’s administrator authority to utilize certain outside innovations.
These days there are plenty of ways to interact with computers including mice, touchpads, touchscreens, and pens (and keyboards, of course). But one option that’s largely fallen by the wayside is the trackball.
While a handful of companies continue to offer “trackball mouse” accessories that are basically mice with a rolling wheel in the side, there aren’t many decent standalone options.
Shapeshifter’s design is open-source, with everything available on Github for the curious musical tinkerers out there. The device is built around a PCB with only through-hole components, making assembly easy for even the least experienced enthusiasts out there. A Teensy 3.6 is then slotted into the socket on the board, providing 180MHz of grunt to run the show. It’s an excellent choice, as the Teensy platform has a huge range of libraries which make it simple to work with audio.
Being open-source, not only is it a cinch to make your own, but there’s plenty of room to remix the design to your personal tastes. There’s even a breadboarding area and the capability to add an expansion card for even more possibilities. Some users have even gone so far as to add displays and filter mods to really open things up.
In November 2017, we showed you [Chris Annin]’s open-source 6-DOF robot arm. Since then he’s been improving the arm and making it more accessible for anyone who doesn’t get to play with industrial robots all day at work. The biggest improvement is that AR2 had a closed-loop control system, and AR3 is open-loop. If something bumps the arm or it crashes, the bot will recover its previous position automatically. It also auto-calibrates itself using limit switches.
AR3 is designed to be milled from aluminium or entirely 3D printed. The motors and encoders are controlled with a Teensy 3.5, while an Arduino Mega handles I/O, the grippers, and the servos. In the demo video after the break, [Chris] shows off AR3’s impressive control after a brief robotic ballet in which two AR3s move in hypnotizing unison.
Makr Mirror is an open source smart mirror created to provide a “customisable out of the box experience”. The smart mirror It has been launched via Kickstarter this week and is now available to back with earlybird pledges starting from $649, providing a fully finished Raspberry Pi smart mirror with shipping available throughout the United States. Watch the project video below to learn more about the Makr Mirror and its inspiration to provide a fully open source and extensible smart mirror.
Releasing the news into the community, BCN3D asked RepRap pioneer Richard Horne, better known as RichRap, for his input. Deemed a “step beyond” the usual release of machine CAD files by the open source advocate, Horne says ““This release of the Sigma R19 and the Sigmax R19 source files also comes [with] an even greater gift to the open source hardware community, this being the inclusion of the designs and information that BCN3D use to manufacture, test and assemble all aspects of the machine during production.”
“With this level of commitment to the open source hardware movement,” Horne adds, “it allows others to learn and further benefit from the R19 project and it’s journey from design to stable production 3D printers.”
Meanwhile, academics at Berkeley created the new RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five") open source instruction set, which is being commercialized by the RISC-V Foundation. Many current and potential Arm server processor designers are evaluating the potential for RISC-V based server processors. They include some large IaaS clouds, like Alibaba Group and Google, plus some chip companies not currently in the server processor design business, like NVIDIA.
Depending on your position, VR is either dead or dying, or just waiting on that eureka technological leap to fully realise its promised potential. HTC's Vive Cosmos headset, released this month, might just be that virtual reality saviour. And we got a complete heads-on experience with it.
Despite wear-leveling techniques, eMMC flash memories tend to wear out over time as they have limited write cycles.
Back in February for LLVM Clang 9.0 was the initial AMD Zen 2 "znver2" enablement, but like the GCC support at the time it was the very basics. With time GCC picked up Zen 2 scheduler improvements and other work while sadly in the case of LLVM the improvements are still pending.
Back in August, AMD's Ganesh Gopalasubramanian sent out the znver2 scheduler model for LLVM for Zen 2 CPUs but a focus on the EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors. "There are few improvements with respect to execution units, latencies and throughput when compared with znver1. The tests that were present for znver1 for llvm-mca tool were replicated. The latencies, execution units, timeline and throughput information are updated for znver2."
This tutorial covers the following topic – Python Add lists. It describes various ways to join/concatenate/add lists in Python. For example – simply appending elements of one list to the tail of the other in a for loop, or using +/* operators, list comprehension, extend(), and itertools.chain() methods.
Most of these techniques use built-in constructs in Python. However, the one, itertools.chain() is a method defined in the itertools module. You must also see which of these ways is more suitable in your scenario. After going through this post, you can evaluate their performance in case of large lists.
You couldn’t just roll down the street leaving huge piles of garbage everywhere you go, making life slower for everyone as they climb over your mountains of junk, just to get on with their life. You’d feel bad about it, right?
That’s how I feel about the digital things we put out into the world: websites, apps, and files.
I prefer coding everything by hand, because I don’t like the huge piles of garbage that the automated generators create. These programs that generate a website, app, or file for you spit out thousands of lines of unnecessary junk when really only 10 lines are needed. Then people wonder why their site is so slow, and they think it’s their phone or connection’s fault.
The Open Cybersecurity Alliance (OCA) project, an OASIS Open Project with IBM Security and McAfee as the initial contributors, is comprised of global, like-minded cybersecurity vendors, end users, thought leaders and individuals from around the world who are interested in fostering an open cybersecurity ecosystem and solving the interoperability problem. This would be done via commonly developed code and tooling, using mutually agreed-upon technologies, standards and procedures.
The new alliance was formed under the auspices of OASIS, a consortium driving the development, convergence and adoption of open standards. It was launched as an OASIS Open Project on Oct. 8.
common (GPL licenced?) formats (rtf, pdf, odt, doc) protocols (http, https, imap) standards yes – but no mono culture of software (one vs many mail providers, one vs many operating systems, one vs many Text Editors, one Mail program/server vs many Mail server).
Software mono culture means: a more fragile system with central point(s) of failure affecting the whole planet (Spectre Meltdown) = insecurity = instability = bad for the whole ecosystem.
"We mean business. It's got to be about shifting and transforming the infrastructure of inequity."
A good starting point for building a Red Team toolkit is downloading and installing Kali Linux, as many of the tools mentioned here are included in the default distribution. From there, additional tools can be acquired and added to address specific use cases. When building a toolkit, it’s important not to focus on the network side of the assessment to the exclusion of the physical aspects. A Red Team is also likely expected to try physical attack vectors against the customer’s security and needs to have the appropriate tools for that part of the work as well.
Chances are pretty good you've heard the term zero-day vulnerability. The term conjures up images of post-apocalyptic landscapes, where technology has either hit a singularity-level madness, or has reverted back to the days of CRT monitors and green screens. Max Headroom has returned and sand is the new currency.
Or not.
Truth be told, zero day is not even remotely as ominous. It is, however, quite serious. In fact, of all the known vulnerabilities, zero day can often pose the most risk. Why? The reason is in the very definition.
“The problem is that many developers fail to disable the debug mode after going live, exposing back-end website details like database locations, passwords, secret keys and other sensitive info,” they said.
Current events concerning Turkey and the Kurds in Syria remind me of a conversation I had with a US Air Force colonel almost 17 years ago in a courtroom in Des Moines.
"Civilian casualties are totally unacceptable, especially in the context of the widespread recognition that there can be no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan."
The Mexican city of Culiacan lived under drug cartel terror for 12 hours as gang members forced the government to free a drug lord’s son, but in many parts of Mexico, the government ceded the battle to the gangs long ago.
Rarely have two sides fought over an issue so ferociously only for both to get it so wrong. First, U.S. President Donald Trump announced almost a year ago that he would be pulling U.S. ground troops out of Syria. He failed to do so. And then, last week, he blessed an invasion into northern Syria by Turkey, which he is now punishing through sanctions for its conduct.
Thousands of people in the German city of Cologne and in the French capital demonstrated Saturday against Turkey’s offensive in northern Syria.
On the same day that President Jair Bolsonaro made his anti-indigenous speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) released its annual report, “Violence Against Indigenous Peoples in Brazil.” The data collected are from 2018, but the report also includes preliminary information for 2019, and the findings are alarming.
In less than two weeks, President Donald Trump has managed to create a massive and avoidable crisis in Syria.€ By greenlighting the Turkish invasion of northern Syria, Trump’s policy forced more than 160,000 Syrians to flee their homes. And guess who emerged as the political and military winners? Russia, Iran, and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
Multiple sources have reported that white phosphorus-loaded munitions are believed to have been dropped in the border town of Ras al-Ayn after images and video surfaced of civilians, including children, suffering gruesome burns associated with the chemical.
The Japanese government should publicly hold Myanmar to account for military atrocities committed against Rohingya and other ethnic minorities, Human Rights Watch said today. It should discourage Japanese investment that would benefit the military or at the expense of minority groups.
Lebanon’s security forces used excessive and unnecessary force against protesters in downtown Beirut on October 18, 2019, Human Rights Watch said today. The Internal Security Force’s riot police fired tear gas at thousands of largely peaceful protesters, including children, in downtown Beirut. The army cleared the areas, sometimes using excessive force, as riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at fleeing protesters.
As “United in Science" put it, current efforts need to be “roughly tripled to be aligned with the 2o C goal and increased fivefold to align with the 1.5o C goal” adopted by the 2016 Paris Agreement (emphasis added).”
Hence we are confronted by the damage already resulting from climate change: more intense and frequent extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, droughts, forest fires, and heat waves; rising sea levels that threaten the homes, lives and livelihoods of millions of people; and melting ice caps and permafrost, among others.
This was Waterston's first-ever time being arrested. The climate crisis, he said, is "worth it."
My colleague Mat Hope recently€ laid out an extensive map of the€ “free market” lobbyist network behind the attacks on Greta Thunberg, including Canada's€ far-right propaganda outlet masquerading as journalism, The€ Rebel.
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who sparked student protests across the globe, had this to tell the UN General Assembly in New York: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.” | By Charlie Simmons
How often I hear that in “polarized” America rural voters will reject a green agenda out of hand. For them, green means liberal, tree-hugging snobs, unconcerned about the struggles of real working people.But last week that frame busted for me when I had a chance to speak with Chloe Maxmin, a 27 year-old Maine legislator.Never heard of Chloe Maxmin? | By Frances Moore Lappé
A terrifying series of gestapo-style assaults, petiton buying, bribery, mass media manipulation and systematic intimidation has smacked into the attempt of Ohio citizens to repeal a billion-dollar bailout for two dangerously failing atomic reactors on Lake Erie.€ The unprecedented assault threatens the referendum process in Ohio and across the nation.€
PG&E has come near universal criticism for its lack of planning in shutting off power and its failure to adequately handle customers' questions while the outages lasted. PUC president Marybel Batjer blasted utility officials saying, "what we saw play out by PG&E last week cannot be repeated."
During the blackouts, Johnson admitted that his company had not been prepared for the impact of the outages, including the crashing of the utility's website and call centers being overwhelmed with customers' concerns.
Metsä is ultimately controlled by a co-operative belonging to more than 100,000 families who have each owned large chunks of the forest for generations. For every tree harvested, four saplings are planted. These are allowed to grow for a few years and are then thinned to encourage the best specimens to develop vigorously. The thinnings, however, are not wasted. They are sent to the mill. The mature trees, meanwhile, are harvested when they are between six and ten decades old. The consequence of this husbandry, according to Finland’s Natural Resources Institute, is that the annual growth of trees in Finland exceeds the volume of felling and natural loss by over 20m cubic metres, despite the increasing demand for wood.
As for the mill itself, Metsä’s stated aim is to make best use of every part of a tree, both to maximise the value of its wood and, where possible, to continue to lock up its carbon. To this end, besides the bread-and-butter business of turning out planks and plywood, the firm has come up with several new ideas. Three are of particular interest. One is a better way of converting wood pulp into fibre that can be turned into textiles. A second is to produce plastic-free cardboard cartons which can be used as food containers and then recycled. The third is to find employment for lignin, a by-product of the pulping process which is, at the moment, usually burned.
"Multiple large trades, resulting in billions in profit, occurred shortly before geopolitical events or statements by the president of the United States that moved the markets significantly."
Former US President Barack Obama endorsed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s bid for re-election.For the centrist status quo liberals, this is a moment of elation. Two tried-and-tested leaders that have respect on the international stage for being progressive heartthrobs, supporting each other against a mounting Conservative opposition. Sounds great.Except, it isn’t.
It’s Hillary Clinton vs. Tulsi Gabbard on the sidelines of the 2020 presidential race.
The British political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, was a man of many pithy phrases. Possibly his most widely quoted assertion is that “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”This quote fits the Trump age perfectly. Where are you, Barack Obama? Obama is still polling higher than any other politician, active or
When the then–Democratic frontrunner stopped by the table of The View on April 26 for his first interview since announcing his presidential run, he was afforded an honorific rarely applied to US vice presidents: “The legendary Joe Biden!”
A defiant Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Saturday that he would resist attempts to delay Britain’s departure from the European Union beyond the end of the month, after Parliament postponed a decision on whether to back his Brexit deal and ordered the government to ask the EU for more time.
"With Alexandria, with Ilhan, and others on board, we're going to put together a coalition that is going to win and win big," Sanders said ahead of the event.
It was not an isolated occurrence. Three days earlier, in the last 10 minutes of trading, someone bought 82,000 S&P e-minis when the index was trading at 2969. That was nearly 4 a.m. on September 11 in Beijing, where a few hours later, the Chinese government announced that it would lift tariffs on a range of American-made products. As has been the typical reaction in the U.S. stock markets as the trade war with China chugs on without any perceptible logic, when the news about a potential resolution of it seems positive, stock markets go up, and when the news about the trade war appears negative, they go down.
President Donald Trump no longer sees fit even to pretend that he is constrained by the law or the U.S. Constitution.It’s hard to imagine a more blatant violation of the Constitution’s anti-corruption provisions than the president steering foreign governments to stay at his luxury resort.
"It's past time to give the American people the real debate they deserved in 2016."
On 17 October 2019, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union (EU) and the European Commission started closed-door negotiations, trilogues, with a view to reaching an early agreement on the Regulation on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online.
The European Parliament improved the text proposed by the European Commission by addressing its dangerous pitfalls and by reinforcing rights-based and rights-protective measures. The position of the Council of the European Union, however, supported the“proactive measures” the Commission suggested, meaning potential “general monitoring obligations” and in practice, automated detection tools and upload filters to identity and delete “terrorist content”.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Friday sent letters to two tech giants over accusations that they were censoring pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong to protect business interests in China.
Members of the House and Senate panned both Apple and Acitivison Blizzard over actions they said suppressed “criticism of the Chinese government in hopes of gaining higher profits.”
Odom and Brunty also authored a paper on their research, titled “Forensic Inspection of Sensitive User Data and Artifacts from Smartwatch Wearable Devices,” which was accepted for publication in the November 2019 issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences. The full article is available to read at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.14109.
From public safety reconnaissance to data-gathering to delivery, potential uses for drones are adding up faster than legalized uses. Without the technical ability to remotely locate and identify all drones in a given vicinity, and thereby avoid safety and privacy concerns, the Federal Aviation Administration has put a moratorium on flying drones at night, above people or beyond a visual line of sight without special permits.
“Mark Zuckerberg won’t take Americans’ privacy seriously unless he feels personal consequences,” said Wyden, in a press statement. “A slap on the wrist from the FTC won’t do the job, so under my bill he’d face jail time for lying to the government.”
Facial recognition uses artificial intelligence to track objects and faces; anticipates what’s important to the user; and scans images against databases with millions of faces. It’s touted as one of the most exciting advancements in tech.
But limited information about how it’s being used by law enforcement, and a disturbing lack of transparency and accountability from the very companies that develop and sell it, mean we need to consider its dangers, including its proven racial and gender bias. In some circumstances, it's easy to see how the technology could potentially cost a life.
Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., reminded Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg what her father stood for after Zuckerberg invoked the civil rights leader while defending the social media company on Thursday.
During a speech in Washington, D.C., defending the platform, Zuckerberg twice referenced the civil rights era and MLK when advocating for “free expression” on Facebook, drawing a sharp response from Bernice King.
Google's "Nest" smart home division has seen major upheaval this year, and according to a report from Bloomberg, the changes aren't sitting well with residential builders that formerly integrated Nest projects into their construction projects.
This year, we finally started seeing results from Nest's 2018 demotion from a standalone Alphabet company to a merger with Google. "Nest" is no longer a line of products developed by a company or division and now seems to be a general-purpose sub-brand for any of Google's smart home devices. We've seen several existing product lines be rebranded from "Google" to "Google Nest" like the Google Nest Mini (formerly the Google Home Mini), the Google Nest Hub (formerly the Google Home Hub), the Nest Wifi (formerly Google Wifi), and the Google Nest Learning Thermostat (formerly the Nest Learning Thermostat).
The threatened lawsuit marks Trump's latest attack on the media, which has included efforts to smear journalists and news outlets; take away White House press passes; and previous threats of legal action. Trump has yet to actually file a lawsuit against any of his media foes, however—and experts suggested Friday that should he actually follow through this time around, he likely won't be successful. “This is an absolutely ridiculous letter,” lawyer Ted Boutrous, who represented CNN in their successful lawsuit against the Trump administration, wrote on Twitter. “No serious lawyer would ever think of sending such a frivolous letter making such a baseless threat.” First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told Mediaite that the lawsuit would be a “self-evident non-starter,” given that “CNN’s decisions as to what to cover and how to do so are fully protected by the First Amendment.” National security lawyer Bradley Moss suggested that the potential lawsuit is more of “a PR stunt being pursued for political reasons” than an actual attempt to win damages, saying that even if the lawsuit's claims were “viable”—which Moss says is “doubtful”—“the purpose of any such lawsuit is no doubt completely untethered to the idea of ‘winning’ in court.” “This threat of a possible lawsuit is nothing more than pure theatrics, pure and simple,” Moss told Mediaite.
There’s a British tabloid war brewing in New York. Rupert Murdoch’s famously fearsome Sun has been plotting a U.S. incursion, laying the groundwork for a Manhattan-based digital American edition that aims to capitalize on the momentum that the über-salacious sensation sheet has been enjoying in its native market. The news trickled out via a job posting, for a head of audience, first noticed on Wednesday by U.K. trade publication the Press Gazette. Several sources with knowledge of the matter confirmed it to me independently, one of them noting, “It is fairly self-evident that there are some plans to better serve the U.S. audience of the Sun.” The job advertisement calls those plans “ambitious.” Another source said, “The intention is to start pretty small, as a toe-in-the-water exercise, and see how far they can push it. I don’t think you’ll see a super-grandiose launch with a lot of hubris. It’s not gonna be like the Daily,” Murdoch’s similarly ambitious but ultimately failed iPad “newspaper,” which lifted off with a splashy event at the Guggenheim in 2011 starring Murdoch and Apple’s Eddy Cue.
Steven Butler, the Asia program director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, was traveling to Pakistan to attend a human rights conference when he was stopped upon entry in the eastern city of Lahore. While Mr. Butler had a valid Pakistani visa, immigration officials told him that the interior ministry had put him on a “stop list” before confiscating his passport. Mr. Butler was forced onto a flight to Doha, Qatar, where he was then placed on another plane to Washington, D.C., C.P.J. said in a statement.
“Pakistani authorities’ move to block Steven Butler from entering the country is baffling and is a slap in the face to those concerned about press freedom in the country,” said Joel Simon, C.P.J.’s executive director. “Pakistani authorities should give a full explanation of their decision to bar Butler from entering and correct this error. If the government is interested in demonstrating its commitment to a free press, it should conduct a swift and transparent investigation into this case.”
Court documents allege clear signs the companies knew who they were hiring.
But the four companies targeted in the operation have yet to face charges for hiring undocumented employees — and similar cases from across the country show they could avoid prosecution altogether.
"The core of the Almajiris [Islamic schools] is the study of the Quran and, in many cases, the actual memorization of the Quran. By and large, schools do not include in the curriculum the kinds of things that we would see as necessary for participation in modern life. The focus is really on religion," Campbell told VOA.
“The second camp is the dangerous place,” a police source said. “The children were molested there.”
The source said the most unruly students and some newcomers were placed in the second building. Students at the first school were sometimes taken to the second building for abuse.
Islamic schools, called Almajiris, are common in the mostly Muslim north of Nigeria. Muslim Rights Concern, a local organization, estimates about 10 million children attend them.
"All too often, the government is too captured by those incumbents that use their power to dictate their preferred policies," Chopra said, discussing his concerns around the unprecedented power and strength of Big Tech. He did not name any specific agency or company.
