01.26.16
Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Executing large corporations' (not even European) wills and whims in Brussels
Summary: The immunity-waving European Patent Office (which is unwilling to waive its right to remain untouchable) is meddling and interfering with European politics, in the interest of monies/entities that are against Europe’s
Lots of political stuff is going on at The Hague (Netherlands), in France and in the UK at the moment, regarding the EPO’s abuses. Is Battistelli in trouble? Political actions may not be effective when the EPO enjoys effective immunity. The political system can barely touch the EPO, but the EPO sure is touching the political system and actively lobbies, e.g. for UPC.
According to a source of ours, “this just came in. It is an internal job posting.
“The Sovereign Republic of Eponia is looking for a plenipotentiary delegate for its Brussels colony, whose task is to pursue Her interests and implement Her policies…
“Can they possibly find that rare person combining all the desired qualities at the EPO in the next fortnight? Perhaps in the entourage of the Sun-King…
“I didn’t know that the EPO or EPOrg had political views, or was allowed to have her own. Who formulates these? The President? The AC? DG5? The Member states overseeing the AC? But if the same member states also sit at the EU, are they then lobbying themselves?
“I wondered what kind of work the Brussels delegate is doing, and found this dating back from 2012 [PDF]
.
The original file is unusable, and text can neither be searched nor copied. It’s apparently not copy protection-inflicted, just brain-damaged software, so we are hereby including an OCR version [PDF]
.
“The following panel from the schedule gives an idea of what the Brussels EPO bureau chief is involved in,” our source told us. “I have no idea what Mr. Gal might have said at this occasion.”
10h45 Enforcement measures for intellectual property rights – what is fair and proportionate?
Moderator: Claude COSTECHAREYRE,
1. Is copyright enforcement obstinate or obsolete?
Subtitle: Some concepts: global licence, graduated response, abuses, damages, injunctive measures, sanctions, technological protection measures, commercial scale
[...]
2. More than copyright: patents on medicines, software, trademarks, border measures – what should change?
- Javier De la Cueva, Lawyer, Madrid
- Jean-Luc Gal, Head of Brussels Bureau, European Patent Office
Was the EPO batting — like hired guns (lobbyists) — for Hollywood and Mickey Mouse? It’s hard to tell, but it’s inappropriate for the EPO to be involved in this way. It is currently lobbying regarding the UPC.
Here is what the EPO now wants in Brussels:
Vacancy notice
Head of Brussels Bureau (5.0.2) (3 years, extendable)
Status: Open Category: Temporary
Area: DG 5 – 5.0.2
Job group: Job group 4
Career path: Managerial
Place of employment: Brussels
Code: TRF/5941
Publication date: 18.01.2016
Closing date: 01.02.2016
Contact: Anne Arca-van Almsick
Permanent and contract employees wishing to be considered for this vacancy are invited to apply online.
It is intended to fill this vacancy by transfer under Article 4(1), first and second indents, and Circular 289.
Please note that only permanent and contract employees in the same job group as the advertised vacancy are eligible to apply.
It is the mission of the EPO’s Brussels Bureau to co-ordinate and enhance relations between the EPO and the European institutions, in support of the EPO’s overall mission and core business and in order to strengthen European stakeholders’ understanding of the EPO’s role as one of the world’s leading patent granting authorities.
Under his supervision, the Vice-President DG5 is now looking for a Head of the Brussels Bureau accountable for developing relationships with key players at the European institutions such as the European Parliament, the EU Commission and the EU Council of Ministers and its working groups and delegations and European stakeholders from business and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and – equally importantly – serving as the EPO’s eyes and ears in Brussels.
Main duties
• Conveying the EPO’s intellectual-property views and interests to opinion leaders, including representatives of the EU institutions such as the European Parliament, the EU Commission and the EU Council of Ministers and its working groups and delegations
• Maintaining and enhancing the EPO’s network of contacts with European stakeholders from business and relevant NGOs
• Producing studies, analyses and proposals for the EPO’s position concerning the European institutions’ activities which affect the European Patent Organisation
• Liaising with other EPO departments in their dealings with the European institutions
• Making the EPO’s political views known to opinion leaders
• Maintaining day-to-day contacts with the network
• Taking part in and reporting on meetings (formal and informal), conferences and other EU events
• Briefing EPO headquarters on developments likely to affect the work of the Organisation
• Reporting and advising on European policy and political initiatives affecting the EPO
• Preparing conferences and other events in co-operation with other EPO departments
• Interacting with the different EPO directorates-general
• Managing and reviewing – as line manager and reporting officer – the performance of the individual staff member and the overall performance of the team according to the team objectives and individual objectives of team members as well as priorities set
• Communicating management’s operational directions and priorities to the team
• Guiding and supporting the professional and personal development of the individual team members
The ideal candidate should have:
Excellent practical knowledge of the structure and political functions of major European organisations, e.g. the Eu
• Years of proven advocacy experience in Brussels
• Experience in people management
• Excellent team-working and interpersonal skills
• Experience in change management and organisational development
• Ability to work autonomously
• An existing, reliable and workable network of contacts
• Good political knowledge of patent issues and the EPO
• Highly developed communication skills (also with the press) and the ability to represent the EPO effectively at various levels
• Ability to get complex issues across clearly and comprehensibly
• Highly developed ability to react and report quickly
Process and timeline
The successful candidate will be selected on the basis of qualifications and relevant experience, supplemented as appropriate by interviews and/or tests.
It is intended to hold the interviews on 01 March 2016 in Munich.
The successful candidate will be appointed for an initial period of 3 years, which may then be extended by further fixed periods. The appointment will be subject to a probationary period of six months.
Since this was an internal posting, maybe they already know who will get this position/job. Maybe it was ‘custom-made’ for that person (recall the Bergot scandal [1, 2, 3, 4]). █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The European Patent Office (EPO) cannot pretend to be law-abiding or deserving any respect anymore
Summary: “Related to EPO,” a source told us, crushing of fundamental rights now deemed a serious offense, based on a new report from France
“Here is a link to a recent publication in the French newspaper “Le Monde” which is of a big interest in the present context. It is all about a report that the French government ordered to the former Minister of Justice, Mr Robert Badinter. I haven’t read Badinter’s report yet but I was appealed by the title: « Le respect des droits fondamentaux, première exigence du droit du travail » which translates approximately into “The respect of fundamental rights, first requirement of labour law”.
“I could summarise the situation by stating tat Dr. Elisabeth Hardon and Mr. Robert Badinter are both fighting for “fundamental rights” with respect to labour law.
“Here is another link on the same subject. The more I dig on this subject, the more it is relevant to the EPO. Last but not least: the Badinter report [PDF]
.
“Here is the translation of the text [...] It is amazing: Mr Robert Badinter should really talk to Benoit Battistelli to teach him good habits.”
Labour law: the Badinter report defines a foundation of fundamentals
January the 25th, 2016
The report of the committee chaired by Robert Badinter defining the fundamental principles that must be established in labour legislation was handed over to the Prime Minister on January 25th, 2016. For the committee, the first requirement of labour law is “to ensure working woman and man, employees and all those who participate in wealth creation process in a company, the respect for their fundamental rights, including their dignity. ”
The report defines 61 basic principles of labour law in eight main areas:
Freedom and rights at work. “Fundamental freedoms and human rights are guaranteed in any working relationship.” Among the stated principles are equality between men and women, racism, respect for privacy, prohibition of harassment, etc.
Training, implementation and termination of the employment contract. “The employment contract of indefinite duration.” Are also defined: the freedom of choice of the professional activity, maternity rights, the right to extended vocational training, the need for real and serious grounds for dismissal, etc.
Remuneration. “All employees are entitled to a remuneration ensuring decent living conditions. A minimum wage is set by law.”
Work time. “The normal working hours are fixed by law.” The report states that any transgression of the legal working hours entitles to a compensation. The principle remains the established weekly rest on Sunday, derogations may be authorized by law. Also part of the essential rights: the daily rest, supervision of night work, paid holidays.
Health and security at work. “The employer must ensure the safety and protect the health of employees in all areas related to work.” The report recognizes the right of withdrawal for employees who consider themselves in situations that present a serious and imminent danger. Employees need access to a independent occupational health service.
Freedoms and collective rights. The report postulates freedom of organisation and freedom for employees to join the union of their choice. He recalls the right of every employee to defend its interests by strike. The exercise of the right to strike may justify neither dismissal nor a sanction.
Collective bargaining and social dialogue. “Any labour law reform project is subject to prior consultation with the social partners.”
Administrative control and dispute resolution. “Labour inspection supervises the application of labor law under conditions protecting its members from undue external pressure.” Work-related disputes are brought before a specialized court, the employees cannot be punished for bringing the matter to court or for testifying.
The minister responsible for labour is expected to present in early March, a bill to reform the labor law. The principles set out by the Badinter Committee could be the preamble.
Keywords: Work, labour
The EPO is not only mistreating staff representatives, whom it is constantly trying to crush. Just recall how the EPO management (mis)treats the sick workers.
IP Kat comments got derailed by one single commenter (maybe another pro-EPO troll), repeatedly portraying EPO staff that’s protesting as spoiled and selfish, echoing the common PR tactic that we found coming out of EPO management every time mainstream media covered these issues. As we can safely skip much of that (the provocation and comments feeding the provocateur) — because it would be unwise and counterproductive to do rebuttals again — let’s look at what new information we can find in the comments. Right now, for instance, among the latest comments (not all) we have what could be related to the upcoming strike:
sick people will declared “not sick”;
interesting question :
if somebody “not sick” causes an accident (e.g. falls down an escalator) and injures/kills somebody else, because of the prescribed medication he had to take, will BB take the blame ?
will the EPO pay the damages?
One response to that says:
The history of labour disputes is full of examples, such as the “blue flu”, of non-cooperation of labour with management. But such history is all irrelevant to life inside the EPO, unless it concerns a labour dispute in a land where there are no courts. A land in which there is just a President who is investigator, prosecutor, judge, court of appeal and the sentencing authority, all rolled into one malevolent all-powerful being, an alien entity who looks down on his subjects from a satellite orbiting above them.
Recall the example of Admiral Byng, the British Admiral who in the 18th century was executed on his own quarter deck, in front of all the officers of the Fleet. Did he forfeit his pension rights? No doubt he did too!
Why did the Naval Authority do that to him? Why “pour encouragez les autres” of course. BB probably knows the story and has learnt something from it.
Now who at the EPO volunteers to be the next Admiral Byng?
Regarding that Admiral, another person wrote:
BB may have read his Voltaire.
But perhaps he should also have studied Blyng’s epitaph:
To the perpetual Disgrace
of PUBLICK JUSTICE
The Honble. JOHN BYNG Esqr
Admiral of the Blue
Fell a MARTYR to
POLITICAL PERSECUTION
March 14th in the year 1757 when
BRAVERY and LOYALTY
were Insufficient Securities
For the
Life and Honour
of a
NAVAL OFFICER
Alluding to the “Pompidou/Brimelow era”, one person wrote:
To answer the question about the applicable health and safety law: The applicable law is that of the host state, see article 16 (I think) of the PPI which imposes on the EPO the duty to co-operate with the host authorities for the observance of this law. However, the EPO has consistently defied this provision, not just in the notorious case of the suicide on office premises, but also earlier in The Hague, when the Dutch Labour Inspectorate sent a letter politely requesting a discussion as to how such co-operation could be arranged, only to be firmly rebuffed.
After a long series of negotiations between the Staff Committee and the management a comprehensive health policy for the EPO was agreed, which among other things, looked at the applicable legal framework. Part of the agreement was that the President would ask the AC for permission to co-operate with the national authorities as laid down in the PP, not that any such permission was needed. The request was never made, despite many reminders from the Staff Committee.
It may interest readers to know that the health policy also adopted a comprehensive health policy based on best practice which included the prevention of occupational illness, reintegration of sick staff, fair provisions for the verification of sick leave, the settlement of disputes by a panel of three doctors, the confidentiality of medical information, etc., etc. All this took place in the Pompidou/Brimelow era and the policy was patchily applied, due to management hostility. Nevertheless, it covered every aspect of the subject, and contained a provision for periodic review, which could have been used to remedy any defects found in practice. It was a model of a negotiated approach to a thorny problem in which both sides strove to solve each others problems.
Of course, all this was all immediately swept away by Battistelli. Occupational disease no longer exists, nor does confidentiality of medical information. The head of the health department is now a lay person, who reads confidential medical files. Battistelli or one of his minions will decide if you are sick or well, over-ruling qualified medical advice, and will decide on arbitrary grounds if and how much sick pay you receive. If you have a long-term illness you will face a form of house arrest for up to 10 years, before you may be allowed to return to your home country.
The speed and ferocity with which the health policy was dismantled shows just how much BB knew he had to fear from its correct application.
To repeat the above, “Battistelli or one of his minions will decide if you are sick or well” (which in itself is absurd). Is this how the EPO treats highly-qualified patent examiners? If so, what does that say about the EPO in relation to the Badinter Report? █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: SUEPO shows and translates a letter sent from Philip Cordery (above) to the International Labour Organisation (I.L.O.) bemoaning the abuses by the management and calling for action
“French MP Philip Cordery (Deputy for French Citizens of Benelux),” according to this comment, “issued a post (dated 9 January 2016) in which he indicates that he has sent a letter (dated 14 December 2015) to Guy Rider, Director General of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Translations are available in English, German and Dutch.”
This links to what SUEPO put in its public page yesterday, regarding a matter that we covered before (also in Spanish), even more than once (in English or in Spanish). It also quotes that in full (the words above are SUEPO’s), except the PDF which correctly states that the I.L.O. is massively overwhelmed by complaints about the EPO's management:
Philip Cordery
Deputy for French Citizens of Benelux
Secretary of the Commission of
European Affairs
Member of the Commission of Social
Affairs
President of the study group for
cross-border zones and workers
Paris, 14 December 2015
To the Director General,
Dear Guy,
As you are aware, the social climate within the European Patent Office (EPO) has deteriorated in the extreme. Since my last letter, however, matters have come to a head. Essentially, the repression has considerably hardened against the representatives of the Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO). A number of them have been suspended from office, while others have been the object of aggressive investigations and also risk dismissal, for entirely fallacious reasons.
While the main protagonists who are the victims of the campaign of defamation all have in common the responsibilities they have assumed within SUEPO (the former or present President, Secretary, Treasurer, active elected officers), all of the personnel of the organization remain subject to intense pressure. The management of the personnel being imposed by the management and the human resources elements of the EPO, based on fear, isolation, and repression, must cease. This is an issue of the physical and mental health of a considerable number of people whose welfare is our concern.
The social situation is well known to all, as attested by the numerous press articles, political actions, or administrative recommendations. In their report last November, the International Labour Office of your organization exposed the tensions within the EPO, citing the very large number of applications lodged by EPO functionaries with the Tribunal (56% of the complaints recorded by the Tribunal in 2015), even threatening to compromise the activity of the Tribunal itself.
In the light of this, and as indicated in the report, it would be particularly appropriate to engage the EPO in discussion in order to ameliorate the present social climate.
I am at your disposal to exchange views with you on these matters.
Yours faithfully and
Philip Cordery
One interesting comment that we found last night said: “Apart from the intervention of James Carver (see youtube), I’ve not seen coverage of the EPO in UK media. No interest? Not even in the run-up to the referendum? Not even in a referendum where a few hundred votes might make a drastic difference? What will a random UK voter think of the current EPO administration, and the way it handles its workforce? And what’s the odds that, given his exceptional achievements at the EPO, BB is rewarded with something much bigger, like, next president of the European Commission? Would the Brits oppose? Would anyone oppose?”
IP Kat has all sorts of discussions over there about UPC, but it’s a little bit tilted in favour of patent lawyers because it’s many of them who are interested in such articles and comment on them.
In relation to that last comment, one person wrote: “How do the British feel that a EU referendum is coming, but the government is making an exit more difficult by signing the UPC? But the media is rather silent everywhere. Süddeutsche has exchanged the reporter covering the EPO, and the new lady seems to be under pressure to produce articles, and seems to have less time for investigation. But like a friend said: how can we generate public interest when we cannot even catch the interest of our users, more specifically, the representatives? He said that when there still have been strikes.”
“The UPC would place even more power at the hands of people who have shown utter disregard for human rights and the Rule of Law.”There is Insufficient reporting on this issue, except from patent-centric sites, by and for patent lawyers. One of them wrote: “Finland has ratified the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement, meaning there are now nine total countries involved with the new regime.”
“EFFI should file a Constitutional Complaint in Finland against the UPC, in memoriam of Ville Oksanen’s work,” the President of the FFII wrote, linking to a writeup more than a decade old (also having cited the above article).
The UPC would place even more power at the hands of people who have shown utter disregard for human rights and the Rule of Law. Until things are resolved inside the EPO it would make a lot of sense to put UPC on the ice. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Original/English
Publicado en Europe, Patents at 5:09 am por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz
El fenómeno del nido de avispas no entendido claramente por la gerencia de OEP
Sumario: A pesar de los despidos y severos castigos (aplicados de sobremanera por Pinocho Battistelli a pesar del consejo del comite disciplinario), la unión de empleados de la OEP continúa mostrando señales de fuerza y tomarán futuras acciones (algunas más efectivas que las de hasta ahora, i. e. huelgas)
Lo que la gerencia de la OEP parece no entender, simplemente es su tardío entendimiento de efecto Streisand, es que lo más duro que aplastes a las uniones, lo más combatiba y/o ´agresivas´ (en un efecto de reacción) sus miembros se convierten y peor la situación se vuelve para la gerencia de la OEP. Están pinchando un nido de avispas.
Después de atacar repetidamente a las uniones, terminando en despidos, algunos empleados decidieron ir a la huelga. El dolor compartido, mas aún ayuda a apoyar a los despedidos. Los sobre estresádos empleados ven a sus representantes como mártires, o como personas que no pueden ser dejados a perecer, ayudando a la gerencia de la OEP a usarlos de ejemplo (para asustar a otros).
Ayuda financiera esta siendo ofrecida a los despedidos lideres de la unión. Solidaridad con sus compañeros y sus familias. Para citar lo visto, ¨respondiendo a la materia más urgente, muchas iniciativas han comenzado en varios lados. Sin embargo a la luz de la compleja situación en Holanda y Alemania, diferentes modelos son investigados. Se asume que los empleados serán informados ni bien algo concreto se sugiera. Aquí esta lo que la SUEPO Munich escribe en la materia: ¨De los cinco (!) representantes que han sido dura e inapropiadamente sancionados por Pinocho Battistelli, el Sr. Ion Brumme lo ha sido más duramente. Necesitará ayuda. Estamos trabajando en esto. Estamos estudiando como afrontar esto del punto de vista legal y taxativo.¨
También hay indicaciones que a pesar del severo castigo no evitó a la Srta. Weaver de estar envuelta en actividades sindicales. ¨En una nota personal,¨ dice el correspondente, ¨después de meses de ausencia, hoy Malika Weaver estuvo en la oficina y de nuevo activa en al CSC. Mientras las marcas de su calvario todavía están visibles, fue muy bueno verla de nuevo. Sinceramente esperamos que muy pronto Ion Brumme y Els Hardon puedan ser vistos de nuevo en las premisas de la OEP. Mientras tanto estamos haciendo lo imposible para hacerlo realidad.¨
Brumme no iba a ser removido de su cargo, pero el desgraciado de Battistelli ignorando al comite disciplinario lo hizo de todas maneres. ¿No piensa este desgraciado que estas personas son padres/madres de familia con niños que mantener? El Rey Sol no escucha a nadie; Battistelli lidera una autocracia disfrazada de algo más. Esto en sí mismo es una causa para la huelga. Basado en este nuevo comentario: ¨No puedo ver donde los examinadores estén HACIENDO algo como señal de protesta. Obviamente, desmostrar en público no es tan efectivo como lo esperado, la gente ¨afuera¨ de la OEP no son tan sensitivos cuando empleados ganando 10k no son felices. Si la AC sólo puede ser influenciada por resultados, bueno, lógicamente, sólo queda una cosa: producir menos. Me pregunto cuándo se darán cuenta de ello. Por supuesto, esto significaría que ellos diga adiós a sus bonos..¨
Hace meses nos quejamos como las examinaciones en la OEP eran hechas en apuro (e.g. trabajo descuidado [http://techrights.org/2015/10/11/closer-contact-with-major-applicants-leaked/]) en order de complir con objetivos. Bueno como este comentario lo pone, ¨todos son presionados para producir por lo menos 10% más que el promedio. De lo contrario eres amenazado con… preveo un quiebre.
¨Aparte de degradar el trabajo, otras acciones industriales son consideradas violatorias a tu contrato y llevarán a medidas disciplinarias. ¨Anda despacio¨ (produce menos que el promedio) es considerado garantía de despido ahora. ¨Revisar medidas aplicables¨, ¨ ir por el manual¨ y otras acciones de calidad donde te tomas el tiempo de revisar si sobremiraste o equivocasee en algo de acuerdo a las guias de procedimiento no són acciones industriales permitidas. Junto con el ajustado presupuesto de entrenamiento, nosotros los examinadores no tenemos oportunidad de leer cuales son las cambiadas regulaciones. Excepto en nuestro tiempo privado. Si, nos enfrentamos el despido por que lo quieres hacer bien la primera vez no es señal de confianza.¨
Un comentario dice: ¨de nuevo este año apróximadament 50 cartas de advertencia for bajo rendimiento serán dadas o un cupon por una rígiida sesión de acoso institucional… lo que asegura alguna clientela para el departamento de resolución de confictos del recursos humanos.
¨Producir menos es el camino al despido seguro en una organización conducida por la productividad¨, dice otro comentario. ¨Serenidad temprana de Busqueda es tal éxito que muchos directorados comenzaron a trabajar buscando documentos de prioridad grupo 4 y agarrar el log de examinacion para otorgar/rechazar procedimientos que no vienen de tedios casos de jurados de leyes, pero por en demanda, casi a tiempo requisitos de eficiencia. Aquellos serán implementados preferiblemente por examinadores por contrato que pueden ser desechados en una manera más flexible y legalmente sólida, por lo cual se reducen drásticamente las emisiones de carbono. Todas estas mejoras están viniendo a no costo al usuario. Revisen sus paracaídas caballeros. Alcanzaremos nuestra altitud de salto pronto. Y la luz se convirtó verde..¨
Se esta haciendo más fácil ver ahora por que muchos trabajadores ven la necesidad de una reforma, y que estan voluntariamente yendo a protestar, e incluso a huelga. Un nuevo comentario esta mañana dice:
El problema es que la experiencia que tu ganas como examinador de la OEP es de uso limitado fuera de ella. Una vez que has estado allí por una década o más, estas atascado allí de por vida. No descubres esto hasta que tu comienzas a aplicar por trabajos. Entonces te das cuenta que tendrás que tomar un real corte en tu salario del 50% por lo menos si realmentes quieres salirte. He estado allí, así que se de lo que hablo.
Esto es por que pienso que Battistelli es tan cruel y vengativo. El basicamente te tiene agarrado de las bolas y lo sabe. En ausencia de freno por el Consejo Administrativo, puede aplástartelas ta fuerte como el quiera, y tu bailarás obediente a su ritmo.
Hace uno años atrás todavía recomendaría el trabajo de examinador de la OEP como responsable e intelectualmente satisfactorio, con la excepción de lo difícil de regresar al mundo real. Estos días, urgiría a cualquier candidato prospectivo, pensar cuidadosamente de verdad antes de vender su alma a esta organización.
Una persona entonces pregunta: ¨¿Qué tal que cada uno se reporte enfermo? En estas circustancias creo que la mayoría de doctores apoyarían tener que trabajar bajo tal presión insoportable es enfermante y causa de extenuación. Será interesante ver como la situacion deviene si BB declara que el enfermo no es enfermo, en contra de los consejos del doctor. Lo cual bajo las nuevas reglas pueda hacerlo increíblemente.¨
Si la OEP llegara a entender que aplastar uniones les causa mas daño a ellos mismos, talvez desistan de hacerlo. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Contents
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Desktop
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A couple of weeks back when we ran our two part GNU/Linux distro poll, a couple of commenters made a single point that, at first glance, seemed valid.
It’s not the distro that’s important to most users, they said, because most users don’t interact with the distro itself as they work and play on their Linux machines. Instead, the average user’s direct interaction with a computer is primarily through the desktop environment, whether that be KDE, GNOME, Unity or something they rolled on their own on a Friday night instead of having a boys’ or girls’ night out.
In other words, they opined, it’s the desktop, and not the distro, which represents the operating system — or even the entire computer — to most users.
That’s probably a truth without being the truth.
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One of the things that some people say about the Linux platform is that it’s fragmented, just like Android. The truth is that fragmentation doesn’t really apply to the Linux platform, and the fact that there are too many distros to count is actually a good thing.
Android is a broken system that works. If we take a look at the Android slice right now, we’ll see that most people are still using KitKat 4.4, about 40%, and about 15% have just moved on to Lollipop 5.0. The rest up to 100% are split in even older versions of the operating system.
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It recently occurred to me that I’ve been running Linux on my computers for about thirteen years. I’ll be the first to admit, it doesn’t seem all that long ago. But as I reflected upon my switch over to Linux, I began to realize that there wasn’t a single event that pushed me over to the Linux desktop. In reality, it was a series of events and discoveries. This article will explain how my switch to Linux came to pass.
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I am an artist (mainly musician) from Croatia. I learned to play the Trombone, and had a classical education at the Music school in Varaždin, after which I went on and studied Business & Economics in Zagreb. Music performance has always been my passion but I also enjoy song writing, music production, photography, photo editing, DJ-ing and the likes. I fell in love with the Linux philosophy of openness back in 2006. and being a sort of a rebel I thought “This is for me!”. I downloaded my first Linux distribution (Ubuntu 6.10) and burned it to a CD, booted the thing, and felt like a REAL HACKER. Back then there were a lot of hardware issues, you had to know your stuff to make things work, and I was a total noob, lost in the totally new world with endless possibilities – TOTAL FREEDOM. But as a professional musician I still needed to use commercial software to make it (so I thought). The Mac was my dream (all the cool artists use Mac), but it was way out my budget… Long story short, I was dual-booting with Windows up till 2011 on my Dell Inspiron, then went total Linux on my laptop and had a dedicated Windows machine for my music. Bought a Mac Mini in 2012, got disappointed, swapped it for a MacBook Pro in 2013, got totally disappointed, then gave it to my wife, installed Ubuntu on the MacBook Pro (BTW. today she is the happiest computer user in the world), and stuck with my Dell using only Linux and compensating with standalone HARDWARE options, like the ZOOM R8, analogue photography, and the recently bought Roland JD-Xi. But, things got complicated when I wanted to create a polished product I can sell without spending millions of dollars, so I need to use a computer that can take the workload, and I need to use software to make it cheap (I learned that the expensive way with analogue photography).
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Not me. I’m a Linux user.
And then we took the huge one-two punch from Shellshock and Heartbleed. Wow. While I do not run servers of any flavor, the fact that a Linux server or code could be infected by either of these nasty brothers….
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Every student at Penn Manor receives a laptop at the beginning of the school year, and I first learned about the help desk program when I visited the tech room because mine wasn’t charging properly. The small room was crowded with computer stations, and student helpers were huddled around a table working on a project.
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Kernel Space
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While Linus Torvalds tends to get angry about last-minute pull requests by subsystem maintainers at the end of a kernel cycle’s merge window, he ended up honoring a few of them today for Linux 4.5
Within the Ceph updates are AIO (Asynchronous I/O) support as well as a number of fixes regarding authentication key timeout/renewal code.
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Last week I carried out tests of the Linux 3.5 through Linux 4.4 kernels. Those benchmarks were fairly interesting in looking at the evolution of the Linux kernel performance over the past three and a half years. With Linux 4.5-rc1 now out, here are benchmarks with this latest kernel version that’s currently under development.
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After announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.3.4, kernel maintainer and developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has proudly informed users about the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 4.1.16 LTS.
Looking at the diff from Linux kernel 4.1.15 LTS, we can notice that Linux kernel 4.1.16 LTS is almost identical in changes to Linux kernel 4.3.4, and according to the appended shortlog, it changes 51 files, with 390 insertions and 164 deletions. Therefore, it looks like it is even smaller than the previous maintenance release, which was announced in mid-December 2015.
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The Linux Foundation made some changes to by-laws, and that stirred things in the Linux community. The organization has issued a statement now addressing the concerns.
The modifications made to the by-laws of The Linux Foundations were underlined by Matthew Garrett, in an article that also touched on possible motives for the changes. He pointed towards Karen Sandler, who is the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. We chose not to take that part of the Matthew’s article since they are conjecture and can’t be verified.
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After the release of Linux kernel 3.2.76 LTS, the kernel developers have announced the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.3.
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“Much of the code in Linux is written by employees paid to do this work, but significant parts of both Linux and the huge range of software that it depends on are written by community members who now have no representation in the Linux Foundation. Ignoring them makes it look like the Linux Foundation is interested only in ‘promoting, protecting and standardising Linux and open source software’ if doing so benefits their corporate membership rather than the community as a whole. This isn’t a positive step,” says Garrett in his post.
The Register has again contacted the Linux Foundation for comment and will update this story if we hear back from them.
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In response to the recent leadership controversy, the Linux Foundation has come up with an unsatisfactory response. Linux Foundation chief executive Jim Zemlin has written a blog post on the Foundation’s website and talked about irrelevant aspects of the issue.
In our last article on this issue, fossBytes listed clear points telling why the latest change in community representation is a bad news for Linux and open source. Up until recently, the organization allowed the individual community members to elect two board members and ensure that the voice of Linux users is present at the board decisions — now this clause has been erased from the bylaws.
Zemlin chose to ignore the concerns and started his response with an irrelevant line: “First, The Linux Foundation Board structure has not changed. The same individuals remain as directors, and the same ratio of corporate to community directors continues as well.”
His reply ignores facts and lacks some gravity. How can the ratio remain same when Linux community is now not allowed to choose its directors?
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I support every word Zemlin has to say against trolling and unacceptable online behavior of the community members. But, Zemlin chooses to drift from the central point of discussion — Is Karen still eligible to run for the board? What about the current situation of the community representation in the Linux Foundation board?
Over the past years, Linux and other big names in the open source world have embraced the support of corporate executives. This recent step is another move away from the community of many individual bright programmers. I hope the Foundation makes room for common Linux users and restores their voting rights and faith.
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Codes of Conduct have often been pushed to create “safer” environments, while opponents sometimes find such codes repressive and suffocating. But are Codes of Conduct a real danger to the development of open source software?
One developer, fearing for the loss of his job, posted his anonymous response to what he thinks are dangerous Codes of Conduct.
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The new kernel, version 4.5, includes major driver improvements, including better 3D graphics support for the Raspberry Pi
Developer Linus Torvalds on Sunday released the first release candidate (RC) for the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel, including expanded driver and architecture support as well as other updates.
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After releasing the Linux 4.3.4 and Linux 4.1.16 LTS kernels, renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman informs the world about the release of the fifty-ninth maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 3.14 kernel series.
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Writer journalist Vox Day speculated the other day that Linus Torvalds himself may have been behind the Linux Foundation’s elimination of individual memberships from their organization. FOSS Force is back with another poll and quiz today and Eric Hameleers released an updated Slackware Live. Debian update 8.3 was announced Saturday and several reviews warrant a mention.
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ANY MINUTE now we should see the first release candidate for Linux kernel 4.5, and there’s a lot to look forward to.
It seems like only a fortnight ago that we talked about the final release of Linux 4.4 (it was) but a lot has happened.
Most notable is that the kernel is now ready for Kaby Lake, the next generation of Intel processors due later this year. This was expected to start in 4.4 but the method of the Linux release schedule meant it was dropped.
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Graphics Stack
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Peter Hutterer this weekend announced the release of libinput 1.1.5 as the newest version of this input handling library used by Wayland, X.Org Server (if using xf86-input-libinput), and Mir systems.
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Samuel Pitoiset sent out a set of 17 patches today that add the core of the compute shaders support to the Mesa state tracker as needed by Gallium3D drivers.
This is almost one thousand lines of code for providing the core changes needed for handling OpenGL 4.3′s important ARB_compute_shader extension. There still are changes needed to Gallium3D drivers in getting the compute shader support going, but this is a major piece of the puzzle.
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libinput 1.1.5 has a change in how we deal with semi-mt touchpads, in particular: interpretation of touch points will cease and we will rely on the single touch position and the BTN_TOOL_* flags instead to detect multi-finger interaction. For most of you this will have little effect, even if you have a semi-mt touchpad. As a reminder: semi-mt touchpads are those that can detect the bounding box of two-finger interactions but cannot identify which finger is which. This provides some ambiguity, a pair of touch points at x1/y1 and x2/y2 could be a physical pair of touches at x1/y2 and x2/y1. More importantly, we found issues with semi-mt touchpads that go beyond the ambiguity and reduce the usability of the touchpoints.
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Benchmarks
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That’s not really surprising: new hardware tends to include more and more instructions to assist virtualization. So in fact, the “cost” of virtualization (in terms of performances) is reduced.
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Applications
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For those out there still using MPlayer, the latest stable release is now available.
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It’s been a while since we last heard from the developers of the most prominent open-source video player software in the GNU/Linux ecosystem, MPlayer, which has reached version 1.2.1 today.
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EasyTAG developer and maintainer David King announced the immediate availability for download of the first maintenance release of the EasyTAG 2.4 open-source tag editor utility for MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and other audio formats.
According to the release notes, EasyTAG 2.4.1 is here to add support for handling FLAC files that contain an invalid sample rate, addresses an issue with the order of the generated playlists, implements support for using the GLib filename encoding consistently, and patches a crash that occurred during playlist writing.
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There is an excellent set of free, open source video software available on the Linux platform which is both fully featured and mature. Become a digital video editing master, turn your Linux machine into a Home Theatre box are two options that are explored in this article.
We previously published an article on excellent open source video tools in 2008. Some of the tools featured in that article have ceased development. There were often developed by one or a few developers. They ceased working on the projects, in part because better alternatives sprung forward. Given the length of time that has elapsed, we thought it best to update the article.
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MyPaint is a free, open source, simple drawing and painting program for digital painters. It is way better and advanced than MS Windows paint, well the truth is you can’t compare this great program with MS Paint. It lets you focus on the art instead of the program. You work on your canvas with minimum distractions, bringing up the interface only when you need it. MyPaint started in 2004 by Martin Renold, he wanted a smooth paint program which could help him digital painting with brush in different way to pressure and speed. MyPaint supports many graphics tablets such as Wacom, and many similar devices. The brush engine of MyPaint is versatile and configurable, and it offers useful, productive tools which a digital painter can expect from a program.
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qBittorrent is a torrent client, similar to µTorrent, which was recently ported to the Linux systems. Among others, qBittorrent has built-in search engine for searching in the popular BitTorrent sites, has torrent queueing and prioritizing features, has IP Filtering options, provides a tool for creating torrents and bandwidth limitations.
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KDE ports updates are getting nearer, since the KDE-FreeBSD team is now doing exp-runs (those are rebuild-everything-with-an-updated-port build jobs that touch all supportd FreeBSD versions and architectures) for Qt 5.5 and the latest CMake. So there’s a whole slew of ports updates looming on the horizon.
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After an usually long hiatus, the RcppExamples package has been updated once more: a new version 0.1.7 is now on CRAN.
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Michael Lancaster a developer based in Chicago has created a new go to application for Soundcloud on your desktop, which is called Soundnode and is fully open source and supports Mac, Windows and Linux systems.
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The developers of the Rhythmbox open-source music player software announced this past weekend the immediate availability for download of the Rhythmbox 3.3 release.
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Simon Fowler found that using git-pbuilder create with a user-supplied –basepath option fails because git-pbuilder always creates a –basepath option and passes it in. The solution, for which he provided a patch, is to just use the supplied –basepath if one is already present.
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Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long time (like every time a SMS is received or sent). And if their computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access during installation). And when these programs send out information to central collection points, the location is often included, unless extra care is taken to not send the location. The provided information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is good and bad, depend on your point of view). What is certain, is that the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way, when they share their whereabouts with private and public entities.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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RetroArch 1.3 was just released for iOS, OSX, Windows, Linux, Android, Wii, Gamecube, PS3, PSP, PlayStation Vita and 3DS.
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I love strategy games, so I just had to give the totally weird looking Death by Game Show a go. My PR people sent over a key so I could check it out.
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Feral Interactive will be teasing the Linux port of XCOM 2 this Thursday at 6PM GMT, so we can see how it’s doing.
I am excited, but it’s one of the times that timezones fail for me, as we are on the same timezone it’s just that little bit too early for me to be able to watch. Hopefully I can catch highlights afterwards if they have set up their twitch to allow you to watch previous broadcasts.
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Now, at this point, I have a humble confession to make. I don’t know C! Specifically pointers. I never got into it at a young age, because after life with my Sinclair ZX Spectrum had come to a halt, I didn’t have access to a PC with a C compiler so that I could follow things in a natural progression (and my parents wanted me to get off the computer and focus on my schoolwork – probably the main reason I did so badly there!). I do remember reading about them at the time (in a book I got for my birthday at the time, in fact), but since I couldn’t actually try it out anywhere, they never became part of my bloodstream! This is the main reason I couldn’t actually try out anything from the Abrash book, since the whole thing assumes you’re adept at C! This has been a huge stumbling block in my programming education, since every single book on data structures or graphics programming, or what have you (not to mention websites like this one), assumes you know C. Now, today, where it’s actually taught in school (wasn’t the case back then), let me give you my opinion – I’m glad I never learnt pointers! There’s nothing wrong with understanding indirection, but when you’re trying to think of and implement a particular algorithm, trying to think of what the 0s and 1s are doing inside the computer is just hugely counter intuitive. This is not how human beings think. C was made so that an operating system could be written in it – that is the crux of how pointers came into being, and for some reason that hacker language caught on to become the most prevalent language in the whole world! Of course, it also led a young kid called Linus Torvalds to use it to do it all over again starting in 1991 (incidentally Linus, before the PC, worked on the QL, another member of the Sinclair family, a sort of a “big cousin” to the Spectrum), thanks to which you’re reading this website today, so I guess it wasn’t altogether a bad thing. But I, for one am glad that we’ve moved on to things like Javascript, in today’s day and age, and it makes me happy that we don’t have to worry about what’s zapping in and out of RAM when trying to write a game. Just at that point where those in charge of the Indian education system want their charges to know about nothing else but the syntax of weird things with asterisks in them (it seems, the more asterisks, the better), as if that was important. Trust the fools! Incidentally, I did get hold of a Youtube video about pointers sometime back, and followed it through, and yes, I did finally get what they are (where was that animation back in 1992?), but I guess it’s too late now – Javascript occupies much more of my mind now than C ever will, and I can’t say that makes me unhappy in any way. All along, I knew what [ and ] do in Assembly in any case! I just wish there were more folks like me, who will now have the happy task of porting, in their own minds, all the code in the Abrash book, to whatever their favourite language is, so that in the case of Javascript, wonder of wonders – their browser can show them the joy of a rotating cube! That’s why the exhortations of this article. By the way, I suggest you Youtube for “banana bread” some time – good stuff! This is clearly the future, and you need to get a handle on it.
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Fans of challenging platformers with the trendy roguelite appellation might be interested to know that there’s something new that they can sink their teeth into. Vagante promises countless hours of procedurally generated fun alone or with friends.
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This is lovely news, Atari Vault a new official collection of 100 classic games is heading to SteamOS & Linux
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Escape from Tarkov is an interesting looking Russian-made action MMO that is apparently going to come to Linux too.
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While many redditors may have opposing views, with the increased snooping issues on Windows 10, it is worthwhile to have a Linux OS aboard your PC. With more and more games being launched for Linux, it is better to opt for Linux in long run.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Linux creates a friendly environment for choices and options. For example, there are many Linux-based distributions out there that use different desktop environments for you to choose from. I have picked some of the best desktop environments that you will see in the Linux world.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I grew a bit tired of it during high school so I stopped for a time and it’s only after finishing high school that I wanted to start digging into CG software again. I was fully converted to open-source projects and GNU/Linux at this moment so in my mind I obviously had to give Blender a try. I learned it, loved it and fall in love with video game art while helping with the development of an open source video game/engine, SpringRTS.
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Plasma 5 comes with a very cool feature: KWin can set a different colour scheme for title bar of each app (basing on app identity or title of the window).
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Here is deepest Padania a 4 story mansion provides winter cover to KDE developers working to free your computers.
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I’ve skipped a few years, but I’m looking forward to seeing some of the familiar KDE faces there, as well as finally meeting a couple of the KDE-FreeBSD folks. There’s a long list of familiar faces at the Legal Devroom. For once, I have a plan of talks that I want to see, even some that I can claim are work-work related (yay!). Whether I’ll be useful at the KDE booth, I don’t know: last time I was there there was Plasma-desktop to be demonstrated and me with still KDE4 on my laptop. I’m not a good poster child for the modern generation.
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As mentioned in my earlier post, the KIOSK framework changed a lot between KDE3 and Plasma. So using the old code and simply port it to kf5 was not an option. My Mentor suggested, I start implementing profile support, which is one of the key feature of KIOSK.
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This is an opportunity for Kdenlive developers and users to exchange ideas, talk about how we want to see the Kdenlive project evolve and also discuss how you can help us on that way!
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Are you browsing the web with your Android smart-phone/tablet and suddenly you see that your favourite distro just release the ISO you are waiting? Do you want to tap on “download” and start the torrent but… do you want to use your PC instead of the current device? OK here KDE Connect and KTorrent are your heroes. Let’s see how to setup all.
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This weekend, we had our place full of hackers again. The Calligra Text Layout Sprint coincided with the Krita 2016 Kick-Off Sprint. Over the course of the sprint, which started on Wednesday, we had two newcomers to KDE-related hacking sprints, and during the weekend, we had an unusual situation for free software: actual gender parity.
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When the streets are covered with snow and ice in many parts of Europe, it’s a good time to sit inside in front of our computers and to improve that software we are sharing here with each other.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME settings app is to get a major design overhaul, GNOME designers and developers have revealed.
The new design proposals will see the utility switch from a grid layout with fixed window size to one using a sidebar list and resizeable window frame.
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Alongside our crunch and focus for 1.1, we’ve also been continuing our campaign of bug crushing. We’ve crushed 22 bugs over the last week, ranging from long sitting bugs that have been resolved since the Budgie rewrite to recent ones that are related to inclusion of git-based patches for new software in the repo.
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Reviews
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In my previous post, I looked at the Full version of the new Kali Linux 2016.1 Rolling release. That version uses the Gnome 3 desktop and includes a large number of security, forensic, and penetration-testing utilities. In this post I am going to look at the Light version, which uses the Xfce desktop and includes only a few security utilities in the base installation, and the Mini version, which lets you choose your desktop, but includes no additional utilities in the base installation.
It seems to me that there are two reasons for the Kali Light distribution. First, a lot of people don’t like using Gnome 3 — especially a lot of experienced Linux users — so this offers a popular alternative desktop. Second, by including very few additional security packages, it lets you build up the distribution with just the tools you want and need.
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Linux Mint Linux Mint is arguably one of the more popular distributions in the open source ecosystem. The project takes packages from the Ubuntu repositories and uses them, along with custom Mint utilities, to build a user friendly operating system. The Mint project has gained a reputation over the years for delivering a practical desktop operating system that offers users a familiar desktop environment with multimedia support.
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Linux, the final frontier. A fellow named Mehdi emailed me the name of this Linux distro for sampling, testing and review. Having already recommended a bunch of software in the past, with pretty good results, I thought this could be another enjoyable exercise.
To make everything all the more mindboggling, Apricity OS tell us it is based on Arch Linux, which means goats and blood and the essence of virgin nerds. Archy Arch and the Funky Byte. But maybe the dreadful can be abstracted into a nice and friendly product. Anyhow, version 12.2015 Beta, underway!
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While Gentoo is a great way to spin your own flavour of Linux, after a year I’ve found that recompiling packages every time you do an update becomes a bit of a drag. With that in mind I decided to look around for an alternative distribution, and while nothing is 100% perfect I have to say I really am very happy with Void Linux. There are a number of “live” iso images which will happily boot from a USB stick, I only looked at two of the images Cinnamon and Xfce, while Cinnamon was all very pretty and all that, I couldn’t get the audio volume widget to show itself and besides I didn’t see any real advantage. I’ve long been a fan of Xfce basically because of what it doesn’t try to do, you don’t get the kitchen sink (thankfully) but what you do get works solidly.
Now its entirely possible that I missed something obvious with the void_installer script but it has two distinct behaviours depending on what installation source you choose. If you choose to install from the internet what you get is a bare minimum of packages (command line only) and you’ll be left with a fair bit of configuration to do for yourself – this isn’t always a bad thing if for example you have some specific use maybe an embedded kiosk for example. For more usual desktop use, its better to choose the installation media itself as the source, this basically copies and configures the “live” image onto your machine. I did find that after an update I had to manually delete the old kernel, but once I did that and a few more of the usual chores one normally expects when installing a new system – (eventually after correctly using the installer!) I found myself in possession of a really nice system.
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New Releases
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Today, 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs us about the release and immediate availability for download of Antivirus Live CD 16.0-0.99.
If you don’t know what Antivirus Live CD is, we will take this opportunity to remind you that it is a small, free and easy-to-use Live ISO image built around the open-source Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) antivirus software and designed for cleaning your PC of viruses, no matter if you’re using Linux, Mac or Windows.
The new release, Antivirus Live CD 16.0-0.99, brings support for the recently announced ClamAV 0.99.0, which has all the latest virus definition updates and bugfixes for protecting your computer from malware. Besides that, Antivirus Live CD 16.0-0.99 is now based on the 4MLinux 16.0 operating system.
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The Parsix GNU/Linux developers have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the third TEST build for the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” operating system.
According to the release notes, Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 (Atticus) TEST3 is powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.1.16 kernel, which has been patched with BFS and TuxOnIce 3.3 and has been built around the latest stable and most advanced GNOME 3.18 desktop environment. It also comes with updates for many of the pre-installed apps and core components.
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The Solus operating system is now available in a stable form, and its developers are preparing to release the first point release.
Since Solus is going to be supported for the next couple of years, the developers need to work on the problems that have been reported by the community. They have already promised that they will squash all the bugs in a little over a month, but they are also preparing for the first point release.
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The developers of the Slackware-based Zenwalk Linux operating system have announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the upcoming Zenwalk 8.0 computer operating system.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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The developers of the ROSA Desktop Fresh operating system announced today, January 26, the release and immediate availability for download of the ROSA Desktop Fresh KDE R7 Linux operating system.
Being based on the long-term supported ROSA 2014.1 platform, which will receive security fixes and patches until Autumn 2016, ROSA Desktop Fresh KDE R7 updates the default set of KDE4 applications with the addition of the Kamoso and Kup applications, and the removal of the KWallet utility. Support for H.265 encoded videos is now available for new installations, along with numerous other multimedia codecs.
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Gentoo Family
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Softpedia has been informed today, January 25, 2016, by GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton about the immediate availability for download of a new build of his excellent exGENT Live DVD Linux operating system.
As this is the first time we’re writing a news story about exGENT Linux, we would like to introduce you guys to it first. So, as its name might suggest, exGENT is a rolling-release Gentoo-based Live Linux distribution built around the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and based on the latest GNU/Linux technologies.
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Arch Family
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If having more tools is better for security, then the latest release of the BlackArch Linux distribution will be warmly received by security researchers. Version 2016.01.10 of BlackArch Linux, which was released on Jan. 10, boasts more than 30 new security tools, bringing the total number of security tools to 1,330. BlackArch is a security-focused operating system that is based on the Arch Linux distribution. Arch Linux is what is known as a rolling release Linux distribution because it is constantly being updated. BlackArch builds on top of Arch and includes anti-forensic, automation, backdoor, crypto, honeypot, networking, scanner, spoofer and wireless security tools for security research. Among the new tools is a utility to conduct attacks against IBM Lotus Domino servers. The new Jooforce tool, meanwhile, enables security researchers to attack the open-source Joomla content management system. Another interesting addition is the credential mapper (credmap) tool that aims to show researchers when user and account credentials have been reused. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features in the BlackArch 2016.01.10 milestone release.
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Ever actually treid to make a package for Ubuntu? Understanding .deb takes a good couple of days of documentation until you get it down, every idiot can make a Pacman package because it’s simpler, it “just works”. The AUR’s success is probably tied to that any idiot can make a Pacman package.
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Slackware Family
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I hope that line is not trademarked by LEGO… anyway, the point is that Slackware 14.1 on the Pandora is a great distro. I had tested it in the past but I had not given it enough of my attention then, and I now realize my mistake. Don’t get me wrong: Super Zaxxon is great and all, but if you want to enhance the utility factor of your Pandora, Slackware is one of the best ways to do it, without losing much of SZ either.
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During the past weeks I have been working on my “liveslak” scripts for the Slackware Live Edition. Check out my previous articles about Beta1 Beta2 and Beta3 releases for these scripts, they contain a lot of background about the reasons for creating yet another Slackware Live, as well as instructions on the use of the Live ISO images and their boot parameters.
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Red Hat Family
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This year may not be spectacular, but the merciless march toward market-beating sales and cash flows will continue. Hint: The company doesn’t mind market weakness.
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The goal is to enable Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated managed container application platform customers to build and host their apps on Google’s Cloud Platform.
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Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has begun shipping an update to its open source IT automation framework, designed to bring increased stability, new automation capabilities, and new integrations with a variety of services and providers. The solution, Ansible 2.0, is intended to better support public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments, as well as Microsoft Windows environments and network management.
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Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) has received a consensus rating of “Buy” from the thirty-four analysts that are currently covering the stock, ARN reports. Two analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, six have assigned a hold rating and twenty-five have assigned a buy rating to the company. The average 12 month price target among brokerages that have updated their coverage on the stock in the last year is $89.73.
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The CentOS community is trying to build an ecosystem that fosters and encourages upstream communities to continuously perform integration testing of their code running on the the CentOS platform. The CentOS community has built out an infrastructure that (currently) contains 256 servers (“bare metal” servers”) that are pooled together to run tests that are orchestrated by a frontend Jenkins instance located at ci.centos.org.
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Mackay Shields acquired a new stake in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) during the fourth quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The hedge fund acquired 18,481,000 shares of the open-source software company’s stock, valued at approximately $24,132,000.
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As many as 16 brokerage firms have rated Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) at 1.5. Research Analysts at Zacks Investment Research have ranked the company at 3, suggesting the traders with a rating of hold for the short term. The stock garnered a place in the hold list of 3 stock Analysts. 2 analysts suggested buying the company. 11 analysts rated the company as a strong buy.
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Shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) have been given a consensus rating of “Buy” by the thirty-four research firms that are covering the company, AnalystRatings.NET reports. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell recommendation, six have given a hold recommendation and twenty-five have given a buy recommendation to the company. The average twelve-month target price among brokers that have covered the stock in the last year is $89.73.
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Fedora
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GPG, or GnuPG, refers to the Gnu Privacy Guard utility. GPG is a freely available implementation of the OpenPGP standard that was released by Werner Koch in 1999. The security and privacy of data and individuals is an important topic in modern culture. The OpenPGP standard allows GPG and other applications to work together to secure and protect your data.
This series will explain the basic fundamentals of GPG and take you step by step through using it. The OpenPGP standard includes the basic features of confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation. By supporting this standard, GPG provides all three features.
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Blue and green lines are the total number of issues and the number of closed issues, number of the left y-axis. Red line is the difference, number on the right axis. The number of issues is growing linearly. Overall, we aren’t doing too bad, 85% of issues have been closed.
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When you read my blog posts you know that I switched not that long ago from Manjaro, an Arch-based distribution to Arch. And now I switched again – this time to [Fedora]. Even so I was really satisified with Arch. It worked, it was fast and the Arch User Repositories are awesome. I rarely had to google how to install a software. I just had to use a wrapper to search them. And when I googled the first hit was often the Arch Wiki. Right now the Arch Wiki is probably the best documentation for Linux-related software.
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Debian Family
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We reported earlier on the official release of the third stable update in the Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” series of Linux kernel-based operating systems, Debian 8.3.
At the moment of writing the respective article, there were no installation mediums or Live DVD ISO images available for download. This is because Debian GNU/Linux 8.3 is not a new version of the acclaimed operating system, but a collection of updates that can be easily applied by existing Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 “Jessie” users through the official channels.
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The switch made in binutils/2.25-6 to use deterministic archives by default had the unfortunate effect of breaking a seldom used feature of make. Manoj Srivastava asked on debian-devel the best way to communicate the changes to Debian users. Lunar quickly came up with a patch that displays a warning when Make encounters “deterministic” archives. Manoj made it available in make/4.1-2 together with a NEWS file advertising the change.
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Debian 8.3 came out today. As part of this update, Debian installer images for QNAP TS-109, TS-209 and TS-409 are available again. These devices are pretty old but there are still some users. We dropped installer support several years ago because the installer ramdisk was too large to fit in flash. Since then, users had to install Debian 6.0 (squeeze) and upgrade from there. When squeeze was removed from the Debian mirrors recently, I received mail from a number of users.
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Almost 9 months after I took ownership of the Neovim RFP, I finally tagged & uploaded Neovim to Debian. It still has to go through the NEW queue, but it will soon be in an experimental release near you.
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Derivatives
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The developers of the HandyLinux computer operating system have been proud to inform Softpedia earlier about the immediate availability for download of the HandyLinux 2.3 release.
Being based on the well-known and powerful Debian GNU/Linux 8.3 (Jessie) operating system created by Ian Murdock, who sadly passed away on December 30, 2015, today’s HandyLinux 2.3 release is dedicated to his memory, and because of that, it has been dubbed by its developers “Ian.”
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu for TV was briefly a thing for Canonical, but it never really took off, and it slowly faded away, but it seems that they haven’t given up on that idea, and we might still get it.
Ubuntu for TV was a really different operating system that was initially showcased back in January 2012, at CES. It’ s been four years since then and Ubuntu for TV is no more. The previous Ubuntu community manager, Jono Bacon, said that the project didn’t actually die, it was just folded back into the main distro.
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The rumors are true: An Ubuntu-powered tablet blessed by Canonical is coming—from Spanish device maker Bq, which plans to unveil it at Mobile World Congress in February.
Linux fans have waited a long time for the realization of Canonical’s long-promised vision of “convergence,” an OS that seamlessly transitions between mobile and desktop environments. Ubuntu blog OMGUbuntu first reported the tablet on January 14, but Canonical refused to comment. In a recent interview with Spanish website Xataka, however, Bq (which has partnered with Canonical on phones) confirmed the rumor.
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We have just been informed by Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical about a preliminary release schedule for the next OTA software updates for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.
According to Mr. Zemczak, the Ubuntu Touch developers have decided that it will be appropriate to release a post OTA-9 hotfix update after all, OTA-9.5, which will be the next thing they prepare for. The OTA-9.5 update will enter final freeze on January 29, two days after the launch on OTA-9 on January 27, and will be released for all supported Ubuntu Phone devices on February 10, 2016.
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The Ubuntu Touch team at Canonical announced earlier the release schedule for the upcoming OTA software updates for Ubuntu Phone devices, and we promised to give you guys more info on the whereabouts of the OTA-9 update.
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Canonical has made some changes to the famous orange color and has changed it, in secret, to a different kind of orange.
The famous color that’s been used in Ubuntu for a long time serves two purposes. One is to make the operating system easily recognizable, and the other one is to drive people who don’t like orange crazy. Most of the community doesn’t really care about the color being used, and people either let it be or change it; the rest of the users are always asking Canonical to replace it.
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There are many icon themes available for Linux and you already know that in one icon set all icons have same pattern, but this is not the case here. The guy (0rax0) who designed this icon theme could have tested every shape on the planet to get a unique and good looking icon set for Linux, and he followed totally unshaped pattern for his icon set but can’t we see these icons still looks awesome, I would say great contribution to eyecandy for the Linux. We all have tested many of the icon theme and none of them have icons for every application, there is always something missing, so don’t expect this set to be complete but good news is that it is in development mode by another guy (ZMA) who is now constantly working on it and adding icons to this icon set. If you encounter any issue or see any missing icon then you should ask ZMA to create and add that icon. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool or Ubuntu-Tweak to change icons.
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The competition, which runs from today and closes February 29, 2016, gives participants just six weeks to create an all-new original Scope for the Ubuntu Phone and publish it to the store.
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Flavours and Variants
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Black Lab Software, through Roberto J. Dohnert, has informed Softpedia earlier today, January 26, 2016, about the immediate availability for download and update of the Black Lab Linux 7.0.3 operating system.
According to the developers, Black Lab Linux 7.0.3 is the third maintenance release in the Black Lab Linux 7.0 series of operating system, bringing the latest software updates, bugfixes, under-the-hood improvements, and security patches.
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Softpedia has been informed today, January 26, 2016, by the Linux AIO team about the immediate availability for download of an updated version of their Linux AIO Linux Mint project, which is now based on Linux Mint 17.3.
Many of our readers know what the Linux AIO project does, and we bet that they were waiting impatiently for them to release a new Live ISO image that would consist of all the flavors of the recently released Linux Mint 17.3 (Rosa) operating system, including Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon, Linux Mint 17.3 MATE, Linux Mint 17.3 Xfce, and Linux Mint 17.3 KDE.
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While Google didn’t make any major announcements at its Ubiquity IoT Developer Summit this week, the search engine giant did highlight its intention to further the development of open source IoT applications – where its open version of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons took center stage.
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PINE A64, the first 64-bit single board that made a great impression on Kickstarter, has managed to conclude its campaign with an amazing $1,73 million.
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Aaeon unveiled a new Linux enabled, Quark-based IoT Gateway design that’s intended to both popularize and ease the setup of Internet of Things installations.
The AIOT-QA, AIOT-QG, and AIOT-QM gateways are based on a common internal design but offered in three configurations — two models intended for commercial and industrial indoor applications, and a third targeting more rugged, outdoor environments. All are based on the Intel Quark x1021, which is a 32-bit, single-core system-on-chip running at 400MHz, with a modest 2.2W TDP.
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The Multicore Association (MCA) launched a new working group to expand and set a standard for the Open Asymmetric Multi-Processing Framework. OpenAMP is a Linux software framework for systems using multiple operating systems and processors.
The framework helps application developers tap the parallelism in systems using multiple multicore processors of the same or different kinds. It works across versions of Linux, real-time operating systems and bare-metal software environments.
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Phones
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European flagship phone with European operating system combines ethics and ideologies in the mobile industry
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Tizen
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Today, Samsung have released an update to the Android Gear Manager app, taking it to version 2.2.16011842. We did once upon a time get quite regular updates to the Gear Manager App, but the last one was back in November, which took us to version 2.2.15111841.
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Android
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As 2016 gets under way users have tons of excellent choices that are under $200, and even great phones under $299 that should be on all buyers radar. Great phones from late last year, and even one announced at CES 2016. Manufactures like Motorola, ASUS and LG, Huawei and much more. Here’s our list of some of the best Cheap Android smartphones available right now.
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As it currently stands, Android device owners are required to have a Google+ account to activate their Play Games account but Google has revealed plans to overhaul its registration system in favor of a Google+-less option. Its new sign-in system, announced as part of an update communicated on the Android Developers blog, will no longer be tied to the social network. In addition, gamers will only need to log into their account once on each of their devices, rather than every time they load a game, as is the case right now.
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Armed with a bagful of patents and the experience of adding his Aulu Z technology to a Huawei device, HiDeep CEO Brian Ko expects 3D Touch to arrive on many smartphones this year.
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The National Australia Bank has started rolling out contactless smartphone payments via NAB Pay, with Android-owning customers able to pay for purchases using their phone’s in-built NFC transmitter.
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Google releases a slightly improved version of Android – but with Android Marshmallow, it’s pulled out all the stops. The latest version of Android adds new features like the battery-saving Doze mode and the brand new Google Now on Tap – and it’s the biggest update we’ve seen to Google’s mobile OS in a ages. Still not sure if you should upgrade? Here are 14 reasons we think Marshmallow is the best version of Android we’ve seen.
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JetBlue flies 130 A320 aircraft, and they all have pretty terrible built-in infotainment systems. That’s going to change soon, though. The airline has announced a revamped design of its cabins that will include Android-powered touchscreens in the seat backs. They’ll be Android-powered sure, but they might not be recognizable as Android.
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Flying, it not exactly the most relaxing or pleasurable experience at the best of times. However, the process has been made much easier in recent times thanks to the mass migration of airlines towards a more technology-based user experience while in-flight. This first began with overhead monitors, although this then evolved in to seat back PTV units which offered passengers a more personalized viewing experience. Even more recently, the use of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have seen their access being far more greatly accommodated for, with the allowing of the use of the devices inflight, as well as the inclusion of USB charge points on most seats, to ensure devices stay powered during longer flights.
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Since its advent, Open Source Software or OSS has grown significantly over the years. This is due in part to the advances made in its development. A few of these advances include: “user-friendliness”, functional capabilities, and their low cost. But despite these achievements, OSS has not achieved the type of pervasive adoption that we have envisaged. And this, in my opinion, is a result of a variety of reasons in different regions. In Liberia for example, I have come to learn of two cardinal reasons: lack of OSS knowledge and the unwillingness by some individuals to ignore common myth held against OSS.
The lack of OSS knowledge in Liberia echoes one thing: Our unarticulated unwillingness to remove ourselves from that which we are comfortable with –proprietary software. Across the Liberian ICT spectrum, Open Source Software is a mundane topic. Yet, it is rare to see ICT professionals in Liberia proffer Open Source Software solutions, even though their ICT budgets face serious strangulations. One can inarguably surmise therefore, that the option for perfunctory proprietary solutions is sought only because it aligns with the skills of their choosers. But how does this benefit a struggling organization?
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We had several requests to blog about why we created Mattermost as an open-source alternative to Slack and proprietary communications software and we wanted to share our story:
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Launching a predictive analytics initiative can be quite costly. Fortunately, companies can use open source predictive analytics tools to keep costs low while exploring the possibilities of predictive analytics. Building a kit of open source predictive analytics tools enables data scientists to take advantage of each tool’s strengths and add new tools when ready to widen the scope of prediction types.
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Events
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Whew. It had over 140 exhibitors, and over 185 sessions. It had just north of 3,600 people registered for the event. It had four days of peace, love and FOSS.
That was SCALE 14X.
But we’re getting ahead of Sunday’s story.
After the cacophony of Saturday night’s Weakest Geek — Ruth Suehle won her third, with talk of a dynasty in the air for that particular game — and the fun and games of, well, Game Night, Sunday rolled into Pasadena on a more quiet, thoughtful note.
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Busting the myth that the generation after millennials are digital natives, that they are really good at computers. But they’re not. Charlie Reisinger tells us how closed software and hardware plays a role. And, how open source software and hardware is the answer.
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Every January, more than 5,000 free and open source enthusiasts from around the world flock to a humble university campus in Brussels, Belgium, for a weekend of talks, discussions, and open source projects. FOSDEM stands for Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting, and it’s one of the largest community-organized events in Europe.
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DevConf.cz 2016 is just around the corner (starts on Feb 5th). If you’re going to attend the conference, the organizers have prepared useful information for you. Check devconf.cz and especially the transportation page.
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Pasadena City Councilmember Andy Wilson proudly welcomed Linux 14X, the 14th Annual Southern California Linux Expo, to the Pasadena Convention Center Saturday morning.
Wilson, who himself comes from the software industry, was thrilled to call himself a “geek” among the packed ballroom, filled with software developers and aficionados. He described his own excitement at having the growing event move from its former location near LAX to Pasadena. The event will draw more than 3500 Linux fans to the convention center over this weekend.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 44 continues allowing unsigned extensions thanks to a last minute change by Mozilla. Firefox 44 also has an option that can be enabled for moving WebGL off the main thread. Firefox 44 additionally presents Brotli compression algorithm support, support for VP9/WebM video support for systems lacking MP4/H.264, WebRTC improvements, Firefox For Android updates, H.264 system decoder support, the new Service Workers API, a WebSocket Debugging API, and other developer enhancements.
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Just a few minutes ago, January 26, 2016, Mozilla pushed the final Firefox 44.0 web browser to the FTP channels of the project, for anyone to download and install on their personal computers.
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In Firefox 43, we made it a default requirement for add-ons to be signed. This requirement can be disabled by toggling a preference that was originally scheduled to be removed in Firefox 44 for release and beta versions (this preference will continue to be available in the Nightly, Developer, and ESR Editions of Firefox for the foreseeable future).
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SaaS/Big Data
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The Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has elevated a slew of big data and cloud computing projects to Top-Level status recently. With that designation, projects get more attention from the development community and other perks.
Now, Google is making a big open source-focused move by offering its Dataflow technology to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as an incubator project. Cloudera, Data Artisans GmbH, PayPal Holdings and Talend are all backing the move.
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Interested in keeping track of what is happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
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Analysts at Forrester Research have been tracking the upward trajectory of the open source Hadoop big data project for years, and have now pronounced that the platform is “mandatory” for companies in pursuit of advanced analytics that leverage their data stores.
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While the open-source OpenStack cloud platform got its start as a platform for compute and storage, networking efforts are now leading the way forward. In particular, the adoption of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) by global carriers is now being accelerated in part by adoption of OpenStack.
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Databases
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A decade ago, most enterprises building a database had only two or three choices: Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and – to a lesser extent – IBM DB2. Open source systems such as MySQL and PostgreSQL existed, but they were not on the radar of most commercial organisations.
But as proprietary licensing has become more complex and costly, and businesses’ needs have changed, so open source systems have emerged to meet evolving demands.
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MariaDB announced $9 million in venture funding to support its open-source relational database solutions. The company also named Michael Howard as its CEO and Michael “Monty” Widenius as chief technology officer.
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CMS
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A website is essential for every small business, even if it’s just a simple information page. Forget phone books or newspapers; prospective customers look websites. You can publish and maintain your own site, and these five open source website builders make it easy and affordable.
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Education
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In my advanced programming classes I’ve discovered that middle school students are capable of far more complex operations than we often suspect. In many cases, they’re wholly capable of using industry-standard tools to produce remarkable work.
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The Open Source Initiative® (OSI) announced today the Affiliate Membership of Indiana University (IU), a long time champion for the use of open source software as a means for greater efficiency in higher education. The partnership highlights the OSI’s recent efforts to extend support to higher education: helping colleges and universities across the globe realize the benefits of open source software, develpoment models and communities.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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The mainframe isn’t dead at all, of course we already knew this to be true.
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Microsoft opens its deep-learning toolkit on GitHub [Ed: 8 Web sites that call themselves “news”, mostly Microsoft propaganda sites, portray moving to GitHub as “open-sourcing”. See below.]
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Microsoft Releases An Open-Source Deep Learning Toolkit [Ed: Imagine the motivation... Microsoft: so, we heard you're moving to Open Source. We at Microsoft are an Open Source company, so you must move to/stay with Microsoft.]
Microsoft claims that CNTK is more efficient than Theano, TensorFlow, Torch 7, and Caffe as other alternatives. The Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) is GPU accelerated using CUDA and can be downloaded today from GitHub under the MIT license. CNTK does appear to be support Linux. More details via this Microsoft blog post.
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BSD
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For those that didn’t notice yet, the first release candidate for LLVM 3.8 and Clang 3.8 are now available.
A lot of new features are coming to LLVM/Clang 3.8 as covered in various Phoronix articles to date and will recap as the release nears. On Friday was the 3.8-RC1 release as announced by Hans Wennborg.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege, for the last 20 years, to be either a volunteer or employee of the two most important organizations for the advance of software freedom and users’ rights to copy, share, modify and redistribute software. In 1996, I began volunteering for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and worked as its Executive Director from 2001–2005. I continued as a volunteer for the FSF since then, and now serve as a volunteer on FSF’s Board of Directors. I was also one of the first volunteers for Software Freedom Conservancy when we founded it in 2006, and I was the primary person doing the work of the organization as a volunteer from 2006–2010. I’ve enjoyed having a day job as a Conservancy employee since 2011.
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Openness/Sharing
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Based on WHO (World Health Organization) reports on diabetes, in 2012, an estimated 1.5 million deaths were directly caused by diabetes and it is projected to be one of the leading causes of death in 2030. More than 80% of diabetes deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.
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Programming
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There has been more discussion recently on the concept of a “10x engineer”. 10x engineers are, (from Quora) “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average”
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GitLab, a code-hosting alternative to GitHub, is adding performance monitoring and “super-powered” search to the 50th release of the platform. Version 8.4, unveiled late last week, also makes it easier to work with large files or large volumes of artifacts.
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GitLab, an online repository for open source code, has rolled out new features, including big data-ready Elasticsearch, in a bid to become the leading platform for hosting and maintaining software for independent developers and large companies alike.
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I’m going to slowly move on from Mercurial
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As a side note, we are also now in contact with a scientist, specialist on marmots (yes it does exist!). Not that ZeMarmot is any kind of scientifically-accurate film, but it is always nice to get some scientific background as a basis, even if it means later breaking the rules of nature (which is ok when done on purpose). We’ll tell more about this if the contact evolves into a real cooperation.
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“They’re having some trouble with their Microsoft Surface tablets,” announced CBS reporter Evan Washburn. “That last defensive possession the Patriots’ coaches did not have access to those tablets to show pictures to their players. NFL officials have been working at it. Some of those tablets are back in use but not all of them. A lot of frustration that they didn’t have them on that last possession.”
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Alec figured that message was never supposed to be seen and suggested it was a kind of silent protest of someone in Sun against the US Government. I replied, saying I was pretty sure such a message anywhere in the Sun bootprom code must have originated by John Gilmore. So I asked John, and he did not disappoint. This is what I wrote me back…
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So, yes, security issues are harmful. They must be taken serious, and a solid and well designed security concept should be applied. Multiple layers, different zones, role based access, update often, etc.
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Health/Nutrition
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Four months after Flint switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River, Lee-Anne Walters’ family began to experience strange health issues.
It started in August 2014 when Walters’ four children and her husband got rashes on their skin and started losing hair. Then, her 15-year-old son became so nauseated, dizzy and in pain that he couldn’t go to school for three weeks.
The worst of it came when one of her toddler twin sons fell behind his brother in weight and developed a bright red rash with scaly patches on his body after bathing. He was diagnosed with lead poisoning.
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Former president Bill Clinton joined his wife and daughter in assailing Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health care plan last week, saying that it would lead to “overcharging and inflation.”
But in 2009, he defended the single-payer approach, in which the government pays for everyone’s health care. During an appearance on CNN, host Sanjay Gupta asked the former president whether single-payer was “politically unpalatable, or is it a bad idea?”
“Well, I think it’s more politically unpalatable than it is a bad idea,” responded Clinton. “Because single-payer is not socialized medicine. Canada has a single-payer system, and a private health care system. Our single-payer systems are Medicare and Medicaid and Medicare is quite popular. The good thing about single-payer is the administrative costs are quite low. We probably waste $200 billion a year between the insurance administrative costs, the doctors’ and other health care providers’ administrative costs, and employers’ administrative costs in health care that we would not waste if we had any other country’s system.”
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Security
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An unknown hacker has breached the computer systems of three banks and a pharmaceutical company and infected most of their computers with crypto-ransomware.
The incident took place at the start of January, all companies were located in India, and the hacker(s) used the LeChiffre ransomware family to encrypt files on the infected computers.
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It encrypts files and appends to their names an extension “.LeChiffre”.
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One solution would be to install an alternative operating system, like OpenBSD. Sorry, I meant to say ARCH LINUX.
I note that a fair bit of the above foolishness revolves around adding some amount of pollution to the OS’s cabal store. Maybe we can use an OS that comes with a store we trust? For example, there’s several ways a user can install OpenBSD and verify that cert.pem has only the 4943 lines it’s supposed to have. That only pushes the question back a step, however. What lines are supposed to be in this file?
[...]
The trials and tribulations of bundleware mirror those of the government. For as long as most traffic was unencrypted, it was easy to inject value. But as sites started moving to full time https, the well of value started to dry up, requiring workarounds to stay in the game. Governments are facing much the same challenge, hence the large number of proposals to build a socialized, universal AV software, so that all citizens can enjoy its benefits on both desktop and mobile. How else will TrendMicro keep us safe from Let’s Encrypt?
When asked to comment, Hillary Clinton responded with a statement. “I clearly specified that the problem was to be solved by Silicon Valley’s best and brightest, not bumbling mediocrity.” Donald Trump promised to build a wall around malware and make the neckbeards pay for it. Carly Fiorina simply tweeted, “Go Iowa!”
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Microsoft is forcing Windows users to upgrade to Windows 10 by quietly slipping in code through its regular updates. This has been confirmed by multiple sources.
But what of those Windows users who want to stick with a known devil — in this case, their own versions of Windows, be they 7, 8 or 8.1 — until a little more is known by the public at large about the strengths and weaknesses of Windows 10?
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While I’m not convinced that encrypting everything by default is necessarily a good idea, it is certainly true that encryption has its uses. Unfortunately, for the longest time getting an SSL certificate from a CA was quite a hassle — and then I’m not even mentioning the fact that it would cost money, too. In that light, the letsencrypt project is a useful alternative: rather than having to dabble with emails or webforms, letsencrypt does everything by way of a few scripts. Also, the letsencrypt CA is free to use, in contrast to many other certificate authorities.
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In the latest bout of alarmist frenzy to sweep the security world, researchers disclosed a vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s open source code last week. It turns out to pose little real threat.
The flaw, which has existed in Linux since 2012 but remained unknown, was reported by the Israeli security company Perception Point. It allows attackers to gain root access to computers running affected versions of the kernel. With root access, they can do anything they want to the system.
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A new OpenSSL release has been announced for January 28, and it’s going to cover a couple of problems, one of which it’s going to be very important.
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A new backdoor for Linux has been spotted by security researchers, one which can download malicious files to an infected system, log keystrokes and take screenshots.
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Threats to Linux computers are now appearing on a regular basis, and what was once dubbed a “no-virus zone” has started being targeted by malware authors.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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You’d need to start with a persuasive review of what hasn’t worked over the past 14-plus years. American actions against terrorism — the Islamic State being just the latest flavor — have flopped on a remarkable scale, yet remain remarkably attractive to our present crew of candidates. (Bernie Sanders might be the only exception, though he supports forming yet another coalition to defeat ISIS.)
Why are the failed options still so attractive? In part, because bombing and drones are believed by the majority of Americans to be surgical procedures that kill lots of bad guys, not too many innocents, and no Americans at all. As Washington regularly imagines it, once air power is in play, someone else’s boots will eventually hit the ground (after the U.S. military provides the necessary training and weapons). A handful of Special Forces troops, boots-sorta-on-the-ground, will also help turn the tide. By carrot or stick, Washington will collect and hold together some now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t “coalition” of “allies” to aid and abet the task at hand. And success will be ours, even though versions of this formula have fallen flat time and again in the Greater Middle East.
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Churchill’s legacy in Sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya in particular is also one of deep physical and physiological scars that endure to this day.
Transparency Reporting
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The city of Chicago has decided it’s not going to wait for a judge to order it to release video footage depicting another unarmed person being shot by one of its police officers. It has released surveillance video showing Cedric Chatman being killed by Officer Kevin Fry. Fry claimed Chatman was carrying a gun. It turned out to be an iPhone box, allegedly taken from the victim of a carjacking.
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For the second time in recent months, Chicago officials released video of police officers chasing and fatally shooting an African-American teenager, bowing to public and legal pressure amid calls for greater scrutiny of officers’ use of deadly force.
The latest set of videos — with views from at least four surveillance cameras — provides a distant, and somewhat incomplete, view of the brief moments on Jan. 7, 2013, after the police confronted Cedrick Chatman, a 17-year-old black youth, in a car at a busy South Side intersection.
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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January 20 is Penguin Awareness Day. No need to wear a fish-shaped ribbon or dress in black and white, but sadly these dapper flightless birds are facing bigger problems than Benedict Cumberbatch not being able to pronounce their name correctly.
Finance
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Hillary Clinton declared on the sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that as president she would “fight to create a robust small-donor matching system.”
Clinton previously endorsed such a system for congressional and presidential candidates as part of her campaign’s platform. While Clinton hasn’t laid out any specifics, almost all House Democrats have co-sponsored the Government by the People Act, which would match political donations up to $150 at a six-to-one ratio with public money. For example, a donation of $100 to a candidate would be matched with $600, so the candidate would actually receive $700 total.
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In a week when the BBC has been hit by yet more scandal as a result of suppressing an investigation into the notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile, we ask: does the BBC need an investigations unit?
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he Unorthodocs season at Somerset House features acclaimed documentaries never seen on British TV. Are UK broadcasters denying audiences access to a golden age of independent film-making?
Censorship
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Few books have sparked such an influence in a young demographic of high school students than the coming-of-age epistolary novel, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Written by author and director Stephen Chbosky, the book has produced a strong impact on young adults facing their own battle against emotional issues such as depression and introversion. In its influence, the novel has become a favorite among teenagers across the nation.
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Back in 2014 I wrote a post that explained why you should close your Facebook account. And now there’s yet another reason why you should immediately delete your facebook account permanently. Facebook is deleting posts in Europe that it considers “racist” or “xenophobic.”
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A few decades ago, Bill Gates got involved in something of a “side project” in which he tried to gain control over the licensing rights of tons of photographs and artwork, in a project that was eventually called Corbis. Gates had a vision of licensing artwork to special digital frames in people’s homes, but eventually it shifted into a standard photo licensing service. Late last week, the news broke that Gates had finally sold Corbis to a Chinese firm called Visual China Group. Part of the deal is that Corbis’ main competitor, Getty Images (which is fairly well-known for its copyright trolling) will get to handle all licensing on Corbis images outside of China for a period of 10 years. Considering that this effectively gives Getty control over its largest rival’s library, I wonder if the DOJ may take an interest in the deal on anti-trust grounds.
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Bollywood filmmaker Zoya Akhtar on Monday termed the state censoring a piece of work as “bizarre” and called for stricter law enforcement.
“The state censoring a piece of work is bizarre because every time the government changes, the morality changes. So it doesn’t make sense.
“We need to enforce the law that if it’s an adult film, then children don’t go and watch the film, which happens everywhere in our country,” Akhtar explained during an audience interaction at the Kolkata Literary Meet.
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Turkey welcomes private investment in its arts and culture. But freedom for artists and journalists is largely restricted. The alternative arts scene has slipped into the background. By Ceyda Nurtsch
More than 500,000 visitors attended the 14th Istanbul Biennale between September and November 2015, turning the entire city into a massive open-air museum and breaking new attendance records. Both Turkish and foreign artists used this opportunity to showcase their work at the event, which is considered the largest international gathering in the country.
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Two brothers from New Hampshire are hoping to channel simmering student frustration into a national protest movement rejecting the censorship of speech on college campuses.
Inspired by concerns over the proliferation of policies and practices restricting student speech—from the deceptively-named “free speech zones” to requirements that students “pre-register” before expressing their opinions in public—Christopher and Robert Sargent decided to organize a nationwide “I Am The Free Speech Zone” event on April 21 to spread awareness of the dangers such restrictions pose to academic and personal freedom.
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Last week, the University of York had its Free Speech University Ranking (FSUR) downgraded from Green to Amber, suggesting the University had ‘chilled free speech through intervention. Spiked, who put together the rankings, use a combination of Freedom of Information requests and publicly available resources to assess the actions and policies of student unions and universities.
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The University of Edinburgh’s student’s association has received a ‘red’ rating for free speech on campus in the second annual Free Speech University Rankings, compiled by libertarian magazine Spiked.
Campus-wide policies on “Dignity and Respect” and trans equality earned the University itself an ‘amber’ rating, meaning that it “has chilled free speech through intervention”, meanwhile, the Edinburgh University Students’ Association (EUSA), received a ‘red’ rating, meaning that the students’ union “has banned and actively censored ideas on campus”.
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Bollywood filmmaker Zoya Akhtar on Monday (January 25) termed the state censoring a piece of work as “bizarre” and called for stricter law enforcement.
“The state censoring a piece of work is bizarre because every time the government changes, the morality changes. So it doesn’t make sense.
Privacy
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By going through various deliberative processes, including the secret interrogation of Abdulmutallab, the end result was the acceleration of the process to hunt down and kill Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Muslim cleric living in Yemen. It was al-Awlaki who helped guide the young Nigerian would-be terrorist. Al-Awlaki himself was killed in a drone strike in September 2011.
This key event is one of the stark reminders that in some ways the Obama White House took policy decisions that even Bush did not.
“Even Bush had not signed off on the deliberate killing of a United States citizen without a trial,” Savage writes. “And notwithstanding the extraordinary precedent this established for state power and individual rights, the Obama administration would fight for years to keep the basic facts and legal analysis about its action secret from the public.”
Indeed, it wasn’t until 2014 that the legal rationale was finally published, after a federal appeals court ordered that it be released.
Many groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, would argue that the extrajudicial killing is in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property…without due process of law.” However, the Obama administration argued that the killing of terror suspects like al-Awlaki is justified as they pose a “continuous and imminent” threat to the national security of the United States.
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On the 5th February, the French National Assembly1 will consider the law on the constitutionalisation of the state of emergency. Prime Minister Manuel Valls has already announced that he wanted an extension to the state of emergency “until we can get rid of Daesh (fr)”, that is to say, for months or years. Together with numerous organisations, La Quadrature du Net calls for the rejection of trivialisation of the state of emergency and for a mass mobilisation against interference with civil liberties and with the rule of law, notably by demonstrating on 30 January and more specifically by calling MPs.
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When the USA Freedom Act passed last June, it put an end to the country’s National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance program in which it collected millions of phone records of citizens’ calls over 14 years.
But the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believes that isn’t enough to protect people’s privacy, because those records still exist in various NSA databases. The non-profit is calling on a secret court to consider ways to delete this trove of data without destroying evidence that proves the NSA snooped on citizens.
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Now that the mass collection of telephone records by the NSA under Section 215 of the Patriot Act has ended due to the passage of USA Freedom, the question has arisen: what should the NSA do with the big mass of records that it already has? The secret FISA Court recently asked the government what it thinks should happen, and EFF sent a letter to the FISA Court (by way of the Department of Justice, asking that it be conveyed to the Court) giving our perspective.
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Citizens Rightfully Expect Privacy in Data That Reveals Their Whereabouts
Chicago—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging a federal appeals court in Chicago to rule that police need a warrant to access cell phone location records that can reveal our everyday travels—when we leave home, where we go and whom we visit.
In an amicus brief filed Friday in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and ACLU of Wisconsin said cell phone location information—data that show where our phones are at a given time and date—generates a comprehensive picture of a person’s movements. Because we carry our phones with us wherever we go, these data can reveal intensely personal information like when we see the doctor, attend a political meeting, or visit friends. Americans have the right to expect that this information remain private and beyond the reach of law enforcement officers unless they first obtain a search warrant.
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Up in Baltimore, where law enforcement Stingray device use hit critical mass faster and more furiously than anywhere else in the country (to date…) with the exposure of 4,300 deployments in seven years, the government is still arguing there’s no reason to bring search warrants into this.
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Ashkat Rathi at Quartz points to an interesting algorithm developed by Michael Kearns of the University of Pennsylvania — one that might give the government something to consider when conducting surveillance. It gauges the possibility of non-targets inadvertently being exposed during investigations, providing intelligence/investigative agencies with warnings that perhaps other tactics should be deployed.
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The police department’s contract with Vigilant Solutions gives it the ability to track people across the country.
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Using the publicly available data, data visualization software firm Uncharted has prepared TorFlow — a map for visualizing how TOR’s data looks as it flows all across the world. It shows TOR network’s node and data movements based on the IP addresses of relays bouncing around the connections of users to avoid spying.
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But those concerns are all about the practical utility of such a law, not the larger concerns over whether this kind of data collection ought to be happening to begin with. To see an example of why a free people shouldn’t allow the government to crack open this door, however, one needs only look again at the law in Australia. What was supposed to be collection chiefly to combat major criminal actions is now a collection that even the food police are trying to get in on. And, yes, I really do mean the food police.
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The U.S. took its encryption argument international last week, with Attorney General Loretta Lynch telling the World Economic forum that it doesn’t want to put security backdoors into encrypted communications, it just wants to vendors and service providers to decrypt when ordered to by a court.
That ignores that facts that vendors and providers can’t decrypt unless there is a backdoor of some sort, and that any backdoor undermines the security and therefore the value of encryption.
It’s a case of the Department of Justice – via Lynch and FBI Director James Comey – trying to steer clear, at least technically, of demanding backdoors, but it’s all a semantic game. Earlier, Comey stopped using the term backdoor and asked for front-door access to decryption instead. Backdoor had become too much of a flashpoint, even though a front-door is exactly the same as a backdoor from a technology standpoint.
So the department is changing the spoken terms of its demand even though it is still seeking backdoors. Now it just describes its needs, not how vendors and providers should fulfill them. They want these entities to come up with decrypted communications when they present a court order telling them to do so. It’s up to the vendors and providers to figure out how to do that.
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The NSA may know lots of stuff about lots of people, but it’s still fairly clueless about how the world works. Documents obtained by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski show the NSA was shocked to find it hadn’t been portrayed more favorably in a major motion picture.
Civil Rights
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Well, this story is interesting me extremely, and for the obvious as well as the perhaps more arcanely legal reasons.
Apparently a former senior MI5 officer is asking permission to give evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee in Parliament about the Security Service’s collusion in the US torture programme that was the pyroclastic flow from the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
I have long speculated about how people with whom I used to work, socialise with, have dinner with in the 1990s might have evolved from idealistic young officers into people who could condone or even participate in the torture of other human beings once the war on terror was unleashed in the last decade.
During the 1990s MI5 absolutely did not condone the use of torture – not only for ethical reasons, but also because an older generation was still knocking around and they had seen in the civil war in Northern Ireland quite how counter-productive such practices were. Internment, secret courts, stress positions, sleep deprivation – all these policies acted as a recruiting sergeant for the Provisional IRA.
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Cologne-style sex attacks and thefts happened on New Year’s Eve in 12 other German states, according to a leaked federal police report cited by media. German investigators said the assaults represented a “new form of criminality.”
Local broadcasters WDR and NDR, and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, reported that the attacks were much more widespread than earlier thought, citing a confidential document prepared for the Interior Ministry by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).
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I am an Aboriginal women, born in 1987 into a staunch family who were ready to teach me and my siblings the truth from birth. They had walked the walk and had earned their right to talk the talk, to educate.
But before I had even left my mother’s womb, I was a statistic, another Aboriginal person to be counted on the census to add to the 3% or so of other Aboriginal people that made up our population in 1987 on a continent where only 199 years prior to my birth, we made up 100% of it. By 1900, it was estimated that the Aboriginal population had decreased by 87%.
Many Australians today will tell you that what happened was not their fault, that they can’t change what their ancestors and other “colonisers” did. In order to truly understand, this country needs to accept a lot of truths that are otherwise conveniently ignored.
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Last summer, we wrote about a troubling criminal case up in Canada, exploring whether or not a Twitter fight constituted criminal harassment. The details are long and complex and I tried to summarize them in the last post so if you want more details go there.
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Two months after the Ash Wednesday protest where Grady Flores was charged with violating the order, on May 23, 2013, President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the National Defense University defending his drone program: “Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.” Despite his pledges, the civilian death toll from U.S. drone strikes continues to climb.
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When a person stands accused of a crime without a competent lawyer, there can be no justice.
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In 2013, it was revealed the DOJ had added First Amendment-trampling to its always-cavalier treatment of the Fourth Amendment by gathering journalists’ phone records. Under the guise of investigating leaks, the DOJ crossed over into totalitarian territory. Following the backlash, the DOJ “revised” its rules on surveilling the press.
How much revision actually took place is still a secret. The Freedom of the Press Foundation sued the DOJ last year for its refusal to release its secret rules on surveilling journalists. The DOJ released some documents but they were redacted into near-complete opacity, prompting the Foundation’s FOIA litigation.
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Americans have become a small-minded divided people, ruled by petty hatreds, who are easily set against one another and against other peoples by their rulers.
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Restraining practices have been called into question since Denver released a video showing the last moments a homeless man who died face-down while being restrained by five deputies. His family is now calling for a federal investigation into the incident.
The release of the video, which runs for more than 45 minutes, comes after Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey said last week that he would not bring charges against the officers responsible for Michael Marshall’s death while in custody in a jail.
Internet/Net Neutrality
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Just about a year ago, the FCC voted to raise the base definition of broadband from 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream — to 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. This, of course, annoyed the nation’s mega providers, since the higher standard highlights the lack of competition and next-generation upgrades in countless markets. It especially annoyed the nation’s phone companies, given that the expensive, sub-6 Mbps DSL foisted upon millions of customers can no longer even technically be called broadband.
Intellectual Monopolies
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Jamie Love has spent years battling global drug companies, unshakable in his belief that even the world’s poorest people should have access to life-saving medicines. Is it time that our own government listened to him?
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Copyrights
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If copyright is to succeed in promoting the creation and dissemination of culture, then it needs to address the diverse needs of creators, fans, and critics. Copyright law achieves this in some jurisdictions through policies such as fair use, but more often than not it fails to address the concerns of anyone who isn’t a copyright holder. Much of the blame for why copyright grows increasingly out of touch with how people experience culture lies with a lack of transparency in, and industry capture of, copyright policymaking.
Nowhere is this problem more apparent than in international trade agreements. For years, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and other copyright industry groups have taken advantage of trade venues to pass copyright rules that would not otherwise survive public scrutiny. Trade negotiations have historically been closed in order to allow negotiators to discuss import tariffs and other market barriers to the trade of goods without political interference. However, the scope of issues covered by these deals have broadened significantly over the years. They have come to include policies on copyright, data transfers, telecommunications, and more. Even as trade agreements now cover all kinds of digital regulations that can affect how lawmakers can set domestic policy, the negotiations have remained entirely closed off from the public.
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Remember that viral video from 2011 where a honey badger trots around, aggressively not caring about things? Well, the guy who made it—Christopher Gordon, who goes by the pseudonym “Randall”—is suing Papyrus and design company Drape Creative over some greeting cards that use the phrase HONEY BADGER DON’T GIVE A SHIT.
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The Nigerian government has continued to make progress toward new copyright legislation in recent weeks, but efforts appear to have become less transparent, as the results of a public comment period that ended weeks ago have not been made available and as of press time the draft copy of the bill was no longer available on the Copyright Commission website.
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A fan-created ASCII version of the 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix is the oldest known torrent that’s still active. Created more than 12 years ago, the file has outlived many blockbuster movies and is still downloaded a few times a week, even though the site from where it originated has disappeared.
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01.24.16
Posted in News Roundup at 8:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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The Linux Foundation hosts numerous Collaborative Projects — independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development in an effort to drive innovation. For these projects, the Linux Foundation provides the essential organizational framework so that participants can focus on innovation and results.
To provide greater insight into some of these projects, we are talking with key contributors about what they do and how they got involved. In this article, we talk with Christian (Chris) Gromm, Principal Software Engineer in the Frameworks & Libraries team at Microchip AIS, about his work with the Automotive Grade Linux project.
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Desktop
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HP’s latest Chromebook is a small laptop designed for use in classrooms. The HP Chromebook 11 G4 EE has a spill-resistant keyboard, rubber edges that help it survive 2.3 foot drop tests, and a 180-degree hinge that lets you fold the laptop flat and pore over the screen with a colleague.
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I write to you today with some very important new about the Chromixium project. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Google’s Trademark Enforcement Team. I was duly asked to cease use of the name Chromixium for this project.
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The new year is a good time to feature one of our favorite desktop creators, dobbie03. Here he’s running Arch Linux, and while it might look like not much is going on, let’s take a look at what it’s like when he’s working, and how he set it all up.
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Server
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Many businesses have the need to integrate web hosting into the mix of services they offer. CMS professionals, web developers and designers, eCommerce consultants, and marketing agencies, often find that the best way to integrate web hosting with existing services is not to use an established hosting company’s reseller accounts but to develop a hosting platform over which they have complete control. It’s not as difficult as you might think — if you can handle Linux server administration and choose a good web hosting control panel, all you need is the server.
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Working with containers presents its own unique set of challenges which can be daunting to any developer. Issues continuing to plague enterprises using containers for working at scale consist of visibility, service discovery, and container health—Just to name a few of the many sharks in the water. Meros has just released a public beta of software-as-a-service (SaaS) that promises to address these pain points while offering performance where it’s needed.
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Linux-based OS10 designed to meld switches, servers, storage into a software-defined data center
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“We introduced low-end Linux-based Power systems to capture the growing Linux market, and are building an IP stream through the OpenPOWER ecosystem,” Schroeter said. “Even though the Unix market is declining, by delivering innovation and repositioning the platform, our Power systems have grown four quarters in a row. This is a good example of how we transform ourselves.”
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Kernel Space
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The EXT4 file-system updates aren’t terribly exciting for the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window.
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“The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors,” Garrett wrote in his blog. “Section 3.3(a) now says that no affiliate members may be involved in the election of directors, and section 5.3(d) still permits at-large directors but does not require them.”
So what happened to spark this move by the big money guys behind the foundation? Garrett offered an answer: “These changes all happened shortly after Karen Sandler announced that she planned to stand for the Linux Foundation board during a presentation last September,” he wrote. “A short time later, the ‘Individual membership’ program was quietly renamed to the ‘Individual supporter’ program and the promised benefit of being allowed to stand for and participate in board elections was dropped….”
The problem with Sandler, as the corporate bigwigs see it, is that she is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that’s highly focused on enforcement of the GPL, and which is currently funding a lawsuit against Linux Foundation member VMware in a GPL noncompliance case.
“The timing may be coincidental,” Garrett continued, “but it certainly looks like the Linux Foundation was willing to throw out any semblance of community representation just to ensure that there was no risk of someone in favor of GPL enforcement ending up on their board.”
Today, Linux Foundation president, Jim Zemlin, addressed the issue in a blog post on the foundation’s website. He was tardy weighing in, he said, because he “had been engaged in meetings on behalf of The Linux Foundation in China, with limited access to email and/or Internet.” Upon his return to the wired world, he was shocked to discover the brouhaha that’s developed “in social media.”
“The Linux Foundation Board structure has not changed,” he wrote.
“[T}he Board voted to keep Larry Augustin and Bdale Garbee as individual At-Large Directors in recognition of their longstanding service to the community and individual commitment to helping advance The Linux Foundation.” His post fails to point out that at-large directors serve one-year terms, meaning they’ll be gone soon enough.
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I spend most of my time working on Project Atomic to further Linux containers deriving from a traditional upstream Linux distribution model, but the space of software delivery/runtime mechanisms is vast, and in particular, I have thought Unikernels were an interesting development. While I do like writing C, the thought of an OS/library in a high level language is an interesting one (particularly interesting to me for a long time is how garbage collection could be better if integrated with the OS).
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The current development kernel version is 2.1.79, with no less than four pre-80 patches released. A code freeze is allegedly in place, though it doesn’t appear to have frozen very solid yet. The stock .79 kernel has compilation problems, but with the pre-80 patches it seems pretty stable. Work continues on SMB and NFS support, and many other issues.
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The Intel VMD (Volume Management Device) driver is explained by the new Kconfig entry as follows, “VMD is a secondary PCI host bridge that allows PCI Express root ports, and devices attached to them, to be removed from the default PCI domain and placed within the VMD domain.” And it’s further explained by its original patch series.
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It’s been about two years since last seeing any Xen PV vs. PVHVM benchmarks, but back then Xen PVHVM was smacking Xen PV’s performance. Since then, with newly-published benchmarks, the lead has only expanded.
As a quick refresher, PVHVM is the Hardware Assisted Virtualization for Xen that’s supported in conjunction with specialized drivers that are common to most modern Linux distributions and is an alternative to Xen’s classic PV (para-virtualized) configuration. If you are unfamiliar, you can read more via the Xen Wiki.
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Several of the places that covered this remarked about the extremely quiet nature of the process.
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As a cultural libertarian, I loathe the Social Justice Warriors. I cannot stand them, and I fully support Linus and the Linux Foundation if they took preemptive action to stop SJWs from infiltrating the Linux Foundation.
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Graphics Stack
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A Red Hat developer has explained why asking the question “Is Wayland ready?” is wrong and why everyone else needs to be ready for Wayland.
We often see this question being asked pretty much everywhere, and everyone wants to know if Wayland is finally ready to be shipped as default. It seems that the community is asking the wrong question since Wayland is prepared and has been so for a very long time. The other ones are not ready for Wayland.
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Earlier this week I carried out an OpenGL performance comparison of NVIDIA GPUs going back 10 years that included 27 different graphics cards from the GeForce 8 series through the latest-generation GeForce 900 Maxwell graphics cards. In this weekend article are some complementary tests from this comparison with the OpenGL benchmarks at 1920 x 1080.
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On January 22, Collabora’s Emil Velikov had the pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the ninth maintenance release for the Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.0 series.
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Applications
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This release has been tagged in git as “v0.6″. You can also download a tarball (GPG signature). Prebuilt binaries for multiple distributions are available via the OBS, and so is a Windows installer.
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If you’ve paid close enough attention to the news, you know that the Mozilla Foundation has cut the cord to Thunderbird. Considering that, for years, Thunderbird has been the most user-friendly desktop email client for Linux, this could have been a disaster for the open source platform. Fortunately, there’s a new kid on the block with plenty to offer. That new kid is N1 by Nylas.
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Kodi 16.0 “Jarvis” has just been released by its developers, and it signals the fact that we’re getting closer to the stable version of this amazing application.
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A new minor release of RcppEigen is now on CRAN and in Debian. It primarily upgrades to the recent 3.2.7 release of Eigen — thanks once again to fine work by Yixuan Qiu. We also have one additonal PR by Alexey Stukalow who ensured that the fastLm() example will work fine with when the Intel MKL is used.
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Bradley White from the upstream CCTZ team prepared some more changes in CCTZ itself — so a new RcppCCTZ version got to CRAN the other day catching up with these changes.
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Two ways to sort your music are either by the lookup method or the scanning method. The lookup method will check the existing metadata saved to the song file and compare that to the MusicBrainz database. This is usually a foolproof way to find data for a song. The scanning method will use an acoustic “fingerprint” of the song based on wavelengths and other miscellaneous sound-oriented factors of the song. It will compare the fingerprint to the existing MusicBrainz database for a match. This is the most accurate method to use, but it will not work out of the box in Fedora. There is an easy workaround to get scanning to work, however.
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Proprietary
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Only three days after the release of the previous snapshot, the Vivaldi developers are back with yet another snapshot build, this time fixing twenty-two more bugs reported by users.
According to the release announcement, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.0.377.10 is now available for download and testing for all supported operating systems (see download links at the end of the article), fixing more than 20 issues (details in the changelog below), which means that its development cycle continues at a rapid pace.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Linux operating systems gives the stability that Windows platform somewhere fails to deliver. But what about gaming? Can we compare Windows and Linux on gaming front? I don’t think it will be a fare game to compare both on this aspect. Users who want to go with gaming will rarely use Linux and users who are comfortable with Linux operations will rarely go for Windows. Both are big competitors to each other and both have respective pros and cons.
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Games
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The development team behind the OpenMW project, an open-source remake of the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind game for GNU/Linux operating systems, has announced today, January 22, the release and immediate availability for download of OpenMW 0.38.0.
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A first-person puzzle game by the name of Attractio, developed by GameCoder Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, has been released for Linux on Steam.
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Eclipse Phase is a pen and paper role-playing game from Posthuman Studios. For those not familiar with pen and paper role-playing games, Eclipse Phase is similar to the more well known Dungeons & Dragons. Players share stories and explore a fictional world by creating characters and rolling dice to resolve challenges while one person, the gamemaster, provides structure and guides the overarching narrative. However, unlike the traditional fantasy setting of Dungeons and Dragons, Eclipse Phase features a hard science fiction setting with transhumanism as the key thematic element. In the future portrayed in Eclipse Phase, the mind and body have become completely separate things that make it possible to create backups and forks of characters, like switching bodies to better suit the mission at hand.
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ABC Murders is an adventure, detective game based on Agatha Christie’s novel, where famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot goes after mysterious serial killer known by the name of “ABC”.
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Hopefully with Aspyr Media helping them out the game will see a really polished experience for Linux when it hits the full release next month.
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Another updated version of a classic roguelike was released for Linux earlier this month. Players can expect to fight monsters, explore and have all the traditional trappings of dungeon crawlers.
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Thanks as usual to SteamDB, it seems Rocket League is making preparations for the promised Linux & SteamOS version.
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Fans of the beautiful game might be happy to know that we’ve had our first football (soccer for you Yanks out there) game available on Linux for a few months now. Well, first one that’s more about the matches than the management side of things. Kopanito is a diverse and fast-paced game that looks pretty fun.
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While it doesn’t have a Linux icon, I assure you it’s on Linux. It had the icon removed along with a bunch of other games a while ago due to not 100% working on SteamOS, but they are taking steps to fix it.
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Skyborn is a pretty nice looking 2D RPG created in RPGMakers, and it has now launched on SteamOS and Linux. It flew under the radar a bit, so some of you probably didn’t know either.
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I have yet to give Bound By Flame a real good go, but it’s really good to see this Action/RPG game get some support with a new patch in beta.
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Do you think we should move to do these every 2+ months, rather than every month? This way we may get a better idea of change happening within the Linux gaming community? I am torn on it though, as it’s fun to see changes between desktop environments so often.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Krita project has made the first “pre-alpha” builds of its upcoming 3.0 release available for download. The release of 3.0 will mark a significant milestone in the project’s history, bringing a new set of features, a port to Qt 5, and a commitment to supporting a new platform.
The alpha release was announced on January 17. For now, the post contains direct links to the binary packages, which are not available through the normal Krita download channels. As maintainer Boudewijn Rempt said in the post: “Right now, Krita is in the ‘may eat your cat’-stage….” There are standard Mac OS X and 64-bit Windows installers provided. The Linux builds are provided as AppImage packages. The AppImage format includes an ISO 9660 filesystem that bundles all necessary files to launch the application, plus a small launcher binary that mounts the filesystem with FUSE and runs the application within. The upshot is that, like the Windows and OS X downloads, the Linux package should be portable (or at least portable enough to run on almost any desktop Linux distribution).
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I had big issues with my Internet connectivity this past week, when my internet cable modem suddenly died. I was able to use a backup connection on my telephony modem but the 1 Mbit/sec up- and download offered by that outlet was not sufficient for the amounts of data I had to upload. So, I was very happy to get a new modem yesterday evening and found that my 200/20 Mbit/sec connection was restored overnight. That allowed me to upload the latest ‘ktown’ package set to the mirror server. KDE 5_16.01 is now available for your enjoyment. These packages are based on the latest KDE releases: Frameworks 5.18.0, Plasma 5.5.3 and Applications 15.12.1.
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After having reached the first milestone of a read-only prototype of Kube, it’s time to provide a lookout of what we plan to achieve in 2016.
I have put together a Roadmap, of what I think are realistic goals that we can achieve in 2016. Obviously this will evolve over time and we’ll keep adjusting this as we advance faster/slower or simply move in other directions.
[...]
We polish Kube Mail, ensure it’s easy to install and setup on all platforms and that all the implemented features work flawlessly.
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This is an overview guide to the KDE Plasma desktop environment within Linux.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Oh, and to be on the safe side, the type selector is only shown for existing objects if the type is already set to one of the defined types (and not for cases where there is a combination of tags, such as a place being defined as both an amenity and a shop, like say, a supermarket with a pharmacy department). This is done as a precausion to avoid any cases where tags would be overwritten in a non-obvious or hidden way. For objects where none of the type tags are defined, the selection will be permitted, and shows the initial ”None“ state.
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The GNOME.Asia Summit 2016 team invites proposals for presentations at the conference. GNOME.Asia Summit is GNOME Asia’s user and developer conference, with the goal of spreading GNOME across Asia and encouraging contributions. The 2016 edition of the Summit will be held at the Manav Rachna International University, Faridabad, Delhi (NCR), India from April 21st to 24th.
GNOME.Asia Summit 2016 will follow the release of GNOME 3.20 and will be a great place to celebrate and explore the many new features and enhancements in the release, as well as potential work for upcoming releases.
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Are you a distro hopper? Are you one of those people who knows what day of the week it is because of which distro you’re using? If so, this quiz is for you. But even if you’re one of those people who finds a distro you like and sticks with it until it becomes as comfortable as a well worn shoe, you’ve probably done your homework, and that’s why you were able to find the distro that was a perfect fit for you. In other words, you’ll probably do well on our quiz too — because it just might be a tortoise and hare sort of thing.
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New Releases
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Kali Linux, a hacker’s favorite operating system, is here with its first Rolling release. This release ensures that you are always using the latest and best tools for pen-testing purposes. The first Kali Linux Rolling release also brings a Kali Linux Package Tracker tool and changes the way VMware guest tools are installed. You can read more about the features below and use the links for downloading Kali Linux Rolling 2016.1 ISO files and torrents.
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Suman Chakravartula informs us today about the immediate availability for download of the Rockstor 3.8-11 free and open-source NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution based on GNU/Linux technologies.
Rockstor 3.8-11 is the third stable update in the 3.8 series, bringing all sorts of improvements to make the software more reliable and secure. Among the most important changes, we can mention multiple enhancements to the Rock-Ons system, which has just received support for third-party Rock-Ons.
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Q4OS, a Linux distribution based on Debian and powered by a desktop environment called Trinity DE, has been upgraded to version 1.4.6 and is now ready for download.
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I am happy to announce the release of Rockstor 3.8-11. This is our third release in the Stable updates channel and I’d like to thank subscribers for their support. As usual, subscribers can just update to this release from the Web-UI.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Deepin 15 has been released and announced by Deepin Developer on December 24 2015, ships with latest version of deepin desktop environment version 3.0, based on debian SID and powered by Linux Kernel 4.2.
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Slackware Family
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Red Hat Family
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Atalanta Sosnoff Capital reduced its stake in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) by 2.9% during the fourth quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the SEC. The firm owned 96,170 shares of the open-source software company’s stock after selling 2,870 shares during the period. Atalanta Sosnoff Capital’s holdings in Red Hat were worth $7,964,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC.
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One of the S&P 500’s big winners for Friday January 22 was Red Hat Inc. (RHT) as the company’s stock climbed 2.57% to $72.12 on volume of 1.18 million shares.
The stock opened at $71.33 and saw an intraday low of $71.29 and an intraday high of $72.82. All told, the day saw a per-share gain of $1.81. The stock’s average daily volume of 1.61 million and 182.63 million shares outstanding. Red Hat Inc. now has a 50-day SMA is $79.82 and 200-day SMA is $77.18, and it has a 52-week high of $84.44 and a 52-week low of $62.43.
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Fedora
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CommOps is the newest official sub-project in Fedora, and the team’s role is to assist other sub-projects in Fedora. This is done by building and improving interactions within the internal Fedora community, as well as by increasing communication across the Project as a whole. 2015 was an important milestone for the Fedora Community Operations (CommOps) team in so many ways. Remy DeCausemaker,the Fedora Community Action and Impact Lead, Justin Flory(jflory7) and the CommOps team as whole recently published an excellent Year-in-Review article on Fedora Community Blog describing the CommOps Team highlights of 2015 and their vision for the upcoming year of 2016.
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In the past year to current day, women in computing is a hot topic in many discussions about diversity in computer science. Particularly in free and open source software, women are underrepresented, even more than average numbers in other computer science fields.
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At tonight’s FESCo meeting, it was decided to go with a three week delay rather than two. Adam Williamson’s N-1 upgrades were approved as an officially supported path and Fedora 25 is penciled-in for November. Elsewhere, Jamie Watson was quick to testdrive Kali’s new rolling edition and another Linux trojan was identified by researchers.
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Debian Family
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The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian 8 (codename “jessie”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were published separately and are referenced where applicable.
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Debian 8 (Jessie) has just gotten a new update, and developers have added a number of fixes and other adjustments for some serious issues.
The Debian developers have issued another update for the OS. It’s only for maintenance, and no new features have been implemented, but that’s to be expected with a regular update. The initial launch for Debian 8.0 was all the way back in April 2015, so three major upgrades in less than a year seems to be a great track record.
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The Debian GNU/Linux project has released an updated version of its stable distribution Debian 8 (“jessie”). You must update to get corrections for security problem as this version made a few adjustments for the serious issue found in Debian 8.2.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I find it very ironic that one of the most divisive things that ever hit the Linux scene is a Desktop Environment called Unity. For those of you who are late to the party, Unity was introduced by Canonical in 2010 and became the default desktop experience on Ubuntu with the release of Ubuntu 11.04. Unity is both loved and hated, depending on who you’re talking to at the moment, and all you gotta do to start a lively discussion is bring it up in mixed (Linux minded) company. Opinions about Unity range from absolute disdain to unabashed “fanboyism.”
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Despite being a very capable depth camera, support for Linux and OS X doesn’t exist. Researchers, roboticists and IoT developers are slightly miffed about this, and it seems like Intel doesn’t care about people using their hardware on platforms that aren’t Windows.
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Relevant tech specs include Ubuntu 14.04 LTS version, quad-core ARM Cortex A-15 processor, NVIDIA Kepler-based GPU and support for CUDA, OpenCV and ROS.
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Phones
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Android
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IMX 7 on e-readers will be a game changer when companies have enough time to optimize their software. Hardware dithering will increase the performance of Android apps because it will be able to render animated page turns. I surmise that one of the big trends of 2016 will be companies gravitating away from Linux and embracing Android.
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According to a new leak, it appears as though March 11 is possibly the date when the Samsung Galaxy S7 will release in the U.S. The information comes from Evan Blass (evleaks), a source who has a mixed track record when it comes to leaked information. Beyond the date of March 11, no additional details were provided.
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Motorola officially launched the DROID Turbo 2 towards the end of last year, and since that time it has been gaining recognition as a strong device with decent hardware, thanks to the ShatterShield display, rear camera and good battery life. Almost a few months later, Motorola is now sharing the open source Android 6.0 Marshmallow kernels for the device so that developers can get their hands on them and do with them as they wish. What this boils down to is some of the necessary tools that developers will need to get started on working with the Android 6.0 software on the DROID Turbo 2.
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Google is the default search engine on iPhones and it’s not because Apple considers Google the best search engine. It’s the result of a high-profile $1 billion deal between Google and Apple bosses.
This unknown fact was recently unmasked during a court hearing regarding Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over the Java copyright dispute. The documents produced in the court on January 14 showed that Google paid Apple $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default search engine on the iPhone, according to a report from Bloomberg.
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Annette Hurst, a lawyer representing Oracle in its long-running case against Google, also revealed that Google paid Apple US$1 billion in 2014 to keep its search bar on the iPhone, according to both Bloomberg and Reuters.
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Avast Software was kind of ‘one of those Central and Eastern Europe’ (CEE) security firms along with the other usual suspects that most of us can name… and then, it kind of became something more than that and started to boast more users than its competitors — so that then… consequently, it has more than tripled in staff in the past five years.
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Android-x86, a port of the Android operating system for the x86 platform that allows users to experience a mobile OS as a desktop experience, has been updated to version 4.4-r4 and is now ready for testing.
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While news of the latest zero-day flaw against Linux is interesting, it is a seemingly trivial footnote in the context of the larger issue of known vulnerabilities for which user devices have not been patched. The truth is that the there are so many known vulnerabilities that an attacker can easily exploit that a zero-day isn’t nearly quite as interesting, regardless of how easy or hard it might be to execute.
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Nginx Inc is out this week with a new release of its flagship product platform, Nginx Plus R8. Among the highlights of the new web server platform are improved HTTP2 capabilities, OAuth authentication and HTML5 video caching features.
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Events
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POSSCON has been cancelled. The surprise announcement was made Thursday by way of an email from IT-oLogy, the nonprofit organization which hosts the event. The conference, which focuses on the enterprise and is targeted at IT professionals who develop or use open source software, was scheduled to be held in Columbia, S.C. on April 12-13.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls — that covers most of you: From a press standpoint, to say that SCALE 14X was busy would be a clear understatement. While the event has pretty much ratcheted itself up to the next level, staying atop the show in my capacity as the publicity chair is somewhat daunting.
So rather than tell you what happened today, I’m just going to show you. You’ll thank me for it later, trust me.
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One of the fears — one of the many in having an established conference at a brand spanking new venue — is this: Suppose they gave an outstanding Friday keynote, and nobody came? All those sleepless nights worrying about it were essentially for naught, since Cory Doctorow’s keynote at SCALE 14X Friday was a standing room only success.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google Chrome is to drop support for all 32-bit Linux distros from March, 2016.
The change, which brings the platform in line with that of Mac OS X, will apply to all x86 Linux builds, regardless of distribution or version number.
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Google dropped support for the 32-bit version of Chrome for Linux distros. Chrome won’t be updated on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as well, as Google recommends users to use the version 14.04 or newer. While this is not a huge deal, as there are alternatives like Chromium, it’s sad to see the 32-bit architecture being left behind.
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Google Chrome users soon will get faster Web access through the Brotli open source compression algorithm, Google Web Performance Engineer Ilya Grigorik said Tuesday.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has announced that it will close down its Persona.org identity service in November 2016. The browser maker stopped developing the Persona software in 2014, citing low adoption, but has maintained Persona.org as a public service. With the announcement that the service will be discontinued, the question arose as to whether or not the software could survive as an independent, community-driven project. Questions also arose as to why Persona failed to take off, and whether Mozilla should have managed the project differently.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The report, released today, looked at how large companies around the world are using cloud services, particularly OpenStack. This research polled 813 senior IT professionals in seven countries from companies with 250 or more employees. According to the report, 90 percent of large companies have implemented at least one private cloud solution to date.
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Databases
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Rackspace is hoping to court more business users of its managed MongoDB NoSQL database service by expanding encryption, disaster recovery and other features on its Dedicated ObjectRocket for MongoDB offering.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The LibreOffice codebase is, to be frank, messy. This isn’t a criticism of previous developers – it’s still an amazing product and an amazing feat of programming given the number of platforms it runs on. The StarView guys, and later OpenOffice.org development team, did a great job. For instance, I was reading up on the font mapping code and I often saw Herbert Duerr’s name, and I’ve got nothing but respect for the work that he did and his dedication to the project.
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With the release of LibreOffice 4.4 last year, we began making incremental updates to the main menus, with the major overhaul happening in the upcoming 5.1 release. The work is guided by LibreOffice’s new Human Interface Guideline (HIG), which has given us the core framework, however some questions have arisen challenging the reasoning of our work. So this post is a summary of what we changed, primarily focused on why we’ve done it – and a little outlook of what is planned for the future.
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It’s been a long time I have talked about the project that I started with GSoC 2015 some time back. We reached at pretty much exciting results by the end of the summer where we could see the integration working pretty well with LibreOffice. We finished and merged all the major work on the Libreoffice side alongwith just-made-it-work integration with gnome-documents. Things were still in the development stage for gnome-documents, and we needed good amount of effort to get it merged upstream.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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With an eye on the changing IT landscape, EMC and Pivotal launched a new program in Cambridge, Mass., focused on the development of open-source software and applications for the cloud.
In Japanese, “dojo” means “the place of the way,” and EMC and Pivotal have named the center the Cloud Foundry dojo. Cloud Foundry is a Platform-as-a-Service offering centered around cloud-native application development.
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At its Video @Scale conference at company headquarters today, Facebook is announcing that it’s open-sourcing Transform, a piece of software it uses to stream users’ 360-degree videos in an efficient way.
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BSD
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The Lumina Desktop Environment is a new, BSD-licensed, graphical system environment which is designed primarily for BSD and UNIX-based operating systems. This focus on BSD systems results in a number of distinct differences in from the current collection of Linux-focused desktop environments, only one of which is independence from all the Linux-based system management frameworks.
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For whatever reason it didn’t come for many months until after Skylake CPUs shipped, but LLVM Git/SVN now has Skylake and its features added to the x86 target list.
Elena Demikhovsky of Intel landed this weekend the Skylake x86 target in LLVM that exposes all of the various CPU instruction set extensions supported by these latest-generation processors. There is also the Skylake server processor class for those with AVX-512 support.
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The DragonFlyBSD Intel DRM graphics driver sure is getting close to catching up against the upstream Intel Linux graphics driver with the mainline kernel.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GNU Parallel 20160122 (‘Bowie’) has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/
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Public Services/Government
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Denmark’s Digital Welfare Strategy 2013 – 2020 is managed by the Danish government, Local Government Denmark (LGDK) and Danish Regions. The aim is to increase the uptake of eHealth solutions, and increase the use of technology to improve welfare.
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The smart city activities of Riga and the intelligent transport systems devised by Latvia’s state road department are two of the many topics in next week’s “Open Technologies and Smart Solutions” conference. The meeting on 28 January is organised by Latvia’s Open Technology Association (LATA).
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Openness/Sharing
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If there’s one field you wouldn’t expect to utilize crowdsourcing, it would be space exploration. However, that’s pretty much what the Open Space Agency (OSA) does. Founded by entrepreneur James Parr, OSA has created a network of amateur citizen scientists to supplement the work of the professional space agencies – or even create their own space programs – right from their backyards. At the heart of the collective is the Ultrascope, a robotic telescope, or automated robotic observatory, controlled by a smartphone.
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Open Access/Content
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Like many businesses, there are economies of scale in publishing. A book that only sells 1000 copies a year will necessarily be expensive. But how many people are going to take a class in introductory calculus this year? What about psychology or health? They have to number in the tens of thousands, if not higher. There are also some fields where knowledge or convention changes so rapidly that books must be constantly updated. But the state of the art in introductory calculus hasn’t changed a whole lot since Isaac Newton. There’s no defensible reason that most books, especially ones for introductory classes, should be so expensive. It seems to me, that purchasing textbooks is a classic principal-agent problem. Professors select their classes’ book and students are essentially obliged to purchase them. Value for money is usually not a central concern, and this lets publishers set essentially whatever prices they so desire.
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Programming
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Many developers working on open source projects choose to put their code on GitHub. By doing so, they use—and depend on—many of this platform’s features, including support. According to The Register, more than 1,100 developers recently sent an open letter to GitHub about the lack of support. In response, GitLab, another code repository unrelated to GitHub, wrote a letter to developers about how they strive to help large and small open source projects use GitLab.
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Until now, at least, 27 “selfie-related” deaths have been reported around the world last year, out of which around half of the deaths occurred in India.
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Science
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Story of the history of computer from a mechanical device to smartphones in modern days computing — how the history of computer saw the replacement of different mechanical parts with electrical ones and then eventually with electronic ICs and Microprocessors — everything in detail.
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Prime numbers, which can only be divisible by themselves, are presumably infinite. However, the higher you count, the fewer and farther between prime numbers are.
The previous highest known prime number held the record for nearly three years. On January 25, 2013, 2 to the power of 57,885,161 minus 1, a figure 17,425,170 digits long, was announced by Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.
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Hardware
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Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will work with Nvidia Corp. on cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and plans to enlist about 1,000 developers to work on its big-data platform during the next three years.
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Health/Nutrition
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A hospital in Flint, Michigan, reported Friday that low levels of Legionnaires’ disease bacteria were discovered in its water system.
The discovery came after the city switched its water supply and the medical staff noticed an increase in people coming in for treatment who were diagnosed with Legionnaires,’ McLaren Hospital said.
Legionnaires’ disease is a respiratory bacterial infection usually spread through mist that comes from a water source.
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In the spring of 2013, Detroit was groaning under the weight of its troubles. It had accumulated billions in debt, was riddled with crime and had seen much of its affluent tax base disappear. A former mayor, Kwame M. Kilpatrick, was convicted of racketeering and fraud.
Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, swept in with a rescue plan: the appointment of an emergency manager, Kevyn D. Orr, who was charged with saving a city in fiscal despair. Many Detroiters were furious that Mr. Orr, then a high-profile bankruptcy lawyer from Chevy Chase, Md., had been given a role with extraordinary power, usurping control from local elected officials.
That anger has been revived in Michigan this week. Public outrage over the tainted water in Flint and the decrepit schools in Detroit has led many people to question whether the state has overreached in imposing too many emergency managers in largely black jurisdictions.
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Even before the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was found to be tainted with lead—before water from some areas tested at more than twice the level considered to be toxic waste, and public-health officials said that every last child in the city should be treated as if the child had been poisoned—the governor’s office knew that the water was discolored, tasted bad, smelled strange, and was rife with “organic matter.” They knew, as one memo sent to Governor Rick Snyder in February, 2015, noted, that “residents have attended meetings with jugs of brownish water.” Officials figured that a reason it looked that way was the presence of rust. And they thought that was just fine. They wished, in fact, that the residents would realize how good they had it, when it came to the water’s substance, and stop complaining about its style. Various safe-water laws, the February memo said, “ensure that water is safe to drink. The act does not regulate aesthetic values of water.” The “aesthetics” (the word comes up several times in e-mails about Flint, which the governor released Tuesday night under pressure) were bad because “it’s the Flint River”; “the system is old”; “Flint is old”—the water, in a word, fit their picture of the city, in which about forty per cent of its hundred thousand people lived below the poverty line (and more than half are black). Until April, 2014, Flint had been part of Detroit’s water system, which had Lake Huron as its source. It was scheduled to be connected to a new pipeline in 2016 or 2017, which would save money; Flint is in such desperate financial straits that it was under the oversight of an Emergency Manager. When that manager felt he couldn’t negotiate a low enough price for Detroit water in the interim, the city was left with the option of drinking from the river that ran by it, and past its active and derelict factories, and had been last regularly used decades before. The city would treat the water itself. All the city had to do was pass a few tests; as long as it did, it didn’t matter if the residents were, in effect, drinking dirt. But then, almost immediately, the water began to fail the tests. In August, 2014, and again that September, the water was found to have unacceptably high levels of fecal coliform bacteria, and specifically E. coli. Certain neighborhoods were instructed to boil their water, while the city added chlorine to the supply to disinfect it. It took a lot of chlorine—and that may be where Flint’s troubles really began. (NBC has a timeline of the crisis.) The city’s water managers, unaccountably, seem not to have added any anti-corrosion agents to the water. Nor did they check for corrosion issues in a way they ought to have for a city Flint’s size. (In a remarkable memo a year later, Brad Wurfel, the spokesman of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, said that the staff had “made a mistake,” and followed the wrong protocol.) By October, 2014, General Motors had announced that it would no longer use the water, because it was corroding its equipment. It was also—and this should have been entirely predictable—eating into the lead pipes that delivered the water to people’s homes, causing them to crumble into the water. Flint is old, and its water system took decades to build. It took only months of cheap, corrosive water to mangle and perhaps permanently destroy it.
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In recent months, Indonesia has again come under the international spotlight for a problem that has dogged the country for more than two decades – haze resulting from uncontrolled and sometimes uncontrollable land fires.
The last two major El Niño seasons – in 1997 and 2015 – elevated haze into a regional issue. Politicians struggled to find a balance between soothing domestic outrage and risking foreign relations fallout with Indonesia.
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Security
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Exactly how much will it cost to secure “Things” connected to the Internet over the next five years? Two recent Internet of Things (IoT) forecasts from industry analysts can help answer the question.
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“Security is a challenge for IT in general, but for IoT it’s compounded by the fact that there are so many moving parts, so many access points through which something could be hacked or a vulnerability could be overlooked,” Hayman told Datamation. Three major concerns are currently keeping security-conscious IT managers up at night.
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Foxglove Security bod Stephen Breen has strung together dusty unpatched Windows vulnerabilities to gain local system-level access on Windows versions up to 8.1.
The unholy zero-day concoction, reported to Microsoft in September and still unpatched, is a reliable way of p0wning Windows for attackers that have managed to pop user machines.
Breen released exploit code for his attack dubbed Hot Potato following his talk at the Shmoocon conference in Washington over the weekend.
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Cyber-crooks have used the open-source code of the EDAD2 ransomware to create the Magic ransomware strain, which was spotted in real-life attacks against users in the past few days.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Four people have been killed and several injured in shootings in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, police say.
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The armed right-wing extremists who’ve taken over a federal building at a wildlife refuge in Oregon just keep digging themselves into an even deeper hole with their past unlawful indiscretions coming home to roost. It seems the government’s idea to wait them out has turned them into an even bigger joke than they already are. So, of course, Bill Maher took them to task on Friday’s “Real Time: New Rules.”
“They keep on promising to ‘occupy that building until… well, we’re not really sure,’” Maher mocked the disorganized cult of stupidity. “And they’re not sure, something about ‘redneck lives matter.’”
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Finance
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After Hillary Clinton spoke at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday, I asked her if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She laughed and turned away.
Clinton has recently been on the defensive about the speaking fees she and her husband have collected. Those fees total over $125 million since 2001.
Her rival Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, has raised concerns in particular over the $675,000 she made from Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that has regularly used its influence with government officials to win favorable policies.
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The bitcoin digital currency is underpinned by a distributed ledger based on block chain technology: in this case the distributed bitcoin ledger ensures that the bitcoins are authentic. But the basic block chain approach can also be modified to incorporate rules, smart contracts, and digital signatures, which could make it a handy tool for government services.
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As an entrepreneur, I know how difficult it can be to set up and run a successful business. To do this against a backdrop of the biggest companies in the world having an unfair advantage is a sure-fire way to threaten our vibrant business sector.
This is just one of the many reasons why the EU-US trade deal TTIP is a major threat to small and medium-sized business in the UK and Europe. And that’s why I’ve joined with other British business owners to launch the initiative, Business Against TTIP.
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Censorship
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There is a passage in Milan Kundera’s novel, The Joke, in which a young man sends a card to his girlfriend, and adds a funny comment about the communist regime of Czechoslovakia. The authorities intercept the letter, search for the sender and put him behind the bar. The author uses this fictitious incident to denote how the state with its all seriousness cannot take a joke.
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Privacy
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For starters, we’ve added a page to help you teach your friends and community what you’ve learned. We’ve also made a number of improvements in the guide itself, including clarifying many technical points and updating it to reflect changes in the software. We’ve expanded the troubleshooting sections by adding links to external resources, so that you can get alternative explanations of the steps, if you find that helpful. There are also new, advanced sections so that skilled users, as well as beginners, can learn something new.
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Privacy is a basic human emotion like love, aspiration, empathy, and understanding. It’s what we feel when we lock the restroom door, it’s what we feel when we lay back on the couch with a good book, it’s what we feel when we close our eyes on the warm beach and just have a little moment completely to ourselves.
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Employees seeking to report wrongdoing are safeguarded across all federal agencies—but the process for doing so in the classified intelligence community can be dangerous.
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The maker of McAfee antivirus and privacy advocate John McAfee is again in the headlines. In his latest op-ed, he stresses upon the need of encryption, calling it a necessity. Bashing the governments who demand restrictions on encryption measures, he says that Obama administration lacks the real understanding of privacy.
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The leaders controlling the US surveillance apparatus can’t agree on encryption. FBI Director Comey has hysterically characterised it as a safe haven for evil-doers. A high-ranking Department of Justice official insisted that encryption could cause a child to die. Meanwhile, the National Security Agency’s leaders are extremely chill about encryption — which is terrifying.
“Encryption is foundational to the future,” NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers said in a speech today. “So spending time arguing about ‘hey, encryption is bad and we ought to do away with it’ … that’s a waste of time to me,” he continued.
That sounds nice and reasonable, right? Rogers isn’t going on a rogue stand for privacy, though. He’s maintaining a status quo. NSA Directors haven’t really given a shit about encryption for a while. And while it’s less annoying than Comey’s fear-mongering, the NSA’s relaxed attitude is worth treating with suspicion.
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If you tuned into a talk by Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., this week, you might think the NSA had begun to change its tune about encryption—the technology favored by Apple and its Silicon Valley brethren to scramble users’ data and communications (much to criminal investigators’ chagrin), making them unintelligible to spies and hackers alike.
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Ad blocking and the software that powers it seems to be in the news lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Recently, several prominent sites have attacked ad blockers in several different ways, ranging from lawsuits on the extreme end down to simply withholding content. These attempts are all misguided in the same way, however, in that they attack the software that readers find useful rather than attacking the core problem that makes users turn to ad blockers in the first place: incredibly crappy and occasionally downright dangerous advertising inventory.
One would think that websites and online advertisers would have much to learn from the providers of ad blockers. It seems there is little appetite for education amongst them, however, as we’ve recently learned that the Interactive Advertising Bureau has flat out barred Adblock Plus from its annual conference.
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The National Security Agency (NSA) is easing its stance on encrypted data. The agency’s director Mike Rogers shared his thoughts on the ongoing debate surrounding encryption and revealed that the NSA is now in favor of encrypted data.
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Civil Rights
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The White House and CIA have yet to comment on the letter and there’s nothing in the history of the incident that suggests either will move forward on this. Obama’s on short time and the CIA already cleared itself of all wrongdoing with an in-house “investigation” and further showed its disdain for independent oversight by throwing its Inspector General and his report on the spying efforts under the bus.
Jason Leopold and Vice obtained hundreds of documents through FOIA requests that appeared to show the opposite of what the CIA’s internal investigation claimed. But it was the CIA that had the last word, proclaiming itself innocent and simultaneously accusing Senate staffers of improperly accessing restricted documents.
But the most damning document — at least in the context of a demand for an official apology from the CIA — was the apology the agency unofficially disavowed when it cleared itself of hacking allegations.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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By some miracle, I was in Delhi, and was able to attend the open house. The telcos made a huge pitch for differential pricing at the TRAI Open House on Net Neutrality, but civil society and the Save The Internet coalition and others argued that the Internet cannot be regulated like telecom networks because users on the Internet are both content creators and consumers.
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But from the perspective of inmates and their friends and family, these new technologies often do not result in stronger lines of communication at all. Some prison officials use the technology to justify restricting in-person visitation or traditional mail. Many communications services are offered under unfair terms and with artificially inflated fees that are only possible because the services operate monopolies at each prison or jail. In addition, users of these systems face potential privacy violations, as illustrated by the recent Securus data breach of more than 70-million prisoner phone calls.
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All societies share rich commons, the cultural and material resources shared by all, and owned equally by either everyone or no one. The air we can freely breathe, the sun that shines on us all. We once shared land too, but the development of small landholding enclosures created private property.
Now there’s a looming enclosure of the digital commons, with Facebook threatening to capture the future of India’s internet. Its ‘Free Basics’ service threatens to limit free access to the digital sphere.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Usually when we talk about the Oscars behaving badly about intellectual property, it has to do with either its combat against film piracy or its rather stunning tradition of facilitating it. What’s clear in most of those stories, though, is that when the Motion Picture Academy decides to sink its collective teeth into something, it is bulldog-ish in its unwillingness to let it go. It seems that this is the case on matters of trademark, as well. Unimaginably petty trademark matters.
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Copyrights
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In recent weeks the music industry has started to target the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) website over tens of thousands of copyright infringements. The deviant behavior doesn’t come from typical pirates though, but from children using the Scratch project to share ‘their’ creative expressions.
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Just over 30 years ago, the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Sony v. Universal City Studios (usually referred to as the Sony/Betamax case), clearing the way for a technology company to sells its products (Betamaxes, and by extension, VCRs) even though they could potentially be used for infringing purposes. After all, the court reasoned, customers also deployed their VCRs to engage in non-infringing fair uses, such as recording soap operas to watch after work. If a product was capable of “substantial noninfringing uses,” the fact that it could also be used for unlawful purposes shouldn’t be enough to force it off the market (and/or require its maker to pay millions in damages).
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There’s a debate happening right now over copyright bots, programs that social media websites use to scan users’ uploads for potential copyright infringement. A few powerful lobbyists want copyright law to require platforms that host third-party content to employ copyright bots, and require them to be stricter about what they take down. Big content companies call this nebulous proposal “notice-and-stay-down,” but it would really keep all users down, not just alleged infringers. In the process, it could give major content platforms like YouTube and Facebook an unfair advantage over competitors and startups (as if they needed any more advantages). “Notice-and-stay-down” is really “filter-everything.”
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One of the most crucial issues in the fight for digital freedom is the question of who will control the hardware that you have in your home, in your pocket, or in your own body.
Have you ever been frustrated when a beloved feature was taken away in an update? Or felt helpless to prevent the apps on your phone from oversharing your personal data with advertisers? Or had to pay through the nose for proprietary cartridges of ink or 3D printing material? Or found that your independent repair shop wasn’t allowed to fix your car or appliance? If so, then you’ve experienced a small—but accumulating—frustration of losing of control over your stuff.
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Mickey Mouse is synonymous with copyright term extension, and with good reason. Every time the first Mickey cartoons creep towards the public domain, Disney’s powerful lobbyists spring into action, lobbying Congress for a retrospective term-extension on copyright, which means that works that have already been created are awarded longer copyright terms. In the USA, copyright law is supposed to serve an incentive to make new works, and there’s no sensible way that getting a longer copyright on something you’ve already made can provide an incentive to do anything except lobby for more copyright, and sue people who want to make something new out of your creation.
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Darlene Love, the voice on the Phil Spector-produced hit “He’s A Rebel,” is suing Google and its ad producer, 72 & Sunny, for violating her publicity rights by using a song she recorded in one of its ads without her permission.
The lawsuit seems to revolve around California’s much-maligned “right of publicity” law, which allows plaintiffs to sue entities for using pretty much anything about them, rather than just for bog standard copyright infringement.
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Posted in Patents at 12:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The profit motive twists the news or the nature of public debates
Summary: Like the Military Industrial Complex, lawyers’ establishments work hard to guard the system which they are constantly milking, profiting from feuds and perceived risks (patent armament)
TECHRIGHTS is accomplishing a long-term goal with the foreseeable end of many software patents in the US. A SCOTUS ruling on Alice became truly a nightmare to a lot of patent lawyers and some of these self-serving patent maximalists bicker about future SCOTUS cases, much like Bilski at one time. We have come to rely a great deal on the Supreme Court, whose judgments are often cited (sometimes both Alice and In Re Bilski) to help convince judges to invalidate patents and dismiss patent lawsuits.
This one Web site of patent lawyers has published China’s “Annual Report on Intellectual Property Cases” (Issued by the Supreme People’s Court on April 21 2015) and stated: “In 2014, the Supreme People’s Court adhered to “administration of justice for the people and impartial justice” as the main themes of its work, actively implemented the state’s intellectual property strategy, fully leveraged the guiding role of judicial protection of intellectual property, intensified the reform of the intellectual property judicial regime, continuously enhanced judicial capabilities and judicial credibility and continuously expanded the international influence of the judicial protection of intellectual property, thereby making positive contributions to the development of an innovation-oriented country and a China ruled by law.”
Now that a lot of the producing industry has already been moved to China, one is led to wondering if China is seen as a fertile ground for Western patent lawyers as well. The US patent system sure isn’t showing them much love anymore, especially if they deal with software patents (which are at the core of a large number of patent cases these days, based on publicly-accessible figures).
See this Entrepreneur article titled “Get a Software Patent to Protect Yourself, But Be Prepared for a Frustrating Process” (misleading headline).
“For a software startup,” says the author, “a patent can be the intellectual property providing the key competitive advantage, or it can be an expensive non-defensible bureaucratic nightmare — or both. I still generally advise software startups to file a patent as a barrier to entry from competitors and to increase their valuation by investors, but every entrepreneur needs to understand the tradeoffs.”
Well, we explained repeatedly why patents don’t and cannot help startups, especially in the area of software. They cannot sue (back) trolls and they cannot sue giants because every piece of software is almost guaranteed to infringe lots of different patents; those with a stockpile of software patents always win. The author says: “The free and growing open source software community, which covers most mobile and web apps, oppose software patents as impeding or prohibiting the distribution of free software. By definition, patents limit the commercialization rate and range for a new innovation.”
“We have come to rely a great deal on the Supreme Court, whose judgments are often cited (sometimes both Alice and In Re Bilski) to help convince judges to invalidate patents and dismiss patent lawsuits.”The title of that part says “Patents are counter to open source initiatives and free software.” This is why we got into this type of activism in the first place, way back in 2006.
Rob Tiller (Red Hat) recently spoke about “hacking the patent system” — an article that got him plenty of criticism from FFII figures because rather than combat software patents he tries to ‘hack’ the system. Software patents cannot coexist with Free software, but Riller “caught up with Daniel Nazer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to pose a few questions relating to software patents. Daniel is a staff attorney at EFF, where he occupies the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents and focuses on patent reform.”
It’s a dialogue between two lawyers, one of whom is funded by a funder of a patent troll, Vringo, and another by an applicant of software patents, Red Hat.
Remember that patent lawyers make a money from disputes. For a person like Tiller, patents are money, so he doesn’t necessarily want software patents to go away. It’s what makes Red Hat pay him a salary. We generally trust programmers (or examiners) a lot more than we can ever trust lawyers. it’s worth noting that Tiller enjoys (as a platform of publication) a Red Hat ‘news’ site that’s not really news (it’s often Red Hat marketing, book tours, and other self-serving promotion).
“The US patent system sure isn’t showing them much love anymore, especially if they deal with software patents…”There are many people out there, especially patent lawyers and their rich clients (like Microsoft), who work hard to expand the scope of patents. They’re maximalists. They also have their own media, which they call/deem “magazines”, “news”, etc.
Over at IAM ‘magazine’, which receives money from the EPO, patent lawyers and their cheerleaders say that India needs more patents, probably software patents ; it’s like Raytheon saying that we need more wars. This relates to a lot of different reports (we saw dozens of them) about Modi trying to encourage patenting, even when it’s clearly misguided.
Two articles [1, 2] from Dennis Crouch, another proponent of more patents (a maximalist), add fuel to the patent bonfire. “Boiled down,” one says, “the court affirmed the grant of the firm’s Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss a complaint that in broad terms alleged that the Finnegan firm had a conflict because it represented the plaintiff and another client in obtaining patents claiming screwless eyeglass hinge inventions. There are two broad issues: when is prosecution of patents for one client adverse to another, and when are two patent applications so close that prosecuting them creates a material limitation on the lawyer’s ability to represent either client.”
“…we explained repeatedly why patents don’t and cannot help startups, especially in the area of software.”Another says that “the Federal Circuit has rejected Carl Cooper’s challenge to constitutional propriety of the inter partes review (IPR) system as implemented by the USPTO. The identical issues had already been decided in MCM v. HP (Fed. Cir. 2015). In that case, the Federal Circuit held that the IPR system does not violate Article III of the U.S. Constitution nor does it violate the Seventh Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As I wrote in December, the MCM decision “essentially forecloses Carl Cooper’s parallel proceedings.””
For some details about CAFC’s biases see the previous post about Alice and software patents in the US. We previously wrote about corruption in CAFC and we generally consider this court to be in the patent lawyers’ pocket.
Earlier on, back in December, a case against Mercedes got mentioned here. It involved software patents. Australian patent attorney Justin Blows (Australia is too soft on software patents, said patent lawyers from Australia this month) wrote about this case (“Vehicle Intelligence v Mercedes Benz, a 101/ Alice case”) and noted: “Claims of US patent 7,393,392 in the name of Vehicle Intelligence and Safety LLC were found not to be patent eligible subject matter under 35 USC 101 because the claims cover only abstract ideas coupled with routine data-gathering steps and conventional computer activity.”
“Remember that patent lawyers make a money from disputes.”This was another case where Alice beat software patents. “Software is patentable subject matter generally,” Blows added in relation to another case, “however if the purpose of the software invention is abstract then there must be a further inventive concept that appropriately limits the claims to prevent prohibition of a vast amount of future inventive activity.”
Blows also cited this one case in favour of software patents, noting: “To be patentable, a computer related invention must be necessarily rooted in computer technology in order to overcome a problem specifically arising in computer technology”
Well, the USPTO is said to have changed its guidelines at least once since the Alice case, but unlike the courts, it is driven by greed and grants far too many patents (for about 92% of applications).
“There are many people out there, especially patent lawyers and their rich clients (like Microsoft), who work hard to expand the scope of patents.”‘Revolving doors’ are a common issue at the USPTO (people from IBM or Google run it) and now it’s ‘ex’ Oracle staff that will be trusted to run the USPTO in Colorado. As WIPR put it the other day, “Kocialski previously worked at Oracle as a senior patent counsel and has experience in post-grant procedures and patent investigations.”
There’s a serious issue when a patent system is run by political people, as the EPO serves to show. It’s arguably even worse when people from large corporations are left to run it. Here is IAM’s take on presidential role in the patent system (no such role should exist). █
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Posted in America, Law, Patents at 10:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Even the United Stated (US) Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the original creator of software patents, is required to obey the law
Summary: Additional evidence of the consistent demise of software patents in the US, which had gradually become more lenient on the subject/domain and after the SCOTUS ruled against software patents any court which follows caselaw is now becoming strict, even reluctantly so
THE PAST fortnight brought us several new examples where software patents got invalidated — once brought before a court — thanks to the Alice case. This will be the subject of some imminent posts of ours. One example, as covered by Patent Hawk the other day, says: “First Choice Loan Services sued Mortgage Grader for infringing its financial transaction patents. In light of the Supreme Court’s Alice decision, the district court found the patent claims directed to unpatentable abstract ideas. The CAFC affirmed (2012-1042). “Computational methods which can be performed entirely in the human mind are the types of methods that embody the ‘basic tools of scientific and technological work’ that are free to all men and reserved exclusively to none.””
There is another report about it, composed by Andrew Chung and published by Reuters. It stated: “The owner of two patents on technology used for selecting mortgages online has learned the hard way just how much of a sea change the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision was after a U.S. appeals court upheld the patents’ cancellation on Wednesday.
“A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said a California federal judge did not abuse his discretion in allowing, and then granting, a late-filed Alice-based motion to invalidate Mortgage Grader Inc’s patent claims.”
“A lot of campaigners against software patents are now seeing what 5 years ago they considered impossible.”A similar report (behind paywall) was composed by/for lawyers and asked: “Remember when some experts said the 2014 Supreme Court ruling wasn’t likely to be a game changer?” (the title of this report is “Federal Circuit [CAFC] Strikes Two Software Patents Under ‘Alice’“)
So who was right, the patent lawyers or Techrights? To his credit, Gene Quinn too predicted it would become a game changer.
CAFC is probably the most software patents-friendly court, perhaps in the whole world. Here is an article about a recent decision of CAFC, courtesy of patent maximalists. Patent lawyers still try to understand why software patents are collapsing even in the US and they study cases such as this one where “Claims of US patents 6,398,646 and 6,656,045 in the name of Planet Bingo, LLC were found not to be patent eligible subject matter under 35 USC 101 because the claims are directed to the abstract idea of managing a game of bingo, which is merely implemented on a computer executing purely conventional functions.”
Time permitting, we shall strive to cover as many cases like this as we can. There is an unambiguous trend in the US and it involves the demise of software patents, thanks to SCOTUS. A lot of campaigners against software patents are now seeing what 5 years ago they considered impossible. █
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