Alex Gallego discusses the lessons learned building a new storage engine from scratch with no virtual memory, no page cache, with purpose-built read-ahead and write-behind strategies.
What a difference two years makes. Knative has applied to become a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project.
Google had insisted in 2019 that it would not be donating the framework to any foundation "for the foreseeable future" but a few short years later it has kicked off the process to donate the IP, trademark, and code to CNCF.
CNCF was obviously cock-a-hoop about the whole thing, and Priyanka Sharma, the foundation's executive director, told The Register: "Knative is a powerful technology that is enmeshed in the cloud native ecosystem making it easy to run serverless containers on Kubernetes. We welcome the decision and look forward to the Knative community contribution as it goes through the CNCF project proposal process.
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get caught up on the week that was. You probably know a ton of people who have a solar array at their home, but how many do you know that have built their own hydroelectric generation on property? Retrocomputing software gurus take note, there’s an impressive cross-compiler in town that can spit out working binaries for everything from C64 to Game Boy to ZX Spectrum. Tom took a hard look at the Prusa XL, and Matthew takes us back to school on what UEFI is all about.
Designed to enable the rapid development of embedded solutions, these open-source device drivers help to streamline the software development process for ADI’s customers, providing access to tested, high-quality software to create innovative solutions across a range of industries. This portfolio includes products from Maxim Integrated Products, now part of Analog Devices.
Analog Devices has also released “Kuiper Linux,” a free Linux-based operating system based on Raspbian/Debian that is optimised for ADI peripherals and supports popular ARM-based systems such as Raspberry Pi, Xilinx Zynq, Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC, Intel Cyclone V SoC, Intel Arria 10 SX SoC, and Intel Stratix 10 SoC.
The new Linux distribution focuses on ensuring ready-to-use in kernel Linux device drivers, offering embedded customers a robust system for software development, reducing risk and development time with pre-existing code that is peer-reviewed and industry backed.
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Through it's open architecture, Blender provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility, an incredibly small footprint, and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics application in the world.
Virtualization is one of the core computing technologies today. With a virtual machine (VM), you can run almost any operating system of your choice on your PC without breaking the bank to acquire extra hardware.
This guide explores how to use the command line terminal in managing your VirtualBox virtual machines regardless of the operating system you are using, be that Windows, macOS, or Linux. All VirtualBox installations come with the VBoxManage command-line tool, a powerful and flexible utility for managing your virtual machines.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RPM Fusion on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, The RPM Fusion software repo is a community-maintained software repo that provides additional packages for Fedora Linux which is not distributed by the official Fedora team. RPM Fusion’s goal is to make the end-user experience as simple as possible by centralizing as much add-on software as feasible. The RPM Fusion repository comes in two variants, Free and Non-Free. The free repository contains a free version of the software that is open source and non-free, which have mostly almost all free software but are closed source and mainly proprietary.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of RPM Fusion on a Fedora 35.
Download the latest version of Apache Maven to install on Debian 11 Buslleye Linux server or desktop using command line terminal.
Apache Maven is an open-source automation tool similar to Ant and Gradle for automating and simplifying many of the procedures that occur over and over again in software development. It is sometimes referred to as the “Build Management System” and is part of the “Software Configuration Management ( SCM )”. While Ant is more command-oriented, Maven is more strategically oriented suitably for more complex multi-module projects.
Managed by Apache foundation, Maven can also be used to build and manage projects written in C#, Ruby, Scala, and other programming languages. Here, we will learn the commands to install Apache Maven on Linux Debian 11 Bullseye distro.
Give your Roblox games a visual upgrade by building new graphics in Blender 3D.
Contemporary video games have grown increasingly complex in terms of graphics and mechanical designs, with their realistic textures and immersive environments. Unfortunately, Roblox's default, blocky environments prevent developers from matching those robust worlds. Well, developers can now cast those limitations aside. Roblox now has the ability to import custom mesh objects, so game makers no longer need to endure blocky parts and basic worlds. If you want to try your hand at building beautiful Roblox games, follow these steps to create custom meshes. But first, some background.
Another two weeks and more fixes coming in, the Wine 6.23 release is officially out now with new features and bug fixes.
This is the compatibility layer that allows you to run games and applications developed for Windows - on Linux. Part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made which will be Wine 7.0 likely in January 2022 and the Release Candidate stage for Wine 7.0 will begin soon.
This week saw many fixes landing for the KDE desktop components along with some UI tweaking and other alterations.
This week KDE developer Nate Graham called for KDE to embrace simplicity by default in an effort to appeal to more novice users. He's also been wanting to squash more "annoying bugs" and paper-cuts for the KDE desktop. With this week's development efforts, more KDE bugs were fixed.
One of the biggest changes in Gedit 42 is the introduction of recoloring support based on the controversial libadwaita library, which the GNOME devs use these days to build modern GNOME applications, and using a CSS provider to override the colors in Gedit’s theme, making it look really awesome compared to the previous releases.
A long, long time ago in Minneapolis, this question loomed over a small group of eighth-graders.
Appearing on a teletype machine—basically a primitive computer keyboard connected to a printer—at Jordan Junior High School, the strange question broke open the world of The Oregon Trail. Decades later, the title remains perhaps the most influential educational video game ever created, one that endures today as its influence is still being felt across the gaming industry.
Most people point to Sneakers, Hackers, or WarGames. They’re all wrong. The Wachowskis actually invented the ultimate cyber superhero.
"It's a UNIX system...I know this!"
According to Wired, UNIX actually is what a computer geek like Nedry would have used for Jurassic Park in 1993. But the scene where Lex "hacks" into the security system by typing extremely fast is very inaccurate and today looks unintentionally hilarious. Unlike common Hollywood portrayals of computer hacking, real hacking is often complicated and it's not something a 13-year-old would just know how to do simply because they use computers.
And where UNIX was once extremely modern technology, it now looks a lot simpler than the coding used in security systems today. Much of "Jurassic Park," like the velociraptors entering the kitchen, is still thrilling in 2021, but this scene simply didn't hold up well.
When I talk about things involving the history of Unix, I often wind up mentioning V7, also known as Seventh Edition of Research Unix from Bell Labs (for a recent example, in my entry on when Unix got stack size limits). If you're relatively new to the history of Unix, you might wonder why V7 keeps coming up so often. There are a number of reasons that V7 matters so much both for the history of Unix and for what is what we think of as being 'Unix' and the Unix way.
Unix and C were originally created and developed in the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center (CSRC) by various well known people like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The CSRC's release of V7 was a pivotal moment in the history of Unix, as it was both widely publicized and relatively widely distributed. This led to a number of effects, both practical and of perceptions.
First, V7 is effectively the common ancestor of various strains of Unix since then (this is not quite true for PWB, but close enough). Both BSD Unix and AT&T Unix (System III and System V) branched off from V7, so things in V7 were generally inherited by both of them, while things introduced after V7 (in some Unix line) had to make their way back and forth and didn't always migrate. This tends to be why I go back to V7 (and often no further) to see when something was introduced and if it was originally common to BSD Unix and System III/System V.
Second, V7 was where a lot of what we think of as the way Unix and C are was established. V7 is where we got the Bourne shell and a relatively modern dialect of C, including stdio; both the V6 shell and C were somewhat different, to the point that you couldn't necessarily compile V6 programs even on 1980s C compilers (never mind modern ones). In fact a lot of 'Unix' comes from V7, and it's probably the oldest Research Unix that would feel normal and familiar to us today as users of modern Unix.
I have uploaded packages for VLC 3.0.16. I have not been paying much attention to VideoLAN development in 2021, as I was busy enough with other stuff and my VLC player did everything it needed to. But it was time (after 11 months) to come with a new set of packages for Slackware.
Between the previous 3.0.7 and this 3.0.16 release I updated some of the vlc packages’ internal libraries too: bluray, dav1d, dvdnav, dvdread, dvdcss, ebml, libva, matroska, opus, pcre2, speexdsp, ssh2 and vpx. I also added patches to the internal ffmpeg that fix crashes in MPEG2 DXVA playback.
Proxmox has released its Mail Gateway 7.1. The open source software filters incoming and outgoing e-mails between the Internet connection – usually a firewall – and the actual mail server. The proxy is intended to protect the IT infrastructure and users from spam, viruses, Trojans and phishing. The underlying Linux distribution – currently Debian Bullseye 11.1 – is updated regularly.
The new version brings laut Proxmox Among other things, improvements to the web interface: If you use it to configure LDAP backends, you can now make changes without having to enter your password again. Multi-factor authentication can be set up for access to an account via the graphical user interface; as secondary factors, WebAuthn, one-time recovery key and time-based one-time password (TOTP) are available.
As we reported at the time, Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye came with a free speed boost for certain Raspberry Pi models, a new window manager, and a host of problems not limited to library and HAT compatibility, video drivers, and with camera modules.
The new Legacy release claims to fix all that. Based on Buster, the previous release of Debian, it removes the hardware-accelerated version of the Chromium browser that was one of Bullseye’s headline features, replacing it with an upstream software-accelerated variant. A new option in the raspi-config app allows the reinstatement of legacy camera interfaces.
The legacy OS sticks with version 5.10 of the Linux kernel, and branches the firmware too, so won’t support any future products. It will, however, continue to receive security and hardware support patches as they become available.
“Although we will not support new products on the legacy image, we will make sure any new revisions of older products continue to be supported,” writes Raspberry Pi director of software engineering Gordon Hollingworth on the Raspberry Pi website. “So, for example, if we were to release a (currently imaginary) new Raspberry Pi 4 rev 1.5 (which usually means component changes for supply reasons), it would be supported on the legacy image, whereas a new Raspberry Pi product (a future 5 for example, also currently imaginary) would not.”
Raspberry Pi users now have the option of running a legacy version of the Raspberry Pi OS, allowing them to rely on a stable platform for several years.
The new version of the operating system is called Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy), and it's based on the Debian Buster release. Hardware-accelerated Chromium has been removed and replaced with the upstream software-accelerated browser. This removes a lot of the headaches around supporting hardware-accelerated Chromium, which always requires the latest version of Debian due to security patches.
Like some other Linux distributions, the Raspberry Pi OS is built on top of Debian. Debian, on the other hand, recently received an update from Debian Buster, on which the Raspberry Pi OS was previously based, to Debian Bullseye. Raspberry Pi has now announced that the Raspberry Pi OS will also be based on this new Debian version in the future. But while the Bullseye release itself mainly involves changes that are barely visible to the user, adjustments have been made to the desktop environment and thus also to the hardware requirements for the Bullseye-based Raspberry Pi OS.
Linux Mint 20.3 is just around the corner, and we are already getting to see some exciting new changes coming to it. As outlined in their November blog post, we will hopefully be seeing an updated version of MATE, a dark mode for XApps, and a brand-new app. Let’s have a closer look at these changes!
IAR Systems€®, the world leader in software tools and services for embedded development, and Codasip, the leading supplier of customizable RISC-V processor IP, today announced their partnership enabling joint customers to build low-power embedded applications based on RISC-V. Following this, version 2.11 of IAR Embedded Workbench€® for RISC-V now supports the L30 and L50 processors from Codasip. The L30 and L50 are small and energy-efficient low-power embedded processor cores from Codasip, all fully customizable and adaptable to the unique needs of a project.
Industry talk is continuing to circulate regarding a possible public listing of the UK makers of the diminutive Raspberry Pi computer.
Over the weekend, The Telegraph reported that a spring listing could be in the offing, with a valuation of more than €£370m.
Pi boss, Eben Upton, described the newspaper's article as "interesting" in an email to The Register today, before repeating that "we're always looking at ways to fund the future growth of the business, but the $45m we raised in September has taken some of the urgency out of that."
Mutterings regarding a potential IPO emerged earlier in 2021 - Upton waved off rumours in March 2021, but things have moved on during the rest of the year.
For those of us who remember old ball mice, they were a lot like modern optical mice except that they needed to be cleaned constantly. Having optical mice as a standard way of interacting with a computer is a major improvement over previous eras in computing. With extinction of the ball mouse, there are an uncountable number of cheap optical mice around now which are easy pickings for modern hacking, and this latest project from [Vipul] shows off some of the ways that optical mice can be repurposed by building a digital ruler.
The build seems straightforward on the surface. As the ruler is passed over a surface the device keeps track of exactly how far it has moved, making it an effective and very accurate ruler. To built it, the optical component of a mouse was scavenged and mated directly to a Raspberry Pi Zero W over USB. Originally he intended to use an ESP32 but could not get the USB interface to work. [Vipul] was then able to write some software which can read the information from the mouse’s PCB directly and translate it into human-readable form where it is displayed on a small screen. The entire device is housed in a custom 3D-printed enclosure to wrap everything up, but the build doesn’t stop there though. [Vipul] also leveraged the Bluetooth functionality of the Pi and wrote a smartphone app which can be used to control the ruler as well.
Healthcare is a tricky subject to cover from just about any angle. One of the big issues with healthcare software is the strict privacy laws that govern the industry, which make it challenging for healthcare software to not just be created but maintained over time. Because of this, it's not easy coming up with solid open-source healthcare solutions. Such healthcare software has come and gone over the years (most have gone), but some tools have managed to stick around.
Here are five such available healthcare software tools, four of which are free and open-source, and one that is free. All five of these tools are cross-platform.
This is an advent calendar for techies. In the fully commercialized digital world, almost everything belongs to a large Internet corporation. Their software is neither open nor free. As an alternative, there is this small island of the open source world: software whose code is publicly visible and can be independently checked for possible security gaps and backdoors. Software that can be freely used, distributed and improved. Often the drive for work is simply the joy of providing something useful to society.
Short portraits of open source projects will be published on heise online from December 1st to December 24th. These are about the functions of the respective software, the pitfalls, the history, the background and the financing. Some projects are backed by an individual, others by a loosely organized community, a tightly managed foundation with full-time employees or a consortium. The work is entirely voluntary, or it is financed through donations, cooperation with Internet companies, government funding or an open source business model. Regardless of whether it is a single application or a complex ecosystem, whether a PC program, app or operating system – the diversity of open source is overwhelming.
Your phone's hardware is still in good shape, but the manufacturer has stopped supporting the software. In cases like these, you should consider installing an alternative Android version so that you can continue making the best of a perfectly good phone.
Smartphone manufacturers are notorious for ending Android updates after two to three years, despite phones being capable of longer lifespans.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has been leading an upcycling initiative for Android phones with the goal of preventing e-waste by extending the lifespan of Android phones using free software.
Two alternatives that offer enhanced data protection are CalyxOS, which has a focus on security, and LineageOS, which is designed to run on as many devices as possible, according to guidance from the FSFE.
There are also alternatives to Google Play when it comes to getting apps for your Android phone. For example, there’s the F-Droid store where all the software is free and open source.
This is an advent calendar for techies. In the fully commercialized digital world, almost everything belongs to a large Internet corporation. Their software is neither open nor free. As an alternative, there is this small island of the open source world: software whose code is publicly visible and can be independently checked for possible security gaps and backdoors. Software that can be freely used, distributed and improved. Often the drive for work is simply the joy of providing something useful to society.
Short portraits of open source projects will be published on heise online from December 1st to December 24th. These are about the functions of the respective software, the pitfalls, the history, the background and the financing. Some projects are backed by an individual, others by a loosely organized community, a tightly managed foundation with full-time employees or a consortium. The work is entirely voluntary, or it is financed through donations, cooperation with Internet companies, government funding or an open source business model. Regardless of whether it is a single application or a complex ecosystem, whether a PC program, app or operating system – the diversity of open source is overwhelming.
Blancco Technology Group (LSE: BLTG) and The Dariu Foundation are urging Vietnamese businesses to save used laptops and desktops from physical destruction and instead, donate them to low-income school children and rural schools that don't have computers.
"Because of COVID-19, the education of more than 21 million children was disrupted in Vietnam, and of these, an estimated 4 million lack devices," said The Dariu Foundation Program Manager Lan Anh. "By working with Blancco partners and the private sector, we hope to provide 70 rural schools and 2,000 disadvantaged children with free-of-charge rental of desktops and laptops to access digital literacy education and online education."
Many of these groups got an influx of attention and money in the summer of 2020 — which makes now a good time to give, since they’re now getting less attention and might be in greater need of funding than they were 18 months ago.
The Dutch web developer and science philosopher Thomas FK Jorna seems to be a fan of old-school text editors: in any case, he has given the text editor Emacs, programmed in C and Lisp, a new online presence, on which friends of Plaintext start with the documentation on GNU Emacs , GNU Elisp as well as an org manual for organizing life in pure markup and a somewhat more complex manual for the LaTeX editor AUCTeX.
Modern shop window for Emacs & Co. According to the GitHub entry, Jorna was obviously tired of handling the old-fashioned Emacs manual and wanted a more modern implementation, which he created himself without further ado.
A long-time favorite of Linux users, the GIMP image editor is now available on all platforms. While its interface isn’t exactly friendly to beginners — especially if you’re used to other programs — it’s at least as powerful as Photoshop for standard image editing tasks.
Following the elections in September, Germany is set to get a new coalition government made up of the Social Democrats, Alliance 90/The Greens, and the Free Democratic Party. According to The Document Foundation, which has been reading the coalition agreement, the new government will embrace the notion of Public Money, Public Code (PMPC), a concept that has been promoted by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) for a number of years.
Hypertext Preprocessor, better known as PHP, is a programming language that has been around since 1994. With more than two decades of use and still going reasonably strong today, there’s no doubt that it has some advantages – but how exactly does it compare to some of the other coding languages that have come out over more recent years? And is it still worthwhile, or is it common purely because it’s so well known?
While you can find a lot of information on PHP interpreters online, e.g., at Droptica , where you’ll find a little more information on how it could potentially be the best option for your needs.
Ruby developer and internet japester Aaron Patterson has published a REPL for 64-bit x86 assembly language, enabling interactive coding in the lowest-level language of all.
REPL stands for "read-evaluate-print loop", and REPLs were first seen in Lisp development environments such as Lisp Machines. They allow incremental development: programmers can write code on the fly, entering expressions or blocks of code, having them evaluated – executed – immediately, and the results printed out. This was viable because of the way Lisp blurred the lines between interpreted and compiled languages; these days, they're a standard feature of most scripting languages.
The Linux Foundation has launched a group called the QIR Alliance to make quantum computing applications more portable across hardware architectures and simulators.
JetBrains has released version 1.0 of Compose Multiplatform. The framework uses the declarative approach of the Android UI toolkit Jetpack Compose and implements it across platforms for desktop, web and Android applications. Unsurprisingly, Kotlin is used as the programming language.
Santa has been around for a long time already. Santa remembers the days when bits where set by using a magnetic screwdriver! In those days, you’d made sure that things were orderly set up and sorted for quick access.
Santa likes the Raku Programming Language a lot, because it just works like Santa thinks. There’s just this one thing missing to make Santa feel at home again, just like in the olden days: an easy way to make sorted lists and easily insert new values into these lists to keep them up-to-date.
In 2022, the German Perl/Raku Workshop will take place in Leipzig. We are very happy to announce that long time Perl supporter Geizhals Preisvergleich sponsor the workshop.
Large online platforms with essential services such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb and Booking.com with a market capitalization of over 80 billion euros are subject to significantly stricter competition requirements. The lead Committee for Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) in the EU Parliament supported this course on Tuesday.
A new antitrust instrument is intended to deter dominant “gatekeepers” in the network from engaging in unfair practices. According to the line of the MPs for the planned Digital Markets Act (DMA), which still has to be formally confirmed in a plenary session of parliament in mid-December, “gatekeepers” should make their messenger services and other accompanying products such as news feeds on social networks interoperable in the future .
The LoRa radio protocol is well known to hardware hackers because of its Long Range (hence the name) but also its extremely low power use, making it a go-to for battery powered devices with tiny antennae. But what if the power wasn’t low, and the antenna not tiny? You might just bounce a LoRa message off the moon. But that’s not all.
The team that pulled off the LoRa Moonbounce consisted of folks from the European Space Agency, Lacuna Space, and the CA Muller Radio Astronomy Station Foundation which operates the Dwingeloo Radio Telescope. The Dwingeloo Radio Telescope is no stranger to Amateur Radio experiments, but this one was unique.
Ginkgo biloba L. is an ancient relict plant with rich pharmacological activity and nutritional value, and its main physiologically active components are flavonoids and terpene lactones. The bZIP gene family is one of the largest gene families in plants and regulates many processes including pathogen defense, secondary metabolism, stress response, seed maturation, and flower development. In this study, genome-wide distribution of the bZIP transcription factors was screened from G. biloba database in silico analysis. A total of 40 bZIP genes were identified in G. biloba and were divided into 10 subclasses. GbbZIP members in the same group share a similar gene structure, number of introns and exons, and motif distribution. Analysis of tissue expression pattern based on transcriptome indicated that GbbZIP08 and GbbZIP15 were most highly expressed in mature leaf. And the expression level of GbbZIP13 was high in all eight tissues. Correlation analysis and phylogenetic tree analysis suggested that GbbZIP08 and GbbZIP15 might be involved in the flavonoid biosynthesis. The transcriptional levels of 20 GbbZIP genes after SA, MeJA, and low temperature treatment were analyzed by qRT-PCR. The expression level of GbbZIP08 was significantly upregulated under 4€°C. Protein–protein interaction network analysis indicated that GbbZIP09 might participate in seed germination by interacting with GbbZIP32. Based on transcriptome and degradome data, we found that 32 out of 117 miRNAs were annotated to 17 miRNA families. The results of this study may provide a theoretical foundation for the functional validation of GbbZIP genes in the future.
The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press releases touting the advantages of the new technology, articles describing the whys and wherefores, but… nope. There is nothing.
[Grow Your Own Clothes] had finally found their ideal sewing machine for doing zig-zag stitches (/\/\/\) and converting to a treadle drive (mechanically foot-fed) — a Singer 411G. This is a well-respected workhorse of a machine, and if you see one in a secondhand store, you might want to grab it. The only problem is that its multi-step zig-zag stitch is a 4-stepper and not a 3-step, which is what [GYOC] prefers. Having heard it was possible to hack them into doing a 3-step, [GYOC] set out to learn Tinkercad and grow their own sewing machine parts.
This stems from a combination of private patients wishing to avoid potential exposure to COVID-19 in hospitals, as well as the Ministry of Health’s request for telemedicine providers to assist and reinforce the handling of Covid-19 patients recovering at home.
Wind turbine maker Vestas says "almost all" of its IT systems are finally up and running 10 days after a security attack by criminals, confirming that it had indeed fallen victim to ransomware.
Alarm bells rang the weekend before last when the Danish organisation said it had identified a "cyber security incident" and closed off parts of its tech estate to "contain the issue."
Today the business - one of the largest worldwide to design, build, install and maintain wind turbines – said it has undertaken "extensive investigations, forensics, restoration activities and hardening of our IT systems and IT infrastructure."
Cybersecurity has been in the spotlight ever since President Joe Biden issued an executive order in response to sophisticated cyberattacks earlier this year. The EO was followed up with a cybersecurity summit at the White House where programs focused on different aspects -- from implementing zero trust to addressing the skills shortage -- were announced. The steady flow of initiatives, culminating in the recent announcement by the Open Source Security Foundation of its $10 million commitment to supply-chain security highlights the urgency assigned by the administration to these cybersecurity measures.
These moves are especially crucial for one area that is being targeted by new initiatives: open-source security. Just as the issue of ransomware drew attention and calls for legislation, which is expected to rise to 30% by the end of 2025, similar calls for regulation may target open source.
Dear EU High Representative Borrell and Foreign Ministers of the EU member states,
We are writing following credible revelations that Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware was used to hack the devices of six Palestinian human rights activists – the latest in a growing series of reports about human rights abuses linked to the use of NSO technology – to urge that the EU takes serious and effective measures against NSO Group, including the designation of the entity under the EU’s global human rights sanctions regime.
Already in July, reporting by the Pegasus Project – a collaboration of more than 80 journalists from 16 media organizations in 10 countries coordinated by Forbidden Stories with the technical support of Amnesty International – exposed how the Pegasus software was used to infiltrate the devices of activists, journalists, and opposition figures, including in the EU. Forbidden Stories and its media partners identified potential NSO clients in countries known to engage in unlawful and arbitrary surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of NSO Group.
Twitter in a recent policy change has tried to make the platform safer for its users but the move has raised more doubts than assurances.
Under its updated policy, the social media giant will now take action against users who post photos or videos of private individuals without their permission. And the policy also raises the question of the role of human content assessors at Twitter, who are seemingly now the final authority on the intent behind every post on the platform.
Yemen, in cooperation with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), has been examining the use of the electronic visa system at all its ports with an aim to enhance border security.
The Interior Ministry's Undersecretary for Police Services, Major General Mohammed al-Amir, said the project will represent a paradigm shift in the ministry’s work and will contribute to the improvement of security at the country’s entry points and borders.
Can open-source blockchains be coercive? In a recent debate between Erik Vorhees and Alex Gladstein, Vorhees asserted that “there is nothing in Ethereum that is based on coercion, period.”
Australia's government has announced it will compel social media companies to reveal the identities of users who post material considered defamatory.
Prime minister Scott Morrison phrased the planned legislation as creating a power "to unmask anonymous online trolls".
The effect of the planned law will be to put social networks in the same legal position as publishers – liable for whatever material they carry if it is defamatory, even if it was written by a third party. More on that later.
"Anonymous trolls are on notice, you will be named and held to account for what you say. Big tech companies are on notice, remove the shield of anonymity or be held to account for what you publish," states the PM's press release. That document goes on to explain that if social media companies reveal the identity of users that have made allegedly defamatory comments, whoever posted the contested material can become the subject of a defamation action rather than the companies.
A woman posing in a thong outside a church; a single mother who berated Russian lawmakers and President Vladimir Putin; a saxophonist who criticised World War Two commemorations.
They are among thousands of Russians who have faced court over their social media posts in the past year - a number digital rights groups say could soon turn into a deluge as authorities use artificial intelligence (AI) to police the web.
"We expect that all content posted on social media (in Russia) will be monitored by automated software," said Sarkis Darbinyan, head of the legal department for digital rights group Roskomsvoboda.
Gadsden Public Library Director Craig Scott says he “immediately put his hand up” when he heard that Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery was offering a traveling exhibit on the civil rights icon.
[...]
“We’re honored to have the exhibit here in Gadsden,” Scott said. It will be on display until Dec. 28.
Titled “Tired of Giving In: Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” the panels offer an overview of Parks’ life and her civil rights activism, which continued well after the events of 1955 and 1956. (After her death in 2005, at age 92, she became the first woman and the second Black to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.)
They also feature Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church at the time of the bus dispute, who gained national prominence through his leadership of the boycott.
The government of India has advised locals not to subscribe to SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service, revealing that it does not have a valid license to operate on the subcontinent.
Starlink registered its business in India on November 1, actively engaged in advertising and even pre-sold subscriptions. But it has not secured a license to operate, prompting India's Department of Telecommunications to issue a warning tweet.
As a child growing up in war-torn northern Uganda, Daniel Komakech's education was interrupted every time he had to flee rebels and hide in the bush for days to avoid being abducted.
Today, Komakech, 34, helps run a locally owned internet network that ensures villagers in the former conflict zone can study and stay in touch with each other - without unwanted interruptions.
"Accessing the internet was a turning point in my life," said Komakech, program coordinator for the non-profit Battery Operated System for Community Outreach (BOSCO), one of a growing number of community-led internet and phone networks in Africa.
A federal judge on Wednesday granted a preliminary injunction against a Texas law that prohibits large social media companies from banning users or blocking posts based on their political viewpoints.
HB 20, signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Sept. 9, targets companies with at least 50 million monthly users in the US, including Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube, and would also allow residents of the state to sue companies for reinstatement of accounts. The law, billed by the governor's office as protecting Texans "from wrongful censorship on social media platforms," was set to take effect Thursday.
EU software and cloud businesses have joined Nextcloud in filing a complaint with the European Commission regarding Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive behaviour over the bundling of its OS with online services.
The issue is OneDrive and Microsoft's habit of packaging it (and other services such as Teams) with Windows software.
Nextcloud sells on-premises collaboration platforms that it claims combine "the convenience and ease of use of consumer-grade solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive with the security, privacy and control business needs." Microsoft's cloud storage system, OneDrive, is conspicuous by its absence.
The accusation of bundling is reminiscent of concerns raised during the 1990s browser wars, when Microsoft eventually received a severe slap on the wrist over Internet Explorer. Today, the concerns are in relation to how difficult it is to avoid OneDrive when dealing with storage in Windows; that business app Teams turned up built into Windows 11; and all manner of Microsoft 365 grumbles.
A coalition of software and cloud companies has filed a complaint with the European Commission (EC) against Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior of bundling its OneDrive cloud storage, Teams, and other services with Windows 10 and Windows 11.
The Coalition for a Level Playing Field includes several European Union (EU)-based companies led by open source hosted cloud storage vendor Nextcloud.
“This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the [web] browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade. Copy an innovators' product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating,” says Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud.
A complaint has been filed by a coalition of cloud and software companies, with the European Commission against Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior. They bundled up Teams and OneDrive cloud amongst other services with both Windows 11 and Windows 10.
The Coalition had to even out the playing field by including a couple of European based companies, such as open source hosted by cloud storage vendor Nextcloud.
“This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the [web] browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade. Copy an innovators’ product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating,” said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud.
A coalition of European Union companies and groups led by Nextcloud GmbH has filed a complaint with the European Commission over Microsoft Corp. bundling services, including OneDrive, with Windows 10 and 11.
The “Coalition for a Level Playing Field” claims that Microsoft is engaging in anticompetitive behavior in bundling services with Windows.
“Microsoft is integrating 365 deeper and deeper in their service and software portfolio, including Windows,” the coalition claimed in a Nov. 26 statement, making it “nearly impossible to compete with their SaaS services.” Specific mention is made of OneDrive and Teams being a default part of Windows 11.
The obvious parallel to the complaint is Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows in the late 1990s and the coalition specifically mentions the famous case.
Although the complaint is targeted at Microsoft, the coalition also mentions Google LLC and Amazon Web Services Inc. as well.
The human cost of their sustained opposition to the temporary suspension of the intellectual property rights arrangement amounts to rights violations on a global scale, unions representing 2.5 billion health workers have said.
The Global Nurses United (GNU), which represents more than 30 leading nurses and healthcare workers unions on every continent, has written to the United Nations (UN) demanding an urgent investigation into COVID-19 “criminals” who are obstructing the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) bid to “temporarily waive patent protections on vaccine recipes”.
In the letter, dated November 29 and addressed to Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN special rapporteur on physical and mental health, the GNU has alleged that the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom (UK), Switzerland, Norway and Singapore are “endangering millions of lives around the world” and violating “our right to health—of nurses, caregivers, and patients”.
The union, representing more than 2.5 million healthcare workers, wrote that it has “witnessed the staggering numbers of deaths and the immense suffering caused by political inaction”.
Pointing to the failure of pharma companies and governments in ensuring equal distribution of vaccines, the GNU wrote: “High-income countries have procured upwards of 7 billion confirmed vaccine doses while low-income countries have only been able to procure approximately 300 million doses. This has created what public health advocates around the world have described as ‘vaccine apartheid’.”
