06.23.16
Interview With FOSSForce/All Things Free Tech
Summary: New interview with Robin “Roblimo” Miller on behalf of FOSSForce
Summary: New interview with Robin “Roblimo” Miller on behalf of FOSSForce
Right now, I was planning on grabbing zRAM from the MATE Software Boutique as wisely suggested by Don Nadie to see what a little software magic might be able to do for me until I can maximize my hardware. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be available by that avenue, so I’ll have to find an alternative route. Adventure, ho! If all goes as disastrously as hoped, I should have much more to report next time around. Additionally to this purpose, I plan to avoid any and all friends who might try to intrude on my experiments between today and then. Ubuntu MATE’s my new girlfriend, now!
Today, June 22, 2016, Black Lab Software’s CEO Robert J. Dohnert has informed Softpedia about the general availability of new hardware powered by the netOS Enterprise Linux operating system.
After around six years, it looks like we might see the final judgment in Sony’s infamous PlayStation 3 and Linux operating system incident.
Sony is finally closing in on a settlement for the infamous court case involving PlayStation 3 and the Linux operating system.
That’s according to Ars Technica, revealing that after six years of litigation the platform holder reached a deal with lawyers on Friday.
Citing security concerns, the option to ‘install another OS’ was officially pulled from the last-gen hardware all the way back in 2010 and, as a result, early adopters who purchased their PlayStation 3 anytime between November 1, 2006, and April 1, 2010 could be entitled to some repayment.
The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project has another big name on board: Intel.
The project was announced in December, but got its first serious impetus back in February when IBM slung its blockchain code into the effort.
With the imminent Mesa 12.0 release there is now OpenGL 4.3 compliance for Intel Broadwell graphics hardware and newer, rather than OpenGL 3.3 as was the upper limit in the Intel Mesa driver to this point. Now having OpenGL 4.x support with this open-source Intel driver, I decided to see how various OpenGL 4.x games are running with the Intel driver when using a Skylake CPU sporting HD Graphics 530.
Yesterday I mentioned how the AMDGPU driver needed some important last minute fixes for the soon-to-launch Radeon RX 480 “Polaris” support. Those patches are now pending to be pulled as part of the next round of DRM fixes heading into Linux 4.7.
Just weeks after their first round of DRM updates for Linux 4.8 were submitted, the Intel crew has their second — of a possible three — feature updates readied for the Linux 4.8 kernel via DRM-Next.
As expected, the fourth and last RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Mesa 3D Graphics Library 12.0.0 has been announced on June 21, 2016, by Collabora’s Emil Velikov.
Mesa 3D Graphics Library 12.0.0 Release Candidate 4 incorporates the latest fixes and improvements that the development team behind the open-source Mesa 3D project managed to introduce during the last week, since the release of the third Mesa 3D 12.0.0 RC build.
Just a few minute ago, June 22, 2016, Arun Raghavan proudly announced the debut of the PulseAudio 9.0 sound server for GNU/Linux operating systems, a major release that introduces several improvements and new features.
Prominent features of PulseAudio 9.0 include support for sample rates up to 384 kHz, the implementation of a memfd-backed shared memory transport, significant improvements to the automatic routing functionality, as well as the adoption of the C11 C standard instead of C99.
Furthermore, it looks like PulseAudio 9.0 comes with LFE (Low-frequency Effects) remixing disabled by default, which was enabled as part of the PulseAudio 7.0 release, the module-role-ducking and module-role-cork modules received various enhancements, and webrtc-audio-processing 0.2 or later is now required.
Version 9.0 of the once-controversial PulseAudio sound server is now available for your open-source audio needs.
First off, PulseAudio 9.0 brings the memfd transport support for Linux systems. This lets PulseAudio use Memfd on newer Linxu kernel versions rather than POSIX SHM shared memory.
The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 6.1. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.
To show other people what is possible, here is a screencast-style video book review I recently created on my Linux laptop. The book I’m reviewing is titled “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity,” a history of autism published in 2015.
A developer of Ashes of the Singularity has stated very clearly that both Vulkan and Linux/SteamOS are still planned for the big RTS game.
Not free to play for 24 hours, actually free. If you install it you get to keep it. LIMBO is actually a pretty great platformer you all need to try.
A few people messaged me about it and I agree it’s worth a quick shout out. Not much to say another than hooray a free game, go check it out.
VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action has been released for Linux and thanks to the guys at GOG I have been sent a copy to play with. Here’s some thoughts.
If you buy it from GOG, be aware that you will need to install specific libs to get it running, as GOG games do not bundle the libs you need with it.
I personally think Operator Overload looks fantastic and the developer email me to let me know it’s fully Linux supported and needs help on Greenlight.
Megapolis is an older title, but positively rated and it’s now on Steam with Linux support. It’s a small city building simulator, something more casual than say Cities Skylines.
Never tried it myself, but I’ve heard of it, any of you tried it?
I sincerely hope none of you pre-ordered Street Fighter V on the promise of the Linux version, as it has shown yet again how silly it is. Street Fighter V is now officially late.
I have to say it has been a long time since I played any form of PAC-MAN, now maybe I will. PAC-MAN 256 was released on Steam with day-1 Linux support.
The colourful and colour changing platformer On Rusty Trails is now available DRM free on GOG. We already covered the Steam release with flesk, but here’s a look at the GOG version.
Last week we released the beta version of Plasma 5.7 which means we know what this release will have for better Wayland support. First of all I need to mention what didn’t make it: unfortunately I missed the freeze of Frameworks 5.23 to land support for xdg-shell. I have a working implementation, but was not yet satisfied with the API. This is a difficult interface to provide an API for due to the unstable nature of the interface. Due to lack of xdg-shell support GTK applications are still going to use X11 on Wayland (like the Firefox window I’m just typing this blog post in).
There are a lot of Wayland support improvements to find in the upcoming release of KDE’s Plasma 5.7.
Wayland advancements for KDE Plasma 5.7 include the improved task manager, virtual keyboard support, sub-surface support, improved input device support, and more. However, missing from Plasma 5.7 is their XDG-Shell support as the API wasn’t stabilized in time.
The problem with Qt 5.6.1, reported in QTBUG-53761, is that certain Qt Quick applications crash after some time. The problem occurs with code that loads more than 64 components (.qml or .js files) without instantiating objects from all of them. The components that initially don’t get instantiated will then be removed from the type cache, which causes problems if you later try to instantiate objects from them. Reason for the problem is too aggressive trimming of the QML type cache, which ends up deleting some QML types even though they were still in use by the application.
Qt 5.6.1 was released earlier this month to fix outstanding issues with the Qt 5.6 tool-kit release while today the 5.6.1-1 hot-fix release is available to fix a critical problem.
Slipping into Qt 5.6.1 was a regression that prevented certain types of Qt Quick applications from working correctly. This issue with Qt 5.6.1 would cause Qt Quick applications to crash but did not affect the newer Qt 5.7.0 release.
The Krita Foundation is going to publish a glossy, shiny book of art created with Krita! This book will be sent out to the seventy Kickstarter backers who selected the artbook as their reward, and it will be available from the Krita shop. We’ll also try and make sure it’s available through online bookshops! It’s the very first time the Krita Foundation will publish a book, and we’re really excited about it.
If you had to pick one favourite of all your work done in Krita so far, what would it be, and why?
So the last train has left Randa, and we can look back at a — judging from the bugs that were fixed and the ideas that were traded and the code that was written — successful sprint. The last two days were characterized by the authentic Randa Internet experience, in which a mountain goat eats 18% of the packets, but that doesn’t stop KDE developers from writing code and sharing AppImages.
KDE neon User Edition 5.6 came out a couple of weeks ago, let’s have a look at the commentry.
In the end of May, ~20 gearheads from different countries of Latin America were together in Rio de Janeiro working in several fronts of the KDE. This is our ‘multiple projects sprint’ named LaKademy!
Like all previous editions of LaKademy, this year I worked hard in Cantor; unlike all previous editions, this year I did some work in new projects to be released in some point in the future. So, let’s see my report of LaKademy 2016.
The master branch of Doxyqml, a QML input filter for Doxygen, had been waiting for a release for a long time. Olivier Churlaud, the new KApidox hero, reported that it did not work with Python 3 and submitted a patch to fix this.
Cutelyst a web framework built with Qt is now closer to have it’s first stable release, with it becoming 3 years old at the end of the year I’m doing my best to finally iron it to get an API/ABI compromise, this release is full of cool stuff and a bunch of breaks which most of the time just require recompiling.
One day, about half a year or so ago, it came up in a discussion that while we in KDE have a lovely document viewer named Okular, we don’t have something that is well suited to actually reading things, comic books in particular. So, a project was hatched to fix this. I’ve blogged about it before, and made a few tweets on the topic, but today is special. Today, 1.0 happens.
Hello all,
GNOME 3.21.3, the third snapshot of the GNOME 3.21 cycle, is now
available. You want it!To compile GNOME 3.21.3, you can use the jhbuild [1] modulesets [2]
(which use the exact tarball versions from the official release).[1] https://developer.gnome.org/jhbuild/
[2] https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.21.3/
Now that the GNOME 3.21.3 desktop environment is out the door for public testers and early adopters who can’t wait for the GNOME 3.22 release this fall, it’s time for us to take a look at other upcoming GNOME and GTK+ technologies.
We reported earlier on the release of the GNOME 3.21.3 desktop environment, which was made available for early adopters and public testers who want to see what’s coming to GNOME 3.22 later this year.
The GNOME Shell user interface and Mutter window and compositing manager have been updated to version 3.21.3 as well, and we would like to tell you all about the improvements and new features that landed in these new development releases.
So, there you have it. Please keep in mind that these recommendations are based only on my own experience, on the specific Samsung N150 Plus target system, and on the variety of Linux distributions I currently have installed on my own N150 Plus. I did not consider a few others which I currently use on other systems (Sparky, Korora, KaOS and a few others), and I did not consider anything that I do not personally install and use.
At the end of May I set out to discover how well a handful of popular Linux distributions (and FreeBSD) would handle a live upgrade between major versions. The results were mostly positive with four of the five open source operating systems successfully upgrading to their latest version.
Following that article, some people asked if I would perform similar upgrade tests on other projects. This past week I set out to perform live upgrades on four more open source operating systems and report on the results.
One of the most difficult tasks for Linux newbies is to install Arch Linux. Unlike most of other Linux distributions, Arch Linux does not have graphical installer. It’s completely CLI. Users have always been interested to use Arch based distros and luckily there are many. Antergos Linux is one the best, beautiful and sleek Arch based distros available.
I am excited to announce the release of Puppy Linux Slacko 6.3.2. It is available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions.
This might be called a bugfix release to Slacko 6.3.0 but it is so much more than that!
This is the first ever official puppy to support UEFI booting for both for 32 and 64 bit versions and the same ISO image will boot legacy BIOS PCs as well. And there is so much more that is improved, such as the theming, sound detection, firewall, default application management plus our home grown apps such as pMusic.
About linux distros then this news come with the new Devil-Linux 1.8.0-rc1 released. You can download it from here.
openSUSE Project’s Ludwig Nussel was happy to announce the release of the second Alpha milestone towards the openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system, just in time for the openSUSE Conference.
Red Hat expands its DevOps platform to enable developers to more easily build their own containers.
Red Hat is expanding its open-source Ansible platform with a new module called Ansible Container that enables organizations to build and deploy containers. Ansible is a DevOps automation platform technology that Red Hat acquired in October 2015.
Michael Dyrynda is a web developer at Hostworks, a freelance developer, and a blogger. He’s working on his first open source project in Confomo with Matt Stauffer and podcasting the journey on briefs.fm. He also writes about web development and solving day-to-day problems with no readily available solutions. Michael’s web development skills extend to front-end aspects of web development, including JavaScript, LESS/Sass/CSS, designing databases, as well as building applications that can scale.
Three Indian women made it to the list of finalists after taking part in the 2016 ‘Women in Open Source’ competition, organised by Red hat.
The finalists in the academic category include three women from India who are full-time students pursuing computer science and engineering degrees.
Now in its second year, the ‘Women in Open Source Award’ was created to honor women who make important contributions to open source projects and communities, or make innovative use of open source methodologies.
Today Red Hat, Inc. announced the next generation of its open software-defined storage platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage 2. The latest version of Red Hat Ceph Storage is based off of the Ceph Jewel release and introduces new capabilities that enhance support for object storage workloads and promote greater ease of use.
Fedora 24 Workstation is the latest release of our free, leading-edge operating system. You can download it from the official website here. There are several new and noteworthy changes in Fedora Workstation.
The Pulp team is happy to announce the availability of a new documentation site for Pulp and its plugins: https://docs.pulpproject.org/
Fedora 24 just became available and is officially released. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system. If you’ve upgraded from past Fedora releases, you may be familiar with the dnf upgrade plugin. This method is the recommended and supported way to upgrade from Fedora 23 to Fedora 24. Using this plugin will make your upgrade to Fedora 24 simple and easy. Note also that shortly after the release of Fedora 24, you will also be able to update to Fedora 24 Workstation using the Software app.
The Linux desktop has long been held back by platform fragmentation. This has been a burden on developers, and creates a high barrier to entry for third party application developers. Flatpak aims to change all that. From the very start its primary goal has been to allow the same application to run across a myriad of Linux distributions and operating systems. In doing so, it greatly increases the number of users that application developers can easily reach.
The development team behind Flatpak has just announced the general availability of the Flatpak desktop application framework. Flatpak (which was also known during development as xdg-app) provides the ability for an application — bundled as a Flatpak — to be installed and run easily and consistently on many different Linux distributions. Applications bundled as Flatpaks also have the ability to be sandboxed for security, isolating them from your operating system, and other applications. Check out the Flatpak website, and the press release for more information on the tech that makes up the Flatpak framework.
This is a very exciting day for me as two major projects I am deeply involved with are having a major launch. First of all Fedora Workstation 24 is out which crosses a few critical milestones for us. Maybe most visible is that this is the first time you can use the new graphical update mechanism in GNOME Software to take you from Fedora Workstation 23 to Fedora Workstation 24. This means that when you open GNOME Software it will show you an option to do a system upgrade to Fedora Workstation 24. We been testing and doing a lot of QA work around this feature so my expectation is that it will provide a smooth upgrade experience for you.
The MATE desktop is another option for Fedora 24 Workstation users as an alternative to GNOME 3.20. Shown here is the software’s built-in file manager. Other desktop choices include KDE, LXDE, and Xfce.
We run out of time to have a play around and do any kind of serious testing of the Boxes application. But we have been reading about it and understand it is a virtual machine package, designed to run sandboxed virtual machines. Yes, similar to Oracle VM VirtualBox. We intend to look more into the Boxes feature a little later down the track. So we will bring you more information on it soon.
Fedora 24 was released today to many headlines and LinuxConfig.org posted the first official review. openSUSE 42.2 saw an alpha release today giving users a bit of a sneak peek. Interestingly, Matt Asay and Bruce Byfield both authored stories today on the press coverage of Canonical’s Snap announcement – both saying the press believed the hype hook, line, and sinker.
Fedora 24 brings with it a number of technical improvements, software upgrades, and under the hood. It’s clear that the Fedora developers have been working closely with upstream sources to tightly integrate advances in everything from the kernel to GNOME, Systemd, NetworkManager, and GCC6 which have all been forged into a powerful core. However, that’s about where it ends.
When it comes to a being a full fledged desktop distribution, Fedora 24 falls a bit short, and that’s mostly due to the Fedora project’s limited repositories.
The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 24 Linux distribution.
Coinciding with today’s release of Fedora 24 is the official debut of Flatpak, formerly known as XDG-App.
The Debian GNU/Linux project says that former Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum is no longer welcome at its events, after charges of sexual misconduct were levelled against him.
The very-first alpha-quality release of reprotest is now in Debian’s NEW package queue, so it should soon be available for install through apt.
etckeeper was a sleeper success for me. I created it, wrote one blog post about it, installed it on all my computers, and mostly forgot about it, except when I needed to look something up in the git history of /etc it helpfully maintains. It’s a minor project.
Linux Australia has predictably chosen to take the safe option in the case of well-known privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum who has been chucked out of various free software projects and associations after sexual misconduct charges were levelled at him.
The development team behind the Point Linux project, a desktop-oriented GNU/Linux operating system based on the Debian’s Stable branch, has announced the general availability of Point Linux 3.2.
Today, June 22, 2016, Softpedia has been informed by the Linux AIO developers about the immediate availability for download of the Linux AIO Debian Live 7.11.0 ISO images.
Linux AIO is a non-profit project whose main goal is to create Live, bootable ISO images that contain all the essential Live editions of various popular GNU/Linux distributions. For example, you’ll find Live ISOs with all the official Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, Zorin OS, or PCLinuxOS Live flavors.
Ubuntu’s “snap” applications recently went cross-platform, having been ported to other Linux distros including Debian, Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo. The goal is to simplify packaging of applications. Instead of building a deb package for Ubuntu and an RPM for Fedora, a developer could package the application as a snap and have it installed on just about any Linux distribution.
Every so often, I get to sit in on a phone call, video chat, or conversation that absolutely blows my mind. Tuesday, June 14 was one such occasion. I was invited to hear Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Canonical, which produces Ubuntu Linux) discuss a major announcement. Naturally, I assumed the announcement had something to do with Ubuntu Touch (maybe they’d found a major US carrier for the Ubuntu Phone). Little did I know the announcement would be so profoundly game changing.
When Canonical Software, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced that developers from other distributions were working on Snappy packages, the media pumped a minor announcement into a major story.
The headlines alone tell the story: “Snap! Ubuntu 16.04 Just Made Installing New Apps MUCH Easier;” “Goodbye apt and yum? Ubuntu’s snap apps are coming to distros everywhere;” “Snap Packages Become Universal Binary Format for All GNU/Linux Distributions;” and “Ubuntu bids to eliminate Linux fragmentation by making Snap packages available to all.”
If this story were true, the headlines would have been announcing the most important news in Linux for several years. However, like much that seems too good to be true, the news was.
Dexter’s $17 “GrovePi-Zero” IoT expansion board for the Raspberry Pi Zero features analog, digital, and serial ports that support Grove modules.
Back in 2014, robotics specialist Dexter Industries released a GrovePi expansion kit for the Raspberry Pi equipped with ports that support SeeedStudio’s catalog of hundreds of Arduino-compatible Grove sensors and I/O modules. This was followed up with a $30 GrovePi+ board. The company has now spun a smaller, simpler GrovePi-Zero I/O kit specifically for the miniscule Raspberry Pi Zero.
A developer in Latvia has come up with a clever but simple control interface for your Linux devices which can be embedded Raspberry Pi designs.
Dubbed pyLCI, the software framework runs on the Raspberry Pi as long as it is connected to a suitable display and will control and configure a Linux system in headless mode.
Hey Tizen Devs, as you know you can use the Tizen SDK to develop your Tizen apps. Now, the Tizen tools team are happy to announce the release of the latest Tizen SCM Tools. You can find the major changes and known issues below:
Samsung Electronics showcased their digital signage and visual display solutions portfolio at the InfoComm 2016 trade show, which was held last month at the Las Vegas Convention Center. InfoComm is the largest annual global conference for the professional AV industry and is expected to welcome more than 40,000 attendees from nearly 110 countries.
A unique feature of these signages is that they are powered by the Tizen Operating System (OS). By utilising the OS the signs are able to be used for advertising, content delivery, and information display management in corporate, hospitality, public, retail and at-home environments.
The game of chess has challenged and entertained players for centuries. From the courts of medieval royalty to modern after-school chess programs, the game has widespread appeal and has withstood the test of time. Chess is easy to learn but difficult to master. Each player controls 16 pieces on a board consisting of 64 squares. There are six different types of pieces: Pawn, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Queen, and King—so learning the basics can take an hour or so.
Since we announced Nextcloud, an ownCloud fork, many people have asked me how we plan to build a sustainable, healthy open source business. My short answer is that it requires a strong focus on maintaining a careful balance between the needs of all stakeholders: users, contributors, employees, customers, and—of course—investors. Building a solid open source business requires that management has confidence in the abilities of your company, stakeholders must be on board with the business model, and everyone must understand that balance is important for the ecosystem. Like a rising tide lifts all boats, a strong ecosystem benefits all stakeholders.
My work colleagues know me well as a Free/Libre software zealot, constantly pointing out to them how people should behave, how FLOSS software trumps commercial software and how this is the only way forward. This for the last 20 odd years. It’s a strain to argue this repeatedly: at various times, I have been asked to set out more clearly why I use FLOSS, what the advantages are, why and how to contribute to FLOSS software.
This latest update to the widely-used BusyBox software features a new blkdiscard applet, new options for gunzip/gzip, new nsenter / unshare / ubirename applets, build system changes, fixes for unzip, updates to ntpd, Ash additions, and a wide variety of other changes.
One of the problems that continues to hinder HPC is that, by and large, there’s a greater demand for computing cycles than there are CPUs and GPUs available. With researchers and engineers lining up to have their calculations crunched, it’s critical that HPC schemes have effective job management software that can keep track of a queue or jobs and assign the appropriate hardware to each project.
Container technology remains very big news, and if you bring up the topic almost everyone immediately thinks of Docker. But, there are other tools that can compete with Docker, and tools that can extend it and make it more flexible. CoreOS’s Rkt, for example, is a command-line tool for running app containers. And, ClusterHQ has an open source project called Flocker that allows developers to run their databases inside Docker containers, leveraging persistent storage, and making data highly portable.
The first day of this year’s openSUSE Conference went well and the keynote speaker team of SaltStack Chief Technical Officer and technical founder Thomas Hatch along with Senior SaltStack Engineer David Boucha and SUSE’s Joe Werner showed how powerful Salt is for IT automation.
Boucha gave a live demo and Hatch talked about the evolution of Salt and even talked a little about Salt’s Thorium Reactor, which was added to Salt as an experimental feature in the 2016.3.0 release. Werner discussed how SUSE uses Salt with SUSE Manager.
Our samples are usually about sixty to seventy respondents, and self-selecting — from their responses, we can say with confidence that LibrePlanet attendees feel we’re doing a decent job organizing the conference. The questions “How much did you enjoy the sessions you attended, compared to those at other conferences you have attended?” and “How likely is it that you will return to LibrePlanet next year?” received an average of about 3.5 out of 4 each of the last three years.
The GNU Hackers’ Meeting is a friendly, semi-formal forum to discuss technical, social, and organizational issues concerning free software and GNU. This is a great opportunity to meet GNU maintainers and active contributors.
Mozilla has announced that it is updating its brand identity “so that people may know and understand us better”. True to its open source spirit, it’s inviting its community to take part in that process, saying that “everyone’s invited”.
The nonprofit behind Firefox is looking to get a fresh new look to make its brand more distinctive and is reaching out to its community for input.
The worldwide web may be aware that Firefox is the second most popular browser on the Internet, but the number of people who’ve heard about Mozilla, the not-for-profit company behind this success, is miniscule.
While Fedora 24 made great inroads on their Wayland support plans for running GNOME by default off this next-generation technology compared to X11, the Firefox package in Fedora currently relies upon Wayland.
However, if you are an early adopter of Firefox on Wayland, there is a new package available for experimenting with native Firefox GTK3 on Wayland without resorting to XWayland. Red Hat’s Martin Stransky has published a Copr repository that offers Firefox for Wayland.
The modern tech business is all about networking infrastructure. For a leading company, the power to communicate effectively with its IT assets is vital. However, that same networking can be a wall to development process; how does a team develop for an environment that is always shifting and changing? Removing the networking concern is a top priority for any business that wants to be efficient and agile.
At its developer conference in Seattle, Docker today announced the private beta of the Docker Store, a new marketplace for trusted and validated dockerized software.
The idea behind the store is to create a self-service portal for Docker’s ecosystem partners to publish and distribute their software through Docker images — and for users to make it easier to deploy these applications.
Docker’s partner relationships are likely to change following the announcement this week of Docker Engine 1.12, which builds more orchestration features into the core Docker container platform.
Docker announced a new beta effort for Docker container images at Dockercon today, called the Docker Store.
Docker on Monday announced Docker Engine 1.12 with built-in orchestration, which allows automated deployment and management of Dockerized distributed applications and microservices at scale in production.
Containers and cloud services remain much in the news, and open source tools such as Docker and OpenStack remain red hot at organizations of all sizes. Docker is running its developer conference in Seattle this week and there are many container tools being shown there.
Meanwhile, Bright Computing, focused on vendor-independent cluster and cloud management software, is coming out with Version 7.3 of Bright Cluster Manager and Bright OpenStack, scheduled for release in July.
Microsoft has been increasing its focus on Docker and is even building support for it into Windows Server. The effort is part of the company’s focus on incorporating more open source technologies. This week, the company is showing off the upcoming Linux version of SQL Server that can run in containers on Ubuntu.
Years ago I read the cannon of the classic medical book “House of God” by Samuel Shem which reads: “…the House of God was sad and sick and cynical…like all our doings in the House…” At first, before I had worked in an actual hospital I thought the book itself was sick and cynical. After working in an actual hospital I re-read the book. I then found it hilarious for its uncomfortable truths, and did not think it was sick or cynical enough. Therein likes the crux of the matter with regard to very expensive large hospital EHR’s.
The latest GCC 7 development code now has support for the ARM Cortex-A73 processor.
Support was added today for handling the Cortex-A73 with the GNU Compiler Collection as a target exposed as cortex-a73.
Robert Gebeloff, database projects editor at The New York Times, demonstrated how to use XML Grid to access and interpret a website’s data. Using these tools and techniques, Gebeloff showed how one can find which Trader Joe’s stores sell beer by simply scraping the site’s XML code. Gebeloff has published detailed instructions for web scraping without programming on his GitHub page.
The S.2852 OPEN Government Data Act aims to require true open data access at the federal level. In this article I will discuss the importance of open data in government, the current state of open data in government, and what we need to do to implement true open data.
VR is pretty good at distracting us from the outside world – take off the headset you’ve been wearing and you’ll see that it’s gone dark/everyone has left/you really need to shower.
Anyone looking to learn more about coding and creating video games may be interested in the new DIY open source games console called 2048 which has been created by 2048.
The name refers to the special screen that the game console is equipped with that is constructed from 2048 individual LED bulbs that are placed in a matrix form offering a 64 x 32 resolution.
Learn more about what is possible using the open source games console from the developers at Creoqode. Who was taken to Kickstarter this week to raise the £20,000 they require to take the hardware into production. Early bird pledges are available from just $99 with delivery expected to take place during December 2016 with worldwide shipping available if required.
Google’s leading security engineer Tavis Ormandy recently won a bug bounty challenge run by security solutions firm Bromium and decided to donate the money to charity. Following his gesture, Bromium matched Ormandy’s donation and donated $15,000 to Amnesty International organization.
The TOR Project is working closely with security researchers to implement a new technique to secure the TOR Browser against the FBI’s de-anonymization exploits. Called “Selfrando”, this technique will fight the FBI’s “Code Reuse” exploits and create a “hardened” version of TOR.
For many years people with visual impairments and the legally blind have paid a steep price to access the Web on Windows-based computers. The market-leading software for screen readers costs well over $1,000. The high price is a considerable obstacle to keeping the Web open and accessible to all. The NVDA Project has developed an open source screen reader that is free to download and to use, and which works well with Firefox. NVDA aligns with one of the Mozilla Manifesto’s principles: “The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.”
Open source is very important nowadays, especially from a privacy and security standpoint. Look, closed source ideology is not inherently bad — it is a good way to protect a company’s code. The problem, however, is that users are increasingly suspicious of software since Edward Snowden’s leaks. There is no telling what kind of back doors or other malicious things are hiding in the code.
n a world where any new software project is built in large part on existing third-party code, finding and patching vulnerabilities in popular open-source libraries is vital to creating reliable and secure applications.
For example, three severe flaws in libarchive, recently found by researchers from Cisco Systems’ Talos group, could affect a large number of software products.
Libarchive is an open-source library first created for FreeBSD, but has since been ported to all major operating systems. It provides real-time access to files compressed with a variety of algorithms, including tar, pax, cpio, ISO9660, zip, lha/lzh, rar, cab and 7-Zip.
After an initial burst of fire between Omar Mateen and a security guard at the Pulse nightclub, a group of five to six police officers arrived on the scene within minutes, broke through a large glass window and entered the club as the killing of 49 people was underway inside, according to a Belle Isle police officer who was among the first responders.
Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Guillaume Long says there is concern about the health of Julian Assange, who has now been in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy for four years.
He told Zeinab Badawi: “We are concerned about his health. He doesn’t have access to good health care. We are very worried about this. After four years, there is a clear deterioration.”
The Wikileaks founder sought refuge in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face accusations of sexual assault, which he denies.
This past Sunday, June 19, Julian Assange began his fifth year inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum from the United States in 2012. The date was marked with simultaneous worldwide events—with 60 prominent supporters, including Noam Chomsky, Ai Wei Wei, Patti Smith, and Michael Moore, demanding Assange’s release. The theme of the day was “First They Came for Assange,” an allusion to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem warning of the dangers of staying silent in the face of rising state repression.
Phil Stocker, NSA Chief Executive, says: “Our understanding is the Project Advisory Group will design the trial that will only go ahead if Lynx UK is successful in gaining a licence from Natural England and/or Scottish Natural Heritage. We feel it is inappropriate for NSA to provide guidance to Lynx UK ahead of that licence application, as we remain opposed to any pilot taking place. In addition, we are not prepared for someone from NSA to be part of the group when the terms of reference state members would not be there to represent the views of any particular organisation.”
But two more sites on either side of the border are still under consideration and one will ultimately be chosen to have lynx released to start breeding colonies.
Alarmed farmers say it could lead to savage attacks on livestock and even children by the hungry beasts, which became extinct in Britain around 700 AD, almost 150 years before King Alfred the Great was born.
One of two sites will be chosen where the Eurasian lynx will be reintroduced.
Alarmed farmers warn the decision could lead to savage attacks on livestock and even children by the beast.
Now the Lynx UK Trust hopes to release the wild cat to somewhere in Aberdeenshire or Northumberland.
Plans to reintroduce the lynx to the wild in Cumbria and Norfolk have been scrapped.
The Lynx UK Trust said the animal, which has been extinct in Britain for 1,300 years, would help control deer populations and attract tourists.
But it has now ruled out Ennerdale in the Lake District and Thetford Forest in Norfolk, as too small to support populations of the big cat.
Banks and money transfer services are warning that a surge in market volatility surrounding Thursday’s EU referendum may impact electronic trading platforms.
As holidaymakers flock to cash in on the strong pound, and buy their travel money ahead of the vote, a number of money transfer companies are suspending services.
Azimo and rival website Transferwise, have both announced they will be suspending trading on Thursday morning.
Michael Gove has compared economic experts warning about Brexit to Nazis who smeared Albert Einstein’s scientific findings during the 1930s.
Mr Gove, who chairs the Vote Leave campaign, also suggested that he may quit the Government if Britain votes to stay in the EU because David Cameron will not be able to meet his pledge to control migration.
English comedian Eddie Izzard is a passionate European who has been vigorously campaigning for young people to vote Remain in the Brexit referendum. Ahead of his last speech before the vote, he told Handelsblatt about his vision for a positive, unified European future.
The Unite union is fighting all the way for a remain vote and for British workers to build their future in unity with workers in the rest of Europe. But I refuse to lecture or to patronise those working people who take a different view. After all, who can be surprised that in so many industrial areas, voting for the status quo is not a popular option?
British tech firms overwhelmingly support the UK remaining part of the European Union, even at the eleventh hour before Thursday’s referendum vote.
In fact, the vacuum cleaner innovator Sir James Dyson is the only really big name among the country’s tech players to publicly come out and back Brexit—he believes that leaving the EU might help him recruit top engineering talent from outside Europe to come and work in the UK, and says “we will create more wealth and more jobs by being outside the EU.”
Aside from him, the British tech sector appears to be very pro-European Union.
From the salmon-spawning waters of Alaska to the cloud forests of Ecuador, communities are standing up to mining projects that threaten their health, environment, and livelihoods.
But mining corporations are fighting back with a powerful tool buried in trade and investment agreements: the ability to go to private, unaccountable tribunals and sue governments that act to protect communities from mining.
In these private tribunals, which sit outside of any domestic legal system, corporate lawyers – not judges – decide whether governments must pay corporations for halting destructive mining projects. To date, mining corporations have used these private tribunals to sue over 40 governments more than 100 times.
Deficit hawks often raise the specter of hyperinflation to scare people who disagree with them. And that’s exactly what Hillary Clinton did on Tuesday.
Speaking in Columbus, Clinton criticized Donald Trump for saying last month that the U.S. can never default on its debt obligations “because you print the money.”
“We know what happened to countries that tried that in the past, like Germany in the ‘20s and Zimbabwe in the ‘90s,” Clinton said. “It drove inflation through the roof and crippled their economies.”
But printing money — otherwise known as increasing the money supply – is a routine occurrence for governments that control their own currency. The Federal Reserve has increased its balance sheet by over $3 trillion since the financial crisis, explicitly to support the economy. (The Fed does this by buying stocks and bonds with electronic cash that didn’t exist before.)
In fact, an increasingly influential school of economics, known as Modern Monetary Theory, argues that deficit spending, including through money printing, is critical to promote full employment.
How did Google become the internet’s censor and master manipulator, blocking access to millions of websites?
Anyone venturing into a 3.3-square-mile “event zone” surrounding next month’s Republican National Convention will be prohibited from carrying tennis balls, tape, rope, bike locks, sleeping bags, or any object they could stand on to rise above the crowd and speak. They won’t be allowed to carry swords or water guns. But if they have a license, they’ll be permitted to openly carry real guns, including assault weapons.
As Cleveland gears up to host one of the most controversial GOP conventions in decades, Ohio’s permissive gun policy isn’t the only red flag raised by prospective protesters and civil rights advocates. Many also warn that the regulations put in place by the city place “unacceptable restrictions on free speech” and risk escalating conflict, rather than diffusing it, by forcing rival groups of demonstrators to share tight quarters and schedules while keeping them out of sight and earshot of delegates and the media.
The restrictions imposed on the large event zone drawn around Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena — known locally as “The Q”— have earned the city a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Ohio and widespread criticism across the spectrum of groups planning to show up at the convention to make their voices heard.
In making her short film “I Say Dust,” Darine Hotait wanted to explore Arab American identity from her perspective as a New York-based American Lebanese writer and director. It just so happened that her two lead characters would be women in their 20s who share a kiss. That kiss, however, has put “I Say Dust” at the center of a long-standing discussion about censorship after it was recently banned from two film festivals in the Middle East.
The Sex Party says it will reluctantly take down posters around Canberra deemed offensive by the ACT government.
The party’s Senate candidate Steven Bailey says he will on Thursday remove signs reading “Screw the major parties – Vote for the Sex Party” and “Tax the Church – Vote for the Sex Party”.
He said a city ranger on Monday gave the party 48 hours to remove the signs or face potential prosecution.
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used the CIA and NSA for personal projects
For decades, intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA that have been tarred with accusations of sexism and racial profiling have worked hard to clean up their images and present a friendlier, more inclusive face to the world. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, similar scandals continue to hound the intelligence community, from the CIA’s hand in helping the NYPD monitor “ancestries of interest” to a culture within the NSA that condones violations of women’s privacy.
We’ve been talking a lot about Rule 41 lately around here. As we’ve discussed, the DOJ had pushed for an update to the rule, basically granting the FBI much greater powers to hack into lots of computers, including those abroad (possibly creating diplomatic issues). We’ve been discussing the problems with the DOJ’s proposed change for years, and we haven’t been alone. Civil liberties groups and tech companies have both blasted the plans, but to no avail.
Back in March, a judicial panel approved the DOJ’s proposed changes, and the Supreme Court gave its blessing a month later. The rule changes are set to go into effect on December 1st if they’re not stopped. Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul have introduced a bill to block them, while the EFF, Tor and friends have kicked off a big No Global Warrants campaign, encouraging Congress to block this change.
A mobile advertising company that tracked the locations of hundreds of millions of consumers without consent has agreed to pay $950,000 in civil penalties and implement a privacy program to settle charges that it violated federal law.
The US Federal Trade Commission alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday that Singapore-based InMobi undermined phone users’ ability to make informed decisions about the collection of their location information. While InMobi claimed that its software collected geographical whereabouts only when end users provided opt-in consent, the software in fact used nearby Wi-Fi signals to infer locations when permission wasn’t given, FTC officials alleged. InMobi then archived the location information and used it to push targeted advertisements to individual phone users.
A controversial amendment that would expand the FBI’s surveillance power was narrowly defeated in the Senate Wednesday.
The final tally was 58 to 38, two votes shy of the 60 needed for the amendment to move forward. The issue will likely surface again soon, however, as Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., immediately filed for a motion to reconsider the amendment.
These two make one wonder how many times officers have just fabricated reasonable suspicion and courts have bought it:
The dashcam video supports the defendant’s argument that he was stopped without reasonable suspicion of driving with lights off when they should have been on. The stop for following too close is also unsupported. The highway was nearly empty. Suppressed. United States v. Dominguez-Fernand, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 76368 (S.D.Ind. June 13, 2016).
Very rarely does anyone want to believe a defendant in a criminal prosecution. They have the most to lose, are often presumed guilty by all involved, and if they’d done nothing wrong, they wouldn’t be here defending themselves, right? None of that is how the system is supposed to work. But that’s how it often does.
Law enforcement officers, on the other hand, are often treated as unimpeachably credible, even when their recollections of events are less than accurate. Sometimes they get called out for it. Most times they don’t. About the only way their dishonesty is called out if if there’s another set of eyes on the scene — like dashcams or body-worn cameras. (This, too, is far from a sure thing.)
That’s what happened here. A bogus traffic stop that morphed into a drug bust began with zero traffic violations — even though the officer performing the stop claimed at least two violations had occurred. (via FourthAmendment.com)
Victor Dominguez-Fernand was pulled over for allegedly driving with his headlights off and following too close to the vehicle ahead. Unfortunately for Deputy Nicholas Ernestes, his dashcam showed both claimed violations were bogus.
First off, the supposed violation of “driving with headlights off” was only a presumed violation. Deputy Ernestes testified that he “believed” headlights were required because of the weather conditions (overcast and raining) but couldn’t actually assert that such a requirement exists.
A GCHQ document has put forward the ‘operational case’ for bulk collection.
Authored by the UK’s signals intelligence agency, which is also the principal agent of bulk collection in the UK, the report sets out the manner in which “bulk powers provide vital intelligence that cannot be generated from any other source”.
It goes on to draw out scenarios, some real, some hypothetical, in which bulk powers were or could be useful.
The controversial National Security Letter (NSL) statute could be significantly expanded under two separate bills currently being debated by the Senate. Every year, the FBI issues thousands of NSLs to telephone and Internet companies, demanding records about their customers and gagging the companies from informing the public about these requests. NSLs are inherently dangerous to civil liberties because their use is rarely subject to judicial review. But NSLs are not magic, and they don’t require recipients to do whatever the FBI says. Above all, the type of information available to the FBI with an NSL is quite limited, reflecting the need to tightly control the extrajudicial nature of this controversial power.
It’s time to lift the cloak of secrecy that has until now shielded the NSA from judicial scrutiny. EFF served the agency with information requests late last week in Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s signature case challenging government surveillance. Since we filed the case in 2008, leaks about government spying—much of which have been confirmed by intelligence agencies—have vindicated our claims that the U.S. government is and was illegally spying on millions of innocent Americans. Now, we are seeking answers to basic questions about the nuts and bolts of the government’s Internet and telephone mass surveillance programs.
Not only does this mark the first opportunity to obtain evidence since the case was filed nearly eight years ago, but it’s also the first time any party has been allowed to gather facts about the programs’ inner workings from the NSA in a case involving the agency’s warrantless surveillance.
The police obtained no drugs, but Eckert obtained a $1.6 million settlement.
Perhaps that sort of payoff is in 18-year-old Ashley Cervantes’ future. Cervantes did nothing more than cross the border to eat breakfast in Nogales, Mexico. Upon her return, things went from bad to worse to nightmarish.
Let’s start off with this: there’s no legitimate way to defend Zane Alchin, a guy in Australia who appears to be an all around horrible person. He went on Facebook, and after seeing a friend of his post (and mock) a woman’s Tinder profile, proceeded to post a whole bunch of pretty horrible and misogynistic posts on Facebook, including some pretty horrifying statements about “raping feminists.” I won’t post any of his other comments, though they’re covered in some of the articles written about the case. Alchin, who now claims he was just drunk and trolling, and also insisted he wasn’t breaking any laws, has since discovered that apparently he was breaking a weird Australian law…
A Sydney labourer, who unleashed a torrent of explicit abuse online after a screen shot of a woman’s Tinder profile was uploaded to Facebook, told police he was drunk and unaware that trolling was a crime, court documents show.
The GCIG report is here. Information on the OECD Ministerial is here.
Information Society (ISOC) background on Ministerial is available here.
Insurance companies for example are asked in the report presented in Cancun today to “rise to the challenge of ensuring that best practices for data protection and security are appropriately rewarded.” Governments are requested “to ensure their taxation policies do not bias the market for internet services or related equipment.”
For a while now we’ve warned how “zero rating” (letting some content bypass usage caps) is a creative way for ISPs to tap dance around net neutrality –potentially to public applause. Comcast, for example, exempts its creatively-named “Stream” streaming video service from caps, but claims this doesn’t violate net neutrality because the traffic never technically leaves Comcast’s network. Verizon exempts its own Go90 video service from caps as well, and to date doesn’t even bother justifying the move. Both AT&T and Verizon let companies pay for cap exemption.
And while these programs all laugh in the face of neutrality, many users still tend to applaud the horrible precedent because they believe — despite paying an arm and a leg for wireless data — that they’re getting something for free.
T-Mobile has been perhaps the most creative in exploiting this belief and implementing zero rating, now exempting some 90 video services from user usage caps and throttling these services to 1.5 Mbps (or 480p) unless a user opts out. But neutrality advocates have repeatedly noted this idea still violates net neutrality given that thousands of startups, educational orgs, and non profits still aren’t whitelisted — and may not even realize they’re being discriminated against.
Want to watch unlimited videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other providers on your mobile device for free? Make us your internet service provider, says T-Mobile. Our Binge On service allows you to do just that.
Not so fast, says Northeastern’s David Choffnes, assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information Science. New research by Choffnes and his colleagues shows that what T-Mobile promises is not what you, or content providers, may actually get.
As you may or may not be aware, Sky TV is a European cable television network owned by Rupert Murdoch. Sky TV is also a company that has trademarked the word “sky” and enjoys bludgeoning anyone who uses the word “sky” in business into the ground. This has resulted in exceptionally silly disputes, such as Sky TV suing Skype, despite there being not a lick of competition between a messaging/calling system and television.
This past week, gaming enthusiasts learned that the much anticipated open universe space exploration game No Man’s Sky had been battling with Sky TV over the inclusion of the word “sky” in its title. This case of trademark bullying can act as a wonderful barometer, because if you don’t think this is ridiculous, then you are ridiculous.
Today’s misguided IP infringement lawsuit comes from Cinemark USA, one of the largest theater chains in the United States. Its target is Roblox, a multiplayer online sandbox game where users can create their own “worlds” using blocks — putting it somewhere between Minecraft and Second Life.
Cinemark is accusing Roblox and a few dozen of its users of trademark infringement, thanks to the latter’s creations. According to the lawsuit [PDF], various users have created versions of Cinemark theaters (complete with branding) and placed them in their own worlds, or uploaded for others to use in theirs.
Roskomnadzor is the Russian “telecommunications regulator” or “watchdog,” but it could just as easily be described as the Russian internet censor, because that appears to be a large part of its role in the country. In the past, we’ve written about Roskomnadzor blocking all of Wikipedia over a single reference to hashish (really) and also a plan to block all of CloudFlare because the company made it difficult for Russia’s internet censorship plans to work. Earlier this month, Roskomnadzor made news for blacklisting a Vice article, claiming that it would encourage shoplifting.
So, who better to support such a censorship regime than… Hollywood! The MPAA has now proudly signed an agreement with Roskomnadzor to cooperate on protecting copyright online. The linked article is unfortunately horribly written. The title implies that the MPAA represents the government of the United States (while sometimes true in practice, that’s not how it’s supposed to work…) and then provides frightfully few details on what the agreement really is), beyond “protect copyright!”
Michael Fröhlich lobbying for the UPC as an EPO employee
Photo credit: Nordic Patent
Summary: The loose but seemingly ever-growing connections between AstroTurfing groups like IP Europe (pretending to represent SMEs) and EPO staff which is lobbying-centric
THE EPO is a small world and there are many revolving doors in that world. Just watch what kind of people Battistelli gave top positions to. See their recent professional background. Apparently it’s OK for Battistelli to dismiss and prevent future employment of people whom he doesn’t like, but the same standards do not apply to him. He won’t reciprocate when it comes to ethics because he has none. Those who mention it are likely to become victims of his witch-hunting parades (intended to terrify the rest of the staff).
We recently did some research regarding Michael Fröhlich, who not too long ago joined the EPO and is already lobbying for the UPC with his EPO hat. On our path we found all sorts of interesting connections. “IP Europe” for example (these are newly-named parasites, vultures and enemies of Europe, as mentioned by Professor James Bessen, a high-profile trolls opposer, earlier this year) has been doing a lot of pro-UPC lobbying. There is also Francisco Mingorance, the author of the EU Commission’s proposed software patent directive. There is even Claudia Tapia, previously at BlackBerry, which increasingly leans towards patent trolling [1, 2, 3, 4]. Claudia’s colleague of then, Michael Fröhlich, works at the EPO right now. It appears to be a lobbying-oriented job (a growing activity at the EPO, which perhaps forgot its real task, which is patent examination). Earlier this year we mentioned in an article about the PR strategy of the EPO how an entity called “IP Europe” was about to be launched in Brussels (a location/site for which EPO hires lobbyists).
“It’s rather revealing that Battistelli visits nations that consider leaving the EU as of late, notably Finland and the UK.”We mentioned Michael Fröhlich earlier this month in relation to that UPC promotion he had done in Scandinavia and perhaps elsewhere. He lived in Munich even while working at RIM, so he didn’t even have to relocate for becoming another Battistelli minion. The UPC is definitely stoppable, but the 'UPC gang' (a conspiracy of patent lawyers basically) wants us to believe otherwise. So does the EPO, albeit it reluctantly admits there are major barriers as of late (Battistelli and his minions name Brexit as one of them). So what’s all this UPC lobbying for? It’s rather revealing that Battistelli visits nations that consider leaving the EU as of late, notably Finland and the UK.
Sadly, UPC lobbying comes from many directions right now, including from what Florian Müller said yesterday made the “false claim of supporting ‘innovatives SMEs.’” This is reminiscent of the Association for Competitive Technology (Microsoft front group, pretending to represent SMEs in Europe). As we have shown here before, UPC lobbyists are hijacking the voices of SMEs, which openly complain about this. Here is what Müller wrote about the latest name of the front group, “IP Europe” (calling it a “trolls’ lobbying entity” in his headline):
With respect to standard-essential patent licensing, my preferred European voice of reason(ableness) is the Fair Standards Alliance, an organization Google recently joined and which I’d like to see Apple and Samsung team up with at some point. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a lobbying group named IP Europe. While I personally know and respect two of the individuals working for that one, I fundamentally disagree with its policy positions and object to its false claim of supporting “innovatives SMEs.” IP Europe advances the cause of patent trolls and of businesses that failed in the mobile phone business for a lack of innovation and increasingly resort to patent licensing as a revenue source.
Looking at IP Europe’s member list, it’s generally easy to see why each of those organizations expects to gain something from overpatenting and from an overcompensation of patentees, with a couple of exceptions, however.
[...]
To many of you this may seem obvious, but let me explain this for the rest: there is no such thing as a software patent that guarantees stability and security. The reason: no matter what a patent may describe (with or without specificity), it can always be implemented in an unstable and insecure fashion.
Airbus has a software quality problem. Last year Airbus even admitted that a software configuration error caused the crash of a military transporter, and I vaguely remember a crash of a commercial Airbus plane many years ago that some experts attributed to a software issue. In terms of success factors in the airplane business, that is what Airbus should be focusing on. It has nothing to do with patents. Any code that is stable or unstable, secure or insecure, is protected by copyright (and trade secrets). Any configuration that is stable or unstable, secure or insecure, is a matter of quality assurance.
If Airbus focused on software quality, it wouldn’t have to fear copycats. If someone copied great code, copyright (not patent) law would protect Airbus.
With ‘SMEs’ like Airbus it’s not hard to imagine who “IP Europe” really stands for (or fronts for).
Expect us to write a lot more about the UPC in the coming months. It has a lot to do with everything that’s wrong in the EPO nowadays. █
“When asked by Ars, the EPO’s spokesperson mentioned the imminent arrival of the unitary patent system as an important reason for revising the EPO’s internal rules…”
Board 28 has already admitted there's a "crisis" as mass departure [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] goes all the way to the top
Summary: Letter says that “recruitment of Brits is down by 80%” and “the EPO lost 7% of UK staff in one year”
THIS morning someone diverted a message about the EPO to us. This message appears to have headed towards quite a few delegates and perhaps politicians too.
In the tradition of maximal transparency we have decided to share it below. We hope that readers will end up contacting their national representatives to let them know what nationals (whom they supposedly represent) think about this.
“We hope that readers will end up contacting their national representatives to let them know what nationals (whom they supposedly represent) think about this.”The message below is long (3 pages) and there are some interesting things in there about brain drain and the rather amazing exodus of British workers this past year (or slightly longer).
“The EPO-FLIER Team,” we learned, “a group of concerned staff of the EPO who wish to remain anonymous due to the prevailing harsh social climate and absence of rule of law at the European Patent Office, sent an open letter to delegations of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation. Interested circles and stakeholders of the European patent system were informed as well.”
Text of the E-mail was as follows:
Open letter to the Delegations of the EPO’s Administrative Council
Dear Heads and members of the Member States’ delegations to the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation,
dear Chairman, dear Mr Grandjean,Please find enclosed an open letter titled
‘The Administrative Council’s fiduciary duty to the European Patent Organisation and the Office’s duty of care’
directed to the delegations of the member states of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation.
The EPO-FLIER Team,
a group of concerned staff of the EPO
who wish to remain anonymous
due to the prevailing harsh social climate and
absence of rule of law at the European Patent Office__________________________________
further links:http://www.fosspatents.com/2014/12/european-patent-office-examiners-fear.html
http://www.ip-watch.org/2014/12/10/epo-supervisory-body-to-face-patent-quality-judicial-independence-fears/
http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/EPO-examiners-can-no-longer-ensure-appropriate-quality-standards.pdf
http://techrights.org/2014/12/08/epo-staff-is-demonstrating/
There was a PDF attached to the message and here is what it said:
Open letter – by email to the Heads of Delegation
22 June 2016
EPO-FLIER teamThe Administrative Council’s fiduciary duty to the European Patent Organisation and the Office’s duty of care
Dear heads and members of the delegations to the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation, dear Chairman, dear Mr Grandjean,
Ever since the founding fathers drafted the European Patent Convention, a high perception of legal validity of a granted patent has taken the Office from strength to strength. Highly qualified staff has for a long time dealt with significant workload increases while maintaining the quality of work that has drawn applicants to the EPO. However, we are now observing an accelerated change for the worse. Strong professional ethics are gradually giving way to rubber stamping in order to meet entirely arbitrary production targets. Despite embellished statistics allegedly showing otherwise, staff’s health is on the decline and the EPO is no longer an employer of choice.
Is it not the Administrative Council’s (AC’s) and the President’s duty to hand over to any successor an Office that is at least as healthy as it was when he took it over? And should
the AC not be seen to be positively influencing good housekeeping and a constant pursuit of excellence?Who is the boss?
It was so refreshing to see the AC take its responsibility when it issued a resolution with clear and achievable objectives for the President. Very briefly there was a marked
improvement of the atmosphere in the Office. Very briefly, the AC had switched on the light at the end of the tunnel.But instead of complying with unambiguous instructions, Mr Battistelli is playing games like an adolescent who is testing the envelope. He has not even tried to comply. Instead, he is
doing the opposite, challenging his supervisory body, rebelling against his “parents”.It is time for the members of the AC to stop flogging a dead horse:
Mr Battistelli is causing immeasurable damage to the Office; he is now untenable.The President’s extravagances
The AC delegations are aware of and endorse the costs for the President’s luxury fortress on the top floor of the Isar Building and his alleged need for highly expensive personal body guards. The EPO further pays for hosting high-profile events that seem to be mainly instigated for the greater glory of the President.
The Office should not be seen to be celebrating some inventors as being better than others. It risks reputational damage by highlighting the success of some inventions, especially if they later could prove not to work (see media coverage on Elizabeth Holmes’ dysfunctional blood testing equipment). For critical observers, her results looked too good to be true. The same applies to the current EPO results.
EPC changes through the back door?
Sinking almost endless resources into the IT Roadmap, with its badly managed outsourcing and brain-drain (due to salary cuts and a poor work atmosphere), is failing to provide appropriate tools. The changes in operation – above all an ill-conceived new career system in combination with management by intimidation – are resulting in more products per staff member, but with an outcome that no longer compares favourably to past quality standards.
Critical observers have started speculating about the effects the dramatic increase in the number of patents granted may have1. Applicants have started observing a decline in the quality of the EPO’s products and sometimes share their concerns with individual examiners. The existing quality indicators are not reliable. IAM 2, 3 is sponsored by the Office and the EPO’s own quality measuring system ‘CASE’ suffers from a built-in conflict-of-interest. The way it has been designed, it will always indicate excellent quality, no matter what the actual quality is.
A presumption of invalidity of granted patents leads to higher litigation costs. Big applicants might be able to finance such higher costs, but SMEs will suffer economically from low quality patenting4. The EPO can foster economic growth only if it returns to the previously high search and examination standards5.
The AC is the guardian of a non-discriminatory application of the EPC.
That is not possible under the leadership of this President.EPO – employer of choice?
Word has got out that all’s not well at the EPO. The Office no longer attracts the same calibre of staff and therefore has had to resort to recruiting what it gets. That’s why the
EPO is currently abandoning previous quality criteria, such as language skills, or a balanced geographical distribution6, in the selection of new staff.The recent Technologia survey on psycho-social risks for EPO employees is alarming, and the comparison of three surveys from consecutive years shows that the situation is deteriorating. Despite the AC’s mandate to the President to go easy with HR reforms, the Administration is still instigating some highly undesirable changes.
The self-proclaimed Dr. med. Battistelli and Dr. med. Bergot judge on the fitness of staff for work. The EPO exposes vulnerable staff to its medical advisors, who now have a direct reporting link to a PD Human Resources, who herself has a reputation of being vindictive. The Office now has the tools that it needs to breach medical secrecy indiscriminately and to abuse information given to medical practitioners in confidence.
The unfair dismissal of two staff representatives, the downgrading of a third and the ongoing attacks on other members of the staff representation are unacceptable, and have been criticised by the Council itself. Staff are dumbfounded by the way that an organisation that has a legal function (granting and refusing patents) behaves in ways that are contrary to the rule of law in its member states and how representatives of countries with a great legal tradition can condone such behaviour.
_________
1 http://ipnoncredere.blogspot.de/2016/06/high-how-will-ball-bounce.html
2 http://www.iam-media.com/Blog/Detail.aspx?g=77979ee9-60a0-4b2c-b074-e9a2b2623a0c
3 65% of the respondents rated the quality of patents granted by the EPO as excellent or very good.
4 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/15/patent_trolls_innovation_and_brexit/
5 http://www.fosspatents.com/2014/12/european-patent-office-examiners-fear.html
6 It seems that in the EPO the „brexit“ is taking place, as according to the Social Report for 2015 CA 55/16, page 22, the recruitment of Brits is down by 80%, while according to page 8, the EPO lost 7% of UK staff in one year. Further, no Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish and Swiss personnel was recruited.
Mr Battistelli continues to undermine the rights of staff
EPO staff undergo a stringent selection process and have a long probationary period before being appointed as permanent staff. But in the interpretation of the EPO’s very senior management it is professional incompetence if staff members do not meet inflated output demands. In the President’s plans there will be no intervention of any meaningful advisory review instance in decisions for dismissal for reasons of professional incompetence (CA/53/16). If the proposal gets approval, Mr Battistelli will be in a position to expose staff of the EPO to unemployment without a social security system, which he aggravates by claiming exclusive rights to permit gainful employment a full two years following departure from the Office (CA/29/16).
The review of the Investigation Guidelines (CA/52/16) will, if adopted, increase the autonomy and powers of the Administration. The guidelines would become an even more dangerous weapon if put in the wrong, i.e. in Mr Battistelli’s and Ms Bergot’s, hands. Due process, duty of care and state-of-the-art HR management are completely absent from the Office now.
And all the time, the members of the Office’s only supervisory body watch it happen. To the neutral observer there is no doubt: this Administration is professionally incompetent, and
the supervisors are doing nothing about it.The President and his cronies have to be stopped. By you. Now.
The Council and President have to show that they are good caretakers of the great organisation that has been put in their custody and entrusted to them. It is time to live up to
the expectations of the founding fathers, the European public and the staff of the Office.You will be in the spotlight during the June Council meeting.
Please do not support the President’s change proposals in CA/29/16, CA/52/16 and CA/53/16.
Instead, please do what needs doing: restore a constructive climate at the EPO, under leadership of a President who wants to join the effort for the continued success of the Office.
For the undersigned, that President is not Benoît Battistelli.
With our best regards,
The EPO-FLIER teama group of concerned staff of the EPO who wish to remain anonymous due to the prevailing harsh social climate and absence of rule of law at the European Patent Office
Copies to: Competent Ministries of the Member States
These proposal were mentioned here one week ago. We can’t help wondering how many other EPO employees are contacting delegations or at least heads of delegations. These delegates might only feel compelled to save the EPO if they witness enough voices of concerned insiders and outsiders. That’s how it goes in politics, for better or for worse. █
Bristows and Bird & Bird among the culprits
Summary: The parasitic firms that lobby for the UPC and actually create it — firms like those that pass money to Battistelli’s EPO — are doing exactly the opposite of what Europe needs
THE EPO is in a dire and sad state because of its top-level management, which is effectively a cabal of ‘yes men’ to Battistelli. The sociopaths find these positions attractive and if they’re French and former colleagues of Battistelli, then they already have some job requirements covered. Megalomaniacal tendencies of Battistelli are rather contagious and it shows. This takes its toll on staff. Many are thankful to have never accepted a job offer from Battistelli’s EPO as there is an element of entrapment to it (Battistelli can veto employment choices even after someone leaves the Office).
“Megalomaniacal tendencies of Battistelli are rather contagious and it shows. This takes its toll on staff.”There are even worse things coming out of the EPO and they impact everyone in Europe, not just EPO staff. There’s no escaping the wrath of Battistelli and his grand plan, notably the UPC which rumours say he wishes to head (in spite of retirement age). The EPO routinely lobbies for the UPC rather than focus on patent examination (the EPO’s real purpose).
All one needs to know about the UPC is that it would harm European businesses and the media misleads about it (EPO's payments to European media companies contribute to this). The UPC is being designed and refined by and for patent lawyers, primarily in order to increase their overall profit/reputation, typically by making the number of lawsuits greater and the damages higher. Coup by occupation is all it boils down to, and it is not EU-centric either. The moment more people come to grips with what the UPC is and who it has been optimised for is the moment the whole thing comes tumbling down like ACTA in Europe, but right now a lot of UPC proceedings and intentionally kept in the dark, except when politicians are approached to ratify under the false preteses and the premise that this kind of coup is all about “unity”, “harmony”, “EU”, and “community” (among other euphemisms whose purpose is to perfume this very bad deal/bundle). A lot of the misinformation about the UPC just ‘happens’ to come from Battistelli, who has been promoting this whole scheme for a very long time along with other Frenchmen who consider French a more important language than Spanish (how convenient for them).
“A lot of the misinformation about the UPC just ‘happens’ to come from Battistelli, who has been promoting this whole scheme for a very long time along with other Frenchmen who consider French a more important language than Spanish (how convenient for them).”Based on some sad news from self-serving UPC propagandists, the Dutch people have been put aside again while the patent microcosm (includes the EPO and its clients/lawyers) used control of politicians to ram UPC down the country’s throat. This is a gross attack not only on democracy but on human rights. As I put it earlier in relation to similar plans in Germany (“UPC software patent ratification is on the agenda of the Bundestag this Thursday evening around 21H,” according to Benjamin Henrion), the UPC tests whether a nation is a client of its citizens or of patent lawyers and their foreign clients. It is a corporate takeover attempt, much like ISDS. Will it work?
Well, never for a moment believe that the UPC is inevitable. It’s not. To say so is to help the propaganda strategy of the patent microcosm, which has grown visibly stressed about UPC woes this month. Things aren’t going as they hoped because even Battistelli and his minions say that UPC might not happen. There are still many barriers.
“Can Europe beat its enemies, those scheming to undermine European laws (and the EPC) to make a new “order”?”“Kluwer UPC News blogger” is what Wouter Pors and the lads call their blog now. It’s just more UPC propaganda like Bristows’ (with “Bristows UPC” for marketing) and Wouter Pors has quite a reputation for UPC meddling, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. These are the very same people who ‘engineered’ much of the UPC and are actively pushing software patents into Europe, as well as patent trolls. To them, it’s all about money (theirs, at everyone else’s expense).
Can Europe beat its enemies, those scheming to undermine European laws (and the EPC) to make a new “order”? We sure hope that more people will join the battle. Just look which firms are behind this site (top) that promotes UPC events right now (EPLAW). UPC is for the lawyers, by the lawyers, against the people, definitely not by the people. Those same lawyers recently mentioned that Battistelli basically crushes the Office and ruins patent quality by demolishing appeal boards, in effect paving the way to UPC (where appeals would be dealt with differently).
Let’s bury the UPC before it’s too late. Now it the time to take action and expose what UPC is really all about. █
The gentler equivalent of Donald Trump discrediting a US-born judge for being “Mexican”?
Summary: A quick glance at how patent lawyers and their lobbyists/advocates have reacted to the latest decision from the US Supreme Court (Justice Breyer)
TECHRIGHTS isn’t too shy to mock those who mislead the public in order to attract business. They’re selling snake oil.
Earlier today we found this piece from IP Watch which took the side of patent holders [sic] as if they and they alone are the ones who matter. This is rather typical and very much expected from so-called ‘IP’ sites. Dugie Standeford (publishing behind a paywall) tells/covers only one side of this debate — the much smaller side. The narrative is not complete.
“Personal attacks on SCOTUS Justices (especially Justice Breyer) are again quite tactlessly thrown into the mix, with focus on the same Justice whose intelligence was attacked before (see above).”IAM, which is funded by patent law firms and even patent trolls, is once again lobbying for software patents, trolls and many others that lose in the Cuozzo decision last covered here this morning (yesterday’s rant was apparently not enough for this author). Earlier today he selectively mentioned people supportive of his position (i.e. IAM’s sponsors). Just remember that IAM is not a news site but a lobbying campaign dressed up as 'reporting'. It’s an advocacy site for EPO management as well, so it’s important to see what these guys (yes, all male) are up to.
Personal attacks on SCOTUS Justices (especially Justice Breyer) are again quite tactlessly thrown into the mix, with focus on the same Justice whose intelligence was attacked before (see above). And for what? Simply for daring to put an end to (or helping towards the end of) software patents and by extension patent trolls in the US? Watch the ad hominem parts therein. How shameful. Over at Patently-O, which is a lot more professional, two related decisions are named as “their impact could shape the business model of patents licenses as property.”
Actually, patents are not property but a time-limited monopoly on an idea, a concept, and sometimes a mechanical design or chemical recipe etc. SCOTUS is not in any way challenging property rights. There’s nothing physical at stake.
“Actually, patents are not property but a time-limited monopoly on an idea, a concept, and sometimes a mechanical design or chemical recipe etc.”Speaking of physical things, this new post from the Docket Report indicates that § 101 has just eliminated another bogus patent. To quote the original: “Similarly, a lawyer’s legal assistant may provide her with messages or mail in a manner that does not interfere with her primary activity: participating in a conference call. This could be accomplished at a certain time (delivering the message between telephone calls) or in a certain location (placing the message in the corner of her desk).”
It is truly satisfying and increasingly nice to see that all those bogus patents (on old ideas implemented in software) drop like flies. With few exceptions, no doubt, software patents continue to die in the US. For the first time in over a decade (since I started getting involved in this area), patent lawyers are on the defensive and they’re terrified. Their software patents bubble is bursting and they might have to downsize a bit (maybe no yacht and one Ferrari fewer). Patents on algorithms are sinking like the Titanic in the very birthplace of software patents (it has been two years since Alice at SCOTUS; many patent applications get rejected now). It’s great, unless one is a patent lawyer. Having been let down by SCOTUS, lawyers and attorneys now lean on [1, 2] CAFC, the nepotists’ court that gave the US software patents in the first place (several decades ago with Martin Goetz). Incidentally, Patently-O writes about the very same case (Immersion Corp. v HTC Corp., which is effectively against Android/Linux) and it’s not about patentability of software patents at all; it’s about timing. Not much will come out of it and they’re trying to find some small victory to distract themselves from the major defeat (Cuozzo).
“As always, we remain committed to fighting software patents wherever they appear.”Funnily enough, in light of the Cuozzo decision Apple advocacy sites now pretend that Apple is fighting patent trolls when in fact it is Apple that acts like a massive troll, especially when it comes to its war on Android OEMs. Here is one such Apple advocacy site reminding us of Apple’s patents hoard. Another site warns that “LinkedIn’s portfolio of over 1,000 families of granted patents, though only roughly half the size of Facebook’s, is on a par with Twitter’s.” The LinkedIn deal with Microsoft “has a patent profile,” says the headline. These are two companies which are very hostile with software patents, especially against GNU/Linux and Free software.
As always, we remain committed to fighting software patents wherever they appear. Software developers do not want them, whereas many of the above-mentioned parasites want them, in order to claw/grab the money earned by hard-working professionals that actually produce things. █
There’s so many more fun projects out there to explore, so don’t let my modest list be the end of the adventure. Too often in the open source world, we suffer from people looking in, scrutinizing what we make, and seeking practical and clear paths toward monetization. But that’s not what open source is about, really; open source is supposed to be fun and inspiring. It empowers everyone to follow their vaguest notion to completion, no matter how “useless” or “frivolous” it may be.
If you’re looking to land a profitable job in the tech sector, having a broad range of skills is the best way to get your foot in the door.
Is Android on Chromebook ready for mainstream use? Not quite yet. But, I can see it from where it is now. I’ve long thought that Chromebooks could replace Windows PCs. Now, with Android apps, I can see people choosing $200 Chromebooks over $400 Windows 10 laptops. Windows’ last stronghold, the desktop, finally has some real competition.
For now, there’s only one Chromebook that will do it, the ASUS Chromebook Flip, but soon most newer models Chromebooks will be able to run most of the 1.5 million Android apps.
A nice surprise landed on my Chromebook Flip when I checked for updates late last week. The dev channel running on Chromebook was ready with the much awaited 53.0.x update that brings the Google Play Store to Chrome OS devices. I updated it and I have been running Android apps on my Chromebook Flip since Friday.
Fujitsu has signaled it will use 64-bit ARMv8 cores in the whopping exascale supercomputer it’s building for Japan’s boffins.
Every computer runs a version of Unix, with all but 16 being a Linux variant.
After six years of litigation, Sony is now agreeing to pay the price for its 2010 firmware update that removed support for the Linux operating system in the PlayStation 3.
Sony and lawyers representing as many as 10 million console owners reached the deal on Friday. Under the terms of the accord, (PDF) which has not been approved by a California federal judge yet, gamers are eligible to receive $55 if they used Linux on the console. The proposed settlement, which will be vetted by a judge next month, also provides $9 to each console owner that bought a PS3 based on Sony’s claims about “Other OS” functionality.
Ensuring U.S. government agencies have a compliant cloud-based infrastructure is the task of the General Services Administration’s 18F digital services, which created cloud.gov, a Cloud Foundry-based hosted cloud service specifically for federal agencies.
Weaveworks announced the public beta of its Weave Cloud hosted cloud product. It combines versions of Weaveworks’ container networking and management software.
Of particular interest: Weave Cloud offers native Docker container integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), so that Docker containers can run directly on AWS VPC.
A “serverless” approach to API deployment involves containerization, webhooks, virtualization and reciprocity, with no infrastructure (servers, deployments or installed software) required. Microservices can be used as an abstracted resource that allows developers to work more effectively, and focus more on development and less on operations.
“Microservices” is fast becoming one of the newest buzzwords that IT decision makers need to know as DevOps redefines modern software application delivery. Here’s a primer on what microservices mean and how the concept is affecting the channel.
Patrick Debois is best known as the founder of DevOpsDays and as a creator of the DevOps movement, which explains why some refer to him as the “Godfather of DevOps”. As CTO of Small Town Heroes, an interactive video company, he puts these DevOps practices to the test on a daily basis to deliver mobile applications, and he recently organized a new event, Mobile Delivery Days.
On Linux, userland processes typically have a stack that is around 8 MB long. If a program overflows the stack, e.g. using infinite recursion, this is normally caught by a guard page below the stack.
Linux kernel stacks, which are e.g. used when handling system calls, are very different. They are relatively short: 4096 bytes on 32-bit x86, 16384 bytes on x86-64. (The kernel stack size is specified by THREAD_SIZE_ORDER and THREAD_SIZE.) They are allocated using the kernel’s buddy allocator, which is the kernel’s normal allocator for page-sized allocations (and power-of-two numbers of pages) and doesn’t create guard pages. This means that if kernel stacks overflow, they overlap with normal data. For this reason, kernel code must be (and usually is) very careful to not make big allocations on the stack and has to prevent excessive recursion.
Kernel developer Jiri Slaby has announced the release of the Linux 3.12.61 LTS kernel, which is the sixty-first maintenance update for the long-term supported Linux 3.12 series.
Timothy Arceri of Collabora has prepped the latest version of his massive patch-set for providing an on-disk shader cache for Mesa, albeit focused for now on the Intel DRI driver.
Emil Velikov announced the release this morning of the fourth and final planned release candidate for Mesa 12.0.
Mesa 12 is a monstrous release with a lot new OpenGL 4 support across the major drivers and tons of other improvements: learn more via The 12 Big New Features Of Mesa 12.0.
With Fedora 24 set to ship today, here are some benchmarks I carried out yesterday comparing Fedora 23 to Fedora 24 on a Core i5 6600K “Skylake” system with HD Graphics.
Besides performance improvements, Skylake users will have much better out-of-the-box experience than they did on Fedora 23. In fact, with F23′s stock kernel wasn’t even the accelerated graphics support by default — fortunately, over the past six months, everything has been tightened up and there’s now good Skylake support on Fedora 24.
Time tracking software is a type of computer software that records time spent on tasks. This category of software can enable users to run billing reports, and prepare invoices for clients.
The deployment of this software offers a new level of productivity to organisations, as it provides management with information on what time is spent by employees on different activities such as projects and tasks. This can help to measure productivity over time. This software is commonly used by professionals that charge clients by the hour such as accountants, solicitors, and freelancers. The generation of automatic invoices with minimal or no data entry removes the inconvenience of billing and invoicing clients, and improves efficiency.
As mentioned earlier in our news story about the features coming to the Orca 3.22 open-source screen reader and magnifier, the GNOME developers are currently working hard on releasing the third snapshot towards GNOME 3.22.
The GNOME developers announced this past weekend that they were working hard on releasing the third snapshot towards the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment.
The new development team behind Shotwell, the open-source image editor used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems, has announced the availability of a new maintenance build in the Shotwell 0.23.x series.
Shotwell 0.23.2 is now the latest and most advanced stable version of the project, bringing better support for the Facebook integration by adding a pop-up login and updating the documentation in regards with the Facebook publishing permissions.
Since Evernote client is not available for Linux, Linux users always search for an Evernote alternative. Today we have come up with Wiznote, a note taking app that is available for all major platforms including Linux. Wiznote is developed by Wozhi Tech Beijing Co. Ltd. a team of 20 developers. It allows to take, edit and view notes and collaborate with your team members. Let’s see more about Wiznote and how to install it in Linux.
After seeing how smoothly Steam ran on the Cinnamon Linux box, we sat together at my house the next day and put Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.3 LTS on her Dell, installed I might add, without hardly any drama over EUFI. Mint has that handled nicely. I explained to her that while Steam has almost 2,000 games running on Linux, some of the larger game houses haven’t boarded the Linux Steam ship. For her, that was fine. What she plays runs just fine on Linux…at least for now.
Comcept today announced — on the game’s release day — that Mighty No. 9 has been delayed on Xbox 360, Mac and Linux.
A Valve developer on reddit has talked a bit about Valve and VR, and he specifically stated that a third of Valve is now working on VR. A third of Valve, yet still no Linux support.
What does it mean when developers behind one of the world’s most popular desktop environments decide to jump into the deep end and fork a distribution? Depending on who you ask you’ll hear madness, excellence, confusion, and excitement as onlookers figure out the exact nature of a new breed of beast and guess what it will do.
KDE neon is a new distribution freshly forked from Ubuntu being driven by prominent KDE contributors and figures. When initially announced some mixed messages marred the event, but since then the project has found its footing and expectations are seemingly being set…
Neon is entirely unique as a product produced by a community which always made generalist software; Plasma and KDE software is offered by Suse, Red Hat, Arch, Slack, any distribution you can name. Neon is in direct competition with those systems, and several people decried this new distribution as opening the potential for favouritism.
The latest updates for KDE’s Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users, together with other package updates,
Plasma 5.6.5 includes a month’s worth of bugfixes and new translations, with most changes being related to plasma desktop, plasma workspace and kwin.
Applications 16.04.2 include more than 25 recorded bugfixes and improvements to ‘akonadi, ark, artikulate, dolphin. kdenlive, kdepim, among others’.
Frameworks 5.23.0 include bugfixes and improvements to breeze icons, plasma framework, kio and ktexteditor, among others.
Chakra GNU/Linux developer Neofytos Kolokotronis informs the community of the rolling release operating system about the availability of numerous up-to-date GNU/Linux technologies in the main software repositories.
I’m back from the GTK hackfest in Toronto, Canada and mostly recovered from jetlag, so it’s time to write up my notes on what we discussed there.
Despite the hackfest’s title, I was mainly there to talk about non-GUI parts of the stack, and technologies that fit more closely in what could be seen as the freedesktop.org platform than they do in GNOME. In particular, I’m interested in Flatpak as a way to deploy self-contained “apps” in a freedesktop-based, sandboxed runtime environment layered over the Universal Operating System and its many derivatives, with both binary and source compatibility with other GNU/Linux distributions.s
In the upcoming weeks you will be able to see these tips “in action” since we will create more scenario tasks for GNOME applications.
And scenario tasks need to be written using the language that your testers would normally use. Avoid using very technical words if your users wouldn’t be technical. You might use technical words and phrases if you were building a usability test for a programmer’s IDE and Debugger, but you wouldn’t use technical words and phrases for a general desktop environment like GNOME. It’s all about finding the right balance and “voice” in your scenario tasks.
Last week I attended the GTK+ hackfest in Toronto. We had a really good group of people for the event, which lasted 4 days in total, and felt really productive.
There were a number of interesting discussion and planning sessions, from a design point of view, including a session on Flatpak “portals” and another on responsive design patterns.
These release notes for Point Linux MATE 3.2 (agni) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Point Linux MATE 3.2.
Solus Project has announced the latest Solus 1.2 Linux distribution release. This modern Linux distro offers an elegant experience with a polished Budgie desktop environment and better gaming experience. Solus 1.2 also brings the out-of-the-box support for 32-bit applications.
The Germany-based GNU/Linux company SUSE has teamed up with Intel with the latter to offer its server distribution, which is optimised for high-performance computing (HPC), as an option on the Intel HPC Orchestrator, an HPC system software stack.
The first week at Redhat was an amazing learning experience in which I spent time getting familiarized with the fedora ecosystem. For starters fedora hubs is like collaboration and communication tool which allows both developers and non-developers to easily share ideas and contribute to the open source community.
Last year Red Hat, which has been mostly known for selling Linux in the enterprise became the first $2 billion open source company. Now it wants to be the first to $5 billion, but it might not be just Linux that gets it there.
A couple of years ago Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recognized, even in the face of rising revenue, that the company couldn’t continue growing forever featuring Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) alone. As successful as RHEL had been, the world was changing and his company like so many enterprise-focused companies had to change too or risk being left behind.
Mid term evaluations of GSoC starts today. It’s been a month since it all started and I’d like to blog (brag) about what I’ve done so far.
I am in my second week and I am still getting used to using inkscape. I recently found out that inkscape has many functionalities that photoshop does not have. This was especially useful in case of importing and exporting images by directing selecting the required image or drawing. I found out that it is really useful feature that Adobe generally allows it by exporting the entire document. As I am starting to use it more and more, I figured inkscape to better and faster for vector graphics.
The idea was to depict the fedora 24 release cycle for the web and the mobile version.
Today, June 21, 2016, Fedora Project has announced the general availability of the final release of the Fedora 24 Linux operating system for desktops, servers, cloud, and embedded devices.
Delayed four times during its development cycle, the Fedora 24 distribution is finally available to download today. It looks like it ships with the usual Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, and Fedora Cloud variants, as well as the official Fedora Spins with the Xfce, LXDE, KDE, MATE/Compiz, Cinnamon, and Sugar desktops.
The Fedora Project has embarked on a great journey… redefining what an operating system should be for users and developers. Such innovation does not come overnight, and Fedora 24 is one big step on the road to the next generation of Linux distributions. But that does not mean that Fedora 24 is some “interim” release; there are great new features for Fedora users to deploy in their production environments right now!
There’s a lot of good stuff in Fedora 24 across their Server, Workstation, Cloud, and other products.
Long story short, this latest Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution release has shaped up to be another splendid release. Fedora 24 features the GNOME 3.20 desktop and all of its latest innovations on the desktop side, GCC 6 is the default compiler, many other package updates like glibc 2.23 / Mono 4.2 / Golang 1.6 / Python 3.5, and many other improvements. You can see a complete list of Fedora 24 changes via FedoraProject.org.
This year a significant number of students are working on RTC-related projects as part of Google Summer of Code, under the umbrella of the Debian Project. You may have already encountered some of them blogging on Planet or participating in mailing lists and IRC.
I’m looking forward to meeting with many of the hard-working Debian hackers, and collaborating with them to build and promote excellent Free Software. The mgmt project considers both Fedora and Debian to be first class platforms, and parity is a primary design goal.
Softpedia has been informed today, June 21, 2016, by Patrick Emmabuntüs about the first-ever release of the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition computer operating system.
One of the most common issues I see among newer Linux users is the desire to upgrade their distribution needlessly to a new bleeding-edge version. This is especially true with those who use Ubuntu and its derivatives. In this article, I’ll explain why most people would be much better off sticking to stable distribution releases that have been “in the wild” for six months or longer.
After many months of silence, and probably hard work, TheeMahn has finally released a new version of his Ubuntu-based Ultimate Edition computer operating system.
Take the case of Canonical’s recent pronouncement that it has ended decades of dissonance between competing Linux package management solutions. The lack of thoughtful scrutiny of the claims by the tech press beggars belief. Fortunately, a swelling chorus of critics is rising to put the claims in context, separating the wheat from the chaff in Canonical’s attempts to unify Linux distributions.
Solving operational difficulties with a modular, easy-to-use system was the solution Mark Shuttleworth laid out in his keynote entitled “More Fun, Less Friction” at Apache Big Data in Vancouver in May.
Good code is cheap; it’s operational knowledge that’s holding back big data from solving the great problems of our time.
Solving those operational difficulties with a modular, easy-to-use system was the solution Mark Shuttleworth laid out in his keynote entitled “More Fun, Less Friction” at Apache Big Data in Vancouver in May.
I am really excited about this new chapter. While I feel I have a lot I can offer my clients today, I am looking forward to continuing to broaden my knowledge, expertise, and diversity of community strategy and leadership. I am also excited to share these learnings with you all in my writing, presentations, and elsewhere. This has always been a journey, and each new road opens up interesting new questions and potential, and I am thirsty to discover and explore more.
Parrot Security OS developer Frozenbox Network was extremely proud to announce the release of the final Parrot Security OS 3.0 “Lithium” computer operating system.
Several home automation platforms support Python as an extension, but if you’re a real Python fiend, you’ll probably want Home Assistant, which places the programming language front and center. Paulus Schoutsen created Home Assistant in 2013 “as a simple script to turn on the lights when the sun was setting,” as he told attendees of his recent Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit presentation, “Automating your Home with Home Assistant: Python’s Answer to the Internet of Things.”
Schoutsen, who works as a senior software engineer for AppFolio in San Diego, has attracted 20 active contributors to the project. Home Assistant is now fairly mature, with updates every two weeks and support for more than 240 different smart devices and services. The open source (MIT license) software runs on anything that can run Python 3 — from desktop PCs to a Raspberry Pi, and counts thousands of users around the world.
Ask many people to name the technology categories that are creating sweeping change right now, and cloud computing and Big Data analytics will probably be top of mind for a lot of them. However, there is an absolute renaissance happening right now in the field of artifical intelligence and the closely related field of machine learning. And, open source tools are making a difference in this space.
eInfochips has ported Android 4.4 to the PowerPC architecture on behalf of an avionics customer that will use it for an HMI that monitors engine health.
eInfochips has developed the first Android port to the PowerPC CPU architecture using a modern Android build and featuring Big Endian support. The port is based on Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code for Android 4.4 (KitKat) and features Kernel 3.12.19.
Android TV is basically Android… for TVs. Google’s operating system for smart TVs and set top boxes is based on the same code as the company’s software for smartphones and tablets, but it features a custom user interface designed to be easy to navigate using a remote control and big screen TV and it supports apps with similar features.
OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence non-profit backed by Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services, and others to the tune of $1bn, is working on a physical robot that does household chores.
The robot OpenAI is targeting would be as reliable, flexible, and intelligent as Rosie the maid from TV cartoon comedy The Jetsons.
OpenAI leaders Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockton explain in a blogpost that they don’t want to manufacture the robot itself, but “enable a physical robot … to perform basic housework”.
Without a doubt, open source is making the software business better. But, if you’re considering going the open source route for software that’s critical to your company, keep in mind that “open” doesn’t mean “free.” It’s understandable that cost would be a major factor in the decision to go open source, as it’s free to license and allows you to spin up unlimited instances. However, there are a number of hidden expenses associated with using open source software that in many cases can drive up the price tag way past commercial software. The real differentiating factors in open source have less to do with cost than they do with your objectives, and the capabilities of your team.
It’s time for us B2B marketers to stop being so transactional and impersonal—to stop believing that buyers’ purchase decisions are completely rational. Buyers, after all, are people, not cogs in a wheel spinning inside their companies.
Traditional B2B marketing tactics are expensive and increasingly ineffective. You know them well: online banners, emails from random salespeople, sponsored golf outings, airport advertising, billboards, radio ads. Our customers are swimming in messages about why our product is better than the next guy’s. They’re messages designed to promote, persuade, and convince, and they speak to the part of us hungry for just one more tiny bit of data that might help with an important decision.
I see a strong and promising future for Ceph. Sure, like any other data storage solution it doesn’t address all data storage needs, but it’s here, and it’s yet another contender in the software-defined storage arena.
I’m forty years old. I’ve been developing free software for twenty years.
A decade ago, I wrote a series of posts about my first ten years of free software, looking back over projects I’d developed. These retrospectives seem even more valuable in retrospect; there are things in the old posts that jog my memory, and other details I’ve forgotten by now.
Platform9 uses a fork of the OpenStack cloud platform. The startup’s product allows companies to turn private servers into in-house versions of public cloud services like Amazon‘s. Last year the company debuted a virtual appliance that integrates its OpenStack controller service with VMware vSphere services.
Nobody likes being locked out. Locked out of their home, locked out of their car, locked out of their corporate network. It feels helpless.
Nobody likes being locked in either. Locked into a contract, locked into a relationship, locked in by a proprietary network operating system or a particular platform. Can’t take advantage of great new developments from other platform companies. It feels helpless.
Markus Mohrhard cross-posted today on the Document Foundation blog of a new feature coming in LibreOffice 5.2. Mohrhard said, “Starting with LibreOffice 5.2 the LibreOffice project will have an automated crash reporting tool with server side analysis.” In other news, GNOME’s Sébastien Wilmet today blogged this thoughts on Mint’s X-Apps, little applications commonly forked from GNOME apps and Sam Varghese reported on the exit of Jacob Appelbaum from Debian. Gizmodo listed five reasons to install Linux, and by Linux they mean Ubuntu, onto your laptop and Matt Hartley discussed why Ubuntu LTS is better than the latest and greatest.
Starting with LibreOffice 5.2 the LibreOffice project will have an automated crash reporting tool with server side analysis of the reports. This has been active in the builds since 5.0.0.0.beta1 and was really working since beta 2.
Dockercon the primary conference for Docker container has a three year old tradition of appeasing the demo gods prior to any live demo – and Dockercon has lots of live demos.
A trio of new reports show positive trends for Docker container adoption, although there is a concern that Docker is too complex to integrate into organizations’ environments.
As the DockerCon 16 conference gets underway June 20 in Seattle, users and advocates of the open-source container technology are being bolstered by multiple reports that imply adoption is growing, although there are some challenges to adoption.
During the opening keynote for the Dockercon 16 conference, a primary message that was repeated time and again was that that Docker is all about building tools that help developers and operators do their jobs, faster and easier.
Docker today at DockerCon 2016 here officially announced Docker Engine 1.12, which directly integrates container orchestration technology that previously had required separate technology to implement. Docker first announced the Swarm orchestration technology back in February 2015 as a stand-alone project, requiring separate installation.
At DockerCon 16, Docker CEO Ben Golub discusses the business of containers and how he’s growing the company.
In a series of tweets, ubuntuBSD project leader Jon Boden announced a few of the technical features coming to the soon-to-be-released ubuntuBSD 16.04 operating system.
FreeBSD VGL provides a library for accessing graphics modes and carrying out basic drawing operations atop its syscons console driver. Not only is basic graphics output on a virtual console supported by libvgl, but mouse input is too handled. However, not many people seem to be using this library.
I respectfully draw the community’s attention to two “Op Eds” that explore missed opportunities for the EU in relation to open source everything.
Selecting an open source license is not actually as easy as you might think. This article provides links to some valuable resources for anyone faced with choosing from the sea of open source licenses currently available.
In a government town like Ottawa, where information has traditionally been jealously guarded, what Alex Benay is proposing could trigger a bout of cognitive dissonance.
According to Benay, president and CEO of the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation, almost all documents generated by the corporation’s three national museums – Science and Technology, Aviation and Space, and Agriculture and Food – will soon be available to the public through an online portal.
“Our hope is by the fall, roughly 90 per cent of our information is available to the public in real time,” Benay said in an interview Monday, hours after tweeting that museum documents will be “open by default” by autumn.
Not everything will be made public: cabinet documents and material dealing with such things as personnel matters or corporate planning will remain confidential.
But after that, pretty much anything goes, Benay said, including early drafts of historical assessments, exhibition plans and schedules for travelling exhibitions.
Paulus Schoutsen created Home Assistant in 2013 “as a simple script to turn on the lights when the sun was setting,” as he told attendees of his recent Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit presentation, “Automating your Home with Home Assistant: Python’s Answer to the Internet of Things.”
I’ve spent the past few months writing about the small, incremental behaviors that individuals can employ to be more successful. This month, I’d like to highlight team behaviors that I think are critical to having small successes at work. I spent time with one of the AtomicOpenShift (AOS) teams at Red Hat—the Cockpit project.
Although I spend a significant amount of my time with the AOS teams, I rarely get the chance to work directly with Cockpit. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit with them for a while when we were all in Brno earlier this year. From an outsider’s perspective, the team has an ease of speaking with each other—both on technical topics and personal ones—that makes you take notice. In fact, you might have assumed they all work together in the same office. However, all five engineers and the designer on the team are spread out across Europe and the United States.
Even though parallel programming is known for its speed and efficiency, it’s not hidden that it brings along complexity in the code. To tackle this problem, some MIT researchers have teamed to create a new chip design named Swarm.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced today that it has upheld the ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) on Russia’s track and field athletes.
Meeting in the Swiss city of Lausanne, the IOC said that the widespread doping allegations in Russia casts “very serious doubts on the presumption of innocence” on Russian athletes and every athlete from the country who wants to compete in the Olympics will have to undergo an individual doping evaluation from an independent lab before being allowed to compete.
Although some Russian media and officials had pinned hopes on the IOC intervening in the ban, most indications were that the Olympic body would affirm the IAAF decision. On Saturday, the IOC released a statement that it “fully respected” the IAAF decision and said it accepted the IAAF’s right to determine athletes’ eligibility to compete.
As little as one free meal from a drug company can influence which medicines doctors prescribe for Medicare patients.
Evidence is mounting that doctors who receive as little as one meal from a drug company tend to prescribe more expensive, brand-name medications for common ailments than those who don’t.
A study published online Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine found significant evidence that doctors who received meals tied to specific drugs prescribed a higher proportion of those products than their peers. And the more meals they received, the greater share of those drugs they tended to prescribe relative to other medications in the same category.
The researchers did not determine if there was a cause-and-effect relationship between payments and prescribing, a far more difficult proposition, but their study adds to a growing pile of research documenting a link between the two.
A security researcher from Tencent, China’s largest internet service portal, has discovered a critical security flaw in Microsoft’s Windows operating system that affects every single version of Windows over the last two decades, from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 10.
If you’re a fan of the cryptocurrency projects, you’ve heard of something called Ethereum. It’s similar to bitcoin, but is a seperate coin. It’s been in the news lately due to an attack on the currency. Nobody is sure how this story will end at this point, there are a few possible options, none are good. This got me thinking about the future of security, there are some parallels when you compare traditional currency to crypto currency as well as where we see security heading (stick with me here).
The current way currency works is there is some central organization that is responsible for minting and controlling the currency, usually a country. There are banks, exchanges, loans, interest, physical money, and countless other ways the currency interacts with society. We will compare this to how IT security has mostly worked in the past. You had one large organization responsible for everything. If something went wrong, you could rely on the owner to take control and make things better. There are some instances where this isn’t true, but in general it holds.
Now if we look at cryptocurrency, there isn’t really a single group or person in charge. That’s the whole point though. The idea is to have nobody in charge so the currency can be used with some level of anonymity. You don’t have to rely on some sort of central organization to give the currency legitimacy, the system itself has legitimacy built in.
A new variety of ransomware called RAA has been discovered that has the somewhat unusual attribution of being coded in JavaScript instead of one of the more standard programming languages making it more effective in certain situations.
Well it will take some work, security is not like what they show on TV. You don’t need green on black text, special goggles or an unlimited enhance function. Instead, it requires sitting down and understanding the history of the field, what it means to be “secure” and what limitations or assumptions you can work under. This summer I have decided to start my journey on the vast field of cryptography and am doing an online course at Stanford University that provides an introduction to cryptography. It is appropriately named “Cryptography I” and is the first part of a two part course, the second part being offered later in the Fall. Both are taught by a really awesome professor Dan Boneh who I find explains the material very well. I decided I would like to make some posts about what I have learned in this course as I go through the material so that I can share my knowledge and get a chance to write it down somewhere for later reference.
WordPress 4.5.3 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.
A Briton who tried to grab a police officer’s gun at a Donald Trump rally in Las Vegas said he wanted to shoot the US candidate, court papers say.
Michael Steven Sandford, 20, did not enter a plea when he appeared before a judge in Nevada and was remanded in custody until a hearing on 5 July.
He is charged with an act of violence “on restricted grounds”.
This week’s Project Censored features a recent speech by long-time peace organizer Medea Benjamin. She examines recent successes and setbacks for the antiwar movement, and discusses her current campaigns.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of the womens’ peace group Code Pink and the fair trade organization Global Exchange. She spoke at Sonoma State University on March 25, 2016, as part of the student-organized Social Justice Week.
Despite over 400,000 dead and ongoing ground and air campaigns inside the country by the U.S., Russia and several others, 51 U.S. diplomats are publicly demanding the Obama administration launch strikes directly against Bashir Assad in Syria.
Using the broken watchlist system to regulate gun ownership raises issues of fundamental fairness.
In the wake of the attack on LGBTQ Americans in Orlando, gun control is again at the forefront of the national conversation. It is also the subject of proposed legislation in Congress. We at the ACLU, like many other Americans, are appalled by the Orlando tragedy. We have deep concerns, however, about legislative efforts to regulate the use of guns by relying on our nation’s error-prone and unfair watchlisting system.
Do you remember how close we came to Armageddon in the early 1960s when Washington put nuclear missiles in Turkey on the Soviet Union’s border and the Soviets responded by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba? Fortunately, at that time we had an intelligent president instead of a cipher. President John F. Kennedy pulled us back from the brink and was assassinated by his own government for his service to humanity.
In 2013, ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella got a tip on an assassination attempt against Enrique Degenhart Asturias, a 44-year-old Guatemala native who had been working as a consultant to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. Rotella, a veteran Latin America correspondent, knew such violence was common in that part of the world, but this event felt distinctive.
The world’s most famous currency speculator has warned that a vote on Thursday for Britain to leave the EU would trigger a bigger and more damaging fall for sterling than the day he forced Britain out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism almost a quarter of a century ago.
George Soros, writing in the Guardian, said a Brexit vote would spark a ‘black Friday’ for the UK, but the devaluation of sterling would bring none of the benefits to the economy that it enjoyed after it dropped out of the ERM on 16 September 1992 – Black Wednesday.
He said that, as in 1992, there would be big financial gains for speculators who had bet on the UK leaving the EU but that such an outcome would leave “most voters considerably poorer”.
Microsoft’s name has generally been missing from the reporting of tax avoidance by America’s tech giants: the brunt of the attack has been borne by Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, all of which have sophisticated tax reduction strategies. Now the Sunday Times has thrown Microsoft’s hat into the ring, in a half page (paywalled) story headlined “Taxman backs £100m Microsoft wheeze”.
Boris Johnson has said he will apologise on national television if Britain were to plunge into recession after a vote to leave the EU.
His promise came in response to a caller to radio station LBC, who asked the former mayor of London: “If we Brexit and we go into recession, would you have the political courage, to go on TV … and say sorry, I made it wrong and I apologise?”
Former England and Real Madrid star David Beckham has said that he will be voting for Remain in the EU Referendum.
“I played my best years at my boyhood club, Manchester United. I grew up with a core group of young British players that included Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and the Neville Brothers. Added to that was an experienced group of older British players such as Gary Pallister, Steve Bruce and Paul Ince. Now that team might have gone on to win trophies but we were a better and more successful team because of a Danish goalkeeper, Peter Schmeichel, the leadership of an Irishman Roy Keane and the skill of a Frenchman in Eric Cantona.”
Beckham continued: “I was also privileged to play and live in Madrid, Milan and Paris with teammates from all around Europe and the world. Those great European cities and their passionate fans welcomed me and my family and gave us the opportunity to enjoy their unique and inspiring cultures and people.
If Brexit happens, the chances of them running the country will increase. Do their books contain any clues about what they might do?
The former footballer tells Sky News his views have been “misinterpreted” after he said Brexit would be good for English players.
On June 16, Oracle Corporation released financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2016, and corporate executives trumpeted the company’s cloud services success. According to the latest report, Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, platform, and software services collectively brought in $859 million for the quarter ending May 31, compared to $576 million for the same period in 2015. Oracle brought in $2.853 billion in revenues for cloud and had an $8.9 billion (£6.07 billion) profit for the year.
How does Messing propose that the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security, given Sanders’ authorization to stop protecting him, turn the resulting savings into cash for the purposes of “donating to Orlando families”? She, of course, won’t be proposing any such process, because this talking point is based on shallow moralizing, not on an honest assessment of the costs of Sanders’ continuing his campaign. Even without the exploitation of the Orlando attack, it’s a talking point that doesn’t make any sense.
[...]
Does anyone think the Secret Service is going to fire the exact number of agents assigned to Sanders the day he drops out? Does anyone think the additional vehicles and equipment needed will quickly be pawned off and the money transferred over to Johnny Taxpayer? Does anyone repeating this talking point think that if the Sanders campaign had ended one week ago the US federal government would somehow be $166,000 richer?
The anti-body shaming movement says advertisers and media companies are sending a bad message to women every time they promote the idea that a fit, thin body is ideal. They argue every body is a “bikini body” and larger women shouldn’t be forced to see images that portray unrealistic standards of beauty.
Now that the Obama Administration has abandoned its effort to censor the transcript of Omar Mateen’s 911 call, let’s take a look back at when the president actually condemned censorship of “news reports.”
The parents of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American killed in the Paris terror attacks, have launched a legal case against Google, Facebook and Twitter, who they blame for helping the likes of their daughter’s killers radicalise and recruit.
The undersigned civil society organisations are deeply concerned about the Directive on combating terrorism and the European Commission’s initiatives that could enable and encourage needless or even counter-productive censorship, both by platforms and by governments, without judicial oversight. The NGOs sign a joint letter to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to urge them to avoid making this mistake.
What was NSFW (or, more specifically, theaters) nearly a century ago? Look no further than what CineGraphic has dug up: a compilation comprised of footage from an old reel of 35mm nitrate from 1926 that was unearthed at an old movie theater in Pennsylvania. The result is Forbidden Images, a collection of clips that were banned and censored to meet local “moral standard,” featuring a brief clip from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and short glimpse of Greta Garbo in The Temptress, among many others.
What instantly becomes glaringly apparent is that all of the scenes feature women (shocker!), but no men. This compilation is a look into the historically sexist lens by which many ratings and censorships are governed, from small towns to the MPAA. To this day, women are still exploited for their sexuality and bodies in cinema. Depictions of sexuality are either celebrated, as in the case of Black Swan (a phallocentric gaze), or shamed, such as Blue Valentine, which received the doomed stamp of NC-17 for its female-centric gaze prior to getting appealed. Considering Hollywood’s ongoing antipathy sex and obsession with violence — and the MPAA rewarding these inclinations — perhaps we haven’t come so far in the last century.
Folks in the Bitcoin/blockchain world can be fairly opinionated — that’s no surprise. But just because you have an interview go sideways, it doesn’t mean you get to threaten a lawsuit over it. That’s not how it works. Perianne Boring founded and runs a lobbying organization focused on Bitcoin/blockchain issues called the Chamber of Digital Commerce. I have to admit to not being that familiar with the organization (I’m more familiar with another organization called Coin Center). However, late last week, Boring appeared on a podcast called Bitcoin Uncensored. To say the interview did not go well… would be an understatement.
For a long time, critics of the Obama administration have been all over them for supposedly downplaying the key source of the threat, radical Islamic extremists.
The evidence ranges from the State Department’s insistence, under Secretary Hillary Clinton, in blaming the Benghazi attack on an anti-Muslim video, to the president’s refusal to blame “radical Islam” for atrocities like Orlando
Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about the FBI pushing strongly for an update to the law that covers National Security Letters (NSLs) to cover up the fact that the FBI has been using them to get electronic communications records. The current law on NSLs doesn’t cover that information, though the FBI insists that it’s just a “typo” in the law, and still frequently asks for them in its NSLs, because NSL recipients often don’t know the law themselves and will still turn over the info. Of course, it helps that the NSLs often come with gag orders. Reports going back a decade have shown that the FBI has a serious problem with abusing its NSL powers to get lots of information it’s not supposed to have. And rather than do something to stop such abuses, the FBI’s friends in Congress have, instead, been trying to legalize such abusive practices to allow the FBI to do even more.
And, in the spirit of “leave no crisis unexploited,” Senator Mitch McConnell is pushing forward on the amendment put forth by Senators McCain and Cornyn to expand NSLs. And, cynically, they’re citing the Orlando shootings as the reason why, despite the fact that this amendment was being pushed for before the shootings even occurred and the fact that this would have done absolutely nothing to stop the shootings.
The security services are to receive a licence for hacking into the phones and laptops of a “major town” under the snooper’s charter legislation, which reaches the House of Lords next week.
The broad nature of the hacking powers to be handed to GCHQ are disclosed in an obscure case study in a background Home Office document setting out the operational case for their use.
This shows that all the phones and laptops in a “major town” could be hacked into, as long as the town were overseas and the action were necessary for national security purposes. The example used in the case study is identifying the phones and laptops being used by a terrorist group planning an attack on Western tourists in a major town
According to the minutes of the most recent EU-US justice and home affairs ministerial meeting, held in Amsterdam on 1 and 2 June, the US: “commended the EU collection of biometric data which had facilitated the fight against terrorism and the work of US law enforcement.”
YOUR PRIVACY PAL the Tor Project is going the extra mile to protect users from the spying eyes of the FBI.
Tor, as you might already know, is a solid privacy choice that the anti-privacy people would like to see eviscerated. The Russians want it, and so does the US, which has broken into Tor already, apparently legitimately, in the pursuit of the Silk Road marketplace.
Tor does not rest, and a document entitled On the Effectiveness of Address-Space Randomisation (PDF) shows the firm’s efforts to limit the kind of exposure that it was set up to circumvent.
Body-worn cameras as a tool of accountability is an idea whose time has come, but so far, the implementation has been less than ideal. Lawmakers — pressured by law enforcement agencies and unions — have frequently pushed legislation that makes it almost impossible for the public to get their hands on recorded footage.
In other cases it’s been shown that camera placement results in highly-subjective footage — where the “first-person” perspective can obscure what’s really happening. One notable case resulted in two sets of footage. The body-worn camera footage gave the impression that officers were dealing with a highly-combative arrestee. A nearby surveillance camera showed something completely different: several cops beating a non-resisting suspect.
So, it’s somewhat a surprise to hear that body camera footage has resulted in the firing of police officers. For one, officers generally don’t get fired. They get suspended. Or, if the misconduct is egregious enough, they’re allowed to resign.
Index on Censorship calls for the immediate and unconditional release of journalists Şebnem Korur Fincancı, Erol Önderoğlu and Ahmet Nesin, who were arrested by Turkish authorities on 20 June.
“These individuals have committed no crime. Their transgression was to exercise freedom of speech to show their support for a free and pluralistic media. It shows the depths to which Turkey’s authorities have sunk to silence any and all narratives that differ with the government’s,” Melody Patry, senior advocacy officer for Index, said.
Turkish authorities have arrested three prominent press freedom campaigners, including the local representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), on charges of spreading “terrorist propaganda”, according to human rights groups.
Turkey arrested the local representative of international rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on “terrorist propaganda” charges Monday, in the latest crackdown on the media in the country.
The excuse that worked so well for so long — “because terrorism” — seems to have lost its luster. Despite having a locked iPhone tied to a mass shooting with terrorist overtones, the FBI was unable to budge the needle on encryption backdoors or magical “lawful access” crypto keys.
However, that doesn’t mean any number of government entities aren’t willing to use the ever present “threat” of terrorism as fuel for their various civil liberties-endangering bonfires. Or that they won’t use it as a profoundly cheap excuse to withhold information from the American public — like the Indiana State Police’s refusal to turn over Stingray docs because doing so might allow terrorists to plan attacks on cherished annual state events like the Mule Day Parade.
The Maryland Transit Authority has been ducking a Public Information Act (PIA) request from the Baltimore Sun for nearly a year at this point. The paper asked for surveillance footage from the Mondawin Metro station, captured in April of last year as police shut down mass transit in anticipation of protests following the death of Freddie Gray in the back of Baltimore PD van.
A 23-year-old woman was paraded in her village streets with blackened face and shaved off head by her family members for allegedly eloping with a man, the latest in a series of ‘honour’ related crimes in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
According to eyewitnesses, the family members including parents of the woman, on Saturday paraded her in the streets outside her house after blackening her face and shaving off her head in a village of Uch Sharif, Bahawalpur, some 400km from Lahore.
Strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan is accused of hauling the offenders before a judge for breaking article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code.
The controversial text states anyone who insults the president could be locked up from six months to two years.
Last year, Sweden backed up its self-imposed reputation as a “humanitarian superpower” by taking in an unprecedented 163,000 asylum seekers. However, this feat has left Sweden struggling with integration problems, also spurring a surge of organized crime. Curiously, the refugees themselves have become the victims of this ham-fisted policy.
The attackers, who have not been identified and are said to have totalled several hundreds, were reportedly angry that people were consuming alcohol and listening to music during the holy month. They reportedly forcibly entered the Velvet Indieground music shop in Istanbul where a Radiohead listening party was being held, before beating people with pipes, Al Jazeera reports.
International Christian Concern says there has been a surge in incidents in the last two months with little help from the authorities.
Chilling videos have been published online of teenage girls saying they chose to run away and convert.
But the families left behind and the ICC say victims are being beaten and raped before being blackmailed into taking part in the videos.
The ICC says Upper Egypt is “paralysed” by the number of disappearances of young girls.
Former prime minister Ehud Barak blasted Israel’s current government on Thursday evening, saying it was putting the country on the path to becoming an “apartheid state,” and should be brought down if it fails to get back on track.
“I call on the government to come to its senses, to get back on track immediately,” said Barak. “If it does not do that, it will be incumbent upon all of us — yes, all of us — to get up from our seats, comfortable ones and uncomfortable ones, and bring it down via popular protest and via the ballot box before it’s too late,” he said.
Calling the Netanyahu government “weak, flaccid and noisy,” Barak lobbed criticism after criticism at the Israeli leader and his ministers in a blistering speech at the Herzliya Conference, accusing them of operating based on a “covert agenda” to make a two-state solution untenable.
“Fulfilling [that agenda] will inevitably — and that’s a key word in this discussion: inevitably — bring us to a single state, which will be an apartheid state,” Barak said. “Or it will be a bi-national state with a Jewish minority in a generation or two — which will have a high likelihood of experiencing a drawn-out civil war.”
Has the Israel Lobby assigned former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon to the class of “self-hating Jews?” These two former top officials of the Israeli government are obviously, to the crazed mind of the Israel Lobby, especially ADL, anti-semites for critizing the Israeli government.
Former PM Barak said that “only a blind person or a sheep, or an ignoramus, can’t see the erosion of democracy and the budding fascism” in Israel.
Former DM Ya’alon said that Israel had been taken over by a “fanatical core group with a radical ideology” that freely attacks the Supreme Court, freedom of expression and other principles of democracy.
Donald Trump told CBS News over the weekend that the United States should consider religious and ethnic profiling to prevent terror attacks.
“I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” Trump said. “Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully. And I hate the concept of profiling, but we have to start using common sense and we have to use our heads.”
Israel’s most systematic use of racial profiling occurs at its borders and has been rife with abuses that stand in contrast with American values of equal treatment and safeguarding personal liberties.
The Arab American Institute has collected stories of Arab and Muslim Americans who have been harassed or detained while entering Israel. They offer a window into the human impact of racial profiling.
Due to the very sensitive subjects in the directive (censorship of websites, legalisation of intrusive investigative tools, etc.) it is very important for MEPs to be able to discuss and to adopt an amended version of this text in plenary session before negotiating it in a trialogue.
In the LIBE Committee, Ms Hohlmeier tried to bypass the debate and the negotiations with the shadows by tabling compromise amendments only a few hours before the meetings with the shadow rapporteurs, by choosing bilateral discussions instead of collective meetings and by avoiding a real debate during the shadow meetings. This kind of behaviour is not worthy of the democratic arena that the European Parliament should be. The current version of the text to be voted tomorrow in LIBE committee is more Ms Hohlmeier’s work than the work of the entire LIBE Committee. Ms Hohlmeier is pressured by Member States to adopt urgently this Directive and legalise at the European level without proper oversight the dangerous measures that exist in some national legislations on censorship and surveillance.
Before the bodies were removed from the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last week, Democrats began eagerly exploiting that atrocity to demand a new, secret “terrorist watchlist”: something that was once the domestic centerpiece of the Bush/Cheney war-on-terror mentality. Led by their propaganda outlet, Center for American Progress (CAP), Democrats now want to empower the Justice Department — without any judicial adjudication — to unilaterally bar citizens who have not been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime from purchasing guns.
After two years, the DOJ has decided to drop its bogus conspiracy/drug trafficking case against Federal Express. In July 2014, FedEx was hit with an indictment for allegedly knowingly delivering illegal/counterfeit drugs to a handful of sketchy recipients.
The government insisted FedEx perform interdiction efforts for it by opening boxes and determining (without guidance) whether or not the contents were legit. FedEx pointed out that it was in the package delivery business, not the law enforcement business. The DEA shrugged and said, “Do better.” FedEx said, “Why don’t you give us a list of people/businesses you think are engaged in illegal activities?” The DOJ refused to do so and rewarded FedEx’s good faith efforts with an indictment.
An indictment is easy to obtain, as anyone familiar with the machinations of grand juries is aware. The DOJ’s case, however, immediately fell apart after it dragged its purple and orange ham sandwich into a process that’s actually adversarial. Judge Charles Breyer — who we know from his hilariously-redacted denial of HP’s heavily-redacted request to seal documents and his interest in the FBI’s possibly-illegal courthouse step wiretaps — presided over the opening arguments… and that was pretty much all he had to hear.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about how legislators in various cities (mainly SF, Chicago and LA) were trying to push through anti-Airbnb legislation that would require homeowners doing short term rentals to register with the city — and which would hold the platform (Airbnb) liable if its users failed to do so. As we noted, that almost certainly violates Section 230 of the CDA, which bars any law that attempts to hold a platform liable for the actions of its users. At least in San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors ignored all of this with a city attorney claiming (incorrectly) that since it regulates “business activities of platforms,” it’s not regulating the content on those platforms. That’s an… interesting dodge on the Section 230 issues. It seems unlikely to hold up in court, but California’s been especially wacky on CDA 230 lately. The SF legislation has since passed, and it will be interesting to see if anyone (i.e., Airbnb) decides to challenge it in court.
As you might have heard, New York City recently launched one of the biggest free Wi-Fi initiatives ever conceived. Under the program, some 7,500 Wi-Fi kiosks will provide gigabit Wi-Fi, free phone calls to anywhere in the country (via Vonage), as well as access to a device recharging station, 311, 911, 411 and city services (via an integrated Android tablet). The city is installing ten a day — most at old payphone locations — and hopes to have 500 of the kiosks in place by July. It’s a pretty impressive effort, and by most measures providing fast, free connectivity to the city’s five boroughs has been something to celebrate.
A recent internet outage has affected many services like WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack, Reddit, and CloudFlare. After this massive outage was reported across many countries, TeliaSonera sent a note to other network operators and informed them about the mishap.
The cable industry is aggressively fighting the FCC’s attempt to bring competition to the cable box market. So far that’s been via a two-pronged approach of buying a torrent of incredibly misleading editorials by people pretending to be objective observers (including Jesse Jackson), and throwing money at politicians who oppose the plan, but pretty clearly have no goddamned idea what they’re actually talking about.
Under the FCC’s plan (pdf), cable providers would be required to provide their existing programming to third-party hardware vendors, creating competition and hopefully a flood of better, cheaper hardware without the need for expensive, and annoying CableCARDs. But with the average user paying $231 annually in set top box rental fees, the cable industry is pulling out all the stops to protect $21 billion in annual, captive revenues.
In its second ruling in the Wiley v Kirtsaeng dispute, the US Supreme Court has provided guidance to lower courts on the award of attorney’s fees in copyright cases
Image credit: SCOTUSblog
Summary: Much-anticipated decision on the Cuozzo v Lee case (at the highest possible level) serves to defend the appeal boards which are eliminating software patents by the thousands
THE previous post spoke about Alice v CLS and its impact on software patenting in the US. Lots of encouraging news regarding software patents could be found as of late, not just in the US but also in India. Battistelli’s EPO and the UPC are the only setbacks right now.
Yesterday night we found lots of articles about the Cuozzo v Lee decision [PDF]
(at SCOTUS level). As of midnight, all the following covered the decision (the decision on the gun ban received a lot more coverage):
Here is the corresponding SCOTUSblog page. As expected, IAM’s propagandists still refer to PTAB — which effectively invalidates a lot of software patents — as a “death squad”, even right there in the headline. Well, IAM is a death squad of science and technology (they promote patent trolls and software patents). To quote their biased piece: “In what will widely be considered as a blow to patent owners [sic], the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) this morning declined to overhaul two key tenets of the post-issuance review proceedings, leaving the broadest reasonable claim interpretation intact and ruling that review decisions were not appealable. The Court’s decision in Cuozzo v Lee had been much anticipated by US patent owners [sic], many of whom have seen their patents challenged and claims invalidated in inter partes reviews (IPR) over the last four years.”
All those inter partes reviews which we mentioned here before were great news to software developers, who simply (based on many polls) do not want software patents. Here is what Patently-O wrote about it:
The Supreme Court has upheld the AIA provision barring challenges to the Patent Office’s decision to institute inter partes review. 35 U. S. C. §314(d). In addition, Justice Breyer’s majority opinion approved of the Patent Office’s approach of applying the broadest reasonable construction (BRI) standard to interpret patent claims – finding it a “reasonable exercise of the rulemaking authority that Congress delegated to the Patent Office.”
The Court was unanimous as to the BRI standard however, Justices Alito and Sotomayor dissented from the no-appeal ruling – they would have interpreted the statute as limiting interlocutory appeals but still allowing review of the decision to institute within the context of an appellate review of the PTO’s final decision on the merits.
There’s hope that the USPTO will improve quality control and maybe even become better than the EPO, where quality has declined rapidly under Battistelli. As a side note, WatchTroll talks about the openwashing efforts of the USPTO (mentioned here earlier this month), namely the open APIs.
We would like to commend the US Supreme Court and even the USPTO for doing the right thing by tightening patent scope. This can, in due course, sandbox a lot of patent trolls. █
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